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Ascerbic Web Cartoonists Bare All for Dean Esmay

If you ever wonder whether or not there's a liberal slant to the newspapers of the country, reflect that the editorial cartoons of John Cox and Allen Forkum appear in none of them. Their work is, as of this writing, unsyndicaed. Easily the equal of any editorial cartoonists found in newpapers, and superior to most, this duo remains, along with Chris Muir, one of the crown jewels of the Web; proof that this medium's ability to deliver high-quality content and a wide rage of views is now unexcelled.

Continued...

We recently received the following memo from an obscure blog on Salon.com. We are not sure it is 100% genuine so we thought we'd share it here so that others might comment.

To: The Central Committee to Make the Pledge Good Instead of Evil and Old and in the Way.

From: Newspeak Central

Re: The Way Cool New Pledge

Dudes and Dudettes and Other Cool Persons Between Genders,

At your command Newspeak Central has spent some time reviewing the "old and in the way" Pledge of Allegiance. The result, below, is what we have -- after six months of multicultural diversity focus groups and self-criticism sessions -- come up with. It's just a start but we think it is in the right direction. We hope you give us hugs for it.

Original Bad Pledge:
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag
of the United States of America,
and to the Republic for which it stands:
one Nation under God, indivisible,
With Liberty and Justice for all.

Stinky, right? Who can say that kind of tripe with a straight face? Nobody cool, that's for sure. So we got our game face on and worked it over to a thing of beauty that MTV could make a video of once Justin Timberlake records it.

Our line and word editing and the our reasons follows;

"I " [ Too narcissistic -- Alter to 'One may or may not"

"pledge" [ Too binding, implies a commitment to something no matter what may happen to it -- Alter to "hereby loan on a revocable basis"

"allegiance " [Just far too antiquated a notion for today's fast time. Change to: "a smidgen of one's attention"]

"to the Flag" [ The Flag? You've got to be kidding. No symbols drenched in blood,

Continued...

Taylor's third wife, Jewel, is "a trained economist"... or so the sexed-up BBC tells me. Hard to credit given the below zero level of Liberia's economy under the Mr. and Mrs. Taylor regime, but there might be something in it.

Like you, I've spent endless weeks lately wondering how I, a mere mortal, can help the oppressed and unfairly criticized African despot and criminal Charles Taylor on to a happier and more fulfilling life. My answer came from his wife this morning.

Continued...

Teeny Bopper and Geezer Rocker do not a catchy duet make. Fresh from a recording session touting all beef patties and sesame seed buns for McDonalds, and a hard couple of weeks necking with Cameron Diaz in tony hotels from Miami to Chicago, Justin Timberlake just had to hoist a tune with Mick Jagger who obviously just don't care any longer. The crowd, however, did care:
Justin Timberlake Joins Stones At Toronto Benefit, Gets Pelted With Garbage

Continued...

From Seven Pillars of Wisdom

"Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a cord; for the unpledged allegiance of their minds made them obedient servants. None of them would escape the bond till success had come, and with it responsibility and duty and engagements. Then the idea was gone and the work ended--in ruins.

Without a creed they could be taken to the four corners of the world (but not to heaven) by being shown the riches of earth and the pleasures of it; but if on the road, led in this fashion, they met the prophet of an idea, who had nowhere to lay his head and who depended for his food on charity or birds, then they would all leave their wealth for his inspiration.

They were incorrigibly children of the idea, feckless and colour-blind, to whom body and spirit were for ever and inevitably opposed. Their mind was strange and dark, full of depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule, but with more of ardour and more fertile in belief than any other in the world. They were a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing.

They were as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail. Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing themselves against the coasts of flesh. Each wave was broken, but, like the sea, wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place where the material world had been, and God would move upon the face of those waters. One such wave (and not the least) I raised and rolled before the breath of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and fell at Damascus. The wash of that wave, thrown back by the resistance of vested things, will provide the matter of the following wave, when in fullness of time the sea shall be raised once more."

Check out Dateline: Hollywood for the latest in Hollywood Dish undisturbed by fact-checking.

Actor Nicolas Cage has launched a preemptive strike on his love life.

You will remember that the Oscar winner divorced Lisa Marie Presley last November. The nasty split came less than four months after their romantic wedding in Hawaii.

It was a short-lived marriage even by Hollywood standards, although not the first to go bad for the actor. He divorced actress Patricia Arquette in 2000. Cage, who just started dating actress Angelina Jolie, filed divorce papers yesterday in a Downtown Los Angeles courtroom. "I want to make sure that when we get married and then quickly get divorced, the paperwork will already be complete," Cage told me yesterday outside the courtroom. "I have a pretty busy shooting schedule. When I get divorced again, I don't want a lot of red tape."

Shallow Grave in Iraq

In an extended essay entitled "The War in Iraq" on the weblog of Norman Geras, Mr. Geras notes, in passing:

Here is one approximate measure of the barbarities of the Baathist regime I have just referred to. It comes not from the Pentagon, or anyone in the Bush administration, or from Tony Blair or those around him. It comes from Human Rights Watch. According to Human Rights Watch, during 23 years of Saddam's rule some 290,000 Iraqis disappeared into the regime's deadly maw, the majority of these reckoned to be now dead. Rounding this number down by as much as 60,000 to compensate for the 'thought to be', that is 230,000. It is 10,000 a year. It is 200 people every week. And I'll refrain from embellishing with details, which you should all know, as to exactly how a lot of these people died.

Had the opposition to the war succeeded this is what it would have postponed - and postponed indefinitely - bringing to an end. This is how almost the whole international left expressed its moral solidarity with the Iraqi people. Worse still, some sections of the left seemed none too bothered about making common cause with, marching alongside, fundamentalist religious bigots and known racists; and there were also those who dismissed Iraqi voices in support of the war as coming from American stooges - a disgraceful lie. [Emphasis added]

Geras then goes on to other arguments that buttress his main theme of how the Left has failed to respond well to any of the global moral issues of the last few years. It is an excellent analysis and I commend it to your attention.

However, I was struck by the gruesome mathematics of the phrase: "It is 10,000 a year. It is 200 people every week." Horrendous enough to contemplate. The small town of Laguna Beach where I live has a population of around 25,000. That would mean, in terms that I can comprehend, that every man, woman and child in this town would be wiped out in 2.5 years. And they would be killed in some of the most awful ways we can imagine, and many that we cannot.

Continued...

Top Ten Reasons Not to Go to France This Summer
And, no, its not the money. We have money.

10. By the time you get there it will be August which means that even the French will have left France. What do they know that you don't?
9. Islamic Terrorists pissed because French Government still dragging feet on conversion of State Religion from Catholicism to Islam. Eager to kill Americans to bring Chirac to heel.
8. No more fine art on funny French money. All boring Euros from Belgium.
7. Nouveau Beaujolais is getting old.
6. Lance Armstrong has been and gone, and the French national sport of le traffic jam leaves you uninspired.
5. The French Riviera is toast... as are four inhabitants to date.
4. Email is required by law to be called "courriel," and when you hear "You've got courriel! you want to check yourself for a body rash.
3. Jacques Chirac remains as Le Grande Fromage; too soft, too runny and too stinky for your Cheese Whiz tastes.
2. You're Jewish and American and don't care to see two sets of cemeteries and monuments defiled, thank you.
1. Dominique de Villepin's 800 page doorstop, " In Praise of Those Who Stole the Fire," will be on sale everywhere: "From the bottom of my pockets, stuck to the back of my smock, hidden in the corner of abacuses, poetry gushed out..."

Take my advice: Stay home and stay out of the gush.

