THE PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS is reportedly running a story on Flight 93 tomorrow that points to some timing discrepancies in the cockpit voice recorder data. You can read an advance posting here. I’m rather skeptical of the various conspiracy theories that have been swirling around the Net of late, but there have been some unaccounted-for details.

Thanks to Stuart Buck for emailing the link.

UPDATE: The story is online now.

READER ROBERT PATTERSON SENDS this story of tourists mistaken for terrorists that’s worth a read.

THIS HEADLINE makes it sound like a bad thing.

WILLIAM BURTON (whose permalinks aren’t working) has a message for the world:

Hi, World, how’s it going? Been a while. I know our current leader doesn’t call you much, but we really do like you. In fact, we’re a lot like you. Really. We’ve got Hindus, and Muslims, and Christians, and Jews, and people who believe in Body Thetans and the healing power of crystals. We’ve got Irish Buddhists, Japanese Baptists, and Jewish atheists who are trying to find a nice Jewish boy to settle down with. We’ve even got women who make a living travelling all over the place telling other women to stay home. All sorts of crazy shit. You’d love it over here. I know we told a lot of you to stay home, but you know we didn’t mean it. Ya’ll do most of the work around here anyway, except the stuff that involves typing (and that ain’t really work).

I know that some of the stuff we’ve been doing hasn’t been explained real well, so I thought I’d take a shot. Listen to me real good, now. We, the United States of America, don’t want to kill you or anyone else, nor do we want to piss you or anyone else off (well, maybe France). We’d prefer that everyone just keep sending us their smartest students and hardest workers while buying our soft drinks and watching our action movies. However, we are going to defend ourselves against attack and take steps to keep ourselves from being attacked. We also reserve the right to stick up for people who are getting slaughtered for no good reason at all. Don’t expect any different. Ever.

If we have to defend ourselves, people are going to die. Some of those people won’t deserve it. That’s just the nature of warfare. It’s real hard to sort the good guys from the bad guys when the bad guys are trying to keep from being sorted. So if we end up killing someone who didn’t deserve it or stationing troops near someone’s holy place, we’re genuinely not trying to be insensitive. We’re trying to do the best we can in an imperfect world. Believe me, we don’t like it when innocent people die. It’s not our nature.

You might mention to your leaders that you don’t want to get caught in any crossfire, so they need to make sure they don’t kill any Americans (’cause if they do kill any of us, there’s sure to be crossfire). If they seem intent on killing Americans anyway, you might try shooting your leaders in the head with an AK-47 or throwing them in prison. I know the Rumanians are awfully glad they shot theirs, and the Serbians don’t seem too upset that theirs are in jail. I know you don’t always have that option, and you may be stuck with the scumbags you’ve got. If so, our condolences. But your beef is with them, not with us.

There’s more.

RICH HAILEY reflects on America.

IT’S NOT JUST Florida. Maybe it just gets noticed there.

UPDATE: Oh, this hurts. Or maybe that’s just my eyes burning from the sulfuric acid vapors.

WHIGGING OUT purports to find a Democrats/Al Qaeda connection based on the Buffalo Five all being registered Democrats. Seems a bit of a stretch to me. I think that his real point is more along these lines:

After Oklahoma City, Republicans were forced to dress in sackcloth and ashes and parade around as if people who wanted tax cuts and limited government helped load explosives into McVeigh’s truck. While there was of course no connection between the GOP and McVeigh, the argument for the abovementioned Islamic/Democratic connection is far more compelling, and needs to be examined without fear of appearing conspiratorial.

He’s right about the way McVeigh was used — there’s an interesting discussion of it in George Stephanopoulos’ White House memoir, which reports that Dick Morris was behind it, and wanted to do even more.

After the Hilliard, McKinney, and McKinney defeats, though, I don’t think many Democrats are going to be doing anything that might make them look close to Al Qaeda or radical Islam in general.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis emails to say that he’s surprised I gave credence to the Democrats / Al Qaeda connection. Hmm. I thought I was debunking it. I don’t even think that Whigging Out means it seriously. I saw him (I think it’s a him) as using the opportunity to twit the Dems for how Dick Morris used McVeigh — and there’s nothing imaginary about that.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Whigging Out has posted a clarification.

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ORWELLIAN, AND MAYBE RACIST when the United States talked about fingerprinting immigrants from Arab countries. But now Saudi Arabia wants to require visitors to wear radio ID tags.

COMBAT WEBLOGGING: Yep. This is a weblog from some U.S. soldiers in the ‘stans.

MARTIN DEVON isn’t a multiculturalist.

BLOGOSPHERE FAVORITE ROBERT FISK has a column mentioning Hanan Ashrawi’s speech. Damian Penny responds.

UPDATE: Misha has some comments, too. Meanwhile Tim Blair points out what happens when you hire John Pilger.

JOSHUA TREVINO is claiming vindication.

SO FAR, WE’RE STILL ALIVE. Well, actually it’s not bad, though you can smell the stuff in the air. We had a nice dinner down in the Old City, though. My daughter is eagerly chasing rumors that her school will be closed tomorrow.

JOHN WEIDNER SAYS that Sweden is on the road to extinction. Except for his Swedish relatives, of course.

TOM MAGUIRE has a post responding to my post below on the Central Park jogger case, and various other bloggers’ commentary on it. And reader George Zachar sends this first-hand account:

Away from the suddenly nighmarish legal turn in the Central Park Jogger case, I want you to know there really was terror, in the pre-9/11 sense, in the park that night.

