STEVEN EMERSON PROVIDES SOME BACKGROUND on the ongoing trial involving CAIR and the Holy Land Foundation. I’m surprised this hasn’t gotten more media coverage. (Via LGF, which notes that this is “the largest terror financing trial in history”).
MORE BLOGGING FROM IRAQ, by Wesley Morgan.
And don’t miss this interview with a female U.S. soldier.
UPDATE: Oops, the interview turns out to be dubious — Morgan says he was lied to.
ON HILLARY AND TERROR: “Clinton is prodding us to think about what a good candidate she will be in different situations that may develop over the lengthy campaign season. The others don’t want to talk about that because they look worse in these imagined scenarios. So here we see how Clinton has played a shrewder, more complex game all along.”
CHINA: From Cultural Revolution to sexual revolution. Sounds like a great leap forward to me!
CRACKING THE CODE FOR KEYLESS ENTRY:
A group of Israeli and Belgian researchers found a vulnerability in the algorithm that is used to secure anti-theft digital key systems in numerous vehicles, including those made by such companies as Honda, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes Benz and Jaguar. With that information they were able to devise an attack to crack the code of anti-theft keys.
With just an hour of remote access to the digital key of one car made by a manufacturer, the researchers say they are able not only to crack the unique code for that specific key but can also determine the key initialization process used to code the digital keys for all of the cars made by that manufacturer. From there, it’s pretty simple for them to crack the unique code of another car made by that company.
Oops.
THE STORY KEEPS CHANGING, THOUGH: “This morning on C-SPAN 2, I heard a nice young historian spout the conventional wisdom about President Bush and the Iraq War. This particular interpretation is now totally uncontroversial – but it is false.” Back in 2003, people were telling a different story.
CHRIS WALLACE on Bill Moyers.
WHAT WILL THEY THINK OF NEXT? An Apple computer that also serves beer! Beat that, Michael Dell. Plus, lots more Apple news.
MORE QUESTIONS about reporting from Iraq.
FORGET HYBRIDS: Volvo is focusing on the diesel route to high mileage. But there’s a hitch: “Unfortunately, Volvo has no plans to introduce the Powershift or the diesel into the U.S. market. Apparently certifying the new engine for the U.S. market is too expensive at this point. And they’re unsure if there is enough customer support to back the effort. Too bad. We think both the transmission—and the diesel—would do quite well here.” Maybe we need to take a hard look at regulatory barriers to automotive efficiency?
ORIN KERR: “If the rumors are true that Gonzales will soon resign and Bush will nominate Chertoff to replace him as AG, that would be a very positive development.” I’d still favor Randy Barnett — and wouldn’t things have gone better if the Bush Administration had listened to me last time? — but Orin reminds us that this is the real world, not the ideal world.
AT JULES CRITTENDEN’S: Little Saddam.
DAVID BROOKS ON the political brain.
BURT PRELUTSKY LOOKS AT the private lives of public men. And women.
NEW GLASS: An interesting Iraq metric. (Via Charlie Foxtrot).
IN THE MAIL: Lawrence Anthony and Graham Spence’s Babylon’s Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo.
UPDATE: A reader asks if U.S. troops get as much credit in the book as they got in this contemporaneous news story. I’m not sure, but he thinks the Amazon listing downplays the troops’ role. However, there’s this: “What follows is a truly remarkable book, as Anthony pulled strings, made connections (legal and illegal), sweet-talked bureaucrats, and made miracles happen as he, with the help of the American military, brought the Baghdad Zoo back from the brink.”
SOME QUESTIONS ANSWER THEMSELVES: “Seriously, would you rather live 30 days without a politician or 30 days without a sewage treatment facility in your neighborhood? The septic tank pumpers, the garbage collectors, and the electricians are the only folks who hold back the threat of a new Dark Ages. They stand alone along the thin, brown line between anarchy and order. Some of the dirtiest jobs are the most vital. . . . If the world was a fair place, the sump-pumpers and bilge-bailers of this world would make as much as a Congressman. They do more for the public good than both houses of Congress.” Amen.