The International Herald Tribune notes: U.S. tourists stay away from France

PARIS: The number of American tourists visiting France has dropped dramatically this year, by as much as 80 percent in the first half of 2003, the newspaper Liberation reported Monday, quoting the president of a group representing France's travel agents.

"Our colleagues across the Atlantic no longer schedule France," Balderacchi told the daily newspaper.

Balderacchi's somber assessment was countered by the Tourism Ministry, which put the decrease in American visitors at 30 percent for the first five months of 2003, attributing the decline mainly to the weak dollar.

Oh, mai oui! Le decline au cause de weak dollar. Bien sur, mon brave. Le attitude has rien to do with it. Right? Right.

Hat Tip to Roger Simon

From Dr. Leda's Journal comes this taut tale of an Obsessive Roseologist and a gaggle of roseophiles: Dr. Leda and the Rose Snobs

"Now that's Jim, our secretary," she continued, pointing to the affable looking man who was standing silently at the podium. "He's one of our most pompous spray snobs. He only sprays with restricted insecticides and over-the-counter miticides, but he won't touch any fungicides. Or maybe it's the other way around, I forget. Anyway, he's calling for a vote. "

"Harry has moved and Louise seconded that membership in our group be denied to anyone who grows fewer than 350 varieties of roses. They're our quantity snobs."

But Jim isn't saying anything," I observed.

"Well, no, he can't," she explained. "You see, Jim's also a fragrance snob. In fact, he's been aggressively lobbying the state legislature to pass a bill that would ban the sale of all non-fragrant roses. Anyway, we had a heated debate ten years ago over whether or not 'New Dawn' is scented, and as a result, he's not on speaking terms with anyone in this room."

BIO:"Dr. Leda Horticulture, O.R. (Obsessive Roseologist) aka Elizabeth Churchill, is a rosarian who worked for eight years at nurseries in the San Francisco Bay Area. She recently retired and moved to a beautiful old Victorian in southern Louisiana. If she told you how much room she has for new roses, you would hate her."

For the rest simply go to Leda's Garden.

ScrappleFace: Dem Poll Shows Neptune is Center of Solar System

Dem Poll Shows Neptune is Center of Solar System (2003-07-29) -- A poll released today by the Democrat Leadership Council (DLC) shows that 93 percent of Democrat politicians believe that the planet Neptune is at the center of our solar system.

Roughly the same number think that the sun is on "the far right" side of the solar system.

The survey also shows Democrat politicians believe...More at the amazing Scrappleface site

Click Me and Grow Big

The Pumpkin that Ate My Backyard

It began as a $1.49 seedling at Home Depot which I bought for my step-son to plant.

He planted it, as heedless 9-year-old boys will, in an obscure corner of a sandy bed under some ice-plants. It seemed to me at the time that the pumpkin was going to have a short and shady life.

But then, after about a month, it seemed to suddely clamber across my terrace. Then it strangled the corn plants. That gave it HUNGER and it ate the chair. When it approached the deck it lunged, fell back and sprouted this "fruit" of the vine.

Now it is trying to invade my neighbor`s yard. Last night I heard them outside calling plaintively for their new puppy to come back in, "Sloopy! Little Sloopy! Sloopy, come!"

But answer came there none...

It's not nice to mess with memories... as Susan Clancy discovers in "A Bad Trip Down Memory Lane" by BRUCE GRIERSON in the Sunday Times Magazine.
==
The "mystique of mirrors" is reflected upon in Mark Pendergrast's book Mirror, Mirror in the Chronicle Book Review: "...how could he be sure that Kelley wasn't actually conjuring with the devil when the specter in the glass ordered the two men to swap wives for the night?" Which makes us think that that particular mirror was simply a few centuries ahead of its time.
==
"We have to honor those who had “political misgivings,” because dissent is a virtue too pure to be stained by truth. Nevermind that the end result of those “political misgivings” would have been another generation of Afghan daughters beaten with bats for winking at a cute guy. Those “political misgivings” would have assured that any young Afghan woman who stepped outside her house and asked to be educated would be whipped with 2 X 4s by the Committee for Flaming Theocracy Gynophobe Committee.

But that can’t be said. People who were wrong for the right reasons will always get a pass."
-- James Lileks
==
Stating the Obvious: "Stop and think, if in 2001, or in 2000, or in 1999, we had gone to war in Afghanistan to deal with Osama bin Laden, and we had tried to say it's because he's planning to kill 3,000 people in New York, people would have said, you don't have any proof of that" - Paul Wolfowitz
==
Get Me Rewrite! HEADLINES nobody saw coming: "Crime down, but prison costs up" - San Francisco Chronicle. "US troops in Iraq 'are terrorist magnet'" - UK Guardian. "Protestors target global trade talks" - BBC NEWS "Arab Stations Reject U.S. Criticism They Are Biased" - Reuters

"An Agreeable Person is One Who Agrees With Me."

It is always gratifying to see my odd opinions and observations confirmed by more distinguished sources. Not that any of my insights are particularly new, they just, at times, reflect those that are in the wind. Some time back I overcame my addiction to the New York Times and took up a subscription to The Wall Street Journal. While I always find the Journal to be agreeable, it was especially agreeable this morning when it agreed with several observations I made just last week.

In today's Wall Street Journal editor emeritus Robert L. Bartley writes:

I frankly doubt that Mr. Keller will succeed in restoring objectivity or balance to the Times newsroom. Former executive editor A.M. Rosenthal, actually a conservative, had a hard enough time. Then too, the current tone and culture are the work of publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., who remains in charge at the sufferance of his family.

Last Friday, I expressed the same sentiment with less concision:

Raines may be gone, but ... the Moose still has his job.

The origin of the shrunk-wrapped mindset that controls the Times .... is to be found, as all newspapers policies are to be found, in the office of the Publisher.

.... Raines was given the boot because his actions and inaction had directly threatened the Publisher's job. It was, at the end of the day, a situation that evolved into either Howell or Pinch. In that case, adios Howell. Every time.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. (aka 'Pinch') is the person responsible for the tone and the direction of the Times .... As long as he remains at the wheel, and there is no reason to believe that he will soon be gone, the Times will continue, at bottom, to reflect the attitudes and aspirations of the privileged liberal social milieu that created him.

Elsewhere Bartley notes:

The opinion of the press corps tends toward consensus because of an astonishing uniformity of viewpoint. Certain types of people want to become journalists, and they carry certain political and cultural opinions. This self-selection is hardened by peer group pressure. No conspiracy is necessary; journalists quite spontaneously think alike. The problem comes because this group-think is by now divorced from the thoughts and attitudes of readers.

While I agree with Bartley's conclusions, the cause I ascribed last Wednesday was somewhat different when I somewhat seriously proposed that the workers in Big Media suffered from industry induced ADD / HD:

The recent events here at home in the political circus that is known as "Lots of Democrats Running Around Begging to Be President," and abroad in the collective media hallucinations known as "All is Lost in Iraq Because We Won," underscore the fact that ADD has infected and taken over the media.

The terrible truth is not that so many people working in the media are biased towards wanting the United States to fail all the time and everywhere (although there are more than a few who do). That is merely one of many obvious truths about media people. No, the terrible truth is that nearly 100 percent of media professionals are infected to the marrow of their bones with ADD / HD. And not just the "stars" but the whole pack of them, root and branch.

The truth is that most revel in their ADD / HD media jobs simply because these are the only jobs and careers open to them that promise both wealth and fame.

Similar symptoms but a different diagnosis. That's why it is always good to get a second opinion. Especially one that you agree with from the agreeable Mr. Bartley.

