Ralph Nader catches a horrendous case of BDS.

Last week, there was an amusing piece in Slate on the alleged conservatism of John Hughes, the man who launched a thousand brat-pack actors in the 1980s:

It should have come as no surprise, then, that a faint smirk of family-values-friendly subversion stamped itself on all of late Hughes, which is to say his even more establishment period as a filmmaker. From The Great Outdoors (in-laws sure are difficult) to Home Alone (towheaded McMansion latchkey kid foils robbery, saves Christmas) to Dennis the Menace (overall-wearing scamp of the manicured lawns sling-shoots his way straight into your heart)—these were comedies for the Dan Quayle in all of us.

Gen X nostalgia is as interesting for what it remembers as for what it chooses to ignore. Every so often, you'll turn on TBS and be forced to take inventory of the popular culture of your youth. Trading Places delivered its comeuppance with a switcheroo act of commodities fraud;* the true nemesis of Ghost Busters wasn't Gozer but the EPA; Stripes is all about making a kind of screwball peace with the military-industrial complex … Sure enough, there's Harold Ramis—another Lampoon alum, who directed Hughes' screenplay for Vacation—reflecting on the Chicago Seven hearings in a recent interview with the Believer: "They ran up and down the street, smashing car windows and stuff. My first reaction was, 'Yeah, right on!' But then I thought, 'Wait, I'm parked out there.' " The polite term for this gentle rightward shift when it happens to artists and intellectuals is embourgeoisement. What a shame the philosopher of puberty never warned kids about that.

Actually, this is entirely bass-ackwards. The Hollywood of the 1980s was a return to a political middle-ground designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible after the Young Turks drove the industry leftward in the 1970s, nearly bankrupting it in the process, until two guys named Lucas and Spielberg began to make films that appealed to mass audiences again. That Hughes also followed this trend to box office success in the 1980s is hardly surprising.

With a massive collective case of BDS, Hollywood has made another turn leftward this decade and--surprise!--revenues are once again down. Who wants to spend nearly $10 a pop on tickets, and nearly the same amount for each person's snacks for two hours of P.C. agitprop politics?

Olbermann Watch ponders video Dowdification via the dreaded 18-second gap.

I haven't blogged on the cretinous Mark Foley (R-FL) or the fallout from his resignation, but Pajamas is your one stop source for blog linkage.

Elsewhere, Betsy Newmark writes that there's Florida precedent to replace his name on the ballot even later than Foley's resignation yesterday, adding, "How ironic that the Democrats were so thoughtful to explore this law and pave the way for the Florida GOP to find a way to perhaps salvage this election".

Does this mean that Florida could influence yet another contentious election year?

Found via Tammy Bruce, the bloggers at The Brussels Journal post that it's "Third Night of Ramadan Rioting in Capital of Europe"--with memories of last year's Paris Riots fresh in everyone's minds. Except the media's of course.

Peggy Noonan praises the freedom of choice that demassifying mass media has brought us, while simultaneously exploring its downside:

Forty and 50 years ago, mainstream liberal media executives--middle-aged men who fought in Tarawa or Chosin, went to Cornell, and sat next to the man in the gray flannel suit on the train to the city, who hoisted a few in the bar car, and got off at Greenwich or Cos Cob, Conn.--those great old liberals had some great things in them.

One was a high-minded interest in imposing certain standards of culture on the American people. They actually took it as part of their mission to elevate the country. And from this came..."Omnibus."

When I was a child of 8 or so I looked up at the TV one day and saw a man cry, "My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse!" He was on a field of battle, surrounded by mud and loss. I was riveted. Later a man came on the screen and said, "Thank you for watching Shakespeare's 'Richard III.' " And I thought, as a little American child: That was something, I gotta find out what a Shakespeare is.

I got that from "Omnibus."

Those old men on the train--they were strangers, but in the age of media a stranger can change your life.

And because the men on the train had one boss, who shared their vision--he didn't want to be embarrassed that his legacy was "My Mother the Car"--and because the networks had limited competition, the pressure to live or die by ratings was not so intense as today. The competition for ad dollars wasn't so killer. They could afford an indulgence. The result was a real public service.

Now the man on the train is a relic, and no one is saying, "As the lucky holders of a broadcast license we have a responsibility to pass on the jewels of our culture to the young." In a competitive environment that would be a ticket to corporate oblivion at every network, including Fox.

TV is still great, in some ways better than ever. Freedom works.

And yet. When we deposed the old guy on the train, it wasn't all gain. No longer would the old liberals get to impose their vision. But what took its place was programming for the lowest common denominator. Things that don't make you reach. Things you don't want to teach. Eating worms on air-crash island with "Jackass."

I spoke with a network producer a few weeks ago, an old warhorse who was trying to explain his frustration at the current ratings race. He wrestled around the subject, and I cut with rude words to what I thought he was saying. "You mean it's gone from the dictatorship of a liberal elite to the dictatorship of the retarded."
Yes, he said. And it's not progress.

When liberals miss something in the media, that's what they should be missing. Not a unity that never existed but standards that were high. When conservatives say there's nothing to miss, they're wrong. We lost some bias, but we lost some standards, too.

Betsy Newmark asks, "Why be angry at Fox News"?

But even if you grant that Fox is unequivocably conservative, they're a small, small part of the overall viewership of nightly news. And, I suspect that Noonan is quite correct - the people who are watching Fox regularly are the ones who are already going to vote Republican. So, why should liberals in New York City be so outraged by their watching a conservative news channel? Could Peggy be right that they just resent having had to give up their monopoly on news dispersal to talk radio, Fox, and the internet? They're just ticked off that the mainstream media's barricades have been breached.

