Division of Labour links to an interesting graphic tracking the relocation of Katrina survivors.

Sadly I'm a day late, but allow me to send a belated happy 34th to Nolan Bushnell's Pong. Nobody knew it then, but we'd never look at our TVs the same way again.

The Manolo illustrates that Kiwi Parade Gloss polish can be used for more than just shoes...

Linking to a photo of a sleeping transient, Architecture And Morality's "Corbusier" writes that if it's not one thing, it's another in France:

I found this image via the Drudge report. The reuters caption reads as follows:

People walk past as a homeless person takes cover from the cold on a Paris sidewalk November 28, 2005, as six homeless have died in France since the arrival of winter temperatures. French authorities have raised their weather alert in 31 departments and asked for increased vigilance to the homeless in Paris.

If it's not a major heatwaves that kills the elderly in France, it's now an extreme coldspell that kills the homeless in France. The message is clear: If you are on the fringe of helplessness don't expect your government to save you from the whims of nature. We hear constantly of the great French social model, but I must admit my ignorance on how this system is supposed to protect its most vulnerable. I get the feeling that this system favours the vast middle, who go about their lives taking care of few things on their own while letting the state make the most important decisions for them. As for those who are unable, either by age or by mental incapacity, to take charge of their own lot, they're rather seen as an inconvenience for the happy middle. The photograph clearly illustrates the nature of the French happy middle, going about their day to day lives in their gently pleasant ho-hum way, willfully ignoring the few that are not part of their content state of being.

This picture is not unique to France, nor is the idea of society's weakest being more vulnerable to neglect and death all that new. Such a scene can be found all over the world, and almost makes one wonder whether it is a natural state of affairs within human society. But for a country that loves to boast to everyone who will listen about its culture of humanity and of equality, such scenes of homelessness belie the rhetoric.

Not to mention the many scenes of nocturnal automobile immolations that have dotted the Parisian landscape this fall. Of course, 13 years ago French pundits assured themselves that they'd never have to face anything like the L.A. riots, "mainly because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs."

More from the great Claudia Rosett on the UN, this time on her home turf, the Wall Street Journal. She writes that the UN may be getting ready to shred the documents that make up the archives of the Paul Volcker's investigation into their uber-corrupt Oil For Graft Food program.

Pajamas Media now has RSS feeds for both its top stories, and the Best of the Blogs links. Click here to add them. (As I just did to My Yahoo page. And speaking of which, just click here or follow the link on the sidebar to add this site to your My Yahoo page, as well.)

Hugh Hewitt writes:

The best laugh of the day comes via a letter from 24 Democratic Congressman bemoaning the paper's cancellation of Bob Scheer's ravings. Dennis Kucinich posted it at the Huffington Post. Before you think, "Good for the Times for dumping the crazy," ask yourself if there has ever been a columnist for the paper whose column --if cancelled-- would elicit a protest from two dozen conservative members of Congress? There is of course no such columnist, and never has been. In fact, there isn't a single high profile center-right writer identified with the Times in any capacity other than syndicated columnists. But the Times cheerfully indulged Scheer all these years, and then in a vain attempt to cover its quality control firing of the around-the-bend Scheer, tossed the only conservative on Spring Street, cartoonist Michael Ramirez, over board at the same time.

What a disaster the Tribune Company has on its hand: It knows it must win back center-right readers to survive, but it lacks the guts to try to do so boldly, and its Ramirez-move steps on its big anti-MoveOn.org gesture.

Glenn Reynolds has several additional links highlighting the L.A. Times' obtuse nature.

Dr. Sanity has some thoughts on denial. Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin looks at projection.

Claudia Rosett writes:

The most notorious of the recent UN power grabs was Oil-for-Food, which began as a limited and somewhat ad hoc relief program, but turned into the biggest scam in history for the simple reason that the UN tapped right into the oil wells of Saddam Hussein’s UN-sanctioned Iraq – effectively dipping its cup right into the world oil market. Once that happened, getting relief to the Iraqi people became a sideshow to doing business with Saddam. The idea was that the UN would supervise Saddam, ensuring he sold oil only to buy relief goods for the Iraqi people. For its administrative pains, the UN Secretariat collected 2.2% of the revenue on every barrel of oil sold by Saddam, totaling $1.4 billion over the course of the seven year program. Member states that supported Saddam got lucrative business from him, with the eager but confidential approval of the Secretariat. What followed was oil-for-fraud, oil-for-palaces, oil-for-weapons, kickbacks for Saddam, payoffs to businesses and politicians, and, allegedly, bribes to assorted UN officials surrounding Kofi Annan. None of that was disclosed to the public at the time, and far too little has been disclosed since, by this same UN now proposing itself as the keeper of the Internet information society. We know it today only because President Bush finally put together a coalition outside the UN, and over UN protest, to topple Saddam -- and in so doing, exposed a lot of dirty laundry, not only Saddam’s, but the UN’s.

Oil-for-Food was the kind of fiasco that should have humbled the UN. But with the Oil-for-Food scandal high in the headlines, Annan rolled out another proposal this year that has the potential to be even worse -- unimaginable though that might seem. This one was his plan for global taxation, in which he wants the world’s wealthiest nations to pledge an automatic .7% of their annual gross national income for aid – much of that, presumably to be administered by the UN. Never mind that decades of UN-run aid programs have done more to prop up and bail out tyrants than to help the impoverished people living under them – since UN aid is generally funneled through governments, and it is basically despotic government that keeps people poor. For the UN, the big effect of Annan’s global tax plan would be to provide a steady gusher of billions straight into the coffers of the same UN Secretariat that administered Oil-for-Food. That plan was shot down by the U.S. at Annan’s “reform” summit this past September. But it is only down, not out. That number, the .7%, persists in UN rhetoric. It is the germ of a plan, and the UN has been playing with similar, smaller, and perhaps more feasible plans of similar kind. A tax on airlines. A tax on… well, that brings us back to the internet.

The danger by now is that the UN has two powerfully motivated interest groups, the censors and the taxers, both gunning for control of the net. And the UN has already sprouted a bureaucracy, complete with Prepcoms, to organize the next summit, and the next. The takeover bid failed in Tunis, but with enough time and persistence, it could very well happen.

So, what’s a blogger to do? For people who care about freedom and value the internet for all the right reasons, the best answer I can see is to fight back with the best weapon you’ve got— the truth. It helped air out CBS. Indeed, it is on blogs that much of the best UN coverage can be found already. We need more. If it’s information the UN wants to talk about, let’s start with a lot more information about the UN itself. Find it, post it, The more daylight, the better the chance that the UN will have to either shut itself down, or clean up its act—and back away from the internet.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the first two options coming true anytime soon.

Betsy Newmark catches Moveon.org firing up their airbrushes:

That ad from Moveon.org that used a picture of British soldiers in it wearing shorts purporting to be American soldiers missing their families for the holidays has now been altered.

They have photoshopped in some long pants. Compare the picture as it was yesterday. And if you click on the video, you'll see that they haven't yet been able to change the film.

Apparently, they couldn't tell what an American serviceman looks like, but thinks that they can photoshop their message and fool people. You be the judge of the sincerity of their concern for those servicemen.

Indeed^TM.

Update: James Taranto writes:

We're not even sure what the point of this deception could be. Perhaps MoveOn's dishonesty is simply pathological.

Well, yeah.

Another Update: Michelle Malkin writes that the ad has been pantsed pulled.

Right Reason, a weblog with some stellar writers on the topic of philopshical conservatism, has an interview today with Roger Scruton, the author of The Meaning of Conservatism:

I wrote The Meaning of Conservatism in 1979, during the last year of a failing Labour Government, when the Conservatives were in the process of choosing a new leader (Margaret Thatcher), and also looking around for a new philosophy -- or rather any philosophy, having subsisted to that point without one. I was teaching in the University of London, and had begun to take an interest in political thought. I was surprised to discover that the politics department of my college library contained largely Marxist or sub-Marxist books, that major conservative thinkers like Burke, de Maistre and Hayek were hardly to be found there, and that the journals were all uniformly leftist. Academic political science was in the style of the New Left Review, with a strong leaning towards the idiocies of 1968, a sneering contempt for England and its heritage, and a witch-hunting tone towards the opposition, which it dismissed as middle brow, middle class, and racist.

At the same time I was troubled to discover that the Conservative Party had no principle with which to oppose this kind of "resentment politics," other than the Free Market. I wanted to remind people that there really is a tradition of conservative thinking in politics, that it is wiser and deeper than the left-liberal orthodoxies of the day, and that it is not reducible to free market principles, even if it contains them.

It should be added that I would not have written the book, had I not been commissioned by Ted Honderich, then politics editor at Penguin and also a University colleague, who was desperate to find someone, somewhere, however feeble, to defend the conservative position. Without The Meaning of Conservatism, the intellectual left -- whose ideas, emotions and very existence depends upon a stance of opposition -- would have had nothing to oppose. Hence the book’s appearance caused a huge sigh of relief among my colleagues, who were at last able to hate again.

And they do so need someone to hate.

Two recent articles look at the prime movers behind Hollywood's great 1954 movie, On The Waterfront. Harry Stein writes of Elia Kazan, its director:

As a chief villain in the blacklist myth, Kazan got his due and then some when the Motion Picture Academy announced in 1999 that it would at last award the sickly 89-year-old filmmaker a lifetime-achievement Oscar. The firestorm that followed split Hollywood between those who insisted that Kazan should never be forgiven and those who argued that honoring his artistic work wasn't the same as excusing his testimony.

None defended Kazan's actions a half-century earlier. What put Kazan beyond redemption wasn't simply his cooperation with HUAC. He could still have won forgiveness. But far from repentant, Kazan was defiant. The day after his HUAC appearance, he took out a New York Times ad entitled, almost regally, "A Statement by Elia Kazan." "I believe that communist activities confront the people of this country with an unprecedented and exceptionally tough problem," it read. "That is, how to protect ourselves from a dangerous and alien society and still keep the free, open, healthy way of life that gives us self-respect." Kazan then briefly recounted his youth in the communist movement and the contempt that he came to have for the totalitarian mentality that he'd seen firsthand.

Waterfront's screenwriter, Budd Schulberg also saw the totalitarian mentality first hand--when he arrested Leni Riefenstahl:

Years before he wrote "On the Waterfront," before that film brought him an Oscar, and before he earned the ire of many colleagues by testifying during the Hollywood communist witch hunt, writer Budd Schulberg had the distinct honor of arresting Leni Riefenstahl.

He was in Germany, assembling a film to be used at the Nuremberg trials as evidence against the Nazis. Riefenstahl, the legendary director and propagandist for Hitler, knew where the skeletons were. So Schulberg, dressed in his military uniform, drove to her chalet on a lake in Bavaria, knocked on her door, and told the panicked artist that she was coming with him.

"I tried to calm her down," says Schulberg, 91, remembering in a thin, dry voice an episode more than a half-century distant. But he needed her to identify the seemingly endless gallery of faces on film that he had been collecting. So, very much against her will, he drove her to Nuremberg in an inelegant open-air military vehicle, and listened to a sad and defensive argument that would define the rest of her life, and that no one would ever believe.

"She gave me the usual song and dance," he says. "She said, 'Of course, you know, I'm really so misunderstood. I'm not political.'"

(H/T: Brothers Judd)

Wonder if this scene will be in the Jodie Foster's recently announced biopic in which she attempts to resuscitate Riefenstahl's reputation, much like Hollywood's recent string of pro-Che and Castro movies. And if so, which artist will she portray more sympathetically: Schulberg or Riefenstahl?

Neo-Neocon looks at far, far leftwing former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who ever since his days in LBJ's administration, has never met an enemy of the US he hasn't felt sympathy for:

One can argue that even dictators need defense attorneys, and that is most certainly true. It's a nasty job, but somebody has to do it. And yet someone is already doing it; Clark's lamentably eager services are hardly needed.

Yes, Clark never met a dictator he didn't like, and this has been the case for decades. And yes, Clark is probably the most extreme leftist alive today who actually held a position of power in a Presidency--in his case, that of Lyndon Johnson, under whom he served as Attorney General.

Why am I interested in all this? It's what so often grabs me, intrapersonal political change. So my question about Clark is: how did what originally seems to have been a relatively mainstream guy end up esposing views that put him in the running with Noam Chomsky? Did something happen to change him? Or was he always like that, despite having served in the Johnson administration?

After doing a bit of research, I've got some ideas about it, and my answer is "yes" and "yes." Yes, he was always more or less like that; and yes, he became even more so as a result of his experiences during the Vietnam era.

Neo adds:

In some strange and dreadful alchemy, it seems that those suffering peasants of postwar China, those blacks who were disenfranchised (and worse) in the American South, and those who died in Vietnam, have morphed over the years in Clark's mind into the dictators and war criminals who arouse his sympathies now. It's quite a journey.

Read the rest and follow the links to see how he got there.

Steve Green reminds the MSM about this pesky little thing called inflation:

Oooooh, it must be time to panic:

The price of gold rose above 500 dollars an ounce for the first time for 18 years, propelled by strong buying from investment funds.

Gold hit 502.30 US dollars in overnight Asian trade before staging a retreat during European trading hours. The price was the highest since December 14, 1987 when it had touched 502.97 dollars.

Well, not really. Adjusted for inflation, gold today would have to cost over $830 an ounce, in order to match 1987 prices.

But remember: Just because the story is fake, doesn't mean it isn't accurate. A 60% difference is practically a rounding error to most people, right?

I don't have a problem with folks who like to keep a small portion of their portfolio in a gold fund for diversity sake. But serious gold bugs are in a perpetual Chicken Little mode.

Either that, or they've bought into the talk radio cliche that it's always a good time to buy gold. As James Lileks once wrote:

I’ve been listening to talk radio for 15 years, and I can now tell you the sum total of what I’ve learned:

This is an excellent time to buy gold.

Market’s up? An excellent time to buy gold. Market’s down? An excellent time to buy gold. Mars Rover discovers that the red planet is composed mostly of gold? A wonderful time to buy gold.

Well, it rounds out your stable long term conservative slow growth investment in home heating oil futures, another talk radio favorite.

Pajamas Media examines the layoffs at the moribund L.A. Times, or as Hugh Hewitt recently called it, "The Least Read Editorial in America".

The recent Super Bowls have had some surprisingly close action on the gridiron, but let's face it: the ancillary "entertainment" is invariably craptacular, even when it doesn't involve a wardrobe malfunction.

Breitbart.com reports that this February, the Rolling Stones will be getting the nod to perform there:

The Rolling Stones will take a brief break from touring to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show.

The rock 'n' roll greats will go on stage during the game Feb. 5 at Ford Field, the NFL said Tuesday.

"We are thrilled to perform for millions of fans at one of the most exciting and highly anticipated sporting events of the year," the band, which earlier in the day announced its European tour dates, said in a statement.

The Rolling Stones are currently touring North America to promote their latest album, "A Bigger Bang."

The NFL has a history of getting top acts for its halftime show.

Last season, the primary entertainer was former Beatle Paul McCartney.

That followed Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" in the 2004 game during a performance with Justin Timberlake.

Considering that Mick is 62, that's one nipple (well actually two) that I hope we won't be "accidentally" seeing in a couple of months.

Ian Schwartz of The Political Teen has video of a petulant Mike Wallace who believes that "Karl Rove will not permit [President Bush] to sit down with me". Ian adds that Wallace "acts as if it is President Bush’s duty to meet and be interviewed by him".

Gee, I can't imagine why Bush would not want to appear on CBS, can you?

And it's not like Wallace is attempting to find anything that would actually be, you know, news. As Jay Rosen wrote last year, the traditional MSM is all about The Gotcha, especially when it comes to administration whose views they, seemingly to a man, oppose:

Read More »

The role of Howard Cosell will be played...Arlen Specter?!

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Sen. Arlen Specter has accused the NFL and the Philadelphia Eagles of treating Terrell Owens unfairly, and might refer the matter to the antitrust subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Specter, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, said at a news conference Monday in Harrisburg it was "vindictive and inappropriate" for the league and the Eagles to forbid the star wide receiver from playing and prevent other teams from talking to him.

"It's a restraint of trade for them to do that, and the thought crosses my mind, it might be a violation of antitrust laws," Specter said.

The Eagles suspended Owens on Nov. 5 for four games without pay for "conduct detrimental to the team, and deactivated him with pay on Sunday after the suspension ended.

Arbitrator Richard Bloch said last week the team's actions were supported by the labor agreement between the league and the NFL Players Association.

"The arbitrator's decision is consistent with our collective bargaining agreement, and it simply enforced the terms of the player's contract," NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said.

Some legal experts disagreed with Specter's view.

"To have an antitrust violation, you have to have a contract or conspiracy in restraint of trade," said Robert McCormick, a law professor at Michigan State University.

Matthew J. Mitten, director of the National Sports Law Institute at Marquette University, said, "We're in the labor arena, not antitrust."

Specter emphasized that he was "not a supporter of Terrell Owens."

"I am madder than hell at what he has done in ruining the Eagles' season," the Pennsylvania Republican said. "I think he's in flagrant breach of his contract and I believe the Eagles would be within their rights in not paying him another dime or perhaps even suing him for damages."

But Specter said, "I do not believe, personally, that it is appropriate to punish him (by forcing him to sit out the rest of the season). He's not committed a crime, he's committed a breach of contract. And what they're doing against him is vindictive."

Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader also jumped on the publicity gravy train earlier this month.

I don't recall any similar sort of kerfuffle when Tampa Bay imposed the same basic decision on Keyshawn Johnson two years ago. What makes Owens' situation any different, except that, if anything, his disruptive hijinks have been that much more bizarre?

Update: Power Line also notices the strange troika that Senator Haggis finds himself in.

Another Update: "Specter backs off threat to investigate Terrell Owens' treatment". Pass the Glenfiddich!

This is the headline of an article from Friday's San Francisco Chronicle:

BERKELEY
Mao debunkers defend their book
Critics call it effort to discredit communism

After over 100 million killed, one certainly hopes.

(For our earlier looks at Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao book, click here and through the links on this post.)

Denny Hastert renames the capital's "Holiday Tree":

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert has told federal officials that the lighted, decorated tree on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol -- known in recent years as the "Holiday Tree" -- should be renamed the "Capitol Christmas Tree," as it was called until the late 1990s.

The Capitol's senior landscape architect confirmed the name switch yesterday for The Washington Times.

"It was known as the 'Holiday Tree' for several years and just recently was changed back to the 'Capitol Christmas Tree.' This was a directive from the speaker," said Capitol architect Matthew Evans.

"The speaker believes a Christmas tree is a Christmas tree, and it is as simple as that," said Ron Bonjean, spokesman for the Illinois Republican.

The Capitol tree, traditionally overshadowed by the White House's "National Christmas Tree," was renamed a "holiday tree" several years ago, according to the Capitol Architect's offices, in an effort to acknowledge the other holidays of Kwanzaa and Hanukkah -- although no one seemed to know exactly when the name was changed or by whom.

Calling a Christmas tree a Christmas tree has become a politically charged prospect in jurisdictions across the country -- from Boston to Sacramento and in dozens of communities in between.

"It's a growing problem," said Jared N. Leland, spokesman and legal counsel for the Becket Fund, a District-based legal and educational institute. "Celebrating the season with Christmas trees ... and leaving them named 'Christmas' is simply recognizing the religious nature of people. Christmas should be able to be called Christmas."

(Via Mary Katharine Ham.)

Business Week looks at "Cyber Monday, Marketing Myth":

Do a Google search on "Cyber Monday," and you get as many as 779,000 results. Not a bad haul for a term that was created just a week and a half ago to describe the jump in online shopping activity following the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. While Black Friday is the official kickoff of the traditional retail season, the story goes, online retail really takes off the following Monday.

Just one problem: It's not true, at least for many online retailers. Contrary to what the recent blitz of media coverage implies, Cyber Monday isn't nearly the biggest online shopping or spending day of the year. It ranks only as the 12th-biggest day historically, according to market researcher comScore Networks. It's not even the first big day of the season.

For most online retailers, the bigger spending day of the season to date was way back on Nov. 22, three days before Black Friday. What's more, most e-tailers say the season's top spending day comes much later, between around Dec. 5 and Dec. 15.

Maybe someday Business Week can also tell me what day marks the end of what it describes as "the traditional retail season"--it's nowhere to be found in this article.

In terms of geopolitics, it's utterly astonishing what a powerful president George W. Bush has been, even going back as far as the late 1990s.

Err, come again?!

James Taranto catches this classic groaner in the Times of London:

Simon Jenkins, a columnist for London's Sunday Times, comments on reports that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair toyed with the idea of bombing al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based TV network:

That Blair and Bush should have discussed bombing the Al-Jazeera building in Qatar is hardly surprising. They agreed to bomb the headquarters of Serbian television during the Kosovo war.

Well, color us impressed. Who knew President Bush was already conducting foreign policy back in 1999, when he was still governor of Texas?

CBS did, buddy, that's who!

As Glenn Reynolds noted in May of 2002, two years before CBS's obsession would reach full err, maturity with Mary Mapes and Ra^therGate, the Tiffany Network filed this astonishing report, piped in fresh from the Twilight Zone:

FREUDIAN SLIP? Better visit this CBS story fast because they'll probably fix this:

The Washington Post said Saturday that a top-secret briefing memo presented to President Bush in 1998 focused on efforts by Osama bin Laden to strike at targets in the U.S.

Um, President who in 1998? I've been pretty hard on the Bush Administration over this -- and especially on the lame spin the Administration is offering -- but this just might suggest that some other people have a bit of an agenda.

Charles Krauthammer has written several times that BDS can cloud judgment--it also seems to frequently have astonishingly negative effects on memories as well.

(Although, to be fair, chronological lapses are the least of its issues.)

James Lileks beams back a report from that alternate universe where Teddy Kennedy wears a sleeveless gold command jersey, John Kerry has a goatee and Fu Manchu, and Nancy Pelosi bares her midriff (whoops--sorry for implanting that image in your brain): what would happen if we bugged out of Iraq.

The L.A. Times calls for--surprise!--a mammoth government bailout of America's Big Three auto manufacturers. In contrast, Bill Quick says market forces should be left to do their thing:

No, you must let them collapse. They are the automotive equivalent of Terry Schaivo - dead husks that need to be buried, not embalmed in a living death. One of the reasons that the American auto industry is in such sad state is that decisions are influenced by the moral hazard generated by a governmental policy of "too big to fail."

This sort of thing emboldened the automakers to accede to outrageously exorbitant union demands, particularly in the area of pensions, because they knew that these monumental unfunded liabilities would be picked up by a politically sensitized government unwilling to accept the sort of awful publicity that involves taking money out of the mouths - or retirement accounts - of seniors and other pensioners.

The business of capitalist business in productivity engendered by creative destruction. Nature's law of tooth and fang has nothing at all on capitalism's law that the market will destroy the weak and clear the way for newer, stronger businesses to take their place.

If Ford and GM are too weak to survive without government help, let them fail. Something newer, better, and stronger will replace them. Count on it.

I agree.

Calvin Coolidge will be eternally misquoted as saying that "The business of America is business", but one thing he actually did say, when asked, near the end of his administration, about its greatest accomplishment, "I think it would have to be, minding our own business."

Would that modern politicians thought the same way when it came to meddling with the marketplace.

Jonah Goldberg looks at crazed fight for the center of politics, and its accompanying language disconnect:

Behold: We have entered the Age When Dinos and Rinos Rule the Earth. See them battle each other for absolute dominion!

Though this might sound like a cool monster mash of the "Mechagodzilla versus Godzilla" variety, it's a good deal less exciting and more depressing, like a taste test between 2% milk and soy milk. What we are witnessing is the dawn of the boring phase of the Great Republican Realignment, and it promises to have liberals and conservatives alike going bonkers.

I should back up. Dinos, of course, are "Democrats in Name Only." Rinos are their GOP counterparts. Nobody actually ever admits to being a Republican in name only. Rather, these are epithets used to describe politicians of insufficient ideological purity or partisan backbone. Think David Gergen without the smoldering sexual intensity [Heh--Ed]. Or, if you can't, think moderates, squishes, apostates, New York Times-pleasing "mavericks," centrists, and all the others who want to "get beyond labels" or get a standing ovation from the Brookings Institution.

Galloping toward the center is nothing new in American politics. The parties have always regressed to the mean. The center of gravity is in the, uh, center. What's changed is that the center has — finally — been moving an eensy bit to the right.

* * *

This anti-Bush huffing and puffing has been caused in part by an overreaction to the Iraq war and liberal terror over losing the courts. But much of the rage can also be traced to an overcompensating bitterness over small differences. In much the same way the Marxist English professor is suddenly deeply troubled by the slightly less Marxist ideology of the colleague who unfairly got a better office, many liberals are more angered by the fact Republicans are running the government than they are about Republican policy. It just seems wrong! Republicans don't even like government!

This isn't to say there haven't been some big victories for the conservative wing of the GOP over the last five years. Tax cuts, judges, John Bolton, the blocking of the Kyoto Protocol and watching Dan Rather dismantle himself like a robot ordered to put himself back in the box: good times, good times.

But you know, when tectonic plates smash into each other, there are earthquakes and, after that, it's slow inexorable grinding, with little chunks breaking off of one side and then the other now and then. That's where conservatives are now: the slow, grinding phase.

If you average out the spikes in the political Richter scale, the trends have been obvious for more than a decade: The Democrats are becoming a minority party. The 1990s saw them hemorrhage power in the House, Senate, state legislatures, etc., even as Bill Clinton moved his party to the right on many of its core issues. Even this month's Democratic election victories are at best preservations of the status quo. In Virginia, the winner of the governor's race was a nominally pro-life Dino replacing another Dino. These centrist Democrats understand that listening to the base of their party would be electoral suicide. Not exactly champagne wishes and caviar dreams for the crowd at the Nation.

And we aren't drinking out of slippers here on the right either. Bush is a lame duck, Social Security reform is dead, the dreams of the revolution come up only when we gather around the campfire to sigh about what might have been. The Rinos are in charge now. Drilling in ANWR was pulled from the House appropriations budget, tax-cut extensions in the Senate were crushed in deference to the fearsome clout of ... Olympia Snowe. Even on judges, the power players are the Gang of 14 centrists and Rinos like Arlen Specter. It was Specter, not Kennedy, who gave John G. Roberts Jr. the toughest questions during his hearings.

The most depressing prospect is that this will be the status quo for years to come. Liberals will shriek about GOP radicalism and conservatives will whine about the lack of it. And we'll all have to make do with 2% milk.