The Atlantis Massif, site of the Lost City

Mysterious and haunting discoveries emerge almost weekly not from outer space but from the depths of our own oceans. One that I find especially chill inducing concerns the structures at the top of the Atlantis Massif:Hydrothermal Vent Systems Could Have Persisted Millions Of Years, Incubated Life

The staying power of seafloor hydrothermal vent systems like the bizarre Lost City vent field is one reason they also may have been incubators of Earth's earliest life, scientists report in a paper published in the July 25 issue of Science.

Discovered just 2 years ago during a National Science Foundation-funded expedition in the mid-Atlantic Ocean, Lost City has the tallest vents ever seen; the 18-story behemoth at the site dwarfs most vents elsewhere by at least 100 feet.

Water is circulated through the vent field by heat from serpentinization, a chemical reaction between seawater and the mantle rock on which Lost City sits, rather than by heat from volcanic activity or magma, responsible for driving hydrothermal venting at sites scientists have been studying since the early 1970s.

Spire of the Lost City

The daily journals of the Lost City Expedition can be found online with entries such as this one:

We drove along the cliff face for about an hour, and only saw veins, carbonate rubble, and steep slopes of serpentinite. Because of this, Debbie decided that we should go further up the cliff, to trace where the carbonate was coming from.When we reached the top of the cliff, we found a broad, flat area that was covered in carbonate, and was the probable source for the pieces we found further down the slope. We grabbed a few samples to finish our exploration to the east. Pat flew us back to Lost City, and we circled around Poseidon, the huge structure in the middle of the field. We were on the lookout for an active vent structure, called the Beehive, that the previous Alvin dive had knocked over. We managed to find the site of venting and took some water samples from this vent. Then we searched until we found the shattered remains of the Beehive. While we were doing this, I was looking out the window at Poseidon. It's so big that I couldn't see the top, the bottom, or around the corner. It is simply unbelievably huge. After I gawked at it for awhile, we still had a little time left to explore to the west of Lost City. Along the western cliff, we saw beautiful outcrops of serpentinite, topped by breccias and carbonate...

"This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did."

William Gibson, "The Road to Oceania"

The Ironman and the Sea
by Bill Plaschke in today's Los Angeles Times.

Every day for 27 years Dale Webster has gone surfing. It might have been crazy for the first 20 years, but now it has gone on to be a crazy kind of deep wisdom.

Everybody knows where Dale Webster has been, and where he's going, this man who has defined himself by his refusal to be defined.

"Surfing has been so commercialized, so sold out, surfboards on runway models, surfing as a reality show," Barilotti said. "To many people, Dale has become one of the last real surfers."

As of now, there is no party planned for February. Dale Webster says he doesn't need a party. He says a life of dedication has led to a life of understanding, and that's celebration enough.

"Seeing the wave is the future," he said. "Its curl is the present. Its break is the past."You ride a great wave, you turn around, and all you see is foam, nothing to show for it, a memory."

Always the setting forth was the same,
Same sea, same dangers waiting for him
As though he had got nowhere but older.
Behind him on the receding shore
The identical reproaches, and somewhere
Out before him, the unravelling patience
He was wedded to
-- W.S. Merwin

An article published in Scientific American, "Genetic Analysis Revises Tally of Past Whale Populations" reports new findings that sets the vile practice of hunting whales back many decades.

A high historic whale population could have an impact on how scientists presently view the status of whales as an endangered species. The current humpback whale population of around 10,000 is roughly 50 percent of the pre-industrial whaling numbers determined from logbook records. Using the genetic analysis, however, the current population is only 4 percent of what it once was. Palumbi says that with the revised historical estimates, it could be "on the order of 50 to 100 years" before whales can again be hunted.

Let's hope that in much less than 50 to 100 years, the world will have evolved enough to make this "need" part of it's shameful past. But while we're waiting, we could use a lot more inforcement as well.

Computer phone support with friends is something most of us have done more than once in our lives. Still, there are times when the mind is pushed beyond boggle.

In a recent phone conversation with my good friend -- who can cause mainframe computers to crash just by walking past the building they are in -- I tried to help him with advice that included the phrase, "Just copy and paste the information."

He replied, "Well, I don't know how to do that."

Bear in mind that he has owned comptuers since sometime in the late 1980s and has, over that time, actually hired computer tutors to come to his house and get him squared away. If you do bear that in mind, you will understand that my reaction was to sigh deeply and look to see if I could get my hands on a bottle of Stoli before going forward. In the end, I just copped out and begged off. I just couldn't do it.

Luckily, the Web came to the rescue with How to copy and paste

Once you know how to perform the copy and paste operation, your will cherish this knowledge and teach it to others. It is more useful than being able to drive stick-shift, and it will save more time than your ATM card.Here is how!

An amazing tutorial. You should save the permalink. After all, you too could need these instructions for someone near you soon.

Majority Leader Tom Delay had some insightful advice to the current crop of Democratic Party Leaders yesterday in a speech to College Republicans Fear and Loathing in the Mother Ship

The Democrats' accusations AREN'T meant to be taken seriously. Because they're unserious people.

We're in the middle of a global conflict between good and evil and they're in the middle of a Michael Dukakis look-alike contest.

They either don't understand or don't care that this is a time for serious leadership.They're just trying to change the subject, because on the issue of Iraq, they have nothing of substance to offer: only fear, and loathing, and a motley crew of presidential contenders.

They've gone off the deep end.

Consider:Bob Graham, a respected former governor and chairman of the intelligence committee, is calling for the president's impeachment.

John Edwards, a so-called moderate compares the president to a dangerous socialist.

And Dennis Kucinich, a long-time member of Congress now calls for legislation (I love this) to ban mind control weapons in outer space.

These ideas aren't they're just weird.

Tip via LGF

One of the most moving contemporary portraits, Chuck Close's portrait of his mother-in-law, Fanny/Fingerpainting, reveals a sublime blend of technique and feeling. One which, viewed from a distance or up close, unifies his technique with his feeling -- makes that which is merely clever subordinate to that which is deeply felt.

The notes at the National Gallery of Art tell a slightly different story:

Seen from a distance, the painting looks like a giant, silver-toned photograph that unrelentingly reveals every crack and crevice of the sitter's face. Closer up, the paint surface dissolves into a sea of fingerprints that have an abstract beauty, even as they metaphorically suggest the withering of the sitter's skin with age. The fingerpaintings provide a far more literal record of the artist's touch than most abstract expressionist brushwork -- but are at the same time dictated by an abstract, distinctly impersonal system.

As usual in the manner of 'curator's notes' in contemporary exhibitions, these comments seek to involve us in the same "abstract, impersonal system" that the curator has bought into in order to achieve and extend his or her position. The notes only real role is to distance our reaction to the image that the artist has created. They say little about the emotions of the viewer and less about those of the creator.

Does anyone imagine that Chuck Close thought "I'll use fingerprints to construct Fanny's face and thereby make a broad statement about touch versus an abstract system?" Close is a clever and distinguished artist, but he works in the world of emotions. If he did not, his work would not reach from the image into the heart of the viewer.

It is a source of constant wonder to me that when so many of our better contemporary painters can be pushing deeper and deeper into the wordless realm of the human heart, our professional art establishment is fleeing from it. I'll put it down to the behavior of the "herd of independent minds."

Links to emails and other reports filed, not by reporters, but by soldiers and other persons on the ground in Iraq:

It Ain't Necessarily So. [Army Spec Ops letter from Iraq - a must read!]

"A bunch of bad guys used a group of women and children as human shields.The GIs surrounded them and negotiated their surrender fifteen hours later and when they discovered a three year-old girl had been injured by the big tough guys throwing her down a flight of stairs, the GIs called in a MedVac helicopter to take her and her mother to the nearest field hospital. The Iraqis watched it all, and there hasn't been a problem inthat neighborhood since.

