READER ALEX BENSKY WRITES: “I enjoyed the link to Jonathan Last’s column on Star Wars. In the interests of truth I think you should remind your readers that Star Fleet could destroy both the Empire and the Republic and not break a collective sweat.” Actually, as Steven den Beste points out, the current-day USMC could defeat ’em single-handed.

Back when I was in high school, some of my friends figured that a good high school rifle team was worth at least a battalion of Imperial Stormtroopers, given that the former actually aimed their weapons and understood the concept of cover and concealment, while the latter showed no sign of doing so. Furthermore, that cumbersome armor doesn’t seem to be of any actual protective value.

THE U.N. has asked the Saudi regime that currently governs much of Arabia to end its practice of amputating criminals’ limbs. The Saudi regime says buzz off.

NOT WHAT THE PRESIDENT KNEW, BUT WHY HE DIDN’T KNOW: Robert Musil has some perspective.

CHORTLE. I knew if I kept it up I’d finally get a rise out of ’em.

NAPSTER MAY BE DEAD, but file-sharing is thriving and music-industry download sites are lame, writes Janelle Brown.

JOEL KOTKIN IS A REALLY SMART GUY. His 1989 (I think) book, The Third Century was a terrific debunking of the Japanese-supremacist hysteria sweeping the American financial and political press at the time, and if you read it now you’ll be amazed at its prescience.

Now he says that the newspaper Matt Welch and Ken Layne are starting is likely to succeed. I hope he’s prescient there, too.

OKAY, I WASN’T GOING TO POST ANYMORE, but I realized I had forgotten to follow up with some of the additional Rolling Stone suggestions. The winner, however (as my earlier post may have suggested) was something along the lines of “RS can’t be saved, it’s irretrievably lame.” That said, some other suggestions included, in no particular order, Jonah Goldberg (like Jann Wenner’s really gonna do that), James Lileks, Steven den Beste, multiple votes for perennial blogosphere fave Rachael Klein, and one each for up-and-comers Dawn Olsen and Jim Treacher. Simon Reynolds (no relation) got mentioned, as did Christopher Buckley. And, unsurprisingly, Mark Steyn got several votes.

All of these people would be better than most of those writing for Rolling Stone today. And none have much of a shot (neither do Welch, Layne, or Blair, mentioned earlier.) That says some pretty bad things about Rolling Stone, but not any that we haven’t figured out on our own. To the above I’d add Stacy Osbaum, formerly editor of URB, who’s now freelancing, I think.

Personally, I think the Blogosphere is the Rolling Stone of the 21st century anyway.

UPDATE: Eric Olsen writes that he’s already written for Rolling Stone.

SFSU UPDATE: SFSU’s President copied me on this email he sent to someone else who had attached a copy of my FoxNews column:

Thank you for writing to express your deep concern about the May 7 rally on this campus. The University is unequivocally committed to maintaining both free speech and civility, and we are taking a great many steps to address issues emerging from that event, as well as to provide clear, factual information about it. We have established a web site, “SFSU’s Response to Pro-Israel Pro-Palestine Tensions on Campus,” which you can reach from the University’s home page. The web site includes information about what is being done, but much more is already in the works. I suggest you check that site periodically, as we will continue to add to it as our plans evolve through meetings and conversations with individuals from both on and off-campus. I have communicated with all SFSU faculty, students, and staff several times in recent weeks around these issues, via e-mail. Two of those messages follow.

— Robert A. Corrigan, President

You can see the messages by following the link — they’re too long to post here. The “summary of events” makes things sound a bit tamer than more contemporaneous accounts. The University says that it has videotape of the demonstrations. How about making it available on the Web?

FRENCH READER LEO LE BRUN writes:

I am faithful reader of InstaPundit.com from Rennes, France and I can’t agree more when you hit the French where it hurts: anti-semitism. Still, I cannot believe you would support a boycott on French products based on that. I don’t really like my country and plan to move back to the US (where I was a student) next year. France is indeed a deeply ambivalous country and my fellow Frenchmen often take the wrong stance on many issues. Our not supporting Israel, our criticizing of US for being ‘simplistic’, our unwillingness to join the US in attacking Sadamm and root out terror are positions that disturb me.