COOKWARE: Reader Jordan Schwartz emails:
I just re-read your cookware post from December of last year, but unfortunately, it didn’t answer one of my questions in my great high-end cookware search. I’m deciding between All-Clad stainless steel and Calphalon One Infused and Anodized collection (not non-stick). Do you have any preferences? You have mentioned that you use All-Clad before–have you ever tried the Calphalon One? It’s almost been a year–think its time for another cookware post?
I also seem to remember that you and I share a birthday–August 27th. If so, happy almost birthday!
I have the All-Clad and like it a lot. (I also have some of the much cheaper Cuisinart Multiclad stuff, and it’s quite good, especially for the money. My brother has it, too, and was saying just last night how much he likes it.) I don’t know anything about the Calphalon One stuff other than that it looks pretty in the stores, though if you follow the link to the December post you’ll see that Megan McArdle likes it. Any reader comments?
The only new cookware advice I have is that my brother — who’s taking advantage of the 59 cents per pound mangoes at his grocery store — swears by this GoodGrips Mango Splitter. He says it’s works perfectly, splitting and seeding them. Not bad for under twelve bucks. When we were kids, mangoes were a rare delicacy. Now they’re cheap, and you can buy specialized mango-cookware at Kroger. Three cheers for globalization!
And reader Ed Bush writes:
Over the years I must have missed you talking about your Romertopf clay pot. Someone like you would have to have one. If you don’t, get one and make your Insta Chicken in it.
I’ve seen these over the years, and they look cool, though it seems like something that might get broken in my household. And how easy are they to clean, really?
Also, I should note that this cheap nonstick skillet, which I picked up last year based on its promise to resist damage from metal utensils, is still holding up perfectly despite the best efforts of, ahem, some of the less careful cooks in my household.
And, yeah, tomorrow is my birthday. Thanks!
UPDATE: A Romertopf endorsement: “This baby is worth every umlaut. . . . Despite being made of clay, it is durable (eight years and counting with an accident-prone chef and two twitchy toddlers) and simple to clean.” That sounds good.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Paul Byers emails:
I have been using Calphalon One for over a decade. It has had other names in that time but still the same pots. They cook great! Even temps and brown really well. Cook a lot like well seasoned cast iron, which is what I learned on. I fearlessly use the OXO Stainless utensils without damage to my pots. I wash them with Scott brand pads and soupy hot water. If you take care of the pans they will glaze and then are much easier to clean. DO NOT PUT THEM IN THE DISH WASHER! Have a couple of the newer stainless Calphalon pans that have been gifts from folks who know my loyalty to the brand. They cook well but not as nice as the anodized. Little harder to reduce in the stainless but the thick aluminum plate on the bottom keeps the hot spots to a minimum. I have owned and passed on All Clad, Old copper bottom Revere Wear and well seasoned cast iron. I am all Calphalon now, even when I am camp cooking on a charcoal grill.
That dishwasher thing is a dealbreaker in my house Others may feel differently. Meanwhile, reader Mark Butterworth writes:
I’ve picked up a number of Calphalon pieces on sale and built up a nice set of pots, but I’ve also added some All-Clad which I love. They are beautiful and I thought my Saucier pot heated up faster than others I use.
To prove it, I did an All-Clad pot vs. a Calphalon pot of similar dimensions. I put two cups of water in each and set both pots on equal gas burners (two small ones on my range).
It took about 8-9 minutes to get a rolling boil and much to my surprise, the anodized aluminum Calphalon won. It beat All-Clad by a minute or so.
I still prefer my All-Clad. So pretty. So Shiny.
Mmm. Shiny.
THOUGHTS ON ART AND LIFE, from Megan McArdle: “Back when I wanted to be a fiction writer, I wanted to be the kind of fiction writer who has a dramatic slide into the abyss. It wasn’t long after I stopped writing short stories that it occurred to me that dying old, desperate and alone probably wasn’t nearly as inspiring for the people it happened to as it was for twenty-year olds looking for an excuse to smoke too much.”
UPDATE: From the comments: “Even goth chicks prefer guys who make them laugh.”