I was jogging up the west side of the reservoir just past 9:30 pm when an approaching runner began gesturing frantically for me to turn around.

As he passed me, he said there was a gang of kids attacking joggers at the northern end of the reservoir, and that he’d just barely escaped them. I, of course, turned south and ran to the nearest park exit.

When I saw the next morning’s papers, I learned the man who’d warned me was a former track star whose speed had saved him. And that if I had left my apartment 10 minutes earlier, reaching the reservoir’s apex before him, *I* would have been a victim, with no chance of eluding the wilding youths.

Just offering a local, non-legal perspective to the events of that night.

I may post more on this later. I’ve gotten some email charging me with being unfairly biased against prosecutors, and I’m trying to decide whether to respond with some anecdotes from my time working in a prosecutor’s office or not.

UPDATE: Here’s more on the subject, with the amusing title “Central Park Bloggers.”

SMALLPOX UPDATE: The U.S. government appears to be planning a rolling vaccination program that will probably reach the general public eventually. I suspect that public pressure may move that timeline up.

I’M AT THE OFFICE, and my wife just called to say that a train wreck and chemical spill may cause an evacuation of our neighborhood. Jeez.

UPDATE: So far, it looks like we’re in the clear. However, our plans for a birthday party tonight have been scrubbed. Dang.

ANOTHER UPDATE: They’ve expanded the evac. area. Still not quite to our house, but my wife and daughter are meeting me down here, and we’re going out to dinner while they work on the cleanup. Here’s the latest, for the two or three of you who may actually care.

N.Z. BEAR points out bias in an Associate Press story on antiwar protests by Angela Watercutter — though, to be fair, the bias could have been injected by an editor. Wouldn’t be the first time that happened.

UPDATE: Brian Carnell isn’t very happy with UPI, either. And nobody likes Reuters. Hmm. I’m beginning to sense a more general problem. . . .

READER BRIAN JONES WRITES:

Q: “What’s the quickest way to shut Noam Chomsky up?”

A: “Ask him a linguistics question.”

Thankyouverymuch.

Someone should try this.

ORRIN JUDD writes that Jonah Goldberg doesn’t understand the Internet. Well, kind of.

KEN LAYNE’S WEIRD FILES SYNDICATED FEATURE is taking off! Encourage your paper to pick it up.

JEFFREY ROSEN WRITES THAT CHECKS AND BALANCES ARE WORKING:

In the course of researching the state of liberty and security after 9/11, I’ve been especially struck by how restrained America’s legal response appears when contrasted with that of our European allies. Although they weren’t directly attacked, the countries of the European Union passed anti-terrorism measures during the past year that are far more sweeping than anything adopted in the United States. In October, France expanded the powers of the police to search private property without a warrant. Germany has engaged in religious profiling of suspected terrorists, a practice that was upheld in a court challenge. In Britain, which has become a kind of privacy dystopia, Parliament passed a sweeping anti-terrorism law in December that authorizes a central government authority to record and store all communications data generated by e-mail, Internet browsing or other electronic communications, and to make the data available to law enforcement without a court order. In May, the European Union authorized all of its members to pass similar laws requiring data retention.

The Bush administration has tried to emulate its European allies by expanding executive authority in similarly dramatic ways. It asserted that the president may designate citizens or aliens as enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely without judicial review. It claimed that the president may deport certain aliens based on secret hearings whose existence is withheld from the pressand the public. And it attempted to blur the legal lines that separate domestic law enforcement from foreign intelligence gathering, transforming the FBI into the equivalent of Britain’s domestic security intelligence agency, MI5.

What distinguished America from Europe, however, is how quickly all three of these extreme positions met with opposition from the other two branches of government.

Jeffrey Rosen has been thinking deeply about these issues since well before 9/11/2001 and this piece is well worth reading — as, I expect, his book on this subject will be.

SECOND-GENERATION ASTROTURF? RegulateGuns.Org is a website that argues that guns should be regulated as a consumer product. (By which they really mean guns should be regulated out of existence). The contact page indicates that it’s related to the Consumer Federation of America, though it’s not clear whether the site is actually part of CFA or if CFA is just a “supporter” of the site. But the WhoIs entry says that the domain name is registered to the Violence Policy Center.

I couldn’t find any mention of a VPC connection, and entering “violence policy center” into the site’s search engine produced no results, so apparently VPC isn’t mentioned anywhere. And when I entered “regulateguns.org” in the search window on the Consumer Federation of America site, I got no returns. I got the same non-result when I searched the Violence Policy Center’s site.

So who’s actually behind this?

UPDATE: FYI, courtesy of an alert reader, here’s an article on what it would actually mean to treat guns like a common consumer product. Oh, and another reader points out that searching for “VPC” does bring up some links to the Violence Policy Center.

HERE’S A REPORT on the Florida non-terror inicident that’s worth reading. Excerpt:

Friday’s coverage was the source of a staggering amount of misinformation. Among the inaccurate reports:

• Several stations reported that a woman in Georgia told police three Middle Easterners were coming to Miami to blow something up. (That’s not what she said.)

• Several also said cops spotted the men after they roared past a tollbooth on I-75. (One car rolled by at a normal rate of speed; the other stopped and paid the tolls for both.)

• The cops used explosives to detonate a suspicious knapsack found in one car. (They didn’t.) Channel 7 reported that explosive ”triggers” were found in one of the cars. (There were no ”triggers” or anything else to do with explosives.)

