Don Surber looks at the numerous quotes from Democrats praising Judge Alito. I do think that Chuck Schumer got a little carried away with himself, however...

In Tech Central Station, Imam Khaleel Mohammed writes that Saddam Hussein has gotten religion while under arrest, and therefore, should first be given a fair trial--and then sentenced accordingly:

Let us face a simple fact: different areas have different norms. In Iraq, as in the rest of the Muslim Middle East, a verdict of guilty on the charges of which Saddam is accused would bring an automatic death sentence. This contrasts with the situation at the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), where accused Serbian mass murderer Slobodan Milosevic and similar individuals are on trial. ICTY has its seat at The Hague, and the Netherlands will not carry out death sentences.

Let us face another fact: there is no lack of evidence against Saddam. It is doubtful the prosecution will need to produce any material that can be reliably challenged.

And let us face yet one more fact: Saddam, as he appeared the last time we saw him on 60 Minutes, has morphed into a devout Muslim, even interrupting an interview to complete prayer. Surely, as a sign of respect (albeit undeserved), we can allow that he be given a trial according to Islamic standards!

Why should Saddam not accept this, since he has challenged the authority of the present court? We can even go further and call for a tribunal consisting of Sunni and Shi'ite jurists.

Certainly defense lawyers must be allowed to question the evidence. But even though the criteria for testimony and evidence in Islam are far more demanding than in Western law, and unless we are living on some other planet, the evidence against him is overwhelming. If he is found guilty, the court may follow the Qur'anic law -- which, as any Muslim scholar, Shi'ite or Sunni, will confirm, calls for capital punishment.

The Iraqi people have suffered long enough under Saddam -- and their voice must be heard in dealing with their own. If any one body of Shi'ite or Sunni jurists disagrees with me, I will bow to their judgment. But I will not say that I am wrong.

Nor will I.

Neo-Neocon posts a photo of an astonishing advertisement promoting a hate-filled anti-Semitic Middle Eastern "seminar" (Iran's "World Without Zionism" conference) and writes:

Lovely [poster], isn't it? I mean that sincerely. One of the more pernicious aspects of much modern propaganda is its slickness and polish, its ability to appeal to the most sophisticated among us. This aesthetically pleasing poster is no exception--in fact, it's an excellent example of the genre.

Note how the conference and the poster focus on the word "Zionism," not "Jews." The old argument about whether one can be anti-Zionist and nevertheless not anti-Semitic keeps cropping up around the blogosphere and elsewhere. The comments section of the thread linked above at Gates of Vienna contains a good example of such a discussion.

I'm sure there truly are people who have objections to Zionism but honestly feel they have no objections to Jews themselves. But I'm just as sure that such people would have been hard-pressed to have explained where else the leftover Jews were supposed to go right after WWII, when Europe had killed so many of its Jews and was in the process of spitting out the exhausted survivors. Even the UN, that august body which in recent decades has been the very poster child for "anti-Zionism," voted at that time to partition Palestine and give the Jews their own tiny piece of land.

In the years since Israel's founding, the sophisticated propaganda which has over the last few decades managed to demonize it in the eyes of many has emboldened the Iranian mullahs. It is possible for them to speak quite openly of wiping Israel off the face of the earth, and trust that at least some will defend such a statement on the grounds that it's not technically "anti-Semitic," it's merely "anti-Zionist" (see this).

Poor, poor Hitler, so ahead of his time! If only the state of Israel had already existed when he offered his Final Solution, he could have phrased it in terms so much more acceptable.

If Robert Harris had set Fatherland in 2004 instead of 1964, he'd probably have described advertisements much like the one illustrated in Neo's post.

Pejman Yousefzadeh has some thoughts on Brent Scowcroft, whose comments on American foreign policy we highlighted last week:

The punditry world is abuzz with talk of a recent New Yorker article (no link available) by writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who has interviewed Brent Scowcroft, the former national security advisor for the Ford Administration and the Administration of George H.W. Bush. In a number of passages in the piece, Scowcroft takes on the current Bush Administration over the issue of Iraq, something for which he has earned applause from many Democrats and other Bush critics.

But when one reads the entire New Yorker piece, one finds that Scowcroft's critique is directed at foreign policy idealism in general. And it's a critique that should make Democrats jubilant over his attacks on the Bush Administration's foreign policy more nervous than they appear to be right now. Scowcroft's brand of foreign policy realism is shot through with contradictions and weak attempts at self-justification that should cause many realists to take issue with his arguments.

Consider that if Democrats capture the White House in 2008, they will look largely to foreign policy veterans of the Clinton Administration for guidance in constructing a new foreign policy strategy to replace that of the current Bush Administration. If so, then much of a new Democratic foreign policy will be based on idealist intentions and ambitions. Such idealism drove the intervention of the Clinton Administration into the crisis concerning the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, the political crisis in Haiti and the Clinton Administration's decision to take the first Bush Administration's relief operation in Somalia and turn it into a larger nation-building plan.

Brent Scowcroft thinks as little of this Clintonian idealism as he does of the Bush Administration's "neocon" foreign policy ambitions. In the article, Scowcroft backs the first Bush Administration's decision not to get involved in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia by saying that "there was only so much that the United States could do" about the breakup and the ensuing bloodshed. This puts Scowcroft in direct opposition to the Clinton Administration's foreign policy regarding the former Yugoslavia, as pointed out by Goldberg:

Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the Bosnian peace accords on behalf of President Clinton, saw the [first Bush] Administration's reluctance to take effective action in Yugoslavia as a failure of realism. "When the Cold War ended, the Bush people concluded that our strategic interests were not involved," Holbrooke said. And they turned their back on Yugoslavia just as it fell to its death. They said they determined that it had no strategic value, but, as it turns out, the Balkans still had strategic value and an overpowering humanitarian case as well." A good foreign policy, Holbrooke believes, ought to "marry idealism and realism, effective American leadership and, if necessary, the use of force."

Scowcroft's brand of foreign policy cannot be reconciled with the brand practiced by the Clinton Administration. As mentioned in the Goldberg article, Scowcroft simply "would have proposed that we go to the Yugoslavs and say 'It makes no sense for you to break up. Economically, you're small as it is, but, if you're going to break up, here are the rules. Here are the rules, and we're going to insist on those rules.'" As Goldberg writes, the first Bush Administration was going to rely on hope that Yugoslavia would stay together, much as it urged former Soviet republics to avoid the dangers of "suicidal nationalism" in an August 1991 speech by President Bush that was dubbed the "Chicken Kiev" speech.

It's clear that Scowcroft's statements in the New Yorker article are not simply attacks against the current Bush Administration. Rather, they are a shot across the bow against the likely foreign policy ambitions of any future Democratic Administration that would emulate the Clinton Administration's foreign policy. So while Democrats may be pleased to see Scowcroft -- the former national security advisor for Bush the Father -- taking the rhetorical lumber to Bush the Son, they will have to contend with his critiques the next time they are given the chance to occupy the White House.

As Cindy Sheehan's recent comments highlight, the prospect of repeating the vigorous foreign policy of the Clinton 1990s won't make the Democrats' anti-war isolationist base happy.

Roger L. Simon has a look (literally, in the case of the Vanity Fair photo spread he posts on his site) at the shy, retiring Valerie Plame.

Here's another look (scroll down a bit for photo). And another.

The folks profiled in the article the previous post linked to are certainly brave, but far braver is the admission of Pajamas member Cathy Seipp, also based in Los Angeles. Just click.

(Via Instapundit.)

Brian Anderson, the author of South Park Conservatives looks at the ideology that dare not speak its name in Hollywood:

When a trendsetter like [producer Gavin Polone] (subject of a glowing 2004 New York Times Magazine cover story) can observe that “we live in a much more conservative country than the entertainment industry had thought it was, and it would be much smarter for them to move in that direction,” it’s a pretty safe bet that the new Hollywood establishment will indeed be very different from the one that it soon will replace.

But as Brian writes, in the meantime, expect more Bonfire of the Vanities-style PC rewrites from Hollywood such as these:

There’s a simple explanation of why Tinseltown churns out so many commercial duds. Elite filmmakers want to make moola, of course—and they still do, lots of it, though not nearly as much as they could be making. But giving the public what it wants isn’t their prime motivation. More important is their wish for recognition as artists from peers, critics, and the liberal elites, says Emmy- and Oscar-nominated writer and director Lionel Chetwynd, one of Hollywood’s most vocal conservatives. “And it has been true from the late sixties on that if you wanted to be seen as an artist, you have to be a liberal—you have to rail against the government, be edgy,” he adds. Having the right artistic vision can mean other social advantages, too. “Making something commercially successful and appealing to a broad public, like The Incredibles, is less likely to get a Rebecca Romijn look-alike to sleep with you than making dark, hard-hitting, critically acclaimed material like Million Dollar Baby,” says longtime Hollywood watcher Medved.

Further reinforcing Hollywood’s leftish leanings are liberal interest groups that monitor script content for “offensive”—read: politically incorrect—content. This pressure can utterly transform a film project, as Tom Clancy will tell you. In his novel The Sum of All Fears, Muslim terrorists explode a nuke at the Super Bowl. When Clancy optioned the book and the film went into development, the Council on American Islamic Relations got to work. The 2002 film villains: white neo-Nazis, not Muslim fanatics. Some Hollywood production companies actually have outreach offices that contact advocacy groups ahead of production to vet potential film scripts. “Keep in mind [that] one of the reasons why the FBI or the government or business are the villains is because everyone else has a constituency,” former Motion Picture Association head Jack Valenti points out.

The PC concerns, internalized in scriptwriters’ heads even before any advocate complains, can produce bizarre incoherence. Novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan’s True Crime is about an innocent white man on death row, railroaded because officials needed to prove that the death penalty isn’t racially biased. “The only one who figures this out is this politically incorrect journalist who can see through the B.S.,” Klavan relates. The gripping 1999 movie version, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood as journalist Steve Everett, transforms the innocent death-row inmate into a black man (played by Isaiah Washington). The movie works, even if it takes the anti-PC edge off Klavan’s novel.

But the screenplay leaves in a sequence depicting a black woman confronting journalist Everett for caring only about injustices against whites and not blacks—even though the movie now revolves around the reporter’s relentless quest to exonerate a wrongly convicted African American. “That scene no longer makes any sense,” Klavan laughs. “The screenwriter apparently found the original politically inappropriate.”

Even so, jolted by The Passion’s huge success, Hollywood seems to be catching on that it is neglecting a large part of its potential audience. “When something does nearly $400 million in U.S. box office, and it isn’t in English—it makes an impression,” says former Universal Pictures boss Frank Price. The New York Times reported in July that studios have hired “newly minted experts in Christian marketing” to help sell movies with religious or family themes to red-state America. After cold-shouldering Gibson when he shopped around The Passion—he famously had to finance it himself—the studios lined up for the chance to distribute his next movie, the Mayan-language Apocalypto, with Disney landing the deal.

Needless to say, read the rest; this is a superb piece--which sadly will be ignored by the people in Tinseltown who need to read it the most.

Update: Welcome City Journal readers! For most posts in a similar vein, scroll through our "Hollywood, Interrupted" archives. And for my interview this past summer with Brian Anderson, City Journal's senior editor, click here.

Glenn Reynolds looks at the Peter Lemon Moodring style of Judge Alito.

Update: In another tenuously syncronistic musical connection, Betsy Newmark notes that the judge's mother's name is Rose Alito. "Say it fast and you'll hear Bruce Springsteen singing in the background", Betsy writes. However, Jack the Rabbit, Weak Knees Willie, and Big Bones Billy could not be reached to confirm.

As you may have heard, President Bush nominated appeals court Judge Samuel A. Alito (born in my home state of New Jersey) to the U.S. Supreme Court today.

Which begs the question...what does National Review think about him?

Well, quite a bit if this post is any indication:

WITH ONLY SLIGHT EXAGGERATION: IT'S GO-TIME [Jonah Goldberg]
This is it. Back in June I wrote, "In Washington, conservatives and liberals are quietly loading up on drinking water, D batteries and extra ammo, in preparation for the coming battle over judges. Ralph Neas himself has been seen by the campfire carving notches into the stock of his rifle, muttering, 'Pain don't hurt.' No one knows when the fight's coming, but everyone knows it is."

Ever since, my prognostications seemed wrong. Roberts virtually sailed through. Miers didn't cause a split between right and left but between right and right. But now, this is the guy. Cokie Roberts said a senior Demcratic Senator has already denounced Alito as a "rightwing whacko" or words to that effect. Nina Totenberg called him "filibuster bait." Even now, federalist society and Naral types are running around town ducking their heads into barber shops and shoe shine parlors, shouting "it's on! It's on!" Those inside throw down their newspapers, haircuts unfinished, and race to the law libraries.

It reminds me of one of those scenes from "Any Which Way You Can" or "Caddyshack" where the buzz spreads that the big fight or the big match is on.

The seventh seal has been broken, the goat entrails point toward gotterdamerung, it's on.

The snowballs will be flying in DC and the all corners of the media (new and old) this holiday season.

And it's already started:

Chuck Schumer just argued that it is possible that Judge Alito, as Justice Alito, would roll back the achievements of Rosa Parks. That can only be understood as Schumer's belief that Judge Alito could find segregationist policies acceptable under the constitution. While it is undeniable that the nomination of Robert Byrd would have raised such a question, it is preposterous and indeed base to even hint at such a thing about a distinguished judge and public servant.

Schumer's argument for delay is as predictable as it is unpersuasive. Chairman Specter needs to knock down this nonsense today.

Jerk those knees, Chuck!

For the Blogsphere's take on Alito, Glenn Reynolds, Hugh Hewitt and PoliPundit have lots-o-links.

Michael Barone looks at the bottom of the perigee:

George W. Bush's administration has come through what many have been saying would be its worst week, and it has turned out to be -- well, if not one of the best, then one that is far more encouraging than most of the mainstream media expected.

Four events, or non-events, have put the administration in a position to make progress and advance the standing of the president and his party in public policy and in the public opinion polls.

Read the rest. And as John Hinderaker writes:

Having now read fifteen or twenty news stories about what a devastating blow the Lewis Libby indictment was to the administration, about how President Bush is "reeling" and the administration is "in turmoil," even "in crisis," and how Libby was a key and irreplaceable figure in the administration, whose departure is a serious blow because he played such a vital role, I couldn't help wondering: does anyone remember who Al Gore's chief of staff was when he was vice-president?

As soon as President Bush announces his Supreme Court nominee (possibly later today, or early in the week), the name "Scooter" will go back to being associated with Jim Henson and company. But I'd still like to see more forward progress, and less rope-a-dope with the MSM and other opponents.

Mr. E. Blair wrote in 1949:

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs -- all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.

Glenn Reynolds looks a similar turning on a dime in real life:

One of the things I've noticed in the Judy Miller / Scooter Libby coverage is the development of a new history that's very convenient for a lot of the people peddling it. The new story is that:

1. We only went to war because of WMDs -- that was the only reason ever given.

2. Bush lied about those.

3. He told his lies to Judy Miller, who acted like a stenographer and reported them.

4. Everyone else gullibly went along.

There are lots of problems with this, beginning with the fact that it's not true. I've addressed much of this -- especially parts 1 & 2 -- in earlier posts like this one, this one, and especially this one. It gets tiresome having to repeat this stuff, but the new history, despite its falsity, is just too convenient for too many people to be stopped by anything as simple as the truth.

Or as James Lileks wrote about a similar bit of revisionist historical airbrushing in a Boston convention hall late last July, "The past was more malleable than you had ever expected."

Ed Morrissey writes:

What is it about frustrated members of the British royal family who, when unable to garner the throne for themselves, decide to campaign on behalf of genocidal nutcases? After being forced to abdicate the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, Edward Windsor flirted with the Nazis to such an extent that the British thought they might have to forcibly remove him from Spain. Churchill had to order him to the Bahamas to separate the Duke from German agents.

Now we have Prince Charles, the man who would be King if his mother would just let him, deciding that George Bush just doesn't understand how wonderful Islam truly is -- and wants to travel to the United States to deliver a lecture on the Religion of Peace^TM.

In the 1920s, the Duke of Windsor was one of the most influential dressers of all time (see above title), but as Ed notes, later became a dedicated follower of fascism, a trend that runs in the royal family beyond he and Charles. Prince Harry was spotted last year wearing a swastika armband to a fancy dress party, and as Mark Steyn wrote in response:

Personally, I found the sight of the Prince of Wales climbing into the full Highgrove hejab for dinner with that bin Laden brother a week after the 9/11 slaughter far more disquieting: it seemed a rather more conscious act of identification than his son's party get-up.

And even after not just 9/11 but London's own 7/7 bombing this year, little has changed in the worldview of the man who would eventually lead the Church of England.

Update: Related ironic Drudgery from Willisms. And Don Singleton rounds up additional Blogospheric reaction.

Another Update: Wow--hadn't heard this one before, but it's not at all surprising. Across The Atlantic writes:

[Ed] and others (me included), are deeply concerned about Charles and his blatant flirtation with Islam (Charles wants to do a lecture tour of the US about Islam).

What Ed and others haven’t yet noted is this:-

The oath taken by a British monarch during their coronantion currently contains the words “Defender of the faith”. This, of course, relates to the reigning King or Queen being head of the Church of England. Charles has let it be known that he would like the form of words to be amended to “Defender of the faiths.”

Hmmmmm.

When can we do away with this country’s royal family?

Hey, as long as they're seen and not heard, I like the monarchy. But then I like flipping through Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers catalogs. Both the catalog models and the royal family dress equally nicely--and sound equally vacuous when their mouths move.

Cartoon Network reminds its viewers that unless their politics are identical to founder Ted Turner's, the network doesn't want them in the audience:

Fans fearing that “The Boondocks,” the wildly scathing, racially charged comic strip, will lose its bite when it appears on television next week need not worry. Within the first 10 seconds of the new show of the same name, viewers will be offered the following Molotov cocktail of social criticism: “Jesus is black, Ronald Reagan is the devil and the government is lying about 9/11.”

Since its national debut six years ago, the strip, about two black children living in white suburbia, has slaughtered its share of sacred cows, eviscerating everyone from Condoleezza Rice and Strom Thurmond to 50 Cent and Ralph Nader. President Bush has been a frequent target. As a result, the strip has been suspended, banished to editorial pages and dropped from some newspapers (it currently appears in more than 300).

Trying to translate that incendiary spirit into great television will be a challenge, an expensive challenge at that. Cartoon Network pays Sony Pictures Television, producer of the series, an estimated license fee of $400,000 per episode. Add to that the millions the network has spent on marketing, including many billboards in New York and Los Angeles trumpeting the show’s premiere on Nov. 6 in the late-night “Adult Swim” block, and “The Boondocks” becomes the most expensive show the network has made.

(Hat tip: Charles Johnson, who is also responsible for the original bolding in the above text.)

Last January, Jim Geraghty noted the disparity in media coverage, focusing primarily on the news:

If you're a conservative, chances are you prefer Fox News. You often sense that the "mainstream" networks don't give a fair shake to your leaders, your party, your views, or your beliefs.

If you're a liberal, maybe you prefer your media to be a little more pugnacious — Air America, or the columns of Paul Krugman or Molly Ivins. But by and large, you find the mainstream media's tone and coverage choices to be preferable to Fox.

But if you're a liberal, or at least a non-conservative, your attention is the target of CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and all the major-network news operations — basically, every one except Fox News. Fox will welcome you and tout their fair and balanced approach and their room for such liberal commentators as Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, and Mara Liasson, but by and large they're well-established as the network of choice for conservatives.

In the print world, the major newsweekly magazines, and almost every major city newspaper is clamoring for your attention if you're a non-conservative. In fact, most of the coverage is written from, and for, your viewpoint. You can read the New York Times nationally, or the Los Angeles Times, or Reuters wire copy. Both Chicago and Philadelphia have two major papers, neither of which is conservative. At the magazine rack, you have The New Republic, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, the post-Michael Kelly Atlantic Monthly, and Slate and Salon on the web. (This list isn't exhaustive, I'm just trying to give a sense of the breadth and depth.)

On the radio dial, you've got Air America, as well as much of NPR's programming.

That's a lot of media competing for the attention of the 49 percent.

Meanwhile, on cable, Fox News pretty much has the 51 percent to itself, unless you want to count Joe Scarborough, Dennis Miller, and about half the Capitol Gang.

It's a similar situation in print: You have a few conservative magazines, NR, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, and The American Conservative, as well as the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and some alternative newspapers like the Washington Times, the New York Post, New York Sun, Boston Herald, etc. The radio dial gives you a decent slew of options.

But by and large, the right-of-center "alternative" media outlets are courting the 51 percent, while the many more mainstream media outlets are courting the 49 percent.

Boondocks will be a write-off for Cartoon Network. It won't get any ratings in the heartland where most of TV's viewers are, but it certainly will get good press and buzz in New York and Los Angeles. much like Fahrenheit 9/11, of which Daniel Henninger wrote last year:

This is moviemaking for bicoastal cultural elites. They get to look down at the opposition, at "Bush," but they also get to feel superior to their own foot soldiers in the proletarian heartland.

The F-9/11 crowd now has a cartoon series to join its cartoon "documentary".

The New York Times article above quotes the show--and presumably Aaron McGruder, the creator of the comic strip it's based on, as saying, "Jesus is black, Ronald Reagan is the devil and the government is lying about 9/11". The New Yorker reported last year that McGruder claims he called Condoleezza Rice a mass murderer to her face at the 2002 NAACP Image Awards.

It's interesting to note, beginning probably with Oliver Stone, how many millions Hollywood is willing to pour into the coffers of ideologically like-minded guys who make Criswell sound like Solzhenitsyn, and who would never have gotten past a studio's front gates during the 1930s and '40s. Based on the number of conspirators in JFK, when Mick Jagger sang, "I shouted out who killed the Kennedys, but after all, it was you and me", Stone took him literally. Ted Turner recently told Wolf Blitzer that the only thing wrong with North Korea was that people "were thin, and they were riding bicycles instead of driving in cars". The afore mentioned Michael Moore believes that Iraq was nothing but pizza and fairytales until President Bush was elected, despite mass graves, a million casualties in its war with Iran, some killed via chemical weapons, its invasion of Kuwait, and President Clinton's attacks against it. Morgan Spurlock is mock-surprised that eating 5,000 calories a day at McDonalds made him fat. And so on. And don't get me started on all of the actors involved with this sentence censored by representatives of L. Ron Hubbard.

But really, for television--like the movies--which is more important? Actually making money, or keeping your friends in the cocoon-like echo chamber happy?

If you've been poking around Google Video, the latest edition to the Google search-opoly, you've undoubtedly come across some of the seemingly endless series of half-hour video interviews with veteran television industry pros which currently dominate the video footage on the search engine. This TechWeb article says that 75 hour-hour segments from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation:

Google Inc. on Wednesday said it has started offering free viewing of videotaped interviews with some of TV's biggest celebrities, as the result of a deal with the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation.

The Mountain View, Calif., search engine said the Foundation agreed to make its Archive of American Television interviews available, giving Google access to interviews with Alan Alda, Sid Caesar, Norman Lear, Steven Bochco and many other actors, writers, producers and directors.

As of Wednesday, 75 of the 284 films are available through Google Video. To get a listing of all 75 films, a person needs to enter the query "academy of television" into the Google Video search box. The Foundation's collection covers the last 75 years in television.

Among the other performers in the archives are Diahann Carroll, Ossie Davis, Phyllis Diller, Michael J. Fox, Andy Griffith, Robert Guillaume, Florence Henderson, Angela Lansbury, William Shatner, Dick Van Dyke, Betty White, and James Garner. Producers/creators include Carl Reiner and Dick Clark.

They're oddly hypnotic, if only because it's amazing to see how aging television veterans can talk endlessly about an industry that produces a product that's so ephemeral. And considering how much Hollywood loves to make movies about The Man abusing his employees (Hoffa, F*I*S*T, Norma Rae, North Dallas Forty, and this month's North Country all immediately to mind, and there are dozens more), to watch Dick Wolf (the producer of Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: SVU, and Law & Order: Elevator Inspectors Unit (to borrow a Simpsons riff) talk about his days producing Miami Vice. On his first day on the job, Michael Mann (the show's mastermind and executive producer) called him and asked him if he'd fired anybody yet. I'm paraphrasing, but this is reasonably close to what Wolf actually said (about 19 minutes into the video):

"No Michael, I just started!"

"Go down to the set and pick someone to fire at random. Show 'em who's boss right from the start!"

Geez--now that's nuanced and progressive management in action.

In New Delhi, bombs killed more than 50:

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Three powerful bombs tore through New Delhi markets packed with families and shoppers on Saturday ahead of the biggest Hindu and Muslim festivals of the year, killing more than 50 people and wounding scores.

Charred bodies, blood, glass and smoking debris littered the blast scenes as rescuers frantically pulled out the dead and wounded while thousands of shocked survivors milled around trying to find out what had happened to missing relatives.

Meanwhile, a passenger train derailed in South India, killing at least 110:

HYDERABAD, Oct. 29 (UPI) — Rescue workers, hampered by drizzle, resumed the grim task Sunday morning of recovering bodies from a wrecked train in South India.

At least 110 bodies had been pulled from the wreckage by Saturday night, NDTV reported, and another 20 were believed to remain.

The Delta Express derailed at 4:15 a.m. local time Saturday about 18 miles south of Hyderabad on a stretch of track that borders a reservoir, where part of a bridge had been swept away by high water. The engine and seven cars went off the tracks into the water.

Rescue workers used cranes to remove cars from the water and blowtorches to cut them open. Army, Navy and Air Force troops joined the rescue effort.

Continued heavy rain hampered the rescue effort.
Many of the passengers were on their way to family gatherings to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, this Tuesday.

The article doesn't speculate on the cause of the derailment.

Want to see an amazing headline? Check out the one atop this Arab Times article:

Pakistan team to visit 'Israel'

I can honestly say, I've ever seen a sovereign nation's name in scare quotes before. I can only theorize the local editor put the quotes in the headline; the body copy from the Agence France Presse wire service doesn't contain them.

Last year, Steve Green (who's going trick-or-treating tonight dressed as an extra from Exit To Eden; no word yet if Robin Givhan will be critiquing his leather duds) wrote that for him, Halloween is the grown-up equivalent of Christmas.

He may be more right than he knows: these folks theorize that Jesus was born on October 31st.

(Found via the Corner.)

Maybe Volvos should start sporting a new bumper sticker, alongside the de rigueur NPR and "FREE TIBET!" stickers:

"This Car's Manufacturer Bribed Saddam Hussein,
And All I Got Was This Lousy Bumper Sticker!"

MOSCOW - A scathing report on corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program for Saddam Hussein's Iraq drew widespread denials, terse dismissals and protestations of innocence Friday. But there were also pledges to investigate from some of the 2,200 companies cited and countries with citizens named.

Russian officials angrily alleged that documents accusing companies and officials in that country were fake, and the head of the nation's electricity monopoly called for the report's writers to be punished. But in a rare partial admission, Sweden's Volvo AB acknowledged making payments through an agent to Iraqi authorities but said it did not consider that bribery.

Of course.

As Roger L. Simon writes, "Don't tell the soccer moms"; but I think he just did!

Pop a 'lude, slip into your white polyester suit and gold chains, and break out the Bee Gees records, before you read this item from those dancin' freakazoids at the BBC:

A 76-year-old French woman with dyed red hair and a business-like look in her eye can legitimately lay claim to one of the most important inventions of the last century: the discotheque.

As Ace of Spades writes, "Ummm... maybe to Andrew Sullivan":

It's hardly any wonder the BBC reports the news the way they do when the staff considers strobe lights, velvet ropes, & I'll Tumble 4 Ya to be the zenith of Western civilization.

Apparently the disco just edged out radio & radar, penicillin, and, you know, human flight for the distinction.

Dr. Jonas Salk is said to be wearing a big Cat in the Hat chapeau and a necklace of glow-sticks wonderin' where all the love is.

Found via Steven Den Beste, who has his own list of which inventions from the previous century that changed the world:

Arbitrarily limiting myself to five, I'd say they were, in order:

1. Semiconductors
2. Synthetic polymers (i.e. plastics)
3. Heavier-than-air flying machines
4. Nuclear weapons
5. Antibiotics

That's based mainly on the extent to which they did, or will, change our lives -- whether for good or for ill.

I'm not sure if I'd rate those items in the same order, but it's hard to argue with Steve's list.

...Unless your name is Deney Terrio, that is.

...is give peace a chance.

Or as I wrote during the presidential election, "For a party of pacifists, Democrats can fight long, hard, and dirty when they want to".

Michelle Malkin has more, along with additional flashbacks (including photos) to the leftwing violence from last year's presidential race.

Betsy Newmark has some thoughts about Robin Givhan, the Washington Post's political-fashion reporter (there's a job that cried out for being created, huh?), a sort of cross between Maureen Dowd's snarkiness, Mr. Blackwell's fashion sense, combined with lots of dollar book Freudian analysis and the Post's usual liberal pieties:

You might remember Robin Givhan. She's the nasty reporter who commented quite snarkily on how Mrs. Roberts dressed her children just too perfectly in their pastel Sunday clothes to go to the White House when their father was nominated for the Supreme Court. And remember how critical she was of Dick Cheney's choice of jacket at the ceremony at Auschwitz? I guess his jacket distracted her from the heavy thoughts about the Holocaust she might have had otherwise. But one administration official she has approved of in a fashion sense is Condoleezza Rice. Givhan was just breathless on the Secretary of State's choice of black boots and the impression of sex and power. Apparently, Givhan approves if your clothes choice is reminiscent of The Matrix.

And, during the 2004 campaign, she felt compelled to agree with John Kerry that the Democratic ticket just had the better hair. She looked at the Republican hair do's and concluded: Yech!

"Fortunately", Betsy writes, "the American people don't vote based on such cosmetological criteria".

Prescient quote from the original P.J. media maven:

Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the "baby boom", a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, "Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!" This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions - North and South, black and white, labor and management - but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and non-smoking sections.

--From Republican Party Reptile, 1987.

Frank Martin writes:

The single dumbest statement I have ever heard in regards to the "war in Iraq" was made to me today, and here it is:

“The Bush administration has destabilized the middle east and stopped the "peace process"...”.

Frank responds by running the numbers that illustrate just how bloody the Middle East has been, long before either President Bush was sworn in, and rightfully concludes:

The Middle East was never “stable”, unless you consider a concentration camp or charnel house to be the model of stability on which you refer. .

For the last 60 years, the Middle East has been a meat grinder into which tyrants and dictators have fed their own people with little or no concern for being held accountable so long as they remained the clients of the western world.

Which was also the prevailing "realist" policy of much of the west from in the 1960s and '70s when it came to the Soviet Union. Once President Reagan declared them an Evil Empire, the clock was ticking on their demise.

It's possible to see the contrasting worldviews in action in two Washington Post articles that both concern Brent Scowcroft, Papa Bush's national security adviser. First on deck, Richard Cohen:

About six months after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, George H.W. Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, went to Beijing and met with China's "paramount leader," Deng Xiaoping. Scowcroft said he communicated the president's unhappiness over the massacre, to which Deng essentially said, Mind your own business. "And I said, 'You're right. It is none of our business,' " Scowcroft tells Jeffrey Goldberg in the current New Yorker. This raises an obvious question: How many have to die before it is our business?

That question is at the heart of the dilemma now facing American foreign policy. Scowcroft is a famous realist. Not for him any grand, noble causes. He is parsimonious with American lives and treasure, and he vocally opposed George W. Bush's intention to go to war in Iraq. He found out this was a different Bush with a different foreign policy. The younger Bush's was infused with moralism.

