DAWN OLSEN has decided to start offering sex advice. Well, now that Rachael Klein’s graduated, the position of sex-advisor to the Blogosphere is open, I suppose.

FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH. Airport security is a dangerous joke. You’ve said it. I’ve said it. Now the people who run airports are saying it. But will “underperformin’ Norman” Mineta listen?

INTERESTED IN THE COMING SEASON’S TV SHOWS? Me neither. But the Weisblogger has actually managed to sit through the pilots of five new shows and reports back.

Just reminds me why I love the Internet.

TIME’S COMICS REVIEWER, Andrew Arnold, gives a boffo review to Ted Rall’s book. He says “Rall reveals that ‘contrary to the propaganda back home, the U.S.A.F. bombed anything and everything.'” If you’re wondering how that can possibly be true given that the latest civilian casualty estimates are even lower than we’d heard before, well, I guess that means that we were just bombing, you know, the enemy. Apparently the Afghan people knew this, too, as we also learn from Rall that “Reasoning that the odds of being hit are slim, people learn to disassociate the sound of bombs from death. Instead they worry about the gangs of heavily-armed thugs who rob and murder with no recourse.”

In other words, Afghans are more worried about the local thugs than about the U.S. bombs that Rall is decrying, since they recognize that they’re not much of a threat to civilians. Afghan civilians have learned to “disassociate the sound of bombs from death.” Rall apparently hasn’t, given his complaints about the bombing (and Arnold’s statement that we bombed “Afghanistan” rather than “Al Qaeda” or “The Taliban” suggest that he’s too dumb, or too dishonest, to figure out what the Afghans knew). Yet neither Rall, nor Arnold, notices the contradiction. No surprise there. Interestingly, I didn’t even know about this until I noticed a reference in Flit. I guess the “ignore Ted Rall” campaign has been working. Too bad Time didn’t get the word.

By the way, there’s a click-through to email Arnold.

UPDATE: Bill Herbert fact-checks Ted Rall’s ass and includes a link to an email exchange he’s had with Rall over Afghan casualties and Rall’s inability to find a source to support his rather inflated claims. He also discusses Rall’s latest column.

THE JOY OF SETS: Jay Manifold has some shrewd thoughts on why politics is getting harder to figure out.

JIM BENNETT WRITES THAT Will Hutton is the new voice of Euro-LePenism. Hutton, readers may recall, is the author of a book called The World We’re In, which shows sufficient hostility to America that The Economist likened it to a 1950s Soviet tract.

Bennett is less kind.

READER RICHARD AUBREY writes to explain why nobody took the lessons about FBI ineptitude that the Ruby Ridge and Waco debacles made plain:

The reason the FBI got away with that is that nobody cared. Not just the FBI. Nobody in the media, the chattering classes, the universities, gave a rodent’s patootie about this. You will recall the WaPo’s view of Pentacostals and Fundamentalists? Poor, dumb, and easily led. When the doo-doo hit the fan, their excuse (the first attempt) was that they were only saying what everybody knew. What happened on Ruby Ridge and at Waco was no more than those people deserved, was the general view. You could get called a redneck really, really, quickly if you mentioned something about Vicki Weaver.

So the FBI had nothing to worry about. My guess is they probably knew it. Now, even looking at a mosque while driving by…. That’s a different story.

This is probably right. Sadly, if you look at it rationally, the smart thing to do was nothing. Go arrest a bunch of Arabs and turn out to be wrong — or just unable to prove beyond any doubt that you were right — in predicting that they were going to commit a gigantic terrorist attack, and you’d lose your job for sure. Fail to arrest them, and . . . um, well, nobody’s lost a job over this yet, right?

THIS NEWSWEEK STORY supports the theory that 9/11 wasn’t so much a failure to gather intelligence as a failure to properly make use of intelligence we already had.

Meanwhile the USA Patriot Act, and almost all the intelligence-related “wish list” items we’ve seen from the FBI and CIA, are about gathering intelligence, not analyzing or acting on it.

Heads must roll.