• Channel 7 also reported that cops were searching for a third car. (They weren’t.)

It was a wretched performance — worse yet, a wretched performance that dragged on for eight hours, terrorizing South Florida and smearing the daylights out of three medical students who can be counted on to contribute heavily to the next edition of the travel guide What Sucks About South Florida.

”This is what is wrong with local news,” said Bill Pohovey, news director at WPLG-ABC 10, one of the two stations that kept their perspective on the story and stuck with regular programming. (WLTV-Univision 23 was the other.) “This is why viewers get disgusted with local news.”

My only quibble with Pohovey is the word local. The worst parody of journalism Friday was actually on CNN, where the high-paid-low-rated anchor Paula Zahn speculated, without a jot or tittle of evidence, that the three men were coming to Florida to blow up the Turkey Point nuclear reactor. Now you know why CNN promotes her sex appeal rather than her news judgment.

Sounds like what Reid Stott was saying. And mainline journalists say bloggers are sloppy?

YEAH, I KNOW: Not many posts so far today (though several updates to yesterday’s stuff — scroll down). I’ve spent a lot of family time and only got a little bit of time at the computer while my daughter was occupied playing Barbies. More later, though I have to finish up two columns for this week, which may limit posting somewhat. In the meantime, PunditWatch should be up later this afternoon.

KATHY KINSLEY writes about terms that have lost their meaning.

What I find amusing is that many people who complain constantly about “fascism” seem to have trouble recognizing it in an objectively fascist state like Iraq or Syria.

PAUL WRIGHT says that the antiwar movement is suffering from the generational imperialism of baby boomers mired in Vietnam-era thinking:

The old revolutionaries need to keep an image in mind before they put their hand up: Eisenhower. No-one could fault his ability at war, his patriotism or his intellect. So outflank him call him outdated, out of touch, a relic. But consider: his war was only 25 years out of date when JFK ordered the troops into Vietnam. Your war is older than that, and much more obsolete.

Actually, it was closer to 15 years — but that only makes Wright’s point stronger.

PERRY DEHAVILLAND says that Jacob Hornberger is morally obtuse.

AIMEE DEEP reports that both Osama bin Laden and Michael Eisner are finished.

I’VE NOTICED the new developments in the Central Park jogger case, and I have to say that even after reading this article in the Village Voice I don’t feel that I have a complete handle on the issues involved.

Jeanne d’Arc has a post on the many reasons why the case is disturbing. It comes as no surprise to lawyers that the criminal justice system locks up innocent people. It’s an old and unfunny joke among prosecutors that “convicting guilty people is just your job — convicting the innocent is the real test of professionalism.” Like most dark jokes within the professions (for brain surgeons it’s “oops! there go the piano lessons!”) it’s mostly just dark humor, but like all of them it’s dark humor tinged with truth. Prosecutors say that their goal is achieving justice, not convicting people. But their conviction ratios are too important to their careers to ignore.

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said that it’s much worse to convict an innocent person than to miss a guilty one — because when you convict the innocent, people perceive that obedience to the law is no protection. And I certainly don’t think that it’s okay — as some have apparently been saying — that no harm is done if a wrongly convicted person is eventually exonerated. Those years spent in jail are years lost forever, and pretty damned lousy ones at that.

Of course, any system run by humans is going to be imperfect. Even the old maxim, “better ten guilty go free than one innocent be convicted,” seems implicitly to suggest that if the ratio were 100-1 things might be different. (See Sasha Volokh’s already-famous law review article on this very issue.)

To my mind, the real test of a system isn’t whether or not it makes mistakes: by that standard, all systems will fail, since all make mistakes. The real test is whether the mistakes were made in good or bad faith, and whether the response to them, once they’re discovered, is marked by good or bad faith. What unfortunately happens in some criminal cases is that prosecutors try to block DNA tests, or hide exculpatory evidence, to keep a conviction from being overturned. I consider that sort of behavior to be the very worst sort of crime — because it’s not only wrong in itself, but undermines the whole system.

UPDATE: Here are some comments at Pundit Tree. And reader Tom Maguire points out that Max Power has been debating this with Uppity Negro for some time. And here’s something from Sisyphus Shrugged, which is also one of the better blog names I’ve seen lately.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oh, and here’s one by Armed Liberal, who finds Jeanne d’Arc just a bit too “self-satisfied.” He adds:

I’m interested in why our three reactions are so disparate, and it cuts to one of my significant core issues, the alienation of many of us from our society and the overt disgust with all the instruments of government. In other words, the collapse of legitimacy.

I’m interested in why it is, when we correct the injustices of the past, and devise tools to ensure that it will be difficult to make the same mistakes again, we are dwelling on the “Oh, no, we were so bad” rather than the “we’re getting better”. See, I think that real liberalism…the kind that builds schools and water systems and improves people’s lives…comes from a belief in progress.

I think that this is a good point — though one question is, now that the system appears to be correcting its mistakes, how far will it go to make things right? I think a million bucks each is reasonable, though no more than reasonable, compensation if these guys turn out to be honest-to-God innocent. Think they’ll get that much?

And if the State of New York replies that compensating the wrongly convicted at that level is too expensive, given how often such things happen, well, that will tell us something, now won’t it?

ONE MORE UPDATE: Mark Kleiman weighs in with the voice of experience.

HOW THE BLOGOSPHERE CHANGES YOU: I’ve noticed this phenomenon myself.