Next up, Glenn Kessler:

Scowcroft, in his interview, discussed an argument over Iraq he had two years ago with Condoleezza Rice, then-national security adviser and current secretary of state. "She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. The article stated that with a "barely perceptible note of satisfaction," Scowcroft added: "But we've had fifty years of peace."

As Frank notes above, it was the peace of the charnel house.

(Hat tip on WaPo pieces to the Brothers Judd.)

Kevin Aylward of Wizbang writes:

If the new Supreme Count nominee is announced Monday the Plame case will quickly be drained of any energy is still left after this weekends talk shows.

When the new nominee is announced the left is sure to raise a fuss. Assuming the Bush follows through on his campaign pledge to nominate a justice in the mold of Scalia and Thomas the right and the punditocracy will quickly engage as the did with Chief Justice Roberts nomination. In that case President Bush's poll numbers are sure to head upward as a energized base prepares for a confirmation battle of historic proportions. The reason Bush's poll numbers are so low now is that the Miers nomination has temporarily turned off a lot people who voted for Bush.

Turning all of the negatives of last week around is well within the reach of the White House. It all starts with the Supreme Court nominee...

As for Iraq, in case you've forgotten, we already won that war...

We've long won the war on the ground--but the real front in the battle is against the American media. And Victor Davis Hanson, not surprisingly, has some thoughts on how to break that quagmire:

In the last six months we have heard from various demagogues — though they are recognized as such due to their prominence in the media — that we were waging nuclear war in Iraq (Cindy Sheehan), that there was cannibalism in New Orleans (Randall Robinson), that George Bush and Dick Cheney should be shot (the novelist Jane Smiley) or executed (Al Franken). Alfred Knopf has published a book about the theoretical assassination of the president, and the Nazi slur is now commonplace in Democratic circles, where a Senator Dick Durbin or Ted Kennedy slanders American soldiers as akin to either Saddam’s torturers or even Nazis and Stalinists. The case needs to be made that we are seeing a new paranoid style — but from the Left, whose opponents are not to be out-argued, but rather deemed worthy of death or demonization as Nazis. The recent eclipse of George Galloway — due in no large part to Christopher Hitchens’ lonely and underappreciated pursuit of his perfidy — reminds us how hard these reprobates finally will fall.

All of these issues are interrelated. If the president can win the hearts and minds of the American people on one theme, the others will fall into play. The more the president talks of principle and values, the more he can do so with zeal, and yes, real passion and occasional anger.

The odd thing is that so far the conventional advice to the president — keep the discussion on Iraq only to U.S. national security, not the upheaval of the existing corrupt order; reach out to the Democratic Senate; curb your idealistic rhetoric with Syria or Iran; ignore shrill enemies; nominate someone that the opposition will not seriously object to — has only emboldened critics here and abroad. It is time to go back on the offensive, both for the idealistic legacy of the Bush presidency and the immediate future of his ideas in the upcoming 2006 elections. The American people, both pro and con, are more than ready for a great debate to settle these issues one way or another.

That's the next real battle--one that's long been ignored by the White House, partially as a result of the rope-a-dope strategy that was worked to help neutralize many of its opponents. But just as Ali eventually came out swinging against George Foreman after absorbing several rounds of punishment, sooner or later, as VDH notes, the battle for ideas needs to be fought by the White House.

Just click: The New York Times hits bottom, continues to dig.

We've been relatively free of Plame here, and the only scooters thus far have been in a recent review of Quadrophenia, but as you no doubt have heard, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, was indicted today by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. As Glenn Reynolds writes:

Lying to a grand jury is serious, if true. The rest is Martha Stewart stuff. But this isn't the Libby-Rove-Cheney takedown that the lefties have been hoping for -- there's not even a charge of "outing" a covert agent -- and the very extravagance of their hopes will make this seem much less significant.

Neo-Neocon has some thoughts on what constitutes a feeding frenzy and writes:

Pundits and bloggers, known for the sharpness of their opinions--and, as with sharks' teeth, such sharpness is often a necessary part of the arsenal of such creatures--need to be careful that, in the group excitement of the fray, they don't end up destroying more than they intended.

Which is partially why Glenn adds, "If there's no more [than an indicted Scooter], this will probably do Bush little harm". Orrin Judd agrees, writing:

This wasn't an October that the president would have sought, but it ends up going as well as he could possibly have hoped on the 4 issues that had hurt him most.

Read Orrin's post for the list.

Meanwhile, Roger L. Simon writes:

It's obvious too that the Plame Affair is not at all about some minor not-so-covert CIA official, but about Iraq. It is a replaying of the war on other turf. The odd thing about this is that it has always struck me that Iraq could just as easily have been a Democratic Party war. Despite his present ultra-dovish position, Gore, who has often been a foreign policy hawk during his career, might easily have led the nation into the Iraq War had he been elected. His opinions now are dictated, in part, by his current constituency.

That's absolutely true--but who's driving the train? To turn your opinions on a dime for nothing more than partisan reasons is hypocrisy of the worst order--and speaking of which, the H-word is a topic Jonah Goldberg explores in his latest column.

CNN and Barbie agree: math is hard, especially when it doesn't produce the numbers you want. Daly Thoughts catches CNN spinning a recent poll on Harriet Miers. (You remember her, right?)

Of course, this is far from the first time that CNN's been confused by big numbers.

Austin Bay (recently profiled by Pajamas Media, where he's an editorial board member) writes:

October 2005: Peter Jennings has passed away, Al Jazeera is still with us -- though arguably less antagonistic since the Iraqi presidential election of January 2005. The terror war within Iraq continues to pit terrorist hell against democratic hope. A multitude of economic and governmental challenges linger.

But current combat in Iraq is not simply the result of slapdash postwar planning. The United States has two strategic goals that have taken years to mesh in terms of political, economic and military operations.

Goal One: engage Al-Qaida on military and political battlefields in order to destroy its claim to "divine sanction" and to "speak on behalf of Islam."

Goal Two: seed development of modern, democratic states in the politically dysfunctional Arab Muslim Middle East.

Achieving both goals defeats Al-Qaida. Goal Two is a multi-decade project. Reaching it requires sustained, courageous effort, but Iraq's January election and its constitutional process are signs of progress. Sensational carnage and "expert pessimism" dominated the international media's January election coverage. Despite the dour predictions, Iraqi voters responded, waving ink-stained fingers -- a terror-defying demonstration of political change. Al Jazeera didn't miss it.

Military defeat in Afghanistan dealt Al-Qaida's claim of "divine sanction" a hard blow.

However, smashing Al-Qaida's claim to act on behalf of "all Muslims" is far more complicated than killing or arresting terrorists. Undermining its megalomaniacal appeal meant exposing it as the inhuman, ungodly Mass Murder Inc. it is. The optimal outcome would be to expose Al-Qaida as a threat to Muslims and detrimental to the best ideals of Islam.

When Al-Qaida's zealots blow up trains in Spain or subways in London, those are attacks of their choosing conducted on "infidel terrain." The genius of the war in Iraq is a brutal but necessary form of strategic judo: It brought the War on Terror into the heart of the Middle East and onto Arab Muslim turf. In Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's theo-fascists have been spilling Arab blood, and Al Jazeera has noticed that, too.

Arabs have also seen the Iraqi people's struggle and their emerging political alternative to despotism and feudal autocracy.

Read the whole thing. As the man says, every last word.

Elsewhere, Teachout wonders if "schadenfreude" is becoming more popular. It's a word that does seem to get around in the Blogosphere these days, doesn't it?

A friend of Terry Teachout writes him about a recent dinner in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Connecticut:

It was beautiful—everywhere the eye went it found something to delight it. Wright's big public rooms have found a ghastly afterlife in today's McMansions. He's not responsible for that, but he is responsible for the tiny kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms, the smoking chimneys, and the leaky roof—all traits, the owners assured us, of other Wright houses (they belong to a Wright homeowners' association).

I suppose the Parthenon would be drafty.

It's a pretty safe bet that the private homes designed in the 1920s by Le Corbusier, France's answer to Wright shared similar qualities. Of his post-'20s public work, we shan't speak much here, having dynamited it thoroughly only a couple of months ago.

Over at Tech Central Station, Ryan Sager has some thoughts on the Miers withdrawal:

The Harriet Miers nomination is dead. Long live the Harriet Miers nomination.

The political fallout from the Miers withdrawal will likely be minor. The Democrats will get a day of Snoopy-dancing, and conservatives will get a day of tearful embraces -- brothers and sisters laying down their arms. But the long-term impact on the judicial selection process is (at the risk of being optimistic) likely to be positive.

If nothing else, Miers has proved that the vaunted "stealth nominee" tactic is a game of Russian roulette -- not just for the Constitution and the American people years down the line, but for the president pulling the trigger in the here and now.

Sure, with the perfect, straight-A, spotless-attendance, gold-starred, shiny-haired, white-teethed, adorable-childrened, Reagan-White-House-tenured Judge John Roberts, you can get away with it. Conservatives have already forgotten how perplexed and disappointed they were by Bush's first Supreme Court pick. The sheer glint in his eye and unflappable competence calmed them like a cool, September breeze.

But there just aren't that many John Robertses in the world, with impeccable resumes and non-existent paper trails, both at the same time. Jokes about cloning John Roberts were made when he was confirmed. Now, conservatives are thinking of lifting Bush's federal-embryonic-stem-cell-research-funding ban -- if it might help the process along.

Bush found out that if you're going to eliminate from the selection process every serious and principled conservative jurist and legal scholar right at the outset, there's a pretty limited universe of qualified candidates to chose from. So limited, in fact, as to be virtually non-existent.

Now that Miers has left the stage, there is the risk that a petulant president will pick a nominee wildly unacceptable to his conservative base, but confirmable by the Democrats and some GOP moderates -- simply out of spite toward those who betrayed him ("I know it was you, Frum. You broke my heart!")

If he takes responsible counsel, however, he will begin looking at the serious conservative candidates (yes, likely women, such as Priscilla Owens, Janice Rogers Brown, Edith Jones or Edith Clement) and a serious confirmation process.

But aside from the immediate crisis, this entire episode should also make conservatives think a little harder about the twin ideas many of them had advanced about the judicial confirmation process in general: that a president is due a virtual rubber stamp on his desired nominee, short of massive ethical problems or utter incompetence, and that a nominee cannot properly be questioned on any matter that may conceivably come before the Supreme Court.

He's right--but only because of how important the Supreme Court has become in modern politics--especially to the left. It's "almost as if God has spoken", as that well-known theocon, Nancy Pelosi famously uttered over the summer after the Kelo decision came down.

When the stakes were a little lower--when the wasn't a culture war dividing the country and the Men In Black weren't our de facto rulers, cronyism wasn't much of a concern, as this recent Knight-Ridder piece makes clear:

Franklin Roosevelt regularly chose close associates to sit on the court, but none turned out to be an embarrassment. John F. Kennedy chose Byron White, a friend so close he used to participate in Kennedy family football games.

But three picks by Harry Truman rank among court watchers' worst, at least in the 20th century. Sherman Minton, Harold Burton and Chief Justice Fred Vinson all were close associates of Truman, but none left a favorable mark on the high court. The 19th century is replete with political cronies who had undistinguished careers on the court.

"The truth is that if you compare Miers, just on paper, to some of the political cronies who have wound up on the court, her qualifications put her square in the middle," said court historian David Garrow. "Thirty or 35 years ago, no one would have thought there was anything out of the ordinary about it."

But Garrow said Miers' nomination, coming on the heels of John Roberts' confirmation, makes her seem less impressive.

"She's following a 24-karat All Star onto the court," Garrow said, referring to Roberts' stellar credentials. "By comparison, she looks inescapably unqualified."

Let's hope the next nominee, whoever he or she is, won't appear that way.

That's the German translation of "For You", the message that was printed on the Berlin Wall--by the East Germans, for the benefit of their citizens imprisoned behind it. As Tom McMahon writes, hopefully we'll "never forget what a monstrosity Communism was in general, and the Berlin Wall was in particular".

(Via VodkaPundit, who writes, "This picture isn't exactly news, but it's sure worth remembering". Related thoughts here.)

Great quote by Mickey Kaus:

Pinch's overarching, original crime: Freeing a respected national newspaper to become an unashamed cocooning organ of New York liberal political and aesthetic prejudices (with a few exceptions, like Miller, that are slowly being corrected).

All of which poisons the well for the rest of America's me-too MSM, as I wrote last year:

the Times' reporting influences not just what you read in other papers, but what you see on TV as well. Many, many TV news stories begin as Times articles, which TV networks simply hand to their reporters and say, "craft a TV story out of this".

Maybe if journalism were decentralized...moved out of Manhattan...put into the hands of a diverse group of citizens, instead of dominated by one house organ. Now there's a thought.

Harriet Miers, in case you haven't heard, has resigned. As Glenn Reynolds writes:

She's to be commended for doing this. The White House made a dreadful error in nominating her, which it compounded by its ham-handed efforts in support of her candidacy, and this was perhaps the only way to ensure that it wouldn't be a complete debacle for the Bush Administration. Let's hope that they'll do better the next time around.

Indeed.

The legacy media has been using the cliché of "Grim Milestone" to describe the 2000 American servicemen killed in Iraq, but for these Bay Area far leftists, it's time to party like it's 1939!

(Via Charles Johnson.)

It's actually well over 5,000, but then, as Andrew Sullivan presciently noted early last year, for the left, it's as if 9/11 never happened. Nor the Iranian hostage crisis, the chemical weapons used by Saddam in the 1980s, the first Gulf War, the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania by al-Qaeda (on the anniversary of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait), nor President Clinton's attacks against Iraq in 1998 and the bipartisan support for the removal of Saddam Hussein until, well, until the 2004 presidential election began to loom near. Sample quote:

"The suffering inside Iraq can come to an end when Saddam Hussein's regime is replaced...And I hope -- and most of the world community hopes -- that this regime based on terrorism and atrocities against his own people will be replaced. Over time, we hope to achieve that result."

Donald Rumsfeld? Paul Wolfowitz? Dick Cheney?

Al Gore, in 1993.

So remember the mammoth protests and parties when American servicemen died under President Clinton's watch? Me neither. "It wasn't very hip" back then, as Janeane Garofalo would say (when she's not backing the man with the moustache.)

Update: Beyond The News has related thoughts--and a graphic well worth studying.

The Manolo has relaunched a new and improved blog for the men.

But I imagine it must feel quite a bit like this.

There was...Atari!

(You never know what strange flotsam and jetsam will turn up on Google Video).

Cinema historian and restoration expert Robert Harris looks at all of the work Warner Brothers is putting into getting the original (and still best) 1933 RKO version of King Kong ready for DVD release next month.

I'll definitely be glad to add it to my collection on the same shelf with RKO Production Number #281 from a few years later.

Californication spreads: a common cliche heard here is that the state government spends plenty of taxpayer money on welfare programs, but little on infrastructure. Which is why California has some of the busiest roads in the nation, in the worst shape.

In Tech Central Station, Vaclav Smil writes that the rest of the nation is heading that way as well:

An ancient dam about to collapse in Massachusetts; levees breached in Louisiana; a blackout blanketing millions of people across the country's most populous Northeastern region; repeated media references to the shrinking number of crude oil refineries; detours forced by collapsing bridges; ubiquitous flight delays. All of these are assorted tips of the Brobdingnagian iceberg of America's aging, crumbling, strained and poorly maintained infrastructure. Studying its massive dilapidation is a depressing endeavor; writing about it is not the media's favorite choice -- how can sewers, garbage dumps or bridges compete with witless celebrities or DC gossip?; mobilizing the needed investment for its upkeep is a thankless task (after all, legislators are voting for outlays that may be buried underground or located out of sight of 99.99% of people) -- and the job is never done.

And so the management of the country's immense infrastructure becomes repeatedly a victim of postponements, procrastination, corner cutting and outright neglect. Yet virtually everything that matters --- a country's economic performance, myriads of daily chores of a civilized society, basic personal satisfaction and safety, and (perhaps most importantly) a nation's long-term security -- depends on well-maintained, appropriately repaired, and periodically renewed infrastructures.

In its broadest definition this fundamental category includes the dense city networks of roads, bridges, tunnels, subways, water and sewer pipes, above- and below-ground electricity lines and telecommunication links. Urban landscapes are dotted with schools, recreation facilities, fire, transformer and water pumping stations, and contain wastewater treatment plants, railway and bus stops, airports and, when situated along rivers or coast, passenger and container and industrial ports. Outside the cities there are far-flung webs of interstate highways, railways, high-voltage transmission lines, crude oil, natural gas and chemical product pipelines and numerous electricity-generating plants, refineries, dams, reservoirs, levees, canals, shipping channels, water breaks, garbage dumps and sites for the disposal of toxic wastes.

Some of North America's vast infrastructure is relatively new, and much of it was originally well built and hence it has been smoothly functioning (out of sight and out of mind) for decades. But many infrastructures -- above all water mains, sewers, numerous bridges and dams, roads, railway and subway tunnels -- are truly archaic and they have been serving decades beyond their original life expectation and thousands of them are, literally, on the verge of collapse. Moreover, with so much of the nation's infrastructure built during the New Deal years of the 1930s, during the war years and during the decades of vigorous pre-1973 economic expansion, the number of badly aged structures will be increasing rapidly, often exponentially. For example, in 2004 Oklahoma had 135 bridges older than 80 years, but by 2015 that total could surpass 800.

The East Coast blackout in 2003, the 3000 killed in France that summer due to the heat, and the rolling blackouts in the years prior in California should have been wake-up calls, but obviously weren't. Smil writes, "The enormity of the problem calls for a grand strategy: I wish I could say that there will be no shortage of bold initiatives to bring it about".

In the quote above, Smil mentions 1973 as a bit of a cut-off date. One reason why infrastructures have stagnated of course, is the anti-modernism of the environmental left, which began early in that decade. Also in TCS, Henry I. Miller writes of the challenges to America's resilience:

In both the private and public sectors, resilience is crucial. The buggy-whip manufacturers had to adapt to supplying automobile components to Henry Ford's assembly line, or die; and the federal government achieved an historic success in World War II's Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs that ended the war.

In many realms, resilience is in short supply these days, however, and there is plenty of blame to go around. Politicians -- federal, state and local -- tend to be short-term thinkers, their purview often limited to the next election. Moreover, many of them are just not very smart, and they're particularly challenged in science and logic. The harsh truth is that there is little correlation between electability and problem-solving.

The nation as a whole would have been far more resilient to Katrina, had we located oil refineries in other parts of the country and markedly broadened our energy mix by constructing additional nuclear power plants. However, these efforts have been blocked by failures of both government and non-governmental lobbying groups. Nuclear energy has become the third rail of politics, and irresponsible radical environmentalists have prevented the construction of a single new oil refinery or nuclear power plant for decades. (And witness the seemingly endless acrimony over the creation of the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.)

These activists detest the oil and coal-mining companies, they abhor nuclear power, and now they're even complaining about wind turbines killing birds -- so what do they approve of? Not long ago, a Greenpeace activist who knocked on the door of my home tried to convince me that the answer to our energy needs was to grow vast quantities of hemp. Hemp? I threatened to set the dog on her.

Mindless, anti-technology activism -- whether in NGOs or government -- is inimical to resilience. It jeopardizes our survival as individuals and our success as a society.

Exactly.

Between Condi and Chutch, it's obviously Photoshop day in the neighborhood. So let's look at the folks who pioneered the art of selective airbrushing: Stalin's Soviet Union.

Well, here's one liberal college's definition of gun control: got a reactionary radical chic professor coming whose entire look and mindset screams 1969 right down to his long hair parted in the middle, beret and AK-47?

Why not give him a fashion makeover? Bring him up to date. Into the 21st century! And airbrush that pesky ol' AK-47 right out of hands. There! Now he's all set to expose the kids to ideas that would been right at home at one of Leonard Bernstein's Black Panther fondue and Twister parties. (To borrow a great riff by Iowahawk.)

Back in February of 2001, I gave a brief, capsule history (as opposed to a long capsule history...) of HDTV in America in Nuts & Volts magazine, as the intro to a feature article whose text is sadly not available online:

In the US, HDTV began entering the public’s eye in the mid to late 1980s. This was the period when the nation was in awe of Japan. Remember when Hollywood cranked out films like Gung Ho, Black Rain, and Rising Sun? When the Japanese stock market was going through the roof? It was against this backdrop that the FCC made HDTV sound like a national emergency. As Jeff Taylor, the author of Reason magazine’s weekly email newsletter on technology and politics (www.reason.com) describes it, “This was the period when the Japanese were building great cars. They were building all of the consumer electronics. We used to lead the world in those areas. What are we going to do for technology? They’re going to do digital television, so we should do something about that. So that’s what got a lot of people in the FCC being very concerned about HDTV. So you have that whole backdrop of, ‘The government has to get involved or this is not going to get done right.’”

Unfortunately, the combination of government hearings, competition between the phone companies, the cable companies and the networks, and the general ramp up time that a new technology always faces, especially one designed to replace a very entrenched existing technology, meant a very, very long gestation period.

During which, in the mid-1990s, the Internet gave a tremendous boost to the phone and computer industries. So it was now doubly important that the television get HDTV off the ground.

If you noticed, one thing I haven’t mentioned is consumer interest, and feedback. As Taylor describes it, “At no part in this process, was anyone saying, ‘what about the average consumer out there who might want to look at this high definition television?’ I think that has been the missing link all along in that no one has tried to figure out if there is a market demand for this and how would you go about filling it if there was. So what we have is all of these different interests motivated by different things, trying to come up with a system that the general public may or may not want. This has taken up a better part of a decade now, just to get to the point where we just might start building things.”

By early 1998, HDTV antennas were starting to appear on skyscrapers, mountains and other locations with sufficient height across the US, along with early programming. Today, HDTV is firmly entrenched, and even with the deadline to discontinue all analog over-the-air broadcasting pushed back to 2009, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) wants to fund digital converter boxes for those few remaining viewers, despite the seemingly universal prescence of digital and analog cable, and satellite TV.

In Tech Central Station, Glenn Reynolds writes:

I suppose that there are worse ways to waste the taxpayers' money -- I can't actually think of any at the moment, but given Congress's ingenuity I suppose that Ted Stevens and his colleagues probably could -- but this strikes me as pretty pathetic, especially when the government is laying off scientists for lack of money. Subsidizing TV and starving science seems like a recipe for something short of national greatness.

Meanwhile, technology is, as usual, passing Congress by. Because while the long-planned switch to HDTV creeps along, video technology is advancing by leaps and bounds in areas that, in what I'm pretty sure isn't really a coincidence, Congress hasn't managed to get its hands on yet. The result, widespread video podcasting, is likely to bring about something far more revolutionary than higher resolution commercial broadcasts: It might actually produce TV that people want to watch.

Podcasting is already big, with people producing "radio" programs for Internet distribution using nothing more than a computer and an Internet connection. Video podcasting will make producing and distributing TV programming nearly as easy. Podcasting and audio MP3 technology have demonstrated pretty clearly that in the audio world people care more about hearing what they want, when they want, than they care about super high sound quality. I suspect that video podcasting will demonstrate the same thing: a pretty good picture coupled with a show that you actually like is worth more than a stupendous picture coupled with a show you don't care about that much. And according to some people, the Video iPod is already good enough to ensure that video podcasting will be "huge."

If Congress cared about promoting video distribution technology, it could do a lot -- without even spending taxpayer dollars -- by reforming intellectual property law to make it easier on amateur producers and distributors. (Some general advice on that, from J.D. Lasica, can be found here.) That seems like a better enterprise than forking out taxpayer dollars to help buy set-top boxes, but one that's unlikely to materialize since it would involve making the entertainment industry unhappy.

On the other hand, I should probably be thankful that Congress doesn't seem to "get" the coming video revolution. As its behavior with HDTV has demonstrated, Congress isn't much good at helping new technologies along anyway, and it may well be that in these overregulated times technologies need to be fast, nimble, and below the radar to flourish. In the 21st Century, at least, Congress's biggest contribution to promoting the progress of science and the useful arts may sometimes be to overlook them until they've become a reality.

That Third Wave technology is advancing beyond the speed of a First Wave institution is a definite feature, not a bug.

National Review Online explores Annie Jacobsen's new book, Terror In The Skies:

Journalist Annie Jacobsen gained a certain degree of fame last year as the woman who wrote about the strange and frightening behavior of a group of Syrian “musicians” aboard a Northwest Airlines flight. She has now written a riveting book, Terror in the Skies: Why 9-11 Could Happen Again about what happened that day and in the months that followed. Jacobsen put her investigative skills to work, and discovered that the harrowing events that took place on her flight were far from an isolated occurrence. She ends her book with a warning: If our security system does not improve, another 9/11 is almost inevitable.

* * *

When Jacobsen decided to write about her experience aboard Flight 327, she was contacted by Dave Adams, the head of public affairs at FAMS. Adams insisted that the Middle Eastern men on her flight were “just musicians” from Syria. They’d been questioned by FAMS, the FBI, and the TSA. Their story checked out, Adams said, and none of their names appeared on the FBI’s “no fly” list. Given the evidence that terrorists had been trying to assemble bombs in airliner restrooms, why, Jacobsen asked, had air marshals done nothing about the Syrians’ bizarre behavior — much of it involving restrooms? “Our . . . agents have to have an event to arrest somebody,” Adams explained.

Jacobsen didn’t buy Adams’s “they were just musicians” story, and her gripping account of what happened on Flight 327 — “Terror in the Skies, Again?” — was posted on July 12, 2004, on WomensWallStreet. It exploded through the blogosphere, then the mainstream media, spawning intense debate. To some, Jacobsen was a courageous journalist exposing deadly flaws in America’s security system; to others, she was a racist, paranoid mommy with an overactive imagination. Jacobsen’s persistence in pursuing the story angered higher-ups in FAMS, and led to her testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

Astonishingly, Jacobsen writes, many of the federal agents who investigated the events of Flight 327 continued to insist that nothing unusual happened. In a sense, this was correct: These dry runs, or probes, apparently happen all the time. In the weeks after she posted her story, Jacobsen received more than 5,000 e-mails — including 250 from commercial pilots, flight attendants, and other airport employees who are forbidden by their employers to talk to the press about similar “incidents.” Gary Boettcher, president of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations, told Jacobsen that she’d likely witnessed a “dry run,” and that he’d had many similar experiences himself: “The terrorists are probing us all the time.” Mark Bogosian, an American Airlines pilot, said incidents like the one she described were a “dirty little secret” that airline crew members had known about for some time. Air marshals sent e-mails congratulating Jacobsen for bringing to light “something that had been going on since shortly after 9/11 and was being suppressed.” Many airline employees expressed outrage over security procedures that are lax, politically correct, and likely to lead to another 9/11.

As NRO writes, "It is a sobering and necessary book--one that ought to be read by anyone planning to fly the increasingly unfriendly skies".

Michelle Malkin wonders why USA Today photoshopped Condoleezza Rice's eyes to make her look, as Power Line suggests, like she's stepped off the set of an Omen movie.

One of Michelle's readers suggests it's a Photoshop sharpness filter run amok, but the rest of her face appears unchanged.

Update: USA Today has pulled the airbrushed photo and replaced it with a non-doctored version, along with a surprisingly lame explanation from the newspaper on the incident.

Another Update: Sissy Willis writes:

USA Today got religion in record time...Holding the media's feet to the fire by confronting them with the errors of their ways: It's one of the things the blogosphere does best. We notice there were 60 trackbacks to Michelle's original post -- most if not all in support of her thesis -- including technical explanations by Photoshop experts as to how the original image may have been doctored. Congratulations to Michelle and her army of seekers of wisdom and truth for not letting 'em get away with it.

Indeed, as the Blogfaddah would say.

...And not necessarily in that order, N.Z. Bear notes, as he catches Apple using Rosa Parks' image on their homepage and asks:

If you want to commemorate her life and achievements, fine, I guess. But slapping your corporate logo and slogan on the image is a bit over the top, no?

Apple's about the only company I can think of that can get away with this stuff...

Certainly two days after someone died, it seems a mite tacky.

Linda Chavez writes:

Few people in history can claim to have truly changed the world, and even fewer by one simple act. But Rosa Parks, who died this week at 92, did just that. On Dec. 1, 1955, she boarded a bus in Montgomery, Ala., and helped launch a revolution against bigotry and ignorance by refusing to yield her seat to a white man. She later said she was tired -- not physically so much as weary of putting up with second-class citizenship in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal. Mrs. Parks' defiance was one more nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, and the United States would never be the same.

It is almost unfathomable that barely 50 years ago it was illegal in many parts of the country for blacks to sit in the front of public buses, or eat at lunch counters or drink from the same water fountains as whites. Rosa Parks' protest inspired thousands of others to engage in civil disobedience against such tyranny. Soon, blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, old and young were taking to the streets to march against injustice and demand that this nation live up to its ideals. But the modern civil rights movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott sparked by Rosa Parks.

Read the rest--as Chavez concludes, "America is a better place for Rosa Parks. She will be missed by all who value freedom".

The Manolo explains some simple facts which so many in society--both high and low--have forgotten:

These inescapable facts obtain: that the clothes they are always necessary, and that others they will always judge us by them. These are the reasons why the Manolo he would have you dress with the purpose, to consider carefully what you would wear, and to think about the effect your clothes and how you wear them will have on others.

Of the course, this it does not mean that you must dress to please others, nor that you should follow the lowing herd, but rather that you should be conscious of the image you are projecting.

For the example, if you wish to project the image of carefree disdain for the high fashion, be aware that your dirty t-shirt of the Oakland Raiders, torn sweat pants, and flip-flops may not be conveying that exact message, may in the stead be saying to the by passer, “Cross to the other side of the street, lest this person’s disdain for personal hygiene and grooming infect you with the parasites.”

Manolo says, the fashion, it is not the nuclear rocket brain surgery.

There are the simple rules for dressing that can be used by anyone to maximize the assests and diminish the faults, and thus project the worthy image. Likewise, there are the ways and reasons to deviate from these rules that will thus project the pleasing counter image. But the central necessity for properly using, and sometimes ignoring, the rules of the fashion and the clothing it is to be thoughtful, to consider your choices carefully, and to be aware that you are always, always, always projecting the image, even when you think you are not.

Exactly. Or as Oscar E. Schoeffler, the former fashion editor of Esquire warned:

Never underestimate the power of what you wear...After all, there's just a small bit of you-yourself sticking out, at the cuff and at the neck. The rest of what the world sees is what you hang on the frame.

(From Alan Flusser's indispensable--well for us guys who care about these things--1985 book, Clothes And The Man.)

As Jonah wrote, one reason why a grab at guild socialism is an increasingly popular survival strategy for old media is their new-found competition. But even a formal or informal guild strategy can't stem all the ongoing hemorrhaging, which is why Bill O'Reilly paints a gloomy future for newspapers. That's not at all a surprising take from Bill given his biases, but he makes several great points:

Here's a story the print press doesn't really want to report -- many American newspapers are in big trouble. Earnings at The New York Times Company, for example, are down more than 50 percent this quarter, the Los Angeles Times has changed its editor and editorial director in the face of steep circulation declines, and scores of other papers are having major problems convincing consumers to buy their product.

There are a number of reasons for the depressing situation, pardon the pun. The Internet provides news efficiently, the decline of public education means fewer Americans care about what's going on, and people are very busy these days. Many of us don't have time to spend an hour reading the paper.