"How many such stories, and there are hundreds of them, never get reported in the fair and balanced press? You know, nada.

"The civilians who have figured it out faster than anyone are the local teenagers. They watch the GIs and try to talk to them and ask questions about America and Now wear wrap-around sunglasses, GAP T- shirts, Dockers (or even better Levis with the red tags) and Nikes (or Egyptian knock-offs, but with the "swoosh") and love to listen to AFN when the GIs play it on their radios."
===
The Braden Files : SITREP from Iraq

"We are fighting former regime-backed paramilitary groups, Iranian-based opposition, organized criminals, and street thugs. We have stood up governing councils from neighborhood to district to city level...."
===
Chief Wiggles -- Straight from Iraq

"Earlier on in the week we received word that our counter intelligence teams were being moved north. With two days notice they packed their stuff and said their goodbyes. I am really going to miss those eight guys whom I am lived and interacted with for the past three months. We have been like family, me being the dad of course. All of them are just young men under the age of thirty, whom I have a great respect for. They are some of the finest young men I have ever met, honored to call each and every one of them my son."
===
t a c i t u s: From a Marine

"Then, suddenly, about 9 PM, it sounds like the early days of American troops pouring in here, i.e. real-live combat: gunfire everywhere, tracer rounds visible, even illumination (a.k.a. fireworks). The people of Baghdad weren't awaiting confirmation. It was nonstop celebratory fire. The war's critics warned constantly about the uprising of the "Arab street." Well, here it was: celebrating the end of 2/3 of the triumvirate."
===
DoD News: Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Briefing on His Recent Trip to Iraq

"And as we were passing the line of butcher shops, the young Army captain, commander of that company, started telling me this quite remarkable story about how there had been a problem because the butchers were dumping -- doing slaughtering on the street and dumping carcasses out in front of the butcher shops. And in order to get the problem under control, they had done a number of things, and one of them had been to organize an association of the butchers, so that they would have an authoritative institution to interact with. Of course, in the old regime, you didn't let anybody organize an association, you simply took some -- anyone who was putting carcasses on the street out and shot them! We don't use those tactics. An I kiddingly said to him, "Well, did they teach you that at West Point?" And of course they didn't. He figured this out all by himself, and the fact that they're doing this on a daily basis."

Violating his own home-grown edict of 'what happens here, stays here,' Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman has his underwear wedged over the Bambi Hoax: Vegas Presses Charges in Hoax Over Paintball-Hunting for Naked Women

This site sniffed out the Bambi Gambit last week with Internet Bites O'Reilly Back, but this wasn't good enough for the mayor of the city that runs on gambling, booze, drugs, prostitution, and all other things that make up this Adult Disneyland.

Swearing vengance on a typical Las Vegas citizen who was just trying to make a few bucks out of the gullible, Goodman said: "I'll do everything I can to see this man is punished for trying to embarrass Las Vegas."

If he keeps that up, every floor show on the Strip will have to shut down. Casinos to follow. Brothels soon after. Would the last person to leave Las Vegas kindly remember to turn out the lights?

Brooks Appointment as Columnist Gives False Hope to Sullivan, Drezner, et. al.

"Mr. [David] Brooks's appointment was announced by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The Times, and Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page." -- New York Times Announcement

The always eloquent David Warren, reponding to the good news of the deaths of Saddam's sons, issues a timely warning:Smelling Blood [Emphasis added]

The power of the enemy does not depend on his strength, but on our weakness; not on his malice, but on our restraint.

As Daniel Pipes explained yesterday, paraphrasing Lee Harris: "Al Qaeda destroys airplanes and buildings that it itself could not possibly build. The Palestinian Authority has failed in every field of endeavor except killing Israelis. Saddam Hussein's Iraq grew dangerous thanks to money showered on it by the West to purchase petroleum Iraqis themselves had neither located nor extracted." And the ability of such enemies to regroup against a West trying to defend itself, now depends on the media's ability to hog-tie the West's legitimate political leaders....

...That is why small, but highly visible pieces of good news are crucial just now -- of which the killing of Saddam's sons would be an example. At a moment when the "liberal" media are smelling blood, let us pray it turns out to be their own.

I've always respected the power of prayer, having been a devout "Christian in Crisis Only" for a number of years, but here I fear prayer will not avail us.

Our enemies persist even though we like to think we have them on the run, and they are given aid and comfort daily by those for whom America will always come last, i.e. those whom America has made first. They are aided, not out a direct desire to help them, but out of a misplaced empathy and the distorted one-world vision of the Liberal Media Ownership. Not "Establishment," but "Ownership." The distinction is critical as we shall see.

Raines may be gone, but ... the Moose remains.

As I wrote a couple of days ago, those in the media that continue to wish for and work for the downfall of this country are the least likely to see themselves as others see them. They cannot. They exist in a bubble of mutual self-regard and congratulation that is, in the end, impervious to outside correction. They see themselves as 'patriots of the human race and citizens of the world.' They exist in the pampered realms of international ease and, being surrounded with others like themselves and their sycophants, they cannot perceive any other universe. East Side, West Side, Hamptons, Bel Air, Vail, the Colony. It is a rarified air they

Continued...

Unlikely to be leading troops into battle

Donald Sensing's fascinating One Hand Clapping boasts an item that will bring grief to the hearts of Goths across America. Tattoos will get you barred or bounced from the Army.

I previously related that my eldest son was nearing a decision to enlist in the Army or the Marine Corps. In a conversation with the Marine recruiter, he said that they can get waivers to approve enlistment if a prospect has used narcotics or smoked marijuana, has a record of repeated arrests, or, in one approved waiver, had one leg literally pinned together with steel rods.But absolutely no waivers whatsoever are granted for a prospect who has more than six tattoos or has any tattoo that cannot be covered by the recruiter's hand. Period. It doesn't matter what the tattoo depicts - gang related, drug related, or a full-color American flag, doesn't matter.

If I were a member of the Tattoo Lobby, I'd be begging for the draft to come back.

Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs is one of the crown jewels of the American blogsphere. For years the site has been unremitting in its criticism and exposure of the global terror network. It has been especially vocal in exposing the unremitting dedication of the Palestinians' terror network to the total destruction of Israel. Accordingly the site has become a global clearing house for

Continued...

"Today in Literature" reminds us that the creator of America's favorite hymn was born on this day in: John Newton and 'Amazing Grace'

Perhaps Aretha Franklin giveth what Judy Collins hath taken away. In his recent book on Newton, his hymn, and its musical life (Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song), Steve Turner contrasts the night in the early 70s when Collins sang the hymn to her encounter group in order to calm things downï¿‘her record producer was present, and had her include it in her next albumï¿‘with the night Franklin recorded her live, fourteen-minute version, at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts. This was in "the long meter style of the Holiness churches where the tune is pulled apart wide enough to let the spirit in,"

Okay, sing it! C'mon. You'll feel better if you do. It never fails.

Amazing grace-how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.

The Lord has promised good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
'tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

When we've been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
we've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we'd first begun.

See, I told you you'd feel better.

On Frederick Turner and American Poems in the Key of Life

The universities were thick with lies.
Ten thousand poets would betray their name
To buy the good opinion of the liars.
-- Frederick Turner

Was Frederick Turner the only one of our poets who felt a wave of revulsion sweep over him when the "herd of independent minds" that fancy themselves as 'important' American poets formed a viscous slab of drivel around opposition to the war?

It may well be the case since I am not aware of any other American poets that stood apart from this wholesale hijacking of an art form. "Poets Against the War" was an Internet driven round-up of poets hot to resist America's plan to set 25 million Omars free, and make Iraq a place where poets critical of their despot would not have their eyes ripped from their sockets and their throats cut. It was a shameful roster of poets so deeply ashamed of themselves and their work that they were willing to consign other poets in the present and future Iraq to silence, torture, and death that their hate of America in general, and George Bush in particular, might prevail. Having fattened at the table of America, they were determined to let the world know they were not at all grateful.

