In no particular order, because that would be even more pointless and stupid than this list.

Songs for Swingin' Lovers

Frank Sinatra's 1956 masterpiece is arguably the first concept album, and still one of the finest. Previously, albums were collections of singles related only by the artist singing them. Sinatra wanted to make an album which would carry a single mood with a single sound all the way through. Well: Mission accomplished. Frank's vocals are upbeat without being saccharine, and romantic without being coy. But without Nelson Riddle, the whole project might have been doomed. Riddle sticks with a tried-and-true big band – but his arrangements are wittier, more charming, and far more urbane than any previous big band had dared to attempt. Sinatra, growing comfortably into middle age, starts the album belting out "You make me feel so young…" without fanfare or introduction. Then Riddle's band kicks in, and wonderful things happen.

The Nightfly

Released in 1982 onto an unsuspecting public, Donald Fagen's first solo effort was good. So good, that it prompted one critic to wonder what Fagen's old bandmate, Walter Becker, had ever contributed to their Steely Dan partnership. In Fagen's own words, the songs "represent certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties." Not everyone may enjoy Fagen's overly-polished musical stylings, but his lyrics powerfully evoke the Cuban Missile Crisis-era fears and fantasies of a teenage boy. The intro to "New Frontier" says it all:

Yes we're gonna have a wingding
A summer smoker underground
It's just a dugout that my dad built
In case the reds decide to push the button down

I wasn't born until the summer after the Summer of Love, but Fagen's album can somehow still take me back to 1962.

Magnolia

Technically, "Magnolia" is a soundtrack album and shouldn't be eligible for this list. On the other hand, filmmaker PT Anderson wrote the movie to fit Aimee Mann's songs – not the other way around, as is usually case for movie soundtracks. The musical result, however derived, is a Robert Altman-esque collection of dysfunctional, semisynchronistically connected SoCal characters, all in desperate search of love or healing or something they're unlikely to ever find. The music is sparse without feeling bare-bones, and a couple tracks feature some killer licks from guitarist/singer/songwriter Michael Penn. The first track is a cover of Three Dog Night's "One" which puts the original to shame. The last track, "Save Me," ("You look like/a perfect fit/for a girl in need/of a tourniquet") is itself enough to make "Magnolia" either the last great concept album of the '90s, or the first one of the Naughts.

I'm Breathless

Songs "from and inspired by" Warren Beatty's underrated Dick Tracy movie. You like showtunes? Madonna gives you showtunes. You like clever (but never pretentious) Steven Sondheim lyrics? He wrote almost the entire book. In whole, this so-wrong-it-should-have-been-a-disaster record takes you gleefully back to an Art Deco comic book world that never really existed. A particular joy is the Latin-themed "I'm Going Bananas." When always-all-too-serious Madonna can pull off singing…

I'm non compos mentis
And I feel like a tooth being drilled
A nerve being killed
By a dentist
For I'm non compos mentis.

…with all the goofy charm and verve of a modern-day Carmen Miranda, then you know you're listening to something special. The last song, a full-on dance "mix" with some really bad Beatty vocals, might leave a sour taste at the end. But with that one aside, this is an undervalued album inspired by an underappreciated movie.

The Wall

Pink Floyd's 1979 magnum opus needs no introduction. If you're like me, however, and you define rock'n'roll by loudness and youthful defiance, then this two-disc collection is the loudest, most unrelenting rejection of adulthood ever recorded. Other than that, there's nothing left to say. Either you agree with my last pick, and you've been nodding your head ever since reading "The Wall" in boldface up above, or you're too old and too deaf to care. Either way, that was the Floyd's point.

The new issue of Parameters is up, and I suggest you read the whole thing cover to cover. (If you don't know, it's the official quarterly publication of the US Army War College, and it specializes in serious deep-think stuff.) The summer edition has three articles of real interest.

The first is a discussion-generating piece on the Bush Doctrine by Harry S. Laver. Although a thorough reading of his artical reveals that he's mostly critical of preventitive war, he raises some good arguments. The most important, however, is this:

Leaving behind the definitions and semantics of international law raises the practical issue of applying a strategy of prevention in a world of WMD, terrorists, and the possible mixing of the two. Professor Jason Ellis, offering one perspective, maintains that preventive action should be part of a broader strategy of counterproliferation. Past efforts at nonproliferation of WMD, including ballistic missiles, he argues, have failed, and the Bush Administration has adopted a proactive response to the “proliferation-terrorism nexus.” By acting “offensively today to preclude the development and delivery of graver threats down the line,” the Administration has the best chance of stopping or mitigating the effects of the WMD proliferation that has already occurred. The challenge will be “translating this strategic guidance into credible operational capabilities and plans.”

Amen. Our Cold War containment policy wasn't easily arrived at, and went through several permutations - some good, some bad - through 40-plus years. We're still in the early stages of this new war - and we'll need time for a good policy to cohere. (NOTE: When I say "early stages," I mean that this Terror War is likely to last as long, if not longer, than the Cold War. If the Cold War began in 1948 and the Terror War began in 2001, then today we're only up to the equivalent of 1951. By that measure, we're doing much better at this early stage than we were doing back then.)

The second recommended piece is more of a chest-thumping excercize, but still worth your time. Check out Michael H. Hoffman's thoughts on how to deal with illegal combatants in a legal war:

The long-term import of recent trends can’t be overstated. The United States is surely—and not so slowly—bestowing legal status and privileges on members of terrorist organizations that have no precedent in the 3,500-year recorded history of warfare. Terrorists are acquiring legal recognition and support of a kind unavailable to members of US and other national armed forces, and for that matter unavailable to insurgents during civil conflict as well. (There are early intimations that the United States may end up unilaterally bestowing similar status and privileges on the members of opposing state forces as well as terrorist organizations.) The notion that opposing forces will ever make these unique legal privileges reciprocally available to the US armed forces simply doesn’t warrant serious consideration.

This troublesome trend stems from uncertainty over how the law of war should be applied to meet terrorist threats. Though terrorism presents unfamiliar legal issues, these aren’t quite as novel as they seem, and we could devise a more pragmatic approach. There is a way forward, but time is working against the establishment of an effective, national-security-focused wartime strategy for counterterrorist action.

Hoffman's critique isn't just timely - it ought to be required reading for Washington policy-makers and their critics.

And finally, William M. Darley looks at the role of the press in maintaining public support for war policy.

None of these is light reading, so I linked to the PDF versions. Print them out and read them over the weekend.

The computer is back up and running - and so am I.

After 3-plus years, hardware just started failing. It all started when I did a forced (CTRL-F5) reload of a web page, and the system rebooted itself. Except it never rebooted. Just kept hanging. It's an old Gateway box, never once upgraded. So what did I expect?

Catching up on the news now - back in a flash.

Well, now. Isn't this interesting:

Who's funding the insurgents in Iraq? The list of suspects is long: ex-Baathists, foreign jihadists, and angry Sunnis, to name a few. Now add to that roster hard-core Euroleftists.