But the collapse of journalistic standards is another reason some have turned away from the press. Most Americans are not ideological junkies, craving their daily dose of political propaganda. Just give us the facts and some lively opinion based on the facts. The political jihadists who have taken over some newspapers are driving people away.

Here's an example. In the 30 days following Hurricane Katrina, The New York Times ran 53 columns criticizing President Bush on its editorial pages. Even Barbra Streisand might consider that overkill.

The Boston Globe, which is owned by The New York Times, has one conservative columnist and 10 liberal ones. So why would any conservative bother with the paper?

Over at the Washington Post, an editor named Marie Arana criticized her own paper saying: "The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and we are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions ... if you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat."

So why would any Republican buy The Washington Post?

As Patrick Ruffini said in February on the night of the (astonishingly low-rated) Oscars:

Liberals get all pissy when conservatives decide to tune out institutions that don't represent them and create new ones -- just look at the sneering at "Faux News" and Rush and homeschooling and values voters. In Hollywood as in mainstream media, there is a price to be paid when an institution decides to leverage its prestige to push a political position where none is warranted; it's a price that is paid in viewership, influence, and profit -- in this case, a 30% falloff in viewers.

For newspapers, the situation is even worse: it takes serious money to put together even a small, independent movie. But a blog? The only cash one need put out to get started is to buy the pajamas.

Matt Drudge once said, "Roger Ailes told me early on, you don't need a license to report. You need a license to do hair". Naturally, as Jonah Goldberg notes, most in Big Media would like that to change:

Many putative First Amendment voluptuaries defend their position against the most absurd hypotheticals. My favorite example (as some readers may recall) comes from the columnist Michael Kinsley. A "very distinguished New York Times writer" once told Kinsley that "if the Times ballet critic, heading home after assessing the day's offering of plies and glissades, happens to witness a murder on her way to the Times Square subway, she has a First Amendment right and obligation to refuse to testify about what she saw." Why? Because she's a member of the priestly caste.

Other than the obvious problems - that the First Amendment is not a blanket protection to conceal crimes, that nowhere in case law or in the Constitution itself has such a right been established - there's a sticky public policy problem. Who gets to be a journalist? That question is why federal shield laws are the camel's nose under the tent of journalism licenses. If everybody can be a journalist simply by pecking away at a keyboard, then tens of millions of bloggers, newsletter writers and coupon-clipper weekly editors are journalists. If that's the case, then such a sweeping right is unenforceable and dangerous. If, on the other hand, only some people get to be called "journalists," then we've got the makings of a trade guild here.

There's been some interesting economic research in recent years on the role of guilds (i.e., professional associations, including some unions, that work with the state to require licensing for people seeking similar occupations). Morris Kleiner, a University of Minnesota economist and visiting scholar at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, recently summarized some of his findings in The Wall Street Journal. Apparently, even though guilds don't lead to better or safer service, they're on the rise. Why? Well, one reason is that guilds have been very successful at persuading the public they're better for the consumer even though much of the time they're really better only for the members of the guild themselves. In states where a license is required to become, say, a hairdresser, salaries are higher by some 10 to 20 percent. This is partly because the licensing - the fees, the extra training, etc. - becomes a barrier to entry to others seeking employment. In states where strict state licensing isn't required, job growth is 20 percent higher.

The same dynamic would surely play out if elite journalists got their way. The resentment and vitriol aimed at bloggers and the "New Media" is palpable at journalism school symposiums and panel discussions. Is there any doubt that the key masters of any new state-sanctioned journalism guild would translate that animosity into higher wages for themselves and fewer opportunities for the untrained masses nipping at their heels?

This illuminates the fundamental problem with the "enlightened" media's fashionable pose on the First Amendment: It's anti-free speech for anyone without keys to the clubhouse. They want special rights for "real journalists." Well, special rights for some mean weaker rights for others. The editors of The New York Times rightly demand untrammeled opportunities to criticize politicians, but they want complex rules and regulations for everyone else - including other politicians! They think the First Amendment offers blanket protection to strippers "expressing" themselves, but citizens eager to criticize a candidate by taking out an ad can be muzzled if they want to take out that ad when it will be most effective - i.e., near election day.

The First Amendment was intended to keep political speech free; everything else was open to debate. Today, the leaders of the First Amendment industry see it exactly the other way around.

I think it's a pretty safe bet to say that Pajamas Media will definitely be keeping a close eye on this issue.

Early on Sunday, I wrote:

With America's politics fractured between conservatism and the far left, leaving little room for agreement, Neo-Neocon files a report direct from the frontlines of the culture war titled, "Dinner party politics and how to avoid them".

Dennis Prager has some thoughts on what makes such discussion often seem so frustrating for anyone who's not on the left.

Perhaps in a symbolic effort to remind all newspaper writers to toe the line or risk their careers, the New York Times is attempting to demonize Judith Miller. Ed Morrissey writes:

Reading the news about Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame these days, one would come away thinking that if not for Judith Miller, the United States would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003.

To debunk the conventional wisdom du jour, Ed links to a recent essay in the Washington Post by Robert Kagan, who has a long list of newspaper articles, from a wide variety of authors from the late 1990s on what a danger Saddam Hussein was, which is something we've discussed as well a few times. And as Morrissey adds:

In fact, the Clinton administration had made a big case about Iraq's WMD capabilities as part of its policy of continuing military expenditures in maintaining containment of Saddam Hussein. Russia, China, and France wanted to end the sanctions on Iraq in order to resume their lucrative oil contracts within the country. Anti-war activists had shifted their focus from spotty military action to the sanctions, claiming that Clinton's policies were killing 5,000 Iraqis a month through starvation. The Exempt Media at the time responded by writing many such stories -- Kagan offers more references in his column -- in order to support the Clinton policy of engagement.

The result, as Kagan notes, was that the media and public accepted the Clinton intelligence on Saddam's WMD capability as definitive -- and it matched that of Germany, France, and a number of other countries as well. Bush inherited the same information and the same conclusions, and during the first nine months of his term, continued the same policies as Clinton on Iraq. When 9/11 happened, he and Condoleezza Rice had almost completed what they called "super sanctions" as their new Iraq policy, but what amounted to a small modification in the old policy to attempt to close a few loopholes.

People keep forgetting how much 9/11 affected the calculus of thought in the administration. The surprise attacks showed that superpowers could not expect to see attacks coming in a frontal manner, or even with any warning at all. A handful of terrorists -- or foreign agents of other kinds -- could sneak into the country and wreak any kind of havoc. The US had only two strategies for stopping them: wait until they came here and arrest them, or stop the threats before they got here through military action. Given that the WMD everyone knew Saddam had withheld could be used by Saddam or his terrorist associates for devastating sneak attacks, and that he had refused to meet the terms of both the Gulf War cease-fire and sixteen UN resolutions, it now seemed much more prudent to remove him and use a strategy of democratization in the Middle East to pre-empt such attacks.

That history has been forgotten by the Exempt Media whose extensive Clinton-era reporting on the massive and imminent dangers of Saddam's WMD programs has gotten conveniently overlooked in order to condemn Judith Miller and the Bush administration. The Times need look no further than their own archives and by-lines to see that Miller had ample reason to trust what her sources told her. After all, the Paper of Record had consistently reported the same thing and the editorial board had urged stronger action in response for years before she began to get her own bylines there.

That's the New York Times, though -- the paper that has ever been ready to rewrite history in order to meet its own peculiar needs.

Well, since the 1930s at least.

It's a strategy that used to be able to work; it's much more difficult to achieve these days, thanks to a media that's been--blessedly--demassified.

Paul Anka drops the hammer on his band.

(Don't listen to this at work: the language is, shall we say, colorful, to say the least.)

In Eric Lax's biography of Woody Allen (published about 30 seconds before the name Soon-Yi because a household word), he mentions that when Allen was writing for Sid Ceasar and other star comedians in the mid-1950s, his fellow writers on their staffs called it "Feeding the monster"--the celebrity comedian created a persona and his writers contributed material to feed it.

Apparently, comedians aren't the only monsters in show biz.

Speaking of Electronic House, I have a piece on Digital Rights Management in the November/December issue of their sister publication, TechLiving.

Glenn Reynolds has been tracking the progress of James Lileks' new book on Amazon, and is of course, partially responsible for its quick and blinding success. (I had no idea it would be out so soon, and immediately ordered a copy yesterday. Incidentally, can you still use "with a bullet"? Probably not if you're a New York teacher; fortunately for my sanity, I'm not.)

The other reason for its success is its theme, which sounds great, based on Lileks' own description:

It’s called “Mommy Knows Worst,” and the short description is thus: The Gallery of Regrettable Parenting. It’s a compendium of archaic child-rearing advice, going back to the 1920s, when parents were urged to give their kids sunburns and linseed enemas. It’s perhaps the only book I will ever write that devotes a substantial chapter to the greatest problem of the 1940s: CONSTIPATION. You have no idea how slow the bowels of American children moved in the forties. Dads will enjoy how stupid and useless they were made to look in the 50s; Moms will enjoy the detailed how-to-give-birth-at-home section from the WW1 era, and everyone will love the 1960s pamphlet on dealing with home stresses via industrial tranquilizers. It’s the usual retro-fest with many ads, laden with unfair commentary, and attractively priced; perfect for everyone who’s ever had a kid or a mother. I think that covers it all.

Many thanks to the Prof for the push. Now let’s get this thing into the top ten – if only for a minute. It’ll make me happy. It’ll make you happy, knowing that the continued success of these books keeps lileks.com ad-free. AND, if you like the Joe Ohio series, well, good sales figures on this one will make the book version more likely.

Twelve bucks! Cheap. And hours of laughs.

I thank you. Now buy! Or I’ll podcast twice as hard on Friday!

His last book, Interior Desecrations is still worth picking up as well of course--here's what I wrote about it last year for Electronic House magazine, when I suggested it would make a great Christmas gift:

Interior Desecrations
By Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.

12/09/04 - With the holidays rapidly approaching, you're probably looking for fun gifts for the holiday season. One book that might make a great gift, and at 24 bucks or less, not break the piggybank, is James Lileks' new "Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes From The Horrible '70s".

How hideous? The book's back cover flashes a stern WARNING! in a 48-point all caps bold sans-serif classic-1970s font, followed by this disclaimer:

This book is not to be used in any way, shape, or form as a design manual. Rather, like the documentary about youth crime "Scared Straight", it is meant as a caution of sorts, a warning against any lingering nostalgia we may have for the 1970s, a breathtakingly ugly period when even the rats parted their hair down the middle.

What does this have to do with furniture? Nothing. Everything. The kind of interior design you'll see in these pages is what happens when an entire culture becomes so besotted with the new, the hip, the with-it styles that they cannot object to orange wallpaper— because they fear they'll look square.

Please note that the author and publisher are not responsible for the results of viewing these pictures.

Hideous Photos, But Captions Make The Book

Hear me now and believe me later, these photos are staggering in their horrific ugliness. If any of your rooms look like those in "Interior Desecrations", you don't need a Roomba; you need a flamethrower and a gallon of napalm to start fresh.

But as frightening as the photos are, it's Lileks' captions that make the book so much fun. Lileks, who toils during the day for the "Minneapolis Star-Tribune" newspaper, and writes one of the Internet's best Weblogs at night, is a humor writer on par with Dave Barry and P.J. O'Rourke.

Underneath a particularly horrendous area rug combining patches of blue, teal, green, yellow, red, orange, and a dozen other colors not found in nature, arranged in a pattern charitably described as "abstract", Lileks writes:

"Mommmmmmmmmmm! Fido threw up Smurfs all over the rug again! To fully grasp the horror of the era, you have to realize a crucial, telling fact: this was the perfect rug for someone's room. They were happy when they found this rug."

Blame Park Avenue

Lileks alludes to the subtext of his book in its introduction, but it's worth repeating: by and large, these aren't photos of average, everyday 1970s American interiors. Rather, they're photos that Lileks has collected and scanned from 1970s-era home decoration magazines.

In other words, these photos reflect the collected wisdom of decorating pros working inside posh office buildings high above Manhattan's Park and Madison Avenues in the 1970s, and their take on what would be best for homes that wanted to stay contemporary.

I gotta say though, as much as I hate everything else pictured in "Interior Desecrations", that "2001"-style bathroom with the curved Orion Space Shuttle walls is pretty radical. Next time we remodel Casa de Ed, I'm soooo there! I wonder if I can find that abstract Smurf rug on ebay?

Resource Links

Amazon.com: If it sounds intriguing, you may buy the book here.

SmartHome.com: What the intelligent home wears—inside its walls.

Lileks.com: Both a sneak preview at the horrors of "Interior Desecrations" and an extension of the book: this section of Lileks' personal site contains material found after the book went to press.

UPI paints a Katrina-like picture of South Florida after Hurricane Wilma's devastation:

MIAMI, Oct. 24 (UPI) — Hurricane Wilma's race across South Florida and the Keys left at least seven people dead and millions without power.

The eye of the hurricane hit the west coast at dawn near Naples. Wilma, which subjected Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula to almost three days of battering, moved so fast that by 1 p.m. the eye was northeast of Palm Beach.

But the powerful storm packed winds of up to 120 mph. It lost a little power as it moved overland but sustained winds of 105 mph were recorded in West Palm Beach.

By Monday evening, seven deaths had been reported, The New York Times said. Gov. Jeb Bush warned residents to stay inside, reminding them that many hurricane-related deaths occur after a storm has passed.

The dead included a man in Coral Springs, near Fort Lauderdale killed by a falling tree; two men in Collier County, one crushed by the roof of his house and the other dead of a heart attack, and a woman killed in a car crash while trying to escape the storm, the Times reported.

The Miami Herald said that a man in Palm Beach County died when he tried to move his car and a woman died of heart failure after being crushed by a glass door.

In 2000's Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe looked at the pride through which the average American middle class tradesman viewed his country--and for good reason:

Indirectly, subconsciously, his views perhaps had to do with the fact that his own country, the United States, was now the mightiest power on earth, as omnipotent as Macedon under Alexander the Great, Rome under Julius Caesar, Mongolia under Genghis Khan, Turkey under Mohammed II, or Britain under Queen Victoria. His country was so powerful, it had begun to invade or rain missiles upon small nations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean for no other reason than that their leaders were lording it over their subjects at home.

Our air-conditioning mechanic had probably never heard of Saint-Simon's, but he was fulfilling Saint-Simon's and the other nineteenth-century utopian socialists' dreams of a day when the ordinary workingman would have the political and personal freedom, the free time and the wherewithal to express himself in any way he saw fit and to unleash his full potential. Not only that, any ethnic or racial group — any, even recent refugees from a Latin country — could take over the government of any American city, if they had the votes and a modicum of organization. Americans could boast of a freedom as well as a power unparalleled in the history of the world.

But a seeming omnipotence can be surprisingly fragile under the surface. It would be quite easy to rewrite that above passage to describe the average Englishman's view of his country at the turn of the 20th century. After World War II, of course, the Empire ebbed away, like a slow dissolve into the last act of a bitter movie.

How did it happen? Jonathan Last has a must-read piece in the Weekly Standard comparing the damage done by the pacifist/isolationist left's abolition of Britain after World War I (even as the Nazis began to arm), and today's anti-American left. Reading passages such as these, it's obvious that a worldview such as Teddy Kennedy's or Cindy Sheehan's is nothing new:

In 1933, the Oxford Union - a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion - held a debate on the resolution "this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country." The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England's leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: "There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him. . . . The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate."

Churchill disdained the new liberalism, mocking one of his opponents as part of "that band of degenerate international intellectuals who regard the greatness of Britain and the stability and prosperity of the British Empire as a fatal obstacle. . . . " So deep was this liberal loathing of empire that even as the first shots of World War II were being fired, Churchill's private secretary, Jock Colville, witnessed at a theater "a group of bespectacled intellectuals" who, to his shock, "remain[ed] firmly seated while 'God Save the King' was played."

These elites could see evil only at home. The French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir did not believe that Germany was a "threat to peace," but instead worried that the "panic that the Right was spreading" would drag France, Britain, and the rest of Europe into war. Stafford Cripps, a liberal Labor member of Parliament, feared not Hitler, but Churchill. Cripps wrote that after Churchill became prime minister he would "then introduce fascist measures and there will be no more general elections."

In an important sense, the British Empire's strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.

Sound familiar? Read the rest.

(Via PoliPundit.)

The great civil rights pioneer is dead at age 92.

(With apologies to the Bee Gees for paraphrasing their title.)

On Saturday Night or Sunday Morning (to paraphrase yet another title), we mentioned North Country, the Charlize Theron film opening this past weekend, and linked to Libertas' take on it:

What we have here essentially is another earnest, humorless attempt from Hollywood to ennoble audiences who probably would prefer being entertained. Who is going to go see this film? Women won’t see this. If I may be so bold, most women out there do not want to be coal miners. They do want equality in the workplace, but it’s fair to assume that women are happy leaving the coal mining duties to men.

Men will not want to see this film, with the possible exception of liberal, urbanite males with a masochism complex. Why? If men want to see Ms. Theron in a movie on a Friday night, it’s not to see her slug coal around, or harangue us in a courtroom. Trust me on this one.

Why can’t the industry understand this stuff?

I wrote in response:

Understand it? Heck, they're proud of these sorts of celluloid pedantry, as this recent, glowing USA Today article illustrates.

That article's titled, "Movies Sound A Call To Action". Evidently, it's an action properly defined as "Stay Away From This Movie At All Costs"; Debbie Schlussel notes, "Overhyped Feminist Movie North Country Huge Flop":

Not even two thumbs up by Ebert & Roeper fooled who didn't want to see another "fiction based on fact" liberal propaganda film--Charlize Theron or not. The movie--about a female coal miner who sues to stop alleged discrimination against female miners--came in 5th, bringing in less than $6.5 million.

We're happy to report that even a much bally-hooed "Oprah" show on the movie did not help.

Even more embarrassing, "North Country" trailed awful movies such as "Doom" (starring former wrestler "The Rock," Dwayne Johnson), which was #1 and bad remake, "The Fog," which came in at #4. Even more appropriate, kiddie movies, "Dreamer" and "Wallace & Gromit," were ahead of "North Country," at #2 and #3, respectively.

All evidence that Tinseltown may offer liberalism up, but movie-goers aren't having it. Maybe Hollywood will finally realize it's time to get out of the leftist propaganda business. Wishful thinking.

Indeed. Talk about life imitates art: Hollywood risks this Onion satire becoming reality sooner than they think if they keep making films like this.

Alan Greenspan is scheduled to retire on January 31, after serving 18 years as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Larry Kudlow sounds happy about the man President Bush nominated today to be his successor:

CEA chair and former Fed governor Ben Bernanke is about to be nominated to succeed Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

In my view it is a good choice. Though Mr. Bernanke is not a hardcore advocate of the price rule, he does favor an inflation target, which is the second best option. Noteworthy is the fact that in recent speeches he has emphasized the slow and steady 2 percent zone of core inflation and inflation less energy. So he is not as militant as some of the crazed Fed presidents.

Bernanke does watch financial market indicators such as the inflation-adjusted Treasury bond and the TIPS spread.

Bernanke will also support an extension of Bush’s tax cuts for capital gains and dividends, and he has told me in the past that raising tax rates would only harm the economy.

He is widely respected in the economics profession as a former chairman of the Princeton Economics Department.

Orrin Judd adds, "Mr. Bernake's most important credential is that he's the first Chairman ever to comprehend the danger of deflation".

Meanwhile, Steve Green writes:

I've been reading up on Bush's pick to replace Alan Greenspan at the Fed. From what I've read this morning, Ben Bernanke seems like a sharp guy with real concern for price stability.

There are, of course, some naysayers, but Bernanke is more of a John Roberts than a Harriet Miers.

That's a relief!

Yesterday, we linked to Roger L. Simon's thoughts on the dismissive review by Nicholas Kristof of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's important new book, Mao, The Unknown Story in The New York Times. James Panero of The New Criterion has more:

What is it with public intellectuals and mass murderers? Kristof's disgraceful conclusion to his review speaks volumes to the acceptability and even expectability in intellectual circles of praising the most murderous villain--in terms of numbers killed--of the twentieth century. Kristof's shameful display caps a review that applauds the book in disclosing the details of Maoism abroad but fails to mention anything about Maoism at home. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised, then, at Kristof's critical and moral breakdown. It's the old "Benito Mussolini made the trains run on time" defense--a defense as indefensible for Il Duce as it is for Chairman Mao. [Kristof is far from the first to attempt it of course--Ed.]

Nicholas D. Kristof, thank you for telling us how you really can improve a country by murdering twenty million of its people. And for this, you are today's Walter Duranty Award Winner!

When it comes to the Times, that could be a daily series.

Update: In a post titled "Lost Illusions", Greg Hlatky writes:

Pray, what is incongruous about [Mao] being bumbling and a psychopath and being revered? Take away their power and the great dictators of the 20th century are pretty nondescript. Apart from his cunning and ruthlessness, Hitler was a remarkably banal character. His underlings were even less impressive: a Nuremburg prison guard said, "Who'd have thought that we were fighting this war against a bunch of jerks?"

Then there's Kristof's "Yes, but...", which I've noticed before, where Communism's evils are supposed to be balanced out by the good it brought to the nations unfortunate enough to fall under it: Soviet electrification, China's reduction in child mortality or, nowadays, the famous Cuban health care system, the virtues of which we can always read about in the nuttier letters to the editor of the New York Times or from Hollywood goofballs. Always ignored is the question of whether such advances would have taken place without Communism. The answer, I think, is obvious.

I forget which biography of Hitler I read that noted that while his apologists praise the Autobahn, the Volkswagen, and other technological advancements, such breakthroughs were going on in the 1930s throughout the world--and didn't need murderous totalitarianism to spur them on in the rest of Europe (Italy being the exception of course) or America. The same is even more true in the free world, post-World War II.

Germany seems to be rapidly back on the road to 1939: "The official Iranian pavilion at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair prominently featured virulently anti-Semitic literature, in violation of German law", complete with one of the most evil and virulently destructive fakes in history: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which was made into a 30-part mini-series for Egyptian TV in 2001.

Germany's response? "No action was taken against the Iranian pavilion by the German authorities or the Fair organizers, even though the illegal material was in plain view."

There's a shock.

(Via Charles Johnson.)

Heh.

Great passage by Mark Steyn, which is far more universal than just Canada, whose liberal government continually refers to it as "a young nation":

As George Orwell wrote in 1984, "He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future." A nation's collective memory is the unseen seven-eighths of the iceberg. When you sever that, what's left just bobs around on the surface, unmoored in every sense. Orwell understood that an assault on history is an assault on memory, and thus a totalitarian act. What, after all, does it really mean when Mme. Robillard and Mr. Martin twitter about how "young" we are? Obviously, it's a way of denigrating the past. Revolutionary regimes routinely act this way: thus, in Libya, the national holiday of Revolution Day explicitly draws a line between the discredited and illegitimate regimes predating December 1st, 1969, and the Gadaffi utopia that's prevailed since. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge literally reset the clock, to "Year Zero."

But it's not a tactic commonly deployed by governments in evolved constitutional democracies, and, to be fair, even Pol Pot did not intend that time should stand still. Two hundred years after Year Zero, Kampuchea would have been in Year 200. Canada in that sense has gone further than the Khmer Rouge: in Trudeaupia, Year Zero is a movable feast. Is it 1965, when we got the new flag? Or 1980, when we got the new anthem? Or 1982, when we got the new constitution? Or 1983, when we got the new national holiday? And, as Dominion Day became Canada Day, a nomenclature unsurpassed by any other nation's holiday in its yawning nullity, so some influential figures now wish to replace Victoria Day with Heritage Day, for only in Canada do we celebrate our heritage by obliterating it. In Trudeaupia, it's a permanent ongoing Year Zero, where every national symbol can always use a little work. Look into the face of Canada, and you'll see our collagen implants are way too puffy.

Isn't all this talk of how "young" we are itself getting a little old? Isn't it, frankly, a little unbecoming? As the saying goes, a man is as old as the woman he feels--and, if you're Hugh Hefner marrying Canuck Playmate Kimberley Conrad on Canada Day 1989 or that other wrinkly old swinger Pierre Trudeau chasing Margot Kidder, you feel great, at least until she gets to 23 and you move on to someone else. But when the Liberal Party of Canada--the oldest established permanent one-party government in the free world--insists that it's young and fresh and innocent it comes across somewhere between a professional virgin and those creepy youth cadres of 'tween-wars European fascist movements.

It's one thing to delegitimize all those chaps in frock coats with knighthoods who built a constitutional monarchy in a northern wilderness. But to make youth and "newness" the one enduring if paradoxical feature of your national identity is a project far more audacious than even Orwell foresaw. To live permanently in the present tense is to deny even the possibility of societal memory and collective roots.

And for the politically correct, that's not a bug, but a feature to be exploited time and again.

(Oh God, am I whoring for hits with a headline like that, or what?)

After the past four or five years of watching Hollywood produce hagiography about international communists such as the murderous Che Guevara, Castro, and the Stalin-worshiping Frida Kahlo, and stores as mainstream as Burlington Coat Factory selling Che T-shirts, I can't say I'm at all surprised that National Socialists are worshipped in Hong Kong. It is, after all, under control by a regime with a similarly bloodthirsty totalitarian lineage:

Akasi, a quarterly publication for the discerning Nipponophile, has become the latest convert in Hong Kong’s love affair with Nazi Germany. The October issue of the top-shelf glossy is dominated by pictures of an attractive young lady partially dressed as a tank commander and cavorting with wartime general Heinz Guderian.
But unlike every other local business that naively or cynically cashes in on Nazi notoriety, Akasi has yet to generate a single raised eyebrow. Until this reporter spotted a copy on the top shelf in a Causeway Bay 7-11 last week.

In Hong Kong’s English language media, there are few subjects more likely to generate an outraged print campaign than the use of Nazi memorabilia as a marketing gimmick.

There's nothing a Hong Kong girl loves more than a man in Hugo Boss with a handbag. To many Hong Kongers, Nazis represent the epitome of desirability. Their tanks were made by Mercedes and Porsche; their uniforms were original Hugo Boss. Twenty years after the last British skinhead tired of the joke, it’s still not unusual to see a Hong Kong teen in an Adolph Hitler European Tour t-shirt.

And whether it be a karaoke den with photos of Germans executing prisoners (a strange choice of decoration, admittedly), a fashion store decorated with swastikas, a TV station describing its ad breaks as “the final solution” or a coffee shop picking Hitler for its daily quote, German wartime symbolism is never far from the editor’s outrage button.

From Simon's World, which has the above article minus its photos, and a link to the article itself, which should you follow it past the Simon's World blog, is most definitely not safe for work. (Found via Charles Johnson.)

Jodie Foster has already announced that one of her next projects will be a biography about Leni Riefenstahl:

In an interview in the latest issue of Premiere magazine (September 2005), Ms. Foster was asked: "For years, you've been planning a biopic about Leni Riefenstahl, who directed the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will and who died two years ago. Are you still going to make it?"

Foster replied: "Yeah, we're still working on the script, and I'm still going to play her. I met her a couple of times...She wrote a biography that's almost all lies, but it's interesting. I wanted her archives, but I didn't want her involvement (in the film) -- and that's something she really wanted, because she'd been libeled so many times. She was not a member of the Nazi Party, and she was not Hitler's girlfriend--that's just stupid. But she's a complex morality tale."

[Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies] said: "Foster is wrong. There's nothing morally complex about what Riefenstahl did as Hitler's favorite filmmaker. The only thing complex is Foster's confusion on this issue."

Should do boffo box office in Hong Kong's cinemas, particularly if Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom produce it.

Update: Sadly, this isn't too surprising either, come to think of it. Hey, attractive young women sporting Nazi paraphernalia--they aren't just for Hong Kong anymore!

Thirteen-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede have one album out, another on the way, a music video, and lots of fans.

They may remind you another famous pair of singers, the Olsen Twins, and the girls say they like that. But unlike the Olsens, who built a media empire on their fun-loving, squeaky-clean image, Lamb and Lynx are cultivating a much darker personna. They are white nationalists and use their talents to preach a message of hate.

Known as “Prussian Blue” — a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes — the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

“We’re proud of being white, we want to keep being white,” said Lynx. “We want our people to stay white … we don’t want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race.”

Lynx and Lamb have been nurtured on racist beliefs since birth by their mother April. “They need to have the background to understand why certain things are happening,” said April, a stay-at-home mom who no longer lives with the twins’ father. “I’m going to give them, give them my opinion just like any, any parent would.”

April home-schools the girls, teaching them her own unique perspective on everything from current to historical events. In addition, April’s father surrounds the family with symbols of his beliefs — specifically the Nazi swastika. It appears on his belt buckle, on the side of his pick-up truck and he’s even registered it as his cattle brand with the Bureau of Livestock Identification.

“Because it’s provocative,” explains April of the cattle brand, “to him he thinks it’s important as a symbol of freedom of speech that he can use it as his cattle brand.”

As Rob Port (currently profiled on the Pajamas Media site) adds:

What an ironic thing for a Nazi twit to say. Ideals like “freedom of speech” don’t exist when the Nazis are in charge.

Exactly.

To paraphrase something that Jonah Goldberg wrote this past summer, and Simon's World quoted elsewhere in his post above, Nazism is supposed to define the outer limits of evil, not the lowest threshold. That its symbols are joining its linguistic expressions (ala Dick Durbin, Janeane Garofalo, and many, many others), to slowly become part of the dumbed-down pop culture vernacular is a depressing sight to observe.

In his 2001 obituary for Katharine Graham (deliciously titled, "Kay, Why?" and reprinted this weekend on his site), Mark Steyn describes the legacy media at its peak:

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Writing in National Review Online, Alex Massie wonders if James Bond can be saved:

Although the memorable villains — Rosa Kleb, Goldfinger, Dr. No, and Blofeld — are vital to Fleming's success, there is material to work with in terms of Bond too. Fleming relished his descriptions of Bond as "cruel," and the character's sadistic streak has only fleetingly been glimpsed on screen. In most of the movies you could be forgiven for forgetting that he's a killer.

Bond is a certain type of conservative hero. Not because he enjoys fine things (the problem with caviar and toast is making sure there is a sufficient supply, not of caviar, but of toast), nor on account of his private-school education and double first in Oriental Languages at Cambridge, but because he would have been repelled by today's emotion-fuelled confessional culture. Histrionics are for villains and foreigners of dubious provenance. Though he chafes at bureaucracy and suffers few fools gladly, and is frequently on the brink of resigning from the service, duty always brings him back to the fray. He is, after all, a lapsed Presbyterian (courtesy of his Scottish ancestors).

He is a loner, easily bored when not working (like Fleming too). His one true love, Tracy, is murdered at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, never to be replaced, and alongside the ice in his heart rests a thick streak of melancholy. In Diamonds Are Forever he muses that "Before a man's 40, girls cost nothing. After that you have to pay money, or tell a story. Of the two, it's the story that hurts most." Decline weighs heavily upon him.

There is, then, plenty of room for character to replace cardboard. That's just as well because very little actually happens in Casino Royale. Bond plays a lot of Baccarat, is double-crossed by his assistant Vesper Lynd, gets tortured and does not even execute the villain, Le Chiffre. There's not too much glamor in Casino Royale, merely the messy, often squalid business of Her Majesty's secret service.

We will know if the Bond reinvention is for real if the producers include Bond's cold judgment on Miss Lynd: "The bitch is dead now."