IT’S TIME FOR The Hipster Olympics! “We’re forced to assume that our competitors’ participation is strictly ironic.”
Video is here.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO Todd Steed!
THE ECONOMY SUCKS: “Record low unemployment across parts of the West has created tough working conditions for business owners, who in places are being forced to boost wages or be creative to fill their jobs.”
Oh, nooo! Low unemployment! Upward pressure on wages! This really does suggest that to the Big Media folks there’s no such thing as good economic news these days.
TEXAS GOVERNOR RICK PERRY responds to European criticism on the death penalty.
JAMES KIRCHICK EXAMINES the Obama doctrine. “Judging from his statements thus far, it appears that Illinois Democratic senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama — though many steps away from becoming leader of the Free World — has presciently formulated his own doctrine: The United States will remain impassive in the face of genocide.”
FLORIDA VOTERS DISENFRANCHISED? “Florida officials complained that the DNC was going to ‘disenfranchise voters,’ as it says on the state party’s home page.”
More here:
Florida lawmakers angrily assailed the Democratic National Committee and its chairman, Howard Dean, saying he is threatening to “disenfranchise” the state’s voters by considering a plan to invalidate the state’s presidential primary.
Reader John Underriner emails: “They said if Bush was elected Florida Democrats would be disenfranchised — and they were right!” Funny how those predictions keep coming true.
AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE: A report from Lima.
SO YOUR COMPUTER IS hostage to Microsoft’s “Genuine Advantage” servers? Which don’t always work. That’s a selling point.
IS IT THE PRESIDENT’S JOB TO BE role-modeling what good families look like?
IRAQIS PROTEST TERROR in a rally at the Saudi Embassy. Good for them.
THE ULTIMATE ALL-IN-ONE BREWING MACHINE: It’s quite an achievement, but I can’t help but feel that at the end of the day, it makes homebrewing so easy that it’s almost like buying your beer at the store . . . .
CALLING FOR A MILITARY COUP at The Huffington Post. Ed Morrissey is appalled. I think it’s a new high point for Bush Derangement Syndrome. Which is saying something, especially at the HuffPo.
UPDATE: Perhaps it’s all part of the new urgency on the left that Tom Smith notes.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Bill Quick is unimpressed.
HITTING SPAMMERS WHERE THEY’RE VULNERABLE:
Between July 1 and the end of the year, spam jumped to nearly 60 percent of all e-mail traffic monitored by Symantec, and many administrators say it makes up an even greater percentage of e-mail now.
Spam filtering is not the answer, said Garth Bruen, who runs a volunteer project focused on taking down the Web sites run by spammers. Bruen tracks down the ISPs and domain name registrars used by spammers and arranges to have their sites shut down.
“This problem is not going to go away if you ignore it. Blocking and filtering is just a jacked-up technological form of ignoring,” he said. “What you want to do is report it and make it difficult for these people to exist on the Net and do their transactions.”
Earlier this month, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, endorsed Bruen’s position, saying that anti-spam fighters could really hurt the spammers’ bottom lines by targeting their Web sites.
This seems plausible to me.
RALPH PETERS ON JOHN WARNER: Peters, writing from Fallujah, isn’t impressed:
Although this trend has been reported, our battlefield leaders here agree that the magnitude of the shift hasn’t registered back home: Al Qaeda is on the verge of a humiliating, devastating strategic defeat – rejected by their fellow Sunni Muslims.
If we don’t quit, this will not only be a huge practical win – it’ll be the information victory we’ve been aching for.
No matter what the Middle Eastern media might say, everyone in the Arab and greater Sunni Muslim world will know that al Qaeda was driven out of Iraq by a combination of Muslims and Americans.
Think that would help al Qaeda’s recruitment efforts? Even now, the terrorists have to resort to lies about their prospective missions to gain recruits.
With the sixth anniversary of 9/11 approaching, how dare we throw away so great a potential victory over those who attacked our country?
Forget the anti-war nonsense you hear. The truth is that our troops want to continue this struggle. I know. I’m here. And I’m listening to what they have to say. They’re confident as never before that we’re on the right path.