Turns out that far-left groups in western Europe are carrying on a campaign dubbed Ten Euros for the Resistance, offering aid and comfort to the car bombers, kidnappers, and snipers trying to destabilize the fledgling Iraq government. In the words of one Italian website, Iraq Libero (Free Iraq), the funds are meant for those fighting the occupanti imperialisti. The groups are an odd collection, made up largely of Marxists and Maoists, sprinkled with an array of Arab emigres and aging, old-school fascists, according to Lorenzo Vidino, an analyst on European terrorism based at The Investigative Project in Washington, D.C. "It's the old anticapitalist, anti-U.S., anti-Israel crowd," says Vidino, who has been to their gatherings, where he saw activists from Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Italy. "The glue that binds them together is anti-Americanism." The groups are working on an October conference to further support "the Iraqi Resistance." A key goal is to expand backing for the insurgents from the fringe left to the broader antiwar and antiglobalization movements.

Eugene Volokh and the Blogfaddah are on Hugh Hewitt's radio show right now. They're talking about the SCOTUS eminent domain decision, natch.

UPDATE: Over now.

A horrible, horrible Supreme Court ruling today on eminent domain powers. By a 5-4 vote, SCOTUS allowed localities to take private property away for no better reason than added tax collections:

A divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that local governments may seize people's homes and businesses against their will for private development in a decision anxiously awaited in communities where economic growth often is at war with individual property rights.

The 5-4 ruling represented a defeat for some Connecticut residents whose homes are slated for destruction to make room for an office complex. They argued that cities have no right to take their land except for projects with a clear public use, such as roads or schools, or to revitalize blighted areas.

As a result, cities now have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes in order to generate tax revenue.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who has been a key swing vote on many cases before the court, issued a stinging dissent. She argued that cities should not have unlimited authority to uproot families, even if they are provided compensation, simply to accommodate wealthy developers.

This is a dreadful decision. If politicians have the right to take your private property and give it to somebody else just because the other guy claims that he can generate more taxes from it, then property rights have ceased to exist in the US.

The localities are still required to pay "a just price" when one of these takings occurs, but the price even a willing seller would be able to get from his property just took a huge hit. All a developer has to do now is make a lowball offer and threaten to involve a bought-and-paid-for politician to take the property away if the owner doesn't acquiesce.

Disgraceful.

UPDATE: Imagine this. What if you were in an unrelated fight with your local city council over something. Maybe you had a problem with your kids' school, or a tax dispute, or you were complaining about a dumb law, or you just spilled a drink on some councilman at the local bar. This ruling would literally give them the power to throw you out of your house and put up a strip mall in its place. And that doesn't even touch on the prospects of developers making campaign donations--or outright kickbacks--to local politicians.

This ruling is a license for corruption and abuse.

Forget about Darth Vader--here's a real Dark Lord. The Hubble space telescope has located Sauron.

Here's a larger picture.

Dickie Durbin just shuffled down to the Senate floor and made a pretty abject apology for the mindless blather he belched out last week. I doubt Durbin is any more sincere today than he was thoughful before. The political heat simply got too high, so he backed down.

The forced apology doesn't mean much. The damage is done, and al-Jazeera isn't likely to tout Dickie's retraction with much vigor. But I can guarantee you that Dickie's energetic defenders in the MSM and leftie blogosphere are awfully unhappy unhappy right now. He just cut them off at the knees.

At least now they have some idea of how the troops felt a week ago.

The "Broadcast Flag," which would have allowed Hollywood to decide how, when, and whether you could record television shows, was thrown out by the DC Court of Appeals last month. According to the Electronic Freedom Foundation, MPAA lobbyists have convinced some as-yet unidentified senator or senators into sneaking new Broadcast Flag-enabling legislation into a giant appropriations bill. Somebody needs to remind Bill Frist that these guys are not on his side.

Bad Hollywood. Bad senators. Everybody involved should be forced to watch 72 hours of uninterrupted '70's TV show remake movies, "Clockwork Orange" style.

UPDATE: Either the EFF got some bad information, or they scared the senatecritters off. Either way, broadcast flag language apparently did not make it into the Senate appropriations bill.

Had lunch on Friday with Ashley Kindergan, a young reporter for Colorado Springs' own Gazette. It's a pretty damn good paper, with a libertarian-leaning editorial page – or at least it leaned that way six years ago, the last time I subscribed. Anyway, Ashley was assigned a story on local bloggers, which led to a really fun 90-minute sitdown with yours truly.

There was no drinking involved. We were on Ashley's dime, and she's a young reporter in a smallish city. I didn't know if her pockets are as deep as my liver, and it wouldn't have been gentlemanly to find out.

Naturally, Iraq was one of the topics we discussed. Poor thing. She asked one little question – and I went off on an iced-tea fueled rant. I didn't mean to rant, but this one has been a long time coming. Ashley just happened to be in the way when the pressure valve finally let loose. The subject was exit dates.

Last week, there was some hubbub in Congress demanding President Bush announce a firm date for pulling out of Iraq. Announcing an exit date would be dumber than using a taffy puller to epilate your scrotum.

Granted, an exit date would have one positive effect: There would be an immediate and sustained reduction in terror attacks. Right up until the day we left. Let me explain.

Wars aren't won by killing every single bad guy. Even at the end of World War Two, there were still plenty of Nazis around. Rather, wars are generally won in one of two ways:

1. By completely eliminating the enemy's ability to resist.

2. By convincing the enemy that he's beaten.

For brevity's sake, we'll call these two routes "Means" and "Will." In the first option, the enemy's means of fighting are taken away from him. In the second, it's his will to fight that you take away.

For reasons discussed during another war two years ago, the first option just ain't gonna happen in Iraq. Could we make it so that Iraq's "insurgents" lost their Means? Well, yes. But doing so would entail the kind of destruction we haven't seen since WWII – and in a circle of nations around Iraq, not merely in Iraq itself. While the outcome would be desirable, the method (probably nuclear) would haunt us for years to come. So right now, let's take Means off the table.

All we're left with is the Will – making sure the enemy loses his will to fight us.

I'm not certain how you take the Will away from people who take their inspiration from God – but I'm pretty sure that, eventually, killing enough of them in large enough numbers would do the trick. Do we have enough soldiers on the ground to do the job? Do we, as a people, have the political will? Will the Iraqi forces evolve quickly enough to help us in this vital task? Can all this be done without completely alienating the Iraqi people?

I don't have the answers to those questions. Neither do you. History will decide. The best we can do is maintain our will, and keep the pressure on our leadership to do what must be done. And in the meantime, we should all support the hell our of our troops – which means we should, at the very least, refrain from accusing them of Nazi atrocities.

But here's what I do know.