Sadly, the movie franchise is rapidly approaching a similar state. While Daniel Craig is replacing Pierce Brosnan, as an actor, his presence alone will not jumpstart the Bond series. As Massie notes, only better writing that returns the series to its Ian Fleming roots, and away from both the flabbiness of the Roger Moore era and the politically correct nonsense draped around Brosnan's Bond will.

Much as I love the character, I'm not hopeful for a return to Bond's glory days.

Yesterday, we looked at Europe's long-running malaise and then pondered whether or not "a similarly European worldview percolates amongst America's left". We linked to a Jonah Goldberg essay from May, in which he wrote that the answer is yes indeed, it does. "The ideas, assumptions and prejudices held by the statistically typical Democratic voter, according to [a recent] Pew study, are quite simply, European".

On Tech Central Station tonight, James Glassman wonders if America as a whole is becoming too European, adding, "don't expect much soon in the way of European economic transformation":

. This is the life they have chosen -- one in which, they believe, the state relieves them of the stress of a market society. But the price is very high. Surveys show rampant European unhappiness and pessimism. European birth rates have fallen so sharply that populations are headed for steep declines. Why? Sadly, couples don't place a high priority on bringing children into the paradise they've created.

But Europeans will have to find their own path. My concern is with Americans. Is it inevitable that, as we grow more prosperous, we will become more like Europe -- losing initiative, insisting that our governments coddle us?

I worry that we are beginning to see the initial signs of just such a turn for the worse. A distinguished 20-member panel of experts convened by the National Academies, America's top science advisory group, has warned in a new study that the U.S. "could soon lose its privileged position" as the world's top innovator and growth engine. With competitors "who live just a mouse click away," we stand to lose high-paying jobs, especially to Asia.

Key statistics: The number of U.S. doctorates in science and engineering peaked in 1998. In 1970, the U.S. accounted for more than half such degrees; by 2010, just 15 percent. By 2010, China will produce more science and engineering doctoral graduates that we will.

The whiners think that we can opt out of a globalized world, cocoon ourselves in protectionism. In fact, if we take that course, the crack-up will come sooner.

The Academies panel takes a more constructive course, with a list of that focuses on science teaching in high school and college and on more government spending on basic research in science. I agree. It's also imperative that we cut our lofty corporate tax rates, which are sending thousands of good jobs abroad.

But government action is only part of the solution. The personal counts more. America has a choice: more like Europe, or more like Asia. Actually, Asia has become more like America in recent years, so the real choice is whether we want to be complacent Europeans or to our hard-working, compassionate, imaginative American selves.

In other words, over the long run, whose values will win? Red or Blue America? Also known as, Hard or Soft America.

On Thursday, we discussed Howard Dean's new catchphrase, "The Merlot Democrats". Today, PoliPundit notes, it's "now is part and parcel of the official RNC lexicon".

Can't say I'm much of a Merlot man, myself. This however, is certainly an enjoyable--if bitter--apéritif.

Michelle Malkin spots Mike Wallace of CBS speaking at an anti-Second Amendment Brady Center event. In an earlier post on the subject, she links to blogger David Hardy at Of Arms and the Law: "We all know there's a certain media bias at work, but you'd think they'd be less obvious about it..."

Frankly, no I wouldn't. At least not after the actions of Mike's fellow colleagues at CBS and the rest of the legacy media last year.

Gates of Vienna disagrees with the Wall Street Journal and Cathy Young of Reason on their take concerning the Oklahoma U. suicide bomber (who fortunately only killed himself). They note much use of ad hominems by both parties.

"Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks."

--General "Buck" Turgidson, as played by George C. Scott.

Roger L. Simon skewers the New York Times' review of Mao, The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday:

If anyone wants to know what I mean by the "New Reactionaries," they should have a look at Nicholas D. Kristof's review of MAO, The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in today's NYTBR. After paying some homage to the biography and condescendingly evincing surprise that the author of a popular book could write such a work (even though her husband is a professional historian), Kristof gets to the crux of his argument:

This is an extraordinary portrait of a monster, who the authors say was responsible for more than 70 million deaths. But how accurate is it?... (some Dowdification on my part here but you can easily check) Take the great famine from 1958 to 1961. The authors declare that "close to 38 million people died," and in a footnote they cite a Chinese population analysis of mortality figures in those years. Well, maybe. But there have been many expert estimates in scholarly books and journals of the death toll, ranging widely, and in reality no one really knows for sure - and certainly the mortality data are too crude to inspire confidence. The most meticulous estimates by demographers who have researched the famine toll are mostly lower than this book's: Judith Banister estimated 30 million; Basil Ashton also came up with 30 million; and Xizhe Peng suggested about 23 million. Simply plucking a high-end estimate out of an article and embracing it as the one true estimate worries me; if that is stretched, then what else is?

Okay, so, accepting the lowest estimate of only 23 million dead - roughly three times the population Mr. Kristof's own New York - what's his point here really? He's copacetic with killing only 23 million? Well, evidently he is.

Read the rest, and be sure to follow the link to Bizzy Blog, which adds:

Kristof’s “Hitler did some good things too” excuse-making for Mao is unconscionable. As long as Communist China’s one-child policy exists (a policy the government says “must be permanent,” and has led to “Forty Million Missing Girls“), Kristof’s statement about “the emancipation” of Chinese women will remain a sick joke. And I guess the 70 million deaths attributed to Mao by the authors (which Kristof spends an inordinate amount of time quibbling with) merely represent unfortunate collateral damage–as if there was no other way to shake off the “slumber.”

Roger's use of the word "reactionary" is spot-on: nice to know that 70 years after Walter Duranty, and 50 years after their necrophilic obituary of Stalin, little has changed at The New York Times.

To paraphrase our last two items, "VISUALIZE HOLLYWOOD COLLAPSE" is this gist of this terrific recent Onion satire of Tinseltown's current box office malaise:

BURBANK, CA—Universal Studios joined DreamWorks SKG, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Fox Monday, when CEO Ron Meyer announced that the company is shutting down operations and ceasing all film production, effective immediately.

"In their hearts, every studio chair would like to be a patron of the arts," said a candid and reflective Meyer, speaking from his New York office on the 69th floor of Manhattan's Rockefeller Plaza. "But this is a business, not an artists' charity ward."

According to Hollywood insiders, summer 2005 dealt the death blow to an already ailing industry. With box-office receipts 9 percent lower than those of 2004, the few successes, such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin and War Of The Worlds, could not carry the industry.

Regarding the decision to liquidate Paramount, Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone said, "It was a simple choice: cling to an outdated business model or cut the pictures loose."

To better protect their stockholders' interests, Hollywood will be shifting its focus to safer, more reliable profit models, including real estate, life insurance, and the sale of hygiene products.

Said Meyer: "The mortuary industry also seems like a good bet. No matter what happens in the economy, there's always a market for funeral homes. People are always dying. That doesn't go unpredictably out of fashion with the public's taste, like, say, historical costume epics or Russell Crowe."

Monday, construction crews quietly dismantled the storied Hollywood Walk of Fame.

"This is a real shame," said foreman Kevin McKnight, directing members of his crew to pry the brass stars from Hollywood Boulevard and transfer them to a nearby freight crate destined for a Japanese smelting plant. "I love movies. My whole family does. All my life, I loved movies."

And like that satiric strawman of a foreman, so do I--I take little pleasure in describing Hollywood's current woes; I'd much rather spend a couple of hours every weekend in a movie theater thinking, "yup, I'll be picking this one up on DVD in a few months". I used to do that all the time (and prior to DVD, buying VHS and even laser discs).

Someday, I'd like to think that Hollywood will return to producing films that folks like me would like to see, instead of attempting to jam bad politically correct product down audiences' throats, much the same way that Wall Street's Salomon Brothers jammed bonds during Michael Lewis' days there.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one...

There's an old joke that when Hollywood films tank, their reels get cut up into thousands of guitar picks. And this year, it does seem like lots and lots of Fender Premium Celluloid picks are being created out of lots of far from premium movies, doesn't it? As I wrote a few days ago, in a post that looked askance at two recent movies, "when did Hollywood decide that all of its new films must suck?"

Tech Central Station and Power Line add two more to the list: Doom and North Country, regarding the latter, a few weeks ago, the Libertas film blog described it thusly:

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I first came across the excellent Gates of Vienna Weblog in late September. It was via a post describing (I'd use the world 'infiltrating', but it was all out in the open) a weekend gathering cheerfully promoting itself via bumper stickers that read "VISUALIZE INDUSTRIAL COLLAPSE!"

Fortunately, the couple who helm the Gates of Vienna have a rather diametrically opposite worldview, as does Pajamas Media, where they're currently profiled at the top of the homepage.

With America's politics fractured between conservatism and the far left, leaving little room for agreement, Neo-Neocon files a report direct from the frontlines of the culture war titled, "Dinner party politics and how to avoid them".

In an excellent "where we stand today" post on Iraq, Glenn Reynolds links to this 2003 essay by UPI's James Bennett. We've ocassionally discussed Europe's malaise; Bennett's essay ties many of their problems back to the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust:

Continental Europeans, helped by the Marshall Plan and American investment, rebuilt their countries with vigor after 1945. Led by the last generations to mature in the environment of the hybrid Jewish-European civilization, Europe seemed to pick up where it left off in 1933.

Gradually, however, Europe seemed to run out of creativity, in everything from arts, to academia, to demographic vigor, to the will to political reform. Endless rehashing of elsewhere-discredited Marxism replaced creative political thought. Overt fascism and national chauvinism were banned, but a new Euro-chauvinism took its place, loudly proclaiming the superiority of European ways over crude American ones -- a new chauvinism on a wider scale, based like the old national chauvinism primarily on resentment.

It may be coincidence, but these new generations are the ones who grew up without the experience of studying, working and socializing with substantial numbers of Jews. Can this have no effect on politics?

Consider that the current war has seen the rapid re-emergence of the classical anti-Semitic themes in Europe, and coming from the same classes and types that supported the previous anti-globalization revolt of the 1920s and 1930s. The whitewashing of anti-Semitism as "anti-Zionism" grows more and more transparent by the day. French television has begun to adopt the terminology of the Vichy propagandists in reporting on the "Anglo-American attack" on Iraq. "Neo-con" serves the same code-word duty that "rootless cosmopolite" did in Stalin's anti-Jewish purges.

The widespread anti-Americanism in the world, of which Continental Europe is the ultimate source, has almost nothing to do with the character of President George W. Bush or the current administration, or other such cosmetic issues.

The modern world was first carried forward by two great civilizations. The Anglosphere was one. The dynamic industrializing culture of 19th century Continental Europe, to which the spark of the Judaeo-Christian encounter was so important, was the other. That culture committed suicide in the '30s. Perhaps its successor is not the revival of that culture, but rather its zombie.

In considering the Holocaust, most attention has been given to its direct victims, as is appropriate. However, we must also consider that it was a form of self-administered lobotomy for Continental European culture.

It would not be surprising if the twin anti-modernist themes of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, now rapidly coalescing into a single nasty mess visible in many of the pro-Saddam demonstrations of the past year, become once again the predominant political-cultural theme in Western Continental Europe, overwhelming the decent and positive forces there that had previously prevailed.

And we should not be surprised if such people hate us.

Or if a similarly European worldview percolates amongst America's left. As Jonah Goldberg noted in May, that the "ideas, assumptions and prejudices held by the statistically typical Democratic voter, according to [a recent] Pew study, are quite simply, European".

Update: Welcome, fellow weekend Insta-readers.

Another Update (10/23/05): Related thoughts from Ilya Shapiro of Tech Central Station.

The text of an article I wrote last year for Vintage Guitar magazine is now online:

By the late 1970s, cumulative changes in the details of the various classic guitar models on the market – Fender’s Stratocaster and Telecaster, and Gibson’s Les Paul – were so numerous that the instruments barely resembled their original versions. Serious electric guitar players and collectors clamored for reissues of the original instruments. But both manufacturers, at the time mere cogs in large corporate wheels, all but ignored them.

That all began to change in the early 1980s, and you can read how in the rest of my article.

And why yes, that is my 1985 reissue of Fender's classic 1952 Telecaster in the photo at its start.

On December 1st, Woody Allen will be 70 frickin' years old.

(Watch the media go crazy lionizing a man whose last 15 films have yet to make back their budgets in the US. But then, what a talent he once was. And a what a potent reminder of how easy it is to lose your feel, or watch the zeitgeist pass you by. Or both.)

Yes, I'm about to defend Dan Quayle. If you're a long time reader of this blog, I estimate there's a 30 percent chance you're either going to say, "'bout time someone did!", or a 70 percent chance you'll think, "Ed's finally lost it". If you're in the latter camp, stick this one out to the end, huh?

In the New Republic (found via Instapundit), William J. Stuntz compares Harriet Miers to Dan Quayle, as a sort of backhanded compliment:

Harriet Miers is to the Supreme Court what Dan Quayle was to the vice presidency: a sign of rising standards. And here's the really good news: That proposition will hold even if, like Quayle, she winds up holding the office for which she was unwisely selected.

By historical standards, Quayle was a more-than-plausible pick. He had served twelve years on Capitol Hill, eight in the Senate and four in the House--only a single House term shy of John F. Kennedy's record when he entered the White House, a fact that Quayle probably wishes he hadn't mentioned to Lloyd Bentsen. It was a longer and better record than a number of Quayle's predecessors. Spiro Agnew was a first-term governor of Maryland when Richard Nixon made him a national figure. Henry Wallace had served seven years as secretary of agriculture, after which he was vice president to a man on whom the world depended--FDR during World War II--and who barely survived his term. (We're all lucky he did survive his term: Had Wallace filled Harry Truman's shoes, Stalin might have gotten the communist Europe he always wanted.) Before becoming McKinley's first vice president, Garret Hobart was, briefly, president of the New Jersey state Senate--not the best training for running a nation that was then extending its military power across the globe. Chester Arthur's highest office had been collector of the port of New York, where he distributed spoils for the state Republican machine.

Quayle was surely better than that. And Quayle was not just a run-of-the-mill senator. He had a reputation for mastery of arms control and nuclear weaponry, subjects that were about to drop off the political radar but ones that dominated American foreign policy during much of the 1970s and '80s. The elder George Bush could be excused for thinking he had made a better selection than, say, Dwight Eisenhower 36 years earlier: Eisenhower too tapped a young senator (Quayle was 41; Richard Nixon was 39) with a special interest in foreign affairs, one with only half of Quayle's service in Congress.

Thankfully, standards change, sometimes for the better. American voters took a look at Quayle and concluded, rightly, that he was not ready for prime time: not--at least not yet--a plausible president. Politicians noticed. Every major-party vice-presidential candidate since Quayle was a plausible president: someone who, given the right circumstances, might get a major-party nomination for the top spot on the ticket. Not since the early years of the republic have we had such a long stretch of high-quality vice-presidential candidates. The voters seem to have decided that the historical practice of picking lightweight would-be vice presidents in order to satisfy some local constituency was no longer acceptable. American politics and government is healthier because of that judgment.

As for the last segment, something tells me that the prospect of Edwards stepping in an emergency is not an event that even a lot of Kerry voters would have looked forward to, especially after Dick Cheney filleted him during their debate. And certainly environmentalists would have feared the damage that that much concentrated use of Aqua Net would have caused to the Ozone layer.

But regarding Quayle himself and Miers, I think Stuntz has his argument slightly backwards. Pappa Bush picked Quayle for his ticket in part to placate conservatives who feared (rightly as things turned out) that Bush #41 would have been too liberal (in the entrenched big government sense of the word) a president to run as the successor to the Gipper. It was only because Quayle was instantly framed by the mainstream media (who had far more centralized power in '88 than they do now; remember, this was prior to the World Wide Web, the Blogosphere, and Fox News, and Rush was just barely getting started as a national broadcaster) as a lightweight that Quayle became a pop culture joke. Dennis Miller dubbed him "The Rosetta Stone of Humor", 13 years before he too, succumbed to the Dark Side of the Force. In '88, Bush himself was too established a Washington player for the media to attack head-on, smashmouth style, but Quayle made too tempting a target for the liberal media to ignore.

But most hardcore conservatives liked Quayle, and many still do. If anything, the media's loathing of him caused his supporters to rally around him even more. In contrast, the mainstream media didn't frame public perception of Harriett Miers, the conservative alternative media did. In particular, it was National Review's loathing of her (led by David Frum, after championing her in July--July 4th, oddly enough), that caused many--not all though--on the right to disagree with Bush's pick.

There, I just defended Dan Quayle. And oddly enough, my fingers have yet to catch on fire. Any minute now, though...

I have a lengthy review of a new live DVD by The Who, over at Blogcritics.

Sporting a tan that would make George Hamilton bronze with envy, and posting food and drink recipes that leave Emeril Lagasse in the dust, Stephen Green of VodkaPundit is the current profile on the Pajamas Media site.

Stephen Moore takes a tour of the Vermont factory which produces the left's favorite ice cream:

Our guide is almost apologetic when he tells us that back in 2000 our lovable heroes got filthy rich by selling out to corporate food giant Unilever. But never fear: In the tour video, the new, aptly named CEO, Walt Freese, assures us that "our commitment to social and economic justice and the environment is as important to us as profitability. It's our heritage." I nearly have to wipe away tears streaming down my cheeks.
It is fortuitous that I am here the very week Ben & Jerry's announced that, for the first time in 10 years, it will get back to "leading with its values" by spending $5 million on a social awareness TV ad campaign. More than one analyst has wondered aloud whether this is just a slick Madison Avenue advertising gimmick to hike profits. After all, corporate responsibility has become the chic new marketing theme for Fortune 500 companies like British Petroleum, Starbucks and even GE. But Mr. Freese assures us that "this isn't a short-term strategy to drive up sales. These are issues that are important for our society to address."

And just what are those issues? Here our earnest tour guide raises his chin a bit and proudly declares that the first ads are dedicated to saving the family farm. When I burst out laughing, 22 sets of angry eyes glared at me. For the past 100 years, as the productivity of the American farmer has surged to unprecedented heights, the number of Americans working in agriculture to feed the world has fallen from 35 workers per 100 to two.

This is called progress. What is Ben & Jerry's proposed solution, anyway? To turn back the clock and abolish the tractor? Many Americans seem to be under the illusion that the small family farmer has lived a carefree idyllic lifestyle. In truth, this livelihood has traditionally involved backbreaking toil, work-days that last from sun-up to sundown, and monotony--which is why sons and daughters have been fleeing the farm for five generations. The only people who actually want to save small farms are people who've never worked on a farm.

The Ben & Jerry's ads moan that the corporatization of farming is a horrid trend. I couldn't help asking our tour guide during the Q-&-A why, if corporatization of farming is such a bad thing, that isn't also true of the corporatization of ice cream.

Heh. Moore also wonders why the trial lawyers haven't pursued Ben & Jerry's yet and ponders a potential case of schadenfreude if they ever do:

Although this company touts its "wholesome and natural ingredients mixed with euphoric concoctions," the truth is that Ben & Jerry's ice cream mostly contains two hazardous ingredients: fatty cream and sugar.

Herein lies a second irony: This product is probably about as good for your health as a pack of Camel cigarettes--and at least cigarettes carry the Surgeon General's warning labels. At Ben & Jerry's, the saying goes "if you can't eat a whole pint . . . in one sitting, you aren't really trying." But if you do, you might as well be injecting your arteries with Elmer's glue. And they have no qualms about marketing this dangerous product to children. If you want to know the definition of a liberal's dilemma, just wait till the trial lawyers slap Ben & Jerry's with a billion-dollar lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg looks at another of Vermont's favorite sons and his new catchphrase:

"No longer will the Democratic Party allow itself to be defined by the Republican Party," Dean thundered recently at a Nevada confab.

So, after years of denouncing the GOP for unfairly labeling Democrats as effete, coastal liberals out of touch with heartland America, what label does Dean think best describes the Democrats? What cuts to their core? One word: Merlot.

He described the contest as "Merlot Democrats" vs. "Reliable Republicans." Ah, yes, that's a term that will rally the lunch-bucket crowd. That'll put steel in Dean's prediction that the "The South will rise again, and when it does, it will have a 'D' after its name!"

Now, in fairness, "Merlot Democrats" is an analytical label, not a rallying cry. But for those of us who believe in labels, it's a telling one, demonstrating that Democrats remain right where they've been stuck for decades.

And that's why the GOP has cause to cheer. It may have it's problems, but they are the problems of success. The Democrats' problems are the problems of failure. Of course, Dean might call them the "challenges of conviction" or some such - but that's old wine in a new bottle.

And it's just the ticket to drive a verbal stake through heart of the left's increasingly elitist image!

(It's also prompted Betsy Newmark to ask, "Couldn't they have picked a wine other than the one so skewered in the movie Sideways?")

Speaking of Russia, Mark Steyn take a cold sober look at that vodka-infused nation, and does not like what he sees:

Russia is the sick man of Europe, and would still look pretty sick if you moved him to Africa. It has the fastest-growing rate of HIV infection in the world. From virtually no official Aids cases at the time Putin took office, in the last five years more Russians have tested positive than in the previous 20 for America. The virus is said to have infected at least 1 per cent of the population, the figure the World Health Organisation considers the tipping point for a sub-Saharan-sized epidemic. So at a time when Russian men already have a life expectancy in the mid-50s — lower than in Bangladesh — they’re about to see Aids cut them down from the other end, killing young men and women of childbearing age, and with them any hope of societal regeneration. By 2010, Aids will be killing between a quarter and three-quarters of a million Russians every year. It will become a nation of babushkas, unable to muster enough young soldiers to secure its borders, enough young businessmen to secure its economy or enough young families to secure its future. True, there are regions that are exceptions to these malign trends, parts of Russia that have healthy fertility rates and low HIV infection. Can you guess which regions they are? They start with a ‘Mu-’ and end with a ‘-slim’.

So the world’s largest country is dying and the only question is how violent its death throes are. Yesterday’s Russia was characterised by Churchill as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Today’s has come unwrapped: it’s a crisis in a disaster inside a catastrophe. Most of the big international problems operate within certain geographic constraints: Africa has Aids, the Middle East has Islamists, North Korea has nukes. But Russia’s got the lot: an African-level Aids crisis and an Islamist separatist movement sitting on top of the biggest pile of nukes on the planet. Of course, the nuclear materials are all in ‘secure’ facilities — more secure, one hopes, than the secure public buildings in Nalchik that the Islamists took over with such ease last week.

Russia is the bleakest example on the planet of how we worry about all the wrong things. For 40 years the environmentalists have warned us that the jig was up: there are too many people (see Paul Ehrlich’s comic masterpiece of 1970 The Population Bomb) and too few resources — as the Club of Rome warned in its 1972 landmark study The Limits To Growth, the world will run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993. Instead, poor old Russia is awash with resources but fatally short of Russians — and, in the end, warm bodies are the one indispensable resource.

Steyn has some short-term solutions, none of which sound very palatable...unless, of course, your name happens to be Vladimir Putin. Meantime, he concludes:

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

It won't be the last.

Update: Surprisingly related thoughts, here.

Well, after that dark depressing post on Loving Big Brother, how 'bout something completely different--and a lot more fun?

Cold Hard Flash, a blog about (what else) Macromedia Flash, interviews Jennifer Shiman, the inventor and animator behind all those bunny-driven movie parodies you've seen over the past couple of years.

Back in March, I looked at the surprising number of anecdotes involving Russians and Germans who long for their totalitarian past and concluded:

Part of the challenge of freedom is that it involves the messy vitality of individualism. And a big part of the attraction of totalitarianism is its order. Long before he entered the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan knew the Soviet Union was a third world economy hiding behind an enormous and powerful military. It's easy to look at millions of hulking men in black boots and assume that their force equals the sum total of a nation's vitality. And there's obvious order in those images (see: Riefenstahl, Leni).

They're seductive surfaces, even though what was under them was so rotten. And its obvious that even as the former Russian, East German--and even West German people and their leaders struggle with moving forward, their dark, but ordered pasts can be an awfully attractive alternative.

Roger L. Simon spots the Chinese revering the third man in the troika of 20th century monsters: Mao, who killed 70 million people. Roger wonders if there will be a potent minority of Iraqis who long for the days of Saddam Hussein, even knowing, as they now do, about the shredding machine, the iron maiden (no, not the rock group), the government salaried official "violator of women's honor", and one million murdered.

Sadly, I know the answer; for many Americans, it's right under their nose.

The beneficient Lord of Jasperwood writes:

I don’t mean to start out the day with a polarizing note, but: do you think that if President Clinton had invaded Iraq and knocked Saddam for power in 1998, we’d be seeing a movie about the dictator’s trial right now, with George Clooney as the prosecutor?

Yes, that sounds about right.

Over at The Weekly Standard, Ed Morrissey has some thoughts on the symbolism of zillion dollar sports stadiums and the implications of his hometown Minnesota Vikings' Love Boat scandal.

(Disregard any ironic implications of the accompanying ads for the Weekly Standard's upcoming cruise; I think it's relatively safe to assume that Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol won't recreate North Minnetonka Forty...)

Found via Ed's own Captain's Quarters. For my rather tenuously-related thoughts on sports arenas and the audiences inside them, click here.

Michele Malkin (found via Roger L. Simon), looks at an amusing--if sadly predictable phenomenon, which Roger dubs (accurately), the mainstream media's "weirdly pro-Saddam coverage, a kind of journalistic Stockholm Syndrome". (Michelle links to blogger Matt Margolis, whose phrase appears in this post's title.)

There was a preview of it this weekend, as the MSM tut-tutted Iraq's democratic elections. Remember, it was only a few years ago, that they gave Saddam's "elections" a pass, without a shred of irony or dissent in their reporting, as these classic groaners in 2002 and 2003 illustrate:

“Seven years ago, when the last referendum took place, Saddam Hussein won 99.96 percent of the vote. Of course, it is impossible to say whether that’s a true measure of the Iraqi people’s feelings.” — ABC reporter David Wright, World News Tonight, October 15, 2002.

“All 11,440,638 eligible voters went to the polls with one thought: Yes to Saddam Hussein! The government proclaimed it a victory of light over darkness, good over evil. It seemed more like a political miracle.“ — NBC reporter Keith Miller on Today, October 16, 2002.

Diane Sawyer: “I read this morning that he’s [Saddam Hussein] also said the love that the Iraqis have for him is so much greater than anything Americans feel for their President because he’s been loved for 35 years, he says, the whole 35 years.”

Dan Harris in Baghdad [responds to Sawyer]: “He is one to point out quite frequently that he is part of a historical trend in this country of restoring Iraq to its greatness, its historical greatness. He points out frequently that he was elected with a 100 percent margin recently.” — ABC’s Good Morning America, March 7, 2003.

CNN of course, served as a de facto propaganda arm of Saddam; its founder seems to have never met a totalitarian regime he didn't admire.

In his MSNBC column the other day, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

I've written here before about GM's problems, and Thomas Bray notes that it's a case of the bankruptcy of the industrial welfare state. He's right, and the problem isn't limited to GM. Enterprises based on similar models -- bloated pension costs, lots of perks for managers, little concern with competition or delivering value to the alleged customer -- are failing all over. In fact, the serious structural problems facing the Western European nations, as their huge pension and healthcare liabilities, and their political inability to do much about those, sap budgets and lead to crushing levels of taxation, are just another example of the same problem, as are the problems of the other two Big Three automakers.

I've mentioned Alvin Toffler's Waves Theory from his 1980 book, The Third Wave a few times--and it's fascinating to watch how long it takes for a wave to complete its cycle. Toffler's theory was that the Third Wave--the information, or post-industrial age--began with little notice in the mid-1950s when white collar workers first began to outnumber their blue collared counterparts. Given the then-recent contractions America's steel industry was suffering in the 1970s, he also used them as an example of a second wave (or industrial) institution forced to change or die by the coming of the Third Wave--which began gathering steam in the 1970s, and arrived in spades during the following decade, when computers, cable and satellite TV and the Internet began to gather steam, which the coming of the World Wide Web in the 1990s only accelerated.

The challenge is for the remaining sclerotic Second Wave institutions to try and survive in this era--along with governments whose men know only Second Wave-style solutions to problems. There's an alternative, of course, which Glenn suggests later in his post:

we should be modeling our policies around dynamic approaches rather than trying to save Old Economy behemoths that were never very good at competing. (Indeed, the notion that we could help the "working man" at GM do well by making sure that other workers paid too much for inadequate cars was always a bit iffy, wasn't it? That's not expanding the pie, just taking a bigger share for some at the expense of others.)

I certainly don't mean to suggest that there's no role for government -- things like more health-insurance portability, for example, would go a long way toward facilitating the growth of small businesses -- but I do think that we should be looking at things differently. In a dynamic economy, we should probably be trying to embrace dynamism, rather than -- as the UAW and auto executives did with notable lack of success -- trying to stop change.

That's far easier said than done of course. Both conservatives and the left have taken turns "standing athwart history yelling stop"; currently, it's the left, as Radly Balko noted a couple of years ago:

You know, you sometimes get the feeling the day after the polio vaccine was invented, today's left would have run editorials lamenting the good ol' days, when we were a little more cautious about what swimming pools we jumped into, and expressing sadness that we'd now have no new stories about the afflicted overcoming their disability to inspire the rest of us.

I'm not kidding. They're that resistant to change. Every mill that shuts down is a "sign of our sad times." No matter that the new mill will do things better, faster and cheaper than the old one. New farming techniques grow more food on less land. But dammit, if there wasn't something romantic about the old-stye "family farm" that's deserving of government protection. Innovation isn't celebrated, it's excoriated for displacing some idealized vision of the way things once were. In matters of progress and dynamism, the left is far more conservative than the conservatives are.

And unions, who provide much of their funding don't have much incentive to see the Second Wave fully roll into history, either.

Mark Steyn reviews Nicholas Cage's new film, Lord of War:

For a self-consciously ‘important’ film, it’s full of careless infelicities: thus, Nicolas Cage congratulates his fellow arms dealer Ian Holm because ‘in the Iran/Iraq war you sold guns to both sides’. But he’s congratulating Holm at the 1984 Berlin Arms Show: why the past tense when the Iran/Iraq war’s in full swing?

Oh, well. Aside from that, Lord of War is a brisk trot round the last 20 years of trouble spots as seen by a chap who’s all in favour of trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with G and that stands for gun. As Cage explains in the opening scene, one in every 12 people on the planet has a gun, and, to illustrate the statistic, Niccol gives us a swift montage of one bullet’s journey from ore to assembly line to packaging, sale and eventually its final destination — straight through the skull of a stunned-looking young man. In other words, the arms industry is focused on death.

I’d say, as one of those one-in-twelve, that it’s a little more complicated than that. If those Tutsis in Rwanda had had guns, a million of them wouldn’t have been hacked to death. Niccol himself shows a Sierra Leonean mother being macheted into pulp, while an arms dealer frets about letting her killers have guns. Even if that’s the choice — being shot or hacked to death — I’d take the former. But this is Hollywood and, though every movie star has armed security, that’s no reason not to make a picture about the wickedness of the arms industry.

There's no reason to watch one either, especially by the time Steyn is done shooting bulletholes into the rest of its plot.

Incidentally, when did Hollywood decide that all of its new films must suck? I saw the ad for this movie on TV last week. It's allegedly a comedy, but if you can't make me laugh in the commercial, which, ideally, should be using your choicest material, chances are you're not going to make me laugh in the theater.

Then there's the matter of its poster. Staring at it for a few minutes, it becomes apparent that its the lead character's ring finger, but at first glance, it appears that it's the finger.