And assuming, for the sake of argument, that we don't wake up to President Hillary on Election Tuesday of 2008, it's a safe bet that the next GOP president--possibly Giuliani or McCain--is going to be more of a centrist (in other words, a RINO) than President Bush is perceived to be.

With a 4-7 record this year, it's not all that surprising that the Detroit Lions fired head coach Steve Mariucci and some of his assistants today. "Mooch" is the first coaching casualty of the season--no doubt several more will be joining him by early next year.

On Saturday, Cris Carter wrote that if Mariucci was to get the axe, team president Matt Millen should join him:

Everyone is talking about Steve Mariucci being fired as the Detroit Lions' head coach, but team president Matt Millen should be mentioned in the same breath.

Millen hired Mariucci, who was Millen's second hire since taking over the franchise in 2001. He also drafted the talent, selecting a wide receiver with a first-round pick the last three years. So Millen has to shoulder some of the blame, too, for the Lions' disappointing 4-7 season.

I don't see Mariucci keeping his job after the season. But if he goes, Millen doesn't deserve to stay, either.

He's still there for now--it will be interesting if that holds true 'til next September.

On the Left Coast, Hugh Hewitt looks at "The Least Read Editorial in America", also known as The L.A. Times. 3000 miles away, Pamela of Atlas Shrugs (H/T Donald Sensing) has visual proof that life support is needed for The Gray Lady.

Update: Speaking of legacy medias, Chris Anderson, who coined the brilliant Long Tail meme, says that "The TV broadcasting business stinks".

Scott Adams of "Dilbert" fame explains all you need to know to toss logic to the wind as you seek fame and fortune on your way to become a True Superstar Internet Commenting Machine.

(Via Dr. Helen.)

In Tech Central Station, James Pinkerton compares and contrasts Hugh Hefner and Maureen Dowd:

Indeed, one might suspect that Dowd is getting close to exactly what she wants. She is the best-known and best-paid "sob sister" in America today. If not everything she writes turns into gold, her words are still worth their weight in silver, and that's plenty lucrative.

So when she writes, in her opening, "I don't even understand what I don't understand about men" -- don't believe her. In fact, she understands men full well. In her book, she cites her own mother as a lifelong authority on males; she recalls the late Peggy Dowd telling her, "Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie." Indeed, going further, the elder Dowd observed of modern times, "It's more of a man's world than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries."

And by "bakery," Maureen's mom meant the cookie factory, a.k.a the cheesecake factory. That is, contemporary society, in which men and women wheel and deal themselves sexually -- although as Dowd would be the first to profess in print, the most successful sex-wheelers are men.

We might, for example, consider Hugh Hefner, who founded Playboy magazine the year after Dowd was born, back in 1953. More than any other individual, Hefner changed the name of the game, from patriarchy to anarchy. Bygone institutions such as chaste courtship, followed by marriage, might have oppressed women in various ways, but they oppressed men, too -- or at least men felt oppressed by the need to get married before they could have sex.

"Hef" helped to change all that, not only making sexy pictures readily available, but through the articles -- honest! -- in the magazine, too. Beginning in 1962, he began publishing "The Playboy Philosophy," which captured, and then accelerated, the budding libertinism in the culture. As Hefner wrote of the "playboy" ideal:

"He can be many things, providing he possesses a certain point of view. He must see life not as a vale of tears but as a happy time; he must take joy in his work, without regarding it as the end and all of living; he must be an alert man, an aware man, a man of taste, a man sensitive to pleasure, a man who -- without acquiring the stigma of the voluptuary or dilettante -- can live life to the hilt. This is the sort of man we mean when we use the word playboy."

Those were heady years, indeed, for the young and the restless, when The Pill was becoming common, when a semi-Rat Packer President sat in the White House, when Lenny Bruce shocked and stunned the squares, even as liberal lawyers sought to expand one-narrow definitions of "privacy" to include anything that consenting adults might wish to consent to.

But of course, "consenting adult" has proven to be a synonym for "cookie," or "cheesecake" -- which Hefnerians love to graze upon, without having to stick around and stake a legal and binding claim. Women were liberated from the need to get married, but in a different way, men were liberated from the need to get married, too.

Which, focusing on the bottom rungs of society, is the subject of this profile of Theodore Dalrymple, in Canada's National Post:

Dalrymple's father, a communist and a businessman, worried about humanity's future but didn't like people and couldn't enter an equal relationship with anyone. This left Dalrymple permanently suspicious of anyone selling grand schemes. More important, his parents fought a long silent war over his head. They never spoke to each other in his presence and "created for themselves a kind of hell on a small domestic scale, as if acting in an unscripted play by Strindberg." For a long time Dalrymple pitied himself. Finally he decided, "One's past is not one's destiny, and it is self-serving to pretend that it is." He decided if in the future he became miserable, it would be his own fault.

The single parents he has treated often are at fault -- and they know it. They also know they will not be censured. When discussing social issues it is forbidden to blame "the victims," and women burdened with fatherless children automatically become victims, therefore not responsible for their acts.

He has learned that men who carelessly impregnate women know perfectly well the consequences. "They all know that they are condemning their children to lives of brutality, poverty, abuse and hopelessness." Yet many do it often. Government, by its (unavoidable) decision to provide some support for children, "absolves the men of all responsibility. The state becomes the child's father, reducing the biological father to the status of a child."

He has treated many young women who know "it is both foolish and wicked" to have children by a man without considering whether he could be a good father. His female patients repeatedly choose men who are obviously bad candidates for fatherhood, being some combination of unreliable, drunken, drug-addicted, criminal or violent. In his telling, it sounds as if evolution has gone into reverse, females selecting the males least likely to collaborate in successfully perpetuating the species. They consider transitory pleasure more important than the human beings they create -- not the banality of evil, says Dalrymple, but "the frivolity of evil."

But even Dalrymple faults society. Elite opinion-makers (the "mandarins" in his subtitle) have created an easygoing culture that tolerates just about anything. It abandons traditional values without replacing them and then wakes up surprised to find that millions of young people don't much care about the civilization that makes life bearable.

Go figure.

Update: Kevin Murphy has some thoughts on MoDo and Hef.

Mark Steyn looks at but one example of how political correctness is killing Hollywood:

I stopped to buy the third boxed set in the "Looney Tunes Golden Collection." Loved the first two: Daffy, Bugs, Porky, beautifully restored, tons of special features. But, for some reason, this new set begins with a special announcement by Whoopi Goldberg explaining what it is we're not meant to find funny: "Unfortunately at that time racial and ethnic differences were caricatured in ways that may have embarrassed and even hurt people of color, women and ethnic groups," she tells us sternly. "These jokes were wrong then and they're wrong today" -- unlike, say, Whoopi Goldberg's most memorable joke of recent years, the one at that 2004 all-star Democratic Party gala in New York where she compared President Bush to her, um, private parts. There's a gag for the ages.

I don't know what Whoopi's making such a meal about. It's true you don't see many positive images of people of color on "Looney Tunes," but then the images of people of non-color aren't terribly positive either (Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam). Instead, you see positive images of ducks of color, roadrunners of color and tweety birds of color. How weirdly reductive to be so obsessed about something so peripheral to these cartoons that you stick the same damn Whoopi Goldberg health warning on all four DVDs in the box. And don't think about hitting the "Next" button and skipping to the cartoons: You can't; you gotta sit through it.

A Hollywood that's ashamed of one of its few universally acknowledged genuine artistic achievements is hardly likely to come up with any new artistic achievements. As the instant deflation of that Whoopi cushion reminds us, the movies are now so constrained by political correctness the very act of storytelling is itself endangered. That's something slightly more ominous than the feeble limousine liberalism many conservatives blame for the alleged box-office slump.

In Brian Anderson's recent essay on Hollywood's woes, he illustrated multiple examples of Steyn's last point in action:

Liberal interest groups...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.”

Orrin Judd has written on numerous occasions that "all comedy is conservative". But as Steyn notes, most story-telling designed to appeal to a mass audience is profoundly conservative when compared to the leftwing PC sensibilities that drive so much modern Hollywood thinking. Once again, it isn't that America as a whole has moved to the right, it's that coastal elites have continued a seemingly endless 35-year march in the opposite direction.

Something has to give--while Hollywood will survive in some form thanks to TV and foreign revenues, if I owned a chain of movie theaters, I'd be rather nervous about their future.

Speaking of the Gipper, in his great "A Time For Choosing" speech, he famously said:

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.

Betsy Newmark--who as a teacher, knows of what she speaks--notes that public school programs will also expand to fill all available space.

And then some.

Earlier this month, I uploaded a bunch of photos I shot of the new Air Force One exhibit at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. SoCalPundit has also photoblogged the exhibit--it looks like the weather cooperated with him much better than it did with me!

He also has some fine shots of the library itself. (It's tricky to shoot in there, since the library curators don't permit flash.)

Just in time for the Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Tammy Bruce has a great cartoon.

(Via Lorie Byrd.)

When Jodie Foster announced she was planning to shoot a biography about Leni Riefenstahl, whom Foster was quoted as saying has been "libeled so many times" about the dark deeds of her role in the Nazi Party, I wrote:

Whitewashing Leni Riefenstahl's place in history was only a matter of time I guess, as all the films airbrushing Che's reputation are becoming old hat.

In a similar vein, Dean Esmay has some thoughts on Prussian Blue, the Neo-Nazi answer to the Olsen Twins we looked at yesterday:

There's apparently a significant kerfuffle over two 13-year-old singers who are gushy about Nazism, and I find myself strangely unable to get excited about it. Not because I have anything nice to say about Nazism, but because I've been watching the entertainment industry speak endearingly of vile totalitarian ideologies for most of my life.

This is the same entertainment industry that lionizes Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. The same industry that made heroes out of the mass-murdering Sandinistas. That to this day pretends that the McCarthy era in America was nothing but one long paranoid nightmare wherein nobody, not even people like Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, or Harry Dexter White, was guilty of anything but being a bit too liberal.

Some of these people still can't admit that Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Mary Travers were communists for God's sake.

A couple of years ago I was in a Denny's when I spotted a kid wearing a bright blood-red shirt with a big yellow hammer and sickle. I wanted to walk over to him and slap him in the face. But instead I shrugged. He was 21 or 22 at the oldest, maybe more like 18 or 19. He couldn't possibly have known the depths of the evil his shirt represented. The Soviets, when they invaded Afghanistan, murdered a million innocent Afghans. This out of a country of only 6 or 7 million people. That was going on as recently as the 1980s. You think those Afghans today would find Nazi chic more offensive than Communist chic?

I also, a year or two before that, got into an argument with a friend in his early 20s who actually thought I was "melodramatic" when I pointed out that Stalin had killed, by the most conservative estimates available, about 20 million people in cold blood. (Others place his body count over 60 million.) Yet you can go around the world and find restaurants, drinks, and music that extols the virtues of him and communist dictators just like him.

It's all sick of course. Depraved even. If I were Jewish I'd be particularly stung by "Prussian Blue." If I were Ukranian or Chinese or Vietnamese or Cambodian or Afghan, on the other hand, maybe it would all seem just sadly familiar. Hitler not so bad? Why not? Next up: pop songs about the glories of the Laogai!

By all means, let's kick around "Prussian Blue." Let's especially kick around their parents and their producers. These 13 year old twits likely have no idea what they're talking about, but the adults in their lives have no such excuse. But while we're doing it, let's remember all the other cases of covering up for, even romanticizing, hateful totalitarian ideologies. I think we'd be doing more good in the long run that way.

It can't hurt, but as all of the examples that Dean includes in his post illustrate, it's asking far too much of the entertainment industry to be that self-policing.

(H/T: Murdoc Online.)

I felt pretty cynical about the hope that Brian Anderson expressed for Hollywood in his recent City Journal essay, but hey, maybe he was right after all, when he noted:

Guess what: ever more Americans are shunning Hollywood’s wares—and disgust with Left Coast politics, both on and off screen, clearly plays a part. In a time of declining moviegoing, what gets people out to the theaters, it turns out, are conservative movies—conservative not so much politically but culturally and morally, focusing on the battle between good and evil, the worth of heroism and self-sacrifice, the indispensability of family values and martial honor, and the existence of Truth. Hollywood used to turn out a steady supply of such movies—watch just about any film from its Golden Age of the thirties and forties—and it still makes them once in a while (sometimes thanks to off-screen lefties like Steven Spielberg). We may soon see a lot more of them.

Narnia is due out next month; and Michelle Malkin links to this Times of London article that says that Bruce Willis is planning to make a film about the heroes of Deuce Four, (the battalion that won the battle for Mosul) based on the reporting of embedded journalist/blogger Michael Yon:

ANGERED by negative portrayals of the conflict in Iraq, Bruce Willis, the Hollywood star, is to make a pro-war film in which American soldiers will be depicted as brave fighters for freedom and democracy.
It will be based on the exploits of the heavily decorated members of Deuce Four, the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry, which has spent the past year battling insurgents in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul.

Willis attended Deuce Four’s homecoming ball this month in Seattle, Washington, where the soldiers are on leave, along with Stephen Eads, the producer of Armageddon and The Sixth Sense.

The 50-year-old actor said that he was in talks about a film of “these guys who do what they are asked to for very little money to defend and fight for what they consider to be freedom”.

Unlike many Hollywood stars Willis supports the war and recently offered a $1m (about £583,000) bounty for the capture of any of Al-Qaeda’s most wanted leaders such as Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri or Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, its commander in Iraq. Willis visited the war zone with his rock and blues band, the Accelerators, in 2003.

“I am baffled to understand why the things I saw happening in Iraq are not being reported,” he told MSNBC, the American news channel.

He is expected to base the film on the writings of the independent blogger Michael Yon, a former special forces green beret who was embedded with Deuce Four and sent regular dispatches about their heroics.

Yon was at the soldiers’ ball with Willis, who got to know him through his internet war reports on www.michaelyon.blogspot.com. “What he is doing is something the American media and maybe the world media isn’t doing,” the actor said, “and that’s telling the truth about what’s happening in the war in Iraq.”

A lot can kill a film production before it gets off the ground (hey, how about that blockbuster cinematic version of Atlas Shrugged, huh?!), but hopefully this one will actually be made. As a member of the Pajamas editorial board is apt to say, Faster, Please.

Update: Lorie Byrd and Betsy Newmark have some thoughts as well.

Via Justin Hart of Right Side Redux, here's Victor Davis Hanson:

A bewildered visitor from Mars would tell Washingtonians something like: "For twelve years you occupied Saddam's airspace, since he refused to abide by the peace accords and you were afraid that he would activate his WMD arsenal again against the Kurds or his neighbors. Now that he is gone and for the first time you can confirm that his weapons program is finally defunct, you are mad about this new precedent that you have established: Given the gravity of WMD arsenals, the onus is now on suspect rogue nations to prove that they do not have weapons of mass destruction, rather than for civilization to establish beyond a responsible doubt that they do?"

So much of this attitude is caused by something Jonah Goldberg once dubbed "hypocrophobia":

Feminists demanded that "something" be done about the Taliban's treatment of women for years. Conservatives scoffed. But when the Bush administration saw fit to liberate the women of Afghanistan — for reasons larger than merely their freedom — feminists drew circles in the floor with their open-toed shoes and grumbled about how they didn't like war. But I guarantee you if Bill Clinton had unleashed the 10th Mountain Division on Kabul to ensure reproductive choice for Afghan women, Gloria Steinem would have done cartwheels.

Exactly. For the left, what matters far more than America's success is who will get the credit for it.

Last month, we linked to an exceptional essay by the Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last, who compared the attitudes of the modern American left with those of England's during the period between World Wars:

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.

As I wrote back then, "Reading passages such as these, it's obvious that a worldview such as Teddy Kennedy's or Cindy Sheehan's is nothing new". This passage from a 1941 essay by George Orwell truly hammers the same point home, and with only a handful of changes is directly applicable to the current American reactionary left:

The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone in England, but it had an especially direct effect upon two important sub-sections of the middle class. One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the left-wing intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic opposites--the half-pay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur, the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck--are mentally linked together and constantly interact upon one another; in any case they are born to a considerable extent into the same families.

* * *

But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole British morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire.

It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in
some sense 'left'. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E.
Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone describable as an 'intellectual' has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order.
Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for
him. In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be 'clever' was to be suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any important job. The intellectuals could find a function for themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political parties.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most 'anti-Fascist' during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia--their severance from the common culture of the country.

In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.

It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during the past ten years, as purely NEGATIVE creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class stupidity. Society could not use them, and they had not got it in them to see that devotion to one's country implies 'for better, for worse'. Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and intelligence. If you were a patriot you read BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE and publicly thanked God that you were 'not brainy'. If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical courage as barbarous. It is obvious that this preposterous convention cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot afford either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again. It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this possible.

And to a certain extent, once Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, it did create a grudging unity between the far left in England and America and the rest of each nation--although in England, the dissipation would return almost immediately after the end of the War, and in the US, about 35 years later.

More and more I do my DVD shopping at Amazon, but the Digital Bits DVD review site has a tip to a pretty nifty Best Buy exclusive:

Best Buy has got a very special deal going on. If you buy the King Kong: Two-Disc Collector's Edition there, you get the tin packaging version... bundled with BOTH Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young, AND a set of 5 additional poster art collector's postcards (different from the ones included in the tin), all for just $33.99! It's a great deal, and it gives you everything you want as a Kong fan DVD-wise. Just FYI.

It's listed as sold out on their Website, but I just picked up a copy at my local Best Buy.

The Bits also has a great interview with film historian Robert A. Harris on what a bear (so to speak) Kong was to restore before it could be released onto disc. I'll let you know if it was worth it at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Jerry Goldsmith died on July 22, 2004, at age 75. In 1999, he said he scored 175 films--and looking back at his career, there’s some terrific and memorable work and more than a few pieces that appear to have been done strictly for a paycheck.

Of course, any composer who’s written that many soundtracks is bound to have a few skeletons in his closet. In the “strictly for a paycheck” category, I’d nominate the “Barnaby Jones” theme, and 1988’s eminently forgettable “Rent-a-Cop”, which featured Burt Reynolds and Liza Minelli. But the all-time stinker has got to be 1981’s “Inchon”, which featured an aged Laurence Olivier under an inch of waxwork makeup as General Douglas Macarthur. The film’s $44 million budget came from Rev. Tsung Yung Moon--yes that Rev. Tsung Yung Moon, he of the Moonies. There is no music that could elevate that bomb.

But despite those misfires, Goldsmith has become a permanent part of movie history because of four great scores: “Patton”, “Chinatown”, “Planet of the Apes”, and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”.

That last title was far from a great movie, but Goldsmith’s theme became a big part of pop culture seven years after the film was released at Christmastime in 1979. Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator, who produced “Star Trek: The Next Generation” for TV in 1987, liked Goldmith’s “Star Trek” movie theme so much that he recycled it and tacked it onto the first 16 bars or so of Alexander Courage’s original theme from 1966.

Blaster Beams and Echoplexed Trumpets

Goldsmith wasn’t afraid to use unique instruments, effects and genres in his scores. For “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, Goldsmith used an instrument called “The Blaster Beam” for an deep metallic percussive “sprrrrrrrong!!!!” effect. The Internet Movie Database describes it as being “15 feet long, incorporating artillery shell casings and motorized magnets. It was used as part of any scene featuring V'ger.”

In his 1968 score for “Planet of the Apes”, Goldsmith merged primitive instruments and dissonant 20th century classical composing techniques to create an atmosphere that’s simultaneously primitive and futuristic. 1974’s “Chinatown” had a subtle jazz influence with its prominent muted trumpet. And in later years, Goldsmith used synthesizers along with traditional orchestral instruments in several of his scores.

Perhaps the best-known effect Goldsmith used was the Echoplex, a piece of electronic gear designed in the 1960s, which created delays and echoes (hence the name) via a spool of analog tape in the unit. Compared today’s digital effects, it’s remarkably crude, but a few die-hards, such as famed electric guitarist Jimmy Page, still cling to it.

Goldsmith used it for arguably his most important (and most emulated) score: “Patton”. Specifically, the echoed trumpets used in several key scenes, most famously the scene were General Patton (played by George C. Scott) visits an ancient cemetery where countless young men over thousands of years had been buried, and more would soon be joining. Goldsmith’s Echoplexed trumpets highlighted both the magnitude of war in our history, and its costs--and reminded the audience that Patton was simultaneously a brilliant field commander, and a man who believed in his own reincarnation.

The Internet Movie Database has a list of films and TV series that Goldsmith scored that are available on DVD--and you could have a far worse weekend of movie viewing than renting “Planet of the Apes”, “Patton”, “Chinatown”, and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, to experience Goldsmith at his best. As for the rest? Who knows--maybe one day a season or two of “Barnaby Jones” will be out on DVD as well. (Let’s hope “Inchon” does not return!)

Resource Links

Jerry Goldsmith Online: A well-done fan site, with much more additional information about the composer.

The Internet Movie Database: Goldsmith’s page has links to all of the films and TV series he wrote for.

An Interview with Goldsmith: Interesting discussion from the late 1990s, on Goldsmith’s oeuvre.

(From my August 2004 Electronic House newsletter.)

More and more I do my DVD shopping at Amazon, but the Digital Bits DVD review site has a tip to a pretty nifty Best Buy exclusive:

Best Buy has got a very special deal going on. If you buy the King Kong: Two-Disc Collector's Edition there, you get the tin packaging version... bundled with BOTH Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young, AND a set of 5 additional poster art collector's postcards (different from the ones included in the tin), all for just $33.99! It's a great deal, and it gives you everything you want as a Kong fan DVD-wise. Just FYI.

It's listed as sold out on their Website, but I just picked up a copy at my local Best Buy.

The Bits also has a great interview with film historian Robert A. Harris on what a bear (so to speak) Kong was to restore before it could be released onto disc. I'll let you know if it was worth it at some point in the not-too-distant future.

In Asharq Al-Awsat, which dubs itself "The leading Arabic international paper", Amir Taheri writes:

The idea of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq has been built into the entire project from day one. It was on that understanding that the Iraqi people chose not to fight for Saddam, thus allowing the coalition to win a rapid and easy military victory. That fact created a moral contract between the people of Iraq and the US-led coalition as co-liberators of the country. The Iraqi people’s part of the bargain was not to prevent the dismantling of the Ba’athist machinery of repression and war and to welcome the chance to build a new political system. The coalition’s part of the bargain was to protect Iraq against its internal and external enemies until it was strong enough to look after itself.

In the general election and the constitutional referendum held this year, the people of Iraq formally endorsed that contract. The coalition, for its part, must continue to honour that contract until new Iraq feels strong enough to bid farewell to its liberators.

That moment could come as early as next spring. But it could also take another year or two. My understanding of the situation in Iraq today is that the bulk of the coalition forces could be safely withdrawn within the next year.

The insurgency, which has already lost the political battle, is set to peak out in terms of the violence it is still capable of triggering against the Iraqi people. And if the recent performance of Iraq ’s new armed forces in a series of operations in two Western provinces is an indication, the Iraqis will be able to manage the insurgency on their own for as long as it takes to finish it off ..

What matters, however, is that it is up to the people of Iraq and its coalition allies to decide the moment an the modalities of the withdrawal It is a judgment that no outsider could make .. Those who opposed the liberation and those who have done all they could to undo it have no moral right to join that debate.

Indeed.

Pajamas Media writes that Teen People came this close to singing the chorus to "Springtime For Hitler":

According to Media Orchard, a public relations blog, "Teen People came close to publishing a story on the white-supremacist singing duo Prussian Blue that did not mention the words 'hate,' 'supremacist' or 'Nazi.' The writer had agreed with the teen duo's mother not to use these terms, but instead the more palatable "white pride." Media Orchard then goes on to add, "And you thought my "Anderson Cooper Interviews Hermann Goering" post was an exaggeration? Blogging Baby is also relieved that Teen People has killed a forthcoming article about the 13 year-olds, who pen paeans to "Rudolf Hess, man of Peace" and wear t-shirts featuring a smiley-face Hitler. "It seems someone at the pub (Time Inc., Teen People’s publisher, blames it on the omnipresent "junior staffer") assured the twins they would avoid using the terms "hate", "supremacist", and "Nazi" in the write-up. (But apparently, comparing the duo to the Olsen twins wasn’t off-limits.)"

It's Anthony Burgess' world, we just live in it, when the left can compare an American president to Hitler seemingly daily, but a liberal magazine can't be bothered to call an actual pro-Hitler singing duo Nazis.

(Maybe Jodie Foster can direct their music videos.)

I wrote several articles for Audio/Video Interiors; it was the original home theater magazine, and inspired by Architectural Digest. So it's reasonably safe to say that I love high-end interiors and exteriors. But if you ever catch me uttering anything along the lines of this astonishing quote discovered in a recent issue of Arechitectural Digest by ShrinkWrapped, a blogging psychoanalyst, well, send me off to a psychoanalyst:

"Once we got the house, I didn't need my therapist anymore. And when it was finished, we invited her over, and she liked the renovation. She found it very beautiful. She approved."

I suppose it's somewhat less potentially dangerous than plastic surgery--though infinitely more invasive to the wallet.

(Via Roger L. Simon.)

Glenn Reynolds writes:

A USEFUL COLLECTION of urban legends about the Iraq war. (Via Rand Simberg). Also, here's a look at the New York Times' shifting editorial positions on Iraq. It's almost as if partisan politics are behind them.

Heh^TM.

Update: Don Surber rounds up several quotes from Democrats in Congress during the run-up in 2002 and writes, "The left was sure he had WMD. It did not care. It opposed disarming him. To complain about the lack of WMD today is hypocrisy".

Not to mention dishonest.

Guest-blogging for Hugh Hewitt, Mary Katharine Ham (whom I had the pleasure to meet last week in DC when we live-blogged the Senate), looks at "The story that launched a thousand Leno/Letterman jokes".

Wizbang looks at the holiday who's primary symbol Must Not Be Named--at least in English.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, my local Albertson's Supermarket is happily advertising Freshly Cut Christmas Trees, however.

Update: Michelle Malkin has more on the War On Christmas. And this post is a good place to replay something I wrote last week:

As I noted in my post about the OSM launch, New York Times fashion contributor Elizabeth Hayt thinks we're in midst of a conservative theocracy. But it's been ten years since the GOP took control of Congress, they've held the Senate for most of that period, and January will mark five years of President Bush in office. Meantime, the gift shop inside that theocratic GOP-controlled Senate sells festive "Holiday" ornaments. To place on your non-demoninational winter solstitial temporary interior tree.