And so does the nonchalance of my government when it comes to horrible acts of anti-semitic hatred. These acts are comitted by young Arabs who watch the deeply biased coverage of the Middle East on T! V and feel the need to ‘get even’ by beating up Jewish teens playing soccer or setting a synaguogue on fire. I know you will tell me that’s no excuse since the Socialist government (finally over, thank God) has not done what it should have done about these horrific acts, and you would be right, because that’s the core of the problem, no matter who is behind these acts. I have been denouncing the situation on my blog (http://leolebrun.blogspot.com) for weeks, in French and English, and 90% of the reactions I received were positive. I have been linked to by Asparagirl, Diane E., Dawson.com and LGF who were relieved to see that not all the French were anti-semites or pro-Palestinian. That is why a boycott on French products is a terrible idea. We are not like the Palestinians who all seem to support terror and worship “martyrs”. Many pundits here, and most of them were not Jewish, called on the French to not accept this situation and denounced classifying antisemitic acts as part of “insécurité”, as we call crime here.

Sure there has been pro-Palestinian street demonstrations with hateful messages, but did you notice that the next day, 300.000 French people took to the same streets to express their disapointment with the Government and their support for Israel? These protestors outnumbered the pro-Palestinians 3to1! I happen to work in a field that depends on American tourists coming here and nothing would sadden me more that seeing Americans stop visiting my country. Would you boycott any product that comes from the Bay Area because lots of students at Berkeley and SFSU legitimize Palestinian terror? Would you give up Rice A Roni? I don’t think so. Please acknowledge that many Frenchmen are good people who sympathize with Israel even if they are not Jewish (you will not find somebody who is more Breton than me!);and love the US for what it stands for, even more so in these trying times. Please don’t make all Americans see France in this way, even though we have a lot of things to improve!

Well, except for minor things like Cannes, I’m not really for an actual boycott of France, much less the campaign to pave France. I have some hope that since the recent election, the French political class is beginning to awaken to reality. I hope I’m right.

Oh, and here’s a link to Leo’s blog, which is in both French and English.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg emails:

Tell Leo there were lots of reasons to give up the “San Francisco Treat”
even before all the anti-semitism out there.

And Chris Blanchard likens it to an American boycott of French Fries. “Please,” he writes, “don’t take it out on the starch.” Another reader points out that Berkeley was in fact boycotted last fall by Americans who disagreed with its anti-American stance.

TURNS OUT THAT BOYCOTTING FRANCE IS ACTUALLY THE MODERATE POSITION.

SOME SOBERING THOUGHTS on the future of the Palestinians, from StrategyPage. It doesn’t look very bright, but that’s mostly their own fault. Here’s a somewhat similar take.

IMAGINE: Reader Harry Helms has this useful observation:

Of course the events of 9/11 were beyond the imagination of anyone in the FBI. Why is this so difficult for you to grasp?

Government jobs—and, in particular, government law enforcement jobs—attract people who DON’T want to think creatively or “out of the box.” Instead, they want to think INSIDE the box. They don’t want to use their imagination; they want a detailed set of procedures and rules to follow. If they haven’t seen it before, they can’t conceive of it. Asking the FBI to “think creatively” about possible terrorist incidents is—pardon my non-PC analogy—-like asking the blind to be architects. They simply lack essential characteristics necessary to adequately perform the task.

It’s interesting to note that other posters have cited examples from television (“The Lone Gunmen”) and fiction (Tom Clancy) of hijacked airliners used as weapons. And that’s why, in all seriousness, the government should be asking creative people to visualize new terrorist scenarios and plots. Screenwriters, novelists, and—yes—terrorists are all imaginative, while the FBI and other government drones aren’t. Creativity is just as big a weapon in this new war as missiles and guns—maybe even more so.