In the previous post, I noted the elite media's derision when Matt Drudge arrived on the scene as the first journalistic star created solely via Internet popularity. But I've always found their astonishment at the time so strange. Or as I wrote a year ago:

It's weirdly ironic--despite the fact that they're in the news business, the media are often the last to spot a realignment of their own industry. Witness how the Big Three networks never expected cable TV's rise in the early to mid-1980s, the first in a series of (to borrow Alvin Toffler's word), demassifications. The next was Rush Limbaugh and talk radio's rise during the same period the following decade, equally unexpected. Witness how Matt Drudge took newspaper journalists all by surprise, even though he shouldn't have: the Internet had existed since 1969, the World Wide Web, which runs on it, since the early-1990s, and it was due for a media celebrity of its own. And others were destined to follow, as Weblogs make self-publishing a breeze.

Liberals have had a commercial television medium that suited their biases for 50 years--a medium which titled further and further to the left beginning in the late 1960s as they did, and whose on-air representatives derided President Reagan's election in 1980 as they did, and the Republican Congress' Contract With America in 1994, as they did. Why on earth should they be so surprised that (a) conservatives would want at least one channel that reflected their worldview as well, and (b) someone was finally willing to give them one in the 1990s, once he saw an opportunity to make a profit?

A few years before the Blogosphere took off, Matt Drudge arrived on the scene as its harbinger. He was of course, instantly reviled by elite liberal journalists, who were feeling--at least subliminally--the ground shifting under their feet. But there was even earlier one-man news gatherer whom they did respect, immensely. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in January of 2000:

I’m thinking of a journalist who works alone, without editors, accountable to no one. Many feel he has an ax to grind, but he is read furtively by government workers and journalists. Often, he levels wild accusations against public officials of broad conspiracies he cannot prove. He lifts much of his material from other publications and adds his own interpretation. He calls the mainstream press "collaborationists" with the President.

Can you guess? Most people today would say Matt Drudge, the Internet columnist. But Drudge evokes nothing but scorn from the establishment press, while the guy I’m thinking of was called a "journalist’s journalist" by ABC’s Peter Jennings. The Los Angeles Times hailed him as "the conscience of investigative journalism." The New York Times’ Anthony Lewis praised him as "the reporter who taught us to penetrate the squid-ink of official truth."

His name was I.F. Stone (1907-1989), and he won fame editing, writing, and publishing I.F. Stone’s Weekly. Unlike Drudge, Stone was a man of the Left, labeling himself a "Jeffersonian Marxist."

A new biography of Stone by Myra MacPherson, reviewed in the New York Times weekend, labels Stone as a willing dupe of the KGB. Or as John Podhoretz writes:

A dozen years ago Stone's reputation was rocked when a retired KGB officer seemed to finger Stone as a paid agent of the Soviet Union. MacPherson evidently went to great pains to disprove this charge, and in her book she triumphantly claims to have done so. But, as Paul Berman explains in a fascinating review of her book (and a new collection of Stone's writing), MacPherson "seems not to notice that in her ardor to rescue Stone from his enemies, she has yanked the rope a little too firmly and has accidentally hanged the man."

* * *

So Stone didn't work for the totalitarian government in Moscow. He merely "performed tasks" for the Soviet Union for free, out of conviction. I confess that in the past, I have described Stone as a paid agent. That wasn't true. What he was, though, was every bit as despicable.

Read the rest.

Update: A Cornerite comes to Izzy's defense.

Another Update: "Of course, everyone is allowed to change his mind. What was missing from Stone during his lifetime was some candor about what made him swerve so radically from one view of Israel to another. But when we think back on Stone's Soviet boosterism, even during the worst of Stalin's crimes, we are reminded that candor was not always his strong suit."

This Daily Mail article that Drudge links to is headlined, "China's 'cruelty olympics' causes international outrage", and yet its photos--a monkey lifting weights, a bear balancing himself on the high bars, don't look all that horrible to me. Instead, it looks like the sort of stuff Americans watched every Sunday night on the Ed Sullivan show, and later, pretty regularly on Johnny Carson for literally decades. (But I'm willing to parachute in Lancelot Link, Secret Squirrel, and Morocco Mole to investigate the situtation further, if you'd like.)

I linked to Julia Gorin's essay on global warming yesterday, which began thusly:

It's a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming - at least that's what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

Substitute "animal 'rights'" for environmentalism, and those points apply equally well with China's "animal olympics".

And it's worth noting that the International Olympic Committee didn't lose much sleep over China's human rights record, when awarding them the real Olympics in 2008, of course. (It's probably not a coincidence whom China then immediately hired to iron out the architectural details...)

Update: Heh^TM.

Senator Joseph Lieberman sits down to a video (and audio) podcast with maximum Pajamahadeen Roger L. Simon.

Senator James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Environment And Public Works Committee explores what Pajamas' Seattle editor dubs, "The Four Ages Of Media Climate Hype":

I am going to speak today about the most media-hyped environmental issue of all time, global warming. I have spoken more about global warming than any other politician in Washington today. My speech will be a bit different from the previous seven floor speeches, as I focus not only on the science, but on the media’s coverage of climate change.

Global Warming -- just that term evokes many members in this chamber, the media, Hollywood elites and our pop culture to nod their heads and fret about an impending climate disaster. As the senator who has spent more time speaking about the facts regarding global warming, I want to address some of the recent media coverage of global warming and Hollywood’s involvement in the issue. And of course I will also discuss former Vice President Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares during four separate and sometimes overlapping time periods. From 1895 until the 1930’s the media peddled a coming ice age.