FLORIDA NON-TERROR UPDATE: Donald Sensing and Reid Stott weigh in on false alarms. Here’s an excerpt from Stott’s post:

They didn’t do anything but what citizens have been asked to do repeatedly, especially in a week of heightened terror alert, on the anniversary of the death of thousands due to such terror. Law enforcement officials announced the tip to the media, not Eunice Stone. Only after the men had been stopped in Florida, and the story of her initial tip broken, did the media show up in droves outside Ms. Stone’s house. Did she hold a smiling press conference on her front lawn to boast of what she’d done? No, visibly uncomfortable with all the attention, she go into the family vehicle (followed by a family member politely chastising the media scrum in a true Southern manner: “Y’all mind if ah git in mah truck?”) She said as little as possible, and then left them there (admittedly, partially because Fox had scooped the hell out of everyone and somehow locked her up for a live interview).

And you know what? In the very first phone interview she did, one of the first things she said was ” ‘I hope I haven’t done something wrong,’ Stone had told Fox News. ‘I hope I haven’t caused someone problems that really didn’t do anything … At the same time, I thought, ‘What if they really are doing something and I stopped them?’ ” Does that sound like someone seeking to get others in trouble so that she might glory in the media?

And the media, even today, continues to get her story wrong, as Christiane Amanpour did this morning on CNN when she very snidely said the alert was due to the word of a “fast food waitress,” suggesting the whole episode showed America is out of control. Perhaps one should make certain of at least the known facts before one engages in speculative punditry before millions, like the fact the very very early reports that said the tipster was a waitress at Shoney’s were quickly debunked, long before we even heard the name of “Eunice Stone,” oh, and that little fact that our country had bumped up the alert status 48 hours beforehand. Of course, those facts would tend to tear down both sides of Christiane’s point, but no matter, she’s just a pro with a bully pulpit to millions. No need to get bogged down in accuracy, it dulls the rhetoric.

Well said.

UPDATE: Aziz Poonawalla is rather critical of Donald Sensing’s post. However, Rod Dreher seems to find the same anti-Southern prejudice in media coverage that Sensing complains about — though he concludes, after examining his own assumptions in the matter, that bias goes both ways.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Suman Palit writes that this is why TIPS was a bad idea: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Well, maybe. On the other hand, this was a credible report. The question is, are we better off examining these, or ignoring them? That’s not an easy question to answer, since it depends on the ratio of good to bogus reports, and the costs of acting and not acting. Certainly the tips from the Buffalo, New York muslim community that led to the arrests there seem to have been worthwhile. I do agree with Suman’s main point, though, which is that these defensive efforts are far less important than cutting off the head of the snake.

THE ARAB LEAGUE IS NOW URGING IRAQ to agree to Bush’s inspection plan. But the big item in this story is the following, from Bush:

“The U.N. will either be able to function as a peacekeeping body as we head into the 21st century, or it will be irrelevant. And that’s what we’re about to find out,” Bush said.

Either way, Bush wins. For a dumb guy, he winds up in this situation a lot.

SCOTT RITTER SAYS THAT “WAGING PEACE” IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN TRUTH:

[TIME] You’ve spoke about having seen the children’s prisons in Iraq. Can you describe what you saw there?

[Ritter] The prison in question is at the General Security Services headquarters, which was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children — toddlers up to pre-adolescents — whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I’m not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.

Typical. We saw the same unwillingness to discuss such things from those who defended the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, and many other evil regimes. Usually in the name of a “peace” that really meant “surrender.”

As Tony Adragna notes, though some people are saying that Ritter is being “demonized,” the truth is that he’s doing it to himself.

A TRAP SWINGS SHUT: Robert Musil writes that it’s rope-a-dope on several levels.

WHY THEY HATE US: Friedrich has an answer.

DAVID WARREN WRITES that those who say we’re embarked on an unending war are wrong:

For, contrary to the most pessimistic assessments, we will be able to know when the war against terrorism has been won. It will be when we see a phenomenon sweeping the Middle East, equivalent to what swept Central and Eastern Europe in the years 1989-91. (Though we may yet see the contrary in the meantime — Islamists overthrowing governments in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.)

We are dealing with an enemy that is defeatable, but which is not small. And we are dealing with entrenched attitudes that penetrate far more deeply into Muslim society than into the societies that were freed in Central and Eastern Europe. There was in these latter, after all, no one left who genuinely believed in Communism. In the Islamic world there are great masses of people who genuinely believe in the most bellicose interpretation of the old Muslim concept of “jihad” or holy war. Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden does command armies of millions of sympathizers, people living an apocalyptic fantasy.

But we have faced that kind of thing before. The Nazis were living an apocalyptic fantasy; so were the fascists of Mussolini’s Italy, and the emperor-cultists of Tojo’s Japan. In many ways, the antebellum U.S. South once fell into such a collective fantasy, and behaved aggressively in a like way. Such enemies were never going to be won over by reason or negotiation, and every proposal for appeasement strengthened their hand. . . .

That is the hard fact of life. Only the infantile narcissism in so much of the post-modern West prevents us from seeing it plain.

Yet there are still appeasers out there, driven in large part by what Diane E. describes as anger against effectuality. At least, anger against Western effectuality.

For some similar thoughts, see this post from OxBlog.

UPDATE: NEXIS OF EVIL: Richard Bennett hits an antiwar (er, and antilogging, and anti-meat, and, well, you get the idea) activist where it hurts.

JEFF JARVIS has an excellent suggestion for the Chicago Tribune.