Heck, I'm old enough to remember when films used to wait until the audience paid their money to sit inside the theater before they symbolically flipped them the bird. These days, it seems like Hollywood's contempt for its American audiences doesn' t allow them to wait that long.

Human Events explains how the attack on Bill Bennett in late September was staged and calls for an alternative to AP to be formed.

Hey--now there's a thought!

(Via Power Line.)

Meanwhile, speaking of the man who's book title we parodied in the headline above, Roger L. Simon is surprised as to how small Noam Chomsky's net worth is compared to his influence amongst the international left:

I had a funny reaction to the excerpt from Peter Schweizer's book published today on Tech Central Station--The Branding of the World's Top Intellectual: Noam Chomsky. Sure, I agree with Schweizer that Chomsky's hiding his money from the taxman in a revocable family trust is hugely hyprocritical for someone with the intellectual's 'progressive' views. But what caught me up was the value of his estate - a mere two million. That's not much for a supposedly successful leftist with international acclaim. Out here in Hollywood, a middling screenwriter has got that much tied up in his house. A real Hollywood leftie star like Barbra Streisand is worth a few hundred million. But of course there's some justice in that in terms of the market place. Chomsky's ideas are banal retreads, not even worth the ninety-cents download price he's charging. Streisand can sing!

Maybe Chomsky needs a duet with Streisand to push his career up a notch.

(Now there's a Saturday Night Live sketch--or more likely, a "Day By Day" cartoon--that's just begging to be written.)

In his Pajamas Media profile yesterday, the Manolo, (celebrating the first anniversary of his Super Fantastic blog!) he say the childhood of the Manolo was hardly the out of the ordinary experience:

From these earliest moments the Manolo he developed in the usual ways that the young boys develop, kicking the football with the other boys, playing the hooky from the school, making the tiny designer shoes out of the tinfoil for the household pets, the usual sorts of the things.

Which of course, prompted my wife and our friend Susan to attempt just that with Susan's dog, Bea.

Bea was certainly a good sport about it--God knows what was going through her mind though, while humans attempted to mummify her front paws in Reynolds Wrap. (No, not that Reynolds. No blenders were involved in this project, much to Bea's relief.)

Incidentally, it's not at all surprising that Manolo was photographed wearing a fine pair of kicks himself. In a nice bit of synchronicity, I was wearing my brown suede monkstraps for my profile's photo--although unlike the shoes of the Manolo--and the Bea--they were out of the camera range.

Update: Welcome Super Fantastic readers of the Manolo! Please look around; hopefully you'll find other material that will be of the interest.

But it's getting awfully weird there, it seems. In case you're keeping score at home, prison paganism is in, provided clothes are kept on. (Nudity is only permitted if it's tasteful and essential to the plot. Oh wait, sorry, that's a Jonah Goldberg speech.)

But Winnie the Pooh's buddy Piglet is right out.

Got that? Well then, carry on, ol' sport!

Heh:

"After high school and college, I worked for a while in a foundry, pouring molten aluminum. I think it’s not that different from journalism school, really, which is the equivalent of having molten aluminum poured into your head."

--Tim Blair, today's Pajamas Media profile.

In the mail today were two soon to be released books on the language of music: first up, Rikky Rooksby's How To Write Songs On Keyboards. I've interviewed Rikky a couple of times for magazine articles, and he has a seemingly endless knowledge of pop music's history--on both sides of the Atlantic--from the Beatles to the present day. He's already written several books on songwriting for the guitar (including this one, which was a tremendous eye-opener when I began playing seriously again around 2001); here he teaches songwriting craftsmanship to (as the title implies) keyboard players, who have many more options in terms of harmony more easily under their fingertips than the typical guitarist.

Also in the mail, a galley edition of The Language of the Blues, by Debra DeSalvo (with an introduction by the Night Tripper himself, New Orleans' favorite son, Dr. John). Due out in January, this isn't a music book per se--it's a glossary of blues-oriented lingo, including words and phrases such as The Dozens, Cutting Contests, Vestapool and many more. If you've ever wandered what exactly a Stingaree is and how the word was derived, then this is your book! (Warning for curious parents: there are definitions of 12-letter words that make this book more than a little unsuitable for children.)

I'll have more detailed reviews of both books over at Blogcritics--and I'll let you know when they're online.

About 15 minutes into Citizen Kane, the "News On The March" mock-documentary suddenly ends, and we find ourselves in the dark, backlit, thick with cigarette smoke screening room of a large magazine, whose editor says of Kane:

Here's a man who might have been President. He's been loved and hated and talked about as much as any man in our time - but when he comes to die, he's got something on his mind called "Rosebud." What does that mean?

...Nothing is ever better than finding out what makes people tick. Go after the people that knew Kane well. That manager of his--the little guy, Bernstein, those two wives, all the people who knew him, had worked for him, who loved him, who hated his guts--[PAUSE]--I don't mean go through the City Directory, of course.

But his garage couldn't hurt, I guess, so let's watch AP go in search of Rosebud inside Karl Rove's.

New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson has been looking for a reason to leave the Big Easy for years; has the combination of Katrina and sell-out crowds in San Antonio created the Perfect Storm for Benson?

SAN ANTONIO (AP) -- Mayor Phil Hardberger reiterated his resolve to bring the Saints to San Antonio permanently, saying he wanted to close the deal before next season begins.

Hardberger, part of a sellout crowd at the Saints-Falcons game Sunday in San Antonio, said Sunday that Saints owner Tom Benson agreed to serious talks with him, probably at the end of this season.

Benson ``understands that we will sit down and talk,'' Hardberger was quoted as saying in a story in Monday's San Antonio Express-News. ``That is his desire as well. I'm pretty comfortable in saying he wants to be here.''

Attempts to reach Benson by telephone Monday were not successful. Team spokesman Greg Bensel declined comment.

The Saints are under contract to play at the Louisiana Superdome through 2010, but certain provisions allow them to opt out before a Nov. 29 deadline.

Gov. Rick Perry watched Sunday's game with Hardberger from Benson's suite and said he agrees the Saints should relocate to the Alamo City and is open to the state offering some type of financial assistance.

Damage to the Superdome by Hurricane Katrina prompted the Saints to practice in San Antonio and play three games in the city's 65,000-seat Alamodome. Four other games were moved to Baton Rouge, La., where ticket sales have been sluggish.

Can Texas handle three NFL teams? California and New York certainly manage to.

Remember the cries on the left in the late 1960s and early '70s for zero population growth? (They spawned an awful Star Trek episode and a couple of even worse movies if you need a quick refresher.) Well, it's possible to see it in action these days on both coasts--and in Old Europe. First up, the Connecticut Post writes, "Can New England be saved? Report finds too many negatives":

Are New England's best days behind it? Is it fated to be an old, blue, cold and complacent corner of a red-hot America?

Some indicators suggest so. The six states are barely holding their own in population; Massachusetts is actually slipping. Each year the merger mania of big companies seems to snap up a famed New England corporation — a Hancock, Fleet or Gillette. Only scrappy fights stem closure of the region's principal military bases, an anchor of its long-standing defense economy.

Despite the remarkable surge of biotech research and corporate spinoffs in the Boston region, the overall economic growth rate is anemic.

Check around New England, as we have in hundreds of interviews over the past three years, and you sense little of the dynamism of the American South and West.

The region's congressional strength is dwindling, and it won no favors in Republican-led Washington with its six-state sweep for John Kerry in 2004. Right now, states like Massachusetts and Connecticut look strong in national rankings of education and income, but the trend lines are down as competitors nip at their heels.

But is decline inevitable?

We argue "no."

Well, San Francisco would probably beg to differ, in a trend that James Taranto spotted a few months ago:

"San Francisco has the smallest share of small-fry of any major U.S. city," the Associated Press reports. "Just 14.5 percent of the city's population is 18 and under." The AP dispatch attributes the small number of children to high housing costs and Frisco's high prevalence of nonprocreative sexual orientations. Not mentioned is the Roe effect. The AP also describes how the city is responding:

Determined to change things, Mayor Gavin Newsom has put the kid crisis near the top of his agenda, appointing a 27-member policy council to develop plans for keeping families in the city. . . .

Newsom has expanded health insurance for the poor to cover more people under 25, and created a tax credit for working families. And voters have approved measures to patch up San Francisco's public schools, which have seen enrollment drop from about 62,000 to 59,000 since 2000.

One voter initiative approved up to $60 million annually to restore public school arts, physical education and other extras that state spending no longer covers. Another expanded the city's Children's Fund, guaranteeing about $30 million a year for after-school activities, child care subsidies and other programs.

So the lack of children is a reason to spend more taxpayer money on schools and other programs for kids. If there were more kids, would that be a reason to spend less? The question answers itself, doesn't it? As Ronald Reagan once observed, "No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth."

Nowhere is that more evident than across the Atlantic, where governmental policies have created a Carter-style malaise in which birth rates are down--and unemployment is up, putting the Old into Old Europe.

As Mark Steyn wrote earlier this year:

When I've mentioned the birth dearth on previous occasions, pro-abortion correspondents have insisted it's due to other factors - the generally declining fertility rates that affect all materially prosperous societies, or the high taxes that make large families prohibitively expensive in materially prosperous societies. But this is a bit like arguing over which came first, the chicken or the egg - or, in this case, which came first, the lack of eggs or the scraggy old chicken-necked women desperate for one designer baby at the age of 48. How much of Europe's fertility woes derive from abortion is debatable. But what should be obvious is that the way the abortion issue is framed - as a Blairite issue of personal choice - is itself symptomatic of the broader crisis of the dying West.

Since 1945, a multiplicity of government interventions - state pensions, subsidised higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything - has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that in Europe a child is now an optional lifestyle accessory. By 2050, Estonia's population will have fallen by 52 per cent, Bulgaria's by 36 per cent, Italy's by 22 per cent. The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what's the point of creating a secular utopia if it's only for one generation?

Of course, for the left, the ultimate secular utopia was the Soviet Union. How are things working out in its aftermath there in terms of population growth? Not very well on the front-end...

Russians, whose lives are shorter and poorer than they were under communism, have more abortions than births to avoid the costs of raising children, Bloomberg.com reported Tuesday quoting the country’s highest-ranking obstetrician.

About 1.6 million women had an abortion last year, a fifth of them under the age of 18, and about 1.5 million gave birth, said Vladimir Kulakov, vice president of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. “Many more” abortions weren’t reported.

...Or the back-end, either.

Late Update (10/20/05): "Demographic Destiny In One Glossy Photo".

In his latest Screeeedblog, James Lileks writes:

One of the signs, of course, said “Who Would Jesus Bomb.” Never heard that before. Hmm. Well. I think the proper question is “On Whom Would Jesus Levy Porous Sanctions Undermined by Corrupt International Officials Who turned Oil-For-Food Into a Massive Payola Operation for the International Nomenklatura,” but that wouldn’t fit on a sign.

The answer would, though. Jesus, you may recall, got the moneylenders out of the temple. How? With sternly worded pamphlets, I think. Also a march, which oddly enough included people who wanted the Jews out of Palestine. Strange bedfellows and all that.

So why do they get to play the Jesus card? Everyone got highly spooked over that bogus and rebogused story about how God came down in a flaming pillar and told Bush to invade Iraq. It makes an annual appearance, because it confirms what so many wish to believe: Bushitler is a freaky nutwad who thinks he gets specific operational instructions from on high everytime his knees hit the carpet. Sometimes the message comes in a dream, sometimes it’s a bird that looks at him with a cocked head, sometimes it’s the change in the color of his urine. You have to be careful to note the augurs.

He’s batshite, in other words, because he thinks he speaks for Jeebus. But the people on the streetcorner appear certain that Jesus did not want the Iraqi Defense Ministry leveled by Tomahawks in the middle of the night, no? Probably not. It’s just a jape to needle the Red State God-botherers, just the way they used to needle The Man in the 60s by pointing out that Jesus wore long hair and sandals just like high holy hippies did. Of course, I doubt Jesus had crabs, the clap, collapsed veins from a heroin habit and the abiding conviction that monkey-headed silverfish were coming out of the kitchen sink. But otherwise, yeah, peapod mates.

Yes, I know, it’s rather tired to beat up on “Hippies” this late in the game; it’s like, oh, making the 832nd movie about the sins of the McCarthy era. And Lord knows we’ve put that one behind us.

My point? No point. Just that the day the people of Iraq went home with purple fingers, some folks in a nice safe suburb of Minneapolis reacted by standing on a streetcorner with transcribed bumperstickers urging the US to abandon Iraq tomorrow.

Maybe that bumper sticker is much rarer in Minneapolis than it is on the West Coast, because I've seen it--or at least a slight variation on it--a few times these past two years.

In the spring, I saw it on the back of a Subaru wagon in Washington State, when Nina and I drove back to the US after a weekend cruise up to Vancouver. As soon as I spotted it, I thought, "Hey, I knew we're back in the US now".

But during the previous two summers, I could spot it nightly, on a pickup parked in front of a neighbor's house, which is a fascinating story in and of itself. The neighbor is a Vietnam vet (complete with the appropriate tags on his car), and frequently flies the American flag above his garage. But for a couple of months a year during the summer, someone visits with a "WHAT WOULD JESUS BOMB" sticker on his truck. I have no idea if this fellow is his son, son-in-law, brother, or what, but his host's acceptance of it is an amazing example of something that Mark Steyn wrote yesterday:

Anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti- masochists.

Evidently so. Because it seams to me that taking "WHAT WOULD JESUS BOMB" literally would mean that no bombs can possibly meet the Jesus test, which means that no wars would either. So:

Founding America? Forget it! Remember: WWJB!

Ending slavery via the Civil War? Not a chance. Hey...WWJB!?

Freeing western Europe? Verboten. After all, WWJB?

Ending the Cold War?

Well, this one's a bit tricky. After all, Reagan defeated the Soviet Union with just about nil in the way of bomb tonnage.

So on that basis alone, and to find an ironic way to wrap this post up, evidently, the WWJB crew are hardcore Pat Buchanan isolationist paleoconservatives who supported the Gipper, but have little desire to spread democracy to the Middle East or protect its most important democracy, the one that's been there since 1948.

Which, oddly enough, could be possible, come to think of it.

Orrin Judd links to a New York Times magazine feature with this lead:

Ever since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the strength of American conservatism has largely confounded historians and intellectuals. Before then, a generation of influential scholars claimed that liberalism was the core of all American political thinking and suggested that it always would be. Well into the 1970's, many observers wondered whether a Republican Party that allied itself with the conservative movement could long survive.

Parsing those two sentences reveals quite a gap that missing--two seminal events that both occurred in the early to mid-1970s. The first was the beginning of liberalism's increasing shift to the hard left. As Jonah Goldberg wrote shortly after the presidential election last year:

The conventional wisdom is right: Democrats have a values problem. At the national level, they can't talk about them convincingly. Even Rahm Emanuel, a former Clinton staffer and now a Democratic congressman, explained to the New York Times, "people aren't going to hear what we say until they know that we don't approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment."

As my old boss - and lifelong Democrat Ben Wattenberg - noted in his book "Values Matter Most," when the Democratic Party moved to the left, many moderate and conservative Democrats felt abandoned. In 1964 Barry Goldwater carried five states in the Democratic South. In 1968, the left kept LBJ from running and ruined the convention. In 1972 the leftists ruled the roost. A young militant with a huge afro, wearing a dashiki, was splashed across the airwaves because he helped get Chicago mayor Richard Daley dumped as a delegate to the Democratic Convention. That militant was Jesse Jackson.

Jackson both led and represented a change in the Democratic Party. For example, the '72 Convention imposed a severe racial and gender quota system - which exists to this day - so that the party would be more "inclusive."

Referring to such reforms, George McGovern, the presidential nominee in 1972, said he opened the doors to the Democratic Party "and 20 million people walked out." McGovern lost the election in a historic landslide to Nixon. Only Massachusetts voted for McGovern, and even there it was surprisingly close.

Only two Democrats have won the oval office since LBJ. Both were Southerners who campaigned as moderates. Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian, lost his re-election bid in part because he seemed to break his promise to be a moderate (and partly because he was "history's greatest monster" - if you are a devotee of the Simpsons). In 1992 Gov. Bill Clinton also ran as a moderate on abortion, crime, the death penalty and welfare. He even criticized the rapper Sista Souljah - which infuriated Jesse Jackson, now comfortably wearing suits, paid for with corporate shakedowns. When Clinton was elected, he governed from the left - Hillary Care, gays in the military, etc. - and the American public elected a Republican Congress to punish him.

And, because the one thing we know Bill Clinton likes more than interns is being president, he suddenly tacked back to the center and basically stayed there for the rest of his administration.

As to the second statement in that Times lead, which says:

Well into the 1970's, many observers wondered whether a Republican Party that allied itself with the conservative movement could long survive.

The shifting of the Democrats' power base to the hard left created a vacuum in the middle. And it's worth reading Crag Shirley's terrific Reagan's Revolution to understand just how down-and-out Republicans were in 1976, the year that they made a historic choice: to align themselves with Rockefeller me-to liberalism, or Reagan/Goldwater-style conservatism. They made the wrong choice in '76, but Ford's failure set-up the Gipper's run in 1980.

Last July, I wrote:

Because liberalism dominated culture--especially pop culture--for the majority of the 20th century, it's interesting to note how key events have been forgotten by reporters, journalists and historians.

As those two example linked to above illustrate, David Frum was right: more so than the sixties, the seventies is the decade which has shaped modern life. But it's very easy to forget so many of the events of that era--even if you're the New York Times. (Or perhaps, especially if you're the New York Times.)

Test, test, test. Check, check check. Check one, two! Check one, TWO!

Hey, I think we're up and running again!

I had no idea, when I switched from Blogger to Movable Type last year, what a drag it would be on my old Webhost's CGI resources. I wasn't the only site on my server, and during the day, new posts would take an agonizingly long time to upload after I hit "Publish". And frequently took a long time to load when a reader clicked on a hyperlink.

Eventually in mid-August, like a rubberband stretched too far, or even better metaphor that isn't coming to mind right now, those CGI resources snapped, and my blog was out of commission for nearly a week. Eventually, Mel of Bona Fide Style did yeoman work getting it back online.

Ever since then, I began to look seriously at finding a new Webhost. Livingdot is one of a handful of hosts recommended by Movable Type, and I can see why. Their customer service has been absolutely exceptional. First class is a phrase that comes to mind, and I don't use those words very often (to say the least) to describe anyone's customer service. My only concern: they're in Minnesota, the nexus of several big league bloggers, which means that a fair amount of the Blogosphere's traffic routes through our 32nd state. But I think I can count on the Captain and the Lord of Jasperwood not to break the Internet.

We're in the process of changing servers to one that's proprietized to handle Movable Type, our blogging software. If all goes well, it should be a fairly seamless transfer, and you, gentle reader, should notice no ill effects. But we're going to pause from posting until it's complete, which hopefully, should be by Monday.

There's plenty of previous content up to explore in the meantime, though. Please explore, while we're rearranging the deck chairs.

Over at Blogcritics, I have a look at a new software program which packs tens of thousands of dollars worth of musical synthesizers into a PC for a couple of (pardon the pun) C-notes.

Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Tice trades perpetual bad boy Randy Moss to the Oakland Raiders this off-season, only to find that his own team has become the Raiders of the Midway. Don Banks of Sports Illustrated outlines the Vikes' current woes:

It's only a guess, but after the news that 17 Minnesota Vikings were aboard two charter boats on which sex parties allegedly were held on Oct. 6, I'm assuming no more United Way spots for the Vikings for the time being.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any more embarrassing for the team that gave us Onterrio Smith and "The Original Whizzinator'' and the Mike Tice Super Bowl-ticket-scalping affair, the Vikings may have hit a new high for lows.

I've heard of team bonding excursions, but never one in which almost one-third of the roster potentially had to post bond. But then, these are the Vikings, and they are adept at making the wrong kind of news off the field. In August, Minnesota All-Pro defensive tackle Kevin Williams was charged with domestic assault against his wife. (He has pled not guilty to the fifth-degree misdemeanor charge and has a mid-Oct. court date). In September, Vikings offensive linemen Bryant McKinnie and rookie guard Marcus Johnson were arrested in connection with a late-night fight at a Twin Cities-area gas station. (Both have pleaded not guilty to disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process; preliminary hearings are scheduled for Nov. 4)

Even if the current allegations of prostitution and lewd behavior on Lake Minnetonka don't result in indictments, the controversy-plagued Vikings might still see their bid for a new stadium derailed by the avalanche of bad publicity. How's that for bottom-line impact?

As bad as a Jim Marshall tackle could feel, in the good old days before the Vikings decided to write their own version of North Minnetonka Forty.

Michael M. Rosen writes "Don't Call it a Comeback (Yet)" for Governor Schwarzenegger--but his poll numbers, and that of his initiatives on the ballot in November are rising fast:

A Survey USA poll taken in the beginning of October found all of the governor's initiatives favored by wide margins, some by more than 20 points. Other polls have confirmed these findings.

Schwarzenegger's internal polling showed more than 60% support for the initiatives as recently as mid-September, even as his own personal approval remained mired in the mid-30's. Since then, he formally announced that he would seek reelection in 2006, perhaps persuading voters that he's in this for the long haul.

How has he generated those numbers? See if this strategy rings a bell:

Just a few months ago, conventional wisdom had all but written Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's eulogy, complete with all the shopworn Terminator clichés fit to print.

The "Governator's" approval ratings were in the high 30's. The Democrats in the Assembly and Senate had stymied his reform agenda at almost every turn. His attempt to bypass the California Legislature and take his case directly to the people was in jeopardy as several of his initiatives were floundering. As little as 28% of Californians approved of the special election he called (California's fourth statewide election in as many years).

Worst of all, according to a Field Poll, positive opinion of Schwarzenegger hovered perilously close to the level of his ousted predecessor, Gray Davis.

Much of this bad news was attributed to a vehement and intensely personal advertising campaign against the governor on the part of the various unions, who had much to lose if the initiatives succeeded. Beginning in late spring, the airwaves have been blanketed with "everyday" teachers, workers, and parents lambasting the governor -- depicted in dull and grainy footage that would embarrass the National Enquirer's editorial staff -- for his betrayal of schools and families.

Rather than respond in kind, the governor and his supporters held their tongues (and checkbooks) until about six weeks before the November election. This rope-a-dope aimed to lure Arnold's opponents into a state of complacency; the trap would be sprung in late September when the governor, we were told, would finally go on the offensive.

if that all sounds familiar, it certainly should: that was President Bush's exact re-election strategy. As I wrote early in September of last year, during the week of the Republican National Convention:

Since January, Bush endured a year where he was beaten up over 30 year old phony AWOL charges. (And before the Swift Boat Vets raised the stakes, you can't help but think they surfaced partially with the hopes of making Kerry look better in comparison, and shut down debate about his service record.) The first lady had disingenuously headlined articles written about her thoughts on gay marriage. That the gay marriage issue was brought up so forcefully in both Massachusetts and in San Francisco simultaneously (where it's illegal, but that didn't stop a newly elected mayor) in this election year was probably not a coincidence.

Then the partisan 9/11 Commission. Then Fahrenheit 9/11, and the endless anti-Bush tomes at bookstores, and endless attacks first by Howard Dean, then Al Gore, and then Senator Kerry.

The silence from the White House was brutal to endure for those of us who wanted to see the president fight back. But it paid off this week.

And in November of course, which is why Governor Schwarzenegger is employing a similar strategy, with--so far at least--equally similar results.

Update: Instalanche! Welcome, fellow readers of the Professor.

Except for the enormous maintenance costs. UPI notes that Amtrak may--if such a thing is possible--quietly divest itself of ownership of the Northeast Corridor. The corridor is an asset that Amtrak has maintained since it was given to them by Congress, back when Conrail was launched in 1976:

The Amtrak Board of Directors has quietly approved a plan to create a subsidiary to maintain track and stations in the Northeast Corridor.

The national rail passenger agency did not announce the proposal, which was adopted Sept. 22. It became public Wednesday in the newsletter of United Rail Passenger Alliance, a Jacksonville, Fla., advocacy group.

In most of the country, Amtrak trains operate on track owned and maintained by long-distance freight railroads. In the Northeast Corridor, between Boston and Washington, Amtrak owns and maintains the track, which is also used for freight and by state-subsidized commuter lines.

The alliance supports the proposal, saying Amtrak "will finally be able to be run as it was originally intended, without the millstone of the NEC around its corporate neck." The group believes Amtrak executives have been able to play financial games while forcing rail passengers in California to subsidize commuter service in the northeast.

But the plan has its critics.

"The Bush administration wants to hold a fire sale on Amtrak and dump its best asset, the Northeast Corridor," Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said in a statement reported by the New York Times.

Why not do the reverse? Hold the fire sale and dump everything else but the corridor? It's the only place where Amtrak has a shot at turning a profit.

Incidentally, if this proposal goes forward, what will this do to Amtrak's ownership of the current underground dive version of Penn Station? Will it give them the opportunity to put the NASA-style "ABANDON IN PLACE" sign on the door and move in to the swanky new Penn Station being built across the street?

Roger L. Simon notes that Yahoo and Microsoft are teaming up to release a new instant messaging rogram. As Roger writes, "Be afraid. Be very afraid".

(Yes, I know Microsoft is in Redmond, Washington. But it was too good a title not to use.)

Iowahawk's special guest blogger, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, says that his fellow backroom boffins aren't very happy over at JihadCo.

(Warning: link contains exceedingly vulgar and wildly satiric language.)

Or not.

Ed Morrissey looks at yet another big media enviro-scare that wasn't:

Remember the "toxic soup" that flooded New Orleans, the one that the media widely reported was so polluted that mere momentary exposure could burn the skin and create potentially mortal illness for Katrina victims? As with the widespread gunfire, rapes, and murders, the toxic soup turns out to be another media myth. The Washington Post reports that an extensive look at the floodwaters reveals that its composition appears equivalent to floodwaters anywhere else.

As Ed writes:

Of course, this is good news for the people of New Orleans who had to suffer from exposure to the water, but other than that, it makes little difference. The damage caused to structures comes from the water itself, as well as the mud and silt that come along with it. The rot that sets into structures throughout the basin will likely require total or near-total reconstruction efforts.

It does, however, demonstrate the toxic combination of hyperbolic media and sensational events. Not content with reporting the news that happened before their eyes, media outlets had to reach beyond the news to report events that never happened, all without doing even basic research to determine the veracity of their reports. How difficult would it have been for NBC or the New York Times to get a test of the water before unleashing reports on the so-called toxic soup? How about getting reporters to verify accounts of rapes and murders by the score before airing such rumors to a repulsed nation?

Yes, that would be a good first step. As I wrote last week:

I wonder which version history will ultimately remember--the media's Weekly World News-style first draft, or what actually happened. Sadly, something tells me it will be the former.

(With apologies to Peter Gabriel for mangling the title of what's actually a pretty nifty song.)

Mickey Kaus skewers the Los Angeles Times (not that that's all that difficult these days):

Dear Tribune Company: Can we have the massive layoffs now? Please? Can it be that an improvised explosive device was found and detonated by police on Friday near the University of California at Los Angeles and the story still has not made the Los Angeles Times? It looks that way. ... Note to LAT editor Dean Baquet: Whatever you do, don't run this bomb story. People might be interested! That's always dangerous. But if readers never find out about it then they won't be unnecessarily worried. The responsible course!

One possibility: eventually, the L.A. Times will run op-eds on the topic, which assume that their readers got the underlying news story from the Internet.

Which, when you think about it, is a weird reversal of the original role of the Blogosphere--but it wouldn't be the first time that it's happened. As Bill Quick said in his Pajamas Media profile, "To me, the only function the media serves is to give us [bloggers] the raw material" to opine on.

Is the reverse starting to happen on news that the media thinks could be too controversial or too "politically correct"? I could see an editor thinking, "Let's let the bloggers sort it out, then we'll jump on it if anything develops. Our audience is too sclerotic to figure out how to get onto the Internet; why bother having a scoop?"

Update: Meanwhile, regarding the other coast, Ed Morrissey pushes a galvanized roofing nail into the balloon that is the New York Times' pretensions:

The torturous process of actually saying something meaningful about the Iraqi agreement on a new constitution in the days ahead of the vote grinds on through eight paragraphs written in this stultifying prose, as like a bad pop song with an unrelenting, unchanging bass line. It takes that long for the Times to admit that the developments this week give greater hope for unity after the plebescite and for greater Sunni participation in democracy thereafter. The editorial approaches masterpiece status for sour grapes and for burying the lede. Even its title, "A Flicker Of Hope In Iraq", makes this major step forward seem little more than a mere footnote in an encyclopedia of misery.

Cheer up! We liberated 25 million people from a genocidal dictator, helped them create a National Assembly, watched as over 8 million of them voted freely lasy January, and now see them peacefully negotiating the laws under which they will govern themselves. Perhaps the Gray Lady finds democracy too distasteful for her scrubbed hands, but the rest of us find these developments very pleasing and reason for hope of eventual unity and peace.

Or if you can't cheer up, at least hire someone who knows how to write an honest editorial.

But if an editorial falls behind a pay-to-read firewall, will anyone hear it?

Muggeridge's Law states that there is no way that a satirist can compete with real life for its pure absurdity. But I was sure James Lileks, in his new "Backfence: The Quirk" column (Is it the Backfence, or The Quirk? C'mon Strib, make up your mind!), was kidding around when he wrote:

Barbie gets a bad rap. A few years back she got slapped for admitting something everyone knows: "Math is hard." She didn't say, "I cannot perform elementary addition because I have bosoms," but that's what everyone seemed to infer. You'd think this paper regularly had headlines like "Lack of Trigonometry Knowledge Leaves Six Dead," and that Barbie was leading us to a world where young women would be unable to compete with Japan, where most embryos begin algebra lessons upon conception.

But Barbie isn't stupid. As a role model, you could do worse. You could do the Bratz, which are grotesque pumpkin-headed creatures with Kate Moss coke-hag bods and bedroom eyes. And the "bedroom" in this case is a motel room on the outskirts of Vegas littered with crack vials and crumpled cigarette packs.

I know, I know: Kids grow up faster today, which is why it's important to provide 10-year-olds with slutterific dolls so they'll know how to dress for their photo in the escort section of the free weekly. But why Barbie gets people riled up and the Bratz get a pass -- go figure.

I bring this up only to note with despair that Barbie has gone Bratz as well. For the holiday season Mattel is bringing out the "My Scene Bling Bling Barbie," an attempt to out-skank the Bratz market by tarting up America's sweetheart. Her lips now contain so much collagen she looks like she'd make a sloshing sound if she puckered up; her eyes are bigger, the mascara looks like she was attacked by a rabid Sharpie, and her lids have that come-hither half-mast appearance that make her look as though she smoked half a pound of hash on the way over from China.

Her accessories are blinged out, as you might expect -- a silver cell phone for calling her dealer, a tiny silver purse whose contents you can imagine dumped out on a police car hood (sold separately), gauche synthetic fur that suggests they lifted the ban on trapping pimps and selling the pelts, a halter top, short shorts, pink leg warmers and high-heeled boots. Just ghastly. "Flashdance" meets "Foxy Brown" meets "Pretty Woman." On Cinemax.

It fits the target market, though. Let's be honest: Most kids have no sense of style. Most little boys would wear a Spiderman costume to Great Aunt Agnes' funeral if they could. But adults are the ones pushing bling on kids, even though bling can only be worn ironically as a comment on the awfulness of bling. Adults are supposed to teach kids about style. In a way, it's apt; Barbie's clean-cut California classic look is out, replaced by the ugly incoherence of modern fashion, most of which looks like something Audrey Hepburn would slit her wrists rather than wear.