It's for damn sure you won't sap the enemies will by telling him exactly how long to keep his head down. If we announce an exit date of six months or a year from now – or even in five years or a century – then we'll already have lost. An exit date is a signal of retreat. An exit date says, "We've given up. Just keep quiet until we're gone, and then the place will be all yours."

The best case we could hope for would be a new Iraqi strongman to keep a lid on the place – Saddam Lite, if you will. The worst case: A Baathist/Qaeda condominium – the Taliban with Soviet-scale repression and petrodollars.

For our sake and Iraq's, we have to be in this for the long haul. Announcing an exit date would tell our enemies we were never really in it to begin with.

Newsweek's Robert Samuelson says that "many assumptions that economists once casually accepted and taught are now suspect or discredited."

Need examples? He has three:

We once thought we understood consumer spending, the economy's mainstay.

And:

We don't know how much the world economy affects the United States—and vice versa.

Finally:

We can't determine 'full employment.'

Read the whole thing, especially his conclusion.

George Will on Emmett L. Till -- the last line will have you wiping your eyes.

A confession: I'm having a hard time getting worked up over Dick Durbin.

Yes, what he said was indefensible and stupid, but Durbin's never been anything but a party machine hack, and few senators on either side of the aisle are often described as "intelligent." Yes, the statement itself is destructive nonsense destined to be endlessly recycled in propaganda from the al-Jazeeras and New York Timeses of the world, and one would hope that a high-ranking US senator would know better, but then again, this is Dickie Durbin we're talking about. It's not really that surprising when you consider the source.

Durbin's Nazi-Soviet-Khmer-Rouge ramble was probably only tossed out as a bit of red meat (or perhaps deep-fried Vegan tofu) for the MooreOn donations crowd. I've no doubt that he and the DSCC have been raking in leftie money over the last couple of days. They'll need it--since what Durbin's dumb rant really accomplished was demonstrating to everybody else just how unserious the Democratic Party is when it comes to dealing with terrorism.

Equating anything and everything thus far reported from Guantanamo with "torture" is nonsense on stilts. Air conditioning changes, intimidation, sleep deprivation and having your personal space invaded by a woman? Hell, I put up with worse stuff that that at summer camp. What will they threaten these thugs with next, the comfy chair?

To borrow a few lines from Lileks,

I don’t want them to beat the hell out of these people until they spit names and teeth, in no particular order. But I don’t care if they make them stay awake most of the day for a month or two. I really don’t. I’m sorry. We’re talking about people who will not be satisfied until Israel is gone and the United States crippled. I’d like to know what they know, and if they wet themselves in the process, I do not regard this is as the equivalent of uprooting several million people to Alaska to build a canal dressed only in long johns.

Quite so. I suspect that's pretty close to the general opinion of everybody outside of the raving moonbat left and the MSM (my apologies for being redundant).

Durbin and company aren't worked up over "torture," or even terrorism. They're just worked up over hating George Bush. So let them rant. All they're doing so far is revealing their own uselessness. They'll be rewarded for it again and again, every other November.

UPDATE: Writing in the comments, Mike Rentner reminds us (and Dickie) that there's a lot more at stake here besides domestic politics:

You may think it's all just political posturing, but I'm over here in Al Anbar Province, Iraq and every stupid statement like this from such a high level of our government is a direct threat to my life. Statements like this are used to recruit people to kill me. I take it very personally.

And rightly so.

Check this out:

THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has criticised the new web-based media for “paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry”. He described the atmosphere on the world wide web as a free-for-all that was “close to that of unpoliced conversation”.

"Unpoliced conversation." Can you in your wildest dreams imagine such a thing? Talking, actually talking with another human being or two, without some legal or moral authority present to keep things, ah, kosher?

Markos "Screw'em" Zunigas finds no difference between Saddam's reign and Gitmo:

The torture that was so bad under Saddam, is equally bad under U.S. command.

Rusty Shackleford reminds us there is a huge difference, but I warm you - the pictures are graphic.

How much trouble is the magazine business in, anyway?

I'd gotten so frustrated with Newsweek's practices and editorial slant (tiny Kuwait was "worth saving" in 1991; Iraq wasn't deemed worthy in 2003) that I let my subscription slide. Notice after notice arrived in the mail, each one promising me a cheaper re-up price. Each one ended up in the garbage. My subscription ended two or three weeks ago, but the magazines keep coming every Tuesday.

Last year I got a postcard from Playboy, promising me a year-long "professional courtesy" subscription. All I had to do for a free year of Playboy was to not mail the card back to them with the "no" sticker attached. I missed the Party Jokes, so why not?

A few months later, Stuff magazine started arriving each month – no explanation given. If you don't know, Stuff is a lot like Maxim, only dumbed down. Yes, that's possible, although I'd have never believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

Magazines base their ad rates on how many eyes they can promise to deliver. Issues on newsstands barely count – there's no promise anyone will ever buy them. What counts is, how many people get each issue mailed to them. 100,000 paid subscribers are worth a lot more than 1,000,000 issues delivered to Barnes & Noble.

But it would now appear that even unpaid subscribers are considered too valuable to lose.

We've seen the same thing going on in the newspaper business, with last year's revelation that certain papers were artificially inflating their sales statistics. In other words, lying.

I'm getting magazines I no longer want – or in the case of Stuff, never wanted. Usually, I just throw them out. Newsweek isn't just losing the 30 or 40 bucks I used to pay them each year, they've also lost a pair of ad-viewing eyes. And yet to their advertisers, they can still claim me as a subscriber.

Something similar is going on in my front yard. I took The Rocky Mountain News for a year, to help out a college-bound kid who needed the money. He told me he'd get his commission, even if I called the paper to cancel. I did. Last summer. Despite several phone calls, the paper still arrives on my lawn each morning. If I've ever read anything in that paper, it was only very briefly as I used it to start a fire.

But something tells me my fake subscription still counts when The Rocky Mountain News reports to their advertisers.

That's dishonest. It's also an indication of just how desperate the MSM has become to keep their ad revenues.

Of course you don't understand the EU Constitution -- it was written by your betters.

There's a recent movie I really enjoyed. I've already seen it twice, and I'll see it at least two more times before it leaves the theaters. At least one of the next two viewings, I'll gladly pony up an extra buck or two for the treat of seeing it on a digital screen up in Denver. When the DVD comes out next fall, I'll snap up a copy the day it's released.

That said, right at this moment I'm also downloading the movie courtesy of BitTorrent.

The copy I'm getting is illegal, and so is my download of it.

That said, my illegal download won't cost the producers, the studio, the theaters, or anyone any money at all. Four times is as many as I'd see it without having it on my hard drive. And I'll still, as I said, buy the DVD. I want those special features. I want to see that five gigabyte 480p picture on my HDTV in Dolby 6.1 Digital -- and no AVI or MPEG file compressed down to 1.4 gigs can give me that.

So, yes, I'm breaking the law. But what harm am I causing? Everyone will get their money from me - all I get is a chance to re-watch a few favorite scenes (rendered in crappy quality) at my leisure.

