JEFF GOLDSTEIN GIVES TOM TOMORROW A MAKEOVER. I think that Dan Perkins is a smart guy, and not necessarily a knee-jerker in general, but Goldstein’s every bit as fair as the original Perkins cartoon was.

JANIS IAN ON THE RECORDING INDUSTRY, courtesy of Reid Stott.

DIDN’T I HEAR SOMETHING ABOUT THIS IN NOSTRADAMUS, or in a Weekly World News article on predictions from Delphi, or something?

Heh, and we just thought it was some sort of symbolic statement.

THE WAGES OF CRYING WOLF: Brian Carnell reflects on apocalyptic predictions and pronounces himself unimpressed with the latest crop.

WELL, I HAVEN’T MOVED on the latest Blogosphere ecosystem ranking, though Steven Den Beste is catching up. More power to him: he rules.

I’m a bit troubled by Bear’s suggestion that my proposal for open traffic counters will accelerate the separation of the Blogosphere into non-egalitarian spheres. I certainly hadn’t thought of that as a possible consequence of my proposal, and I don’t really see that it follows. Of course, my proposal was aimed more at big sites like Slate and The American Prospect than at bloggers, though that’s okay too.

UPDATE: Oops. I misread that. It’s Clay Shirky’s suggestion about counters and inequality, not the Bear’s.

RATIONALITY IS BREAKING OUT:

The just-released Arab Human Development Report, commissioned by the United Nations and drafted by a group of Middle Eastern intellectuals, utterly confirms the deep pathology gripping the Arab world that Western analysts have long noted. Yet what was truly astounding about the account was less its findings than the honest acknowledgement that Arab problems are largely self-created.

Khalaf Hunaidi, who oversaw the economic portion of the analysis, remarked, “It’s not outsiders looking at Arab countries. It’s Arabs deciding for themselves.” And what they decided is sadly ample proof of Arab decline. Per capita income is dropping in the Arab world, even as it rises almost everywhere else. Productivity is stagnant; research and development are almost absent. Science and technology remain backward. Politics is infantile. And culture, in thrall to Islamic fundamentalism and closed to the ideas that quicken the intellectual life of the rest of the world, is “lagging behind” advanced nations, Hunaidi says.

Yet this novel panel of Arab intellectuals, remarkably, didn’t attribute the dismal condition of Middle Eastern society to the usual causes that Western intellectuals and academics have made so popular: racism and colonialism, multinational exploitation, Western political dominance, and all the other -isms and -ologies that we’ve grown accustomed to hear about from the Arabists on university campuses.

Instead, the investigators cited the subjugation of women that robs Arab society of millions of brilliant minds. Political autocracy — either in the service of or in opposition to Islamic fundamentalism — ensures censorship, stifles creativity, or promotes corruption. Talented scientists and intellectuals are likely to emigrate and then stay put in the West, since there is neither a cultural nor an economic outlet for their talents back home, but sure danger if they prove either honest or candid. The Internet remains hardly used. Greece, a country 30 times smaller than the Arab world, translates five times the number of books yearly.

The report didn’t give precise reasons for the growing Arab hostility toward the United States, but its findings lend credence to almost everything brave scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes have been saying for years.

I can’t help but feel that the failure of the Ladenites is emboldening rational thinkers in the Arab world. There may be hope yet.

PATRICK RUFFINI CHANNELS JAMES LILEKS in this ode to Target. Yeah, it’s great, and it’s cheap. But if this keeps up, the tinfoil hat crowd will start saying that the Blogosphere is controlled by Dayton-Hudson, instead of the Military Industrial Complex, or the Trilateral Commission, or the Elders of Zion, or whoever they’re blaming this week.

PLEASE HELP RICH HAILEY find a date. It’s waay past time, judging from this post.

HERE’S A WEBLOG THAT’S (MOSTLY) ABOUT frequent flyer miles and airline accommodations.

RADLEY BALKO has the Bush / Gore thing figured out, with maps no less. Hint: It’s all about soft drinks.

CHARLES JOHNSON HAS AN INTERESTING ITEM on British academic anti-semitism. There’s an email address in the comments, too.

I think it may be the same story as this one, but I’m not sure.

THE ARAB NEWS SAYS BIN LADEN IS DEAD, and echoes the sentiments of a number of warbloggers in its assessment:

With an ego the size of Mount Everest, Osama Bin Laden would not have, could not have, remained silent for so long. He had always liked to take credit even for things he had nothing to do with. So, would he remain silent for nine months during which his illusions have been shattered one after another? If his adjutants can smuggle a video to Al-Jazeera in Qatar, why couldn’t he?

Even if he were still alive physically, Bin Laden is dead politically. He may live some more years in the hide-outs of the tribal zone in Pakistan just as some Nazi fugitives survived in the remote areas of Argentina and Paraguay.