Little has been heard of this rag-tag gang of scribblers since the fall of the despicable regime they struggled to sustain. Indeed, only epitaph is a preening farewell note from Commandante Hamill on their web site that, while humping and pumping his own achievements, proclaims, in the mock bombast that is his signature style:

We have drawn our line in the sand. Our tools are everyone's tools: the simple words we use almost thoughtlessly every day, but use in our art with scrupulous honesty and precision. I am Confucian enough to believe that "All wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name." And we poets understand why Dante put the defilers of language into the seventh circle of his Hell.

If that is true, then Mr. Hamill will understand Dante even more clearly upon his future arrival in said circle.

But not all living American poets signed on to this shameful agenda. Many simply stayed aloof or held their peace. Not a brave stance, but who would risk being tossed out of a safe sinecure just to voice a mild dissent?

Frederick Turner has been many things in his career, but mild is not one of them. From the moment of Poets Against the War's inception, Turner made it clear he was not going to join these hapless babblers when he wrote:

Continued...

Reuters Vies with BBC and the New York Times for Top Honors in Low Game

Yesterday I cited Reuters as a media outlet that exemplifies ADD/HD in that it: "Fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes." I was too kind. I should have said that it is an organization that lies and uses others to give its lies credibility.

Today's Opinion Journal features, among others, Dear Elizabeth: I Didn't Do It - "Why did Reuters put my name on a horribly slanted story?" by Deanna Wrenn. Ms. Wrenn was horrified to find that the once-truthful news organization had hijacked her name in order to put forward its own dubious agenda. Wrenn's article states:

This is from a story that Reuters news service ran this week with my byline:
"Jessica Lynch, the wounded Army private whose ordeal in Iraq was hyped into a media fiction of U.S. heroism, was set for an emotional homecoming on Tuesday. ... Media critics say the TV cameras will not show the return of an injured soldier so much as a reality-TV drama co-produced by U.S. government propaganda and credulous reporters."

Got problems with that?

I do, especially since I didn't write it.

Here's what I sent last week to Reuters, a British news agency that compiles news reports from all over the world:

ELIZABETH--In this small county seat with just 995 residents, the girl everyone calls Jessi is a true heroine--even if reports vary about Pfc. Jessica Lynch and her ordeal in Iraq.

"I think there's a lot of false information about her story," said Amber Spencer, a clerk at the town's convenience store.

Palestine resident J.T. O'Rock was hanging an American flag and yellow ribbon on his storefront in Elizabeth in preparation for Lynch's return.

Like many residents here, he considers Lynch a heroine, even if newspaper and TV reports say her story wasn't the same one that originally attracted movie and book deals...."

..... I understand that news wire services often edit, add, remove or write new leads for stories. What amazed me was that a story could have my byline on it when I contributed only a few sentences at the end--and in later versions I didn't contribute anything at all.

Ms. Wrenn is justified in her outrage, but any hopes she has for an apology or correction will have to wait for the second coming. Like the BBC and the NYT, Reuters has long been in the thrall of hacks, quacks, and the sad sacks of what passes for journalism in that agency. Our advice to Ms. Wrenn is to stop asking "Why?" and to start drawing the obvious conclusions.

Haunting and, we hope, chillingly accurate: Silflay Hraka's "Denouement"

He knows. He's known now for hours, since an aide who once cringed at a glance insouciantly tossed the sweat stained notice of the end onto the desk before him and exited the room without a word.

His sons, dead, betrayed to the enemy by a man they once wronged, a man who in their arrogance they had gone to for shelter. A man who once claimed blood ties. A man who will use his new riches to buy power; who will forswear all connections to the tribe of Tikrit in future.

Just six months ago the fear of his sons covered an entire nation. Today they discovered it had shrunken so much that it no longer covered even a single household.

The Americans came for them, and first they shot the walls away, until only piles of dust lay between them and his sons. And then they shot the dust away, and his name and the last hope of his glory floated away with it.

The rest can be read here.

Duke? .... Or Dick?

Yesterday, one of the Democratic hopefuls, Dick Gephardt, treated America to his current view of why he's the kind of man that should be President:

"I'm seeking the presidency because foreign policy isn't a John Wayne movie, where we catch the bad guys, hoist a few cold ones and then everything fades to black."

"Diplomacy matters. Burden-sharing matters. Follow-through matters. And yes, sustaining the peace is harder, more complex and often costlier than winning the war itself. No matter the surge of momentary machismo -- as gratifying as it may be for some -- it's short-sighted and wrong to simply go it alone."

In a universe long ago and far away... In a universe that people like Gephardt would like the rest of us to forget about; a universe when the fires still raged under Ground Zero, when they still searched for and brought body parts up from the pit, the elegant and eloquent Peggy Noonan wrote on October 12, 2001:

Here's what I'm trying to say: Once about 10 years ago there was a story--you might have read it in your local tabloid, or a supermarket tabloid like the National Enquirer--about an American man and woman who were on their honeymoon in Australia or New Zealand. They were swimming in the ocean, the water chest-high. From nowhere came a shark. The shark went straight for the woman, opened its jaws. Do you know what the man did? He punched the shark in the head. He punched it and punched it again. He did not do brilliant commentary on the shark, he did not share his sensitive feelings about the shark, he did not make wry observations about the shark, he punched the shark in the head. So the shark let go of his wife and went straight for him. And it killed him. The wife survived to tell the story of what her husband had done. He had tried to deck the shark. I told my friends: That's what a wonderful man is, a man who will try to deck the shark.

I don't know what the guy did for a living, but he had a very old-fashioned sense of what it is to be a man, and I think that sense is coming back into style because of who saved us on Sept. 11, and that is very good for our country.

Why? Well, manliness wins wars. Strength and guts plus brains and spirit wins wars. But also, you know what follows manliness? The gentleman. The return of manliness will bring a return of gentlemanliness, for a simple reason: masculine men are almost by definition gentlemen. Example: If you're a woman and you go to a faculty meeting at an Ivy League University you'll have to fight with a male intellectual for a chair, but I assure you that if you go to a Knights of Columbus Hall, the men inside (cops, firemen, insurance agents) will rise to offer you a seat. Because they are manly men, and gentlemen.

It is hard to be a man. I am certain of it; to be a man in this world is not easy. I know you are thinking, But it's not easy to be a woman, and you are so right. But women get to complain and make others feel bad about their plight. Men have to suck it up. Good men suck it up and remain good-natured, constructive and helpful; less-good men become the kind of men who are spoofed on "The Man Show"--babe-watching, dope-smoking nihilists. (Nihilism is not manly, it is the last refuge of sissies.)

Two distinctly opposite visions of what sort of man our country now needs. Soon enough, we'll have to decide what sort of man we want to lead us.

The Short Attention Spans of Media Professionals Mean a Hyperactive Headline Glut for You

[Note: If you can't read all of this you may be infected by media-induced ADD / HD. Seek professional help.]

"If you tell someone they have a short attention span often enough, they might believe you enough to get one, but then they'll forget what channel you're on." -- TV producer, Fox News, 2002

Recently I became acquainted with a young boy, just turned nine. He's a brilliant and happy kid, but he has a problem with cleaning up and organizing his room. It isn't that he can't do it, he simply has to be told about every five minutes to continue the process. You see, in the course of picking things up to put away he discovers anew their potential to fascinate him. The Gameboy? "Oh, here's where I saved that last stage of Turoc. Let's see if I can get the flame-thrower and..." Any one of the 3,000 + Lego units? "Gee, I never did get the moon base hemi-dome set up, just let me put these 400 blocks in place and..." Books? "Sure thing and, hey, did Horton ever hatch that egg..."