What I'm doing is illegal. But I'm not sure that it's wrong.

Here's a site devoted to rebuilding the WTC, as-was.

Mary Hart, who contacted me with info about her site, also says she's "discovered that the corruption involved in the planning of the "Freedom Center" has also extended throughout the entire WTC rebuilding process."

Sadly, that comes as no great shock. But you can click on the link above and get some information to do something about it.

Good news on the civil liberties front? Maybe:

WASHINGTON -- In a slap at President Bush, lawmakers voted Wednesday to block the Justice Department and the FBI from using the Patriot Act to peek at library records and bookstore sales slips.

The House voted 238-187 despite a veto threat from Bush to block the part of the anti-terrorism law that allows the government to investigate the reading habits of terror suspects.

Bush made it through his entire first term - and some record-setting pork barrel spending - without once picking up his veto pen. I doubt he'll use it now for such a petty cause.

Busy day, lots of work, no time to blog, yadda yadda yadda. Unwound this evening with "The Machinist" after the work was done.

What an awful way to unwind. What an amazing movie.

It's packaged like a horror movie. It's shot like a horror movie. It is, I suppose, a horror movie. But then you reach the end and realize it really quite isn't.

Christian Bale lost 60 pounds for the role of Trevor Reznik, a factory worker who hasn't slept in a year. I'm a Bale fan, and have been for years – even enjoyed him in "Equilibrium," which might be the silliest concept ever played out so seriously. But Bale made it work, even the totally unbelievable "gunkata" fights. In "The Machinist," we don't get those movie star good looks. We get a skeleton of a man speaking with Bale's voice. Unsettling, to say the least.

I won't try to describe the plot. You'll just have to figure that a guy who works around heavy machinery and hasn't slept for twelve months, isn't going to keep his sanity.

As entertainment, it does what it aims to do: Creeps you out for ninety minutes, and lets you enjoy some (typically) fine performances from Bale, Michael Ironside, and (schwing!) Jennifer Jason Leigh. As a movie with a message, that's where "The Machinist" really shines. I won't even hint at the ending, except to say that it's powerful, positive, and not at all what you'd expect.

Let me emphasize that middle point again. Despite the creepiness, despite Bale's hollowed-out self (physically and spiritually), and despite the gloomy color scheme, this is a movie with a positive message. In fact, if my kid inherits his/her old man's penchant for horror movies, I'll encourage them to watch it years before the R rating would suggest. There's nothing quite like sneaking a lesson in past a little gore and a couple of nipples.

See it if you haven't already.

UPDATE: Just a quick word about those aforementioned nipples. Even at the age of 43, Jennifer Jason Lee still has the finest B-cups in all of Hollywood. This I say as I dedicated leg man.

Finally, there's a ceiling fan in the master bedroom. With the vaulted ceiling, the fan is on a two-foot drop down. Kinda striking. Also, I had no idea how far these things had come since the last time I put one in. No clue at all.

First off, there's a remote. An RF remote, not IR, so you don't have to worry about pointing it right at the fan for it to work. And a good thing too, because the remote has a built-in thermostat. Want the room at 72? Just tell the remote, and it will keep the blades going until just the right temp.

Don't want the fan to run at all during the day? Set the timer, which, yes, works in conjunction with the thermostat. The remote even controls the lighting. Very cool.

It's not quite warm enough to turn on the A/C, but it's nearly warm enough to make me grab the laptop and blog from bed. That could get to be a habit. . .

Tomorrow, one more fan, some recessed lighting, and -- who knows? -- I might even find some time to blog.

UPDATE: Don't bother clicking on the link to the fan we installed. Home Depot's links are created on-the-spot from session cookies. That's right - you can't permalink to the products they're selling. Amazon, they ain't.

Smart, neither.

Great WaPo column today from Robert Samuelson. Some highlights:

With high unemployment benefits, almost half of Western Europe's jobless have been out of work a year or more; the U.S. figure is about 12 percent. Or take early retirement. In 2003 about 60 percent of Americans ages 55 to 64 had jobs. The comparable figures for France, Italy and Germany were 37 percent, 30 percent and 39 percent. The truth is that Europeans like early retirement, high jobless benefits and long vacations.

The trouble is that so much benevolence requires a strong economy, while the sources of all this benevolence -- high taxes, stiff regulations -- weaken the economy. With aging populations, the contradictions will only thicken.

...

A weak European economy is one reason that the world economy is shaky and so dependent on American growth. Preoccupied with divisions at home, Europe is history's has-been. It isn't a strong American ally, not simply because it disagrees with some U.S. policies but also because it doesn't want to make the commitments required of a strong ally. Unwilling to address their genuine problems, Europeans become more reflexively critical of America. This gives the impression that they're active on the world stage, even as they're quietly acquiescing in their own decline.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Wow. Even better Anne Applebaum piece on the expensive idiocy known as the Transportation Security Administration:

If you happen to be reading this while standing in one of those disturbingly slow, zigzag lines at airport security -- looking repeatedly at your watch, wondering if this time you really will miss the plane -- here's something to make you feel worse: Almost none of the agony you are experiencing is making you safer, at least not to any statistically significant or economically rational degree. Certainly any logical analysis of the money that has been spent on the airport security system since Sept. 11, 2001, and the security that the system has created, must lead to that conclusion.

...

[T]his mass ceremonial sacrifice of toenail clippers on the altar of security comes at an extraordinarily high price. The annual budget of the federal Transportation Security Administration hovers around $5.5 billion -- just about the same price as the entire FBI -- a figure that doesn't include the cost of wasted time. De Rugy reckons that if 624 million passengers each spend two hours every year waiting in line, the annual loss to the economy comes to $32 billion. There has also been a price to pay in waste, since when that much money is rubbed into a problem with that kind of speed -- remember, the TSA had only 13 employees in January 2002 -- a lot of it gets misspent. In the case of the TSA, that waste includes $350,000 for a gym, $500,000 for artwork and silk plants at the agency's new operations center, and $461,000 for its first-birthday party. More to the point, the agency has spent millions, even billions, on technology that is inappropriate or outdated.

In fact, better security didn't have to cost that much. Probably the most significant measure taken in the past four years was one funded not by the government but by the airline industry, which put bulletproof doors on its cockpits at the relatively low price of $300 million to $500 million over 10 years. In extremely blunt terms, that means that while it may still be possible to blow up a plane (and murder 150 people), it is now virtually impossible to drive a plane into an office building (and murder thousands). By even the crudest cost-benefit risk analysis, bulletproof cockpit doors, which nobody notices, have the potential to save far more lives, at a far lower cost per life, than the screeners who open your child's backpack and your grandmother's purse while you stand around in your socks waiting for them to finish.