That's a theocracy? Only to a woman who just knows she's this close to being fitted for a burka with GOP elephants printed on it. (Probably made of polyester, too.)

Another Update: Don Surber has a bit of good news from California.

Stephen Moore profiles the man who just might be the next president of the United States, and finds--not surprisingly--some disconcerting elements in his worldview:

On a broader range of economic issues, though, Mr. McCain readily departs from Reaganomics. His philosophy is best described as a work in progress. He is refreshingly blunt when he tell me: "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated." OK, so who does he turn to for advice? His answer is reassuring. His foremost economic guru is former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm (who would almost certainly be Treasury secretary in a McCain administration). He's also friendly with the godfather of supply-side economics, Arthur Laffer.

But Mr. McCain is no antitax supply-sider himself. He grandstanded against the Bush capital-gains and dividend tax cuts and even co-sponsored an amendment with Tom Daschle to scuttle the reduction in the highest income-tax rates. Why? "I just thought it was too tilted to the wealthy and I still do. I want to cut the taxes on the middle class." Even when I confront him with emphatic evidence that those tax cuts have been an economic triumph and have increased revenues, he is unrepentant and defends his "no" vote by falling back on class-warfare type thinking: "We have a wealth gap in this country, and that worries me."

It is here in my conversation with the senator that the McCain economic philosophy starts to come into vivid focus. Throughout our chat he has referred to Theodore Roosevelt in almost reverential terms and glows when I ask about him. He calls TR "my hero . . . and one of our greatest presidents," and at one point he excitedly searches through his briefcase and pulls out a book that he is reading on the famously tumultuous election of 1912. That was when TR bolted from the Republican Party (which Mr. McCain concedes was "a mistake") and formed the Bull Moose Party to dethrone William Taft. When I mention TR's trust-busting (which was mostly counterproductive economically), Mr. McCain really comes to life, exultantly points his finger in the air, smiles and cries out: "He called the trusts 'the malefactors of wealth.' "

And in this very moment it becomes clear to me that John McCain aspires to be a modern-day TR. The similarities are unmistakable: Both were war heroes, mavericks within their own party, reformers and defenders of the little guy.

But here in a nutshell lies the danger of the McCain view of the world. Where some see the vast virtue of entrepreneurial wealth-generators and job-producers, he too often sees "robber barons." He seems forever in search of the next Joe Camel, Charles Keating, Ken Lay or Jose Canseco (Mr. McCain has been a prominent crusader against steroids in baseball).

* * *

He views himself, I believe, as a kind of modern-day Robin Hood, a defender of the downtrodden and tormentor of the bullying special interests, which is endearing and unquestionably a big part of his broad political appeal, but often leads to populist and parasitic economic policy conclusions like higher taxes on the rich and attacks on "huge oil profits." He wants to be the caped crusader against corruption. The buzzword for the McCain Straight Talk Express in 2008 will be reform: "I want to reform education, reform Medicare and Social Security, reform lobbying and campaigns. Reform immigration. Reform. Reform. Reform."

When I ask him about America's remarkable income mobility, he responds, "Yes, but I keep seeing the thousands of faces of those poor people who were left behind in New Orleans," as if this was a failure of capitalism, not a failure of government. And with this, he gobbles down the last bite of his unpretentious lunch--a hot dog and chips--shakes my hand warmly, and sprints off to his next appointment to clean up whatever the latest mess is in Washington.

I come away believing that if I'm ever in a knife fight or in a foxhole, there is no one I'd rather have next to me than John McCain. Whether he's someone who should be steering the rudders of the American economy is a different issue altogether.

Indeed^TM--although hopefully with Gramm and Laffer as advisors, he wouldn't screw things up too badly.

Speaking of the Manolo, he writes:

Here for the Black Friday are the Manolo’s political beliefs, summed up in the following short statements

Read the whole of the thing--the Ed is in the complete of the agreement on all of the items on the list, especially items five and six:

5) The clothes they are important. They say important things about your identity, even if you pretend that they do not.

6) The fashion it is not the nuclear rocket brain surgery. One does not need the grounding in the theoretical sciences to know how to dress well.

For men, I'd start here.

Update: Julie Fredrickson of Almost Girl writes:

Fashion, more than many arenas, is one of contradictions and half efforts and half starts. My theory is that because fashion tugs so firmly at the core of our own identities as an industry it manifests those contradictions in ways that other areas do not. Toothpaste, despite all marketing to the contrary, does not say as much about us as our clothing. Image, expectations, and ideals all manifest themselves through the aesthetics we project. Clothing makes the man they say, but only because image has the power to convert, cajole, and seduce in a way that other consumer products do not. A large TV can only impress if others come to your house. Clothing is the armour we wear in society, in many ways it is our public persona.

For guys, it's even more so--as Oscar E. Schoeffler, the former fashion editor of Esquire once 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".

Amy Alkon observes life imitating The Manolo:

Don't miss [Elizabeth Snead's] account of [Aaron] Sorkin, Dowd, and the shoes:

Sorkin admitted he often thought of Dowd while writing witty banter for actresses. And he did tell a funny, if slightly embarrassing, shoe fetish tale about Dowd, whom he met during the first season of "The West Wing” when he was shooting scenes in Washington, D.C.

“I wrote an off-screen character who was a powerful, highly feared female columnist for the New York Times. One of the White House staffers had inadvertently made a joke about her shoes and was afraid that the administration was going to suffer if he didn’t apologize.”

To thank Dowd for being “a good sport” about the thinly veiled reference, Sorkin sent her a slew of expensive shoes from Barneys the day the show aired.

“She liked them a lot,” recalled Sorkin. “But she told me that because she sometimes covers Hollywood in her column, to accept the gift was unethical. But she didn’t give back the shoes. What she has done, and this was five or six years ago, is, every once in a while, she will just give me cash. Forty, sixty, one hundred dollars … It’s not clear to me how giving me cash makes the ethical picture less murky, but it was terribly important to Maureen that this be done right and this is her version. She just gives me cash.”

“It’s gonna take me to the year 2030 to pay off those shoes,” confessed Dowd, still smiling, albeit not quite as sweetly.

Dowd says she needs a man. Do we know if the Manolo is single?

(Via Pajamas Media.)

Found via Power Line, Midge Decter (whom I briefly met earlier this year in Washington, DC) has some thoughts on the beginnings of America's culture war:

The first and most important thing of all for any real understanding of the nature of America’s cul­tural war is the fact that it has been going on not merely since the period identified by the name of “Vietnam” but for about a century and a half. That clash of ideas and attitudes that made such a deal of noise in the 1960s and 1970s—and which has con­tinued more quietly and more deeply in recent years—is in fact no more than a particularly gaudy episode in a very old conflict.

I like to say that this conflict began on July 8, 1839. Why that day in that year? Obviously, histor­ical developments can never really be dated quite so neatly, or neatly at all, especially where such developments have to do with culture. Anyway, I am, of course, being somewhat facetious.

Still, a date is sometimes helpful in giving one per­spective, and I have picked the date of July 8, 1839, because that was the day that witnessed the birth of one John Davison Rockefeller, Sr. And some time around that year, too, an already 45-year-old gentle­man named Cornelius Vanderbilt was planning how he would become the owner of a certain public util­ity that would before long prove to be of major importance to the economic development of the United States, namely, the New York Central Rail­road. I could go on and on: a list of John D. Rock­efeller’s and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s contemporaries who were responsible for the explosive creation and expansion of American industry, for business inno­vation, for the newly creative exploitation of natural resources—such a list could keep us here all after­noon, sunk in envy for these men’s visions and the sheer moxie with which they converted their visions into a reality. The government of course helped, but mostly by keeping out of their way.

An Economic Miracle

The result, as we know and experience for our­selves down to this day, was a positive explosion of wealth: the private wealth of Rockefeller, Vander­bilt, and their fellow adventurers, to be sure, but way beyond that, there was the wealth, the belief in self, the venturesomeness, inventiveness, openness to the new that before too long came to be charac­teristic of the country as a whole. Of course, they did not do it all, this band of adventurers, but they led the way and helped to give anyone who was enterprising, on however large or small a scale, the faith to take his future into his own hands.

Moreover, while these men were preparing their economic miracle, the country was going through the bitter bloodletting of the Civil War—the kind of national catastrophe from which, without their kind of faith in a future of wealth and vitality, a society might never quite recover. And in the end, the United States grew to be rich and powerful beyond the dreams of the most murderously avari­cious emperor.

So now we come to the question that bears on my unhappy subject—culture: Were these men in their own time blessed, celebrated, honored for their achievement by America’s thinkers and writ­ers? Need I ask? Look in any history book; and look at the writings of the time: These men were then, and have continued to be, designated the “Robber Barons”—with no admiration, let alone gratitude, intended.

It is true that many of these men tended to revel in, and make a great and not necessarily attractive public show of, their wealth. Although, in addition to living like emperors, some of them were also, as we know, very civic-minded—throughout the land there are cities with libraries, opera houses, settle­ment houses, museums that are owed entirely to their largesse. And some of them (though most def­initely not, I regret to say, Cornelius Vanderbilt) were also, in one way or another, charitable toward their less favored fellow citizens.

But if it is also true that the kind of generous public and patriotic spirit that is so vividly on dis­play in this room today was rare, or even simply absent, among these men, they did set a course that would in the end, whether they willed it or not, prove to be indispensable to the country’s welfare.

So—and now we come to the question of the day—were they honored, appreciated, or let us even say forgiven by the keepers of the country’s social and intellectual authority? Need I ask? The term “Robber Barons” says it all.

Read the whole thing, as Decter takes the impact of the culture war up to the present day, along with its impact on the Vietnam War. And be sure to check out Edward J. Renehan Jr.'s recent essay in Tech Central Station, which focuses on the orgins of that "Robber Barons" opprobrium.

Reuters looks at the online retailers' equivilent of Black Friday: "Cyber Monday":

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. online holiday sales are expected to hit nearly $20 billion this year and should take off on Monday, when consumers return to work and their fast Internet connections after the long Thanksgiving weekend.

"Cyber Monday," the term coined for the Monday after Thanksgiving, comes on the heels of the busy "Black Friday" shopping day when many brick-and-mortar retailers begin turning a profit.

The good news for online shoppers this year, is that "Cyber Monday" is becoming the Web shopping equivalent to "Black Friday" when retailers launch major sales and discounts to drive traffic, analysts said.

Pajamas Media has a round-up of action from the official kick-off of the Christmas shopping season.

Meanwhile, Virginia Postrel looks at--to coin a phrase--the Substance of Style:

The great thing about fashion markets today is how diverse they are, even outside of major metro areas. Many different styles coexist and there isn't a simple, price-based status hierarchy. You can buy trendy but disposable clothes--"fast fashion"--or classic, enduring pieces. Basic jeans, sweaters, and T-shirts cost about the same, in nominal dollars, as they did when I was a teenager in the late 1970s, and their materials and construction are generally much better. Those cheap clothes are also helping a billion Chinese climb out of abject poverty.

The bad thing about fashion markets today is how many empire-waist tops and dresses they sell. I don't care how cute, young, and skinny you are. Those things make you look pregnant.

The other bad thing about fashion markets is that they give The Decade That Taste Forgot a feeling of permanence it in no way deserves.

Sometimes life really does imititate a cheesy Gerry Anderson TV show: Glenn Reynolds files a report from deep within the underground base of SHADO: "the invasion of Iraq was all about securing control of a crashed alien spaceship that had landed in Saddam's territory. Duh."

(I'm back in California, incidentally, via American Airlines, not the Mothership.)

As TigerHawk writes, give thanks that your politics don't compel you to do this.

A little bonbon for Thanksgiving dessert over at Pajamas Media: my interview with one of my favorite authors: the great James Lileks, who recently wrote Mommy Knows Worst, a whitty, sarcastic piece of boomer-era satire.

(But chances are, you knew that already.)

Update: the appropriately-named Corbusier, blogging at Architecture & Morality, has some additional thoughts on Lileks' books and the concept of creative destruction.

They're living blogging the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade over at OSM, Glenn Reynolds has recipe links, and Power Line is celebrating both common sense, and a famous birthday boy today.

By the way, is there any escaping Harvey Fierstein on Thanksgiving Day? Macy's sent him out as Mrs. Claus(!) in 2003, and this year, every ground shot of the floats going past includes a record store advertising his role as Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof.

What an understated way--with perfect deniability--for CBS to give straightlaced middle America the middle finger after all of the scorn that was heaped on them over the past couple of years. I wonder which bright spark at CBS chose that angle? It's brilliant!

Update: OSM cashed my enormous bribery check, and invited me to join the live blogging. Click on over!

A tale of two wars: Ed Morrissey compares and contrasts our continuing involvement in Bosnia and Iraq, and wonders why the latter has driven the fever-swamp far left into bilious fits of pretzel logic and vicious ad hominem attacks, and the former is barely a blip on the debating radar.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

OSM Pajamas Media has a link-filled, detailed post with all the details.

Hollywood is trying to play catch-up to the market "pioneered" by The Passion; The Chronicles of Narnia is the first film made and marketed somewhat following The Passon's template. But Libertas reminds us that there are significant differences between the two films:

I’m reminded of a phrase that Govindini and I have heard about a thousand times over the past year while moving in conservative film circles: ‘Passion dollars.’ Suffice it to say that lots of people are chasing these dollars these days, although not everyone seems to understand where those dollars actually came from.

Like most people, I expect The Chronicles of Narnia to do very well once it opens in December. Its success, however, will probably have little to do with what made The Passion such a unique and unexpected success. If Narnia becomes the blockbuster everyone expects it to be, it will be because its producers at Walden Media (and its distributors at Disney) are following in the footsteps of George Lucas, who with his Star Wars back in 1977 introduced to the modern cinema the mystical, Joseph Campbell-inspired ‘hero’s journey’ into fantastic realms - so familiar to us now from franchises like the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter series. Like those franchises, the Narnia series will be presented as a lavish, effects-driven event films suitable for family viewing - something of a rarity these days, at least among live action films.

The Passion was really something else altogether - a violent, R-rated film shot in Latin and Aramaic! When I first saw it, The Passion reminded me of nothing so much as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver - a gritty, blood-soaked, intensely personal statement about self-sacrifice. The Passion would’ve fit in beautifully during the 1970’s, perhaps Hollywood’s last great decade for personal, director-driven film. And it also fit beautifully into the post-9/11 sensibility of national self-sacrifice.

This isn’t to state any particular preference for one or the other type of film - I like both - but merely to point out that there is a great deal of variety in what one might consider a ‘Christian’ film. And I’m not even saying this as a Christian, myself, but as someone with great respect for the Christian experience and Christian contribution to this nation’s culture …

(Original post ends with ellipses.)

The reason why I put "pioneered" in quotation marks at the beginning of this post is that for decades, Hollywood aimed lots and lots of films at the Christian market, but it's doubtful it would have used a phrase like that. Look at all of the Cecil B. DeMille-style biblical films that Tinseltown cranked out from the 1920s to the middle of the 1960s (ending--not entirely coincidentally--about the time the Hays Office gave way to the MPAA code). More often than not, these films were commercial hits. (Few movies are entirely a guaranteed success, of course.) But for various reasons, Hollywood seemed to collectively think these films were too naive to make after the post-Easy Rider Young Turks took over Hollywood in the late '60s and early '70s. It's gratifying to see Hollywood return to these films after a 40-year hiatus.

My wife and I are still at Rough Creek Lodge, and had our first shooting lessons today. Here's Nina's report--Ed

I am a long time, knee jerk, gun-phobic, New York City-raised never having met anyone who shot a gun 'til I was in my 20s, gun control (not gun banning, but heavy control) middle-aged dame. So even signing up for shooting lessons was edgy for me.

But boy did I have fun today! Chad (yes, that was really his name, and yes he did look like he was sent over from Central Casting) who taught us was adorable. If only I was 20 years younger, unmarried and could handle living in the wilds of Texas. But I digress. He was wonderful, patient and an excellent teacher.

Right now, dayglow orange three-inch disks all over the Lone Star State are trembling in fear. Ed hit two and "winged" one. (Can you wing a three-inch dayglow orange disk?) I hit one.

Ed will no doubt be buying appropriately understated hunting clothes from very expensive clothiers in England. I was wearing a $19.95 jacket I bought, I kid you not, in a gas station festooned with Harley Davidson murals in Glen Rose, Texas. I will keep it forever as the jacket I lost my shooting virginity in.

Next year we'll probably sign up for a real hunt, as shooting defenseless three-inch day-glow orange disks is just wrong. Besides, even with a nice Bernaise sauce, shattered clay just doesn't have much in the way of flavor. Chad said birds are actually easier to hit. For one thing, they are bigger than three inches. And they are much tastier to eat.

It's rare that I read something that perfectly encapsulates my worldview. But I could have written this Dennis Prager piece--only it would have been nowhere near as artfully articulated as Dennis's writing.

In other words: read the whole thing.

(Via the Brothers Judd.)

Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople.

But OSM was once Pajamas Media. Now it's Pajamas Media again, not OSM--and Charles and Roger explain the change back.

(I have a feeling a few other tweaks are also in the works.)

Remember the grief the MSM gave the RNC during the 2000 presidential election, when they claimed there was a subliminal "RATS" visible on screen when the word "DEMOCRATS" scrolled across the screen during an RNC TV ad?

CNN is spotted running an "X" every 15th of a second during Vice President Dick Cheney's speech today. CNN claims it was a technical glitch, but Hugh Hewitt isn't buying it, and looks at additional examples of the liberal media subliminally illustrating their loatching of a conservative president--and let's add this to the list as well.

Orrin Judd asks: what did the New Yorker know about Iraq, and when did they know it? (Hint: 2002.)

Meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein has some related thoughts.

My latest Pajamas Media profile is up: Adam Bellow, the man who left the Zabar's Left.

Over at OSM, Glenn Reynolds and about 50 other bloggers do what the MSM refuses to: pry open the Memory Hole and look inside.

Found via Betsy Newmark, James Lileks brilliantly deconstructs the recent insane praise by Kurt Vonnegut of Muslim sucide bombers as "very brave people". (How insane? "You would know death is going to be painless, so the anticipation - it must be an amazing high."

If (and I'm not holding my breath) Vonnegut ever reads the piece and meets Lileks, I'd like to think the conversation might go somewhat like the line in Red Dragon/Manhunter between Hannibal Lector and FBI Agent Will Graham:

Doctor Hannibal Lector: How did you catch me?
Will Graham: You had disadvantages.
Doctor Hannibal Lector: What disadvantages?
Will Graham: You're insane.

Over the next couple of decades, as the more elderly members of the cosmpolitan intellectual elite die off, it will be interesting to note which--if any--obits mention the advanced cases of BDS that infected so many of their brains for nearly a decade.

I'm blogging in the setting sun from the balcony of my suite at Rough Creek Lodge, an 11,000-acre hunting lodge in Glen Rose, Texas (a couple of hours outside of Dallas). It's got everything a Red State kind of guy (or gal) could want: a bar with the NFL on its big 16X9 plasma TV, incredble food--and service--in its restaurant, and hunting and fishing galore. Plus ATV rentals, a driving range for golfers, a pool, spa, and, well, all sorts of other things.

And it's got free Wi-Fi as well in all the rooms--which is how you're able to read this. More later, or tomorrow, depending upon timing of dinner tonight.

We had dinner here last year around this time, and a guest told us that "Even if you're not into all that hunting stuff, you should stay here a few days--it's really terrific!"

So we are! More later, or tomorrow.

Update: More details here.

(And incidentally, this is pretty heh-worthy, too.)

And Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and about three quarters of the left side of the political spectrum. For a post titled "A Brief History of a Long War (Iraq, 1990-2003)", Mudville Gazette has a long, link-filled, extremely detailed look.

As to its future, Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on what happens next.

Really interesting post by "Dr. Helen", aka the InstaWife--be sure to follow its link and read the comments as well.

Some short personal random takes beyond the OSM piece, which was primarily focused on the new media aspects of the event:

It's amazing, in an odd sort of way, how politicians practically think and breathe in speeches. It's a bit like a salesman memorizing his patter (something I did for a few years) or a radio interviewee (something I've also done) knowing his. As James Lileks recently wrote, the trick is making the patter sound fresh each time you fire it off--because you know you'll be firing the riffs off all the time.

Some politicians go beyond that of course, to talk purely in soundbites. Bill Frist managed to work his medical background into just about every other sentence: I'm a physician. I'm a surgeon. As a doctor... And that was in the first minute of his speech to us.

Say Bill, you're not a doctor by any chance, are you? If Frist runs for the White House, these lines have a very good chance of being his equivalent of another senator's cliche: a haughty, French-looking fellow from Massachusetts--who, by the way, served in Vietnam.

Speaking of Frist, Betsy Newmark is spot-on when she writes

:

Right Side Redux has the video of Senator Frist's response to a question that starts off with Harry Potter and ends up asking when the GOP in the Senate is going to get some backbone. It's a cute question and Frist answers it with boilerplate about being a leader of a conservative movement, yadda, yadda, yadda. He doesn't have an answer for the part about getting some backbone because he so obviously is finding his weakened more and more each week.

It's gotten to the point that, in a week when Democrats and some Republicans have launched an all-out attack on the conduct of the war in Iraq and the GOP's domestic agenda is stalled in both houses, Frist is out there stating that asbestos legislation will be the "Senate's top priority" in 2006. We're at war; Congressmen and Senators are talking about deadlines for pulling out and this guy's top priority is asbestos? Geesh!

Indeed, to coin an adverb.

Jonathan Rauch was dead-on in "The Accidental Radical": traditional Buckley/Reagan/Gingrich style conservatism is either dead, or on long-term hiatus, when one Republican senator (I forget who) can say in back-to-back sentences, "We've expanded Medicare and health insurance access for all. And we need to keep looking for ways to trim the budget." Doubleplusgood use of newspeak, old boy! Hello--why not stop trying expand entitlements and "free" goodies for everyone? That's where the bulk of the spending is increasing.

It's kind of a shame a hardcore libertarian like Radley Balko or one of the Reason boys wasn't present yesterday. When George Allen--who is guaranteed to be perceived as a conservative if he runs for the White House in '08 can praise opening commuter lanes to electric cars as one of his home state's solutions to energy efficiency, and not get that it's the commuter lanes themselves that bog down highways and make them less efficient, that's a huge stolen base for the anti-automobile segment of the far left.

As I noted in my post about the OSM launch, New York Times fashion contributor Elizabeth Hayt thinks we're in midst of a conservative theocracy. But it's been ten years since the GOP took control of Congress, they've held the Senate for most of that period, and January will mark five years of President Bush in office. Meantime, the gift shop inside that theocratic GOP-controlled Senate sells festive "Holiday" ornaments. To place on your non-demoninational winter solstitial temporary interior tree.

That's a theocracy? Only to a woman who just knows she's this close to being fitted for a burka with GOP elephants printed on it. (Probably made of polyester, too.)

Pamela of Atlas Shrugs has a great collection of photos from the impromtu pre-launch party at the Brasserie in the Seagram Bulding on Tuesday night that Neo-Neocon and I organized. It was originally concieved as a little get-together for three people (Neo, Nina and I) and--sort of like a Weblog itself--just grew like Topsy, as you'll see.

Yesterday, I left New York’s Penn Station on an Amtrak Acela bound for the District of Columbia, to have a blogger confab with Senate Republicans. The Senate Republicans seemed to have gotten an incredible case of the wobblies recently, so it will certainly be interesting to here their rationales. That they were smart organize this meeting with a variety of conservative bloggers is a helpful sign, I suppose.

Naturally, there’s no Wi-Fi onboard Acela, and I stupidly forgot to bring a dongle to connect my laptop to my cell phone to send data at 56k-ish rates, so I wrote this long rambling piece to upload later (if you’re reading this, you know it’s "later"), rather than a bunch of short hit and run individual posts. On the plus side, the seats are larger and more comfortable than the Amfleet cars that have been in service since Amtrak commissioned them in the mid-70s after absorbing the aging fleet of the nation’s post-World War II passenger cars. There are several spots on each car where the seats face each other and a fold-open table can be deployed to do some work. Except, because this is Amtrak, the row with those style seats didn’t have any power.

But the side I’m now sitting on does. So with juice to spare, here are some thoughts on Wednesday’s launch:

Like Penn Station, Pajamas Media is fading into the distance, as OSM itself leaves the station: we had a blow-out cocktail bash Wednesday night in the W, and then around 9-ish Roger, Charles, Nina and I slipped out to the Smith & Wollensky Grill Room (as opposed to the Smith & Wollensky Pool Room, I guess...) Seriously though, the S&W Grill is a little less formal, and open until much later, which was fine with us: we all needed time to decompress after an crazy day, and even crazier six months. We all agreed we had the best waiter: loud but cheerful, with a vaguely Philadelphia-ish accent, and nice shock of salt & pepper hair. He was enthusiastic and efficient, but unlike most similarly eager California waiters, never showed you pictures of his children or asked your thoughts on whether or not he should reamortize his 30 year adjustable rate mortgage.

We had tried to talk Steve Green of VodkaPundit into joining us, but we couldn’t pry him away from his many groupies. And it’s not too surprising: in his navy double-breasted suit, pocket square, and perfectly coifed hair, Steve was fighting off bloggerwomen all night. But somehow, I don’t think he minded the attention.

About an hour into our roast beef hash (which Nina and I had previously sampled late Sunday night, when they were the only thing open), we were joined by Andrew Breitbart, co-author of the terrific Hollywood: Interrupted and the man behind not only Matt Drudge, but Arianna Huffington's Huffblog.

Breitbart knows the X’s and O’s of Internet news much the same way that Bill Walsh knows the West Coast Offense. You can almost see the sparks flying as he talks. And we were all happy to listen and absorb his advice.

Afterwards, I had one last Martini at the W’s bar, served by the thin brunette with the endless legs who’s been tending bar there all week. When I ordered a Martini, she asked in the most dulcet and demure Noo Yawk tones why I wasn’t drinking the same thing I had the night before. (A MAHTEEENEEEE?! WHAAAAT! NO LILLET BLONDE?!) But I guess I shouldn’t complain: only an octopus could have worked more efficiently tending that crowded bar alone. And it wouldn’t have the legs for the uniform’s high slit skirt and tight-fitting top.