On it goes until, after the sixth or seventh cajoling instruction, a path has been cleared for the vacuum cleaner. After which, he promptly begins taking everything he has put away out and strews it about the floor once again. Today's pop psychologists, addlepated educators and the marketing departments of large drug companies are hard at work trying to convince me children who behave like this have "Attention Deficit Disorder" or ADD. But I know enough to know they are obsessed, confused and greedy in about that order. What this young boy suffers from is no more than being a normal, heedless and all around great nine-year-old boy. He doesn't have ADD anymore than I have an elephant chained in my back yard. (Yes, I just checked.) What he has is a smart child's ability to multi-task beyond a normal adult's capacity. As adults we are often guilty of projecting our frailties onto the young. We forget that they are more nimble in all things than we are, and we are all too eager in this age of instant advice on any problem to ascribe to the young what is truly a malady confined to the mature.

No section of our society exemplifies this more than the denizens of Big Media whose efforts in spreading fear, uncertainty, doubt and confusion go forward daily with no signs of stopping and fewer signs of shame. Indeed, it is the media, more than any other group, that is happy to spread the myth of ADD / HD (Attention Deficit Disorder / Hyperactivity Disorder) affliction among the young. They are happy to do it because, in a very real way, it protects them from being seen as the single profession in which ADD / HD not only runs riot, but also spreads a virus that threatens the lives and happiness of millions. For many centuries it has been unfashionable in the West to kill the messenger. This convention, along with so many others in the post 9/11 world, may have to be reconsidered.

The recent events here at home in the political circus that is known as "Lots of Democrats Running Around Begging to Be President," and abroad in the collective media hallucinations known as "All is Lost in Iraq Because We Won," underscore the fact that ADD has infected and taken over the media.

The terrible truth is not that so many people working in the media are biased towards wanting the United States to fail all the time and everywhere (although there are more than a few who do). That is merely one of many obvious truths about media people. No, the terrible truth is that nearly 100 percent of media professionals are infected to the marrow of their bones with ADD / HD. And not just the "stars" but the whole pack of them, root and branch.

Before getting down to cases, let's look at the symptoms (with examples) of ADD / HD as listed at Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder or "CHADD" (for those who just can't pay attention to long names struggling to become clumsy acronyms.)

AD/HD predominately inattentive type: (AD/HD-I)
*Fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes:
Reuters
* Has difficulty sustaining attention:
National Public Radio.
* Does not appear to listen:
Ann Coulter
* Struggles to follow through on instructions:
Jayson Blair
* Has difficulty with organization:
Howell Raines
* Avoids or dislikes tasks requiring sustained mental effort:
Larry King
* Loses things:
The BBC
* Is easily distracted.
Foreign Press Corp in War Zone once checked into comfy hotels.
* Is forgetful in daily activities:
Fact-checkers across the media spectrum

AD/HD predominately hyperactive-impulsive type: (AD/HD-HI)
* Fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in chair:
Chris Matthews
* Has difficulty remaining seated:
Geraldo
* Runs about or climbs excessively:
Robert Scheer
* Difficulty engaging in activities quietly:
Fox News
* Acts as if driven by a motor:
The New York Times
* Talks excessively:
Charlie Rose
* Blurts out answers before questions have been completed:
Bill O'Reilly
* Difficulty waiting or taking turns:
Bill O'Reilly
* Interrupts or intrudes upon others:
Bill O'Reilly in a trifecta.

AD/HD combined type: (AD/HD-C)
* Individual meets both sets of inattention and hyperactive/impulsive criteria:
ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, FOX, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, LAT, WAPO, TIME NEWSWEEK, etc. and so forth ad nauseum.

The examples above are only well-known personalities and other growths of the American Media Entity (AME). What is true for the stars above is also true for all those members of AME that labor in the mud below. They have all been infected with ADD/HD and very few are seeking to get well. What they are seeking is to become even more infected so that someday they might get some air-time or ink. Ambition in the media is so viscious because the stakes are so vacuous.

The truth is that most revel in their ADD / HD media jobs simply because these are the only jobs and careers open to them that promise both wealth and fame. Indeed, the AME has, over the years, evolved slowly into the only industry that would accept these hapless personality types as employees. Software companies wouldn't use people with ADD / HD to write programs -- with the possible exception of the Microsoft Windows team. Transportation companies run rigorous background checks and random drugs tests on current and prospective employees; this means that those who labor in the media cess pits would have to spend six months getting clean before they could even hope to drive a FedEx truck. Not likely, is it?

And would you agree to have your house designed and built by an architectural firm composed of Maureen Dowd and Anne Coulter? Not unless you were planning to live in an updated version of the Winchester Mystery House where every allegation and doorway opened into a cavern of twisted little mental passages all alike.

Media types are, by heredity and training, unemployable in any other industry you can think of except, perhaps, sanitation and politics. It takes a special kind of team to design a program that requires the talking head to say: "In Iraq today, yet another innocent, much-loved American soldier was shot in the head by a member of the Resistance. Is this another step into the deepening quagmire of an administration with yellowcake on its face? We'll interview the soldier's weeping grandmother in just a few minutes. But right now, is fast food fat food?"

One look at how the screens of the various news stations appear is enough to tell you somebody at the company has severe ADD / HD and wants to get you down into the hole that they're in: Main image in the center, logo somewhere, caption identifying current blathering expert and current 30 second issue; weather and / or time on the left; promo for some upcoming blatherfest on the right; and beneath it all the ubiquitous crawl slips by giving you a bit of this story and a chunk of that story, neither of which has the ghost of a chance of ever being explicated in any detail on the main screen. Gaze at this while there's a war on and you will have a terminal case of ADD / HD before a statue falls in Baghdad. Guaranteed.

Front pages of newspapers are little improvement these days. They've been infected by the graphics uber alles syndrome too. Above the fold or below the fold or across the fold. All these have some arcane meaning. Little graphs of infolets. Small factoids of this or that. And over all the pall of snappy fuzzed-up color photographs of the latest atrocities in Iraq, Niger, or Bakersfield attached to a few short teasing paragraphs that jump to somewhere inside where you will be forced to find the information somewhere in a sea of banal ads of all sizes and shapes for everything you do not need.

Magazines are worse still with the triumph of two magazine support departments that should never be given any power over a magazine: art directors and circulation departments.

It is well-known among magazine editors that most magazine art directors have not been able to read anything other than the figures on their expense checks for decades. Instead, magazine art directors have fallen in love with video games and transferred those elements wholesale to magazine layout and cover design. The result inside and out are pages devoted to the unrestrained display of "Pix & Fonts." Within these garish displays the actual content of the article may be discovered by the dedicated reader, but he will have to take time for lunch while puzzling it out. In this brave new world art directors depend on readers being as functionally illiterate as they are, and treat them to page after page of jumbled images and typefaces that leave the eye satiated and the brain befuddled.

Now add to this dog's dinner layout style the rise of the circulation directors who, sometime at the beginning of the 1990s were told of a study that said people like to see a lot of numbers on magazine covers. This claim was enough to enable circulation directors to palm off slumping sales on the fact that there weren't "enough numbers on the cover." Hence, you now see, especially among women's magazines, the worst offenders, covers that contain no less than three and possibly seven sets of numbers on the cover. The theory is that if there are a lot more numbers than words, the potential reader's ADD will be overpowered by the HD of the cover, and they will buy the magazine safe in the assumption that they will not be asked to read anything inside.