From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years.

Recently, advocates of alarmism have grown increasingly desperate to try to convince the public that global warming is the greatest moral issue of our generation. Just last week, the vice president of London’s Royal Society sent a chilling letter to the media encouraging them to stifle the voices of scientists skeptical of climate alarmism.

During the past year, the American people have been served up an unprecedented parade of environmental alarmism by the media and entertainment industry, which link every possible weather event to global warming. The year 2006 saw many major organs of the media dismiss any pretense of balance and objectivity on climate change coverage and instead crossed squarely into global warming advocacy.

Julia Gorin's thoughts on why this issue has heated up (so to speak) recently are also well worth reading.

The International World Global Planetary Zionist Conspiracy rolls on, adding Pirates of the Caribbean and both Tom and Jerry to its list.

First Pepsi, now cheesy Disney movies and dopey Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Can't we move the conspiracy a bit more upscale, people?

Update: A different kind of paranoia strikes deep in the Bay Area. Maybe it's just the killer squirrel sightings that have everyone on edge.

Many NFL analysts posit that this is Bill Parcell's last year as a head coach. When he leaves the Dallas Cowboys, Hugh Hewitt has an excellent suggestion for his next career move.

(Hey, if Parcells can handle Jerry Jones and Terrell Owens, Helen Thomas would be a snap.)

I'm not sure where Tammy Bruce is going in this post, but any post that's able to combine Tammy, Starbucks and a breathtaking photo of Catherine Deneuve is well worth your time.

Earlier this week, we mentioned Linda Greenhouse, the New York Times reporter who finally, much like the Times itself did in 2004, came clean about her bias. Betsy Newmark writes:

What is funny is how Jack Nelson, former Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, reacts to this question. He's just peachy happy to have a reporter be so open with her opinions precisely because he agrees with those opinions. If her views were the opposite, he'd have problems with it. It's not the openness that he would draw the line at, but the opinions themselves. And he's willing to admit that!

Jack Nelson, former Washington bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, blanches at hearing of Greenhouse's remarks, but agrees with her tough critique of the White House.

"If I was the Washington bureau chief and she was my Supreme Court reporter, I might have to answer to the editors in L.A. for that," Nelson says. "But I would do my best to support her."

Asked if he would defend Greenhouse had she said something he disagreed with, however, Nelson laughed -- and said he would take issue if she had backed Bush policy.

This is a totally consistent worldview within the elite portions of the legacy media. Back in April, Michael Barone wrote a piece that ends with an anecdote that dovetails nicely with Nelson's quote:

Let's say you were part of a group designing the news media from scratch. Someone says that it would be a good idea to have competing news media -- daily newspapers and weekly magazines, radio and television news programs. Sounds like a good start.

Someone else says that it would be a good idea to staff these news media with people who are literate and well-educated. Check. Then someone says let's have 90 percent of the people who work for these organizations be from one of the nation's two competitive political parties and 10 percent from the other.

Uh, you might find yourself saying, especially if you weren't sure that your party would get the 90 percent, maybe that's not such a good idea. But that's the news media we have today.

Surveys galore have shown that somewhere around 90 percent of the writers, editors and other personnel in the news media are Democrats and only about 10 percent are Republicans. We depend on the news media for information about government and politics, foreign affairs and war, public policy and demographic trends -- for a picture of the world around us. But the news comes from people 90 percent of whom are on one side of the political divide. Doesn't sound like an ideal situation.

Of course, a lot of people in the news business say it doesn't make any difference. I remember a conversation I had with a broadcast news executive many years ago.

"Doesn't the fact that 90 percent of your people are Democrats affect your work product?" I asked.

"Oh, no, no," he said. "Our people are professional. They have standards of objectivity and professionalism, so that their own views don't affect the news."

"So what you're saying," I said, "is that your work product would be identical if 90 percent of your people were Republicans."

He quickly replied, "No, then it would be biased."

And a few years ago, when Hollywood's Lionel Chetwynd was holding a press conference for his Showtime docudrama, DC 9/11, he was asked by a reporter:

Question: "You did contribute to [Bush's] campaign?"

Chetwynd: "Yeah, the limit was $1,000... Would it make a better film if I'd given $1,000 to Gore?"

Question: "Yes."

Chetwynd: "Why?"

Question: "Because it would show less potential bias."

Regarding Jack Nelson's comments about Greenhouse, Betsy wrote:

This is how conservatives always suspected things were at the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. It's nice to have them admit it overtly. That's all I've ever wanted them to do - stop hiding behind the pretense of being totally objective without any agenda and let the readers and viewers of the media take that into account just as we do when we hear politicians praising or criticizing someone or some policy.

As I wrote yesterday, confirming an anecdote by James Taranto of Opinion Journal, the media have been much more willing since 9/11 and the rise of the Blogosphere, to let it all hang out. (These guys really let it all hang out a few months ago, incidentally.) And I'm happy for them to do so. At this point, the stragglers who still hold a viewpoint that their profession is completely objective and without bias seem like those stories of soldiers rescued after decades on a desert island, who haven't heard that WWII is over. (A couple of years ago, Stefan Sharkansky had some thoughts about a completely neutral press would be covering. And it wouldn't be pretty.)

Or as I wrote back in April, Michael Kinsley's right: this is the Twilight of Objectivity, but it was a surprisingly brief era to begin with.

Hey, at least he's finally come clean on the subject--and on The Tonight Show to boot. I have to give him points for that...

(Via Hot Air.)

Way back in 2002, Charles Krauthammer famously wrote:

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

Four years later, both halves of his law have finally been illustrated, via a single photograph.