Should we rob them of their victory now and enhance al Qaeda by giving them a free win? How can we even contemplate quitting now?
I’ve been sitting down with Iraqis, too – including former enemies. They don’t want us to leave. They finally cracked the code. They need us. And although they’ve got a range of their own goals (not all of them tending toward Jeffersonian democracy), they’re unified in their hatred of al Qaeda.
I’m not either, but for a different , or at least additional, reason. First, Warner’s been saying similar stuff for quite a while, and it’s funny that the press is making a big deal of it — perhaps to overshadow the more significant about-face by Democratic Rep. Brian Baird. And Petraeus has talked about a troop pulldown already too. This looks like Warner trying to take credit for something that will probably happen anyway. In other words, Washington as usual. Warner, it’s true, doesn’t come off that well.
Meanwhile, notice that pretty much all the reporting from Iraq is more positive than the talk in Washington? As Damien Cave of the New York Times observed:
I talked to a commander the other day who said that the political debate at home is bizarro-land and something that he doesn’t connect with at all. . . . it’s funny, one of the things that comes up a lot here among commanders and among the press corps is the way that the debate at home seems to be mainly focused on the impact on Washington or among constituents.
Well, that’s how they look at everything, I suppose. But you expect better when a war is involved.
ATTACK OF THE fake bloggers.
PLAYING VIRTUAL ARMY EXPERIENCE:
I didn’t play it — no, that’s not a picture of me — but the gamers playing it didn’t seem too impressed, coming out. The “controller,” if you will, was pretty awesome, but the game itself wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as even the Xbox version of America’s Army outside. They complained of low accuracy. Then again, maybe it’s just a really accurate simulator of how hard it is to fire a giant metal rifle in the back of a military vehicle?
I wonder how the Army is doing, with their “recruit gamer nerds” strategy.
You can probably track that by looking at military purchases of Jolt! cola. . . .
DON SURBER ROUNDS UP the week that was.
BILL MAHER IS DISAPPOINTED, but I’m not surprised. I’ve known Damien Cave since long before the InstaPundit days, and he’s an honest reporter.
IN THE MAIL: Hanna Rosin’s new book on Patrick Henry College, God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America.
HIGHWAY ROBBERY: “Should people who carry large sums of cash just assume that there’s a small chance the government will simply steal it from them at gunpoint?”
JEFF EMANUEL REPORTS FROM IRAQ: Southeast of Baghdad, the Surge is working.
UPDATE: Read this, too.
ILYA SOMIN on dating across ideological lines.
MICKEY KAUS MATH-CHECKS THE NEW YORK TIMES: Shockingly, when 2700 dealers sell a car at about half the rate of 440 dealers, the 2700 dealers still sell more cars! Go figure!
No, really — go do the figures next time. Because apparently those layers of editors and fact-checkers don’t do math either.
‘HANDS OFF MY ANALOGY!”
THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, CONT’D: Jackass is now a video game. “Fans of Jackass and people who always wanted to plummet from a skyscraper but never got up the nerve will love the game.”
MIDWIFE TRAINING saving lives in Afghanistan. “Afghan women die more often in childbirth than women anywhere but Sierra Leone — one in nine will die during or after being pregnant. But the rapid training of midwives and spread of essential health information suppressed during Taliban years is beginning, perhaps, to change this.” More at the link.
A LOOK AT THE GUNS OF BRITAIN:
Following the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, in which seventeen people were killed by a man armed with two 9mm pistols, Britain passed a law outlawing the ownership of most handguns, despite researchers finding “no link between high levels of gun crime and areas where there were still high levels of lawful gun possession.” It’s a law so severe that the Britain’s Olympic shooting team is forced to train abroad, lest one of its members try to shoot up a grammar school. So how effective has the law been? A doubling in gun-related crimes since the ban, naturally.
Read the whole thing.
BOB KERREY VS. CHUCK HAGEL: I’m okay with that.
UPDATE: Reader John Tuttle emails: “Chuck Hagel vs Bob Kerrey ain’t gonna happen … Hagel won’t make it thru the primary.” He does have opposition.