Tim Blair was still down there, and I don’t care with Jeff Goldstein keeps telling me--he looks a lot taller than 5’1” to me! And more importantly, seems like a heck of a nice guy. (And come to think it, I still owe him a Martini, after he spotted me a Lillet on Tuesday.) We met a blogger who’s name or blog I didn’t catch, but she was a hoot: she noticed I was wearing a Hamilton tank watch and immediately wanted to show it to her husband, a very well polished looking 30 or forty-something investment banker. (I bought it in Hawaii in 2000, not knowing anything about it except that I admired its 1920s-ish looks--which go with my 1920s-ish suits. Mister, we could use a man like Calvin Coolidge again!)

Beyond its thoroughly well-lubricated bloggers, (I wonder if Roger has ever asked Steyn or Lileks what they drink, so he can send a case to all his writers…) all-in-all, OSM certainly had a first class launch Wednesday--a couple of bumps on the way out of the drydock, but nobody expected the launch to be entirely frission-free.

Which reminds me: these fellows misinterpreted my feverish stenograph-style typing Wednesday morning as a case 1999-style dot.com fever. The funny thing is, living in Silicon Valley, I watched lots of dot.coms crash and burn, interviewed their staffs for magazines, and had lots of friends who had signed up for all-too-brief tours of duty. And my wife has served as attorney for more than a few start-ups. I’ve also written for a surprising number of start-up magazine ventures that didn’t make it past their first year. (Not to mention writing some of the first articles for National Review Online’s nascent Financial section, some of the first pieces for Blogcritics, and starting a blog three and a half years ago, back when you still had to explain to everyone what the heck a frickin’ blog was.

You don’t have to do that any more. Thanks, Ms. Mapes! Thanks Mr. Klein!

But do I think that OSM is a sure bet? No, of course not. And I’ve never drunk the Tony Robbins-ish Kool-Aid that makes you believe that you must not think any bad thoughts at all or you’ll ruin all that positive thinking. Will OSM succeed? I don’t know--and more importantly, the members of the Complainy-American Community who’ve bitched, moaned and pecked at its ankles for the past few months really don’t know. (Jealousy and paranoia make for a bitter cocktail when mixed together.) But what’s the downside? If OSM fails, it’s not going to be the Internet equivalent of the wreck of the Penn Central: this is as demassified a business as possible, which will make long-term casualties virtually nil: Roger, Charles, Glenn, Michelle Malkin and the other "Names" aren't going to lose their massive readership. Nor will anybody else involved in the project. Do you care whether your broker works for Smith Barney or Paine-Webber if he’s been doing great work for you for a decade?

But I do know that like George Steinbrenner, or Jerry Jones when he bought the Dallas Cowboys, Roger and Charles and their backers have acquired some incredible talent. Now it’s time to put ‘em in position, on the field, and turn them loose, as OSM begins to deliver news on as timely a basis as possible, and a variety of opinions from 70 or so very smart bloggers who don’t lack for ideas or shy from controversy.

Update: IowaHawk explains the OSM business model, using detailed PowerPoint slides and precise mathematical calculations. When it comes to analytical business journalism, Larry Kudlow's got nothing on this guy!

I have a round-up of the Senate GOP meets the Blogosphere confab over at the brand spanking new OSM site, complete with my photo of Sen. George Allen; speaking of photos, RightWing Redux has a shot of your humble narrator blogging away.

(I was going to call this post "Mr. Ed Goes To Washington", but that might send the wrong message to the Nick At Nite/TV Land demographic. More to follow in a bit: I just got into a South Jersey Marriot, as my parents lack broadband--which isn't too surprising, as they pre-date the Nick At Nite/TV Land demographic.)

Update: More thoughts, here.

Can't get enough Pajamas/OSM coverage? Truth Laid Bear is your one-stop shop for launch day linkage.

Off shortly to the blow-out Open Source Open Bar Media Party.

In our piece on the Internet's Long Tail for Tech Central Station, we quoted a pretty nifty line from Jeff Jarvis about Johnny Carson, who had then recently passed away:

Carson also represented the golden age of America's shared experience in media. That era lasted about three decades, from the late '50s to the late '80s, when the three networks turned most cities into one-newspaper towns and we all watched the same thing. I don't regret that era dying; it means we now have more choice and choice equals control. But it was a unique time in our culture, when popular culture became a common platform, a common touchstone for Americans. We all got Johnny's jokes.

The launch today of OSM is but one of example of the continuing demassification of the media; In a post titled "The Revolution Is Upon Us" that links to an AOL article titled, "AOL Launching Online Video Of TV's Favorite Oldies", Hugh Hewitt explores another example that portends an even greater fracturing of mass culture:

At launch, the available shows will include:

Adventures of Brisco County Jr., Alice, Babylon 5, Beetlejuice, Chico and the Man, Dark Justice, Eight is Enough, F Troop, The F.B.I., Falcon Crest, Freakazoid, Freddy's Nightmares, The Fugitive, Growing Pains, Hangin' with Mr. Cooper, Head of the Class, Histeria!, Kung Fu, La Femme Nikita, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Maverick, The New Adventures of Batman, Perfect Strangers, Pinky and the Brain, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Sisters, Spenser: For Hire, V, Welcome Back, Kotter, and Wonder Woman.

AOL expects to add more shows over time.

Hugh adds:

First, given that F Troop is perhaps the most politically incorrect show ever made, I am astonished that AOL is leading with this classic television series as it moves to compete directly with broadcast television.

Second, this is the sound of doom for the networks. Before long their audience will go the way of newspapers' audiences --splintered far beyond their already shattered state as Americans simply call up whatever it is they want to see, whenever they want to see it.

Television in general, and televised sports are arguably the single biggest remaining aspects of mass media. As television continues to demassify (a process begun about 25 years ago with cable TV) and further splinters via video-on-demand and now web-based video-on-demand, the idea of New York and Hollywood dominating pop culture may begin to fade with a speed that will only grow expontentially.

(H/T: Tim Blair for the above riff.)

In an essay in The New York Daily News titled "Poor Babies", John Leo compiles his list of the top victims of 2005.

Via Betsy Newmark, who asks, "Gosh, is anything left over from my childhood going to remain? Piggy banks are out and we can't have jungle gyms or teeter totters any more. The world really is a topsy-turvy place."

Hey, as the PC-fueled madness grinds invariably onward in the attempt to make America resemble the stuck-on-stupid eschaton of Europe, these lists just get more surreal every year.

Victor Davis Hanson writes that Europe has immanentized the eschaton--and with the predictible heads-is-tails results. I was about to link to a whole heaping helping portion of Hanson, then realized you'd be even better off reading the whole thing.

I'm inbetween events, trying to recharge the batteries between the launch at the Rainbow Room, and the BYOL (bring your own lampshade) party tonight here at the W.

Thank you to Glenn Reynolds, La Shawn Barber, and Dave Johnston linking to my stream of conciousness real-time, typo-filled blogging of the events this morning.

Perhaps the most postmdern experience I felt was sitting at an opposite table during the morning sessions to La Shawn (who I had only just met about 20 minutes prior) and to Dave Johnston (whom I wouldn't actually get to greet until after lunch), and doing a Technorati search to see them mentioning my live blogging.

I suspect in a few years though, simultaneous live-blogging of events is going to be much more common.

(Almost as common as vanity Google and Technorati searches are today by Internet savvy journalists...)

Both La Shawn and Dave have comments about the after-lunch speakers, and Jeff Goldstein, live blogging the launch in-person direct from his home in Colorado, notes that a potential gatecrasher was turned away in a rather dramatic--and some might even say erotic--fashion.

Update: Very minor housekeeping note: I just adjusted the timestamps on all of today's posts to reflect Eastern Standard Time, unlike this blog's usual California-based Pacific Standard Time stamps.

The Pajamas Media homepage has streaming live audio via Windows and Real Media.

Check out the blog post below for more on-the-scene updates.

Unlike Jeff Goldstein, I'm actually here, so the following will be tempered by a generous interaction with reality. But here goes...

10:05: Folks are wandering in: Neo-Neocon is talking to my wife about hate email; Evan Coyne Maloney just introduced himself to Charles Johnson.

10:06: Announcement to take a seat.

10:07: Andrew Breitbart is at the podium, introducing OSM to the audience, which looks to be about 90 to 100 people, based on a very, very quick and rough table count.

10:10: Breitbart: "Roger and Charles have gone on a shopping spree and linked together 50 of my favorite bookmarks."

10:12: Breitbart introduces Roger L. Simon.

Roger's speech explains the origins of the Pajamas Media meme. Here's the final draft, Roger may have made a few extemporaneous minor changes:

I would like to welcome you all to the launch and – before we ignite our site – say a few words about what was once Pajamas Media and is now OSM – Open Source Media – the new media paradigm for the 21st Century.

Pajamas Media, as many of you know, was a name conceived in ironic recognition of a moment in the history of the Internet, that moment when supposedly-amateurish bloggers in pajamas accused a major figure of the mainstream media, an anchorman, no less, of deceiving the American public with forged documents. Despite a sea of denials, that same anchorman has now resigned his position and, a year or so later, some of those same bloggers stand before you today to inaugurate a new and fully-funded online media company.

So times have changed.

But with changing times comes responsibility. We don’t want just to criticize – a short run thing. We want to be constructive – a long run thing. We’re here to stay. And so we needed a new name. But what does that name mean and what’s this new company about?

Open Source Media is a new meeting ground for opinion and news online - a unique home for the growing movement of citizen journalism. It amalgamates over 70 thoughtful webloggers from around the globe with mainstream media journalists sympathetic to our goals. Even though we will emphasize bloggers, this is, to our knowledge, the first deliberate blend of these factions to create the next phase in online media, that new media paradigm. As our numbers increase, we will carefully evolve even further into what we hope will be the global news service of the future, replete with a clear and definitive firewall between news and opinion and detailed fact-checking protocols to go along with that. The Internet, via instant messaging and other technologies, is an ideal place to develop new methodologies to assure the accuracy of content and we welcome everyone’s input in this regard. With hundreds of thousands of potential fact checkers online, we have the potential to be more credible and reliable than mainstream media outlets from CBS to the New York Times. We would also point out that such events as the revolutions in the Ukraine and Lebanon, the Asian tsunami and hurricane Katrina have already shown us that blogs on the scene are fully capable of scooping the mainstream media.

Our criticism of traditional media has been its inability, whether through bias or negligence, to correct itself when the inevitable mistakes occur. (We’ve already made plenty ourselves.) And when mainstream media finally makes corrections, they are usually buried in the back pages of a newspaper, sometimes weeks after the actual error was made. We, at OSM, in our allegiance to openness, take the opposite approach. We will publicize our errors on our front page on a continuing basis, inviting readers, bloggers and other interested parties to engage with us in the search for truth.

But we are only beginning this effort. That blog news service, limited or elaborate, is still in our future. We have other more immediate and developed approaches to news and blogging we will show you in a few minutes. But our guiding principle, now and in the future, will be this openness as practiced by citizen journalists in a free and respectful manner.

When we speak of citizen journalism, we mean journalism created not by elites, as in the top-down traditional media, but from the bottom-up by citizens using their observations and knowledge, informed by a desire to speak honestly.

Not all who have joined this effort are or will be bloggers. Some are professional journalists, prominent writers who work from this position of openness and responsiveness, like Claudia Rosett of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and David Corn of The Nation, both members of our editorial advisory board. David also blogs, of course. Others are bloggers of long standing and respect like our Australian editor Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club… who has flown in from Sydney to be with us today…

[Richard says hello]

…and our Western European Editor Jose Guardia of Barcepundit, who greets us from Barcelona…

[a greeting from Barcepundit on webcam here]

And the Fadhlil Brothers, Omar and Mohammed, who have gained world recognition for their blog Iraq the Model…

[UNFORTUNATELY, A LINK TO OMAR AND MOHAMMED WAS IMPOSSIBLE--ED]

Others will be lesser-known emerging bloggers to whom we make a special commitment to promulgate and encourage their work. We are designing a system for spotlighting them and will feature it on our site in forthcoming months.

Taking our themes from the foundations of democracy itself, we expect all who join us to be willing to have their opinions challenged by the humblest competitor, and to acknowledge the truth quickly and wherever it falls. Citizen journalism at its best means the pursuit of this often-elusive truth above all things, including partisanship and the financial interests of the medium publishing it.

OSM seeks to expand the influence of weblogs by finding and promoting the best of these citizen journalists. We will provide a forum for them, and a platform from which they can increase their financial viability through advertising and syndication. In so doing, we do not intend to overthrow the mainstream media but to enhance it – and maybe change it a little bit by making it more responsive.

We also - and this is especially important - have already affiliated bloggers and journalists across the political spectrum and are continuing to reach out to all sides. This is quite deliberate. Mainstream media frequently fosters partisanship. We intend to foster dialogue. The interactive nature of the Internet facilitates this and we would like to maximize it. We believe that Americans are not as easily categorized politically as the mainstream media would have us believe. Toward that end, OSM has already commissioned some studies in conjunction with Princeton Research. We will be issuing more extensive conclusions shortly, but preliminary results are dramatic. According to our poll, taken by Princeton, a full forty-three percent of Americans are uncomfortable being labeled liberal or conservative - or even moderate.

[shows page from poll]

That’s far more, obviously, than any of the other categories by themselves. Americans, apparently, just don’t like to be labeled; at least not with the labels they’ve been given.

Hybrids aren’t just for cars. We are a nation of political hybrids. The mainstream media, however, has preferred to regard politics as sports, placing all of us in rigid categories like sports fans, as if supporting a political party or point of view were as unified and unthinking as allegiance to the Lakers or the Celtics. OSM questions that.

But speaking of sports, OSM is not going to be all politics, all the time. Far from it. We already have many lifestyle blogs--you'll be hearing from The Manolo later on! in areas from fashion to spelunking, some of which are going to be featured here today.

On the business side, our demographics are already remarkably high. Our larger blogs frequently get over two hundred thousand visitors a day with many millions of page views a month. From our own internal studies, the average visitor on these blogs has a profile similar to the New Yorker in income and education – six figures in income and graduate to post graduate in education. Also, they are the kind of early adopters that should be attractive to advertisers in terms not just of purchasing power, but also in word of mouth. They are the people who create trends and fashion. But you need not trust us about this. We are already embarked on official studies via Nielsen and iPro that will be made available to you.

But enough of this theoretical palaver, let’s have a look at our site – or what we call our common pages.

My partner in crime, co-founder of OSM, Charles Johnson of the enormously popular Little Green Footballs blog and I will now ignite our site ….

10:25: Charles does indeed ignite the site. "At the top of the page, you'll see the sexy visage of Alan Greenspan..."

"Our next study is about a tranvsite turbot. This story will be changing often--very often, in the case of this story..."

"We solicit all of you to give us lots of tips, because we rely on the Blogosphere."

[Charles ignites site and shows the various parts, how they are done and work…

Top News – blogs meshed with mainstream media
News feeds from Newstex
Blog Jams… shows some examples of private jams we did, talks about forthcoming jams
Links to bloggers and contributors
Where the corrections go!!!]

"I invite you all to log on to the site and check it out at your leisure!"

10:30: Roger's back on the podium:

Read More »

The Philadelphia Inquirer's "Daily Bling Blog" doesn't seem to get that Jeff Goldstein isn't actually attending the launch festivities:

Starting today there's a new confederacy of bloggers.

Originally to be called Pajamas Media, appropriated from a swipe a CNN exec leveled at the riff raff who snipe from home in states of relative undress, it's now Open Source Media, as in an invitation for citizen contributors. It's planning a press conference and launch for later today. Headline-grabbing Judith Miller is to speak.

Protein Wisdom is liveblogging the press conference. A taste:

My cab pulled up outside the W a little before 9 PM New York time, and after checking in and dropping my suitcase on the bed, I immediately made my way to the hotel bar, where I found Tim Blair, Roger Simon, and Ed Driscoll bunched around a small table near the restrooms. Ed and Roger were nursing Gibsons, while Tim (who at 5’1” is much shorter than I thought he’d be) was drinking what looked to be IPA out of a pilsner glass inscribed with the legend, “Bloggers Do It In Their Pajamas."

Of course, this isn't the first time that Jeff's surrealism has spaced out the same folks that can't tell a Microsoft Word document from the output of a 1972 IBM Selectric.

Update: More here.

The secret's finally out the bag today: Pajamas Media is now OSM:

NEW YORK -- A media Web site scheduled to debut Wednesday will seek to blend traditional journalism with the freeform commentary developed through the emerging Web format known as blogs.

Some 70 Web journalists, including Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds and David Corn, Washington editor of the Nation magazine, have agreed to participate in OSM - short for Open Source Media.

OSM will link to individual blog postings and highlight the best contributions, chosen by OSM editors, in a special section. Bloggers will be paid undisclosed sums based on traffic they generate.

The ad-supported OSM site will also carry news feeds from Newstex, which in turn receives stories from The Associated Press, Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service and other traditional media organizations.

"We're deliberately trying to do something new by affiliating blog and mainstream people," said Roger L. Simon, a blogger and the venture's co-founder.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about 9 percent of adult Internet users in the United States have created their own blogs, and about 25 percent read them. The audience tends to be more influential: blog postings can affect what news organizations cover or politicians discuss.

Many details of OSM remain unsettled. For example, OSM wants to create a mechanism for citizen journalists, including bloggers, to submit original news during natural disasters, civil unrest and other newsworthy events. Simon said organizers still have to come up with ways to check submissions for accuracy.

Initially, OSM will create blog-like discussion panels surrounding major news events, with three or four bloggers and non-blogging experts chosen to contribute.

Although Simon and co-founder Charles Johnson are often described as conservative, Simon said the site will transcend labels and include bloggers of all political leanings.

OSM was founded last year as Pajamas Media, a play on bloggers' ability to opine from home at all hours, day or night. It has raised $3.5 million from venture capitalists.

Click on over, early and often: www.osm.org.

And now, I have to take my pajamas off--literally and figuratively--and get ready for the launch festivities!

(I organized an impromptu pre-launch party last night. OSM-member Jeff Goldstein couldn't make it, and blogged about it from Denver. But as with his wall-to-wall coverage last year's backstage at the NYC GOP convention (which he also covered live and in person from Colorado), he manages to craft a superb piece of Gonzo Gibson-fueled journalism that captures its essence via surrealism surpassing the actual event. And that's saying something!

UPDATE: Fortunately, a photo was taken of the festivities.

While Steve Green is in transit to the Pajamas Media eastern command post (wonder what he'll make of the Austin Powers psychadelia meets Max Headroom chewing gum and bailing wire tech), Will Collier is holding down the fort--err, bar, at VodkaPundit. Will observes E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post revising history--specifically the long run up, and Congressional vote on, the war in Iraq during 2002:

Dionne and others on the Left are in a hissy fit right now. Apparently, it was completely fair to attack Bush for doing things he didn't actually do--but it's entirely unfair for Bush to counter by talking about what Democrats actually said in 2002, and are actually doing now.

Glenn Reynolds has additional links, and looks at ongoing pushback from the GOP against such revisionist history:

The GOP has rolled out this TV commercial featuring leading Democrats talking about Saddam and WMD as far back as the 1990s. Whether the use of Traffic's The Low Spark of High-heeled Boys as the soundtrack was deliberate or not, I don't know, but I think we're seeing another Karl Rove sucker-punch unfold.

I love the Rope-A-Dope strategy, but it always feels so long before it's actually deployed.

(Which of course, is part of the strategy.)

Greetings from the eastern command post of Pajamas Media! (A.K.A. the W Hotel in Manhattan, which has a man on staff who changes the incense sticks in the elevator--no, really--but whose shaky Wi-Fi network seems to run, intermittently at best, on rubberbands and fairy dust.)

Shared an exceptional Tanqueray Gibson in the bar last night with Roger L. Simon and Tim Blair, the latter of whom I had never met in person before.

And I'll see both of them--if not sooner--tomorrow at the launch; of which Andrew Leigh of National Review Online writes:

Johnson and Simon insist that ideology will not play a role in their quest to locate the best blog posts. Both are former liberal Democrats who turned to the right after 9/11. They've made a deliberate effort to include all angles on their board of editors. For example, "you've got David Corn on one side, and Michael Barone on the other," Simon said. "And in the middle Tammy Bruce."

Other editorial board members include Tim Blair (Australia), Jose Guardia (Barcepundit in Spain), and NRO contributors Michael Ledeen, Cliff May, and John Podhoretz.

Simon and Johnson loathe ideological labels. In their view the Internet is creating, in Simon's words, "hybrid political thinking" — people who may be social liberals and foreign policy hawks, for instance, or liberal economically but conservative socially.

"This whole left-right thing kind of sprung out of the French Revolution," Johnson said. "And I don't want to define myself by the French."

Pajamas Media is already edging away from their humble origins a little bit. They plan to change their name to something more respectable. What is it? They're not telling. They plan a kick-off party in New York City on November 16, when they will reveal their new company name, as well as other details of the venture.

Isn't this all a little pie-in-the-sky, however? Who could imagine supplanting the venerable Associated Press wire service, for instance?

"We'd be foolish not to try," Simon replied, grinning toward Johnson. "You're sitting four feet away from the guy who ended Dan Rather's career."

Heh, as the fellow I interviewed last week is prone to say.

In Tech Central Station, James Pinkerton writes:

Welcome to the next installment of the continuing saga: Mary Mapes vs. the Blogs, in which, for good measure, she takes on reality, too. And at the same time, we can consider the rise, fall -- and possible comeback -- of Mapes as part of the ongoing power-struggle between the MSM (Main Stream Media) and the New Media (NM).

Pinkerton writes, correctly, that the discovery that Mary cooked the books was "a hinge moment in the history of the media:

The smackdown of CBS in 2004 compares to such earlier media-hinges as the Drudge Report's revelation about Monica Lewinsky in 1998 and the televised Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960.

He notes that CBS seems to have gotten the message (sorta, kinda), even if Mapes herself hasn't.

Meanwhile, Power Line turns to page 175 of the Thornburgh Report on Mapes and Rather's escapades:

As the segment with Salon's Eric Boehlert and me was closing, Boehlert said that Thornburgh "couldn't" and "wouldn't" conclude that the documents were forgeries. I responded, "It's on page 175."

It's true that the Report avoids stating a definitive conclusion that the documents are fakes; it merely endorses Peter Tytell's analysis that the documents are "not authentic." It does so on page 175. This is a little-known fact that simply hasn't penetrated the mainstream media reporting on the Mapes fraud. If the documents are not authentic -- if they are not what they purport to be -- they are fakes.

At pages 174-175 the Report notes that typeface expert Tytell told CBS on September 10, 2004, two days after the broadcast, that the documents had been prepared in Times New Roman typeface -- "a typeface available on modern computers but one that didn't exist on typewriters in the 1970s." On page 175, the Report states: "The [Thornburgh] panel met with Tytell and found his analysis sound in terms of why he believed the documents were not authentic." The Report cites its detailed summary of Tytell's analysis included in Appendix 4 to the Report, adding that no conclusion was reached "as to whether Tytell was correct in all respects."

If the Thornburgh Report finds Tytell's analysis regarding the inauthenticity of the documents to be "sound," as it does on page 175, the only rational conclusion one can draw is that the documents are fakes. But ratiocination is a commodity in short supply among members of the alternate-reality based community.

JOHN adds: While some issues of typography relating to the documents are disputed, others are not. To my knowledge, no one has questioned Tytell's statement that no typewriter of the early 1970s (or, I believe, any other time) was licensed to use Times New Roman font. That being the case, the documents are blindingly obvious fakes.

Indeed.

As I've explained before, the Muggeridge's Law category on the site is so named because Malcolm Muggeridge first postulated that there is no way that a satirist can compete with real life for its pure absurdity.

Echoing Jimmy Carter, "President Jacques Chirac said yesterday that more than two weeks of violence in the poor suburbs of France is the sign of a 'profound malaise' and ordered measures to reach out to the angry rioters", AP reports.

He who uses the M-word deserves to be in the same company with the man it's most associated with. And like Carter, Chirac has just indicated that there's no way he can control the rioters.

But then, that's not news at this point.

Mark Steyn writes that Europe isn't multicultural--it's bicultural. And that's a huge part of its current woes:

America and Australia grew the institutions of their democracy with relatively homogeneous populations, and then evolved into successful "multicultural" societies. But that's not what's happening in Europe right now. If you want to know what a multicultural society looks like, read the names of America's dead on September 11: Arestegui, Bolourchi, Carstanjen, Droz, Elseth, Foti, Gronlund, Hannafin, Iskyan, Kuge, Laychak, Mojica, Nguyen, Ong, Pappalardo, Quigley, Retic, Shuyin, Tarrou, Vamsikrishna, Warchola, Yuguang, Zarba. Black, white, Hispanic, Arab, Indian, Chinese - in a word, American.

Whether or not one believes in "celebrating diversity", that's a lot of diversity to celebrate. But the Continent isn't multicultural so much as bicultural. There are ageing native populations, and young Muslim populations, and that's it: "two solitudes", as they say in my beloved Quebec. If there's three, four or more cultures, you can all hold hands and sing We are the World. But if there's just two - you and the other - that's generally more fractious. Bicultural societies are among the least stable in the world, especially once it's no longer quite clear who is the majority and who is the minority - a situation that much of Europe is fast approaching, as you can see by visiting any French, Austrian, Belgian or Dutch maternity ward.

* * *

In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war. The Yugoslavs figured that out. In the 30 years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 per cent to 31 per cent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 per cent to 44 per cent.

So Europe's present biculturalism makes disaster a certainty. One way to avoid it would be to go genuinely multicultural, to broaden the Continent's sources of immigration beyond the Muslim world. But a talented ambitious Chinese or Indian or Chilean has zero reason to emigrate to France, unless he is consumed by a perverse fantasy of living in a segregated society that artificially constrains his economic opportunities yet imposes confiscatory taxation on him in order to support an ancien regime of indolent geriatrics.

France faces tough choices and, unlike Baghdad, in Paris you can't even talk about them honestly. As Jean-Claude Dassier, director-general of the French news station LCI, told a broadcasters' conference in Amsterdam, he has been playing down the riots on the following grounds: "Politics in France is heading to the Right and I don't want Right-wing politicians back in second or even first place because we showed burning cars on television.

On Friday, we looked at the American media's attempt to also ignore the problem, hoping it'll go away.