It's a satire, right? A brilliantly subtle Lileksian parody. Mattel wouldn't actually make a slutterific My Scene Bling Bling Barbie Doll, would they? No, of course not.

Then I went to Google...

A blogger at Libertas writes, "Do you remember the reviews for The Passion?":

Remember all the hand-wringing from the Hollywood Press about “historical accuracy” and “Biblical accuracy” and “context,” and all the other stuff they made up to flak for their bad reviews and anti-Christian bias? Do you remember that? Well, I find it interesting that only one reviewer held “Good Night, And Good Luck” to the same standard: Stephen Hunter at The Washington Post

Click here to read Hunter's article, and the rest of the Libertas post.

John Hinderaker writes:

France's former Ambassador to the U.N., who also served as Kofi Annan's "special adviser," has been indicted by French authorities for "influence peddling and corruption of foreign officials." The official, Jean-Bernard Merimee, is alleged to have received kickbacks in the form of oil allocations from Saddam Hussein as part of the Oil-for-Food fraud.

But don't worry, sports fans:

The French government assures us that there was "'no link' between French diplomats' alleged contacts with Saddam's regime and France's decision not to support the U.S.-led war in 2003 that toppled the Iraqi dictator."

Well, that's certainly a relief. Sometimes when people pay bribes they expect results in return. But Saddam apparently wasn't that kind of guy.

He's the ultimate Goodfella, that Saddam!

Ever use the phrase "Robber Barons" to refer to the great capitalists who transformed America (to borrow lingo from Alvin Toffler's "Wave Theory" from its First Wave agrarian-based economy to a Second Wave industrial powerhouse? Ever hear someone else use them? It's a phrase that's become synonymous with men like Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. Edward J. Renehan Jr., author of The Dark Genius of Wall Street explains its origins:

During the bleak days of the Depression, Matthew Josephson -- at that time a self-proclaimed Marxist - published a biased and mistake-packed economic history of the Gilded Age. Josephson's The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861 - 1901 hit bookstores in 1934. At the time -- in the midst of massive unemployment, historically-high industrial malaise, and all the human suffering attendant to those realities -- critics and pundits seemed eager to praise a book that damned Wall Street magnates, bankers, and millionaires generally. Thus Josephson's treatise became an influential bestseller. Thus also did men such as Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller -- the industrialists, investors and entrepreneurs who defined their era -- become robber barons. (The term was not one with which any of the moguls had been acquainted. Rockefeller -- the last of them, destined to die in 1937 at the age of 97 -- most likely never read Josephson's book.) Through the following decades, Josephson's volume became the bedrock for nearly all further considerations of the Gilded Age, forming the misguided track upon which several generations of scholars drove their trains.

Josephson was an unlikely Wall Street historian. Born in Brooklyn in 1899, he studied literature at Columbia University, graduating 1920. Immediately thereafter, Josephson and his bride, Hannah Geffen, went to Paris to join the then-thriving community of American expatriate writers. We find no hint of Josephson in Hemingway's letters of the period, or in Hem's memoir of those days, A Moveable Feast. Still, Josephson seems to have been somewhat prominent on the Left Bank, where he edited the literary magazine Broom (1922-1924), and wrote poetry and criticism for other small but respected journals. (Josephson chronicled these years in Life Among the Surrealists, published 1962.)

Josephson's first two books were biographies: Zola and His Time (1928) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1932). By Josephson's own account, his consideration of the muck-raking novelist Zola -- whose fictions sought to document the plight of France's underclass -- is what that turned him toward his own personal exploration of "America's vast history of economic injustice."

In The Robber Barons, Josephson presented a quintessentially Marxian analysis of enterprise. Quoting Honore de Balzac's catchy but baseless aphorism that "behind every great fortune lies a great crime," Josephson painted Gilded Age capitalism simplistically as a zero-sum game where a dollar acquired by one person was necessarily one stolen from another. As Maury Klein has observed, Josephson was at heart "a moralist who cared less about the accuracy of the story than about the ideological message he saw in it." In shaping his facts to backup his ideology, Josephson completely missed one elemental truth: The leading entrepreneurs of the Gilded Age were to the modern American economy what the founding fathers were to the Bill of Rights. These men built the infrastructure upon which the whole of their country's 20th century prosperity was based. The Carnegies, Goulds, Rockefellers and Morgans created -- and that is a key word here, created -- capacity and jobs, thus enabling the rise of that most radical and democratic of things: a strong, stable, educated middle class. By being visionaries and taking business risks that served their own ends, the Gilded Age industrialists generated new wealth not only for themselves, but for their emerging nation-state.

During the forty years that followed the Civil War, the United States amazed European investors and observers with the speed at which it morphed from a relatively backward agricultural republic to the most powerful industrial nation on the face of the planet. During the "robber baron" years, the United States outstripped other nations by far when it came to growth in per capita income, industrial production, and rising values generally. As well, the Gilded Age saw, for the first time, full economic participation by numerous previously disenfranchised constituencies. But one has a hard time gleaning these facts from Josephson's book, or from any of its numerous descendants.

That's not entirely surprising, to be honest.

The new movie Serenity has certainly gotten plenty of lip service (word service? pixel service?) in the Blogosphere. I'd never heard of the TV series it was based on, so I haven't bothered paying much attention to the recent reviews of the movie. But Mark Steyn describes it thusly:

By now you’re probably wondering, yeah, so you liked the rough’n’ready sets and TV dialogue and reaction shots, but is it about anything? Well, it claims to be. The tag line on the posters in the US was ‘Because the future is worth fighting for.’ And, if it doesn’t quite live up to that billing, it’s got more going on than the Star Wars Zen-by-numbers colouring book. Having won the war, the Alliance begins mind-washing its citizens to make them more content and placid. Unfortunately, as a side-effect, folks also lose the desire to go to work, to breed, and ultimately to live — except for a very small minority whom the mind-washing backfires on and turns into feral predators who destroy everything they come near. Hmm. Aside from anything else, Serenity is also an excellent allegory for the next ten years of the European Union.

Heh. So, maybe it is worth checking out, after all. Or maybe not. Maybe when it hits the #500 block on DirecTV?

Nick Cohen, columnist for England's far-left Guardian, discovers a trend that he finds to be new: anti-Semitism amongst his brethren on the left.

It's actually far older than he thinks, as historians and academics as diverse as John Lukacs, A. James Gregor, and Paul Johnson have all documented, and Edward Feser (himself visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University) summarized in a thorough piece last year for Tech Central Station.

Ever see the Robert Altman movie, Secret Honor? Chances are, you probably haven't, as it received very little box office on its initial run in 1984, and only occasionally appears on the cable movie channels. But everyone should, at least once. There's only one actor in the entire movie: Philip Baker Hall in a fascinating performance as Richard Nixon (with a Chivas Regal assist, as Leonard Maltin wrote), wandering his study at 2:00 in the morning shortly after resigning, and talking into (of course) his tape recorder. It ended with Altman and Hall's Nixon raving and drooling into the tape deck's mic:

Kennedy...F*** 'em!
Kissinger...F*** 'em!
Hoover...F*** 'em!

And on and on. That was the obsessive left's portrait of Nixon, but it's also a reminder: those who hate can easily become whom they hate. Or as the real President Nixon said in his farewell speech to his staff, "always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself."

For Exhibit A of both of those aphorisms in action, Brent Bozell writes of Dan Rather:

New burps and rages are coming out of a book by Rather's memo-mangling producer, Mary Mapes, risibly titled "Truth and Duty." In an early excerpt, she attacked "hyperconservative" blogs, and couldn't believe the "mainstream press" would fall for the "far right" blogger critiques. Mapes warmly remembered Rather signing off a phone call "by saying something that had become a shorthand for us over the years: "F-E-A." That was code for "F--- 'Em All," a sentiment that needed to be expressed from time to time in any newsroom."

That's a sorry slogan for Dan Rather, who routinely claimed it's his job to be fair and accurate, and, as he said in 1997, "I do agree that one test of a reporter is how often he or she is able to keep their emotions out of what they are doing and keep their own biases and agendas out of it." Rather perpetually flunked that test. To honor Rather now, after his transparently dishonest reporting on Bush's service record and the Nixonian stonewalling afterward, is to perpetuate the idea that honest journalism is a myth.

Via Power Line.

Mark Steyn's heartfelt memoriam to James Doohan, which originally ran in The Atlantic (and thus only available online to subscribers) is now on Steyn's Website.

In April, I interviewed Brian Anderson, the senior editor of City Journal magazine, and author of the great South Park Conservatives book (which, to highlight Brian's exceedingly fine taste and refined sense of style, briefly mentions your humble narrator). He had a great anecdote concerning the increasingly advanced average age of television's audience:

Writing in the New Yorker recently, the media critic Ken Auletta pointed out something I hadn't noticed: the commercials on the Big Three network newscasts are frequently hawking drugs like Viagra and Mylanta, and the broadcasts themselves often focus on health issues. There's a reason for that emphasis on infirmity: the average age of a network news watcher is now 60; only about 8 percent of viewership is between 18 and 34.

Roger L. Simon wrote on Tuesday that the average age of a newspaper reader is only a gray whisker in difference: 55 years old.

So when Pajamas editorial board member John Podhoretz says something like:

Thirty years from now, we may say ‘Can you believe 30 years ago there was a group of people called reporters, and they were hired by things called newspapers?’

He may be more right than he knows.

The Contra Costa Times catches leftwing California state senator Carole Migden pushing the voting button of a Republican colleague as her pet issue is about to fail by a single vote while he's away from his desk--and based on the quotes in the story, apparently it's not the first time she's attempted this. As Patterico.com writes:

How much do you want to bet that if the participants were reversed, there would have been front page cries for their heads from the SF Chronicle, the LA Times, and the Sacramento Bee for weeks on end?

Indeed.

If the words "Jamaat ul-Fuqra in Virginia" sound like an Appalachian equivalent of Star Trek's "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" catchphrase, they won't after you read this. On the other hand, it's not a post that's conducive to sound sleep, either.

(Via Instapundit, who has additional, related links.)

Update: Speaking of "sleep tight, America", Power Line looks at the mainstream media's blackout on coverage of the would be-University of Oklahoma bomber.

Hey, we don't call 'em the legacy media for nuthin'.

Tammy Bruce has a simple suggestion for New Orleans' Mayor Nagin.

(Via Roger L. Simon, who demands that I eat more sushi. Can't argue with that--though precise implementation risks violating the independent contractor clause in my Pajamas Media agreement...)

A reader to Instapundit notes a curious breakthrough on the media's coverage of the UN's Oil For Food Scandal:

The interesting thing to me is the Guardian is now stating "Saddam manipulated the program" as a forgone conclusion. No longer is the press treating this as if it "alledgedly" happened. One wonders how long it will take the MSM to make the connection between the lucrative income generated by this scam and the "international resistance" to the war in Iraq.

Glenn Reynolds responds:

I'm guessing a while, but I'd love to be wrong.

Hey, baby steps forward are better than no progress at all.

Twenty years after their TV series was cancelled, UNICEF declares war on the Smurfs.

We can only pray that the Teletubbies are next.

Over the weekend the galley copy of the new book, Redefining Sovereignty arrived. Edited by Orrin Judd of the Brothers Judd Website and blog we frequently link to (and profiled a few years ago), it's currently scheduled for a November release. Orrin has collected speeches by as diverse a range of statesmen on both sides of the aisle as can be imagined--from Kofi Annan on the left, to Presidents Reagan and Bush (#43) on the right, and woven a fascinating narrative to interconnect them.

The blurb on the cover ponders:

Will the citizens of liberal democracies retain the right to determine their own laws and public policies or will they yield these rights to transnational entities in the quest for universal order and justice?

While waiting for Orrin's book to be published, the very best quick overview of the concept of transnational progressivism that I can think of is the brilliant essay that Steven Den Beste wrote on the subject three years ago. And it makes a great de facto introduction to the concept of Redefining Sovereignty.

Back in January, I wrote a newsletter for Electronic House on home theater cabinetry that begin with the supposition that my dad may have had one the first predecessors to today's high tech media rooms. (Its Google cache is still online, if you can get the interminably long URL to load in your browser):

Who owned the first media room? History may never know for certain, but I’d like to put in a vote for my father. In 1969, while Neil and Buzz were exploring the moon, and Jimi, Janis, and The Who were exploring the mud at Woodstock, my father looked around his sealed, finished basement, and decided, "Why yes, a custom-built cabinet to house my hi-fi gear would look wonderful down here". He hired a carpenter to design and build beautifully finished cabinetry to run the entire length of one of the narrow walls in the rectangular basement. The space was divided between housing several hundred of his thousands of LPs (and 78s!), and his multiple reel-to-reel and cassette decks, turntables, receiver, etc. A pair of hinged doors in the corners hid the speakers behind speaker cloth. The royalty of jazz (the Duke of Ellington, the Count of Basie, and Nat "King" Cole) played there nightly—or at least their recordings did.

Boy, was I wrong: James Lileks' wonderful Institute of Official Cheer looks at what might be the first home theater, from 1955, 14 years prior.

Revel in its advanced technology and a design so sleek, Raymond Loewy himself would have put down his conté crayon permanently in humble astonishment if he had gotten wind of it.

This was advanced technology and aesthetics, By God!

Last year, I wrote:

To paraphrase P.J. O'Rourke--I don't think we'd even be talking about Easy Rider today, if its filmmakers hadn't realized what a dog it was going to be at the box office, and substituted that ridiculously contrived happy ending to the film.

It looks as if Warner Brothers is employing a variation of that formula to market their latest re-release.

(Via Damian Penny.)

There's a documentary soon to be released on Senator Kerry's run at the White House last year. According to Libertas, it contains this curious segment:

In a bizarre moment, top Kerry aide Jim Loftus rants about an advance team’s inability to get a pony into a hotel room for a birthday celebration. He fumes: “When I was an advance guy, if someone said ‘get a pony on the 10th floor of this hotel in four hours’ … I would have said: ‘What color eyes should it have?’”

Hey, I thought President Reagan had the lock on pony references!

Leave it to James Lileks, discussing the redesign of his employer, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, to come up with the money quote:

You'll love it. Or not. You can't please everyone. I expect some of the youngsters will love it too, particularly after we unveil our new ad slogan for Gen Y:The Newspaper. A Viable Alternative to Staring Into Space.

Meanwhile, in the latest profile over at the HQ of its successor medium, John Podhoretz says that newspapers may not even be that within a few decades (apparently long after 2014, though):

I don’t think anybody knows where this is going. But it’s clear to anybody who has a sense of the future, and has gotten into the business of writing or reporting or opinion, that many things that were done pretty much the same way for that last 100 years -- in terms of words -- are undergoing a gigantic transition to something else.

Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn’t understand that the internet was the direction computing was going. This guy, who became the richest person the world had ever seen by inventing software, didn’t understand this, you know? And nobody does. My view is that any effort to figure out how to combine the internet with the act of gathering and processing and relaying info and opinion and analysis to people is very important.

The mayor of my own city, Michael Bloomberg, years ago invented a proprietary system for relaying bond prices to people, and now he is worth $9 billion and has a company that if sold would be worth $30 billion. None of that existed before. And until 1996, Matt Drudge was working at gift shop at CBS. That is what happens in a time of change. So getting in the game with citizen journalism, which Pajamas Media represents, provides one possibility. Thirty years from now, we may say ‘Can you believe 30 years ago there was a group of people called reporters, and they were hired by things called newspapers?’

And they all claimed to represent the vast populace of a diverse nation, while thinking exactly the same way on every major issue!

Former FBI director Louis Freeh discussed President Clinton's failure to pursue terrorism on 60 Minutes last night, including, as Atlas Shrugged notes, "the 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia, where 19 U.S. servicemen died and more than 370 were wounded".

See video of Freeh's 60 Minutes appearance here. And for more on the topic, check out this piece from December of 2001 by Byron York, which discusses the numerous other terrorist incidents which happened on Clinton's watch, and his poll-driven response (or lack thereof).

Over the summer, I finally caught The Aviator. Wonderful 1930s and '40s production design, but its casting reminded me why I skipped it on the big screen in the first place. There was simply no way I could buy the babyfaced perpetual child-man Leonardo DiCaprio as business tycoon Howard Hughes. He simply lacked the gravitas to play the character, despite the fact that at 30, DiCaprio is only a few years younger than Hughes himself was at the start of the era depicted in Scorsese's picture.

(Incidentally, could you imagine DiCaprio as the title character in Citizen Kane? And yet Orson Welles was actually four years younger than DiCaprio when he played Charles Foster Kane.)

In a brilliant essay which ties together several of the themes we've discussed here previously (found via Libertas), Frederica Mathewes-Green explains how Hollywood's perpetual youth obsession undercuts how seriously its movies and their stars are taken:

Read More »

Iowahawk writes:

America's sociologists are perplexed: despite damage that surpassed New Orleans, why was there no looting in Mississippi? Magnolia Stater and Katrina survivor JSS3 sends some photo data that may help solve this mystery.

Heh.

DirecTV has long had audio-only music channels in its ozone layer of 800-level channels. This sounds like a pretty cool addition:

If you eye your dish with loathing every time the signal slips--DirecTV Group wants to rekindle the romance. The No. 1 U.S. direct-broadcast satellite TV provider said Thursday it will start offering its customers 72 radio channels from fellow orbiter XM Satellite Radio Holdings.

Led by Chief Executive Hugh Panero, XM is the clear market leader in orbital radio: On Tuesday, it announced it crossed the 5-million subscriber mark, auguring 6 big ones by year's end--versus closest rival Sirius Satellite Radio's 2.1 million.

DirecTV, which boasts more than 14 million customers nationwide, said the XM broadcasts will begin in mid-November. The deal nearly doubles the TV purveyor's current aural programming lineup without an additional fee for customers, it said. The new offerings will include music channels, children's programming and "Home Plate," XM's Major League Baseball talk-radio channel. Unfortunately, the latter comes a tad late in the season.

Satellite radio may be the current next big thing, but it probably can't hurt to have some connections who are already entrenched. DirectTV just might be that well-established friend, as it's nearly 34%-owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. And if the Aussie-born Forbes 400 Richest Americans member doesn't know media--and how to sell it to people--who does?

Besides Panero, that is.

As the Forbes article notes, satellite radio is scheduled to come satellite TV in mid-November.

DirecTV has long had audio-only music channels in its ozone layer of 800-level channels. This sounds like a pretty cool addition:

If you eye your dish with loathing every time the signal slips--DirecTV Group wants to rekindle the romance. The No. 1 U.S. direct-broadcast satellite TV provider said Thursday it will start offering its customers 72 radio channels from fellow orbiter XM Satellite Radio Holdings.

Led by Chief Executive Hugh Panero, XM is the clear market leader in orbital radio: On Tuesday, it announced it crossed the 5-million subscriber mark, auguring 6 big ones by year's end--versus closest rival Sirius Satellite Radio's 2.1 million.

DirecTV, which boasts more than 14 million customers nationwide, said the XM broadcasts will begin in mid-November. The deal nearly doubles the TV purveyor's current aural programming lineup without an additional fee for customers, it said. The new offerings will include music channels, children's programming and "Home Plate," XM's Major League Baseball talk-radio channel. Unfortunately, the latter comes a tad late in the season.

Satellite radio may be the current next big thing, but it probably can't hurt to have some connections who are already entrenched. DirectTV just might be that well-established friend, as it's nearly 34%-owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. And if the Aussie-born Forbes 400 Richest Americans member doesn't know media--and how to sell it to people--who does?

Besides Panero, that is.

As the Forbes article notes, satellite radio is scheduled to come satellite TV in mid-November.

Of England's far-left Guardian, Norm Geras asks:

Whether George Bush actually said what he was reported on the front page of the Guardian as having said seems to be in some doubt now. But, whatever the case, there it was on the front page - as also of the Independent - and yesterday the Guardian readership was following up. It's a case of shock and mock, isn't it (the headlining and then the quips)?

What's behind it? Is it just that, for secular liberals and leftists, all those invoking a line to, or about, God in decisions and actions in the public realm, with far-reaching effects on others, are to be seen as laughable, grotesque, or worse? I guess that must be it. But hold on. This seems to apply only sometimes. Like to the US President; or to Republican voters of devoutly Christian outlook; or to fundamentalist Jews in the occupied territories. It seems not to apply so much, or at all, when Islamists appeal to religious sources as a basis for blowing up themselves and, more particularly, others. Here, what is often urged upon us from the same quarters, from the pages of the same newspapers as have just carried the shock-and-mock stuff, is an understanding of the grievances that accompany the appeal to religious motivations. And what is most certainly urged upon us is the avoidance of any disrespect towards widely-held religious sensibilities.

Why the contrast? Requirements of consistency would seem to suggest that the shock-and-mock responses can't be due to the expression of devout religiosity as such, in support of political decision and political action. So why is it that, for some people, a more understanding approach is less relevant towards US Republicans than it is towards radical Islamists? I'm at a loss.

England's Guardian is far from alone in this. As I wrote about America's legacy media during Newsweek's fabulist Koran in the can scandal:

There could be a pretty nifty opportunity awaiting a politician or other prominent figure who wanted to point out to the media that their hyping of Koran abuse stories is hypocrisy squared.

In other words, it's hypocrisy that hasn't been seen on this level since the left and the media (sorry to repeat myself) turned on a dime from claiming that Clarence Thomas trying to hit on Anita Hill was a Crime Against Humanity, but all of the charges that emanated from Bill Clinton's trousers was just between consenting adults.

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

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

So how 'bout it, MSM? We now know how ardently you'll defend a religion which is practiced by about three million Americans according to Daniel Pipes, and roughly double that from other sources. Ready to start defending the Judeo-Christian faiths practiced by--or at a bare minimum, respected by--the other 290 million people in this country?

No? Then your vaunted claims of neutrality should require to step back a bit--maybe a couple of hundred miles--from hyping this story.

I expect a fair amount of reactionary hypocrisy from the nostalgists at the Guardian--who at least open about their biases. It's amusing to also see it in the American media, who are a bit more schizophrenic when discussing their own worldview.

Update: Instapundit, where I originally discovered Norm's post, just linked to my post regarding Newsweek. Welcome InstaReaders!

Theodore Dalrymple recently quipped that tattoos are a "refutation of the doctrine that the customer is always right. In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong".

He wrote an extensive essay on the subject a decade ago, just as that '90s fad was reaching ascension. This section is a classic:

Not long ago, a prisoner with the words NO FEAR tattooed prominently on the side of his neck came before me with a medical complaint, and I inquired into his medical history. He wore his hair shaved, and his scalp reminded me of that of the old, one-eyed, half-eared tomcat in the garden next door to me at home, whose scalp is a mass of scars.

"Have you ever had any serious injuries?" I asked.
"No," he replied.
"And have you ever been in the hospital for anything?" I continued.
"Yes, four times."
"What for?"
"Broken skull."

I should explain in parenthesis that the tattooed classes of England do not consider fractures of the skull to be serious injuries, even when they result in operations, steel plates inserted into the remainder of the skull, and prolonged sojourns in the hospital. It is difficult for them to conceive of everyday occurrences as being serious: for example, one patient had his skull staved in with a baseball bat but said of the incident that "it was just a usual neighborly row," and therefore nothing for the police or doctors to get too worried about.

Read the rest, for it is equally exceptional.

The Digital Bits has an extensive review of the new DVD release of Batman Begins. I originally reviewed the film on my main blog, in a lengthy post in June, when Batman Begins was one of the few hits at the summer box office, along with Star Wars: Episode Three: Revenge of the Colon:

Saw an afternoon showing of Batman Begins on Sunday. Short synopsis: as a fan of Batman ever since I was a kid, all I can say is that this is the film they should have made all along.

Well of course, that's not all I can say. Long, uber-geeky synopsis? I thought the pacing was just a tad slack, and the last act rather formulaic. (The heavy attempts to poison Gotham's water supply. Wasn't that the last act of the first Batman, with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson?) Batman slugs it out with said heavy on Gotham's "L", just as Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus fought on Manhattan's "L" last year. (But Manhattan doesn't have...I know, I know. Don't blame me, blame Sam Raimi.)

But of course it's going to be formulaic. Heck, Batman itself is pretty formulaic: we know Batman's core backstory pretty darn well by now: millionaire parents murdered, gunned down in front of a theater with young Bruce Wayne watching. Bruce decides to use the symbol of a bat to strike fear into the hearts of criminals. (Besides, Rabbitman or Grasshopperman would have been too silly.) Faithful family butler Alfred willing to assist. Discovers cave under mansion, decides to build crime laboratory there. Arms himself with more gadgets than James Bond. Gotham's underworld is never the same.

Like a bag of Tinkertoy parts, the trick of course, is assembling those elements in unique ways. Christopher Nolan begins his take on Batman by cross-cutting between Bruce as a child, and Bruce as an adult in the Himalayas, where's he's undergoing training vaguely reminiscent of David Carradine's mystical flashbacks in Kung Fu, but with extra added black-clad Ninjas for additional danger and mayhem, and an ultimately well-cast Liam Neeson as his mysterous mentor.

In the comics, Bruce's father was always a successful doctor, but here, he's a zillionaire philanthropist who's inherited his wealth, and both using it to help Gotham during "The Depression", and also working as a doctor on the side, as another way to do good. Based on Bruce's Age and when his father was gunned down, The Depression would have been around the Carter years. Or maybe the Ford years, prompting that famous New York Post headline, "FORD TO GOTHAM: DROP DEAD".

To help the citizens of Gotham, Bruce's dad has built a spectacular overhead monorail, which makes Seattle's or Disney World's look like an HO-scale toy. In the flashbacks, it's pristine, shiny and brand new, but these days, it looks like the 1974-era New York Subway, with cars covered inside and out with graffiti.

Fortunately, Bruce returns from the Himalayas, finds Morgan Freeman working in the basement of Wayne Enterprises, hires him to play the same role that "Q" plays in the James Bond movies, and is off to clean up the streets of Gotham--which look remarkably like the streets of Chicago, since that's where much of the film's urban landscape was shot. (I'm pretty sure I recognized One Illinois Center at 111 Whacker Drive, one of Mies van der Rohe's last office buildings. Gotham's homeless are apparently living under it.)

Rather than Pat Hingle or Neil Hamilton's distinguished and graying veteran police Commissioner Gordon, Batman's aided by young police detective James Gordon, played in remarkably subdued fashion by a mustachioed Gary Oldman, who really does look like a younger version of the comic books' Commissioner Gordon.

He's also aided by Michael Caine's as Alfred, doesn't look much like the comic books' balding 40- or 50-something Alfred, but who does look exactly the same age in the flashbacks with the young Bruce Wayne and his parents as he does in the present, but we're not supposed to notice that. But then, lots of people age very differently in the comics and the movies than they do in real life: Batman has been 35 for nearly 70 years, and James Bond has been 40 for almost 45 years, right?

Besides the film's occasionally languid pacing, if there's a weak link to Batman Begins, it's Katie Holmes as a crusading assistant district attorney: when you make Angie Harmon's Law & Order character more believable as a D.A., you know you're in trouble. Holmes was the one actor in Batman Begins who I never bought.

Beyond that, this is a well cast, well conceived updating of the Batman legend, and at a bare minimum, it's a great popcorn movie. My wife, whose idea of Batman is Adam West and Michael Keaton, loved it. And needless to say, so did I. And to bring this post full circle, when I was a kid, whether it was Adam West's campy Batman, or the darker, tougher Batman of the early 1970s, Batman was my superhero.

It took a long time, but Hollywood finally got him right.

Hopefully they won't blow it again too badly when the next round of sequels begin.

One of the funniest parodies of David Frost was written by his former writers, who later became Monty Python's Flying Circus, and dubbed their spoof of his show "Timmy Williams' Coffee Time".

But as usual with Muggeridge's Law, there's no way any satirist can improve on this: "David Frost joins al-Jazeera TV".

(What? The BBC wasn't anti-Israel enough for him? Maybe Frost was just peeved over never having received an invite to join Pajamas Media...)

Flashback: "Al Jazeera: 'Fair,' 'Balanced,' and Bought:
It turns out that the Arab TV network was on Saddam's payroll. Surprise!" by Stephen F. Hayes.

In addition to the bomb that was actually detonated outside the Oklahoma Sooners game on Saturday, there have numerous bomb threats over the past couple of days, including one at New York's Penn Station.

Isreally Cool and LaShawn Barber are the latest featured profiles on the Pajamas Media homepage.

One of the better recent long posts I've written (if I do say so myself...) was August's "The Life And Death Of England's Cities", which used a pair of brilliant essays by British physician/journalist Theodore Dalrymple on the perils of modern architecture as its launching point.

At the time, it was included in one of Willism's periodic "Carnival of the Classiness" Blogosphere round-ups. And it's gotten a new lease on life, via links from one of Dalrymple's chief American publishers, City Journal, which link to it on their home page, and also from The Brothers Judd, who recently included it on their fine blog.

Don't miss James Bowman's review of George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, his standard Hollywood issue look at Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy:

One line of Murrow’s attack on McCarthy stands out for a Truth that is more, one hopes, than mere advertising hype. It is that “mature Americans can engage in the clash of ideas without being contaminated.”

That may have been true in the 1950s. But a movie like this one, which feels it necessary to protect us from any genuine controversy, suggests that it is so no longer.

Jack Shafer's two-part Slate essay, "Edward R. Movie: Good Night and Good Luck and bad history", is also well worth a read.

Blogger Fistful of Fortnights (with sultry Varga Girl artwork at the top of her blog) explains that Gov. Schwarzenegger is cutting back on the privileges of California's felons. And frankly, we're quite happy about it:

"California taxpayers will no longer help pay the cost of impotency drugs for registered sex offenders under legislation signed Tuesday by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger."

Sounds good to me. As FoF writes, "providing free Viagra to sex offenders is akin to handing the keys to a convicted bank robber for a three-hour joy ride."

Sallie Baliunas writes that Intelligent Design theories are "antithetical to science".

But Douglas Kern says the future belongs to to discussing ID in the classrooms, and has some pretty interesting reasons as to why.

On Saturday, when news of this decade's Oklahoma bomber (there's an ominous pair of words, huh?) first broke, I wrote, "I'll be very interested to hear the outcome of the investigation". The Jawa Report's Dr. Rusty Shackleford assembles some of the first details released, and wonders (probably rhetorically) where the legacy media is on this story.

Elsewhere, one of the good doctor's esteemed colleagues ponders the question:

What Happened to Men?

Has the kinder, gentler world started taking over mainstream manliness? Are metrosexuals the new de facto standard in what men are supposed to be? I ask for numerous reasons but let me start off by saying I sure am glad I have a daughter and not a son. Why?

Reason #1: It's not okay to wear pink, son.

Pink is for girls, son. Just because a few of your friends are wearing pink (or any color with a semblance of pink) doesn't make it okay. Just because your girlfriend thinks you look manly in pink doesn't make it right for you to wear.

I point out this pink fashion trend mainly because of a shopping experience yesterday. My wife, daughter, and I were at some outlet mall here in Ohio and were searching for winter clothes for me (the daughter got squared away; don't worry). We walked into a Polo Ralph Lauren store after we walked out of the Tommy Hilfiger store and I was absolutely stunned. Polo had pink everything; from sweaters to shirts to pants if it could be made pink it was pink. There was more pink in the man's clothing store than there was in the Limited Too we had been in an hour earlier. It was simply disturbing. It shows a trend in today's society that if thought through can be traced back a long way.