TONY ADRAGNA is still on the Scott Ritter story. And Will Vehrs has sympathetic comments on the arrest of Al Gore’s son for DWI, which I hadn’t even heard about. As Vehrs points out, that’s just as well.

UPI COLUMNIST JIM BENNETT WRITES, in a column explicitly inspired by this post on Samizdata:

Three years ago, I was present at a vociferous argument between Margaret Thatcher and a retired American general who was a strong Europhile. The general maintained that Germany was America’s strongest and most important ally, while Britain’s aid was essentially worthless. Today nobody could advance such an argument with a straight face.

Interestingly enough, Tim Hames, writing in the Times of London on Friday, summarized recent British poll results on Iraq. Opposition to Britain fighting is most concentrated in the trendy, higher-income brackets; support for fighting is strongest in Middle England. The Chelsea neighborhood so full of quiet proofs of solidarity on Sept. 11 was in fact the heart of the trendier, higher-income parts of England.

Perhaps the polls today are no more meaningful than the famous Oxford vote prior to the Second World War, a vote of the same sort of elites, not to fight Hitler. After all, the same Oxford students went readily to fight when it became clear that appeasement of thugs does not work.

I suspect that Sept. 11 and its consequences will be part of a longer-term set of changes in the world. The strength of the comments of a random set of Americans to an impromptu memorial by a random collection of Brits reinforces my belief that an emerging Anglosphere will be part of those changes.

Quite a few people are saying so.

DIANE E. describes “a generalized rancid, corrosive anger against any form of effectuality.” You do see a lot of that, thinly disguised as compassion or sensitivity by people who are in fact deficient in both.

STEFAN SHARKANSKY says America’s middle east problems are all about oil. And he’s got an appropriately leftist solution.

UPDATE: Sharkansky is surprised I’ve called his solution leftist. But it’s about redistributing “unearned” income: sort of the inheritance tax writ large. Isn’t it?

MARK STEYN is reflecting on cultural sensitivity. Personally, I hope we all learn to be as sensitive as he is.

FUNNY: Last summer it was the anti-war people who wanted a debate on Iraq. Now it’s the Bush Administration that wants it, and is determined to get it.

THE INDYMEDIA KIDS are obviously provocateurs working for Ashcroft. Who else would respond to a reference on the Wall Street Journal’s website bringing in a lot of new eyeballs by posting this?

As far as defacing patriotic bumper stickers go, I’m all for it. Patriotism is a disease of the ignorant, kind of like believing in UFOs and palm reading. The American flag is also comparable to the Nazi flag and many people around the planet would agree with this comparison.

All empires fall. Let’s take down the American one.

Oh, right: idiots. So which is it?

The link is here and this is currently the very last comment. Beware that trolls unhappy with IndyMedia have posted the goatse.cx photo in various places.

SCIENTIST-BLOGGER DEREK LOWE has a series on chemical warfare. Start with this post and scroll up.

SCOTT OTT has discovered proof that Nicholas Kristof’s column on Cuba, much-reviled in the Blogosphere, is actually right!

ANDREW HOFER’S SUBTERRANEAN CONTACTS have produced this Al Qaeda internal memo, which suggests that their management techniques are more modern than generally realized.

ANOTHER DANGEROUS CABAL is exposed. Brrr.

THE FBI PLANS TO CHARGE five men arrested in Buffalo as part of a suspected Al Qaeda cell. But here’s the key part of the report:

Dr. Khalid Qazi, president of the American Muslim Council of Western New York, said he was told the investigation started when the local Muslim community reported suspicious activities to the FBI.

Yep. That’s how you catch these guys. And it’s why (as I’ve said since Day One) it’s important to treat the American Muslim population in general as allies, not suspects.

UPDATE: I just noticed that Bill Peschel is blogging again and posted similar thoughts last night.

THE MINUTEMAN has an amusing roundup of goings-on around the blogosphere.

EMILY JONES IS RESPONDING TO CRITICS of, well, all sorts. Start here and scroll up.

IN LESS THAN A WEEK, it will be the 20th anniversary of the smiley-face emoticon by Scott Fahlman of Carnegie-Mellon University. Observe it appropriately. I wonder when the Homer Simpson emoticon was invented? ( 8(|)

IF MY BLOG WERE ENTITLED “NO WATERMELONS,” I probably wouldn’t have written about this particular subject.

ANOTHER SUPERHERO ADVENTURE ends badly.

HOW STEVEN DEN BESTE BECAME JASON KOTTKE. And his eventual plan for global domination.

THE COMEDIAN reports on his own personal role in blocking the spread of nuclear weapons technology.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH wants to start a new charity. He calls it “Adopt-a-Bomb.”

DAVE WEIGEL writes that Robert Scheer can’t. Or doesn’t. At least, not well.

JIM CHRISTIANSEN emails this response to Nick Kristof’s column (mentioned earlier today):

Nicholas Kristof’s what’s-the-urgency? column reminds me of these lines from Tom Lehrer’s 1960s song on nuclear proliferation, “Who’s Next?”:

“Then China got the bomb, but have no fears, They can’t wipe us out for at least five years.”

For Lehrer, this was satire. For Kristof, it’s a policy argument.

As for the analogy to the Cuban missile crisis: The difference between Saddam now and Khrushchev in 1962? Khrushchev remembered the twenty-five million dead from World War II. Saddam models himself on the guy who inflicted them.

Well said.

NEWSWEEK displays just how conventional its conventional wisdom is, says Sam Welden.