(Which was found via James Lileks and Tim Blair.)

In TCS Daily, Josh Manchester writes that "Air travel today is an increasingly dehumanizing experience":

One is forced to pack one's belongings in a certain way; possibly not bring some key necessities, unless willing to risk losing to the baggage jungle; be treated as a number, while waiting in line at a security checkpoint; and then have to partially undress while finally entering the metal detector, sometimes barefoot on a tile floor that no one has thought to cover with even a used throw rug, even though we've been doing this now for five years.

But the most dehumanizing aspect of it all is the gnawing suspicion that thousands of people are merely performing a sort of ritualized security kabuki, and that none of it is doing any good when it comes to preventing attacks.

Sure, those who wish us harm now know that they can't get aboard planes with boxcutters, or scissors, or explosives disguised as vials of Vidal Sassoon. But our checklist mentality in attempting to thwart them is largely a reactive measure, and only tells our enemies what their parameters are -- inviting workarounds, deceit, and cleverness, rather than truly inspiring fear of detection.

The problem is that our bureaucrats focus on the composition of checklists of banned items instead of focusing on the mindset of an enemy. In combat, checklists are used regularly, but with different ends in mind: a platoon of Marines leaving a firm base in Iraq would go through numerous checklists of their equipment, weapons, communications, and so forth. But all of this is meant to put these potential problems to sleep -- to reduce friction such that the platoon is then free to focus on the enemy it is about to encounter, or the population it is about to engage. In airport security though, the checklist is the goal, rather than the actions that it enables security personnel to then take. Checklists become a sort of static defense, rather than the fluid, mobile defense that would be more amenable to both deterring and catching terrorists.

Two of the more interesting scenes in ABC's "The Path to 9/11" involved incidents where checklists weren't involved. A female Filipino police captain is suspicious of one man standing around the scene of a fire that is consuming Ramzi Yousef's apartment in Manila. Her suspicion is rewarded when the man is arrested and Yousef's laptop is recovered. Later, Diana Dean, a US Customs Agent, succeeds in picking Ahmed Ressam out of the crowd of motorists entering the United States from Canada. It turns out his trunk is filled with explosives. In neither of these incidents were the arresting officers working from a checklist or a profile. They just trusted their instincts. The next time you fly, ask yourself if the same can be said for those screening the rest of the passengers around you.

Afterwards, Manchester writes, "How can we create a more robust airport security system? The principles to rely upon are those of unpredictability, adaptability, and decentralization".

His ideas make perfect sense, thus ensuring that they'll never come to fruition.

Every year brings a raft of articles on the stars of the NFL and other professional leagues run amok; Terrell Owens and his did-he-or-didn't-he-suicide attempt is merely the latest and most high-profile. How much is college to blame for not preparing young men by infusing them with sufficient character to survive the high-pressure world of professional sports? Probably quite a bit, if the fictitious campus of Tom Wolfe's Dupont University is anything like reality:

Charlotte’s experiences at the fictional Dupont University shed light on these questions, as the ambitious girl from backwater North Carolina is transformed by her sophisticated and salacious surroundings. Far from being the path to higher civilization and refinement of character, Dupont is a toxic impediment to the yearning for higher things, built on a dogmatic denial that higher civilization and refinement of character are even possible. Where, in a former age, the impressionable young student might have aspired to religious salvation or genuine wisdom, today’s typical college student lives more for entertainment, sensation, and release, all the while demanding and largely getting immediate gratification. The individual still seeks status and recognition. But the marks of distinction are all too often inebriation, “hooking up,” expertise at sarcasm (“sarc one,” “sarc two,” and “sarc three”), and insouciance toward matters intellectual and moral. As students learn about and fall into this new ethic, the university not only fails to stand in opposition, it accelerates the process. Dupont, that composite of Duke, Stanford, Yale, and the University of Michigan, corrupts the promising young Charlotte. For revealing this disturbing truth, the author has been reviled by those who are thereby revealed.

More importantly, the teaching of Dupont University is precisely that the soul and the moral dimension of being are illusions. In the past, the university (at its best and in principle) sought to cultivate the human soul toward completion or excellence. The modern university, as Wolfe portrays it, denies that there are truthful distinctions between higher and lower; it teaches that the soul is not real, and that perfection of the soul is thus a thing of the past.

The setting of I Am Charlotte Simmons is truly “postmodern”—a world dominated by Nietzsche and neuroscience, a world which has jettisoned the moral imagination of the past. Not only is God dead, but so is reason, once understood as the characteristic that distinguishes man from the rest of nature. We now understand ourselves by studying the behavior of other animals, rather than understanding the behavior of other animals in light of human reason and human difference. We learn that it is embarrassing for any educated person to be considered religious or even moral. Darwin’s key insight that man is just another animal, now updated with the tools and discoveries of modern biology, has liberated us from two Kingdoms of Darkness. Post-faith and post-reason, we can now turn to neuroscience to understand the human condition, a path that leads to or simply ratifies the governing nihilism of the students, both the ambitious and apathetic alike.

* * *

I Am Charlotte Simmons is an indictment of the primary centers of higher education in America today. These institutions do not well serve the real longings and earnest ambitions of the young people who flock to them, at great cost and with great expectations, year after year. Instead of pointing students to a world that is higher than where they came from, the university reinforces and expands the nihilism and political correctness that they are taught in public schools, imbibe from popular culture, and bring with them as routine common sense when they arrive on campus. Of course, these two ideologies are largely incompatible: nihilism celebrates strength (or apathy) without illusion; political correctness promulgates illusions in the name of sensitivity. But both ideologies are the result of collapsing and rejecting any distinction between higher and lower, between nobility and ignobility, between the higher learning and the flight from reason.