But, then, this isn't a country that has ever been good at risk analysis. If it were, we would never have invented the TSA at all. Instead, we would have taken that $5.5 billion, doubled the FBI's budget, and set up a questioning system that identifies potentially suspicious passengers, as the Israelis do. Even now, it's not too late to abolish the TSA, create a federal training program for airport screeners, and then let private companies worry about how many people to hire, which technology to buy and how long the tables in front of the X-ray machines should be (that last issue being featured in a recent government report). But every time that suggestion is made in Congress, someone denounces the plan as a "privatization" of our security and a sellout.

As I've said many times before, even if there were no security checks at airports, there will never be another successful hijacking of an airliner with Americans aboard. The 2001 attacks were successful only because the hijackers took advantage of three decades of government-encouraged social conditioning: "Don't resist. Do as you're told. Wait it out, let the professionals negotiate, and chances are you'll be all right."

Nobody is going to follow that advice, ever again. While I'm not in favor of eliminating airport security checks entirely, we've clearly gone way over the line of reason (to say nothing of cost benefit, as Applebaum cogently points out) in today's mindless bureaucratic airport "security" mania.

It's a shame there aren't any politicians of either party with the nerve to say the very obvious things that Applebaum so aptly summarizes here. Read it all.

Some stuff to read while I work on other things:

Christopher Hitchens on Iraq.

Max Boot on Koran abuse.

And finally, Mark Steyn.

One other thing. Louis Wu emailed yesterday to say, "The solution to the problem of the desecrated Qurans? Take them away."

Heh.

Busy with home improvement stuff today. Couple of ceiling fans to buy and install, painting to do, and the new lighting for the living room.

Busy day? Busy week.

From Saturday night, John Fogerty, who can still hit every single note in the old Creedence songs:

... and Tom Petty, who unfortunately played a half hour less than the set was billed at. Still, great performance from TP and the Heartbreakers, even though it rained pretty much the whole time:

Tonight it's a bunch of acts that fall under "I'd wouldn't mind seeing them, but I'd never buy a ticket for any of them by themselves," so we're waiting the weather out a bit before deciding whether to go or not.

The Blogfaddah says he's headed for the beach. For his sake, I sure hope he didn't mean Destin or Panama City.

In other news, the wife and I have tickets for Music Midtown in Atlanta this weekend. I'm packing the scuba gear just as soon as this gets posted...

UPDATE: From last night, Francine Reed...

... and Lou Reed (no relation):

Look, it's a cell phone. It's really not that much of a camera...

Well, surprise, surprise, surprise.

Let's review, shall we?

The self-appointed "watchdog of the press in all its forms" hires, at least a year ago, the long-time director of a radical left-wing magazine to run its operations. Said watchdog doesn't announce this hiring, or disclose the presence of the hard-left publisher until he's outed by a blogger (or "drooling moron," in CJR's preferred parlance) at the end of last month.

CJR continued to stonewall on admitting to the hiring in its own pages for ten days, and gave no reason to believe that it would have revealed the presence of former Nation publisher Victor Navasky at the top of its organization if a blogger hadn't sniffed him out.

But hey, this was all just a bureaucratic misunderstanding. Those fine folks at CJR are just award-winning, selfless, apolitical, not a bit slanted or biased guardians of the public trust.

They're certainly not dishonest, guildist and transparently political hacks. Only a drooling moron would think such things.

UPDATE: Nah, I'm sure this has nothing at all to do with any mythical media bias. After all, our old pal Steve Lovelady assures us that "an overworked and elderly anchor who overstayed his welcome at a dying medium, and who got suckered by an overzealous producer" was never a meaningful story to begin with.

Nope, no bias there. Just professional, serious "journalists" who work for Soviet-nostalgist moonbats.

What will Howard Dean say next? The crack young staff at The Hatemonger's Quarterly know.

Big things afoot at NASA:

A massive reorganization has begun at NASA. NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has begun the process by sending out formal notices to more than 50 senior NASA managers aprising them of pending changes in their job titles.

One person has already resigned. Associate Administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, Adm. Craig Steidle, tendered his resignation today effective 24 June 2005.

Changes will occur across all of the agency's activities - except human space flight - those changes come later after both the STS-114 and STS-121 missions have been completed.

Waaaay past due, if you ask me.

(Hat tip: Gen-you-wine rocket scientist Ed Lambert.)

Just a quick update on the Mac-Intel story. First, Jeff Harrell crawfishes (okay, just a little) regarding OS X running on stock Intel hardware. Second, Bob Cringley (real name Mark Stephens, once one of Apple's original employees and now a tech writer/reporter) thinks this is all part of a grand plan for Intel to shove Microsoft aside in favor of Apple. Here's the kicker section:

Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that drives what Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when they did have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere.

So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the market. The OEMs would love to be able to offer a higher margin product with better reliability than Microsoft. Intel/Apple enters the market just as Microsoft announces yet another delay in their next generation OS. By the way, the new Apple OS for the Intel Architecture has a compatibility mode with Windows (I'm just guessing on this one).

This scenario works well for everyone except Microsoft. If Intel was able to own the Mac OS and make it available to all the OEMs, it could break the back of Microsoft.

You've got to be kidding me:

WASHINGTON, June 9 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Journalists who risked jail in the United States-and their lives and livelihoods in Ukraine-were among the top recipients of this year's 32nd annual National Press Club journalism awards.

The 32 winners were selected from an outstanding collection of entries in categories ranging from freedom of the press to environmental reporting to humor writing.

"The National Press Club honors the superb work of some of the best journalists in the world," said National Press Club President Rick Dunham. "The judges were impressed with work that was insightful and compelling on subjects ranging from the power of Washington lobbyists to the failures of assisted living caregivers."

[snipped bits]

-- National Press Club Online Journalism Award, distinguished online contribution: Diana K. Sugg, The Baltimore Sun; Honorable Mention, Steve Lovelady & Staff, CampaignDesk.org; Harriet Ryan & Staff, CourtTV.com. [emphasis added]

What were they thinking?

This is the most sensible way to reveal terrorists - ever.

(Hat tip: Tom McMahon.)

Well, my past, anyway.

You know you're getting older when your classmates are being appointed to Supreme Courts:

Gov. Sonny Perdue named his top legal adviser to the state Supreme Court in the first appointment by a Republican governor to Georgia's highest court in 137 years.

Harold D. Melton, 38, becomes the third African-American on the seven-member court. He will fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Chief Justice Norman Fletcher at the end of the month.

...

State House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram) applauded the appointment. "He exemplifies the kind of common sense, conservative values that reflect the core beliefs of Georgians," the speaker said.

The appointment is expected to have a lasting impact on the court. No Georgia justice has ever lost a re-election bid. Justices serve six-year terms, but the term Melton will fill expires at the end of 2008, when he can stand for election to a full term.

Harold David Melton was born in Washington in 1966 when his father worked as an airport inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration. His parents moved to East Point when he was 5 and later moved to Marietta, where he attended Wheeler High School. Melton was the first black student body president at Auburn University. He now lives in Atlanta.