BUT HIS BROTHER HAD A GREAT BAND: “Attorney Geoffrey Fieger and one of his law partners have been indicted by the U.S. government, which accused the pair of making $127,000 in illegal campaign contributions to the 2004 presidential campaign of John Edwards.”
MONEY: Not evil, after all.
POLITICIZING TERROR.
BUSH, HITLER, AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC. “Comparing Bush to Weimar would only be apt if you thought Bush was the weak and frail President Hindenburg, unable to take decisive action to keep his nation from sliding into chaos… “
LIBERTARIANS IN DEADLY SNEAKERS: “This is even worse than little old ladies in tennis shoes!” Well, the model I run in is called “The Beast.” And a 14EE is surely extra-deadly.
FAMILY VALUES: “The kind of family values that sustains a middle class – rather than an underclass – in a society like the United States aren’t necessarily the kind of family values that you find in socially-conservative societies at very different stages of socioeconomic development, and any transition from the latter to the former is likely to be bumpy.”
THEY CALL IT A M.U.L.E., but it sounds more like the grandpappy of one of Keith Laumer’s Bolos:
Lockheed Martin’s MULE (Multifunction Utility/Logistics and Equipment) has autonomously clambered over a 5-ft.-high obstacle. The Humvee-size vehicle uses six independently powered wheels and an articulated suspension to navigate rubble-strewn terrain or, as in a recent promo video (see below), to climb buglike over a car hood. Three types of MULEs are planned, all intended to dutifully follow dismounted infantry units. A heavily armed 2.5-ton version could be deployed by the Army by 2013.
Video at the link. I can’t help but feel, though, that we need a different Laumer character more than we need bolos at the moment . . . .
BARACK OBAMA GETS THE COVETED ENDORSEMENT OF Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy guru, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Take that, Hillary.
Plus, a line that Republicans will quote against her if she’s in the general election: “‘Being a former first lady doesn’t prepare you to be president,” Brzezinski said.”
JAMES WEBB ON WHAT HAPPENS when you pull out too soon.
UPDATE: James Webb’s website at JamesWebb.com has some quotes about Vietnam that may embarrass some people today:
“Vietnam should teach us an important lesson. Hanoi [is creating] a collectivist society . . . likely to produce greater welfare and security for its people than any local alternative ever offered, at a cost in freedom that affects a small elite.” — Stanley Hoffman
The New Republic
May 3, 1975“The greatest gift our country can give the Cambodian people is not guns but peace. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now.” — Rep. Chris Dodd (D., Conn.)
Congressional Record
March 12, 1975“It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated.” — Producer Bert Schneider
Academy Awards
April 8, 1975
To some people, the good guys won in Vietnam. And what happened after, “didn’t happen.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: James who?
REPORTS THAT CASTRO IS DEAD: It will be nice if they’re true, but we’ll see. I’m not so sure.
UPDATE: “Hades can wait.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Dave Barry says that speculating on Castro’s death is “what we do for entertainment here in Miami.”
MORE: Fausta Wertz has been listening to Cuban radio.
A BUNCH OF HIGH-CHAIR RECOMMENDATIONS: We’re past that phase in my household, I think.
MORE THOUGHTS ON “Hyper-parenting.”
RETIREMENT ADVICE: “Save more. Work longer.”
NOW THEY KNOW HOW MANY HOLES IT TAKES TO FILL THE . . . oh, never mind:
The universe has a huge hole in it that dwarfs anything else of its kind. The discovery caught astronomers by surprise.
The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it’s also strangely empty of the mysterious “dark matter” that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.
Astronomers don’t know why the hole is there.
Star-devouring space monsters.
THE CHICKEN AND THE EAGLE. Dueling economic stories.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF MAKING TIM RUSSERT LOOK LAME: The latest Corn & Miniter Show is up! Only without either Corn, or Miniter. Instead it’s Eli Lake and Michelle Cottle.
UPDATE: Video quit working. Got new embed code. This seems to work now. Sorry — don’t know what went wrong.
USING NANOTECHNOLOGY TO prevent pollution.