Read the rest. Sports Illustrated's Paul Zimmerman has a column today about the problems of superstar athletes such as Owens, and bipolar former NFL players Barret Robbins, Dimitrius Underwood and Alonzo Spellman. While Zimmerman is clearly saddened by the self-inflicted tortures of these high-profile athletes, his prescription for preventing them in future players is as clinical as the white labcoat world that Wolfe depicted in his earlier "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died" essay on neuroscience. He seems to think that if only the right medicine were available, troubled athletes would enjoy perfect living through chemistry. But it seems a safe bet that substantive preparation for the emotional rigors of their chosen professions from their alma maters would help as well.

Is it really any wonder that institutions that combine nihilism and narcissism produce athletes that exhibit the exact same traits when put under pressure?

Back in May of 2004, I wrote in Tech Central Station:

Another strange thing has started happening as well -- in the past, media elites denounced any claims of a liberal bias in the news with a shrug and a "who, us? We're not liberals. We're not leftwing. We're objective and neutral. No biases here!" More and more, as we'll shortly see, the media are going on the record (Brock, Gore and Franken, notwithstanding) that it leans pretty heavily towards the left.

I started a collection of examples right around that time, as well.

Today, James Taranto writes, "Something odd is afoot in America's elite media--increasingly, journalists are unabashed about admitting their liberal bias. "

You don't say...

Last year, Mark Steyn wrote that Europe isn't multicultural, it's bicultural. And while you can witness the clash of its two cultures more or less nightly on the continent, you can see its future in Britain. On the one hand, there's a Europe that, beginning with Nietzsche's famous 1882 aphorism that "God is Dead", has spent the better part of the 20th century eliminating religion from the public square.

In the past, European efforts to eliminate some religions have been rather more aggressive, of course. But these days, it's merely a mopping up operation: last year, the EU issued an edict declaring that the words "Christ" and "Jew" be spelled in all lower-case letters. And of course, European (and American) universities are busy eliminating the millennia-old meanings of the initials B.C. and A.D.

But meanwhile, another culture, Europe's largest group of immigrants, relatively recent arrivals to the continent, takes its religion much more seriously than the postmodern old fogeys in Cambridge and Brussels. And to prove it, they're building the continent's the largest place of worship able to hold up to 70,000 worshippers; to be opened in time for London's 2012 Olympics:

It will be called the London Markaz and it is intended to be a significant Islamic landmark whose prominence and stature will be enhanced by its proximity to the Olympic site. When television viewers around the world see aerial views of the stadium during the opening ceremony in six years’ time, the most prominent religious building in the camera shot will not be one of the city’s iconic churches that have shaped the nation’s history, such as St Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey, but the mega-mosque. ...

The first mosque was opened in Britain more than 80 years ago and there are now well over 1,000 – many converted from Anglican churches. London now has more mosques than any other western city. The biggest in western Europe is just a couple of miles from where I live in south London, on a five-acre site. It can hold up to 5,000 worshippers and, while hardly a Timurid masterpiece, its dome and minarets do not detract from what is a rather gloomy bit of suburban Surrey. Funded entirely by voluntary donations from its congregation, it was erected by the Ahmadi Muslims, who also contructed the first London mosque in Putney in 1924. The Ahmadis, who have lived harmoniously in this country for many years, condemn any form of extremism. Tellingly, perhaps, the Ahmadis are considered heretics by the rest of the Islamic world.

Now consider the east London mosque. Its backers are the Tablighi Jamaat, a missionary organisation that says it is non-political and peaceful. Yet a senior FBI anti-terrorism official has called it a recruiting ground for al-Qa’eda, and the French secret services described it as “an antechamber for fundamentalism”. Its current European headquarters are in Dewsbury, home town of Mohammed Siddique Khan, leader of the July 7 suicide bombers, who attended the local mosque. Much of the funding for the Markaz, which will cost about £100 million, is expected to come from Saudi Arabia. ...

It is suggested that the Markaz complex will become the “Muslim quarter” for the Olympics, acting as a hub for Islamic competitors and spectators, something that is surely contrary to the spirit of the Games, which are meant to bring people together, not keep them apart. Futhermore, in an irony not lost on Mr Craig, just a mile or so from where the mosque is due to go up, the Kingsway International Christian Centre, the biggest evangelical church in Europe with 12,000 worshippers on a Sunday, is coming down to make way for the Olympic stadium.

That last paragraph defines Europe's future rather nicely. More nicely than its future actually portends, of course.

Hugh Hewitt and Ed Morrissey are defending Keith Olbermann--and I agree with them.

The Anchoress's recent thoughts on civility are well worth re-reading; maybe someone should email a link to them to The New York Post.

Update: The Post's comments are even more despicable than at first glance: Ed Morrissey updates his blog with a reminder that the Post itself was victim of an anthrax mailing in September of 2001; one of the paper's mailroom employees required treatment in a nearby hospital.

Another Update: In another example of dogs and cats blogging together, the Pajamas motherblog is praising Olbermann's network for its recent series of advertisements honoring our soldiers in Iraq.

INDC Journal highlights the Pajamas Media panel at DC's National Press Club:

A blogger from the New York Times shot the panelists some skeptical questions, one asking if blogging increased partisanship because people could "choose news" that fit a worldview. Best counter-argument**:

"Like the people who read the New York Times?" -- Val Prieto.

Heh, as the panel's precision-opticalled antennae-less moderator is wont to say.