Having written a pretty nifty piece (if I do say so myself) earlier this year on Chris Anderson's concept of The Long Tail of the Internet, I had planned to link to his recent blog post illustrating its poweful impact on assorted legacy medias. I found it (as you probably did as well) via Glenn Reynolds, who has since added this addendum to his post:

UPDATE: Reader Frank Hujber emails:

Regarding your post on the media meltdown, every six months or so, we encounter an article disparing why the loss of the male audience. Every time, I parse the article and try to find the organization responsible for the survey, and I send them an email pointing out to them the possibility that perhaps they are not showing men enough respect. I might be wrong, but in my view, the media gives so much to the women's point of view that they demonstrate disrespect, or at the very least, dismissiveness, for men and masculinity and fatherhood. I'm convinced that this is the reason men are no longer interested in watching anything but sports.

Anyway, whether I'm right or wrong, I never even get the shortest of replies. It occurs to me that they're so well steeped in their own view that they won't even listen to the notion that they might be wrong.

It seems like there MIGHT be some significant business opportunity there.

You'd think. This is a theme that's been addressed here before. Send 'em a link to Doris Lessing! Or, if you're really angry, to Steve Verdon. Yeah, people notice this stuff.

The biggest offender is television, if only because it's such an image-driven medium. When I flew down to L.A. for Pajamas stuff in September on Southwest, their inflight magazine had an article suggesting some ways for television to woo men back into the fold. But the double standard that Glenn and others have written about has become such a hard-wired component of the MSM's mindset.

The technology of television has become much smarter over the past decade at an exponential pace (DBS, HDTV, TiVO, et al), which if anything will quicken its pace as it goes forward. But the collective mindset of the folks in New York and Hollywood who create the media that goes into our set-top boxes is probably too reactionary to reverse course in any timeframe could remotely be called the foreseeable future. And as with the movie industry, they don't seem to care much about the audience it's cost them.

The New York Post looks at Jimmy Massey:

Scores of media outlets rushed his claims into print, under such headlines as: "I killed innocent people for our government." He was a featured guest on National Public Radio, and college officials fell all over themselves in the stampede to invite him as a guest speaker.

Pretty soon, he'd published a book, "Kill, Kill, Kill," which was released in — surprise, surprise — France. And he became a star attraction on Cindy Sheehan's national self-pity parade.

Sure, the Pentagon insisted his allegations had been probed and discredited. But no one paid any attention to that.

Not until last weekend, when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that its own investigation showed conclusively that Massey, plain and simple, is a liar.

As the paper's Ron Harris reported: "Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated — according to his fellow Marines, Massey's own admissions and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey's unit."

Even though his story "changed repeatedly" on each retelling, no one else in the mainstream media had shown any interest in looking any deeper into Massey's claim that his battalion consisted of "psychopathic killers" who on one "unforgettable" occasion filled a tractor-trailer with the bodies of scores of Iraqi civilians.

Indeed, even his own supposed crime — shooting a 6-year-old child in the head — turns out to be a fantasy. Confronted by Harris, he claimed "that's what my unit did" — but couldn't provide details. Nor could he name even a single Marine to corroborate any of his stories.

Massey, significantly, was discharged after suffering a nervous breakdown. In other words, he was what's known as a Section Eight — that is, crazy.

Both Harris and Michelle Malkin, whose column appears on the preceding page, asked several of the media outlets that had hyped Massey's claim for a reaction.

(Typical was Rex Smith, editor of the Albany Times-Union, who said "it would have been much better if we had the other side." No kidding.)

These supposed news outlets published Massey's claims without even trying to verify them — or, in some cases, without even getting a pro forma response from the Pentagon.

During Vietnam, the news media promoted a similar showcase of the anti-war Left called "Winter Soldier," which also featured first-person allegations of U.S. war crimes. [Paging Mr. Kerry, Mr. John F. Kerry to the white courtesy phone, please.--Ed] Eventually, it came out that the claims were a total fraud.

Now, the same crowd is at it again. And, once again, their media allies are playing along.

How much more proof is needed that the mainstream media are nothing less than shrill propaganda outlets for the Bush-bashing anti-war crowd, willing — almost eager — to undermine the efforts of America's fighting men and women?

Err, not a whole lot at this point.

(Via Power Line, and Michelle Malkin.)

Speaking of James Lileks, in his weekly syndicated Newhouse column, James puts the Blogosphere's fevered talk of the rapidly approaching demise of newspapers into context:

Newspapers are dead, the experts assure us. Pity, but these things happen. Media rise and fall. People move on. Why, once upon a time, millions of Americans got their news and opinions by listening to the AM band of the radio. AM radio! Really.

Who could imagine such a thing today?

Heh.

He does have several suggestions on how to resuscitate a press that's watched newer and faster media blow past it, though:

it's not a fatal spiral. Not if newspapers go local. Unfortunately, most papers still see themselves as the Trusted Guardians of the Global Yesterday, serving up a cold meal of worldwide news to people who've already read the updates on the Web. This is a mistake. Leave the big picture to The New York Times and the Washington Post and the networks. Get small. Only newspapers have the resources to cover their hometowns. Yes, newspaper readers want to know about the world. But they also want crime and restaurant reviews and cute spelling bee winners and dog photos and anti-pothole crusades.

Also, stop chasing the younger market. They do not care what your reviewer thinks of "Doom the Movie." They played the game AND blew through the expansion pack AND downloaded a bootleg of the film on BitTorrent. Trying to court this demographic makes newspapers look like Grandpa doing the Funky Chicken, and it hurts.

Think any major papers will take his advice?

Actually, I doubt he does, either.

The room service menu at the W hotel is a riot. While it contains "Vegan Chocolate Brownies" to cheer up those ordinarily joyless souls who believe themselves to be inferior to animals, it contains lots of treats to make pets--or at least their owners--feel pretty darn superior themselves:

PET MENU
24 hours

10 oz filet ($30)

8 oz burger: lightly cooked with iams kibble ($15)

gourmet iams dog food ($10)

gourmet iams cat food ($10)

bone cookie treats ($9)

still or sparkling water ($8)

(All-lowercase spelling on original menu, complete with sanserif typeface.)

As James Lileks writes today in his Daily Quirk, Thanksgiving for pets is about to have a whole lotta quirk itself:

Today's helpful hint: how to flatter yourself to please a creature that would be happy eating a fly-blown buzzard. Step one: Find one of those boutique grocery stores that sell shade-grown organic Lucky Charms. Step two: Go to the pet food department and look for the "Merrick" label. Step three: Realize you are looking at yuppie culture gone stark howling mad, summed up in three words:

turducken for dogs

Yes, that famous wad-o-fowl has been made in pet-food form. Merrick specializes in upscale treats; their dog food is packaged so attractively I'm tempted to plop it in a bowl and plant my mug in the slop. "Wild Buffalo Grill," for example, contains "cracked pearled barley, zucchini, carrots, snow peas, fuji apples." It's described as "Homestyle," as if you have a family tradition of bringing down a bison in the back yard and carving off hot steaming chunks for Spot. There's "Thanksgiving Dinner," which contains all the trimmings, "Campfire Trout Feast" and "Napa Valley Picnic." The last one contains duck. Duck! So Pluto wants Creamed Donald for supper?

It's two bucks a can, and you're supposed to give four cans daily to big dogs. Or you could send the money to the Union Gospel Mission and toss the dog a slider from time to time. He'll love you anyway. You will miss the feeling you get from being A Person Whose Dog Just Loves Duck, but you'll live.

(Note: Yes, I bought a can. Because I love my dog. Pathetic.)

Hey, at least he didn't make tinfoil shoes for Jasper...

I interviewed Pajamas Media co-founder Roger L. Simon via cell phone while he was driving home on the L.A. Freeway from Pajamas HQ on Friday night--and thus had plenty of time to talk as the traffic flowed at its typical nightly pace that makes the breakup of Pangea look like the Indy 500. His Pajamas Media profile is now online.

And I somehow managed not to transcribe him in Swahili once...

My latest Pajamas Profile is up: "The Cavalier", the man behind YAYsports! , a wild and woolly sports blog:

We target the 14- to 45-year-old male. We can be a little bit edgy. But quite a few women read the blog, and not every reader is a serious sports junky. I’ve had people say to me via email, ‘I don’t know anything about basketball, but I really like your blog.’ I thought that was kind of cool, but if you’re a hardcore sports fan, there’s going to be layers there that mean more to you.

Our motto is “No Scores. No Stats. No In-Depth Analysis”. Because you can find all of that on a thousand other websites out there. We try to find some of the more ‘out there’ things to latch onto and talk about. For example, let’s just say that the recent Carolina Panthers cheerleaders’ story was very good for us. My football writer managed to find some photos of them at team functions, and that was great for traffic. Sometimes we simply take a bizarre quote that an athlete says and just run with it. And over on my section of the site, Kobe Bryant is wearing tights this year, and I’m not sure why, but it interests me. He’s wearing tights under his shorts and nobody is really talking about this, but I’m wondering ... what’s this all about??

Like Hugh Hewitt, The Cavalier is another Cleveland-obsessed sports fan (hence the Cav's handle).

Pray for them, given the season the Browns are having.

Greetings from the W Hotel (insert obvious "does Cheney run this franchise as well?!" riffs here) in the heart of Fun City; I arrived last night for Pajamas Week.

And speaking of TV-related headlines, like Leonard Nimoy, I go In Seach of a Smarter Boob Tube in my latest Tech Central Station column....

Speaking of Hollywood, Warren Beatty's stalking of Gov. Schwarzenegger in the run-up to last week's botched special election makes it almost too easy for Mark Steyn in his latest column:

I don't want to run for governor," [Beatty] said the other day, making it sound like he's interested in the role but he won't audition. He's certainly in the right party: The Democrats have already taken on most of the characteristics of a bad Hollywood project -- no ideas, script full of ancient cliches, but if you can get the right star to commit to it we just might make this thing fly. And, though he's never run for office before, Beatty has the crucial ingredient: name recognition. All over California, women are going: "Warren Beatty? Oh, yeah, right, now I remember. That guy I had sex with in the late '60s."

The ''will Warren run?" story crops up every other election cycle. Last time it was back in 2000, when Al Gore was felt by some (about 300 million or so) to lack charisma and there was talk of Beatty throwing his hat into the presidential ring. He wanted to run because he believed American politics was turning into a plutocracy in which the highest office in the land was put up for sale to a handful of privileged sons of wealthy men, like Al Gore and George W. Bush.

Beatty, by contrast, has come up the hard way, working his way through the long, hard daily grind of Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Brigitte Bardot, Cher, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Isabelle Adjani . . . He can sympathize with the underclass: He knows how it feels to hit rock bottom -- apparently, it was Madonna's in ''Dick Tracy.'' He understands what it's like to try to make ends meet. Crucially for California, he's sensitive to the needs of immigrants: He appreciates the difficulties European art-house actresses have in finding bankable Hollywood stars prepared to go to bed with them.

In 2003, you'll recall, the Los Angeles Times assigned a special team to look into Arnold's sexual background. If they do Warren in the same way, it'll be the biggest hiring bonanza in U.S. journalism for a century. Usually, when his magnificent track record of famous conquests is brought up, Beatty indignantly points out that he's had sex with a lot of very obscure women, too. This is true. He has dallied not just with Natalie Wood, but also with her less celebrated sister, Lana Wood.

Lana, who played Plenty O'Toole in the James Bond film ''Diamonds Are Forever,'' subsequently fell on hard times and found herself with little money and no work. Warren was touched by her predicament and considerately invited her to share his bed. As Miss Wood wrote in her memoirs: "Whatever his motives were, he gave me shelter and my self-esteem back -- and for that I was grateful."

Whether this hands-on approach to tackling the problems of the unemployed can be applied statewide is doubtful. No governor can have sex with every struggling woman in California, though, of course, Beatty does have the advantage of an impressive head start.

Do I even have to say, read the rest?

Glenn Reynolds links to several bloggers who bury Jarhead and describe it as just a matter of time before its celluloid is recycled into guitar picks.

Color me unsurprised.

Sorry for the lack of posting these few days. I've been interviewing some of the folks who make up the new media venture known as Pajamas Media, and drafting their profiles. (If Glenn Reynolds or Roger L. Simon go off on a jag that's written in Swahili or Klingon in their profiles, blame the interviewer, not them...)

Later today, it's off to the City That Never Sleeps for the Pajamas Media launch on Wednesday.

Expect sordid details of on the road mayhem that would make a Led Zeppelin tour sound like Donny & Marie Meet The Ice Capades!

(Especially if by sordid details, you meant visits to MoMA, the Brasserie, Brooks Brothers...)

"As long as we have eyes, we’ll never be colorblind. That sentiment is just as laughable as any liberal’s dream of a socialist utopia. But public policy ought to be colorblind, and there’s no good reason why it shouldn’t be....A government with the power to discriminate in favor of blacks also has the power to discriminate against blacks. Remember that."

--La Shawn Barber

Don Banks of Sports Illustrated has an exceptional piece on that dark day ten years ago when Art Modell announced the Browns were leaving the football-obsessed town of Cleveland:

Ten years ago this week, the unthinkable happened in Cleveland, and Ozzie Newsome still can't quite fathom it. In that sprawling football-crazed city of a half million, there was nowhere to hide from the blast of the bombshell news that Cleveland's beloved Browns were moving to Baltimore.

It was an experience that Newsome wouldn't wish on anyone. There was no escaping the story night or day. The specter of the franchise's relocation to Baltimore -- announced by team owner Art Modell on Nov. 6, 1995 -- and the anger it engendered in Cleveland loomed over everything the Browns did in the second half of that season.

The team complex was picketed by jilted and angry fans almost daily, and it became a fortress of sorts for the bewildered Browns employees, who knew little more than the fans did about what came next and how the team had wound up in this position to begin with. Delivery men refused to even drop off soda and snacks and other vending supplies at the team complex anymore, and Newsome found himself hesitant to risk a trip to the grocery store, the gas station or the post office, lest he venture into a community that was nearly blind with rage.

"Moving the Cleveland Browns was just unheard of," said Newsome -- who was the Browns director of pro personnel and is now Baltimore's vice president/general manager.

And what was it like to be the lightning rod head coach of a contending NFL team consigned to franchise purgatory at midseason, soon to lose both home and hope?

"It was terrible,'' said New England's Bill Belichick this week, in his first extensive comments on the tumultuous closing chapter of his five-year Browns coaching tenure. "To walk into that building every day and have everyone in the entire organization wondering what are we going to do?"

Belichick's role in the Browns' sad saga seems like a couple lifetimes ago, but he's still struck by the chaos and uncertainty that reigned in those early days, and just how helpless it felt to be a Cleveland Brown in November 1995.

"There's no situation I've been in, before or since, that even would remotely approach that one for negativity and affecting the overall focus of the team," Belichick said. "Not within 100 miles. It touched every single person in the building, every secretary, every ball boy. I felt badly for everyone involved."

With the Baltimore Ravens now in their 10th season, and the "new" Browns seven years into their expansion experience in Cleveland, time has dulled some of the intensity of the painful events surrounding the franchise's shocking departure for Maryland.

But not for Belichick, who you'd have to say has landed on his feet with the Patriots. The long, strange trip that was the Browns' '95 season remains vivid in his memory, and it will always hold a singular place in his coaching career when it comes to the art of weathering the storm.

The Browns were 4-4 and tied for first place when news of the team's relocation plans began seeping out. They went into a 1-7 death spiral at that point, ending the season 5-11 and finishing a game out of last place in the AFC Central. Belichick was fired over the phone by Modell on Valentine's Day 1996, a conversation that lasted maybe three minutes, and didn't surface as an NFL head coach again until 2000 in New England.

"The first few days were kind of a shock," Belichick said. "Your wheels were spinning. Everybody was kind of dizzy. But after about a week, when there was nothing coming our way in the way of support (from ownership) or even factual information about what was ahead, you felt just like a flag on a pole. You were just blowing with the wind, with no control over which direction you went."

If you're a football fan--even if you're not particularly a Browns fan yourself--read the rest; it's a pretty classy piece of writing.

They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway. They say there's always magic in the air--and both are never more so than when the IowaHawk Art House Players bring you....Les Risibles (aka Paris Riots: The Musical)!

The Digital Bits has a sneak peak of a DVD release that I'm eagerly awaiting as well--and so are you, if you love Hollywood's golden era--the 1930s and 40s:

I've just gotten my first look at Warner's new King Kong: Special Edition (due on 11/22) and I HAD to tell you all a little bit about it. First of all, the film looks amazing. This restoraton is really impressive - I'm betting Kong hasn't looked better since its original 1933 theatrical release. I haven't listened to the audio commentary yet, nor have I looked at the documentary about Merian C. Cooper. But I'll tell you... the 7-part RKO Production 601 documentary is outstanding. You get a really in-depth history of the film itself, as well as a look the producers and the production, complete with new interviews with film historians (like Rudy Behlmer, Bob Burns), filmmakers (Peter Jackson, Frank Darabont, etc) and special effects experts (Ray Harryhausen, Ken Ralston, Phil Tippett and others), as well as a look at original photographs, production artwork and more vintage materials. But here's what's really great - specifically for this DVD release, Jackson and his crew at WETA (who, as you know, have been working on their own remake of King Kong, which hits theaters next month), worked to build - in exacting detail - replicas of many of the original stop-motion miniatures from the 1933 film, and to recreate footage using the original effects production process. The result of this is that when they're talking about how the original Kong was made, you actually get to SEE the process in action! The folks at Pellerin Multimedia and Sparkhill were able to document the effort as Jackson's animators worked with their new, meticulously recreated Kong puppet, on a multi-layered miniature set that's a nearly exact duplicate of one created for the original film. It's VERY cool to see, let me tell you. As you may know, Jackson also tasked his effects crew with recreating the lost "Spider Pit" sequence for this DVD release. Their work was never intended to be edited back into the film, but simply to give you a sense of what that lost footage MIGHT have looked like. It's a joy to see. In fact, this DVD release is just a really special piece of work - something that's clearly made by die-hard Kong fans, for die-hard Kong fans. You're going to love it. I think it was well worth the wait.

It streets November 22nd, or you can order it direct from Amazon.com.

On this Veteran's Day, I can't help but feel a kinship with the words of Robert McHenry in today's Tech Central Station, who--even if he doesn't know it--captures remarkably well, what it was like growing up in the Driscoll household:

My father was in the service during World War II, though not in a combat role. In fact, he enlisted in 1940, after the war had begun in Asia and Europe but more than a year before the United States entered. I was born just as the war was ending in Europe and have always happily considered myself Not a Boomer. My father loved jazz, up to the point where it began to go all strange on him, say about 1947, and my mother was a movie fan. So I grew up knowing and loving, far more than my slightly younger Boomer friends, the music and films of the 1930s and '40s.

"Their song" was Artie Shaw's incomparable recording of "Stardust." Those who know it can forgive dear Judy Agnew, who, while her husband was running for Vice President in 1968, was asked by a journalist about her taste in music. It ran, she said, to "semi-classical pieces," and she gave "Stardust" as an example. Naturally, I was early taught to recognize Hoagy Carmichael in his various movie roles, always the laconic piano player deeply suspicious of anything happening outside whatever dive he happened to be working. I learned at my mother's knee that at 14 she had identified entirely with Judy Garland singing "You Made Me Love You" to a picture of Clark Gable, and at my father's that Muggsy Spanier was the most reliable of the neo-Dixieland (aka Chicago Style) trumpeters.

I indulge in all this reminiscence, or trivial pursuit, if you insist, only to establish some degree of standing before making my proposal, which is this: Let us declare, by Congressional resolution if possible, that the Glenn Miller Orchestra's recording of "Moonlight Serenade" is the official and eternal elegy for the generation that fought and endured both the Great Depression and World War II. Let it be played at veterans' funerals, at commemorative services, at Arlington National Cemetery, wherever and whenever we pause to think of and thank those millions, our fathers and mothers and grandparents and great-grandparents and, I suppose, great-great-grandparents (I'm losing track of the generations), whose lives and experiences and wisdom are slipping away so quickly.

Jazz, and more particularly that only half-acknowledged offspring Big Band Swing, is affixed, cinematically perhaps but for good reason, in our collective memory as the soundtrack of the war. GIs took it with them wherever they were ordered, and the USO toured to recharge their morale in every theater of operations. The recordings made by the bands of Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, the Dorsey brothers, Glenn Miller, and various others, both before and during the war, remain with us as a unique cultural achievement. (Dad was, "Stardust" notwithstanding, a firm Goodman disciple, and thanks to him I can whistle pretty much the whole of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concert.)

Miller was not the superlative instrumentalist that Shaw and Goodman were, and he may not have been the trombonist that Tommy Dorsey was. But he had an unsurpassed ear for arrangements that defined the dance band genre and that are played to this day, and not only by the resurrection band that uses his name. He stood out from the rest of the band leaders in one other important way: He joined up. As Capt. (later Maj.) Glenn Miller, U.S. Army Air Force, he organized and led the AAF Band as a way of bringing the familiar music of home to the troops. His contribution to the martial tradition in music, not to mention Allied unity, is best suggested by an anecdote.

When I was twelve or thirteen my family attended a "Searchlight Tattoo," a sort of military variety show, at the White City stadium in London. There were regimental brass bands and bagpipe bands, drill teams on horseback and motorcycle, a reenactment of some famous British commando assault, and so on. Everything was well received and heartily applauded by the audience. Late in the program came a guest appearance by the U.S. Third Air Force Band. They strutted onto the field playing "The St. Louis Blues March," a rousing Ray McKinley arrangement of the classic W.C. Handy tune that had been recorded by the AAF Band in 1943. Somehow the massed airmen (some playing, could it be? Yes! Saxophones!) marched in syncopation. You might be blind, or you might be deaf, but you knew in an instant that these were the Yanks. The stadium went bananas. The crowd were on their feet, they cheered, and there were tears, many tears.

So, "Moonlight Serenade." The band recorded it in April 1939, and it was such an enormous hit that it became their theme song. Miller wrote the music, based on an exercise he had composed for a former teacher. Mitchell Parish wrote the words, but unlike his lyrics for "Stardust" they are banal and, in any case, the recording in question has no vocal. For that matter, the melody is pretty, but not in the "Stardust" class. It is the arrangement that propels it into and beyond the first rank of popular music. It features the signature Miller touch -- harmonized saxophones and clarinet -- that yields a piercingly sweet but never cloying sound. The reeds take the melody line at a slow, even tempo. The brasses add a counterpoint that in the first two choruses merely hints at and then in the third and fourth insists on a swing beat, as if to say, after their initial reticence, Yes, we were the Yanks. Both the chorus and the bridge rise to climaxes. In the second rendering of the bridge the solo clarinet soars up and falls back, and then in the closing figure it rises and ends on a high note. Thomas Gray, contemplating that churchyard, was not more elegiac. It is said that the civilian Miller band closed its last performance in 1942 with "Moonlight Serenade" and could not finish it.

I have no idea how to promote this idea of an official elegy, apart from writing about it. Is there a congressman willing to take up a cause that has absolutely no pork or other mischief in it? A veterans' group? Tom Brokaw? It's getting late; another ten or fifteen years will see the end of this generation that only lately got its memorial in Washington, D.C. For this we don't need building permits or an environmental impact statement, just some good will. Who's with me?

My dad (who I'm planning to see next week when I'm on the East Coast for the blockbuster Pajamas Media launch) would probably suggest a Crosby piece rather than something by Miller, but I doubt he'd complain too much about "Moonlight Serenade" as the official song of his generation.

Why, yes it is: Charles Johnson has a round-up of Day 16 of the French Intafada, and a map of where the riots in Paris have been.

In his essay this week in England's Spectator, Mark Steyn looks at the role that changing demographics is playing in the riots, and how it reshaping Europe's future:

Go back to that bland statistic you hear a lot these days: ‘about 10 per cent of France’s population is Muslim’. Give or take a million here, a million there, that’s broadly correct, as far as it goes. But the population spread isn’t even. And when it comes to those living in France aged 20 and under, about 30 per cent are said to be Muslim and in the major urban centres about 45 per cent. If it came down to street-by-street fighting, as Michel Gurfinkiel, the editor of Valeurs Actuelles, points out, ‘the combatant ratio in any ethnic war may thus be one to one’ — already, right now, in 2005. It is not necessary, incidentally, for Islam to become a statistical majority in order to function as one. At the height of its power in the 8th century, the ‘Islamic world’ stretched from Spain to India, yet its population was only minority Muslim. Nonetheless, by 2010, more elderly white Catholic ethnic frogs will have croaked and more fit healthy Muslim youths will be hitting the streets. One day they’ll even be on the beach at St Trop, and if you and your infidel whore happen to be lying there wearing nothing but two coats of Ambre Solaire when they show up, you better hope that the BBC and CNN are right about there being no religio-ethno-cultural component to their ‘grievances’.

Let me give a smaller example. In the Guardian the other day, Maureen Lipman wrote a marvellous rebuke to Clare Short over her claim that American support for Israel is the biggest single factor in global violence — an assertion so deranged it suggests a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome. Miss Lipman is a longtime Labour luvvie but I doubt that she feels too comfortable with much of the British Left these days. I remembered those British Telecom ads she used to do back in the Eighties, playing a nice Jewish lady who’s proud her grandson has got an ‘ology’ in his A-levels, and I found myself thinking how unlikely it would be for any major business enterprise in Britain today to promote itself on TV with a Jewish-flavoured ad campaign. They’d never spell it out that explicitly, of course. I doubt anyone would even propose it at the most wide-ranging brainstorming session. But in the event of anyone running it up the flagpole nobody would salute. Affectionate Yiddisher stereotypes would not be received so warmly in the Britain of 2005. It’s a small loss, unspoken — a response to changing demographics, but also a reflection of how quickly those demographics have been internalised by the broader culture.

It's safe to say that they'd be even less well received in the actual continent of Europe.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey writes that the American media have--surprise!--begun to follow the old "ignore the problem, it'll go away" method of putting their coverage of the Paris riots on the backburner:

If an American consumer read today's newspapers, he would assume that the riots in France have ended. None of the major newspapers that had covered the uprising have any specific updates today on the story, despite the continued overnight violence and an increase in the oddball metric of burnt cars in Paris. Other than an a long-overdue address to the nation by Jacques Chirac and an analysis that repeats the same line the press has taken since the beginning of the crisis, nothing would inform readers that the streets of France remained ablaze last night.