A WINNING STRATEGY FOR THE PALESTINIANS. But do they care more about winning? Or killing Jews? And maybe Americans?

STEVEN DEN BESTE says that global warming is the biggest snail darter in history. He zeroes in (scroll down) on another scam in a way that suggests he’s good at spotting bait-and-switch operations.

UPDATE: Allison disagrees, but I’m not persuaded. I do think that there are people who are far more anti-development than they are pro-environment. They’re like the communists who were angry not because so many were poor, but because some were ricH.

ANOTHER UPDATE: But Drudge is reporting that the Administration is about to do a one-eighty on global warming.

I can’t figure this administration out. It’s getting to be like Clinton without the bimboes.

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Ed Driscoll says that this is a preemptive strike aimed at taking an issue away from the Democrats for the ’04 elections, and that it’s a mistake.

MATT WELCH has sobering reflections on the latest Afghan casualty estimates.

KATIE GRANJU HAS A NEW ESSAY, inspired by her recent time in Childrens’ Hospital with a very sick child. But there’s more to it than just a tale of woe.

SFSU UPDATE: I just ran across this comment by Armed Liberal, who feels that the SFSU administration is still more anxious to look evenhanded than to actually be fair — since fairness would involve punishing the pro-Palestinian rioters. A pretty good analysis here, especially this comment:

But there is an measurable difference between heated political expression and the politics of violence and intimidation. And it is in the nature of politics in our relatively free nation that it must be free from intimidation and violence; the other side…and there is an other side…sees intimidation and violence as everyday political tools. And, frighteningly, they are extending the kind of politics that we see on the ground in Arafat-controlled Palestine and bringing a lind of “lite” version of it here.

I would add a challenge to SFSU President Corrigan: put the unedited videotapes of the event out, and make them available on the Web. Then people can judge your actions for themselves. (Link via Gail Davis.)

BRENDAN O’NEILL says that he’s always been anti-Israel, but he’s deeply suspicious of the anti-Israel bandwagon that’s developed recently.

I was never anti-Israel, but I used to have some sympathy for the Palestinians. I don’t any more. I saw them dancing in the streets on 9/11, and I’ve been paying close attention to their words and their actions since.

ORRIN JUDD fact-checks Maureen Dowd and Mary McGrory by comparing their complaints about FBI timidity now with their complaints about FBI storm-troopering last fall. He’s especially good in taking down Dowd’s usual smarmy war-of-the-sexes slant on the Rowley memo. Does Dowd’s contract say that she has to find (or create) that angle on every story?

THIS WASHINGTON POST COLUMN ON THE NSA is right to point up the shortage of linguists: “Last September, the number of linguists fluent in the primary languages of Afghanistan — Pashto and Dari — could be counted on one hand with fingers left over, a senior intelligence official told me. The problem is not new: When U.S. troops went into Haiti in 1994, for example, the NSA had only one Haitian Creole linguist.”

On the other hand, this suggestion is a bit late: “One way to lessen the chance of future attack by al Qaeda or similar groups would be to create a sort of national linguistic reserve force along the lines of the military reserve.” Actually, the U.S. government has been paying people to learn obscure foreign languages for years, via a scholarship program aimed at addressing precisely this problem. People aren’t subject to call-up, as in the military, but I’m sure that the agencies could have (and probably did) call on some of these people in the aftermath of 9/11.

The real problem with communications intelligence is that you have to know what and who you’re listening for. If your other intelligence isn’t up to that, you have to throw out a dragnet that’s likely to draw in irrelevancies while missing the important stuff.

TIM BLAIR points to this kiddie game called “Islamic Fun.” If it were made up as a parody by Americans it would be called a viciously bigoted slur on a religion of peace.

Since it’s by and for Muslims, it’s not even noticed. Apparently, some things are beyond parody.

THE WEEKLY JAMES has uncovered another example of Orwellian P.C., this time in the New York schools. And he’s saying that it makes homeschooling look more attractive. I’m hearing more and more stuff like this.