Talk radio on the AM dial is a classic case study in media professionals with severe ADD/HD seeking to reach out and infect the entire country. A few mind bending minutes listening to Michael Savage will establish this point with the force of a power drill being run into your ear at high speed. Then, of course, you need to stick around for the 15 commercials in three minutes that support this drivel.

"And hey, what about that web site?"

The Web is, of course, the Metropolitan Opera of Short Attention Span Theatre. You'll know you are not a part of that if you are reading this sentence. Most of those who started reading are long gone for one reason or the other. They clicked away long, long ago.

Yes, on the Web factoids, links, brief opinions, quick takes and hyperlinks that open in new windows while pop-ups bloom above, below, to the right, to the left and within you and without you are what we crave. Manic clicking is what we do and few of us are above it. Few work in the long form while many just point to the next click. And of course, for those who just can't take it any longer there is always "Cntrl-Q." Yes, it can seem like the Web, the Net, the Infospace of a Billion Lies is the ultimate source of the epidemic of ADD / HD. You could think that. I have thought that. But, as usual, I could be wrong. You too.

Seen from the surface, the Web is a vast uncountable, unsearchable and unknowable infinity of links and texts in which we see, for the first time, everything that we, as human beings, are. We see the best of ourselves and the worst of ourselves. We see the greatest works of art and the most degraded images of hate, lust and atrocity. It is the first medium in which any number can play, which has almost no economic barriers to entry, and as a result becomes, in time, the perfect mirror of our souls at this time and in this place.

The Web can be, and most often is, the most trivial of our mediums. But it is also, at some times and in some way, the corrective to all the other mediums that have gone before and still exist around us.

And while it exemplifies the symptoms and effects of ADD / HD better than any other medium, it also holds within it, like the mold on bread or the pox on the cow, the cure for what ails us. As was said once a couple of years ago, the Web can "fact check your ass." It not only can, but it does, as the media moguls with billions invested in extending their ADD / HD virus to the population at large now discover with distressing regularity.

It is one thing to scheme and struggle and manipulate your way into an executive position or an anchor's chair at a major network, it is quite another to have your performance in those roles analyzed, criticized and eviscerated within 24 hours in front of an audience of thousands of your peers and thousands of critics. Media Mogul, Anchor, or Pundit: they used to be such a cushy jobs. Jobs for life. And for a fading few they remain so, but all can see that the age of the anchor, the expert expert, and the preening pundit are drawing to a close.

It may well be that the major media outlets will stagger on. In fact it is a certainty. What has changed is that fact that not every adult in the United States is ready and willing to submit to having their attention span shortened or their activity hyped by the now creaking theories of how major media can make its money.

That Big Media still believes there is money to be made by shoveling its ADD / HD into the collective consciousness of America is manifest in the continuing race of television, radio, and magazines towards the bottom of the social barrel. But when they get there will they find the intelligent and affluent waiting to buy their sponsors' products? Or will they find themselves increasingly dependent on the mouthbreathers of Maxim magazine and applauders of Dr. Phil to chip in and do the Dew and buy the pickups that will keep their cash flow positive? That they've chosen to go for the latter is evident by the programming choices and editorial decisions that are clearer and clearer with every passing day. But sooner or later, like all those infected with addictions, they will bottom. And then they will know that they finally have to get clean. One of the great virtues of the Web is that it is hastening that day.

The smart part of their market, as the Web grows, is quite obviously moving away from Big Media on the one hand and demanding more substance on the other. This is the audience that is starved for substance, that is successful at their jobs, that is affluent, that wants information in depth and not just the latest soundbite or factoid. They are, in short, one of the prime targets for advertising, the mother's milk of Big Media.

They're not easily fooled and they have the tools, at last, to talk among themselves. In short, except for backward glances that sneer at Big Media's infection with ADD / HD they've determined to look at the prime sources, to do their own thinking, to consult a number of background documents. They've left the youth market, with its towering debt and low cash flow, to those who want to sell soda pop and infosquibs. They've become, in a very real sense, awakened from the decades of increasing ADD / HD that make up the Big Media mosaic. They've taken the admonition of Scoop Nisker (" If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." ) to heart. They are basing what they think and what they buy and how they feel on deeper sources than Big Media is capable of supplying.

And by the way, next year they are electing, or re-electing, a President of the United States. Odds are they'll go for a candidate who can stay the course and whose policies are not driven by the daily ADD / HD of the Big Media.

MegaPixels / MiniSize / MaxiPrice

This is one of those products skillfully marketed to make most people feel bad that they could never, ever justify buying it. It's the ultimate James Bond digital camera and it sets those with high-tech fever everywhere shuddering just to look at it. Dynamism, a web site devoted to high end object lust sums up the features:

The Sony Qualia 016 is a digital camera measuring 2.72 x 0.66 x 0.94 inches and weighing 50g. In order to eliminate the blur caused by tiny movements of the hand, the 016 takes up to 4 pictures in very rapid succession and then combines them into one image.

The 016 is made from the highest quality alloy, the Bond-like Qualia 016 has a built-in .55" TFT, records in JPG or TIFF, has 4x digital zoom, and uses Sony's MemoryStick Duo to store photos (64mb stick included). The 2mpixel 1/2.7 progressive scan CCD records at 1600x1200. The Qualia 016 is sold as a kit and includes the case, flash unit, timer remote unit, video out unit, telephoto lens, wide angle lens, and battery charger.

QUAL-016 Sony Qualia 016 kit (Special order only - no returns or cancellations accepted): $3,875.00

I am especially fond of the "no returns or cancellations accepted" notion. Just like the "Joke" IRS form popular a few years back: "How much money did you make?"
( ________________ )
Send it in."

When it comes to food the American tradition has always been, "if it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing." Tauton Publishing's "Fine Cooking" is a magazine dedicated to this propostition with a ferocious intensity. Case in point is Linda Weber's The Only Peanut Butter Cookie You'll Ever Want

Short form: "For a double hit of flavor, sandwich a chocolate-flecked peanut cream between crunchy-light cookies"

Long form:

Peanut butter and a good cookie are two of my favorite things, so for me, combining them is a natural. The trouble is, the traditional round peanut butter cookie with the crossed-fork imprint never really thrilled me. So I decided it was high time to develop my own version. I knew I wanted more, and I wanted it in a sandwich cookie: crunchy-crumbly peanut butter wafers surrounding a creamy filling flecked with roasted peanuts and chopped chocolate.

For the rest and the recipe just click the link above. Warning, browsing the rest of Fine Cooking can be hazardous to your waistline.

THE VALUE OF NOT BEING SEEN

Voice Over: Mr. Saddam Hussein of Presidential Palatial Bunker, Torture Chamber, and Children’s Mass Grave of Baghdad, Iraq, chose a very cunning way of not being seen. When we sent our army in to conquer Iraq, we found that he had gone away on a five year holiday underground somewhere in the Middle East. He had not left any forwarding address, and he had bolted and barred the entire country to prevent us from getting in. However a neighbour told us where he was.

The camera pans around and stops on a obvious looking hut, which blows up. Cut to a palace with a Iraqui Information Minister standing out front

Voice Over: And here is the Minister of Information (he blows up, leaving just his boots. Cut to a shack in the desert) Here is where he once lived (shack blows up - cut to a building) And this is where the government of Syria lived who refused to speak to us (it blows up). so did Hamas who lived here....(shot of a house - it blows up) and Osama here.....(another building blows up) and of course here.....(a series of various atom and hydrogen bombs at the moment of impact)

Yahoo! News - Sports Photos - AP

World champion freediver Tanya Streeter swims up to the surface at a depth of 150 feet after reaching 400 feet/122 metres and breaking a new world record in the Variable Weight category of freediving Monday, July 21, 2003 off the coast of Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Streeter descended to the pre-determined depth on a weighted sled and swam to the surface without assistance.