I think this is exactly right. To their credit, I think they’ve done some of this since 9/11.

RON K WAS PRETTY DAMNED PRESCIENT, as this post from Slate’s “The Fray” from September 17 illustrates:

Retrospective analysis will disclose a great number of warnings, alerts, leads and tips … some of them remarkably specific. Big deal.

The real trick, as always, is to distinguish genuine foresight versus the ordinary daily stream of “alerts”.

That’s why I don’t think that the government necessarily could have prevented the attacks. I just think it’s ridiculous of them to claim they couldn’t have imagined them. Note: Patrick Ruffini has some good thoughts. And Martin Devon raises the real questions. Someone should ask them to George Tenet.

UPDATE: RonK has his own, up-to-date list of questions that should be asked.

THE NEW REPUBLIC’S MICHAEL CROWLEY agrees that the “unimaginable” argument is an insult to our intelligence.

BAY AREA HATEWATCH UPDATE: I had missed this John Podhoretz column, but it’s not a pretty story:

Since the start of the year, there have been 50 documented cases of anti-Semitic acts in and around the Bay Area. That is more than three times as many as in all of 2001, according to Jonathan Bernstein of the Anti-Defamation League. He also reports that his office is the only one of the ADL’s 30 regional bureaus to note an increase in anti-Jewish incidents.

There have been serious arson attempts on two synagogues. One temple, in Berkeley, would have been destroyed had a neighbor not spotted the fire on the roof. Another, in San Francisco, was pelted with Molotov cocktails.

It’s worse at the universities. A man wearing a Jewish ritual skullcap was severely beaten on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Students and faculty attending religious services at the Berkeley Hillel, the Jewish meeting house, were pelted with rotten eggs. The Hillel house itself has been defaced with graffiti.

The worst incident happened last week at San Francisco State University, where there is clearly no division between anti-Israel political sentiment and naked anti-Semitism.

There’s more on SFSU, as you’d expect, but I didn’t know about the beating, or the molotov cocktails.

One day, I hope, the Bay Area will become as cosmopolitan and tolerant as Knoxville.

TIM NOAH SAYS it’s all Robert Mueller’s fault.

JONAH GOLDBERG AGREES WITH JOSH MARSHALL that Cynthia McKinney is still an idiot.

DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE: Mark Steyn says it’s missing in action:

Trundling around Britain, Europe and the Middle East in recent weeks, I can’t say I detected ‘the spirit of liberty’ anywhere. I felt its absence in many places — in the impotence and fatalism of prosperous English property owners barricaded into their homes behind their window locks and laser alarms because nothing can be done about the yobboes lobbing the bollards through the bus shelter until David Blunkett comes up with a nationally applicable policy on the subject. And even then he’s likely to have filched it from some American police chief — like the ‘broken window’ theory, of which one hears more in Britain than the US these days.

That’s what the ‘democratic deficit’ does: it snuffs out the spirit of liberty. The issue is not how to make the chaps in Brussels more ‘accountable’, but why all that stuff is being dealt with in Brussels in the first place — why so much of the primary-school science can only be entrusted to the laboratory’s men in white coats, like Chris Patten. Eurocrats who spent much of the Eighties mocking President Reagan’s ‘trickle-down economics’ are happy to put their faith in trickle-down nation-building: if you create the institutions of a European state, a European state will somehow take root underneath. . . .

Britain and Europe have ‘free governments’ but they don’t have ‘the spirit of liberty’, and they suffer as a consequence. If you were to apply Tom Ridge’s system of colour-coded security alerts — from blue to red via green, yellow and orange — to the entire planet, you’d wind up with something along these lines: the United States, code green; the Britannic world, code yellow; Europe, code orange; the Middle East, code red. The Arab world has no democracy, and little prospect of any, and so its much-vaunted ‘Arab street’ is, in fact, a symbol of weakness. Folks jump up and down in the street when they’ve nowhere else to go. The Arabs are world leaders at yelling excitedly and shouting ‘Death to the Great Satan!’ and are world losers at everything else.