To Brooks Brothers catalogs 50 years ago?

It gets even worse though: I know really far gone guys who wear pink shirts...with contrasting club collars--and even (so it's rumored) French cuffs.

Now that's disturbing.

Doth it is proclaimed (err, by me at least): no man should be allowed to say "shut up" as the defense for his worldview--or heck, be allowed to say "shut up" at all, unless his name is Richard Wayne Penniman, and he's also capable of writing as brilliant a line as "Wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lom-bam-boom".

Last week, we noted that Congressman Charlie Rangel's (D-NY) advanced case of Bush Derangement Sydrome had gotten the better of him in recent speeches. Kudos to the liberal New Republic for calling him on it:

Last Thursday, at a New York town-hall meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus, Representative Charles Rangel took the stage vacated minutes earlier by Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and declared, "George Bush is our Bull Connor." This comment is preposterous enough on its own--Bull Connor, the Birmingham police chief who turned hoses and dogs on civil rights marchers in 1963 and became a symbol of Southern racism, would never have had a black secretary of state. To equate Bush's faltering attitude toward blacks during Katrina with Connor's brazen, unrelenting bigotry is an insult to those activists who endured Connor's persecutions. But, incredibly, instead of repudiating Rangel, various black leaders have opined that his comparison is insulting--to Bull Connor. "I think that's an insult to Connor," New York City Councilman Charles Barron told The New York Sun. "What [Bush] did in New Orleans [is] worse than what Bull Connor did in his entire career as a racist in the South." Others agreed, dragging the conversation down to breathtaking lows: Al Sharpton remarked, "We've gone from fire hoses to levees," and Representative Major Owens pointed out that "Bull Connor didn't even pretend that he cared about African Americans. You have to give it to George Bush for being even more diabolical."

There is a rich and horrible irony here: Martin Luther King Jr. once said of Bull Connor that he "didn't know history." But today it is Rangel and his defenders--who lay claim to the mantle of the civil rights movement--who don't know history. Or, rather, they believe bad history makes for good politics. It doesn't. It makes for demagoguery. King would have known the difference.

(Via Cassandra of Villainous Company.)

The next time you pop a DVD into your player and ogle at all of the bonus features and interactive menus, give some thought to where those features came from.

In 1980, Bob Stein was supporting himself as a waiter but he dreamed of being at the forefront of a technology revolution. Visits to the public library turned up articles on a new technology called the optical videodisc (soon to be known as the laserdisc). "I read until I got interested in something. And I got interested in this," Stein says.

Four years later, Stein bought the laserdisc rights to two classic films -- "Citizen Kane" and "King Kong" -- and hooked up with Janus Films, a distributor of classic and offbeat films, with the hope of releasing Janus' content on laserdisc.

Naming their nascent venture after a NASA deep-space probe, Stein and his Janus partners formed the Voyager Company to distribute interactive laserdiscs. The new company dubbed its classic films division the Criterion Collection.

Pushing the Technology Envelope

For Stein, the laserdisc had several elements that at the time were rarely taken advantage of by mainstream Hollywood studios. First, its original CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) format could display 24 frames a second, meaning that a film could be stopped and each frame individually examined. Second, because laserdiscs originally had a stereo analog audio track, and later, a stereo digital audio track in addition to the analog track, there were multiple audio tracks available on the disc. Those analog tracks could hold an optional audio commentary or two. And finally, the laserdiscs could be chapter-encoded, making it possible to click to certain spots before, during or after a movie. (At the time, most mainstream films on laserdisc didn't bother with chapter encoding.)

Unlike today's DVDs, in the mid-1980s letterboxed films were a rarity, but Criterion pushed letterbox into the mainstream by becoming the first company to fully commit to the format. And it did this in spite of being flooded by letters from viewers, who wrote: "I think my disc is defective. I can only see a third of the picture!"

Criterion Helps DVD Hit the Ground Running

Thanks to Stein's efforts, the laserdisc had a new lease on life as a vehicle for film buffs and scholars who could study films in a format close to original celluloid. In fact, Criterion emerged as a better format because of ancillary features such as trailers, documentaries, still photos, audio commentaries, and anything else Criterion could include.

Douglas Pratt, who began writing The laserdisc Newsletter (now The DVD-laserdisc Newsletter) in the mid-1980s, told me that in 1997: "When DVDs enabled interactive home video to reach the mass market, all of the home video companies were able to hit the ground running, using what they had initially learned from Criterion. The home video companies themselves are filled with people who like movies and are attracted to collector's editions, and there is a certain amount of vanity appeal for the filmmakers that encourages them to participate in creating the programming. When aspects of it caught on with the mass market -- particularly the inclusion of deleted scenes -- it helped to define home video as being the true end-product of the production of a motion picture."

By creating discs that contained both the movies and related interactive elements, Criterion had answered the question: "Why should I buy a laserdisc player? It can't record!"

And in so doing, Criterion paved the way for that DVD player in your den.

(From my February 2004 Electronic House newsletter.)

Yesterday, I rather cheekily titled a post, "A History Of Nihilism", riffing on Mark Steyn's review of David Cronenberg’s new movie, "A History of Violence". In a post titled, "Terrorists: nihilists and/or mass murderers?", Neo-neocon comes far closer to actually delivering on what my title promised.

In other words, don't miss it.

In 1981, Janet Cooke was a Washington Post reporter who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning story of an eight year old heroin addict. She was eventually forced to return the prize, when when it was discovered that Cooke cooked the books and invented Jimmy out of whole cloth. (Walter Duranty's Pulitizer is still on the books, incidentally.)

Asked about Cooke in an interview, new journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe replied:

It reminded me of when I first went to work on the New York Herald Tribune and they were still laughing over the ship-of-sin scandal from prohibition days. An informant had told the Herald Tribune that there was a ship of sin operating outside of a three-mile limit off of eastern Long Island. On board you could get liquor and dope and sex. So the Tribune sent a reporter out. He didn't find the ship, but he did find a saloon in Montauk, and he phoned in about five days' worth of the most lurid stories in the history of drunk newspapermen. Half of New York City gasped and the other half rushed out to eastern Long Island to rent motor launches, until it was discovered he had made up the whole thing. These things happen about every three or four years; some reporter gets caught piping a story out of his skull...Phony stories are going to be written every once in a while, so long as you give reporters the trust that you have to give them.

Especially when you send them down to New Orleans to report on the aftermath of a hurricane when there's a conservative president in office.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation writes, "Delaware Supreme Court Protects Anonymous Blogger--Requires Plaintiffs to Meet Strict Standard Before Unmasking Critic".

My wife, who's down in L.A. today on Pajamas-related legal business, notes that they'll be tracking cases such as this.

I haven't written anything about Harriet Miers yet, because I figured Instapundit, Polipundt, Power Line, Hugh Hewitt, and Mark Steyn had you covered. And speaking of the latter, Steyn writes today in England's Spectator pretty much how I've felt all week:

Where do I stand? To be honest, I haven’t a clue. A vacancy comes up on the Supreme Court and for a month or so every columnist is expected to be an expert on the jurisprudence of a couple of dozen legal types he’d never previously heard of. I had some chit-chat on the nominations a few weeks back with National Review’s Kate O’Beirne and the former solicitor-general (and rejected Supreme Court nominee) Robert Bork. I did my best to keep my end up. There were two Ediths being touted as nominees back in the summer — one Edith was regarded as sound, the other as wobbly — and I pretended I was on top of which one was which, though right now I have absolutely no recollection. Judge Bork knew his lawyers, obviously, but I’m not sure how many of the rest of us do. ‘I like that black woman,’ said the guy who came to change the antifreeze in my heating pipes on Tuesday. He meant Janice Rogers Brown: strong conservative, but black and female and thus less easily Borkable by the Senate Democrats. But ‘I like that black woman’ is not necessarily any less expert than most of the commentary in this field.

Even Presidents aren’t always better informed. The most bungled Supreme Court pick in recent years was Bush Snr’s: Dubya’s dad picked my fellow New Hampshirite David Souter knowing nothing about him and, ever since he joined the bench, he’s been one of the Left’s most reliable votes. If Junior’s sin is that he’s only comfortable with cronies, dad’s problem was that he was way too trusting: whatever else she may be, Harriet Miers is no Souter Two.

And ultimately, that makes her palatable enough for me, and it will be interesting to see how quickly President Bush's base responds from what Steyn calls the "Conservative Quagmiers".

The world of Whabbist terrorism is a wacky one these days: Michael Totten, Pajamas' man in Beirut, dials H for Hezbollah and finds himself in a Marx Brothers sketch.

Meanwhile, Reuters, fresh off of hiring terrorists to perform at their office parties, writes that Al Qaeda is putting help wanted ads on the Internet.

Can't they just ask Reuters to send a few stringers over?

(The following is a true story, based on the real-life misadventures of your humble narrator in July of 2004.)

One issue we rarely think about with our media rooms and home theaters is safety. In a way, that's understandable. Safety? Excuse me, we're watching movies, not sky diving. Besides, safety's for wimps. Real men don't want to think about that stuff. We'd rather put "Full Metal Jacket" into the DVD player and kick back! Look--there's Lee Ermey. "What is your major malfunction, numb-nuts??!!"

Well, yesterday, my major malfunction was to discover--the hard way--that two objects cannot occupy the same space simultaneously. Especially when they're a glass coffee table and me. Which is why safety is on my mind today after taking a nasty spill in the living room: I took a wrong turn and slipped bass-ackwards onto our glass coffee table-and managed to put a pretty healthy slice into my left calf. One demolished table, two hours at the hospital and 11 stitches later, it's certainly given me some food for thought.

First, all those medical shows I watched as a kid on TV showed their viewers nothing. "M*A*S*H"? If Hawkeye had two or three red droplets on his otherwise pristine surgical scrubs, it was a sign the Red Chinese were clobbering our boys at the front. "Emergency" was even more sanitized: Randy Mantooth's hair getting mussed was a sign that Los Angeles was experiencing armageddon.

But you know those Sunday shows that the Lifetime Channel used to show that showed real surgery? I always tried to click past them as fast as possible to get to the football game, but they're certainly true to life, as I discovered yesterday. When you can see all seven layers of skin and fat, and a little muscle as well, you know you're not in Mantooth land anymore, Toto.

Making a Home Theater Safer

If you have a family and the biggest, best, most enjoyable home theater on the block, odds are you also have all of the neighborhood kids in there every so often. This is a good thing, because at least you know where your kids are. But it also makes you a little bit of an informal block parent.

So what can be done to improve safety in the home theater? Here are some suggestions-take them for what they're worth. I'm not saying it's necessary to incorporate all of them into a media room, but an ounce of prevention is worth ten or 11 stitches-or something like that. Having a smoke detector and nearby A-B-C fire extinguisher aren't bad ideas. When one considers how much electronic equipment is typically in a media room wiring it to its own circuit, apart from the main breaker, is essential.

There are all sorts of methods to reduce the clutter of speaker wire in the room, from running wires in walls to building a platform and having the wires run underneath. But at a minimum, keep them coiled up and out of the way of running feet.

Many X10 controllers have an all-on function to activate all of the lights in the house, which can save vital seconds in an emergency. Speaking of lights, most commercial movie theaters have exit lighting always on, even when the main light dim. Incorporating a similar design into a home theater would both add to its theater-like atmosphere and increase its safety.

Keeping a first-aid kit in the house-and knowing where it's located-is always good planning as well.

Finally, if you end up ever hosting movie nights for local clubs or groups, make sure you check out your homeowners' insurance policy to make sure you're covered; or see if the group has insurance in case someone gets hurt while in your home.

Remember kids, it's all fun and games until somebody takes a coffee table out.

Resource Links

CableOrganizer.com: Cable management tips for home theater systems.

Crutchfield: Good article from the online retailers, about hiding the wires in a home theater. (Adobe Acrobat required to read.)

SmartHome.com
The popular online home automation retailer's page on home theater drape and lighting control products.

R. Lee Ermey: The star of "Full Metal Jacket" and former Marine DI's home page.

Back in the 1990s, the big buzzword in the home theater industry was "convergence," i.e. computers merging with home entertainment and home entertainment merging with computers. Nobody was really sure what was going on, but there was a lot of merging and converging that was promised for the 21st century. It would end with a "Star Trek"-style Holodeck in every basement.

Well, the 21st century is here, and convergence is becoming more of a reality every day. It's entirely possible that within a few years as much audio and video will be coming via an Ethernet cable as from a length of RG-6 coax.

Products such as DVRs by ReplayTV and TiVo are beginning to ship with Ethernet jacks to allow for the routing of recorded shows from one unit to another. The idea is that if you record a show on your TiVo in the den, you should be able to watch it on your TiVo in the bedroom. Current units are equipped with 100 Mbps network connections, but there's no doubt they'll have Gigabit (1000 Megabits per second) connections when and if there's a large enough base of home Gigabit Ethernets to make them worthwhile for their manufacturers to install.

Lots of people also have multiple PCs in the home and they're routing photos, video clips, MP3s, CD-quality Windows audio files, and other files from computer to computer. So speeding up the home LAN with Gigabit connections is something to consider.

Speed Kills, But Not Necessarily the Bank Account

Gigabit cards for PCs aren't much more expensive than 10/100 Mbps, and switches are available for a sawbuck or two, depending upon how many ports you need. If you're starting from scratch, you might as well start with the fastest speed available.

However, before you jump to Gigabit, make sure the cabling is Cat 5e, not Cat 5. In a recent interview for an upcoming article for TechLiving magazine (Electronic House's sister publication), Ian Hendler, director of business development for the integrated networks division of Leviton, told me that Gigabit gear would more than likely slow to Megabit speeds if it's run on regular Cat 5 instead of Cat 5e. Cat 6, the newest standard for commercial networks, doesn't yet have the full range of jacks and other parts for residential work. Cat 6 isn't necessary unless you're planning for the next revolution that's to come after Gigabit networks have been played out: 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

I Feel The Need, The Need For Speed

The Internet as we know it first went online in 1969. It was -- and is -- a marvel of engineering, and the fact that it can do so many things its designers never intended it to do is a testament to its flexibility. But the speed limits of the Internet's current architecture prevent it from being a method of delivering multimedia such as HDTV-quality video.

Even at the highpoint of Internet Gold Rush Fever in the late-1990s, researchers were working on building Internet2; a better, faster, stronger, waaay-more than-six-million-dollar Internet. One of the earliest tests of the Internet2 program was to send an HDTV recording across its infrastructure, which required speeds of 270 Mbps to do so. And although this has been done on limited experimental levels, Internet2's speeds are not here yet.

But even before they arrive, the next revolution in networking is already on the drafting boards: 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

(Originally an August 2004 newsletter to Electronic House subscribers.)

Audrey Hepburn: Do you know what's wrong with you?
Cary Grant: No, what?
Audrey Hepburn: Nothing!
--From Charade, 1963

From the late 1930s to the mid-1960s, Cary Grant had the face that was the very definition of Movie Star Handsome; his voice the definition of suave sophistication.

Two new DVD releases, one a box set (whose titles are also available individually) show the man in his prime, and at the end of his career, which concluded at in 1966 at age 62, when he was afraid he was past his prime as a matinee star. (These days of course, Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood and Sean Connery continue to be superstars in their sixties and seventies.)

Warner Brothers' recent box set, The Cary Grant Signature Collection, contains several of Grant's films from World War II and the immediate post-war years. (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Destination Tokyo, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, My Favorite Wife, and Night and Day are included in the set.) These aren't necessarily Grant's best films, but he brings something memorable to each of them.

1943's Destination Tokyo places Grant in the role of a US submarine commander whose boat is on a secret mission (guess where). In a way, the film is a bookend to Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, since one concerns Jimmy Doolittle's air raid, and the other concerns the preparation of it.

As a film, Destination Tokyo creaks--it really shows its age. The subplot has the same cast of seemingly every war film prior to Full Metal Jacket: the virgin, the grizzled veteran, the musician and the older wizened veteran for comic relief (played memorably here by Alan Hale, whose son would command his own memorable nautical journey, as captain of the SS Minnow in TV's Gilligan's Island.)

The All-American Englishman

Sean Connery has often been called Cary Grant's successor. Whenever he appears in an American production, modern Hollywood seems obliged to build some sort of back story to tell us what the heck he's doing with that accent playing a US military officer (The Presidio), the last survivor of Alcatraz (The Rock), or as a Chicago cop (The Untouchables). That last one must have seemed easy to the producers: we'll explain his Scottish burr by making him an Irish immigrant! But Connery both won the Oscar for his performance and topped a recent poll for having the worst accent in his performance, which seems oddly fair in a way.

In fascinating contrast, a running theme throughout Grant's career is that golden-era Hollywood had no reservations casting him as an American despite his thick cockney brogue, and never bothered to build a back story to explain it. He's a midwestern Navy officer in Destination Tokyo, and that theme holds true in other films in the Cary Grant collection: In Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Grant is a Madison Avenue advertising man (a profession he'd take up again in Hitchcock's great thriller North By Northwest). And in Night And Day, Grant plays Indiana-born composer Cole Porter.

Night And Day is one of the more curious films in the Warner collection: Grant plays Cole Porter in a heavily whitewashed and Hollywoodized biography. Grant sort of talk-sings, but like Fred Astaire's singing, who cares? He certainly gets bonus points for being game to try. And I love this bit, from a recent Wall Street Journal article:

Take Cary Grant. Engaged to star in the Cole Porter biopic "Night and Day," the actor soon realized the script was a stinker. And so he focused his attention on what really mattered, nearly driving the director to quit with punctilious costume demands. At one point Grant brought production to a halt, standing on his God-given right to expose exactly one-eighth of an inch of shirt cuff beyond his tuxedo sleeve, not the sloppy quarter-inch the bumpkins over in wardrobe had given him. The movie may have been a disaster, but Cary Grant looked good.

I wouldn't call the film a disaster--in fact watching it, it's a real surprise. It's certainly not the reality of Porter's life: for one thing, Monty Woolley, born in 1888, was Porter's classmate at Yale, when the two graduated in 1913. But since he's playing himself as Grant's co-star in the 1946 movie, the writers made him Porter's professor, to account for the difference in the two actors' ages. More significantly, but understandably for Hays-era Hollywood, Night And Day omits Porter's bisexuality, something a Porter biopic being released this year with Kevin Kline is planning to remedy.

The Lion In Winter

If the Warner Brothers box set shows Grant at his physical peak, Criterion's recent re-release of 1963's Charade (now with a snazzy 16X9 anamorphic picture) shows the lion in winter. Grant looks older and heavier than he did just three years prior in North By Northwest, his peak role. But how can you beat a film that combines Grant with Audrey Hepburn?

In a way, it's almost a post-modern movie. We're not watching a film with actors playing beleaguered American citizens trapped in a dark conspiring Paris. At every point in the film, we're aware that we're watching Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn as superstar actors clearly enjoying starring in a film together. (And that the only way that the dialogue at the beginning of this post works: at the point in the film she says it, Hepburn's character doesn't know Cary Grant's character well enough to say anything like that. But it makes perfect sense coming from Audrey Hepburn to Cary Grant.)

Cary Grant retired from movies after 1966's Walk, Don't Run. He passed away at age 82 in 1986. But he can live on-both in his prime and his final performances--thanks to your DVD player and home theater.

(Originally posted July, 2004 at Blogcritics.org.)

James Lileks touches upon the issue that continues to divide us all:

Here’s a link to a rather amazing commercial – you just wish it did something else than suggest that the entire purpose of life is to drink beer. The entire purpose of life is to drink whiskey.

Nonsense. It is to drink gin.

It was really nice of Hollywood producer Michael Mann to invent the 1980s, wasn’t it? In 1984, he took the 60-minute TV crime drama, which up until then had been populated by middle-aged men who came from the Jack Webb school of Brylcreemed grooming and bought their clothes at Buddy Ebsen’s house of inflammable polyester, and completely revamped the genre.

In their place were cops whose cover allowed them to appear as cool the underworld they investigated—if not cooler. “Miami Vice” didn’t actually pioneer the idea that men could wear t-shirts under their suits—rock stars had been doing just that since the days of Woodstock had ended, but the show certainly put it front and center in the American psyche.

(For better or worse, of course. Brandon Tartikoff, the late former president of NBC once publicly apologized to America for the number of pot-bellied men who sadly adopted the suit and T-shirt look of Sonny Crockett. As another fictional cop once said, “A good man’s got to know his limitations”.)

Something For Everybody

“Miami Vice” had something for everybody: its art deco-inspired visuals made for beautiful eye-candy, as did the show’s conspicuous consumption, which allowed its stars to dress and drive as millionaire drug dealers even as they stayed on the right side of the law and apprehended the bad guy every week. Well, almost every week—“Vice” was one of the first shows where the bad guys occasionally got away.

Great Sound, Slightly Rough Picture

Universal’s new DVD release of the first season of “Miami Vice” has its pluses and minuses: On the downside, the picture quality is slightly rough looking: a fair amount of grain, grit and dirt on the pilot episode, as well as an overall slightly pixilated overly digitized look. The scuttlebutt on the Internet is that Universal shot its budget on securing the music rights for all of the original music the show employed each week (another first), and had little left over to restore the discs.

But that wall-to-wall original music, and the sound overall is fantastic, as Jan Hammer’s score and the film’s MTV-era rock soundtrack is gloriously remixed in 5.1 sound. The explosions, car chases and gunfire all have added oomph, as the soundtrack routes a surprising amount of power to a home theater’s subwoofer.

The show’s music befits how it was originally conceived. The disc’s bonus features rehash the legendary story that “Vice” began with a cocktail napkin scribble from Tartikoff: “MTV Cops”, and was built up from there. Early in the process, Mann hired Jan Hammer (whom I had the pleasure to interview in 2003), a keyboardist who began his career in the 1960s with Sarah Vaughn and shortly thereafter played in the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a groundbreaking jazz-fusion group. Having gotten off the touring circuit, Hammer agreed to do the show only if he could record its soundtracks from his home recording studio in Connecticut. The result was another touch that perfectly suited the show’s era, as Jan Hammer took advantage of every aspect of the 1980s fast changing musical technology.

If the dog days of winter have you down, the prescription for beating them is simple: pop in a copy of the new “Miami Vice” DVD, put on your Wayfarer sunglasses (especially if it’s at night), and crank up the sound. Repeat dosage as needed. The eighties—and network TV in general—never looked or sounded so good.

(Originally a newsletter for subscribers to Electronic House magazine.)

While the sounds of pop music have changed radically over the past four decades, one thing remains a constant. For most commercial music, everything on a recorded track is there to support the lead vocal, whether the song is rock, pop--or heck, even postmodern crunk. Getting the best sounding vocals remains paramount when recording, whether it's in a zillion dollar L.A. studio, or your basement.

Antares Audio Technologies burst onto the scene back in the mid-1990s with their Auto-Tune program, which has been a tremendous boost to singers, both professional and amateur, and their producers. An otherwise perfect take with one or two out of tune notes could be salvaged through careful application, and the average vocalist could now concentrate his her energies on performance, knowing that minor pitch errors could be cleaned up later. (And cranked up to ten, the Auto-Tune can deliver the infamous "Cher" effect, which, like its namesake, is best heard sparingly.)

While the sounds of pop music have changed radically over the past four decades, one thing remains a constant. For most commercial music, everything on a recorded track is there to support the lead vocal, whether the song is rock, pop--or heck, even postmodern crunk. Getting the best sounding vocals remains paramount when recording, whether it's in a zillion dollar L.A. studio, or your basement.

Antares Audio Technologies burst onto the scene back in the mid-1990s with their Auto-Tune program, which has been a tremendous boost to singers, both professional and amateur, and their producers. An otherwise perfect take with one or two out of tune notes could be salvaged through careful application, and the average vocalist could now concentrate his her energies on performance, knowing that minor pitch errors could be cleaned up later. (And cranked up to ten, the Auto-Tune can deliver the infamous "Cher" effect, which, like its namesake, is best heard sparingly.)

In early September of this year, Antares released several additional voice processing plug-ins, as part of their AVOX line. Available both separately and as part of a bundled package (or "vocal toolkit"), retailing for about $500, these plug-ins are capable of a wide range of vocal processing. Combined as a suite, it's possible to do a surprisingly complete range of vocal processing with the software:

THROAT Physical Modeling Vocal Designer - a radical new vocal tool that, for the first time, lets you process a vocal through a meticulously crafted physical model of the human vocal tract.

DUO Vocal Modeling Auto-Doubler: using a simplified version of THROAT's vocal modeling, along with variations in pitch, timing and vibrato depth, DUO automatically generates a doubled vocal part from an existing vocal with unmatched ease and realism.

CHOIR Vocal Multiplier: actually turns a single voice into up to 32 distinct individual unison voices, each with its own pitch, timing and vibrato variations.

PUNCH Vocal Impact Enhancer: as its name so ably implies, PUNCH gives your vocal more dynamic impact, allowing it to cut through a dense mix with clarity and power.

SYBIL Variable Frequency De-Esser: tames vocal sibilance with a flexible compressor and a variable highpass frequency to match any vocal performance.

These plug-ins are currently available in VST and RTAS (for Pro Tools users) versions. (Hopefully Antares will add DirectX versions to the roster in the not too distant future.)

Putting AVOX To Work

When using software such as the AVOX plug-ins, it helps to do some advance planning, beginning with getting as isolated and clean a vocal as possible. The AVOX Choir patch can take a single voice and make it sound like four, eight, 16 or 32 voices. The name is slightly deceptive, in that it doesn't harmonize the voice, but it will definitely make one voice sound like many. (I suspect that combined with a sampled chorus patch from a software synthesizer like Reason, it would be relatively easy to produce a huge vocal sound.

The Punch Vocal Impact Enhancer appears to be a cross between a compressor and exciter, adding a nice sheen to help make a lead vocal pop out of a mix without necessarily raising its volume level or dramatically lowering the instruments in the mix.

Deep "Throat"

Perhaps the most intriguing component is Throat, which can perform transformations both subtle and dramatic to a recorded human voice. So let's look at this one in detail.

As I found it when experimenting with the plug-in, it's important to set the size of the program's Source Throat Precision control to tell it the degree of virtual throat "surgery" you are intending. As Throat's Read Me file recommends:

If you are intending only very subtle changes, you would typically start with this control set to "subtle" while if you were intending major changes, "extreme" might be more appropriate.

Not setting this can result in a disappointing, sort of gauzy sounding effect instead of a really effective transformation.

While the obvious use of Throat is to make someone with a high voice sound like James Earl Jones (and vice-versa), it has far more subtle uses as well. Many commercial recordings add a unique sheen to a lead vocal by having the vocalist record a whisper track, which is then mixed subliminally in the background. They also frequently rerecord the same vocalist, or have a backup vocalist double the part an octave lower, which is also then mixed low in the background. Combined, both tricks can do much to strengthen an otherwise thin-sounding voice. (Err, like mine...)

Throat allows whisper and octave-lower tracks to be generated quickly and easily from an existing vocal. So if the lead singer has already gone home, just clone his or her voice to new tracks, and then process these tracks via Throat to create instant ear-candy.

Perhaps the nearest competitor to Throat is TC-Helicon's VoiceModeler software, which is also capable of some fine sounds. (Like Throat, it can make me sound like Orson Welles, Sammy Davis Jr., or Mickey Mouse, depending upon the effect I dial up.) But VoiceModeler runs on TC's PowerCore module, which requires a separate hardware-based component for the PC, attached externally via a FireWire cable, or installed internally as a computer card. The cost for the VoiceModeler software and a PowerCore can combine to easily run over $1000. And while PowerCore can run a variety of applications beyond VoiceModeler, similar versions of many of those applications, can now be found as internally driven plug-ins requiring no additional hardware. (Such as Antares' Throat.)

First impressions? AVOX is a comprehensive and easy to use suite of products that allows anyone with a PC-recording studio to fine tune a recording's vocals. And it's a handy suite for someone producing demos for his garage or basement band, a video soundtrack, or a commercial jingle--all the way up to the professional producer who installs it on his Pro Tools rig--right alongside the original Antares Auto-Tune.

(Originally posted at Blogcritics.org.)

While Hollywood's present and immediate future output looks grim (to say the least), an exception to the rule might be Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong, if his exceptional Lord of the Rings movies are any guide. It's due out on December 14th.

But even better, the original--and safe to say, still best-- King Kong from 1933 will be coming to DVD in November, according to The Digital Bits:

There's some big news today. The Hollywood Reporter has posted a feature story on Warner's new 2-disc King Kong DVD (yes, that's the classic 1933 Kong), which is at long last expected to street on 11/22. Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is helping to produce extras for the forthcoming edition, even as he works on his own theatrical remake. Specifically, Jackson is working on a new 2-hour/7-part documentary, RKO Production 601: The Making of Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World, that will be included on the set. Among other things, the documentary will include a segment on the infamous "spider pit" deleted scene (including a recreation of the lost footage). Other extras on the Kong release will include a documentary on director Merian C. Cooper, trailers for other films by Cooper, and audio commentary by legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, actress Terry Moore and special effects guru Ken Ralston. Warner's King Kong will be available in no less than THREE versions - a 2-disc special edition, a 2-disc collector's edition packaged in (according to the story) "a collectable tin and including a 20-page reproduction of the original souvenir program, postcard reproductions of the original one sheets, and a mail-in offer for a reproduction of a vintage 27-by-41-inch movie poster", and finally a 4-disc collector's box set which includes the 2-disc King Kong DVD along with The Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young. Each version will contain the same two Kong discs (just the packaging and the "in the box" extras differ). All I can say is it's about damn time. Very cool news indeed.

Indeed.

RKO's lifespan was a troubled one, but the studio certainly had its moments. A few years back, we looked at an even more fabled RKO production, from 1941.

On Friday, Walter Cronkite channeled a variation on Peter Jennings' infamous "temper tantrum" line from election night 1994 to Larry King. Or maybe it's a reissue of Jimmy Carter's malaise speech. In any case, Uncle Water is none-too-happy with the American people at the moment:

We're an ignorant nation right now. We're not really capable I do not think the majority of our people of making the decisions that have to be made at election time and particularly in the selection of their legislatures and their Congress and the presidency of course.

Of course.

"We're an ignorant nation right now", he says, because the majority of voters didn't see eye-to-CBS eye with the mainstream media's candidate. If in 2008 they do, then we won't be as ignorant. Until 2012, or 2016.

But if "the majority of our people making the decisions that have to be made at election time" are "not really capable", who's fault is that? Doesn't Cronkite and CBS play some role in this state of affairs? Given that his network and its two large competitors with exactly the same ideological worldview dominated the mediascape of this country for half a century, Walter could have said much the same thing after Novembers in 1968, 1972, 1980 and in 1984.

But he probably wouldn't have. As I've written before, the combination of Fox News and the right half of the Blogosphere has been liberating to many older media types, who are far more willing to discuss their biases--and in Walter's case, his contempt.

And if "The Most Trusted Man In America", as he was once known, wants to say that he doesn't trust his former viewers, well, who are we to stop him?

(Via Mike Austin.)

In a single essay, Mark Steyn pairs reviews of two new movies, each from high-profile directors: John Singleton's Four Brothers and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. Regarding the latter picture, Steyn writes:

A History of Violence is set in a neighbouring state but a world away, small-town Indiana, one of those sleepy burgs in the middle of nowhere with no reason to stop except you like the look of the diner and there won’t be another one for an hour. This diner is run by Tom (Viggo Mortensen), a likable fellow, nice family, popular in town. Near the close of business, two mean sonsofbitches wander in for a stick-up. Tom has to make an instant judgment and he judges this: that these bastards aren’t planning on leaving any witnesses. They’re threatening his waitress, they’re gonna kill her, and then him. So he brings the pot of steaming coffee down on the face of one of the punks, leaps the counter, grabs his gun and blows the other away.