TURNING UP THE HEAT ON FRED THOMPSON: “If the sweltering 96 degree heat in Nashville at a fundraiser/reception this week for Fred Thompson is any indication of the political heat he’s taking from faithful supporters to get on with it and announce his candidacy for President, then it doesn’t seem like it can stay this hot much longer.” Only 96? It was 102 here yesterday. 96 is brisk.
THE BLOGOSPHERE HITS THE 100 million blog mark. Another “grim milestone?” Some will see it that way . . . .
LAW AND ORDER? “There are new allegations against embattled Miami Police Chief John Timoney by his own police officers’ union as we learn that the investigation is widening into his use of a free car.” Plus, this: “The President of the Miami FOP, Detective Armando Aguilar, said Timoney permitted crime statistics to be altered to reflect a lower crime rate.” At least the free car was a hybrid.
YAHOO, MSN, KOWTOW TO CHINESE BLOG CENSORSHIP.
DEMOCRATIC REP. BRIAN BAIRD has an oped on listening to the troops:
As a Democrat who voted against the war from the outset and who has been frankly critical of the administration and the post-invasion strategy, I am convinced by the evidence that the situation has at long last begun to change substantially for the better. I believe Iraq could have a positive future. Our diplomatic and military leaders in Iraq, their current strategy, and most importantly, our troops and the Iraqi people themselves, deserve our continued support and more time to succeed. . . .
As one soldier said to me, “We have lost so many good people and invested so much, It just doesn’t make sense to quit now when we’re finally making progress. I want to go home as much as anyone else, but I want this mission to succeed and I’m willing to do what it takes. I just want to know the people back home know we’re making progress and support us.”
Read the whole thing. It won’t get the kind of Big Media attention that John Warner’s comments will, because it doesn’t fit the preferred narrative. And some interesting observations about Baird’s background here.
RECREATING OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES without drugs.
TV IS DEAD. Long live TV. “The unspoken subtext — Madison Avenue still hasn’t figured out the how to make buying new media as profitable as as buying traditional media, so they are going to continue to push traditional media on their clients, come hell or high water.”
J.D. JOHANNES, who’s recently back from Iraq, looks at the new National Intelligence Estimate and observes: “This NIE is catching up to conditions on the ground that were developing months ago.” The full document is here in PDF, but J.D. notes this paragraph from the conclusion that hasn’t gotten much media attention:
We assess that changing the mission of Coalition forces from a primarily counterinsurgency and stabilization role to a primary combat support role for Iraqi forces and counterterrorist operations to prevent AQI from establishing a safehaven would erode security gains achieved thus far. The impact of a change in mission on Iraq’s political and security environment and throughout the region probably would vary in intensity and suddenness of onset in relation to the rate and scale of a Coalition redeployment. Developments within the Iraqi communities themselves will be decisive in determining political and security trajectories.
Doesn’t sound like what John Warner is talking about.
NOTHING NEW ABOUT THIS: A homophobic anti-Giuliani ad produced by a gay Democrat. Because sometimes it’s necessary to save the homophobia in order to destroy it.
RESTRICTIONS ON WI-FI in Europe.
IN THE MAIL: Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.
JOHN TAMMES ROUNDS UP news from Afghanistan that you probably missed.
GOTH DAY at Disneyland.
WHAT THE NEW YORK TIMES doesn’t think worth publishing. It’s all about the narrative, remember.
MEN: THREAT, OR MENACE?
When children get lost in a mall, they’re supposed to find a “low-risk adult” to help them. Guidelines issued by police departments and child-safety groups often encourage them to look for “a pregnant woman,” “a mother pushing a stroller” or “a grandmother.”
The implied message: Men, even dads pushing strollers, are “high-risk.”
Are we teaching children that men are out to hurt them? The answer, on many fronts, is yes. Child advocate John Walsh advises parents to never hire a male babysitter. Airlines are placing unaccompanied minors with female passengers rather than male passengers. Soccer leagues are telling male coaches not to touch players.
Child-welfare groups say these are necessary precautions, given that most predators are male. But fathers’ rights activists and educators now argue that an inflated predator panic is damaging men’s relationships with kids. Some men are opting not to get involved with children at all, which partly explains why many youth groups can’t find male leaders, and why just 9% of elementary-school teachers are male, down from 18% in 1981.