I didn't know Harold all that well (Auburn is a big school), but I can safely say that he was one of the most widely-liked and respected students of his (our) day. I had no idea that he'd moved so far up in the world, but I'm certainly not surprised. Congratulations to him.

Here's an anonymous login for the Atlanta paper, if needed.

In light of the recent calls from opportunists, idiots and appeasers leftie luminaries like Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter, and Thomas Friedman for the US to close the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison camp and turn the inmates loose, I have a modest suggestion for the Bush Administration: turn loose some facts about the bad guys instead.

There's very little public information out there about the "detainees," and as a result, it's easy for anti-American outfits like Amnesty and the New York Times to project an aura of wronged innocence around the bloodthirsty thugs who're currently unwilling guests of Uncle Sam. I can't think of a better way to (a) illustrate the need for keeping these guys locked up and (b) discrediting the Jimmy Carter squishes of the world than releasing dossiers on the known activities of the Islamofascists who're under lock and key down there.

Once people get a chance to read about the actual history of Abdul al-Terrorist and how he was responsible for scheduling Talaban stonings of gays, or recruiting suicide bombers, or doing logistical planning for 9/11, I doubt very much a Biden would be able to convince them that old Abdul ought to be given a public defender like a common burglar, or even set loose.

Just a thought.

Check out this remarkable WSJ column by Fox News reporter David Asman, whose wife had a stroke shortly after they arrived in London for a vacation. Among other things, it's an account of how health care works (and doesn't work) when it's "free" (and when it isn't).

Asman's story will also scare you to death imagining the same thing happening to one of your own loved ones, but read it anyway.

Oh, shit:

The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary "gateway" to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on "a journey through the history of freedom"--but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines. To the IFC's organizers, it is not only history's triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona.

It's worse than that. Debasing freedom on the site where freedom was attacked, is more akin to giving equal time to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the National Holocaust Museum. Why doesn't the IFC just go on and include a multimedia exhibit of the West's crimes against Islam?

Actually, it's worse even than that: It's treasonous.

Oh, I don't mean treason in the legal sense. The IFC exhibit provides neither aid nor comfort to the enemy. In any case, I don't use that word lightly here at VodkaPundit. A search through the archives finds just 11 posts using that word, in almost three and a half years - and never once used as an accusation. In that way, I'm a lot more ...sober... than certain Republican talking heads on TV.

But the IFC exhibit is treason to the memory of the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered for the crime of going to work on 9/11/2001. Whatever our nation's faults, whatever injustices have been committed in our names, no matter what someone might ever have suffered at our hands...

...those are not the stories to tell at the site where the World Trade Center towers once stood. At the site where 3,000 people were burned or crushed or leapt to their deaths. Not at the site where we suffered one of the worst surprise attacks in modern history, and against a civilian target.

We don't memorialize our war dead by including pictures of them picking their noses. We shouldn't remember our losses by blaming its victims - or even their great-great-grandfathers. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier isn't inscribed with, "What a Fuck-Up, Huh?"

But those are the things that the IFC's exhibit aims to do.

It must be stopped.

It must. be. stopped.

Austin Bay, on human trafficking.

We plugged in the back yard bug zapper on Saturday, and already it's buzzing and shaking like a meth fiend on a really dirty dose. Why all the fuss? Miller moths.

Here on the Front Range, we get jillions of the little guys every spring. My first year here – way back in 1994 – was an especially bad one. Opened up a kitchen cabinet to grab a coffee cup one morning, and a dozen moths flew out. Needless to say, I gave the mug a Howard Hughes-style cleaning before I poured anything in it.

Here's the deal. Each spring, the Millers migrate deep into the mountains from Kansas, and stop here for a little R&R along the way. Or maybe they're going from the mountains to Kansas, although Whomever knows there's no good reason to do that. Either way, I'm too lazy to look it up.

Our Primary Cat, Dingo, is in charge of eating any moths that make their way into the house, and it's a job he takes quite seriously. Too seriously. Not only does he scream at the ceiling where a moth is hanging out beyond his reach, he screams at the ceiling where a moth was spotted last week. Don't think that routine doesn't get old after a while – a very short while.

The infestation two years ago was almost as bad as The Great Miller Moth Movement of 1994. So many bugs got in the house (don't ask how – we have A/C and kept the windows closed) in 2002, that when the cat wasn't launching himself every whichway trying to catch one, he was screaming at the ones on the ceiling. So I over-thought the problem.

Instead of doing the sane thing and getting a bug zapper, I… well, this is almost too shameful to admit. Really, I thought too hard. Didn't think of the obvious, Home Depot solution. Didn't buy a bug zapper.

Oh, no.

See.. we have a torchier lamp in the living room. (Well, for another couple weeks, until Berwick Electric installs the ever-so-tasteful recessed lighting.) So I put a cutting board on the floor of the living room, then laid the torchier on its side, with the hot end on the cutting board. With all the other lights off, the moths were attracted to the horizontal torchier. Result: Moths within reach of moth-killing cat.

Of course, that was a total pain in the ass, and a cause for amusement for anyone coming to visit early in the day, before I got the lamp set back up straight.

The next year, shopping at Home Depot for some army ant anthrax, I saw the bug zappers for sale, then slapped my forehead and got out my checkbook.

OK, actually, I got out my check card. Anyone writing checks in line at high-volume stores really ought to get zapped, themselves. Or at the very least, mauled by screaming cats.

NOTE: Why such a useless post? As an antidote to this thing, which still has me pissed to tears.

Lileks:

We drove home with the windows down and the music blasting: a “Princess and the Pauper” song for her, “Time is Tight” afterwards. How come we have to listen to your song?

Because it is sheer perfection, honey. It’s not just the drums, although they’re perfect; it’s not just the spare guitar line played with an unerringly sublime ration of both chunk and funk, and it’s not the organ. It is all these things together as Booker T meant them to be.

Someday soon, I'll be teaching my kid about Booker T., too.

I'm not a Macintosh guy, but I've always been sympathetic to the Cause. So I hope John Dvorak is right about Apple's position:

In the short term, the problem for Apple is not to kill its sales during the transitional market. In other words, what happens to the left-over PowerPC machines? The company got through this once before when it switched from the 68000 to the PowerPC. It did it with add-on cards, specifically the Power Macintosh Upgrade card. So I expect a similar product this time. Still, this process is going to be bumpy, but with iPod and iTunes mania propping up the company, this is the exact right time to do this. The company can weather any storms in the process.

The iPod may, as Bill Gates thinks, turn out to be a flash in the pan - a big hit before microdrive-enabled cell phones become out portable mp3 players. But that won't happen for probably another couple years. Meanwhile, those fat profits ought to keep Apple afloat during the changeover period.

The big question is, could Mactel™ prove Apple's ultimate undoing? If the Macintosh/Intel machines become serious contenders, Microsoft could stop making Office for the Mac. And that would spell Certain Doom.