SCIENCE HAS ENSURED that there will be no more Osamas in future generations.

THE MIND OF A TERRORIST: Some deep insight here.

Hmm. I’m a Presbyterian, and I do own a machete. . . .

A SHOCKING REPORT FROM DAVE HILL. Can this be true?

OH, CANADA: Reader James McKenzie-Smith sends this quote from a Canadian sniper in Afghanistan about his record long-distance kill as proof that not all Canadians are like Chretien:

When he hit his first target, an enemy gunman at a distance of 1,700 metres, he said all that ran through his mind was locating his next target.

“All I thought of was Sept. 11th and all those people who didn’t have a chance and the American reporter who was taken hostage, murdered and his wife getting the videotape of the execution; that is my justification.”

More Canadians like that, please, and fewer like Chretien.

I JUST ran across this post from Razib K responding to Nelson Mandela’s silly black/white comments on Iraq. Check out the pictures.

IN SAN FRANCISCO, some “activists” are vandalizing cars with American flags. Some are responding by threatening to give them the Aldrin treatment. In fact, if you scroll down through the comments, you’ll find that at least one burly Canadian has done so.

UPDATE: Someone has added the goatse.cx photo to the comments on the Indymedia page, so scroll at your own risk.

SINCE I NEVER READ BEN SHAPIRO, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this “full frontal Fisking,” but it’s found favor with other bloggers who do read Shapiro.

UPDATE: Here’s Corsair’s take on the subject. Well, this certainly disproves the theory that only lefties get Fisked by the warbloggers.

HOW TO ADOPT THE CORRECT MORAL STANCE in arguing against the war: a guide by N.Z. Bear. Very amusing, but the conclusion is not just amusing, but important.

DAVID BATTISTUZZI is one of the protesters who shut down Benjamin Netanyahu’s Concordia University speech. He’s quoted in news stories as saying “there’s no free speech for hate speech.” Turns out he’s a serial protester with a variety of lame causes. Pundit Tree has the scoop. While this is interesting on its own, its also a glimpse into a subculture of vicious stupidity that’s worth looking at.

FLIT, which has owned this story from day one, has a lot of stuff on the Afghanistan bombing investigation and the decision to prosecute the two U.S. pilots who accidentally bombed Canadian troops. Start at the above link and scroll up.

I HAVEN’T WRITTEN ABOUT FLORIDA, EITHER for the same reason. All I have to say is “what the hell is wrong with those people?”

To be fair, it’s not really Florida. Just two counties in Florida that, well, just seem utterly inept. I forget which weblog asked why they couldn’t just get different-colored rocks and drop them in a basket, but I agree — though I’m beginning to wonder if they wouldn’t experience a basket shortage, or something, and screw that up too.

WHY HAVEN’T I WRITTEN about Warren Zevon? Because I don’t have anything to say, really, besides “that sucks.” Jim Henley on the other hand, does more than that. But it still sucks.

THE NEW YORK SUN announces that it has 20,000 readers. Congratulations, guys — at this rate, one day soon you’ll have as many as InstaPundit!

Actually, I hope the Sun has ten times that many. I think that it’s nice that they’re putting content online, and they’re providing some new breadth to the New York media world. A new daily paper is a great thing, and the Sun is a good, soon to be a great, paper. I hope L.A. gets one next.

And, if you’re wondering, I did finally get the check from them last week.

EUGENE VOLOKH points to a piece contrasting media treatment of Clarence Thomas and Cornel West as evidence of liberal bias.

THE TEHRAN TIMES IS REPORTING that Egypt now says it will support a strike on Iraq. Very interesting.

WELL, I’LL BET THEY WON’T DO THIS AGAIN:

Three medical students of Middle Eastern descent who were stopped as suspected terrorists on Alligator Alley early Friday morning remained detained after they were overheard in a Georgia restaurant vowing to make America “cry on 9/13.”

Federal sources involved in the investigation said they believe the three men – all U.S. citizens – were playing a stupid joke on another restaurant patron who gave them a suspicious look.

All three were on their way from Illinois to take medical training in Miami.

Federal sources said the men could be released as early as today with a ticket for blowing the I-75 toll booth near Naples.

The sad thing is it was entirely credible. If Mohammed Atta, et al., could spill their guts to lap dancers, this kind of talk seemed to fit. I just hope this won’t stop someone who encounters something similar in the future from calling it in.

JOE KATZMAN liked Bush’s speech. So, interestingly, did Jeff Cooper, though I’m not sure they’re on the same page as to why. And reader Chris Durnell observes:

However, there is also a bigger story – the UN as it is conceived right now is dysfunctional as is the entire international system. The phrase “post-1945 international system” is the big clue. Is the world anything like it was sixty years ago? No, it’s not, but all the world bodies are designed as if it were. It’s like the big idea after World War II was to preserve the system established by the Congress of Berlin in 1884.

A new international system is needed that reflects the world power structure of 2002, not 1945. Diplomats are a notoriously conservative bunch unable to react to changes in world events especially if they happen slowly over time. The US as “world hegemon” took a decade to develop, and now the world needs to deal with it, the crisis of failed states across Africa and Asia, and the rise of non-state powers. Not only is the post-WWII system irrelevant, the basic assumptions of international law since the Treaty of Westphalia are beginning to become questioned. How can the current system handle this? It can’t.

I agree with a lot of this. One problem with the post-1945 system is that it created a transnational bureaucracy, and a lot of NGOs that feed off of it, and that creates great resistance to change that might cost people their phony-baloney jobs.