And check out this assessment:

The fifth element that made Bin Ladenism possible was the West’s, especially America’s, perceived weakness if not actual cowardice. A joke going round the militant Islamist circles until last year was that the only thing the Americans would do if attacked was to sue the attackers in court. That element no longer exists. The Americans, supported by the largest coalition in history, have shown that they are prepared to use force against their enemies even if that means a long war with no easy victory in sight.

Hey, I thought that when America fought back, that just added to the problem. Guess not!

Ben Sheriff has some interesting observations on this article — which is worth reading in full, as are his comments. He notes that Saudi efforts to export Wahabbism get a pass in this otherwise-warblogesque assessment.

HERE’S A REPORT that LAX shooter Hadayet met with an Osama bin Laden deputy. Hmm.

FRODO BAGGINS HAS BEEN CHARGED WITH WAR CRIMES by the International Criminal Court:

Baggins was responsible for casting the Ring of Power (otherwise known as the One Ring or simply the One) into the fires of Mount Orodruin in Mordor (“Where The Shadows Lie!” according to the Mordor Tourism Board), thereby destroying both the Ring and Sauron’s long-standing hope to bring heretofore fractious and inefficient Middle Earth under the central political control of the Dark Tower. Without the Ring, Sauron’s legions (defensive in nature and made necessary by the Lords of the West’s aggression, according to Barad-Dur spokesmen) of orcs, wolves, trolls, and “evil” Men lost the will to fight and became helpless in the face of the armies of the West. Millions were slaughtered as a direct and immediate consequence of the destruction of the Ring. . . .

Both Sauron and Saruman claim that their persecution by Baggins and the Lords of the West is based on their religious beliefs, also clearly in violation of Article 8. With the wanton destruction of the One Ring, Baggins also directly and callously murdered every one of the high priests of the Dark Lord’s religious order, known collectively as the Nazgul.

Don’t miss the photo of pro-Sauron protests at the White House.

UPDATE: A reader is upset that I “gave away the ending” here. Um, while I’m at it, Romeo and Juliet die at the end of the play, too. I mean, who doesn’t know this stuff? Some people, apparently.

THE WORLD WILDLIFE FUND says it’s time to think about colonizing space.

JIM HENLEY has some interesting observations on left-wing and right-wing varieties of anti-Americanism.

PUNDITWATCH IS UP!

MATT WELCH writes in the National Post that Bush is losing the benefit of the doubt. He says that it’s because too many PR gimmicks are undermining public trust, and he blames Karl Rove.

I think there’s a lot to that. As I wrote week before last, keeping people behind the war effort means retaining their trust. And it’s hard to retain their trust when you’re engaging in gimmicks and evasions. There’s been way too much of that (and way too little visible action) from the White House lately, and the Administration is paying the price. The problem is that gimmicks work during normal times, when people don’t much care about politics, don’t pay much attention, and — because they don’t expect much from politicians anyway — don’t get too angry about attempts to mislead them. But all that changes in wartime. You need trust — and to keep it, you actually have to be trustworthy. You can fudge that for a little while, but not very long, and probably not for as long as overconfident political operatives think they can.

I wrote some months ago that if Bush took a tumble on this it would happen very fast once it started. I don’t think he’s to that point yet, but I think he’s getting closer. Is anyone in the Administration paying attention?

ANDREW SULLIVAN writes about economic schadenfreude. But he suggests that the economy won’t make much of a political issue:

After the crash of 1987, the Democrats and liberals made every effort to portray the 1980s as a decade of greed, fomented by selfish Republicans. But that is politically much harder to do with the 1990s. It was an era when the Democrats finally managed to persuade Americans that they could manage the economy. Today, the Democrats don’t have any deep incentive to alter that perception. That’s why they want to link the current corporate excess with a Republican administration – a strategy undermined solely by the facts.

THE KAUS-ENRON CONNECTION exposed.

FRIENDLY FIRE IN AFGHANISTAN: If this interests you, you should be reading Flit. He’s got steady updates, and is covering this like nobody else.

THE PENTAGON’S PYSCHOLOGICAL WARFARE EFFORT is moving to Omaha, according to Geitner Simmons.

Or maybe that’s just what they want us to think. . . .

Or, maybe they’re just Moby Grape fans.

COURTESY OF CHRIS BERTRAM AT JUNIUS here’s a link to the Economist article on weblogs.

WILLIAM J. BROAD reports in The New York Times that the federal government is planning mass smallpox vaccinations. This seems like a good idea to me, far superior to the lame vaccinate-just-a-few plan floated a couple of months back. It suggests that either (1) there’s clearer thinking at the top all of a sudden; or (2) the risk of a smallpox attack now seems higher than it did. The former is good news; the latter is not so good.

NEW TROUBLE IN ALGERIA. It’s not getting a lot of press play, though I did see it covered on CNN the other day.