Madeleine Bunting, writing in England's Guardian believes that the Pope should not have spoken out about Islam because he knew it would lead to violence--in fact, she dubbed it, "papal stupidty". In an exceptional TCS column, Lee Harris writes:

"Papal stupidity" is strong language. But a few paragraphs before this harsh phrase, Madeleine Bunting has prepared us for it by arguing that "even the most cursory knowledge of dialogue with Islam teaches...that reverence for the Prophet is non-negotiable. What unites all Muslims is a passionate devotion and commitment to protecting the honor of Mohammed." A Pope who did not know that "reverence for the Prophet is non-negotiable" must, therefore, be guilty of egregious stupidity.

Harris writes, "This leads me to the question that I would like to pose to Madeleine Bunting and all those who have attacked Benedict for his lack of moral responsibility in making the Regensburg address":

Suppose that the eminent English biologist Richard Dawkins delivered a speech at the University of Regensburg in which he attacked supporters of Creationism and Intelligent Design theory as "ignorant boobs" -- words that he has already applied in them in a written article. Now, let us imagine that Christian fundamentalists all over the United States, outraged by this inflammatory language, went on a violent rampage. Suppose that they lynched an elderly professor of biology, and attacked biology departments at several universities. Suppose that teachers of high school biology went about in fear of their lives, while many simply quit their jobs.

What kind of article would Madeleine Bunting write about such a hypothetical incident? Do you think she would violently condemn Richard Dawkins, writing something along the lines of:

"Even the most cursory knowledge of dialogue with Creationists teaches...that reverence for the Biblical account of man's creation is non-negotiable. What unites all Christian fundamentalists is a passionate devotion and commitment to the inerrancy of the Holy Bible."

Would Madeleine Bunting refer to Dawkins' speech as illustrating professorial stupidity? Would she imply that he was personally responsible for the death of the elderly American professor of biology, and describe the brutal murder as having been done "in retaliation" for Dawkins' remarks?

What fools the American Creationists have been to write books, give speeches, and attend the tedious meetings of School Boards, when by rioting, murdering, and running amok, they could have earned the sympathy and respect of enlightened intellectuals like Madeleine Bunting. Instead of being ridiculed as "ignorant boobs," even such prestigious left-leaning papers as The Guardian would rally to their defense reminding us all that for Christian fundamentalists the teaching of creationism is "non-negotiable."

Of course, it was only a year ago, that the Guardian was running columns written by an Islamic journalist trainee who praised the 7/7 London bombers as "sassy". And only a year before that, when the Guardian gave another budding trainee journalist a crack at the op-ed page...

The Professor, safely home from his trip to Washington notes the confluence of non-news-news:

DICK MORRIS promising new Clinton scandals.

Janet Jackson in the news.

The Dow approaching record territory.

It's like the 1990s all over again.

And yeah, this was a rather September 10th kind of story as well.

What time is Babylon 5 on tonight?

Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt "sum up our list of artistic must-nots, based on recent history". James Lileks adds:

If you mock Islam with a drawing or a novel, you get riots and dead people. News of mishandled holy books yields riots and dead people. Insufficiently reverent short films by a Dutchman yields a dead person, specifically the Dutchman.

Now we add this detail: Quoting medieval religious colloquies is a reasonable justification for burning churches, shooting a nun and holding up signs demanding that the pope convert to Islam or saw off his own head. (There have been reports of carpal tunnel syndrome among radical Islam's enforcers, and they have requested we all help out.)

This is a new twist: Now history itself cannot be discussed. Since it's difficult to predict what else will enflame the devout, Islam has to be treated with unusual deference, like a 3-year-old child with anger management problems.

But it's not what we say that truly offends. It's what we are. The West's lack of interest in joining the Ummah is an affront in itself, and we broadcast our sins in High Infidelity. If you believed that the West's apostasy was an affront to God, you'd spend your leisure hours torching straw popes, too.

Progressives at home and abroad seem oddly unconcerned. "Islamophobia," after all, is just a product of the BushCo junta's relentless fearmongering, and Benedict is the Nazi pope who personally swipes the condoms from people's bedroom drawers.

But it's an inconvenient truth, to coin a phrase, when the ranters show up with vibrating uvulas demanding the pope's assassination. (Would they be satisfied with a docudrama version? It would go over big at Cannes.)

Lileks concludes that "As the grim cliche has it: If you say Islam isn't always a religion of peace, the Islamicists will kill you. This doesn't make them hypocrites, of course. The grave is a very peaceful place."

Update: Related thoughts from Ed Morrissey.

Another Update: Allah (of course!) spots tomorrow's seething today, adding, "Remember when the only thing you had to worry about in a Harvey Keitel movie was whether he’d take out his schwanz?"

Armed Liberal is angry: "I'm back from the Warren Christopher lecture, and I'm seriously having trouble understanding the strength of my own reaction":

I doubt that I'll get to the bottom of it in this post alone, and there will be a longer discussion to follow.

But here's what pissed me off - a close paraphrase of one of Christopher's comments:

Why didn't the Americans attack Iran - maybe we should have. Based on Valentine's Day thought Iranian govt would solve it. He, Vance, Carter thought keeping the hostages alive would be the priority.

Maybe if forceful action had been used Reagan wouldn't have been President.
[emphasis added]

Not "maybe we wouldn't be looking down the barrel of a major confrontation with state-supported Islamist radicals." Not "maybe 9/11 wouldn't have happened, and tens of thousands of people wouldn't have died." Not any number of other things involving the United States and our relations with the rest of the world. Ronald effing Reagan's election is as bad a thing as he can imagine.