Western Europe, though, isn’t much healthier. . . . After 215 years, the US Constitution is not only older than the French, German, Italian, Belgian, Spanish and Greek constitutions, it’s older than all of them put together. Whether the forthcoming European constitution will be the one that sticks remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t bet on it. . . . You would think, would you not, that, if Europe were really serious about avoiding the horrors of the last century, it might try and learn from the two most successful and enduring forms of democracy in the world: the Westminster parliamentary system and American federalism. Instead, these are precisely the forms the EU is most determined to avoid.

Indeed.

WANT TO LIVE A LONG TIME? Then you’ll be interested in this post by Charles Murtaugh.

MORE ON FORESEEABILITY: Reader Justin Adams writes:

There will always be intelligence failures because people often aren’t or don’t act intelligently. That inevitability is most dangerous if you maintain a defensive posture and make yourself a static target. The lesson to be learned — the lesson we seem finally to have learned — is to attack our enemies and put them on the defensive, let them worry about intelligence failures. On the offense, bad intelligence means a missed opportunity to kill an enemy; on defense, it means 3000 dead citizens.

Meanwhile, reader Allen S. Thorpe comments:

This whole hubbub over unnoticed warnings is really old news. I agree with you that they shouldn’t be arguing that they “couldn’t” have foreseen this, but it really doesn’t matter. The only reason this is raising such a ruckus is that the Democrats are flailing around looking for an issue. If we want to start pointing fingers, how about our free press who are always standing up for the public’s right to know. They have names like Sentinel, Guardian, Observer and Herald, but why weren’t they campaigning for Clinton to do something about bin Laden and the other terrorists. Apparently, you need more than six deaths at home, and deaths of servicemen and diplomats don’t count, to get their attention or make them think beyond the last news cycle.

Sure the government let us down, but so did all of our institutions. We let each other down, but not being mad as hell that the first bombing of the WTC was treated as a mere criminal problem. Or that we didn’t get tough after our people were blown up in Beirut, or the Khobar towers, or the two embassies in Africa or in the Cole. I’m just glad that when 9/11 happened somebody started doing the right thing. What I’m worried about is that our indignation will drain away into congressional investigations and peace placards, because if we don’t keep our resolve, we’ll be ripe for more outrages.

UPDATE: A reader notes, regarding accountability: “Bush was not in office in 1999 but CIA director Tenet was. ”

SFSU UPDATE: This story seems to be breaking out into old-line media — it’s mentioned in this Village Voice oped.

HAD A LONG CONVERSATION WITH A JOURNALIST about, among other things, the value of “unique visitor” stats. I have to confess that I’m not that impressed: to me, having a reader who refreshes 10 times a day is pretty much as valuable as having 10 readers who look once a day. It’s a question of width vs. depth of interest. He more or less agreed but said that unique visitors is just one of those measures that people like, even though tech-types say that “unique visitors” is usually an undercount because of firewalls, etc.

I think that many of the comparisons going on (MetaFilter is apparently claiming more viewers than the WSJ) are pretty bogus — not even apples vs. oranges, but one thing that you hope is some kind of fruit with another thing that you hope is some kind of fruit. And I don’t think that even well-established metrics are worth much — note the discrepancy between the NY Times bestseller list and actual book sales. Or look at newspapers: if a million people buy a newspaper, do a million people read every story in it? Probably not.

People measure stuff because it makes them feel better. But the measures are of limited value, especially in the absence of any agreement on what’s important. Until you agree on what measures are important, and what you want to know, the measures are mostly bogus. But I’m working on a site redesign, and I’m going to include a counter that measures (however inaccurately) “unique visitors” so as to finally be able to answer the question that journalists ask.