NOTE: Time for the Mucinex nap. Back later.

"Mucinex" comes from the Latin for "I coughed up that?"

Sunday's head cold spent maybe 24 hours in my head, then apparently lost its lease and had to move down to my chest. It's taken up a happy residence there.

Last year, when Melissa had this thing, it got so bad that I went to the pharmacy in a state of near-panic. Correction: Near-sleeplessness, with maybe a little panic thrown in that neither of us would ever sleep again. Her coughing got so bad that, even with her in the guest room across the hall, both of us were up all night.

I grabbed the pharmacist by the sleeve and told him, "I need the best expectorant/cough suppressant you can give me over the counter."

"You need Mucinex."

It's an ugly name, sure. It sounds like some piece of extra ugly Soviet military gear. "Sergeant, get your men and take that hill!" "But sir, they have a Mucinex up there!" On the other hand, the stuff works. After she took the stuff, Melissa and I both slept through the night – and in the same bed, too.

So when I started coughing yesterday, I took one, too. Then I took a nap, Nazi-style. As in, "Ve haff vays of making you nap!" Mucinex puts you down, and hard. When I woke up, I felt as though I would never, ever cough again. No, not even if evil RJ Reynolds executives forced me to smoke an entire pack of Camels every hour for a month.

Except then I did finally cough – and an entire raw chicken breast flew out of my mouth.

This stuff works, in other words. I took today's dose about ten minutes ago. I'll asleep on the sofa in another twenty.

Hopefully, I'll be awake in time to cook dinner. One thing's for sure: We won't be having chicken.

From the Boston Globe:

During last year's presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences.

But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago.

In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.

Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D's in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.

...

The transcript shows that Kerry's freshman-year average was 71. He scored a 61 in geology, a 63 and 68 in two history classes, and a 69 in political science. His top score was a 79, in another political science course. Another of his strongest efforts, a 77, came in French class.

But of course.

Megan McArdle:

To journalists ten or twenty years older than me, this is the long-awaited end to a grand mystery. To people my age or younger, it just doesn't matter that much. Baby boomers, many of whom seem to have trouble accepting the fact that time has passed, often seem incredulous that the major formulating events of their lives simply aren't that interesting to everyone else. Vietnam and Watergate have become the language of public debate, even though both ended over thirty years ago.

Megan and Hewitt (below) both mention this recent Jay Rosen column on Watergate nostalgia. Well worth checking out.

Hugh Hewitt:

[I]t doesn't pay enough to be a professional lefty activist, er, reporter. People get bitter as a result.

Why doesn't it pay enough? Because the marketplace doesn't want that product. Will MSM's rank and file ever figure it out that their own vision of themselves is delusional? Sure, they can tell each other how noble are their efforts, how invaluable their "exposes," but the only reliable measure is the marketplace, and "professional journalism" of the MSM variety is on the ropes. The customer isn't interested. The reality is that journalists don't matter all that much --and consequently aren't paid all that much-- because ordinary Americans aren't waiting with rapt attention in anticipation of being told what to think by a bunch of reporters and producers.

Ouch. I mean, ouch.

After several days of speculation and an unusual level of press leaks (none of which, I notice, have resulted in lawsuits), Steve Jobs announced today that Apple will be building future Macintoshes with Intel processors, moving away from the IBM/Motorola PowerPC chips that Apple has used for the last dozen years. According to Jobs, Apple has been building versions of OS X on Intel hardware for the last five years in preparation for just such a move. He demonstrated the current Mac OS running on a Pentium 4 today.

I'll let others debate the technical aspects of the transition (Jobs, ever the marketer, assures Mac users it will be seamless--we'll see). For the moment, I'm much more interested in this question: Can Apple survive as a software and iPod provider when it loses control of Macintosh hardware?

Yes, yes, Jobs and Apple VP Phil Schiller both say that Apple won't let other companies build Mac clones (Schiller says today, ""We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple computer,") but I doubt very much that they'll have much of a choice.

Very shortly after an x86 (i.e. Intel processor) version of the Mac OS is released to developers--which will happen in a couple of weeks--it's going to escape out into the wild. Sooner or later (I'm betting on sooner) some bright hacker or hackers are going to figure out how to get it running it on generic PC hardware, without the need for the proprietary Apple ROMs that will be included in "official" Macs.

And then it's all over for Apple as a hardware vendor.

They can't possibly compete with Dell and the "white box" PC manufacturers who buy commidity parts and operate on shoestring margins. Once that hack or set of hacks hits BitTorrent, that'll be that. Anybody with a copy of them and a copy of an Intel-friendly version of OS X will be able to cobble together their own Mac clone. I won't be at all surprised if Apple's own first Intel boxes are priced out of the market months before they can even ship.

Apple's profits and R&D structure are built around a business model of selling hardware at a considerable markup. What happens when those markups are completely unsustainable?

Jobs isn't stupid. He has to know all of the above is going to happen. The question is, does he have a plan to transition Apple out of computer hardware, or is he counting on the fearsome reputation of Apple Legal to save him from the inevitable open-source cloners?

Speaking for everybody who prefers the Mac OS (and all of us who'd be just as happy running it on cheap hardware), I hope he hasn't chosen the latter. That'd be about the quickest way to kill the Mac for good. Because like it or not and lawyers or not, it's just a matter of time before that hack hits the web.

Full disclosure: I worked for Apple for a few months in 1993 (which was fun, and I left on good terms), and I shamelessly stole this post's title from a comment on Slashdot.

UPDATE: Jeff Harrell, who actually knows what he's talking about, thinks I'm all wet on this one. Check the comments for some good stuff from Jeff and others.

There's a nasty summer headcold going around, and Melissa and I both caught it. And she's not allowed to take anything stronger than Tylenol. I am -- and have.

Back once it wears off, maybe. Or maybe just another dose.

... and there was much rejoicing.

Yes, that's right folks, Lileks is putting out two, count 'em--two blogs for the price of none, with the happy-go-lucky Bleat now joined by something a bit more pointed. From today's inaugural Screedblog:

I can imagine in late 2001 asking a question of myself in 2005:

What’s the main story? The smallpox quarantine? Fallout from the Iranian – Israeli exchange contaminating Indian crops? A series of bombings in heartland malls?

"Well, no – the big story today has to do with soldiers mishandling terrorists' holy texts at a detention center."

Mishandling? How? Like, you mean, they opened it up without first checking to see if it was ticking, and it blew up –

"No, they handled it in a way that disrespected it. Infidels are supposed to use gloves."

Oh. So we lost, then.

