CAN THE BLOGOSPHERE GET AN AUSSIE BLOGGER a date when he visits the United States? Well, I can think of someone who might be available. . . .

THE TIMES REPORTS that the FBI is investigating a John Muhammad / Richard Reid link:

Reid, 29, from south London, was arrested last December when he tried to ignite explosives in his shoe on a flight from Paris to Miami. He had an onward ticket to Antigua, where he claimed he was intending to visit relatives.

The suspected snipers, John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, were living on the island at the time. Later they returned to Washington, where they are alleged to have been responsible for a killing spree that left at least 10 people dead.

Both Reid, who is currently awaiting sentence in America after admitting the attempted bombing, and Muhammad had converted to Islam and were known to hold radical views.

Reid has been linked to Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, while neighbours of Muhammad and Malvo have claimed the duo expressed support for the September 11 hijackers. . . .

It also emerged that when Muhammad first entered Antigua, he stayed with a woman called Jeanette Reed (or Reid).

Could just be a coincidence, of course.

UPDATE: Here’s more. Justin Katz is suspicious.

ERIC S. RAYMOND writes about the “capsaicinization of American food.” He’s basically right, though southern food was never as bland and lame as the pre-1970s American diet he invokes. There was always barbecue, and tamales (a staple at Knoxville diners for a century, often dunked in chili to become a “full house”) and pepper sauces.

But it’s not just spiciness. It’s variety. There was a time when pizza and spaghetti were considered exotic. Now I live within a mile or two of more sushi places than I can count, and they’re good. Of course, I do live in the Greater East Tennessee Co-Prosperity Sphere.

UPDATE: Russell Leslie emails from Australia:

have spent maybe ten months in the US over the last ten years in two to four week slices. It took me a while to figure out why I always spent the entire trip

with heart-burn and stomache aches. On my last trip I discovered it was because I had developed an “intolerance” for chilis and peppers.

It doesn’t help that I have spent most of my time in New Mexico (Santa Fe, Alburquerque and Los Alamos) – where “red or green” is a question that accompanies all meals – even breakfast!!!

When I am in the States, I live on Tums and Pepto-Bismol. I have to bring some of my own emergency food for when I just can’t take the heartburn any more.

Have pity on us poor foreigners!!

A cheeseburger is usually safe, Russell. And you can get Tagamet over the counter here now.

MARC HEROLD, AUTHOR OF BOGUS CIVILIAN-CASUALTY STATISTICS, HAS FALLEN INTO THE TRAP. And Matt Welch has noticed. I’m unimpressed by Herold’s inability to spell Iain Murray’s name. Er, and by this phrase of Herold’s: “But since my way of being has been to be a ‘grand seigneur’ overlooking the little attempted stings, I will do just exactly what you requested.”

A “grand seigneur”? Get a grip, Herold: you’re a freakin’ professor. I wrote something a while back about the tendency of academics to take this sort of line:

Today’s academia is descended from the clerical scholars and courtier intellectuals of the middle ages. Those folks naturally identified with the princes and potentates who provided their funding. Today’s academics affect to identify with the working classes, but many of their attitudes — a contempt for popular culture, a low regard for business and commerce and a desire to set themselves apart from the common herd — are leftovers from a bygone era. There’s a reason why kings and princes are no longer found in our society; emulating them isn’t going to make you popular.

This is the kind of thing I was talking about. “Grand seigneur?” Sheesh.

THE ARMY IS FIRING ARAB LINGUISTS FOR BEING GAY? As Stefan Sharkansky puts it: “Hey guys! We’re in the middle of a war.”

ARTHUR SILBER HAS ISSUED A CHALLENGE to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. And scroll up for Maureen Dowd’s voting record.

WHIGGING OUT, back from a hiatus, has election predictions up. Culpepper Log has more election-related stuff, too — and scroll up and down for tributes to Larry Flynt, Michaelangelo, and Kinky Friedman. Now that’s an eclectic group. Meanwhile Martin Devon is ahead of the pack, already figuring out the post-election moves.

I’m not sure, though, that the world is ready for MoxiePundit.

WILL TRADE WEB-DESIGN SERVICES FOR BREAST IMPLANTS. No, really.

(Via JillMatrix).

HE’S BAAACK! After a long absence, the Unablogger has returned. Don’t follow this link unless you’re prepared.