Bad Hair Blog suggests pondering their map of the riots, and then asking yourself:

What kind of European (and American) media noise would we be hearing if we've had fifteen continous day of rioting and arson not only in every major city in the country, but coast-to-coast? Would the press be clamoring 24/7 for the Président de la République's head on a platter, or at least for his ousting? Can you think of one, just one, of the 3 networks and cable TV stations that wouldn't be on this all the time?

Actually, we already know the answer to that.

"It's surprising the extent to which people who routinely make the Halliburton and chickenhawk slurs seem to require much greater delicacy from others".

Indeed.

Andrew Breitbart (co-author of last year's Hollywood, Interrupted, which we've made frequent reference to here) writes:

On Thursday at 2:30pm PST while not particularly paying attention to the AM talk radio feed that is my background noise, the ABC News reader droned on about the hotel terror bombings that hit Amman, Jordan the day before. I am inured to escalating death count suicide bomb followup news reports.

The man -- whose voice is a staple in my life and whose name I now can't remember -- revealed that 59 had died and over 100 were injured. My brain unconsciously processed the information: Statistics from half a world away... Thank God I don't know anyone over there...

Sadly, he did--all too well.

Read the rest.

Finally, President Bush is willing to pry open up the Memory Hole:

This progress is not easy, but it is steady. And no fair-minded person should ignore, deny or dismiss the achievements of the Iraqi people.

And our debate at home must also be fair-minded. One of the hallmarks of a free society and what makes our country strong is that our political leaders can discuss their differences openly, even in times of war.

When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support. I also recognize that some of our fellow citizens and elected officials didn’t support the liberation of Iraq, and that is their right, and I respect it. As president and commander in chief, I (accept ?) the responsibilities and the criticisms and the consequences that come with such a solemn decision. While it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.

Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs. They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: “When I vote to give the president of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hand is a threat and a grave threat to our security.”

That’s why more then a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges. These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America’s will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send to them to war continue to stand behind them. Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. And our troops deserve to know that when – whatever our differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for nothing less then victory.

To paraphrase Michael Ledeen, much more, please.

I have a review of Rikky Rooksby's new How To Write Songs On Keyboards over at Blogcritics.

Or, as it was later retitled, A Fistful of Goofy. In any case, blogger Physics Geek writes:

The first Avian Flu death was reported in Anaheim, California. Look at the picture in the extended entry. It's horrifying.

It truly is.

(Via VodkaPundit.)

Back in September 2003, I toured the Reagan Library and was surprised to see a 707-sized aircraft wrapped in plastic protective sheathing, which happened to be Air Force One number 27000. As I wrote back then for Tech Central Station:

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum in Simi Valley California hosts a 3.5 by ten foot segment of the Berlin Wall. If all goes according to schedule, in mid-2004 it will open a pavilion that houses the Air Force One that flew President Reagan into Berlin, where he gave his legendary "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech. The aircraft, sporting tail number 27000, was Reagan's primary Air Force One, in which he logged 631,640 miles and 1,288 hours of flying time. It also flew Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter to Cairo in 1981, to represent the US at the funeral of Anwar Sadat. In 1986, #27000 was used to take Reagan to Reykjavik for his summit meeting with Gorbachev, in which Reagan refused to bargain away SDI, and in so doing, began the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

When the two modified Boeing 707s that served as Air Force One were replaced by a pair of even more heavily modified 747s in 1989, the 707s eventually became backups, and used for jaunts to runways where the much larger 747 couldn't land.

Eventually, #27000 was decommissioned in the summer of 2001. "In July of 2001, word got out that the US Air Force Museum was going to get the retired aircraft," Melissa Giller, the library's director of communication says. "The Air Force Museum already has #26000 on display, and they were looking to see if someone else might perhaps want #27000. They were looking at both us and the Smithsonian, and when we got word of that, we actively sought after it.

"The story goes that President Reagan once said that he wished that his library could have his main Air Force One. So with that, and since we had the room, and the Smithsonian didn't, the US Air Force thought it would be a great fit for us."

And it is.

It took a year longer than expected to complete, but the giant exhibit designed to house Air Force One finally opened in late October (with President Bush cutting the ribbon) at the library--a fitting final resting place for the Air Force One most used by President Reagan.

Here a few photos of the plane and the exhibit that houses it. (Full disclosure: It was terribly overcast yesterday. and the library doesn't permit the use of flash. So to avoid uploading a bunch of dark muddy images, I've color-corrected and/or pushed the exposure on the photos.)

The entry hall to the "hangar"; only the nose of the plane is initially visible, in an impressive--and seductive--bit of stagecraft and composition.

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Well, maybe Rifkin's partially right: Europe's vision of the future won't be coming to America as a whole, just the bluest of the enclaves in the Blue States. Which makes sense--as Jonah Goldberg wrote a few months ago, "the ideas, assumptions and prejudices held by the statistically typical Democratic voter, according to [a recent] Pew study, are quite simply, European".

In a post titled, "Kristallnacht and Arms Control", Dave Kopel writes:

Today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the infamous anti-Jewish pogram in Nazi Germany. In Nazi Firearms Law and the Disarming of the German Jews (Arizona Journal of International & Comparative Law), Stephen Halbrook details how Kristallnacht was the culmination of years of Nazi success in disarming their opponents by using the "moderate" gun licensing and registration laws which had been enacted by the Weimar Republic. During the Kristallnacht pogram, new regulations were introduced which totally forbade Jews to possess firearms, edged or pointed weapons, and blunt weapons. A magazine article by Halbrook, Registration: The Nazi Paradigm, examines Nazi gun control polices both in Germany and in conquered nations.

Among the items voted on in the elections yesterday? "San Francisco Voters Approve Handgun Ban".

San Francisco already has a European-style birth dearth; why not add a disarmed general populace to the mix? (If I was a gay San Franciscan, I'd be particularly incensed by the passage of this measure.)

And while Charles Bronson may have passed away, if I was a filmmaker looking to revive the Death Wish franchise, I know which city I'd set the next movie in.

Update: John Lott looks at what he calls "a silver lining in a gun ban":

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France is being torn apart by ongoing riots, and Europe's birth rate is spiraling downward along with its economy, which means that its unemployment is "twice as high and four times as deep", as Karl Zinsmeister recently wrote, in an essay titled, "Europe Learns the Wrong Lessons".

So I had to chuckle the night before last when I visited in the Barnes & Noble near my L.A. hotel room and saw copies of far-left eco-doomsayer Jeremy Rifkin's The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream prominently displayed on the store's shelves.

But then, like the continent that Rifkin seeks to venerate, this is far from the first time that he's has learned the wrong lessons from history:

In his 1979 book, The Emerging Order, Rifkin wrote: "The age of expansion with faith in unlimited economic growth and the governing truths of science and technology, is about to give way to a new age of scarcity and economic contraction, an age so utterly different from our own that any serious attempt to give form and substance to it all but boggles the mind." Reality check: In the years since Rifkin wrote this, nearly every country in the world has achieved significant growth in their gross domestic product. And our faith in the "governing truths of science" shows no signs of letting up.

In 1986 Rifkin warned that Frostban -- a harmless bacteria genetically engineered to protect plants from freezing temperatures -- "could irreversibly affect worldwide climate and precipitation patterns over a long, long period of time." Reality check: Far from causing worldwide climate changes, Frostban has had no adverse effects on the environment.

In 1987 Rifkin petitioned the NIH and the USDA to investigate a possible link between the cow disease Bovine Immunodeficiency Virus (BIV) and AIDS. According to a New York Times account: "In his petition, Mr. Rifkin speculated that the AIDS virus might have evolved from cattle viruses, or that the cattle virus might itself have played a role in the development of AIDS. But researchers at the Federal Centers for Disease Control today discounted the possibility that the cattle virus was related in any way to acquired immune deficiency syndrome in humans."

In his 1992 book, Beyond Beef, Rifkin was at it again, calling BIV "Cow AIDS" for the shock value. He wrote: "The economic impact of BIV on the beef and dairy industries is likely to be devastating in the years to come." A column in The Washington Times responded: "Worse is Mr. Rifkin's mendacious exploitation of AIDS and cancer hysteria. He notes that the bovine AIDS virus (BIV) and the Bovine Leukemia Virus (BLV) are 'widespread among dairy cows and beef cattle,' and then quotes a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) study out of context, insinuating that humans might contract AIDS or leukemia from eating beef. In fact the USDA, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health have all corresponded with Mr. Rifkin to inform him in the text of one letter that 'the available scientific evidence does not support the concept that either BLV or BIV have any adverse impact on human health in the United States.'"

In his 1995 book, The End of Work, Rifkin predicted that automation, mechanization, and computerization would cause massive unemployment within America in the near future. Reality check: Unemployment is lower now than it was in 1995. A columnist for the Financial Post remarked in 2003: "Who can forget the jeremiads of that great intellectual flim-flam man, Jeremy Rifkin, whose book, The End of Work, said it all. And what ensued? The greatest bout of job creation in post-war history!"

In a 1999 Boston Globe op-ed, Rifkin incorrectly predicted that biotech crops will "run amok"; that they will create "super bugs"; and that they will lead to farmers using "greater quantities of herbicides." Reality Check: There is no evidence that biotech crops have done anything like creating "super bugs." While variation exists, farmers generally use fewer herbicides on fields of biotech crops. Moreover, eight biotech crops have already reduced annual US pesticide use by 46 million pounds, including insect resistant corn and cotton, herbicide tolerant corn, cotton, soy, and canola, and virus resistant papaya and squash.

His 1999 book, The Biotech Century, went even further into the realm of fantasy. Rifkin wonders whether the use of biotechnology might "risk a fatal interruption of millions of years of evolutionary development? Might not the artificial creation of life spell the end of the natural world? ... cause irreversible damage to the biosphere, making genetic pollution an even greater threat to the planet than nuclear or petrochemical pollution?" Reality Check: After more than a decade of consuming foods from biotech crops, we're still here.

Via InstaPundit, who also links to a Frank Martin post titled, "The J. Patrick Buchanan Memorial Library for Failed Prophets of Doom".

The only benefit of Rifkin and Buchanan's doom-saying? Their agreement on so many issues on a mid-1990s episode of CNN's Crossfire was memorable enough to catch Virginia Postrel's eye, which led to her wonderful The Future And Its Enemies. As I wrote in late 2001:

In the mid-1990s, Virginia Postrel--a Forbes, Wall Street Journal and Inc. journalist, New York Times editorialist and editor of the libertarian-oriented "Reason" magazine--watched CNN's "Crossfire" and was amused at what she saw. As Postrel, describes it, there was arch conservative Pat Buchanan and liberal environmental-alarmist author Jeremy Rifkin together, "literally across left and right on sides of the table and agreeing with each other that the American economy was too dynamic and that the government needed to step in and do something, never specifying exactly what, to curb that dynamism because it was rather disruptive and dangerous."

Incidents like these convinced Postrel that the future would have nothing to do with traditional definitions of conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats. Her 1999 book, "The Future and Its Enemies," divides the future between two groups she calls the dynamists and the stasists.

So I guess we should thank Jeremy and Pat for that!

In Tech Central Station, Douglas Kern writes that the Internet has silenced many of the folks searching swamp gasses for flying saucers:

you're looking for one of those famous, big-eyed alien abductors, try looking on the sides of milk cartons. The UFO cultural moment in America is long since over, having gone out with the Clintons and grunge rock in the 90s. Ironically, the force that killed the UFO fad is the same force that catapulted it to super-stardom: the Internet. And therein hangs a tale about how the Internet can conceal and reveal the truth.

It's hard to remember just how large UFOs loomed in the public mind a mere ten years ago. The X-Files was one of the hottest shows on television; Harvard professors solemnly intoned that the alien abduction phenomenon was a real, objective fact; and Congressmen made serious inquiries about a downed alien spacecraft in Roswell, New Mexico. Still not enough? You could see the "Roswell" movie on Showtime; you could play "Area 51" at the arcade; you could gawk at stunning pictures of crop circles in any number of magazines; and you could watch any number of lurid UFO specials on Fox or the Discovery Channel. And USENET! Egad! In the days when USENET was something other than a spam swap, UFO geeks hit "send" to exchange myths, sightings, speculations, secret documents, lies, truths, and even occasionally facts about those strange lights in the sky.

* * *

Yet in recent years, interest in the UFO phenomenon has withered. Oh, the websites are still up, the odd UFO picture is still taken, and the usual hardcore UFO advocates make the same tired arguments about the same tired cases, but the thrill is gone. What happened? Why did the saucers crash?

The Internet showed this particular emperor to be lacking in clothes. If UFOs and alien visitations were genuine, tangible, objective realities, the Internet would be an unstoppable force for detecting them. How long could the vast government conspiracy last, when intrepid UFO investigators could post their prized pictures on the Internet seconds after taking them? How could the Men in Black shut down every website devoted to scans of secret government UFO documents? How could marauding alien kidnappers remain hidden in a nation with millions of webcams?

Just as our technology for finding and understanding UFOs improved dramatically, the manifestations of UFOs dwindled away. Despite forty-plus years of alleged alien abductions, not one scrap of physical evidence supports the claim that mysterious visitors are conducting unholy experiments on hapless victims. The technology for sophisticated photograph analysis can be found in every PC in America, and yet, oddly, recent UFO pictures are rare. Cell phones and instant messaging could summon throngs of people to witness a paranormal event, and yet such paranormal events don't seem to happen very often these days. For an allegedly real phenomenon, UFOs sure do a good job of acting like the imaginary friend of the true believers. How strange, that they should disappear just as we develop the ability to see them clearly. Or perhaps it isn't so strange.

Not really--especially when a true believer puts it this way:

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing, material that seemed to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal.

Hey, Clarke wasn't kidding around when he wrote his Third Law.

Update: And speaking of Mapes...

John Podhoretz puts them into perspective:

Incumbent party victories in two states and one city. A Republican state rejected Democratic initiatives. A Democratic state rejected Republican initiatives.

Don't let the Democratic spin doctors fool you. Election Day 2005 has nothing to tell us about where the electorate is going in the wake of Bush's terrible year.

Read the rest.

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith has long been admired by the left because of his love of top-down, centrally-planned economies. But as Joel Kotkin (whom Glenn Reynolds notes was one of the few economists who saw past the "Rising Sun" conventional wisdom of the early 1990s) notes, France's own top-down, centrally-planned economy is actually a key cause of their riots:

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Written the very night of 9/11, I've thought from literally the first time I read it to this day that Charles Paul Freund's "Apocalypse By Deed" was one of the most perceptive essays on that nightmarish day's events. As Freund wrote, the events of 9/11 were planned to be a spectacular television horrorshow as much as they were coordinated to actually cause death and destruction.

In a long, detailed, and absolutely related essay, Steve Green has written that essay's bookend: he looks at the most important front in America's astonishingly postmodern War On Terror.

Libertas looks at the new Jake Gyllenhaal movie:

The film supposedly features nudity and explicit gay sex scenes between the two cowboys, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. New York Daily News critic Jack Mathews is quoted as saying that the film may be “too much for red-state audiences, but it gives the liberal-leaning Academy a great chance to stick its thumb in conservatives’ eyes.”

Great! That’s just was an industry in economic free-fall should be doing, isn’t it?

I can't comment on the movie itself, as I know nothing about it. But the above quote by Jack Mathews certainly speaks volumes doesn't it? Hollywood has spent most of the past two years sticking its thumb in Red State and conservatives’ eyes. It's certainly done wonders for the Academy Award show's ratings and Hollywood's domestic box office this year, something I wrote about way back in May, at the start of Hollywood's dismal summer season:

The New York Times recently ran an article wondering why Hollywood's box office is down this year. Could it be because of efforts similar this in so many other films over the last 15 year or so, sure to alienate moviegoers in, what after the 2000 election was dubbed the Red States--flyover country where films need to make the bulk of their money in the US to be a hit--have started to take their toil?

As Patrick Ruffini wrote in January, during yet another attempt by the liberal-leaning Academy to stick its thumb in conservatives’ eyes:

That so many people view Hollywood through this political prism is pretty remarkable in a country where people are more interested in the latest with Nick and Jessica than in the condition of Social Security.

And yet: 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.

And BTW: I see Chris Rock just lost the other sixteen conservative viewers with his monologue... Nice!

Narnia and King Kong represent a chance for Hollywood to turn the Titanic around at Christmastime; it will be interesting to see both how these films do commercially, and how they're viewed by Red State audiences.

I thought Jonah Goldberg held the trademark on all Internet cheese-eating surrender monkey riffs, after the phrase was originally invented by The Simpsons. But Mark Steyn just wails on the concept:

According to its Office du Tourisme, the big event in Evreux this past weekend was supposed to be the annual fête de la pomme, du cidre et du fromage at the Place de la Mairie. Instead, in this charmingly smouldering cathedral town in Normandy, a shopping mall, a post office, two schools, upwards of 50 vehicles and, oh yes, the police station were destroyed by - what's the word? - "youths".

Over at the Place de la Mairie, M le Maire himself, Jean-Louis Debré, seemed affronted by the very idea that un soupçon de carnage should be allowed to distract from the cheese-tasting. "A hundred people have smashed everything and strewn desolation," he told reporters. "Well, they don't form part of our universe."

Maybe not, but unfortunately you form part of theirs.

Read the rest; Steyn's usually good, but his writing on the Paris riots in this essay is exceptional.

I’m in Los Angeles for a couple of days with Nina, who’s here on Official Pajamas Business.

We had dinner last night at the Encounter Restaurant, which is the “destination restaurant” in LAX--A.K.A., tourist trap, but we knew that going in. It’s done up in a cross between late George Jetson and early Austin Powers, a sort of psychedelic postmodern homage to late sixties swank, before the crushing stuck-on-stupidity of the wide sideburn brown bellbottom seventies came crashing in. (The atmosphere of the remodeled Brasserie in the Seagram building is very vaguely along similar lines, but the food is much better, and the atmosphere much less interstellar—more Ken Adam and Ed Straker, less Barbarella and Austin Powers.)

The Encounter, which first opened in 1997 (as did the Austin Powers franchise, curiously enough) is certainly a fun restaurant, housed at the top of a vaguely Eero Saarinen-inspired circular multistory building from the early '60s that looks like it could have been George Jetson’s apartment complex. Back then, Saarinen’s architecture was the model for airports--pity that that era has passed. To complete the Jetsons atmosphere, you can hear the psychedelic techno-trance music pumped into the elevator ride up to the restaurant on their Website.

The Encounter's service wasn’t bad, but the actual food and drink were definitely up and down. My Tanqueray Martinis were great, and in just the right sized glass. Not skimpy, but not a big humungous bucket-o-booze designed to quickly bring on insobriety. But the glass of B&B I had with dessert was definitely underfilled—a small puddle of brandy that looked lonely at the very bottom of its cognac glass.

The Apple Tart dessert was quite good, though. The shrimp and scallop appetizers that Nina and I shared at the start of the meal were dynamite—but my pepper-crusted New York Steak was tough and chewy. Not quite filet of Florsheim, but not too far from it, either.

But all-in-all, for someone looking to kill a couple of hours before a flight, it’s definitely worth stopping by--and certainly beats the food court-style dining so many airports have devolved into.

As a recent headline dubbed Terrell Owens, "Open Mouth, Insert Bench"; from all reports, it sounds like the Eagles are taking the same stance with Owens that the Tampa Bay Bucs did a few years ago with Keyshawn Johnson:

The tempestuous star receiver won't return to the Philadelphia Eagles this season -- or probably ever -- ``a result of a large number of situations that accumulated over a long period of time,'' coach Andy Reid said Monday.

Owens was suspended for Sunday night's 17-10 loss at Washington, and will remain suspended for three more games without pay. After that, the Eagles plan to deactivate him for the rest of the season.

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Power Line looks at one possible goal of the Paris riots (to use shorthard for riots that actually involve numerous towns in France):

We are told by the Paris correspondent for the leftist Independent newspaper that the rioters have no sense of political or religious identity and no political demands. I wonder how this correspondent knows so much about rioters' deep identities. The young Muslim who attacked my wife's cousin on a Paris bus seemed to have a religious-political identity (or at least an anti-semitic one). The same is true, judging from the reports I receive, of the kids who often attack the children of the same cousin.

That the rioters make no political demands is neither surprising nor reassuring. As I suggested last night, the fact that these people stand outside of normal French politics is part of what's most frightening. The young rioters, we are assured by those in the know, merely want to protect their turf without being harassed by the police. What this really means is that they want to commit crime and terrorize their neighborhoods without encountering the police. But this essentially secessionist goal is not an apolitical agenda. The desire to create lawless Muslim enclaves within France is precisely what makes these riots less like the riots in this country that occurred along side of the mainstream civil rights struggle, and more like an intifada. Our civil rights movement pushed for, and the riots probably helped bring about, a vastly increased African-American presence in the police forces of our cities. In Paris, by contrast, the issue is the right to be unpoliced.

Moreover, the fact that the rioters themselves are young and arguably apolitical in some sense doesn't mean that there is no Islamofascist element or content. The foot soldiers in this kinds of insurrections are almost always young and politically unsophisticated. It may still be the case that, behind the young foot soldiers, stand more conventionally political elements with an Islamofascist agenda or bent. What, for example, are we to make of the discovery of a bomb manufacturing facility in Evry, south of Paris?

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey notes that the French riots have come after multiple warnings of Islamist attacks, and looks at would could have been a key warning in late September.

And over at Tech Central Station, Stephen Schwartz looks at what he calls "'Red Belt' Riots":

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Mark Steyn looks at the Paris riots:

Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But the French government is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They're in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It's way too late to rerun the Battle of Poitiers. In the no-go suburbs, even before these current riots, 9,000 police cars had been stoned by ''French youths'' since the beginning of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet night. ''There's a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,'' said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes' trade union Action Police CFTC. ''We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.''

What to do? In Paris, while ''youths'' fired on the gendarmerie, burned down a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in two, as the ''minister for social cohesion'' (a Cabinet position I hope America never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters as ''scum.'' President Chirac seems to have come down on the side of those who feel the scum's grievances need to be addressed. He called for ''a spirit of dialogue and respect.'' As is the way with the political class, they seem to see the riots as an excellent opportunity to scuttle Sarkozy's presidential ambitions rather than as a call to save the Republic.

A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the effect that ''I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." But this is why. In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than their grandparents. French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that's less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.

If Chirac isn't exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren't doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the 'burbs gets you more ''respect'' from Chirac, they'll burn 'em again, and again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: ''The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.'' Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages.

On the bright side, that prospect ought to make these folks happy, at least.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds wonders why other European nations haven't sent troops to support the French. "It's supposed to be the European Union, right?", the Blogfather asks.

Maybe they want to make sure that Cindy Sheehan approves first...

The aptly named Dr. Sanity (with an MD in psychiatry/aerospace medicine) looks at, as she describes it, the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the modern far left. She makes waaaay too many great points for me to quote them all here; I'd end up pasting in virtually all of post, which I urge you to read in its entirety. (The posts by other bloggers tracking back to the good doctor's essay are also worth perusing.) But here's a sample:

The Left of today is considerably different from the liberal Left that I became acquainted with during my college years in the late 60’ and early 70’s. At that time, although I disagreed with many of my fellow students about their methods, I could still completely relate to the underlying idealism and desire to improve the world. Back then, the Left was attuned to the values of classical liberalism—freedom; equal opportunity; the rights of the individual. The Left, at that moment in history was compelled to go beyond mere rhetoric and act to promote the liberal ideals and values they espoused. That is when the Civil Rights movement went mainstream in American society. And, even thought there were undercurrents of the ideological rigidity that was to come later, the Left could be proud of the results of that movement.

Those glory days when the Left believed in freedom and individuality; and that the content of one’s character was more important than the color of one’s skin-- are long gone. Nowadays it seems that the Left only pretends to believe in those values and feels it necessary to mouth the words.

But my observation is that today’s Left pretty much stands for nothing—not freedom, not equal opportunity; not individual rights; not even peace. Trying to right the wrongs and injustices of the world is truly ethical and noble goal, but something happened on the road to that beautiful utopia. The Left made a wrong turn and got lost--somewhere in the vicinity of Vietnam, I think.

But I’m not going to rehash Vietnam again. Instead, I’m going to focus on the behavior of today’s Left and antiwar movement.

At this very moment, every issue supported by the Left, and almost all of the behavior exhibited by the Left is completely antithetical to classical liberal philosophies. There is no longer a commitment to personal liberty or to freedom. The Left is far to busy to promote freedom for the common man or woman, because their time is taken up advocating freedom for tyrants who oppress the common man; terrorists who kill the common man; and religious fanatics who subjugate the common woman.

The intellectuals who once promoted the IDEA of freedom, now are ensnared in an IDEOLOGY that depends for its very existence on the silencing of speech; the suppression of ideas; and the persecution of those who dare to refute its tenets.

Patriotism and love of one’s country is mocked by those who once fought to bring the American Dream to all American citizens; and who once championed those who were prevented from sharing in that Dream. Slowly and inexorably those idealists who once shouted, “we shall overcome,” morphed into a toxic culture promoting a never-ending victimhood that cannot possibly be overcome. Love of American ideals and values was transformed into the most perverse and vile anti-Americanism –where all things originating or “tainted” as American are uniquely bad; and where America became the source of all evil in the world.

The classical liberal tradition is now almost exclusively upheld by what are called “conservatives”. Once “liberal” was synonymous with the “left”. No longer.

We've made that point here more than a few times as well.

It's interesting to compare modern conservatism with the modern far left. (so interesting, we do it virtually daily here!) Jonah Goldberg wrote recently:

It is just one sign of National Review's success that people think American conservatism is very old. It's not. In fact, even as we conservatives cheer the “wisdom of the ancients” and decry the modernity and even postmodernity of our ideological adversaries, American conservatism is arguably the youngest ideology on the block. Marxism, which still clings on like a tough carpet mold in a faculty lounge, is well over a century old. As are all of its dirigiste and supposedly revolutionary offspring, including socialism, environmentalism, feminism, and even anarchism. Even the “Youth Movement” began in Italy some 90 years ago.

It's always good to remember that most of those face-pierced, self-proclaimed revolutionaries marching with giant puppets and painting Hitler mustaches on George W. Bush are really the shock troops of ideological kitsch.

Watching the Paris riots in socialist France along with the ever-more severe (if so far infinitely less bloody) cases of BDS here in the US, it seems obvious that something has to give. The contortions of the mainstream media only exacerbate both issues.

But both here and abroad, are we witnessing the end game of the far left? Will it transform itself into something more benign than its current state? Or does it get even worse before it gets better?