I can't imagine a more insular view of things. And I'm terrified that one of the actual people who shaped events can't see past the mirrored window of his political party.

He adds:

This is a bipartisan issue. This isn't remotely a Democratic issue, although I hammer the Democrats about it a lot because they're my party and I want them to change so they can win. And I push them hard on the issue of foreign policy because we need a real set of debates.

This is an issue involving all the 'insiders' who have forgotten why power is worth having.

Isn't power for its own sake precisely what drove the second administration that Christopher served in the 1990s?

More here.

When I saw the news reports on My.Yahoo page last night that Terrell Owens, the Dallas Cowboys' awesomely talented and awesomely troubled wide receiver was rushed to the hospital last night and had his stomach pumped, I thought, nahh...it can't be a suicide attempt, can it?

According to AP, it is. Or it isn't. Or it was, but now it isn't. Confused? Be glad you're not as confused as T.O. himself, who once again turns a team quietly preparing for its next opponent (the hapless 0-3 Tennessee Titans this Sunday) into The All T.O. All The Time Show.

In any case, so much for those fearless NFL prognosticators who wrote, "Terrell Owens will be on his best behavior this coming season", back in March...

Update (12:40 PM PDT): At a televised press conference, T.O., dressed in sweats, a blue Cowboys T-shirt, and earrings says "there was no suicide attempt--the rumor of me taking 35 pills is absurd". Claims that stories of his stomach being pumped are false. He certainly looks and sounds fine--he says that he was working out and catching passes from QB Drew Bledsoe before his press conference.

A reporter asked him if he was depressed: "I'm not depressed by any means. I'm happy to be here--I came here to help this team get on a roll and win playoff games", adding "It's absurd for [press] reports to go from an allergic reaction to a suicide attempt".

Update: Less snark, more substance, here.

Linking to Glenn Reynolds and John Hinderaker, I posted my thoughts on CNN's airport hegemony on Monday. Matthew Sheffield of Newsbusters chimes in today with a lengthy post, here.

Of course, another question worth pondering is why, in a world where so many of us carry around iPods, Blackberries, and/or laptops, so many public spaces, from supermarkets, to doctor's office waiting rooms, feel obliged to install multiple TVs in the first place.

And not surprisingly, it's The Anchoress who defines it:

There is a deep and ugly chasm between left and right in this nation, like a sabre slice that is going untreated and infecting the whole body of the nation, and weakening it. As long as we have folks on the right referring to Democrats as “Demoncraps” and former presidents as “BlowJob”, as long as we have folks on the left referring to Republicans as “extra chromosome people,” (nice and compassionate toward the impaired, btw) and to the president as “Bushitler” the body is going to continue to weaken.

I know there are plenty of sites, both left and right, which engage in the ugliness of name-calling. But there are many on the right and some on the left, who do not. I simply prefer to be one that does not. If one blogger shrieks into his or her echo chamber, there really is no need to shriek back.

Hear, hear.

Read the whole thing.

John Podhoretz writes, "Mainstream Media Biased? Noooo"!

Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times — the paper of record's beat reporter on the Supreme Court — just gave a talk at Harvard in which she basically said, "Hello. My name is Linda, and I make The Nation look like the John Birch Society." Every single time anyone tells you the New York Times isn't a left-wing organ from its news columns to its wedding pages, just send him this link.

Or just send him to the Times itself.

Update: In a post titled, "MSM: The Mask Is Off", Hugh Hewitt links to the Greenhouse admissions, and combines them with recent quotes by Thomas Edsall, who recently retired from the Washington Post, and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek.

As I wrote a few years ago in Tech Central Station, as far as I'm concerned, the mask started coming off with HBO (nee-CBS) insider Bernard Goldberg's Bias and Arrogance books, along with the simultaneous rise of the Blogosphere and its fact-checking skills. But Daniel Okrent's NYT op-ed (linked to above), Ra^therGate, the clampdown on the Swift Vets, Evan Thomas of Newsweek's 15-point spread, and a dozen other examples wrapped up the case definitively by the end of the 2004 election, which is why I don't post quite as many "See? See!" sorts of media bias posts as I did a few years ago. That case has been made, and those few liberal journalists who still claim that their profession is overwhelmingly "objective" are the ones with huge blinders on, still living in the pre-Blogosphere era of monopoly media. Or as Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote in January of 2005:

A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards.

But I'm always happy to see further proof admitted by those liberals within the elite media as well.

In the Washington Post, Robert Kagen writes:

It's too bad we won't get to see the full National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism" selectively leaked to The Post and the New York Times last week. The Times headline read "Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat." But there were no quotations from the NIE itself, so all we have are journalists' characterizations of anonymous comments by government officials, whose motives and reliability we can't judge, about intelligence assessments whose logic and argument, as well as factual basis, we have no way of knowing or gauging. Based on the press coverage alone, the NIE's judgment seems both impressionistic and imprecise. On such an important topic, it would be nice to have answers to a few questions.

For instance, what specifically does it mean to say that the Iraq war has worsened the "terrorism threat"? Presumably, the NIE's authors would admit that this is speculation rather than a statement of fact, since the facts suggest otherwise. Before the Iraq war, the United States suffered a series of terrorist attacks: the bombing and destruction of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998, the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Since the Iraq war started, there have not been any successful terrorist attacks against the United States. That doesn't mean the threat has diminished because of the Iraq war, but it does place the burden of proof on those who argue that it has increased.