MR. CRANKY HATES GUNS AND THE NRA: But he doesn’t like Michael Moore or Bowling for Columbine either:

So, given my modest leanings, you’d think I’d enjoy Michael Moore’s politically correct take on the issue. Alas, no. In fact, the issue is part of the problem, as Moore seems to delight in finding a moral point of view he can pound into his audience over and over again with an increasingly heavy hand. It’s all spelled out as he tells you what he’s going to tell you (guns are bad), tells it to you (guns are bad — watch these people get shot), then tells you what he just told you (guns are bad). Letting the audience draw its own conclusions is apparently far too dangerous.

Additionally, Moore seems to have caught some sort of left-wing attention deficit disorder as the topic runs from guns to racism to American foreign policy to media bias to class division to nationalized health care to killer bees. He also seems to be losing his timing for when to be funny and when to be sober.

Phil Donahue likes the movie, though.

UPDATE: A Canadian reader emails:

I just wanted to mention one of the reactions I’ve heard in Canada to “Bowling for Columbine.” A Montreal journalist friend of mine, who otherwise loves the film and generally agrees with Moore’s ideas on gun control, nonetheless found the Canadian segment of the film to be inexcusably dishonest. The reason: Moore fails to make any mention of our own homegrown Columbine, the Dec 6, 1989 massacre of 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique by a deranged gunman named Marc Lepine.

But that might have undermined his thesis about us peace-loving, gun-controlling Canadians.

Regards,

Gregory Gransden

Montreal, Canada

Well, there’s no place for inconvenient facts in this film, that’s for sure.

JEEZ. I’m procrastinating when I should be working on my TCS column for next week, which is a followup on the one from last week. Now I notice that N.Z. Bear has already written a followup to my TCS column from last week.

Okay, it’s not quite what I’m writing, but it’s close. The speed of the blogosphere is frightening!

UPDATE: I should mention that his piece is part of the Weblog Action Center, a “massively collaborative weblog” aimed at, well, making society better.

THIS IS MEANER than anything Josh Chafetz has written:

If Annie Sprinkle provides one sort of counter-cultural entertainment, The New York Times’s op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd provides another, less sexual but not necessarily less obscene. Dispassionate readers, encountering Dowd’s hysterical outbursts, might be forgiven for wondering if she were quite sane. (They might also, we suppose, wonder about the sanity of her employers.) Dowd was already out of control in the Clinton years, when she first came to prominence. But since George W. Bush took office, she has left mere stridency for a form of editorial hectoring that is partly irresponsible, partly surreal.

Yes, and most damning of all, it just isn’t funny. You needn’t be both funny and profound, a combination reserved for such giants as Mark Twain, Dave Barry, and James Lileks. But if you’re a columnist for the New York Times you ought to be one or the other. At least some of the time.

UPDATE: Juan Gato, on the other hand, is funny.

ANOTHER NON-STORY REVEALED: Three Mile Island produced no increase in cancer deaths. That’s not really a surprise, or shouldn’t be. But given the way it was played at the time, I’m glad this study is getting attention.

I even heard it on NPR yesterday.

(Link via the increasingly commercial DailyPundit.Com).

PERRY DE HAVILLAND AND SAMIZDATA are featured in Wired News today. Happy Blogiversary!

RETAIL SUPPORT BRIGADE SITREP: (Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these). Judging by the crowd at Toys R Us today, and the mall parking lot, predictions of a disappointing Christmas season may turn out to be premature. There was a whole lot of shoppin’ going on. And Christmas is a long way off.

SOME SHIFTY “ALLIES” in Afghanistan. This guy needs to be made an example of.

INTERESTING ELECTION STUFF over at QuasiPundit.

ANTHRAX SCARE IN KNOXVILLE! Rich Hailey has the scoop.

THE NEW REPUBLIC SAYS that it’s time to boot France from the Security Council:

In truth, France’s fantasies of grandeur–fantasies that are decades, if not centuries, out of date–would be laughable, except that they are taken seriously in Turtle Bay. And so the Bush administration must endlessly negotiate with a country whose Iraq policy is motivated by petro-dollars and anti-American resentment, particularly the anti-American (and anti-Western) resentment of its Muslim immigrant masses. Why not stop the charade and let France veto the Iraq resolution? The United States and its allies could, on their own, eliminate the unconventional weapons of that most unconventional tyrant, Saddam Hussein. And, as a side benefit, the United Nations would suffer a humiliation so profound that it might force some long-overdue reconsideration of the Security Council’s anachronistic composition. For international organizations to be relevant, privilege must follow power, and for them to be admirable, privilege must follow decency. Nothing would more dramatically further both goals than dethroning France.