Update: Speaking of things getting worse, Betsy Newmark has a long, detailed post on the Paris riots and their aftermath:

There has been a lot of schadenfreude here about what is going on in France. It's not hard to have a rather childish sense of satisfaction taht the French who have so longed looked down their oh so superior noses at les Americains. But, the time schadenfreude has passed. What is going on in France will probably spread to other countries in Europe. And we can't forget that some of the 9/11 hijackers came through Europe. It wouldn't be difficult for other such men to hide among those stuck in their wretched projects. What goes on there can come here and spread elsewhere. I just feel a sense of doom about this malevolence spreading throughout Europe and then to our shores.

And if it does, historians will look back at these days of rioting as one of the stepping stones towards that day. They will look back on these days as we now look back at the 1850s. They'll wonder why people didn't take some action to forestall what was heading their way. I don't know what the solution is and if any country would have the fortitude to confront these violent youths head on and change fate. I just have a very sad sense of oncoming doom when I read about Europe.

It's been a longtime coming.

John Hinderaker has some thoughts on the Paris riots:

Rioting has spread from Paris to the Mediterranean, with arson attacks in Avignon, Cannes and Nice, as well as to Strasbourg and Rouen. The attackers are evil people; a couple of days ago they doused a disabled woman with gasoline and set her afire. Today they torched a nursery school and interfered with rescue personnel:

In one attack, youths in the eastern Paris suburb of Meaux prevented paramedics from evacuating a sick person from a housing project. They pelted rescuers with rocks and then torched the waiting ambulance, an Interior Ministry official said.
More than 800 cars were burned last night. The French government has no idea what to do, nor do the news media have language suitable to the nightmare that has erupted over much of France. The AP gives us the usual platitudes:

The violence — originally concentrated in neighborhoods northeast of Paris with large immigrant populations — is forcing France to confront long-simmering anger in its suburbs, where many Africans and their French-born children live on society's margins, struggling with unemployment, poor housing, racial discrimination, crime and a lack of opportunity.

Yeah, right. It's the most natural thing in the world for an unemployed person to burn cars, destroy schools, and set helpless women on fire. The authorities need to get a grip on the situation, soon. And wringing their hands about "poor housing" and "racial discrimination" isn't going to help. Napoleon's remedy--a "whiff of grapeshot"--still works, but I doubt whether France has the courage to use it.

The issue is rapidly resolving into an existential one: does France have a future?

Power Line News Video has several videos of the violence in France.

There's another question worth asking: what is the future of the left's philosophy of multiculturalism?

Found via Virginia Postrel, Michael Bierut looks at the last days of a corporate icon: legendary graphic designer Saul Bass's "Death Star" logo for AT&T. Here are a couple of excerpts from Bierut's great post:

SBC Communications Inc. today announced it will adopt AT&T, Inc. as its name following completion of its acquisition of AT&T, which is expected in late 2005.

The decision is a milestone in the history of telecommunications, extending the reign of a global icon. AT&T is inextricably linked to the birth and growth of the communications industry, delivering ground-breaking innovations that enabled modern computers and electronic devices, wireless phones and Voice over IP (VoIP). The brand also has represented quality service, integrity and reliability for more than 120 years.

At close, the new company will unveil a fresh, new logo. After completion of the merger, the transition to the new brand will be heavily promoted with the largest multimedia advertising and marketing campaign in either company's history, as well as through other promotional initiatives.

So take a long, last look at Saul Bass's finest moment. AT&T will live on, but its logo is about to disappear.

* * *

In 1968, Saul Bass was hired to bring order to the system, and created a classic modern identity program. In Nixon-era America, Bass's simplified bell-in-circle logo, rigorous Helvetica-based typographic system and ochre-and-process blue color scheme became as familiar as the Coca-Cola signature. It was the ideal graphic analog for a phone system that was hailed as the best in the world, a virtually indestructable monopoly posing as a public utility: Ma Bell, utterly reliable and as ubiquitous as air.

But nothing lasts forever, even notionally benevolent monopolies. So everything changed in 1982, when AT&T and the U.S. Justice Department agreed to settle an antitrust suit that had been filed against the company eight years before. AT&T agreed to divest itself of its local telephone operations, and seven independent "baby Bells" came into place. This was a gold rush for identity designers. Gone were the Bell logo, the ochre-and-blue stripes, and familiar names like Ohio Bell and Wisconsin Telephone, names as sturdy and plainspoken as the telephones that Henry Dreyfus had designed for Bell since 1930. On New Year's Day, 1984, Americans awoke to a world in which their telephone service would be provided by newly-minted entities with fanciful monikers like Ameritech, USWest, and Pacific Telesis.

AT&T did not cease to exist. On the contrary, not only would it continue its traditional activities as a long-distance service provider, it was now at liberty to pursue business that had been off-limits in its quasi-monopolistic days. Saul Bass was called back to design the identity that would represent AT&T in this post-divestiture new world order.

And Bass was ready. I've heard from more than one person that Bass had tried without success to sell a striped globe logo to several previous clients (or even "every client that came along" as one insider told me). This may not be true, but there is no doubt that Bass liked round logos with horizontal stripes: witness Continental Airlines and Minolta, to name two. But with the new AT&T, he had at last the big client ready for the big idea. Their logo would be nothing but a sphere, a circle crossed with lines modulated in width to create the illusion of dimensionality. And this client bought it, perhaps because like the bell, this new, seemingly abstract image had a reassuringly literal meaning; at AT&T's online brand center, the logo is described as "a world circled by electronic communications." It's not just a logo, it's a picture of a globe girded by wires and cables. Some people saw even more: in some circles, the sphere was nicknamed the "The Death Star."

I have a friend who's a veteran advertising consultant for some huge (Rollerball-sized, dude!) corporations; she's the first person I heard call AT&T's logo "The Death Star" years ago, and the name always stuck with me since.

Read the rest of Bierut's post; for most people, the loss of the AT&T logo, as with AT&T itself will go relatively unnoticed, but it is a reminder that nothing is permanent--especially graphic design.

That was the slogan for a series of TV commercials for the old Atari 2600 game system in the late '70s and early '80s, as you can see in this ultra-cheesy vintage clip.

And if you'd like a history of the 2600, my latest bi-monthly "Micro Memories" column for Nuts & Volts magazine is devoted to the rise and fall of the Cartridge Family.

My review of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant's Unledded-No Quarter DVD from last January's Vintage Guitar magazine is now online.

Can get enough Zep? Click here for my Blogcritics interview with engineer Kevin Shirley who mixed the sound for the DVD release (along with the triumphant Led Zeppelin live DVD in 2003).

Speaking of news from alien worlds, Zombietime has an incredible collection of must-see photos from "The World Can't Wait Rally" in San Francisco Wednesday. There's a lot about San Francisco I enjoy whenever I go up there, but when I look at the photos that Zombie collects on a regular basis, man, oh Manischewitz, I'm glad I don't live there.

(Via Charles Johnson.)

Roger L. Simon is none-too-happy with the New York Times' reporting of the Paris riots:

We have long realized that there is no such thing as impartial reporting, certainly in the New York Times, but their version of the events in France at the moment, placing much of the blame on interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, borders on the ludicrous. Whether the current unrest develops into a true European intifada or simply fizzles out, it has been decades in the making. Sarkozy is just one of many politicians who happens to be there now. Of course, the Times, for its fuddy-duddy ideological reasons, must blame today's cop for dynamics way beyond the compass of a single human being.

And they ask us to pay extra for their opinion writers? We already get them free on the front page.

Well, yeah.

Gotta love Google's left coast environmental hypocrisy. Kevin J. Delaney of The Wall Street Journal writes:

Google Inc.'s two billionaire founders, both 32 years old, will soon be cruising the skies in a Boeing 767 wide-body airliner. They bought the used plane earlier this year, Mr. Page says.

The 767-200, typically an airline workhorse, is an unusual executive jet. It commonly carries about 180 passengers. Delta Air Lines operates over one hundred 767s. The Italian Air Force has ordered a modified 767 as an airborne tanker for refueling military jets. The 767-200 is almost 70% longer and more than three times as heavy as a conventional executive jet, such as a high-end Gulfstream.

Mr. Page says his plane will hold about 50 passengers when its refurbishment is complete. A top Gulfstream business jet typically carries 15 or fewer. He declines to give other details. People in the aviation industry familiar with the planned interior say it will have a sitting area, two staterooms with adjoining lavatories and a shower. Farther aft will be a large sitting-and-dining area. At the rear will be 12 to 16 first-class seats for guests or employees and a large galley.

Tech moguls delight in public one-upmanship and the Google founders' 767 raises the bar. Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen owns a fleet of aircraft, but his flagships -- two Boeing 757s -- are smaller than Messrs. Brin and Page's 767. It also marks a new level of consumption by the Google executives, who have shunned most trappings of the super-rich despite a combined net worth estimated at more than $20 billion.

Delaney adds:

The purchase of a wide-body jet for personal use might seem at odds with the Google founders' support for environmental causes. The company gives employees $5,000 if they buy hybrid gas-electric cars, for example.

Back in September, Michelle Malkin looked what she dubbed "The HuffMobile", Arianna Huffington and the Sierra Club's oversize SUV wheels of choice, and as I wrote a couple of years ago about the ABC TV network's fall season launch party at Disneyland:

In order to ferry the celebrities from L.A. to Anaheim, ABC employed an enormous fleet of stretch limos. I don't think I had ever seen more black automobiles this side of Don Corleone's funeral.

Lots of those limos were actually luxury black SUVs--and not an electric hybrid in sight! (Imagine that!) Next time a celebrity starts complaining about your Chevy Suburban or Toyota Land Cruiser, just remember how this person probably gets around--and smile at his Disneyland-sized hypocrisy.

I don't begrudge anyone his choice of car, SUV, or heck, even jet. (We're planning on the Pajamas-767, right guys...?). Just don't lecture me about, or try to take away my choices.

That seems fair, doesn't it?

Michelle Malkin has a great round-up of links. Tough to argue with her when she writes, "The blogosphere has the best ongoing coverage, commentary, and analysis of the Muslim immigrant gang violence (otherwise known in the politically correct MSM as the "Paris unrest") that has plagued France for more than week".

But then, isn't that usually the case with the Blogosphere?

The Uncooperative Blogger links to a couple of recent items saying that Congress plans to split the far left and far gone Ninth Circus Circuit Court.

There have been several other attempts in the past; I'll believe this one when it actually happens.

As we were just a couple of posts ago in regards to Claudia Rosett, this catch by the Drudge Report is par for the course there:

UN honors 'Zorba the Greek' composer with peace, humanity award...

FLASHBACK: MIKIS THEODORAKIS CALLED JEWS 'ROOT OF ALL EVIL'

I wonder what Anthony Quinn would have thought of all of this.

Glenn Reynolds has a link-filled round-up of events concerning the Paris riots. This is a particular eye-catcher, simply because this first paragraph is so unsurprising in retrospect:

Back in the 1990s, the French sneered at America for the Los Angeles riots. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported in 1992: "the consensus of French pundits is that something on the scale of the Los Angeles riots could not happen here, mainly because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs." President Mitterrand, the Washington Post reported in 1992, blamed the riots on the "conservative society" that Presidents Reagan and Bush had created and said France is different because it "is the country where the level of social protection is the highest in the world."

How the times have changed. Muslims in Paris's suburbs are out shooting at police and firefighters, burning cars and buildings, and throwing rocks at commuter trains. Even children are out on the streets - it was reported that a 10-year-old was arrested. The trigger for the riots was the electrocution of two teenagers last Thursday, which the rioters say came following a police chase, a charge the police deny. But even if the charge by the rioters is true, that the police are culpable in the deaths of the two youths, the fact that such an incident would spark a riot is a sign of something deeper at work - no doubt France's failure to integrate its immigrant Muslim community.

It turns out that France's Muslim community lives in areas rampant with crime, poverty, and unemployment, much the fault of France's prized welfare system. There are those of us who spent part of the 1980s in Europe, supporting the idea, among others from the Reagan era, that immigration was a virtue for a country and that the racial or religious background of the immigrants did not matter. We maintain that view. But immigration into a country with a dirigiste economy is a recipe for trouble, which is why supporters of immigration into France have long warned of the need for liberalization.

Part of France's problem is that it has defaulted on those measures. The lack of labor market flexibility and other socialist policies have created unemployment at nearly 10%, most of which falls among immigrants. And part stems from the fact that France's estimated 5 million Muslims, out of a population of 60 million, are led by mostly foreign radical imams. Only belatedly has the French state started taking action, pressing for clerics to be taught in France. All this is compounded by the image France projects of itself to its Muslims, which one can surmise is the reason why Muslims see rioting as the solution to any grievance.

It's a barely kept secret that Mr. Chirac led the opposition to the Iraq war out of fear of how his Muslim population would react. This fear is a big part of why France portrays itself as America's counterweight and why it criticizes Israel at every turn and coddled the terrorist Yasser Arafat right up to his death. This doesn't elicit thanks from Muslim radicals in France. It turns out to project an image of weakness. Unsurprisingly when faced with some unhappiness they believe they can pressure the French state into submission.

A number of observers of the French scene have looked at population trends and suggested that France is on its way to becoming a Muslim country (one that would, let it be noted, be armed with hydrogen bombs). Some react to this by suggesting a halt to immigration and even expulsion. The better approach is to impose law and order, more speedily to reform the burdensome welfare state, and start integrating the Muslim community. France could also help itself by dispatching troops to help battle the radical Islamists in Iraq, thereby sending a message to Muslims at home and abroad that France is on the side of those Muslims, the majority no doubt, who want to live in peace.

The now-defunct Ottoman Empire was the first of several countries over the previous century to be dubbed "The Sick Man of Europe". But economically and socially, Europe as a whole increasingly looks to be the Sick Man of the World, with dire--and now immediate--consequences for all of its population.

Of course, it is possible to end a malaise and restore vitality, but the EU's endless bureaucracy is far too entrenched--and far too blind--to allow such measures to actually be implemented.

If you know anything at all about the Oil For Food Scandal that is at the heart of the United Nation's corruption, you learned about it largely through the efforts of one woman: Claudia Rosett, whom I'm thrilled to see is an editorial board member of Pajamas Media (soon to be renamed).

As Roger L. Simon (who's played a large role in building PJM's all-star editorial board) writes:

I would imagine the name Claudia Rosett is almost a household word to readers of this Oil-for-Food obsessed blog. All I can say about her is that she is the living proof that the Pulitzer Prize is corrupt. So it goes without saying that we in Pajamas are proud to have her on our Editorial Board.

Indeed, to invoke the New Media's favorite adverb.

In Tech Central Station, James Pinkerton writes, "Happy Anniversary, Reaganites!", for it was on this day 25 years ago that America's impotent stagflation-dominated stuck-on-stupid malaise of the Jimmy Carter-seventies began to come to an end:

Can you imagine the Dow Jones Industrial Average at, say, 3000? Can you visualize inflation and interests in double digits? And per capita income maybe two-thirds of what it is now? It's not so difficult to see those things in your mind's eye -- provided you can also visualize the American people re-electing the 39th president, Jimmy Carter.

Instead, 25 years ago today, on November 4, 1980, the voters in 44 states chose Ronald Reagan. So this day, like any happy anniversary, is worth celebrating. But in addition, we should remember that while Reagan demonstrated the importance of optimism, another conservative immortal, Barry Goldwater, offered us a sterner injunction: There are no final victories. And so on this day, and on all days henceforth, we must recommit ourselves to the maintenance, and the furtherance, of the Reaganaut agenda -- because if we don't, we could lose it all.

As Pinkerton writes, there's still much to be done:

What would the Gipper be telling us if he were still with us?

Having shaken his hand a half-dozen times, I feel empowered to make three points, just on the tax issue.

First, Reagan Redux would say that taxes are still too high. Although the Laffer Curve is a bit too radical -- radical in its simplicity and profundity -- for most economists to subscribe to, at least when their colleagues are looking, no credible economist today would want to return to the bad old ideas of pre-Lafferite tax policy, when tax rates went as high as 94 percent. Interestingly, one of the first Americans to argue that such high tax rates were not only socially punitive, but also economically counter-productive, was a young actor who asked himself, "Why bother making another movie if I take home just six cents on the dollar?" And when Ronald Reagan applied that insight beyond his own situation, to the economy as a whole, his long romance with the Laffer Curve began.

Today, the top rate is 35 percent. And while the new tax reform commission has its heart in the right place, its recommendations are a jumble of poorly articulate "alternatives," none of which seem destined to capture the national imagination -- or a place on the political agenda.

But such neo-Reaganites as Steve Forbes, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and former George W. Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey all say that the top rate should be half that. If we could accomplish such a feat, then maybe America's economic growth wouldn't merely exceed that of Western Europe and Japan; it might rival that of China and the other Asian tigers.

Second, the Gipper would remind us that tax rates aside, the overall burden of taxation -- federal, state, and local -- is too high. The data on Tax Freedom Day show a lot more sideways sidling than forward progress. And Tuesday's rollback of the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights in Colorado is hardly an encouraging sign. And while there's plenty of fight left in fans of limited governments, the Colorado vote underscores Goldwater's wisdom: No Final Victories.

Third, as if to underscore Goldwater's wisdom, one of the worst ideas of the 70s is today making a comeback: a "windfall profits tax" on the oil industry. Yes, it's maddening to see liberal Democrats decrying shortages of oil -- shortages that they helped create through restrictions on drilling and refining -- and thus proposing to "solve" those shortages through demagogic polices. But it's even more maddening to see Republicans joining in. As the Gipper reminded us, "If you tax something, you get less of it." Thus the question to the oil-taxers of today: Is this the time for less oil production?

So while the news of late has been mixed, Reagan Redux would never give in to counsels of despair. As he would say, amidst all this manure, there's gotta be a pony in here somewhere!

And so that's our challenge today, 25 years after Reagan changed American history -- and all of our lives. We should pick up the mantle of his optimistic can-do spirit and wear it around our shoulders. That can be our armor, our protecting shield. And then we should seize upon new ideas, and new thinking, just as the Gipper did in the late 70s, when he turned the Laffer Curve into a mighty sword. Such ideas can be our sword, too, because the best weapon is a theory that's proven itself as policy. If we come up with even better ideas, fine. But if we merely re-interpret the Reagan tax agenda for the 21st century, then the next 25 years will be even better than the last 25 years.

For some additional thoughts on Reaganomics in action, click here and here.

With so many distortions from the legacy media and the left these days, Jonah Goldberg reminds us what the president and vice-president originally said about Iraq, only a few years ago:

First, here's the president:

"If he refuses or continues to evade his obligations through more tactics of delay and deception, he and he alone will be to blame for the consequences. . Now, let's imagine the future. What if he fails to comply, and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction.? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he'll use the arsenal. And I think every one of you who's really worked on this for any length of time believes that, too."

Here is the vice president:

"If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He's already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons. He poison-gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people. So this is a way to save lives and to save the stability and peace of a region of the world that is important to the peace and security of the entire world."

Read More »

Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick's classic 1964 Cold War satire, hinged on this great scene between Sterling Hayden as the mad US General Jack D. Ripper, and Peter Sellars as the terribly British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake:

General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. Nineteen forty-six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Uh, Jack, Jack, listen, tell me, tell me, Jack. When did you first... become... well, develop this theory?

General Jack D. Ripper: Well, I, uh... I... I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.

General Jack D. Ripper: Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.

General Jack D. Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No.

General Jack D. Ripper: But I... I do deny them my essence.

Over at the Corner, John Derbyshire also appears to a purity of essence kind of guy:

A reader: "Mr. Derbyshire---One group where spouses do not share a marital bed is New Guinea's Sambia. Male potency is seen as a strange power called Jerangdu. It is kind of like the Maori's manu in that it can be transferred around. If you run out of it you die. Anyway, jerangdu is found in the semen. Women are always trying to steal the man's potency so the man must be cautious. Men sleep in the men's hut and visit the wife sparingly, less they age too quickly. It gets weirder from there..."

[Derb] Thank you, Sir. Er, excuse me, guys, but don't we all sort of... believe this?

I'll get back to you after I check the CRM-114...

Mark Steyn on the Paris riots:

We kept hearing all this stuff ever since September 11th, you know, the Muslim street is going to explode in anger. Well, it finally did, and it was in Paris, not in the Middle East.

Steyn also has some thoughts which echo both Ed Morrissey and Dr. Dalrymple:

I'm actually thinking of going to Paris. I went to one of these suburbs that's currently ablaze three years ago. And what was interesting to me is I had to bribe a taxi driver a considerable amount of money just to take me out there. They're miserable places. But what was interesting to me is that after that, I then flew on to the Middle East, and I was in Yemen, and a couple of other places. And what was interesting to me was that I found more menace in the suburbs of Paris than I did in some pretty scary places in the Middle East. I mean, there is a real...this, I think, is the start of a long Eurabian civil war we're witnessing here.

HH: Now that's a pretty provocative statement. Let's begin by...describe these for us. Are they like the Moscow or the Leningrad or the St. Petersberg tenements that stretch on and on?

MS: Well, actually, I would say they're more miserable than that...

HH: Wow.

MS: ...because a lot of them are like concrete bunkers. They have very strange things there...these public buildings that you have to have a kind of security card to get into. So, you'll be going to see someone, and you'll be frantically sticking this kind of key card in the door, while you're standing outside on this very exposed sidewalk. They're places where people who are not Muslim feel very ill at ease. They're places where the writ of the French state does not run. The police don't police there. They basically figure if you go there, you're on your own. You're taking your own chances there. I mean, I don't think Americans understand quite the degree of alienation of some of these groups. You know, there's a French cabinet minister whose title is the minister for social cohesion. And I think that would be a pretty odd title to have for a cabinet secretary in the United States.

However, as La Shawn Barber noted, it's possible in the future that title won't sound quite as strange to American ears.

Taking a break from her Pajamas-related legal work, Nina checks in with this important update from the animal kingdom--Ed

BAMBI FACTION SECEDES FROM PETA (Enchanted Forest--11/3/05): The Bambi faction of PETA, representing the deer of the world, has broken off from the rest of PETA, citing long term discrimination.

“Look we’ve spent millions on PR. We had a PR firm get Disney to cast a deer as Bambi. They were originally going to have Bambi be some dumb rabbit. Where do you think the idea of 'Doe eyes' as large and lovely brown eyes came from? It was our PR firm. We’ve done more to bolster the image of wild animals than anyone. And we get nothing back” said a Bambi faction spokesdeer.

In a letter to PETA, the faction stated: “Cows in Japan are being fed grain and sake. But we have to forage for ourselves. They are slaughtered quickly, but we get chased around the veldt for hours and then are ripped apart alive by a lion.”

Reports that the Bambi faction might become militant were bolstered by several reports of marauding deer:

IS IT POSSIBLE IT'S NOT THE BIRDS? [Warren Bell]
Is it maybe the deer? Have the formerly innocent-appearing woodland creatures used the avian menace as a cover, all the while lulling us into a perilously false state of ease? A deer goes after Gov. Tim Pawlenty, breaking windows. A deer attacks a home in Arkansas, breaking windows. A deer rampages in a hospital in Michigan, breaking windows. All in the last three days? I'm no conspiracy theorist, but this seems to be the work of a vast network of secret underground forest operatives.

PETA's spokeshumans had no comments.

Scott Ott, the great Blogosphere satirist, "reports" on the Paris riots:

(2005-11-03) — After seven nights of riots by youth in predominantly-Muslim sections of Paris, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin (who is a man) announced today that police would pull out of areas where dozens of cars burn each night to “let the freedom-fighting insurgents govern themselves.”

“Just like the United States should not force democracy upon Muslims in Iraq,” said Mr. de Villepin, “we should not impose our own provincial thinking about the so-called ‘rule of law’ on Muslim immigrants who have established a homeland in Paris. We’re withdrawing our occupation forces immediately.”

The Prime Minister, who, when he was Foreign Minister, vigorously opposed the U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, today enthusiastically endorsed self-determination for “these peaceful religious people in our midst.”

Scott's post is titled, "France to Let Rioters Govern Themselves"; sadly, that's one of the causes of this week's riots:

Even absent radical Islamism, the French should have foreseen the disaster that has presently come upon them, and had a plan to handle it. After 9/11, the French should have responded proactively to counter the push for French Muslims to join efforts with al-Qaeda and other kinds of terrorist groups. Whether through fatalism or Gallic arrogance, the French has refused to acknowledge the danger -- and now the economic frustration has joined with the religious lunacy of Islamofascism to turn parts of one of the capitals of the West into little more than Fallujah-sur-Seine.

The police have long avoided patrols in these areas, preferring to leave the Muslims there to their own devices -- and they have understood the message: France will not fight for her own territory. Even responsible Muslims have no choice under those circumstances to work within the power structure that arises in these ghettoes, thanks to French surrender. The result has not been rioting, as understood by the press, but rather a series of running battles between France's belated response to the violence and proto-terrorists using the same hit-and-run field tactics seen by Coalition forces in Fallujah and other cities in Iraq. The only weapons they lack are explosives for IEDs, and so the fatality rate has stayed low -- at least thus far.

Rand Simberg notes that the Paris riots aren't the only Islamic-fueled rioting in Europe: Denmark doesn't sound like much fun right now, either. And he also links to a Dalrymple article; this one titled "The Suicide Bombers Among Us".

Blogger "Submandave" looks at the many shades of gray and nuance that one of the reviewers of Michelle Malkin's new book on Amazon.com demonstrates:

Michelle Malkin has a new book, Unhinged, that addresses the manic and irrational side seen far too often from Democrats these days. Brian Maloney noted a "preemptive strike" by an Amazon reviewer that reads, in part:

If you buy this book, you hate America- just like Michelle Malkin, who wants to destroy everything that's great about this country.

A neat thing about Amazon reviews, though, is that it allows the user to see other reviews written by the individual in order to better appraise the value of the review. A quick look at the "Patriotic Professor's" 15 Amazon reviews reveals an interesting pattern. For a person one might expect to exhibit nuance and understanding, her reviews demonstrate a total digital breakdown. Not only does the good Prof have just two speeds (1 for Hate, 5 for Love), with the exception of the single Jazz album reviewed the Love/Hate breakdown falls perfectly along party lines.

But wait, it gets better. Three of her reviews, for books by Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reiley and Sean Hanity are identical except for the tailored insult:

Simply put, if you agree with the sentiments expressed in this book, you hate America. Any person who agrees with [Bill O'Reilly's | Ann "B**ch" Coulter's | Sean "Pig-Head Idiot" Hannity] lies is unpatriotic and is an agent of Osama Bin Laden.