Ed Morrissey concurs, writing, "Obviously, the Times has not played this straight. They have taken selected quotes from the NIE to build a political case against the war":

The only solution to the problem is to declassify the NIE after redacting information about sources and methodology. We need to know the full context of all these remarks in order to know and understand the real conclusions of the intelligence community, not just a handful of disgruntled bureaucrats with Bill Keller on their speed-dial. Let's see the entire report and then debate its contents. Democrats and Republicans should both call for that kind of openness.

President Bush did, ordering the NIE released. John Hinderaker notes:

Earlier this morning, Democrats tried to force the House of Representatives into a secret session to talk about the NIE report. This grandstanding would have generated more leaks and more headlines, but it was voted down. Now, with the report itself being declassified, the Democrats won't be able to pull this kind of stunt.

Click here to read it.

Great cartoon illustrating the meme of the Long Tail in action.

Incidentally, the week before last, in Pajamas' "Blog Week In Review" podcast, Glenn Reynolds, Austin Bay and David Corn discussed MySpace and its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch for $580 big ones. Over at Blogcritics, I explore how MySpace is vulnerable to the Long Tail as well, as a competitor called Nextcat sets up shop.

Tim Blair shakes up the eeeevil secret behind Pepsi-Cola, and other International World Global Planetary Zionist Conspiracies.

John Podhoretz writes:

Greg Pollowitz, NRO's rookie of the year, blows the lid off Larry Sabato's unacceptably vague confirmation of the "George Allen used the N-word" story over at Sixers. Bottom line: Sabato says he's known about this for years. So why didn't Sabato bring it up in 2000 when he moderated a candidate debate between Allen and Chuck Robb?

Pollowitz's lengthy post can be found here. Video of Sabato with Chris Matthews, here.

Update: More here.

Advice Goddess Amy Alkon demolishes an article in Salon by Mike Davis that tut-tuts American investment in Mexico. Amy writes:

American money pouring into Mexico? How tragic! This must be stopped, so Mexico can be maintained as a giant slum teeming with poor brown people! (Oh, the romance!) Hint, Mike: Maybe if they had infusions of dollars at home, they...wouldn't be endangering their lives crawling across the border?

Last year, Matt Welch described a similar sentiment amongst equally leftwing and reactionary tourists to Cuba:

this common sentiment has always irritated the hell out of me. Oh, the crumbling, no-longer-beautiful houses! Ah, the lovely two-feet-deep potholes, and rickety Chinese bicycles (because the 50-year-old Chevys and 30-year-old Ladas don't work, and at any rate there's no gas). How people can derive pleasure from evidence of the suffering of innocents is beyond me, and few sights are more unseemly to my eyes than seeing a Lonely Planet-waving travel snob whine about how some current or formerly misgoverned hellhole has been "ruined" by all that yucky reconstruction, material success, and (worst of all!) tourism. Oh how pretty! The baseball players make $20 a month, and they live on a prison, but at least there's no annoying electronic scoreboard!

Val Prieto, who frequently blogs on Cuban issues at his own Babalu Blog dubs it "Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome".

Sort of like the propagation of SARS, it appears to be spreading beyond travelers to one nation, into a global meme. And it's worth noting that a variation of it was the dominant theme of the 2002 U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, where numerous Gulfstream Transnationalists such as California's own Jerry Brown urged--for the sake of the global environment, if not local civilizational ruins--that the Third World remain as backward and shackled as possible.

The Anchoress has a brilliant idea for a post: using President Clinton's appearance on Fox this weekend as a metric for assessing the power of two mediums: the legacy media and its successor:

Blogs have made inroads, but not enough, and all of their fact-checking amounts (in the eyes of the MSM) to little more than soundwaves in the echo chamber. “One side” of the partisan chasm has the whole story and sits nearly impotent with it, while the other has the “preferred story,” accredited and promoted by the “mediating intelligences,” who still (and will for the foreseeable future) hold the largest sway over public opinion, by sheer dint of their control of public knowledge.

The blogs did an incredible job of fact-checking Clinton - they were quick and accurate - they found files of articles from the NY Times and the WaPo utterly dismantling Clinton’s assertions. They floated the video from NBC News (not a known right-wing establishment) suggesting we had OBL more than “in our sites.” But it will be to little effect, I fear. In subsequent news reports, the “mediating intelligences” have not picked up a bit of the analysis, have not used any of the facts easily available on hundreds of blogs.

Not the right story, you see. Clinton is not the right president to prove a “liar.” The press wants desperately to bring down a president, but Clinton is not the one. And so, facts-schmacts, the only facts that matter are the ones the master can pull out of thin air.

And if that doesn’t demonstrate, more than anything, that we are living in an age of diabolical disorientation, where up is down (the excellent economic news is bad) and right is wrong (men who served with John Kerry know nothing about him) and truths are lies, (US policy from 1998 on was regime change in Iraq, but only until we did it) I don’t know what can.

I feel no great thrill here to see Clinton in a purple rage, nor to see how brilliantly some parts of the blogosphere responded, because in the end our limited audience is still been trumped by the vast and attention-span-challenged audience of the MSM, who click on, absorb a thirty second “Clinton good, others bad” sound bite and click out, certain they’ve got the information they need.

The blogosphere is growing in effectiveness. Blog commentary is increasingly dependable, professional and penetrating, and the fact-checking is above reproach, but our effectiveness is still limited.

I think that's exactly right, and the Achoress's denouement dovetails nicely with some thoughts Peggy Noonan had this past summer, when she compared the strength of Democrats currently in office to the infinitely more powerful strength of Democrats permanently manning newspaper op-ed pages.

Update: Here's another metric for the health of the Blogosphere: the Senate Majority Leader praises "the bipartisan citizen journalism of the blogosphere" for its role in passing the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act--a.k.a., the Porkbusters Act.