UPDATE: Jeff Cooper writes that there’s not all that much difference between his position and Katzman’s.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus comments.

SOME THOUGHTS on what the alleged terrorists in Florida may have been after.

SPEAKING OF VODKAPUNDITS, the original article has an account of Hanan Ashrawi’s speech at Colorado College, which was notable mostly for not being shut down by screaming racist mobs of the sort associated with places like SFSU and Concordia College. Matt Traylor was also there, and has these words for Colorado College: “I hope you didn’t pay much for that speech.” (This meshes with what Stephen Green said: “a complete waste of time.”) Traylor has helpful advice for Hanan Ashrawi, too.

TED BARLOW TAKES ISSUE with my post on Alex Beam and the relative degrees of fun-ness on the left and right. I was certainly having fun with Beam, who seems to exist mostly for my amusement, and that of quite a few other bloggers.

But Barlow claims that Beam — and I — overstate the case. I think that’s a matter of perspective. I don’t know what Ted does for a living, but I’m pretty sure he’s not an academic. If you live in the academic world, the influence of the hair-shirt left is pretty damned obvious. It’s true that the priggish anti-sex wing of feminism has lost its lustre, and its credibility, in the wake of the Clinton / Lewinsky affair. It’s just impossible to take that sexual-harassment stuff very seriously after you’ve seen Susan Estrich, et al., saying that a blowjob between a boss and an employee is a purely private matter. (Human Resources offices still take it seriously, of course, but they’re required to take all sorts of stuff seriously). But serious or not, it’s still alive, in Human Resource offices and feminist studies anyway, and those still wield more power in my world than their moral or intellectual accomplishments would warrant.

Ted says that no one on the left defends Andrea Dworkin anymore, and produces an extensive list of blogosphere citations to prove it — only to be brought up short by Dworkin defenders in his comments section. (Another commenter, displaying the sort of rollicking good humor I’ve come to associate with certain segments of the left, says that I’m an “idiot.”)

But okay, I think it’s fair to say that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon don’t enjoy a lot of support from lefty bloggers. So what? Ted notes, correctly, that “The Right isn’t just a bunch of fun-loving VodkaPundits; it’s also where Jerry Falwell, Bill Bennett, Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson etc. live.” Well, true enough — but we need more fun-loving VodkaPundits and fewer of the others, and as best I can tell that’s where the right is these days — at least if you include the libertarian-inclined right, which you have to if you want to count me and Stephen Green as “right” bloggers. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson don’t enjoy a lot of support from righty bloggers — in fact, I explicitly mentioned them in the post that led Charles Johnson to coin the term “idiotarian.” My question is this: we know about the lefty Falwells — that would be Dworkin and MacKinnon, among many others. But where are the lefty Vodkapundits? And try as he may, Eric Alterman doesn’t count.

UPDATE: I’d count Welch and Layne as lefty VodkaPundits — but I don’t think that Ted, or most of the self-described lefty blogosphere, consider them lefties at all. Which, to my mind, helps to illustrate my point.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an argument that Alterman is the VodkaPundit Of The Left. Well, the real VP would have been smoother, but then he’s been aging in the oaken barrels of the blogosphere for longer than Alterman. . . .

LAST UPDATE: Dave Shiflett has the last word:

More to the point is a larger question: Do any pundits really have fun? And, if so, what does this tell us about the pundit? . . . The saving grace for most pundits is that they are easily amused.

I think he might be onto something. Jim Treacher emails that he’s not a lefty VodkaPundit, but he might be a “moderate GinWonk.” Could be. Though his comments on Moby don’t sound all that “moderate.”

CHRETIEN UPDATE: Here’s a column from the Toronto Sun:

Why on earth would Prime Minister Jean Chretien blame America for terrorist attacks on not only the U.S., but Western civilization in a CBC-TV interview scheduled to run on or around Sept. 11 — a day of remembrance and dedication.

And make no mistake — it was America he was slamming, using the euphemism of blaming “arrogant, self-satisfied, greedy” western countries for “humiliation” that provokes others to resort to terror. . . .

That Chretien resents America and President Bush may well be because they make him look weak and petty.

Chretien can’t inspire others, except those who depend on him for favours. He has disarmed Canada, made us utterly dependent on America for security, and resents it.

Increasingly, Canadians want Chretien gone. The longer he sticks around, the greater the likelihood that the Liberal party will suffer. Chretien has become a national embarrassment.

Americans and Canadians should be equally upset at his boorishness.

No prime minister in our history would have been so crass as to snipe at America the way Chretien has on such a poignant date in its history. It will encourage many Americans to resent Canada and wonder what warrants such hatred from a Canadian PM.

“Weak and petty” seems about right. Until the other day, my attitude on Chretien was Bogartesque — I probably would have despised him, if I had given him any thought. Then he made sure that I gave him thought.

(Via Max Jacobs).

EUGENE VOLOKH has weighed in on the Scott Rosenberg / Damian Penny feud.

IAIN MURRAY REVIEWS some new polls and says:

The distinction between the solid, working/middle class, Euroskeptic, Anglospheric core and the flighty, upper/nouveau class, Europhile, anti-American literati is shown to be real by the polling data. Two nations. Blair has to pick which one he’s for. More by the luck than judgment, I think he’s making the right choice.

I think it’s more than luck.

MATTHEW HOY says that he’s hit the Trifecta with the New York Times op-ed page today: not one, not two, but three dumb op-eds. In response, Hoy attempts a difficult triple-Fisking of Kristof, Krugman, and Albright.