In essence, conservatives hate America. The only way to prove you don't hate America is 1. to not buy this book; and 2. to vote Bush out of office in November.

So, if I got this right, a person claiming to be a professor (i.e. educated and supposedly not unintelligent) who devotes their time to doing cut-and-paste mudslinging on Amazon.com against conservative authors takes offense with Michelle's characterization of the Left as "Unhinged" and proceeds to offer a live demonstration of her thesis. Michelle couldn't have paid for better advertising.

It's like flypaper!

In his post about the Paris riots that we linked to a moment ago, Ed Morrissey wrote:

The riots typify French reaction to Islamism, and spring from a European approach to the Islamic wave of migration into Europe. After WWII, the French built so-called "sink estates" for the workers they encouraged to emigrate to help rebuild the nation, as did Germany. Most of these workers came from Turkey and colonies in North Africa. Instead of planning for their integration into society, however, the French allowed these communities to grow and fester in economic and social isolation. After two generations, the sink estates have proven to be nothing more than preplanned ghettoes, and the workers have no future except as second-class citizens of the nations they helped rebuild from devastation.

In an amazingly prescient article written in 2002, Theodore Dalrymple foreshadowed the role that modern architecture would play in formenting this week's riots. In particular, the early-20th century modern architectural theories of France's own Le Corbusier (whose 1920s aphorism that "the home is a machine for living in" made him a household name):

Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants and a smattering of the least successful members of the French working class. From these projects, the excellence of the French public transport system ensures that the most fashionable arrondissements are within easy reach of the most inveterate thief and vandal.

Architecturally, the housing projects sprang from the ideas of Le Corbusier, the Swiss totalitarian architect—and still the untouchable hero of architectural education in France—who believed that a house was a machine for living in, that areas of cities should be entirely separated from one another by their function, and that the straight line and the right angle held the key to wisdom, virtue, beauty, and efficiency. The mulish opposition that met his scheme to pull down the whole of the center of Paris and rebuild it according to his “rational” and “advanced” ideas baffled and frustrated him.

The inhuman, unadorned, hard-edged geometry of these vast housing projects in their unearthly plazas brings to mind Le Corbusier’s chilling and tyrannical words: “The despot is not a man. It is the . . . correct, realistic, exact plan . . . that will provide your solution once the problem has been posed clearly. . . . This plan has been drawn up well away from . . . the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds.”

But what is the problem to which these housing projects, known as cités, are the solution, conceived by serene and lucid minds like Le Corbusier’s? It is the problem of providing an Habitation de Loyer Modéré—a House at Moderate Rent, shortened to HLM—for the workers, largely immigrant, whom the factories needed during France’s great industrial expansion from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the unemployment rate was 2 percent and cheap labor was much in demand. By the late eighties, however, the demand had evaporated, but the people whose labor had satisfied it had not; and together with their descendants and a constant influx of new hopefuls, they made the provision of cheap housing more necessary than ever.

An apartment in this publicly owned housing is also known as a logement, a lodging, which aptly conveys the social status and degree of political influence of those expected to rent them. The cités are thus social marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically planned from their windows to their roofs, with no history of their own or organic connection to anything that previously existed on their sites, they convey the impression that, in the event of serious trouble, they could be cut off from the rest of the world by switching off the trains and by blockading with a tank or two the highways that pass through them, (usually with a concrete wall on either side), from the rest of France to the better parts of Paris. I recalled the words of an Afrikaner in South Africa, who explained to me the principle according to which only a single road connected black townships to the white cities: once it was sealed off by an armored car, “the blacks can foul only their own nest.”

The average visitor gives not a moment’s thought to these Cités of Darkness as he speeds from the airport to the City of Light. But they are huge and important—and what the visitor would find there, if he bothered to go, would terrify him.

A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.

Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti—BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme. The iconography of the cités is that of uncompromising hatred and aggression: a burned-out and destroyed community-meeting place in the Les Tarterets project, for example, has a picture of a science-fiction humanoid, his fist clenched as if to spring at the person who looks at him, while to his right is an admiring portrait of a huge slavering pit bull, a dog by temperament and training capable of tearing out a man’s throat—the only breed of dog I saw in the cités, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.

There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every store—with the exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy. The underground parking lot, charred and blackened by smoke like a vault in an urban hell, is permanently closed.

We previously looked at the architectural theories of Corbusier--and Dalrymple--back in August, in a post titled, "The Life And Death Of England's Cities".

Ed Morrissey compares the Muslim riots in Paris with General von Choltitz's refusal to carry out Hitler's mad plans in 1944 to burn Paris to the ground to present Allied liberators with a wasteland. "What von Choltitz preserved, Paris' own Muslim population appears intent on destroying now", Ed writes. "For a full week, night has brought riots and destruction to the City of Light, while the French government seems paralyzed and unsure about how to stop it":

The French still dither when they should act instead, sending the message even more clearly that they will not act in their own defense. The Muslim Uprising will soon become an al-Qaeda rallying point; not an intifada, as some have surmised, but an actual military front in AQ's war on the West. They intend to turn the sink estates into holy land and ensure that their bloody rule cannot be dislodged. If the French do not act quickly, they may soon find out what happens when fascists without the humanity of a von Choltitz will do to their beloved Paris once they have enough power.

Meanwhile, Orrin Judd wryly notes that "Europe's secular multiculturalism is getting a nice little test drive in the streets of Paris this week--how's it working?"

La Shawn Barber observes we could be witnessing America's potential future:

Paris is reaping what it’s sown, and if we don’t heed the warnings (as if the murder of thousands and destruction of two buildings in New York City weren’t enough), we can expect the same.

Read the rest.

This doesn't sound like a smart fight to me if it's true. John Podhoretz theorizes that White House press secretary Scott McClellan has leaked a story to the Washington Post to fight a turf war against Karl Rove:

The much-discussed Washington Post story this morning headlined "Rove's Future Role Is Debated" is a bit of a breakthrough because it's one of the few times during Dubya's tenure in the White House that the press has been used as a tool to fight an internal battle. The thing is that Bush hates such things. The other thing is that press secretary Scott McClellan's messy fingerprints are all over the WaPo story, as even Bush will be able to see.

The essence of the story is that Karl Rove needs to go because he's made life difficult for McClellan. You have to figure, therefore, that the story was leaked or sanctioned by McClellan, a fact that is telegraphed clumsily by a series of pro-McClellan sentences. "Many mid-level staffers inside have expressed frustration that press secretary Scott McClellan's credibility was undermined by Rove, who told the spokesman that he was not involved in the leak....'That is affecting everybody,' said a Republican who has discussed the issue with the White House. 'Scott personally is really beaten down by this. Everybody I talked to talks about this.'"

This is the first time ever that a sympathetic word has been published about Scott McClellan, which is tipoff #1 that the story derives from him or his friends. Tipoff #2 is the idea that what's affecting the White House is less the whole leak affair than its effect on Scott McClellan. Yes, I'm sure people are wandering the halls of the Old Executive Office Building, murmuring to each other, "I just can't get any work done because of what's happened to Scott!"

Look, let's talk turkey. McClellan isn't a very good press secretary, to put it mildly. He looks as though at any moment he is going to bolt from the podium and go running into the bathroom to throw up. Karl Rove is the most effective White House strategist in our lifetimes.

Absent more bad news for Rove, if there were a choice about which of the two of them ought to exit, the answer would unambiguously be: Keep Rove and let McClellan walk. Unless, that is, you're the Democratic Party. Or Scott McClellan. Oh, and as for the story's detail about how Rove may still be in trouble with the special prosecutor because Fitzgerald had a conversation with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper's lawyer this week, give me a break. We know, because Fitzgerald said so, that he's tying up loose ends and finishing his investigation. Rove spent four hours before the Fitzgerald grand jury nearly three weeks ago and that's the testimony Fitzgerald is surely doublechecking.

I think it's fair to presume that Rove didn't volunteer to go back to the grand jury, as he did, so that he could tell lies and get caught out in them. That would just be demented. Even the anti-Rove hysterics would surely have to agree with this.

From everything I've read, President Bush puts a premium on loyalty and zipped lips, and despises internal leaks. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a brief mention in the Washington Post after the new year that McClellan has "returned to the private sector".

Really interesting piece by James Piereson in The New Criterion titled, "Lyndon Johnson and the Cult of Sentimentality". Reading it, you can almost watch the swanky grown-up early sixties of JFK give way to the far left dominated anti-reason late-'60s, to the brown corduroy bell-bottom bogosity that was the entire 1970s. And it's logical for Piereson to place LBJ as the man at the heart of the transformation. I think I remember Doris Kearns Goodwin in a PBS profile of LBJ (back when she seemed to be in every PBS presidential profile) in which she said that Johnson wanted everyone's adoration for the Great Society, much as the public three decades earlier adored FDR. "Johnson was giving everyone a gift, and he wanted them to love him for it", is how I remember her quote.

But LBJ was not a figure made for the television, which was at its zenith (sorry) in the 1960s. (Marshall McLuhan wrote endlessly--if elliptically--at the time on whether or not someone was made for the Medium Cool). How could Johnson compete with someone like Bobby Kennedy, who as Piereson writes, knew exactly how to play to the television cameras:

It is perhaps too easy to draw the lesson from this that sentimentalists are destined to be ruled by Machiavellians who know how to exploit their attachment to sentiment and emotional expressions like "We must love one another, or we must die." Yet, just as Johnson sought to exploit the emerging culture of sentimentality, he was also brought down by it because he was so obviously ill-suited to the role of pied-piper to the young and sensitive. The sentimentalists were hard-headed enough to see (leaving Vietnam aside) that Johnson was not one of them. Johnson, no matter how hard he tried or how much liberal legislation he passed, was simply not convincing as an exemplar of peace and love.

No, the growing army of sentimentalists of the time preferred to march behind Robert Kennedy -- a far more Machiavellian figure because Kennedy, unlike Johnson, understood that a politician in a sentimental age must not only say sensitive things, but must also appear authentically to be sad, mournful, and burdened by the tragedies of the world. Robert Kennedy appealed to this emerging culture because he looked like the real thing, a man broken by the tragic but senseless death of his brother. Yet, if this was the case, as to come extent it was, it did not stop Kennedy from exploiting it in his own quest for power and high office. Perhaps the only lesson to be learned from this bizarre period is that, in the end, sentimentality can never answer nor succeed in putting aside the permanent questions of politics, namely: conflict, ambition, and the pursuit of power.

Read the rest, for it is very good.

This is good news for beleaguered motorists, especially if it's part of a trend that also includes building additional refineries. But it's obviously going to be a while before an oil is actually extracted from America's Vast Pestilential Wasteland.

Joe Biden: peace loving Man of God:

Biden said that he chooses to make a second presidential bid, he will aggressively defend his own values as well as those of the Democratic Party. "If I'm the nominee, Republicans will be sorry," said Biden, a Roman Catholic who ran for president in 1988. "The next Republican that tells me I'm not religious I'm going to shove my rosary beads down their throat."

So much for turning the other cheek.

Don Surber looks at the investments of Michael Moore:

Well, it turns out millionaire schlockumentary director Michael Moore owns 2,000 shares of Halliburton. World Net Daily reports Moore's holdings include "nearly 2,000 shares of Boeing, nearly 1,000 of Sonoco, more than 4,000 of Best Foods, more than 3,000 of Eli Lilly, more than 8,000 of Bank One and more than 2,000 of Halliburton ... "

Wonder if shorts his stock whenever he releaes a new documentary?

PoliPundit looks at the nation's desperate need for additional oil refineries, and reminds us that the last such facility was opened in the US in 1976.

Hugh Hewitt reminds us that the ANWR vote is today in the Senate:

Democrats slam George Bush over high gas prices, but they won't let us look for where oil might be, won't let us drill where we know it is, and won't let us build more refineries for the oil we do have.

Watch the Dems vote in the Senate tomorrow on ANWR exploration. A vote against exploration is a vote of indifference to the cost of gas.

Exactly.

Near the beginning of Modern Times, his opus history of the twentieth century, Paul Johnson wrote:

At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.

No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension. He was bewildered by the relentless publicity and error which his work seemed to promote. He wrote to his colleague Max Born on 9 September 1920: 'Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned everything he touched into gold, so with me everything turns into a fuss in the newspapers.' Einstein was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong.

He lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker.

The public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.

Where do we stand today? Europe issues edicts requiring the the words Christ and Jew be spelled in lower case. Hong Kong has a yen for Nazi-pr0n. And a student at U.C. San Diego shot some pornography of his own: a taxpayer-supported porn movie as a student film that aired on the college's student-run television station. (Gee, I don't remember shooting any of those as a student filmmaker at NYU...) What did the faculty think?

HH: But have you personally been contacted by any member of the administration?

SY: Nothing personally yet.

HH: Have you been contacted by any professor?

SY: I've talked with a number of professors about it, and you know, trying to explain the situation as a lot of them are in the dark about this.

HH: And what have they said to you?

SY: They're really listening to the story and seeing how it progresses. Nothing really solid yet. After February...I never had a chance to talk to any professors specifically, as I was pretty busy doing other stuff.

HH: Has anyone stepped up to you and said Steve, you might not want to do this?

SY: You know, nobody personally has stepped up to me. No students, no administrators. They're very supportive of this, and that's the really odd thing.

No it isn't.

Orrin Judd has a new book coming out soon. I have a new article profiling it over at Tech Central Station--which also has a review by Dr. Helen Smith (aka The InstaWife) of James Lileks' equally new Mommy Knows Worst.

(And I'm actually transcribing my interview with James earlier today in-between taking breaks to post here.)

I've written so many posts with variations on that title--mostly about America's left and Iraq--that I finally decided to give them a separate category. It's been quite an interesting 20 minutes going back and retagging them--if you want to see politicians and celebrities doing more radical 180s than Tony Hawk at a skateboard contest, click here and start scrolling.

(I'll eventually put other examples of the burning of the midnight memory hole into this category, such as Kerry's Winter Soldier speech, his Christmas in Cambodia and the like.)

And incidentally, here are even more examples.

Update: This post by Dafydd ab Hugh, titled "Weapon of Mass Media Deception" definitely goes into this category.

Jimmy Carter on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction in February of 2003:

"We want Saddam Hussein to disarm but we want to achieve this through peaceful means. He obviously has the capability and desire to build prohibited weapons and probably has some hidden in his country."

Of course, that's not the same tune he's singing today:

"The Bush Administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were manipulated, at least to mislead the American people."

But then, there's been lots of that going around.

The folks at PoliPundit look back at the rollercoaster ride that was election Tuesday, one year ago today. Here's a flashback to my immediate recollections of that crazy day and the period leading up to it.

The elites in the marble halls of Brussels certainly takes their atheism seriously--and insist that their subjects do as well:

It must be getting a little too close for Christmas for the chi-chi crystal palace of the pretentious European Union. Pooh-bahs in Brussels have come up with a new grammar rule for themselves and the Netherlands--making it official that the name "Christ" will soon be written with a lower-case "c". That was the stipulation in an orthography reform published earlier this month in Brussels.

According to the Kath.net agency, the new spelling legislation will also stipulate that the Dutch word for "jews" (joden) be spelled with a capital "J" when referring to nationality and with a lower-case "j" when referring to the religion. The changes will be mandatory in August of 2006. There is no description of the fines offenders will face if they keep right on spelling "Christ" with a capital "C".

Of Nietzsche's famous 1882 aphorism, "God Is Dead", Tom Wolfe once wrote:

Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a "tremendous event," the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: "If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly"--he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations --"are hurled into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers...will appear in the arena of the future."

Nietzsche never wrote of the upside however: how absolutely ridiculous so many of the utterances of secular Europe (europe?) would look.

Just of curiosity, when can we expect the edict for the EU's "muslims" to spell Muhammad's name with a lower-case "m"?

Michael Totten looks at the ghost city of Varosha, surrounded by barbed wire on the island of Cyprus:

In 1974 the Turkish military invaded and carved up the island. Greek Cypriots in the north were forced to move south side of the line. Turkish Cypriots from the south were forced to move north. Greek Cypriot citizens in Varosha fled the Turkish invasion in terror. They expected to return to their homes within days. Instead, the Turks seized the empty city and wrapped it in fencing and wire. They forbid anyone from entering it to this day.

You can walk right up to it, though, and take a look. Photographing the dead city is not permitted. But if no one is watching there is nothing to physically stop you.

And that's just what Michael did--don't miss the eerie photos that accompany his post.

(Which makes a nice double-feature with this visual tour of the abandoned ruins of Chernobyl.)

Could somebody please shoot the 1970s and put them out of our misery? In the mail today was an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog filled with the worst clothes of the 1970s Manhattan art crowd: pre-destroyed $80 jeans filled with enormous tears, rips, gashes and bleach spills, brown bell-bottoms, horrendous olive T-shirts, and female models who alternately look like Mia Farrow from her saucer-eyed Rosemary's Baby period and Angela Davis with a circa-1972 24-inch high Afro.

William F. Buckley probably won't get carded if he picks this catalog up in his local Manhattan Abercrombie & Fitch, but I think he'd probably want to take a shower after looking at all of these pathetic duds--the smell of stagnant bongwater just oozes from every page. The Manolo, he would have the coronary infarction if he ever flips through this drek.

As James Lileks once wrote, The '70s was the decade that taste forgot. And God knows why, but for clothing retailers, it's the decade that never, ever ends.

If Michael Graham ever decides to write a sequel to his prescient 2002 book, at least one chapter has already just written itself.

Update: Related thoughts from Ed Morrissey.

Just had a fun telephone interview with James Lileks about his new book, Mommy Knows Worst.

Much like how Emmet Ray viewed Django, I'm in awe of Lileks' seemingly effortless chops as a writer. Other than exchanging a couple of emails, this was the first time I had spoken with him, and now I know how Luca Brasi felt before he had his audience with the Godfather. I probably sounded equally articulate when I spoke with James: I don't think I said "And may Jasper's first child be a masculine child", but who knows?

In contrast, as anyone who's ever heard him on Hugh Hewitt's show, or his own podcasts knows, Lileks is a great conversationalist; needless to say, when the profile/review/encomium is finished, I'll let you know when it's online.

Here's the micro-meltdown. Here's the macro version.

And here's the reason for both.

Update: Here's yet another example. When the Blogfather wrote, "Really, Bush's ability to drive his opponents stark, raving bonkers is almost supernatural", he wasn't kidding, was he?

Glenn Reynolds writes that Ted Kennedy--and other elites like him--are the victims of a self-fulfilling prophesy. He quotes Kennedy scion Christopher Lawford, who observed Teddy a while back when he:

"took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. 'I'm glad I'm not going to be around when you guys are my age.' I asked him why, and he said, 'Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.' "

Glenn responds:

[blogger Phil Bowermaster] notes that the whole coastal-elites-and-media establishment is not just going to fall apart -- it has to a substantial degree already done so. But while this is bad news for the Dan Rathers of the world (and perhaps for the dateless columnists at some big metropolitan dailies) it's not so clear that it's bad news for the rest of us. In fact, I suspect that the elites' discontent comes in no small part from the fact that ordinary people are becoming more powerful all the time, making the elites just a bit less elite with each passing year.

That's a point I've been making in this column for years (you can find some examples here, here, here) and it's also the theme of my forthcoming book, whose title, An Army of Davids, makes the theme pretty clear. And with the Davids getting more powerful, it's no surprise that the Goliaths are depressed. No doubt buggy-whip makers felt similar emotions at the birth of the automobile.

But while the members and hangers-on of yesterday's power structures are mulling their reduced prospects, ordinary people seem to be doing pretty well, as the economy continues to boom, small businesses to form, and new kinds of enterprises take off. We certainly don't view government with the same awe we felt before Watergate broke, or journalism with the same respect it had before Dan Rather struck, but all available evidence suggests that it was our earlier attitudes that were misinformed.

At any rate, [Peggy] Noonan is surely right that our current elites are not up to the task of steering the country. They're too ignorant, too insulated, and too concerned with "getting theirs." Fortunately, they're also a lot less important than they used to be. As blogger Justin Katz writes:

"if the functional elites are too resigned to that trouble to lead our society through it, the underclasses now have the technology -- and the faculty -- to pick up the slack."

Absolutely. And as the rapidly blogged response to Noonan's column -- something that was itself made possible by technology that didn't really exist ten years ago -- demonstrates, people are already doing it. Faster please.

This is a prospect that also frightens not just the elites in government (such as the aforementioned Senator Kennedy) and journalists, but also Hollywood. As well it should.

The Dallas Cowboys' Website reports that renowned Middle East expert Sheryl Crow will be performing the halftime show during the Cowboys' nationally televised (on CBS, no less!) Thanksgiving game against the Broncos this year.

Back at the start of the season, in a post titled, "The NFL's All-Star, Bush-Hating Line-up", Michelle Malkin looked at additional examples of how tone-deaf the NFL can be when it comes to half of their audience.

Or maybe it's because that's the only talent the league and its teams can draw upon. Because we know that when it comes to verbally attacking the president and the country, there's a price to be paid. And that price is millions of dollars in concert revenue, Hollywood contracts, and apparently, fees from professional sports as well.

Evan Coyne Maloney notes that Toronto's schools have banned Halloween:

Last week, teachers in Toronto received a memo from the District School Board advising them to "forego traditional classroom Halloween celebrations because they are disrespectful of Wiccans and may cause some children to feel excluded."

Evan adds:

what kind of culture will we be left with if we rid ourselves of everything that makes us unique just so we don't offend any new arrivals? We bend over backwards to accommodate every foreign and fringe culture, but at the same time, we don't even show half that respect to the culture that already exists here.

Are the High Priests of Political Correctness really concerned with being open to other cultures? Or is their real goal to destroy ours?

My money's on the latter. In his latest Newhouse essay, James Lileks looks at Canada's mother country:

Government workers in the West Midlands were ordered to remove or hide anything with a pig on it, including a tissue box that contained a picture of The Littlest Satan, Piglet. (One Muslim citizen had complained. One.) In 2003, a West Yorkshire school removed books from classrooms because they contained pigs. Out went Busytown volumes and "Charlotte's Web." In came cultural apartheid.

At the risk of alienating those who wish to pave the Middle East, Islam is not the problem. The Muslim Council of Britain, after all, opposed the pig-book ban.

The problem is Official England: a culture so terrified of asserting itself that it caves every time someone announces he's offended. The proper response to anti-pig initiatives? Calmly reply that Britain is not ruled by Shariah, but is composed of many cultures, the beliefs of which occasionally conflict.

Multiculturalism is a fine and necessary idea. Cultures that seal themselves off wither and die. England is better for having ska and curry, just as Saudi Arabia is poorer for lacking, oh, women's rights and a penal code that does not hand out amputation. So to speak.

But as an ideology, multiculturalism is not only predicated on a falsehood, but a lie even it doesn't believe.

Multi-culti dogma asserts that all cultures are equal, but refuses to defend the dominant culture when assailed for insensitivity, no matter how retrograde or niggling the charge. Rather than assert the primacy of a generally shared idea, it simply eliminates any official manifestations of the idea. Problem solved! See also, Christmas.

Europe today, America tomorrow?

Only slightly apropos of James' comments, it's fascinating to flip through the latest Brooks Brothers "Holiday" catalog. It's filled with happy, shiny people in expensive, conservative clothes standing in front of holly, and wreaths--and even verdant trees temporarily placed inside homes during the month of December with brightly colored baubles and lights hung on them...and not one mention of the C-word anywhere in the catalog.

Perhaps seeking to vindicate Michelle Malkin's new book, the Village Voice has the four magic words that bring joy to conservative hearts everywhere: Cindy Sheehan for President!

(Who knew Karl Rove had a mole inside the Voice?? Or maybe it's someone on Hillary's staff, as having to debate Cindy would allow for not just triangulation, but a great Sister Souljah opportunity.)

Shimmying inside a sleek new suit from Freddie's Fashion Mart, Al Sharpton boogies his way into your heart. Let's see Ward Churchill or Michael Moore try those moves!

(Via the Corner.)

Michelle Malkin has a new book, which she's introducing on her Website:

The book is about turning MSM conventional wisdom on its head and showing that the standard caricature of conservatives as angry/racist/bigoted/violence-prone crackpots is a much better description of today's unhinged liberals than of us.

You know how the NYTimes assigns a reporter (David Kirkpatrick) to cover conservatives like aliens from another planet? Well, this book turns the tables. I'm your conservative Margaret Mead covering the unhinged creatures of the Left like Australian aborigines. Kinda the same way Maureen Dowd writes about men...without all the bitterness.

As I noted, there were many photos providing vivid documentary evidence of my thesis that didn't make it into the book. So as an exclusive supplement, I present to you without further ado...

Unhinged: The Mugshot Collection

Just keep scrolling, as they say.

Roger L. Simon has some thoughts on the Brian Anderson essay on the decline of Hollywood that we linked to yesterday. Roger reminds us that it's not just politics have caused the precipitous decline in Hollywood's revenues.

Roger writes:

No, the problems for Hollywood are deeper than politics and the production of more movies like Spiderman II (a good programmer which Anderson makes sound like the second-coming of Lawrence of Arabia) is not about to solve them.

I doubt seriously that Brian thinks that Spider-Man II is in the same league with the magisterial Lawrence. (For a more apt pairing, I compared the first Spider-Man movie in in 2002 to the original Star Wars of 1977). On the other hand, unlike the year that Lawrence debuted, there certainly were few other films worth seeing the summer that it played the googleplexes in the shopping malls. And even fewer with as positive--and potent--a message.

In Tech Central Station, Ilya Shapiro writes:

Just as Justices Scalia and Breyer have toured the globe in the pretentiously named "Boston, Melbourne, Oxford Conversazione on Culture," the country is in the midst of the most public, most important debate about self-governance in several generations. Are we to be a government of laws, or of men? Should judges incorporate evolving societal standards (as they see them) into the law, or should they wait for the political process to achieve whatever result it is meant to achieve? No small beer, this.

And now the gauntlet has been thrown, with Judge Alito -- almost as much as Judge Michael Luttig would have been -- as the culmination of the post-Bork culture wars.

Robert Bork's professional destruction kindled a flame that grew to full fire with this nomination.

Sam Alito is set to play Reagan to Bork's Goldwater -- and I must thank my good friends at NPR for opening my eyes (quite literally) to that revelation.

Great analogy.