As with the opening of Four Brothers, it’s a very expertly filmed scene. You’re not just admiring the choreography, you feel the rush, the psychological propulsion that gets him over the counter and to his gun. Taking out the bad guys makes Tom even more popular in town. He’s in the papers and on the TV news. The gal reporter wants to know about the killer pointing his rod: ‘How did it feel?’ ‘Not very good,’ says Tom. She turns to the camera to wrap up: ‘An American hero and a man of few words’ — and then says to her producer, ‘I guess that’s all we’re gonna get.’

But that’s not quite all. With his face plastered all over the front pages, three more hoods show up in town to see Tom — except they call him ‘Joey’. Because they knew him long ago, before he became the nice guy in the one-horse hicksville.

That’s a familiar set-up, too — the fellow reinventing himself off the beaten track until some dark secret wells up from Out of the Past, to quote a Robert Mitchum variation on the theme. Compared to the matter-of-fact title of Four Brothers, David Cronenberg positively brags about the multiple burdens he’s placing on A History of Violence. He means it first as the cliché routinely applied to two-bit hoods: ‘So-and-so had a history of violence, police said yesterday as they sifted through the crime scene...’ But, Cronenberg being Cronenberg, he also wants to give us a real history of violence, or at least a meditation on its roots and America’s propensity for it.

Yawn. I can feel myself dozing off even as I type. Cronenberg’s is a very ahistorical history of violence. He means ‘violence’ not as the word was understood up to, oh, 40 years ago, but in the latter-day leftist sense of any use of force by one person upon another. You know the phrase, uttered by terrorist apologists every few days: ‘We condemn the violence on all sides.’ Also: ‘We need to end the cycle of violence.’ It’s all ‘violence’: if Fred Smith sticks up a liquor store, that’s violent; if his brother Ted Smith joins the marines and invades Iraq, that’s violent, too. And violence only leads to more violence, just as the brutalised child will only go on to brutalise someone else. Cronenberg seems to think he’s the only fellow ever to have had this great insight, and so, parallel to the question of whether Tom’s ‘heroism’ is simply some visceral retreat to the seductive violence of Joey’s murky past, the director gives us portent-heavy scenes between father and son. The taint of violence is seeded in the next generation, with predictable consequences.

Oh, phooey. I live in a part of the world with an enormously high rate of gun ownership and no crime — mainly because you try to pull anything in my corner of New Hampshire and practically every guy, and half the women too, would respond like Tom, and think nothing of it. Cronenberg is Canadian, and in small towns north of the 49th parallel you’ll find many men who’ve committed ‘violence’ as the director defines it: they’re called veterans, and 60 years ago on beaches and in jungles they killed other men, as their fathers and grandfathers did before them. Lacking any interest in the ‘history’ of violence, Cronenberg is a prisoner of his own time, trapped in a tedious and dated reductio of his theme. What a pity. Both these films are so technically accomplished, so skilfully wrought, but the insularity of their world view in the end gives them nothing to say.

There's a lot of that going around Hollywood these days. Meanwhile, Orrin Judd looks at an upcoming film which might be a rare break in this seemingly unending showbiz cycle. Its trailer was certainly well-received by its target audience this past summer.

Michelle Malkin reviews the latest in homicide chic French fashions. A little grungy, a little too Chav for my tastes--but then I doubt I'm in the target market for the explosive growth in these killer designs...

At the height of the Ra^therGate scandal last fall, I wrote:

One thing that [Dan] Rather has in common with both Walter Cronkite, and Ted Baxter, another (albeit fictional) ex-CBS employee, is the belief that as a newsman, if he doesn't appear omniscient, he can't succeed. Imagine any blogger saying, "And that's the way it is", as Uncle Walter did every night and expecting his readers to trust him solely based on his word, without the reader following the links and doing his own digging.

No wonder Fox, with its "We report, you decide" motto, and the Blogosphere, with its "we link, you decide" --and probably start your own blog to tell us why if we're wrong [creed]--are pummeling CBS into the ground.

In the latest Pajamas Media profile, Dean Esmay says:

The internet and blogs show us there is a great deal more intelligence, knowledge and perspective among common everyday people than was ever suspected. There are bloggers who make me look like an idiot, but they make me smarter too. And they learn from me. It’s a synergy you cannot get in normal journalism, and this project is a way of exposing more people to that synergy.

For example, The Jawa Report is run by a political scientist. Is he the most brilliant political scientist in the world? Not the most, but he offers a lot. He can educate, yet also learn from, his readers -- and do it in a way not possible before. And Glenn Reynolds is a good law professor, yet he will tell you he has learned from readers and legal bloggers because the channels of communication are open. What we are doing here will open opportunities to explore a universe of ideas that used to be tucked away in editorial pages and obscure corners of academia.

I'll happily take a dialogue over top-down omniscience, the appearance of which almost always hides the emperor's lack of wardrobe--and assumes his audience would rather be spoon-fed than make up their own minds on an issue.

Update: Speaking of Ra^therGate...

Tech Central Station continues its thorough job in analyzing Katrina and its aftermath. Click on over to read their coverage.

On Tuesday, I linked to several new media critiques of its predecessor's failures in covering the real news of Katrina. Matt Welch has a must-read interview with a public affairs officer for the Louisiana National Guard, who was at the Superdome for eight days, during the height of the period that the media portrayed in such lurid terms. He says. "There's a whole bunch of [laughs] stuff out there that never happened at the Dome, as I think America's beginning to find out slowly".

Welch begins his piece by writing:

We are now into Week Two of elite news organizations' re-evaluation of the New Orleans horror stories they helped transmit to the world in the first seven days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. It was known already by September 6 that tales of evacuee ultra-violence in refugee centers like Baton Rouge and Houston were both false and strikingly similar to one another, but it took much longer to begin clearing the muck from the Big Easy.

I wonder which version history will ultimately remember--the media's Weekly World News-style first draft, or what actually happened. Sadly, something tells me it will be the former.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Well, out of Germany at least. Last year, President Bush discussed closing bases in Europe. Today, UPI reports that the last planes have take off from at least one U.S. Air Force base in Germany:

The last planes have taken off from the Rhein-Main Base in Frankfurt as the U.S. Air Force prepares for the official closing.

The base opened next to Frankfurt's airport immediately after World War II. Officials say that the combination of the need for expensive repairs, Frankfurt's plans to expand its airport and the downsizing of U.S. operations in Europe made its closing inevitable.

Deutsche Welle reports that the base was part of a lot of history. In 1948, it was the main staging area for the Berlin Airlift, when U.S. planes supplied the city for 11 months. A few years later, a young GI named Elvis Presley landed there to begin a tour of duty in West Germany.

Locals also say that the base helped make the Frankfurt area "cool" by introducing residents to jazz and hamburgers.

"The base was part of Frankfurt life for 60 years, and that's reflected in the close ties between the city and the U.S.," Frankfurt Mayor Petra Roth said.

Closing ceremonies are scheduled later this month, although the base officially remains U.S. military property through Dec. 31.

So much of Old Europe's enormous welfare state (and its painful drag on Europe's economy) hinges on their lack of need for military defense over the last 50 years. It will be interesting to see how that changes, now that, as Frank Martin put it last year, "Ich Bin Ein Outta Here" (beginning the process, at least).

Today, on the Jewish new year (Happy Shana tova, by the way!), Richard Brookhiser has a timely piece in the New York Observer, titled, "American Jews Unprepared For Attacks From the Left". It ties together some of themes we've discussed here over the past few years:

Read More »

Glenn Reynolds links to this piece by self-described postmodernist new media consultant Terry Heaton and quotes this passage:

[Demographer Hazel Reinhardt] pulls no punches in describing her "Perfect Storm."

What does the future hold? Change. The status quo can't be the way forward, for the coming together of profound demographic and technological changes will restructure the media, and we are at the beginning of it. This will be geometrically larger than the advent of television in 1950.

The extent to which the public - in the form of citizens media - can undercut the revenue bases of professional journalism will determine how well institutional media will withstand the onslaught. Since media revenue is audience-driven, however, this is one institution that's headed for the tar pits, because - at core - the advertising industry doesn't really care about things like tradition and history. Where that wealth gets redistributed in the economy is anybody's guess, and that's why the entry of Venture Capitalists into the citizens media game is so significant.

Near the end of his article, Heaton writes:

As Ms. Reinhardt noted, no one can really stop the perfect storm. That's why it's important for mid-career journalists to get their hands dirty in using the technology of the personal media revolution instead of thinking about how and where to learn about it. Become a "doer" of the word instead of a "hearer" only. Learning is always accelerated by experience, so those who feel their careers slipping away need to get involved. Start a blog. Build a Web page. Pick up a camera. Play a video game. Get close to young people who are comfortable using technology, and ask questions. Read a book, or better yet, go online and look around for tutorials. They're everywhere. Most of all, don't let fear get in the way. It's only technology. DO something!

I concur; here's some background reading to help kick things off:

"The New, New Journalism": From the late, lamented SpinTech Website, my February 2002 look at Weblogs immediately after 9/11.

"The Year Of Blogging Dangerously", the top ten moments in the Blogosphere in 2004.

My interview with Hugh Hewitt on his early 2005 book, "Blog", and his take on Weblogs.

My discussion of Chris Anderson of Wired magazine's concept of "The Long Tail of the Internet", and how its impacting culture in general. The role of Weblogs are included. (This is a great piece, if I do say so myself...)

That should get you started!

Michael Totten appears, in my opinion in the best photo of all of the Pajamas Media profiles thus far. Reminiscent of Lawrence overlooking production designer John Box's recreation of Aqaba, Totten appears, frame left, in a perfectly composed photograph taken in Beirut, where he's currently living and blogging.

In other words, be sure to check out Michael J. Totten's Middle East Journal.

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes that the death toll in Louisiana is now "More or less" complete:

Authorities have completed the search for bodies in New Orleans, with the total known dead in all of Louisiana at 964. This compares, of course, to the claim that there were 10,000 killed in New Orleans alone, which was made by the city's mayor and repeated endlessly in the media.

I still don't see any sign of a meaningful self-examination by the media of its failed reporting of Hurricane Katrina.

And there won't be one from the legacy media. But fortunately, in its successor, Hugh Hewitt, Mark Steyn and James Bowman have that covered.

Hugh had perhaps the most damning quote in his appearance on PBS's News Hour, something that should give big media pause, but perhaps it's too sclerotic in its aged form to notice:

Well, [Keith Woods, dean of the faculty at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in Florida] just said they did not report an ordinary story; in fact they were reporting lies. The central part of this story, what went on at the convention center and the Superdome was wrong. American media threw everything they had at this story, all the bureaus, all the networks, all the newspapers, everything went to New Orleans, and yet they could not get inside the convention center, they could not get inside the Superdome to dispel the lurid, the hysterical, the salaciousness of the reporting.

I have in mind especially the throat-slashed seven-year-old girl who had been gang-raped at the convention center -- didn't happen. In fact, there were no rapes at the convention center or the Superdome that have yet been corroborated in any way.

There weren't stacks of bodies in the freezer. But America was riveted by this reporting, wholesale collapse of the media's own levees they let in all the rumors, and all the innuendo, all the first-person story because they were caught up in their own emotionalism. Exactly what Keith was praising I think led to one of the worst weeks of reporting in the history of American media, and it raises this question: If all of that amount of resources was given over to this story and they got it wrong, how can we trust American media in a place far away like Iraq where they don't speak the language, where there is an insurgency, and I think the question comes back we really can't.

Indeed, to use the successor media's most popular adverb.

We've already had Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft sucking up to communist China this year; now it's Google's turn, according to Reuters (which has its own peculiar love of totalitarians, at least in the Middle East):

Taiwan's government has asked Web search company Google Inc. to stop calling the self-ruled island a "province of China" on its Google Maps service, the foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

China views Taiwan as a breakaway province and has threatened to attack the island of 23 million people if it pushes for formal statehood. The two split in a civil war ended in 1949.

Taiwan maintains it is a sovereign, independent state that is officially called the Republic of China.

"It is incorrect to call Taiwan a province of China because we are not," foreign ministry spokesman Michel Lu said. "We have contacted Google to express our position and asked them to correct the description."

The foreign ministry has not received a response from Google.

The small pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union has urged the public to write a protest email to Google, demanding the search engine describe Taiwan as "an independent state in Asia."

Half the cars in Google's parking lots probably have the ubiquitous Silicon Valley "FREE TIBET!!" bumper stickers. Too bad that Google's current ozone layer of management doesn't seem to want to symbolically free Taiwan.

James D. Miller uses Bill Bennett's abortion kerfuffle last week to explore what is arguably the biggest cultural divide in the country--Feelers versus Thinkers:

Bennett said "If you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." But Bennett then immediately added that doing so would be "an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do." No thinking person listening to Bennett would believe that he ever advocated aborting black babies.

But Bennett's abortion remarks did conjure a horrible image of the mass killing of unborn black children. Feelers, those who believe emotional reaction should trump all else, naturally were horrified at Bennett's comment. A feeler would find this image very painful to bear. A feeler, therefore, might feel that Bennett would have presented listeners with such a word-picture only if he himself was not bothered by the idea of killing black babies. Thinkers, however, have been defending Bennett because they believe that intellectual rigor often requires deliberately confronting painful images to get at truth.

Besides attacking Bennett, feelers have also gone after Larry Summers, Bill Maher and John Roberts. Harvard President Larry Summers recently suggested that researchers should look into whether genetics could explain why there are so few women scientists. Feelers immediately condemned him. Summers suggested something intensely painful for some feminists to hear. His feeler critics assumed that he would put them though such an emotional ordeal only if he hated them. For feelers Summers' comments were so horrible in part because deep down these feminists probably think there might be a genetic cause for the dearth of female scientists.

Bill Maher, the former host of Politically Incorrect, got in trouble with feelers when he said that the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards. A thinker would have to concede that those who deliberately give their lives for a cause, regardless of how horrid the cause, don't fit the conventional definition of cowards. A feeler, however, would violently reject associating any positive qualities, including bravery, with the 9/11 hijackers. A feeler would believe that Maher would have done this only if he sympathized with the terrorists.

Dianne Feinstein recently made herself the Queen of Feelers when the senator announced she was voting against John Roberts because he wouldn't answer questions as a son, husband and father but just as a dispassionate lawyer. She objected that Roberts gave only "very detached response[s]." Senator Feinstein clearly believes only feelers are qualified for our Supreme Court.

Schools, with their focus on raising students' self-esteem, are doing everything possible to raise our children as feelers. U.S. students do horribly on international math tests but get top marks in mathematical self-esteem. Anything that makes a person or group feel bad is considered a sin by the educational establishment. One educationist even frets over "the damage done to [students'] self-esteem by the dominant culture's fetish about reading and writing." Another consequence of the triumph of educational feelers is the prevalence of speech codes at many colleges which are designed to prevent favored groups from having their feelings hurt.

All of which limits language on campus, and everyone's ability to have "a national conversation", as former President Clinton might say, on any issue.

Well, in many respects, at least. (And allow me to apologize in advance for any Carly Simon flashbacks the above title causes.) Glenn Reynolds links to this post on Slashdot:

Rewind your brain 15 years and imagine what you'd think if I told you:
Your computer will be roughly 1,000 faster than what you're using today. You will probably have more than 4,000 times the memory, and a fast hard drive that stores over 100,000 times as much as that floppy you're using. You can buy these supercomputers for less than $500 at Wal-Mart.

That computer will be hooked into a self-directed network that was designed by the Department of Defense and various universities - along with nearly 400,000,000 other machines. Your connection to this network will be 10,000 times faster than the 300 baud modem you're using. In fact, it will be fast enough to download high-quality sound and video files in better than realtime.

There will be a good chance that your computer's operating system will have been written by a global team of volunteers, some of them paid by their employers to implement specific parts. Free copies of this system will be available for download over the hyperfast network. You will have free access to the tools required to make your own changes, should you want to.

You will use this mind-bendingly powerful system to view corporate sponsored, community driven messages boards where people will bitch about having to drive cars that are almost unimaginably luxurious compared to what you have today.

Remember: in some fields, the singularity has already happened.

Meanwhile, Orrin Judd links to a recent essay by Michael Barone, titled "The 'good news' we are missing":

Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution" was as inspiring an example of people power as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Libya has dismantled its weapons of mass destruction. Egypt, by far the largest Arab nation, had its first contested election this month, and, as the Washington Post's David Ignatius writes from Cairo, "the power of the reform movement in the Arab world today ... is potent because it's coming from the Arab societies themselves and not just from democracy enthusiasts in Washington."

Which is evidence that Mr. Bush was right: Muslims and Arabs, like people everywhere, want liberty and self-rule. Afghanistan has just voted, and Iraq is about to vote a second time this year. Violence continues, but the more important story is that democracy and freedom are advancing. [...]

Polls show that most Americans think the economy is in dreadful shape, even though almost all the numbers are good: Inflation and unemployment are low, and growth is robust despite the exogenous shocks of Sept. 11 and Katrina. After a generation of almost constant low-inflation economic growth, perhaps we Americans are only satisfied when we have bubble growth, as in the late 1990s, and are unimpressed when the American economy proves once again to be amazingly resilient.

This is all the more astonishing when you consider that we are going through a time of increased competition and change, as China and India, with 37 percent of the world's population, are transforming their economies from third world to first world. Such a large proportion of mankind moving rapidly upward has never happened before and will never happen again.

Couple this with the facts that Japan seems to be growing again, after 15 years of deflation, that East Asia and Eastern Europe continue to grow robustly, and that major Latin countries like Mexico and Brazil are growing as well, and the economic picture around the world looks pretty good, despite nongrowth in Western Europe and continued poverty in Africa.

Try telling the workaday press that.

Last fall, the New Criterion wrote:

Martin Heidegger once said that the fundamental metaphysical question is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” While waiting for an answer to that query, we would like to offer for the consideration of our readers a less fundamental, but perhaps no less pressing, metaphysical question: “How is it that cultural coverage in The New York Times, which yesterday seemed as awful as it was possible to be, is today even worse?” This ever-fresh question deserves serious thought. How do they do it: each week a little more tawdry and demotic, more politically correct, less intellectually nimble and journalistically serious.

Some of you may immediately object, pointing out that this prodigy of deterioration is by no means confined to the Times’s coverage of culture. We concede the point. After all, we are talking about a newspaper that actually employs Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and Bob Herbert, not as comic relief but as some of its star pundits. These are moveon.org folks, infatuated by a combination of narcissism, ideology, and moral hysteria.

Late yesterday, Roger L. Simon sussed out the secret:

Ever since I heard about the TimesSelect program, I've been trying to figure out what was going on at the NYT to make them think people would pay fifty bucks a year to read their particular stuffed shirts (sorry, columnists) on line. Then I read the lede for Monday's Paul Krugman column presented as a teaser on the paper's website and I figured it out:

The Bush administration is trying to treat Hurricane Katrina's victims as harshly as the political realities allow, so as not to create a precedent for other aid efforts.

It's a parody. They're going into competition with Mad Magazine!

It would explain much about the Gray Lady.

As I posted recently, Jodie Foster is apparently beginning work on her dream project: a film which will rehabilite the reputation of Leni Riefenstahl.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson looks at a film that's currently making the rounds of the Deutchland art house circuit: Paradise Now, which Charles writes, is "about a Palestinian suicide bomber who blows himself up to murder a bus full of Jews":

The “World Cinema Fund,” who sponsored (paid for) the film, has named it their film of the month because it invites the viewer to “think about the assassin’s motives.”

And according to Davids Medienkritik, Amnesty International has also awarded the film a “peace prize,” because it’s neither “lecturing nor moralizing.”

(Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.)

P.S. At the 55th international film festival in Berlin 2005, “Paradise Now” won the Publikumspreis (“audience award”) and the Blue Angle for best European film.

P.P.S. Have I mentioned lately that we seem to be seeing a replay of 1938 in Germany?

Indeed, to borrow the Insta-adverb.

On Friday, I linked to Evan Coyne Maloney's post on the kerfuffle over the phrase "hunting terrorists" at Bucknell. He has an update today:

I have been in touch with Ms. Owens on several occasions and repeatedly asked her to give her side of the story. She declined to do so. I also gave her three opportunities to deny the account given by the students. Again, she declined to do so, and replied, "Although I appreciate your interest, in my interpretation that conversation was innocuous and cordial. I believe President Mitchell's administration has been marked by attention to all points of view and political speech." After point, she refused to respond to any further queries.

Still, even without Ms. Owens' testimony, it is quite clear why these three students were dragged into this meeting. President Mitchell's e-mail proves it. The three students, all of whom I spoke with independently, all give the exact same account of the meeting. And after trying to confirm these facts three times with Kathy Owens, she did not deny them once.

Now Bucknell is attempting to smear three of its students by implying that they're lying. My alma mater should be ashamed of itself.

They're far from the only school who should be these days, of course.

According to Gateway Pundit (who has photos along with his excellent post), the Sooners were playing their football game yesterday not far from the bombing:

Police are investigating an explosion at the University of Oklahoma late Saturday afternoon that killed one person.

Authorities suspect it may have been a suicide. Campus police say the body was found outside the university's botany-microbiology building on the west side of the Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. A game was under way at the time.

The university's president says the blast could be heard by some in the crowd of 84-thousand, but that no one inside the stadium was ever in danger.

I'll be very interested to hear the outcome of the investigation.

Update: In a post that's also highly illustrated with photos, Duane Patterson tours the memorial of another, far deadlier Oklahoma bombing from a decade ago.

Mark Steyn has a must-read review (with bonus points for the chutzpah of his title) of a new Broadway musical on the life of John Lennon. (Registration required to read the whole thing, but it's quick, painless, and absolutely worth it.)

The play presents the familiar tunes from Lennon's back catalog, but--wait for it--with a twist!

[Writer/director Don Scardino] is aware that John Lennon is more “complex” than “Imagine” and “Give Peace A Chance” might suggest. Granted, few sentient beings could fail to be. But, evidently befuddled at how one conveys such “complexity” on stage, Scardino has instead opted for the most convenient shorthand for it: To show how complex Lennon was, he’s played by nine different actors, four of whom are actresses. Geddit? He has so many sides to him, no single thespian could possibly encompass him. You need a whole crowd scene of Lennons. When he sings “Mother,” he’s white. When he sings “(Just Like) Startin’ Over,” he’s black. When he sings “Beautiful Boy,” he’s a woman. In that spirit, I would have delegated “Give Peace A Chance” to a Muslim. But this is Broadway experimentalism, where all the experiments are stuff you’ve seen a thousand times before.

Just to make clear that the black man, the white woman, the Polynesian pre-op transsexual are all meant to be Lennon, they don his signature wire-rimmed glasses for retailing his anecdotage. In fact, the spectacles are the only spectacle. The set is all but bare, except for the on-stage band. Eventually all nine Lennons come together to sing “Who Am I?”: “Look at me/ Who am I supposed to be?”

The end result of this? Yoko Ono emerges as the de facto star. Go figure!

Amid the vast phalanx of Johns there’s only one Yoko, played by Julie Danao-Salkan. And wouldn’t you know it? Simply by being the one constant in an ever-rotating cast of wire-rimmed specs, she becomes the anchor, the focus. Curious, that. Insofar as the play has a theme, it’s that John was a little boy lost until he met Yoko. Even if it didn’t feel for much of the time as if all nine Lennons were auditioning for Best Supporting Actor nominations in The Yoko Ono Story (Yoklahoma?) it hardly seems worth assembling an army of Johns for such a reductive characterization: the dry sardonic working-class Scouser of the early Sixties, for example, is nowhere in sight.

Later in the piece, Steyn observes something that many of Lennon's fans, who've drunk the "Imagine"-flavored Kool-Aid probably aren't aware of:

It’s almost a relief to get to the anthemic celebrity-fundraiser carthasis of: “Imagine there’s no countries/ It isn’t hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/ And no religion too.”

Scardino’s staging of the number presents it as a piece of self-conscious non-staging, in tribute to its “authenticity.” “Imagine” is an amazing song: an article of faith for people who have none, it’s astonishing how deeply it’s penetrated in a mere three decades to every corner of the culture. At my daughter’s school a couple of Christmases back, it was the grand finale of the holiday concert. The music department had thoughtfully printed the lyrics on the program, and the teacher, inviting the parents to sing along, declared the number summed up what we were all “praying” for: “Imagine there’s no heaven/ It’s easy if you try/ No hell below us/ Above us only sky/ Imagine all the people/ Living for today.”

Ah, that’s the message of the season, isn’t it? Happy holidays! The next time I heard those words was when I switched on the TV a few months later and saw a half-Jewish/half-Muslim choir backing Bill Clinton, who was up on stage crooning them down the cleavage of some hot Zionist babe as the top-of-the-bill lounge act at Shimon Peres’ birthday party. I am not making this up. I wish I were. But I doubt any “creative writer” would ever create such a scene: Too implausible—or rather, all too plausible but too obviously tacky. Yet it happened. And there’s more imagination in President Clinton’s staging of the song than anything in Lennon. In fact, in its own way, the mesmeric garishness of the Islamo-Zionist “Imagine” is a greater tribute to its composer than anything in this lamely predictable biotuner.

Doesn’t a show about Lennon owe us more than just the droning vamp and the company stepping forward to intone the sacred text? Shouldn’t it at least give us an “and then I wrote” moment? Wouldn’t it be productive to explore the song’s meaning as Lennon saw it and his own ambivalence toward the sentiments? You may say he’s a dreamer, but he’s not—whatever the moonily devoted young company sleepwalking downstage may think. I mentioned a couple of years ago the flurry of stories about how Lennon was a very generous contributor not just to organizations that support and fund the IRA, but to the IRA itself. He could imagine there’s no countries and nothing to kill or die for, but until that blessed day he was happy to chip in his tuppence-ha’penny to support an organization willing to blow the legs off grannies in shopping centers. Lennon grew rich peddling fluffy multiculti pap to the masses, but he didn’t fall for it himself.

Neither did Yoko, incidentally.

Finally, the usual disclaimers: When I was about 11, the Beatles were my introduction to rock and popular music, topics I've written tens of thousands of frequently gushing words on. I've long thought that when Lennon was writing very personal songs, he was absolutely terrific--"Help", "In My Life", "Strawberry Fields Forever", and "Julia" were some of the Beatles' very best moments. But when he tried to swing for the rafters and make The. Great. Statement. ("All You Need Is Love"; "Imagine"), his naiveté caused him to strike out. As Steyn writes in his review:

“Imagine there’s no heaven/ It’s easy if you try/ No hell below us.”

Oh, I hope that’s not so, if only because I like to think, in one or the other, John Lennon’s looking down or up on this show and roaring his head off. Back in the Sixties, asked to explain their working methods, Lennon and McCartney said, “There are two things we always do when we sit down to write a song. First we sit down. Then we write a song.” There’s more wit, character and sly revelation in that than in this entire show. They sat down together but they didn’t write together, not really: the Lennon and McCartney songs divide into Lennon songs (“I Am The Walrus”) and McCartney songs (“Yesterday”), and on the whole, though the rock critics prefer the Lennon, it’s the McCartney numbers that will last. That said, I liked “Jealous Guy” so much that I once worked up an arrangement and did it on the radio, which is more than most New Criterion contributors can claim.

Hey, I played "Come Together" in my old rock group in college. My musical partner back then recorded his own four-track cassette version of "Imagine".

That's got to count for something, right?

If you've already read Zombie's post (linked to in the post immediately below) busting the San Francisco Chronicle's attempt at photo manipulation, then be sure to check out an item from yesterday by Neo-Neocon. It's on a similarly manipulated photo, which has become something an icon, for reasons very different than what's actually captured in the photograph.

And Jonah Goldberg's 1999 piece on AP photographer Eddie Adams' relationship with South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan is also worth reading if you've never seen it before, and aren't familar with the before and after history of one of the most infamous photos of the Vietnam War.

Zombie Time looks at the stage management behind a photo of a young war protestor who was prominently featured by the San Francisco Chronicle. Click over and see Zombie slowly pulling the curtain back in a remarkable series of photos. Zombie concludes:

It turns out that the woman giving directions belongs to one of the Communist groups organizing the rally -- if her t-shirt is to be believed, since it depicts the flag of Communist Vietnam, which has been frequently displayed by such groups at protest rallies in the U.S. for decades.

The San Francisco Chronicle featured the original photograph on its front page in order to convey a positive message about the rally -- perhaps that even politically aware teenagers were inspired to show up and rally for peace, sporting the message, "People of Color say 'No to War!'" And that served the Chronicle's agenda.

But this simple analysis reveals the very subtle but insidious type of bias that occurs in the media all the time. The Chronicle did not print an inaccuracy, nor did it doctor a photograph to misrepresent the facts. Instead, the Chronicle committed the sin of omission: it told you the truth, but it didn't tell you the whole truth.

Because the whole truth -- that the girl was part of a group of naive teenagers recruited by Communist activists to wear terrorist-style bandannas and carry Palestinian flags and obscene placards -- is disturbing, and doesn't conform to the narrative that the Chronicle is trying to promote. By presenting the photo out of context, and only showing the one image that suits its purpose, the Chronicle is intentionally manipulating the reader's impression of the rally, and the rally's intent.

Such tactics -- in the no-man's-land between ethical and unethical -- are commonplace in the media, and have been for decades. It is only now, with the advent of citizen journalism, that we can at last begin to see the whole story and realize that the public has been manipulated like this all along.

Indeed.

During the days of Jack Webb's Dragnet, an APB was police code for an All Points Bulletin--and maybe it still is on some police forces. Fausta (found via Roger L. Simon) has a similar sounding set of initials for something we rarely need an APB to locate: Associated Press Deficit Disorder.

She writes that it's been prominently sighted in Princeton:

Last year Dr. Krauthammer wrote about the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release, and he had previously diagnosed Bush Derangement Syndrome. In honor of Dr. K, I'm now proposing the theory of Associated Press Deficit Disorder, APDD (ae-pea-dee-dee, not to be confused with any of Sean Comb's nicknames, P-Diddy, etc.):

the innatention of Associated Press and other news agencies to the actual words said by a person who doesn't fit what AP wants to hear.

Example: Read Eric Quiñones's excellent article Rice affirms vision for peaceful, democratic Middle East, and compare it with the Associated Press's Rice: Iraq Must Not Be Given Up to Killers.

Compare the two articles in light of the actual speech (see link above). Correct me if I'm wrong, but not only was Dr. Rice's theme not limited to Iraq, she didn't even say the title statement that heads the AP article. AP couldn't even be bothered with an actual photo of the event, even when press photographers were allowed, and PU provides photos for free (see links above).

The NYT which is certainly not a world away from Princeton, couldn't be bothered sending a reporter, and printed the AP story. Worse yet, New Jersey's own Star Ledger did the same thing. CNN, Australian Broadcasting Corp., and the Miami Herald printed the story verbatim. Couldn't they have done at least like theBeeb's Pentagon Correspondent, who looked up the State Dept's link for his article?

The Trenton Times's Robert Stern doesn't suffer from APDD, and his article quoted Dr. Rice accurately and impartially.

The press needs more media people like Mr. Stern and Mr. Quiñones. That would go a long way to cure us of APDD.

So would a prominent alternative to the MSM. And I hear that there is one, coming in about a month or so...