IS CHOMSKY VETTING JOB APPLICANTS? That’s what Iberian bloggers John & Antonio wonder:

Is it any surprise that MIT Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy Noam Chomsky is a proud signer of the pro-disinvestment petition? No, not really. That’s not exactly “Man Bites Dog.” What is kind of interesting, though, is that out of the 54 MIT faculty members who signed the anti-Israeli, pro-disinvestment petition, a full 13 are from Chomsky’s own department, and a fourteenth is listed only under linguistics. If we look at the 121 MIT faculty members who signed the anti-disinvestment, anti-anti-Israeli petition, a grand total of zero are from Linguistics and Philosophy. Zero. Zip. Nada. Goose egg. Now, could we take these numbers and use them as evidence that the MIT Linguistics and Philosophy Department is politically vetted? We sure think you could. Especially if you note that out of the five signers currently at Israeli institutions, a grand total of four have Ph.D.s from or did a postdoc at MIT’s Ling and Phil Department. If you were a student at MIT’s Ling and Phil department, knowing that your teachers have unanimously signed one petition and have scorned another, might not you be tempted to follow their example? We think that you just might. The MIT Ling and Phil Department sounds like it enjoys all the freedom of thought and expression of East Germany, with the professorate serving as the Stasi.

Harsh, but not unwarranted.

WHY THE EMPIRE IS GOOD, AND THE REPUBLIC BAD: Jonathan Last is gonna get a lot of flame mail for this.

FORESEEABILITY, REVISITED: Okay, I had a long and (well, maybe) erudite post on all this, which Blogger promptly ate. But those who say that such an attack was unforeseeable need to reflect on the fact that it was already foreseen:

WASHINGTON (AP) – Exactly two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal report warned the executive branch that Osama bin Laden’s terrorists might hijack an airliner and dive bomb it into the Pentagon or other government building.”Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency or the White House,” the September 1999 report said.

The report, entitled the “Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?,” described the suicide hijacking as one of several possible retribution attacks al-Qaida might seek for the 1998 U.S. airstrike against bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan.

The report noted that an al-Qaida-linked terrorist first arrested in the Philippines in 1995 and later convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had suggested such a suicide jetliner mission.

Here’s a link to the report, which even features a big picture of the World Trade Center.

Now I don’t expect that Bush, or Rice, or Rumsfeld, or Ashcroft would have — or should have — read this report. But someone should have, and — knowing that Al Qaeda had actually planned such an attack — might have considered the possibility that a planned hijacking might be more than “traditional” in nature, so that once the word got out that Al Qaeda might be planning a wave of hijackings, this idea might have occurred to someone.

This isn’t the complicity that Cynthia McKinney is bloviating about, but it is an example of a breakdown in thinking about these things. And it’s why — despite TAPPED’s pro-Administration spin — I do think that it’s an insult to our intelligence for Administration officials to keep saying that the 9/11 attacks were simply unimaginable.

To some degree, as several correspondents have pointed out, this is beside the point. The way to respond to terrorism is to put an end to nations sponsoring or harboring terrorists. That’s absolutely right, but it doesn’t excuse silly attempts to avoid responsibility. (Thanks to reader Jim Loan for the link).

UPDATE: Reader Casey Abell thinks I’m too hard on Bush:

Love the blog. But didn’t you notice the date on that report? Last time I checked, in 1999 the “executive branch” consisted of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and other people like that. Bush and Ashcroft and Rumsfeld and Rice weren’t hanging out at the White House.

I realize that the AP is biased and doesn’t want to mention Clinton in their story, though they criticize Bush by name. But there’s no reason for you to follow their lousy example. Pile the abuse on both administrations.

Equal-opportunity abuse. It’s a wonderful thing.

Well, yeah, and I think there’s plenty of evidence that the Clinton Administration didn’t take Al Qaeda seriously enough despite plenty of reason to do so. But I was just arguing that the Administration’s claims that they couldn’t have anticipated that sort of an attack — or non-“traditional” hijackings in general — don’t hold water.