People assume that all men “have the potential for violence and sexual aggressiveness,” says Peter Stearns, a George Mason University professor who studies fear and anxiety. Kids end up viewing every male stranger “as a potential evildoer,” he says, and as a byproduct, “there’s an overconfidence in female virtues.” . . . One abused child is one too many. Still, it’s important to maintain perspective. “The number of men who will hurt a child is tiny compared to the population,” says Benjamin Radford, who researches statistics on predators and is managing editor of the science magazine Skeptical Inquirer. “Virtually all of the time, if a child is lost or in trouble, he will be safe going to the nearest male stranger.”
If you stereotyped on race the same way, you’d be regarded as a hopeless bigot. More here.
HEH: “Warner: Show Qaeda U.S. Commitment Not Open-Ended.”
ANDREW BREITBART TALKS TO PAT DOLLARD ABOUT embedding with the troops in Iraq, and talks to a caller about the relationship between radical Islam and radical Christianity.
STRATEGYPAGE: “But the most compelling bit of news on al Qaeda’s demise in Iraq is the changing composition of the hostiles there. At the beginning of the year, about 70 percent of terror attacks were by al Qaeda, and their Sunni Arab allies. Now, only about fifty percent of , a lower number of, those attacks are al Qaeda. The rest are Iranian supported Shia Arab groups, who are also trying to establish a religious dictatorship in Iraq (one run by Shias, not by Sunnis, as al Qaeda wants.) . . . Iran has backed Shia Arab militias even before the 2003 invasion. Iranian involvement goes back to the 1980s war with Iraq (and even earlier).”
OUR NEW PRIVILEGED CLASS:
So I guess once you’re elected to Congress, you’re immune from drunk driving laws; you can stash the evidence that you’ve committed a crime in your office, because investigators aren’t allowed to search it; if you kill someone because you’ve got a lead foot and blew a stop sign, the taxpayers will cover your financial liability; and, we learn today, you can commit whatever Internet-related crimes you please, because the police aren’t allowed to search your computer.
Meanwhile, the same Congress that has immunized itself from much of the law is also responsible for the ever-expanding federal criminal code, which we can thank for our shamefully enormous and still-soaring prison population, which is by far and away the largest in the world.
You have lawmakers who feel they’re above the law. And who at the same time are criminalizing anything and everything they find tacky, repugnant, or immoral.
No wonder they’re polling so badly. But what are we going to do about it?
A PREVIEW
BRIAN MAY completes his doctorate. Congratulations! More here.
AARON HANSCOM: Confessions of a perpetual adolescent.
AND HE SAID IT, NOT ELIZABETH: “Sen. John Edwards, in a campaign theme speech about the culture of Washington, became the first Democrat to refer to the correlation between major Democratic fundraisers circa 1995 and their subsequent overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.”
It’s the people vs. the powerful.
DAVID CODREA wonders why the tracing reports don’t show all those “assault weapons” allegedly used in crime. More interesting trace data here.
DON SURBER: “I am amused by how often the Brits get the obvious things about America that we Americans cannot see.”
VIRGINIA POSTREL on Science glamor and DNA style.
BERKE BREATHED: CENSORED? “The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus’ host paper The Washington Post. The strips may be viewed in a large format on their respective dates at Salon.com.”
MY BROTHER’S BOOK is now out in China.
ILYA SOMIN WRITES ON Systematic shortcomings of broad Executive power in times of crisis.
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF Middle Eastern civilization. “They are ‘unknowingly making themselves look like homosexuals.’”
And this is pretty funny.
MICHAEL TOTTEN LOOKS AT the worst terror attack since 9/11.
MICHAEL MOYNIHAN LOOKS AT Hugo Chavez and his enablers.
TRUE CONFESSIONS.
VLADIMIR PUTIN: “He is now actively courting the Russian Gay Vote. Bless.”
THOMPSON’S CAMPAIGN: Looking shaky? They’ve had a rough summer; it’ll be interesting to see how they do over the next month or so.