The New York Daily News reports that:Rather Ratings Crash Causes Mystify Boss

HOLLYWOOD - CBS News President Andrew Heyward admitted yesterday that he had no answers to why the "CBS Evening News with Dan Rather" continues to struggle in the ratings.

But he stood by Rather, who has been at the helm of the newscast since 1981.

The newscast runs a poor third among the networks and a few weeks ago logged its lowest ratings in at least a decade, if not ever.

"I'm frankly a little bit puzzled by it," Heyward told members of the Television Critics Association yesterday.

Could the cause be pilot error? Or could Rather be the proverbial canary?

First to fall over when the atmosphere is less than perfect
Your sensibilities are shaken by the slightest defect
You live you life like a canary in a coalmine
You get so dizzy even walking in a straight line."
- - Sting

I have ransacked the encyclopedias
And slid my fingers among topics and titles
Looking for you.

And the answer comes slow.
There seems to be no answer.

I shall ask the next banana peddler the who and the why of it.

Or - the iceman with his iron tongs gripping a clear cube
in summer sunlight - maybe he will know.

- - The great American poet, Carl Sandberg, who died this day in 1967,

Via the newsletter of Today in Literature.

Stephen Den Beste, this medium's master of the Long Form, has written what is currently the finest review of the reasons we are in Iraq, and how they fit into the War on Terrorism. His essay / outline on Iraq, Yellowcake, Liberals, Lies and Terrorism is now, for those who care, required reading. Excerpts cannot do it justice, but....

There has never been any big mystery about the overall scope of the war, the kinds of things which would have to be accomplished over decades before it would end, or the kinds of things we'd have to do in order to win it. Long time readers will recognize that the above outline is a summary of things I've been writing about ever since the attack in September of 2001, and I'm not the only one. The only people who haven't known about this big picture are those who've been in denial all this time about just how big a problem we face.

Those who are claiming that the issue of Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction was the one-and-only reason why we went to war in Iraq, and that the claim about uranium from Niger was the one-and-only piece of evidence used to justify it, are engaging in historical revisionism which approaches hallucination. But it's hardly surprising that they're hallucinating about this, because they also hallucinated 2 million Iraqi refugees, hundreds of thousand of Iraqi civilians killed when we carpet-bombed all the major cities, a huge uprising of the "Arab Street", a vast and palpable increase in terrorist attacks all over the world and especially against the US, and a military quagmire in Iraq including weeks of bloody street fighting in Baghdad which would result in thousands of American and British dead, and ultimately to ignominious retreat. The reason they're concentrating on this issue now is that they have no other, and in the long run it's actually going to increase their political marginalization. It's a sorry statement about them that they can find nothing else to discuss.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into Central Park...Christo Reconsidered

The audacious and totally original artist Christo (and his fiery collaborator-wife Jeanne-Claude) are back now, with the City's approval, to install "The Gates"; their project in Central Park.

While the date isn't finally set, Christo hopes "The Gates" project will be installed as early as 2005.Christo plans to place his "Gates" along the 23 miles of Central Park's paths. Not just five or 10 or 100 but a virtual Roman legion of 7,500 gates: 16-foot-high marching metal stanchions with luminous, saffron-colored banners hanging from their crossbars, waving and billowing in the breeze.

For the complete background on this stunning project, go to The Gates Project

Grizzly Giant, Mariposa Grove -
33 ft. Diam. (Getty Museum)

Carleton E. Watkins
American,
Yosemite, California,
1861Albumen print
Dome-topped: 20 1/2 x 15 5/8 in

The tree was manifestly a very fine one, but we felt disappointed in regard to the apparent size. . . . On looking more attentively and minutely at the photograph, we discovered a group of men at the base of the tree! They were so small that at first, they had escaped notice, but being once seen their effect upon the picture was magical . . . and we felt that we looked indeed upon a grizzly giant.

The Woz is back with a killer app.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to create locator network

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Apple Computer Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak is turning his creative wheels again.Make that his Wheels of Zeus Inc. - a Los Gatos startup he founded in January 2002 to develop wireless technologies that would be "helpful to people's everyday lives." The company, which has been working in stealth mode, announced its management team Monday and unveiled some, but not much, of its product details.The company hopes to create a wireless network of location-monitoring tags and base stations to help people keep track of pets, children, briefcases, or other wayward things. The network will use a low-power, long-range radio technology - the same 900-megahertz spectrum used on many cordless phones - along with global positioning satellite technologies.

From Woz's: Wheels of Zeus | Company Overview

wOzNet also enables the wOzNet Community network that can transparently mobilize an entire community to help locate a person, pet or thing that's not where it should be. Businesses participating in wOzNet Community can provide an important public service to the community at no additional cost. And wOzNet grows organically so a community can be as large as the nation or even the world.

If you had to pick one person from the last half-century of computing who was consistently brilliant, innovative and cared deeply about the welfare of the human race, Steve Wozniak would make just about everyone's short list. If this man isn't awarded the Medal of Freedom in the next five years, something is seriously amiss.

Memo to the Republican Party:

Let me begin by informing you that, with the single exception of Rudolph Giuliani , I have never voted for a Republican in my life. And I've voted in over 15 national elections, including the last Presidential election. This, if our current President stays the course, is about to change. As you know, I am not the only one. If I was on the fence, the last few months of carping and backbiting have pushed me off.

I have "Yellowcake" fatigue and compassion fatigue. I have post-September 11th Chronic Fatigue with Appeasers Syndrome. In short, I have so many things going on in my political nature that it is best to say, surveying the current crop of Democratic candidates for President, I have had it up to here with the whole baying pack of them.

And yet... and yet... There is a chance, a small chance, that the nation could end up with a Democrat as President after the elections, and with Democrats in control of the Congress. A victory such as this will, in the short or long run, cause the United States to lose a city of some size to her enemies.

I am unwilling to consign thousands of my countrymen to death in order to bring the current crop of Democrats back into power. Call me cynical and unsupportive of a Democrat's right to hold any sort of power at this time, but that's just the way I feel. Face it, they haven't been stepping up to the bar and making us feel very secure about the future, have they?

Therefore, I feel that it is necessary for the Republicans to take out heavy insurance on the next election. There is only one scenario that seems to me to fit

Continued...

"We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar."
--T. S. Eliot

"The administration's critics can't offer any realistic alternative to its worldwide offensive against terror. All they can propose is drift under some other name -- containment, multilateralism. Any high-sounding euphemism for inaction will do. They invite a devastation and call it peace. Once again the straw men multiply, arguing for drift over mastery, doubt over faith, for anything but action, risk, sacrifice, for anything but a forward strategy that takes this war to the enemy. Instead, the straw men just rustle in the wind." --Paul Greenberg

What book publishing needs now is a long hard look at itself. One publisher comments in: Nothing Random

''The fact is, Random House needs to make money,'' said Gina Centrello, sounding, as she often does, both determined and defensive. Three months had passed since Olson named Centrello president and publisher of what, after some confusion, is now called the Random House Publishing Group. Centrello, 44, is small and dark and was wearing a navy pantsuit and many shiny diamonds as she picked over a lobster salad during lunch at the tony restaurant Town.

Seems to me that Random House could start making money by cutting Ms. Centrello's salary with a meat axe and swapping out tuna fish for lobster salad. You can be sure that 80% of Random House's authors last saw a lobster salad when Eisenhower was President.
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UPDATE: More reactions, insights and discussion of the Times' article can be found on 2 Blowhards.

And, at the same site, you can read a superior encapsulation about how Bestse