Well, okay, not that difficult — I mean, look who we’re talking about here. But you usually only see contestants attempt a “triple-Fisking” in the Olympic finals. It’s gutsy of Hoy to do it in a mere exhibition event.

WIMPS: The Gop is backing away from Social Security privatization. The notion that a market slump means that social security privatization is a bad idea is indescribably stupid. Markets go up and down. Big deal. Congress has already cut my social security benefits, by raising my retirement age, and it’ll do it again. Somehow that political risk is discounted in all the discussions of privatization, but it shouldn’t be — markets always go up again, but Congress seldom un-screws people once it’s screwed them.

A TANK CAR FULL OF AMMONIA has exploded in Texas, with a boom that was heard 50 miles away. Not much more information at the moment.

NICK KRISTOF compares the current situation with the Cuban Missile Crisis. That earns this response from reader Brannon Denning:

God this is so lame, even by Kristof’s standards. Uh, the reason Kennedy didn’t want to press on Cuba is because there was a FRIGGIN COLD WAR ON!!!! What, are we worried that if we attack Baghdad, the Russians will invade Berlin? Jeez. Oh, and can’t we, for the love of God, give the whole macho JFK thing a rest for once?

There’s been a shortage of macho Democrats since JFK — with the exception of LBJ, and people don’t like to bring him up.

BREAKING NEWS ON the antiterror front. Here’s the CNN story:

Authorities closed a 20-mile stretch of “Alligator Alley,” south Florida’s primary cross-state connector, and detonated a package early Friday after stopping three suspects who they believe may have been plotting a terror attack in Miami. . . .

Florida law enforcement officials issued an alert Thursday night after a Georgia woman said she overheard a conversation among three men in a Calhoun, Georgia, restaurant. Calhoun is about 70 miles northwest of Atlanta on I-75, which runs north-south until it reaches Naples.

She said the conversation indicated they were planning a September 13 terror attack on Miami, according to a report by Miami’s WSVN-TV.

This puts that whole TIPS thing in a better light. Well, maybe.

UPDATE: Here’s the latest as of 11:30. I hope they’re checking for more than just explosives. One report said that “medical equipment” was found.

HEY, the headlines for Bush’s speech should have read “Descendant of Muhammad condemns Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda.”

LILEKS RULES, as usual:

I’ve been reading reactions to the President’s UN speech, and I’m amused at how people don’t seem to get it. Oh, now he’s being a multilateralist? Now he believes in the UN? No. That speech was the equivalent of that fabled kung-fu move that removes your opponent’s heart and shows it to you, just before you crumple. It’s of a piece with the administration’s behavior since 9/11: Let all the carpers and obstructionists gather on the tip of the thinnest branch, then show up with a saw and announce they have five minutes to come hug the trunk, which incidentally is covered with sap and stinging ants. It was sheer malicious brilliance to cast the entire case in terms of UN resolutions, because it mean the UN had to chose: either those resolutions mean something, or the UN means nothing. Why, it’s almost as if the UN painted itself into a corner – and woke up to find this rude simple cowboy holding the brush. How the hell did he do that?

Those damned cowboys. As Neal Stephenson’s fictional Yamamoto observed, crude and stupid is tolerable. Crude and smart is absolutely, positively unfair.

SCORE ONE FOR ROPE-A-DOPE:

President George W. Bush yesterday proved himself a master of the art of turning the tables on his critics, by choosing to make his case for an urgent showdown with Iraq in terms of the very diplomatic multilateralism they hold so dear.

In doing so, he delivered a speech to the United Nations General Assembly that was, by some way, the most powerful indictment of Saddam Hussein that has been heard from the administration since the drumbeat towards war began six months ago.

It not only offered a strong rationale for coercive measures against Iraq. It also presented, for the first time, a possible framework for diplomatic and, if necessary, military action that could broaden the support for regime change in Baghdad beyond the current narrow coalition of the US and the UK.

Above all, the speech cleverly emphasised that what is at stake is the post-1945 international system itself. The challenge to that system comes not from the administration in Washington, but from Iraq.

Glad to see someone’s finally paying attention.

STEPHEN F. HAYES ASKS “Someone remind me why George Tenet still has a job.” The occasion: the CIA’s inability to match the performance of reporters for The New Yorker and — even more embarrassingly — PBS.

LARRY SABATO’S CRYSTAL BALL has a lot of predictions and information regarding this fall’s elections. He says it’s “More accurate and user-friendly than Florida voting machines!”

HENRY COPELAND has a novel and interesting theory about weblogs and traffic. Er, I mean, “Ah, yes, exactly as I planned all along. . . .”

TONY PIERCE offers some undiplomatic criticism of today’s L.A. Times article on weblogs. Matt Welch is more diplomatic, but equally critical.

ANDREA SEE has now gone 97 days without smoking. Hurrah!

I THINK that it’s really an alien spaceship. Just in case you were wondering.

JOHN TABIN says he witnessed late night TV’s first Fisking, courtesy of actor James Woods. I didn’t see it, but his account is a good one.

THE SHOW WAS A GOOD ONE. Timed it perfectly: saw the last song of the second warmup band, a pretty good Lenny-Kravitz-influenced outfit out of Atlanta called Jade. Copper was set up and playing in admirably short time. Good music, scantily clad women, cold beer. They played an hour and a half and I was home, just ahead of the traffic, in 20 minutes. Woohoo!