Yep. As I said before, crossing the United States in matters like this should be expensive. Sadly, there’s every reason to think that Foggy Bottom is as behind the times in this matter as Turtle Bay.

I MEANT TO LINK TO THIS YESTERDAY, but as some of you have noticed it was a reduced-blogging day (I spent some quality time with my wife, took a nap, stuff like that) so I didn’t. But this piece says it better than I did when I tried earlier:

Politics is the biggest, easiest way in all of America to avoid looking at yourself, and who you are, and what fence needs fixing on your own homestead.

A lot of you are in politics not because you want to lead, but because you want to run. From yourselves.

When you’re in politics not to live life but avoid it, you become especially susceptible to a kind of polar thinking. You become convinced you’re with the good team and the good people over here. You become convinced anyone who doesn’t want the same policies you want must be bad. After all, you’re good, so if they disagree they must be bad. When you’re polar like that you dehumanize the people on the other side. And when you dehumanize them–well, then you wind up booing them at a funeral. And worse.

I don’t mean you can’t be tough and honest in your judgments. There are some bad folks on the other side, it’s fair to say it. But most of them? All of them? They’re all the enemy? How could that be? . . .

This embittered sense of constant war with a wicked foe, and anything you can do to defeat the wicked is justified, and a corpse will do as a podium. And we have to stop it, both because we’re better than that and because it isn’t good for democracy. And democracy is still what Churchill said: the worst form of government except for all the others.

So please ponder what I say. And if it applies to you, or you think it might, stop, sit down and figure out a plan to do something about it.

Read the whole thing.

WILL WARREN, the Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, has a new one.

DAVID BROOKS WRITES about Baathism, a rather repellent ideology that has gotten less attention than it deserves. (Funny that the left is so uninterested in this variant of fascism.) Excerpt:

Aflaq’s writings were vague and pathetic whenever he tried to address concrete situations, but he did apparently have a gift for painting glorious pictures of future triumph, which appealed to those with a nagging sense of national humiliation. Like a lot of intellectuals of the middle of the twentieth century, Aflaq also spent time theorizing about the revolutionary process. The Baath saw themselves as strugglers, as people engaged in a permanent revolution aimed at uniting them with the inner perfection that is Arabism. The Baath party, Aflaq felt, embodying the transcendent Arab spirit, needed to be ruthless against those who did not share its beliefs. Moreover, it was through this combat, or struggle, that the Baath could achieve Arab perfection. As Aflaq wrote:

“In this struggle we retain our love for all. When we are cruel to others, we know that our cruelty is in order to bring them back to their true selves, of which they are ignorant. Their potential will, which has not been clarified yet, is with us, even when their swords are drawn against us.”

Struggle necessarily involves sacrifice, he emphasized, but amidst fiery conflict and bloodshed, each person “is forced to return to himself, to sink into his depths, to discover himself anew after experience and pain. At that point the true unity will be realized, and this is a new kind of unity different from political unity; it creates the unity of spirit among the individuals of the nation.”

Ah, yes, we’ve heard this sort of thing before. Interestingly, any warblogger who suggested that the current struggle, and the behavior of Iraq and its allies therein, represents the “perfection” of the Arab character would be denounced as a racist. Or, worse, an “Orientalist.”

UPDATE: Innocents Abroad has some comments.

NOW RICHARD SHELBY IS ALL OVER HARVEY PITT. I’m not a businessblogger, or an econoblogger, so I haven’t followed this very closely. But the SEC is supposed to be all about disclosure. And he seems to have failed to disclose some pretty material facts. That’s reason enough for him to go, isn’t it?

I’M NO EXPERT on Minnesota politics, or even on political campaigns. But it seems to me that when you’re named as a candidate a week before the election, and then you don’t show up for the debate, well, that’s bad.

On a related note, I’ve been deluged with emails reporting that Lileks’ piece on Mondale was quoted on various political TV shows yesterday. Lileks rules!

UPDATE: Oh, now the reasons are clear. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dodd Harris emails:

When Ventura said he was looking for a “regular citizen” to appoint to Wellstone’s seat, it occurred to me that we all know of one who’d make an excellent choice: If enough peopled called Ventura’s office to suggest it, it might just be possible to persuade him to appoint Lileks. Lileks probably wouldn’t want the job, of course, but that just proves he’s perfect for it.

I think this is a great idea. Senator Lileks!

HAPPY BLOGIVERSARY TO SAMIZDATA!

UPDATE: And Natalie Solent too!

ANOTHER UPDATE: And Missy! (Plus, scroll down for her dating rules, which aren’t half bad as those things go.)