In fact, I’m hearing more and more criticism of the public schools and their bureaucracy from non-usual suspects. For example, Jesse Fox Mayshark (who could, and probably should, write for The American Prospect, or at least its cooler online version) is endorsing charter schools with this observation:

I don’t agree with Van Hilleary about many things. Or Lamar Alexander, for that matter. I’m not impressed with the campaigns the two Republican blowhards are running for their respective offices—governor and U.S. Senate—and I think it will be too bad for the state of Tennessee and its citizens if either man gets elected.

But having said that, I can’t help agreeing with both of them on one thing: charter schools. For a variety of political reasons, most of them connected to the influence of teachers’ lobbies on the Democratic party, an issue that should be a natural rallying point for progressives and liberals has been ceded in Tennessee almost entirely to Republicans. . . .

I hate to be cynical, especially since I have a lot of friends and family members who teach in both public and private schools, but the biggest reason for institutional resistance to charter schools appears to be simple turf protection. Charter schools by their nature are supposed to exist somewhat outside the current public education hierarchy. They are public schools, but they are not entirely part of any public school system. People who run public school systems don’t tend to like that idea.

The educational bureaucracy has managed to disconnect itself so thoroughly from reality that it’s getting attacked even from the Left now, making real reform much more likely. Hey — maybe there’s hope for reforming the FBI, too!

UPDATE: See this post by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, too.

DESPITE MY CRITICISM OF THE FBI, I have to note that some of my former students are flourishing there. And they’re damned good — and in some cases rather unconventional — students. But the FBI has always tended to have really good people at street level and really lousy people in mid- and upper management. That seems to be the lesson of this inquiry into the Bureau’s failures before 9/11.

One problem is that although agents face punishment for failure, higher-ups seldom do — and the Bureau never does. I remember Louis Freeh noting that his budget went way up (at a time when other budgets weren’t doing that) after he was raked over the coals during investigations of the Ruby Ridge and Waco debacles. If this was the penalty for failure, he remarked, it wasn’t so bad.

Ruby Ridge and Waco were, in fact, clear evidence that the FBI was badly managed — and particularly that it was inept at dealing with people of, ahem, strong religious beliefs. The problems revealed in the investigations of those failures were not addressed, except in an ass-covering sense, and the lesson to the Bureau was that even major national scandals wouldn’t produce any real accountability.

You prove you’re serious in these things by firing people and cutting their budgets. Nothing else matters — it’s correctly interpreted as mere noise.

LINK REORGANIZATION: A reader writes to ask why Virginia Postrel isn’t in the Big Journalism group, since she writes for the New York Times and all.

My thinking was that only corporate blogs go there. (Okay, I stretched a point with the L.A. Examiner, but it’s going to be a newspaper, so. . . ) Virginia’s a big journalist, but (like Josh Marshall) she has a blog that’s freestanding. If, like Kaus, she “takes the Boeing” and goes the in-house, corporate-sellout, big-bucks blogging route, I’ll move her into Big Journalism.

And why’s The American Times in the Big Journalism group? Just to keep the rest of ’em from getting swelled heads.

THE RIAA has stumbled upon a an approach that may just solve their problems.

YASMEEN GHAURI UPDATE: A bunch of readers have written to inform me that Yasmeen Ghauri is only ethnically Pakistani (on her father’s side) and is actually Canadian. That’s what I get for only googling her image. I had seen some puff-piece bio that gave the impression she was Pakistani, but it was no doubt just an effort to make her seem more exotic than mention of Canadian citizenship would have accomplished. Thanks for correcting me.

Thanks also to the people who pointed out problems in the links. InstaPundit: constantly moving toward perfection, without ever getting very close!

NICK DENTON is doing a lot of gloating today. And he seems to be enjoying it immensely.

KEN LAYNE has a column about India and Pakistan. You know, choosing allies based on “hot bikini models” isn’t as dumb as it may sound. . . .

UDPATE: Then again, Pakistan has Yasmeen Ghauri. Well, but she’s just from there. I’ll bet they don’t have her plastered all over billboards, or sunning by hotel pools in Karachi.

MORE BLOG BOOK NOMINATIONS are up for your consideration and comment.