Don't get me wrong. I want us to do the right thing. I don't think there should be a policy that permits interrogators to treat the Qur'an like it was, oh, a Bible discovered in the Saudi airport customs line. But when it comes to the revelations of these Gitmo tales, I cannot care as much as they would like me to care. I cannot. Not to say we should treat the Qur’an with casual disrespect. But if an infidel touches the book with the wrong hand and people react like a two-year-old whose peas are touching the mashed potatoes, well, I understand why this matters, but when measured against the sins of headchoppery and carbombs, it pales to an evanescent translucence. Odd how the story isn’t about the rules and the precautions and the spine-cracking efforts to bend over backwards to make sure infidels get out the tongs when approaching the sacred book of the terrori – sorry, the detainees - Sorry, the murderous gynophobic gay-hating fundamentalist theocratic cultural imperialists. No, the story is the infinitesimal number of times in which the rules were breached over the course of years. It’s like doing a story about Wal-Mart’s employment practices, and following a story about forced overtime with an expose on expired non-dairy creamers in the breakroom. By hammering the tale for three weeks the MSM manages to dilute the impact of the beloved Abu Grabass scandal; pyramidal prisoners, wafting pee – all the same, all front page news. Of course, it’s all a seamless whole if your intention is to remind people of the three basic preconceptions of reporting on a war conducted by anyone whose initials aren’t JFK: the Pentagon lies, the troops are dullards and brutes, and Nixon is a criminal.

Meet John Kovalic, a dork after our own hearts. Or livers. Or something.

VDH.

Is the mighty euro headed for a fall? Maybe:

ROME (Reuters) - Italy should consider leaving the single currency and reintroducing the lira, Welfare Minister Roberto Maroni said in a newspaper interview on Friday.

Maroni, a member of the euro-skeptical Northern League party, told the Repubblica daily Italy should hold a referendum to decide whether to return to the lira, at least temporarily.

He also said European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet was one of those chiefly responsible for the "disaster of the euro."

The euro "has proved inadequate in the face of the economic slowdown, the loss of competitiveness and the job crisis," Maroni said.

Don't make too much of this story - Maroni's Northern League party is a bit of a crank. It doesn't just want out of the eurozone; it wants out of Italy. No, really. The party was formed to split Italy in two, north and south. But his complaint is still valid.

Before the euro, Italy kept its boutique manufacturing base competitive by devaluing the lira as often as necessary. That's why a glass of cheap red wine used to cost something like 3 trillion lira. Things got so bad that, one time, the entire nation ran out of zeros.

Anyway, the euro prevents Italy from devaluing their currency - and their current recession is the predictable result.

So why the "I Told You So" headline? Because I did just that, back when this blog was all of a week old.

Slow news day.

Tim Peters is a regular commenter around here, and one of my favorite email correspondents. He lives in Alaska, he owns a fine camera, and so it should come as no surprise that he's started his own (and quite good) photoblog.

Check it out - the guy has got some real talent.

John Scalzi sent me a review copy of Agent to the Stars while we were out of town - and I just noticed the package yesterday. Already, I'm 50 pages in - this, for a guy who doesn't much like Hollywood agents or gelatinous space aliens.

So what's it like? It's like Friday without the sex talk, or Tricky Business without the cruise ship. What I mean to say is, it's light, breezy, and laugh-out-loud fun to read.

You can read it for free here, or buy yourself a special limited edition here.

It's all too easy to be a pessimist on Europe these days – especially when you'd rather be an optimist.

Look: Europe has got to integrate, even though a Single Europe goes against a century of American policy (and more than two centuries of British). Left to their own devices, European nations get into all sorts of mischief, like starting world wars, cleansing their ethnics, or colonizing entire subcontinents. Left alone, modern European states are too prone to protectionism and welfare statism to compete to global markets. Left alone, there's not a Continental nation with markets or muscle enough to matter on the world stage.

But didn't we fight a couple world wars, just to keep Europe safely fragmented? Didn't Britain play all the angles against Napoleon for the same reason? Well, yes – and whether we admit it to ourselves or not, any thinking person must be of two minds on the European integration. Without a Union of some sort, Europe's nation-states can cause – and have caused – grief all around the world. But united, Europe could prove bigger, richer, and meaner than even we are.

Reminds me of my third-favorite Cold War joke. Goes like this: "France wants a West Germany strong enough to keep the Soviets at bay, but weak enough to be held in check by Luxembourg."

Ironically enough, today we find ourselves in the same situation as de Gaulle's France: We'd like a Europe strong enough to keep things quiet over there, but weak enough not to threaten our interests.

If a single strongman (named, say, Hitler or Stalin or Napoleon) ran the Continent, then we'd be in trouble – hence all those nasty wars, hot and cold. A federation of mostly-equal states, much like our own, would nicely fit our needs – and Europe's, too.

Problem is, the European Union – at least as currently constructed – isn't the answer. While the EU is far too weak to produce a Hitler (or even a Mussolini), it's also too strong, too suffocating to give Europe's economy the dynamism required to compete in the 21st Century. Instead of a NAFTA-like free-trade zone, the Eurozone is a managed economy. And as everyone knows – even those people loathe to admit it – a managed economy can manage only to just scrape by.

So shouldn't we rejoice now that French and Danish voters have all rejected the niggling EU constitution? Not really.

Some French voters said "non" because they feared the new charter would lead to too much capitalism, and others to stick it to President Jacque Chirac. And still others voted just to demonstrate some good old-fashioned French nationalism. Worse still, many Dutch voters were showing their newfound (and somewhat earned) anti-Muslim xenophobia by voting "nee." Joining a club with Turkey knocking on the door just didn't sound fun to a lot of Dutch. Not after what they've been through the last couple of years.

In other words, the French and Dutch didn't reject the EU Constitution because it would increase the welfare state, harm competitiveness, or lead to peace with their Muslim neighbors. They rejected it because they feared it would shrink welfare, increase competition, and make things too easy for too many Muslims.

With or without a new Constitution, right now the EU looks increasingly unhealthy – politically, economically, and culturally. If this road looks familiar, it is. We went through much the same during the years before the Second World War. But that's not to say Europe is gearing up for WWIII.

In the modern age, wars between nation states are almost passé. Even the American-led invasion of Iraq was less about nation-on-nation warfare than it was a pre-emptive strike to try and prevent a global "clash of civilizations." So – don't buy into fabulist notions of Europe getting us into a new World War, at least not in this lifetime.

That doesn't mean Europe, or at least a few key cities, couldn't devolve into new Sarajevos, with all the random murder, mass rape, and ethnic cleansing that implies. Don't believe me? Then look at French attitudes toward Muslim immigrants, and then look at the Muslim slums outside Paris. Still not convinced? Then ask a fourth-generation German Turk why he doesn't count as a second-class citizen – or even as a citizen at all.

There's a lot of resentment on both sides, some earned, some not. A booming economy could smooth things over, but that's not going to happen so long as European voters cling to their outmoded welfare systems. The EU Constitution wouldn't have helped any, but its defeat doesn't mean that anything is going to improve, either.

We want Europe economically strong, and we need Europe internally at peace. As things stand now, the best we can expect is one or the other, but not both. Recent events, however, indicate we won't get either one – and that's bad news in any language.