WHY THE EUROPEAN UNION IS IRRETRIEVABLY LAME: Another potentially endless series. This appears to be genuine.

WHY JAMES LILEKS RULES: A potentially endless series:

I’m 43 now, and I find bleakness and tragedy less interesting than I did at 23, mainly because I’ve seen some of the real thing. When you’re young and melodramatic, you identify with the tragic because it seems more authentic than your parents’ sunny bouncy happy-crappy attitude. Later you learn that they’re probably far more aware of the Dark than you were, and kept it from you, and from themselves most of the time. It’s how you get through the day without going mad. It’s hard to concentrate at work when you stop and think of the yawning grave that awaits us all. A fascination with things Dark ends up being a self-regarding melancholic pose, a way of signaling to your fellow adolescents that you possess a deep, deep nature. You’re wrong, of course. It’s no insight to think that Life Sucks. The insight comes when you understand that it doesn’t have to, and that its nature is up to you.

Did I mention that Lileks rules?

NICK SCHULZ says that Christie Todd Whitman is a mutineer.

Hmm. What do you do with mutineers? I’ll have to ask this guy, or maybe this guy. Aarrh!

HOMELAND SECURITY: Reader Trent Telenko sends this link demonstrating that the turf wars have already begun.

KEN LAYNE identifies the root causes of terrorism.

ONE OF THE INTERESTING THINGS I NOTICED about the homeland security speech last night was that Tom Ridge was referred to in the past tense. So maybe someone else will replace him. Reader Will Allen has a suggestion:

The point is, Greenspan is famous for poring over reams of arcane data from all corners of the American and world economy, which is, needless to say, an extraordinarily complex organism. Greenspan has been fairly effective, although not perfect, in assimilating this exceedingly diverse information in a fashion that has allowed him see patterns and make inferences that engender effective decision-making in what is a very difficult job. I say this as a person who is generally supicious of central bankers; the very idea of central banking runs counter to the evidence of the futility of all economic central planning. However, credit should be given where it is deserved, and Greenspan has been very good in executing a very daunting task. This is exactly the sort of talent that is needed in a Homeland Security Office, in addition to managerial skills. Seemingly unrelated, arcane, data will be flowing in from all corners of the globe and someone near the top will need the ability to notice patterns and make inferences in a fashion that allows us to stay ahead of our enemies. If done well, it will even allow us to be more efficient in conducting offensive operations, which is the best defense. Maybe someone with a background in economics would be very effective is assisting this

effort.

We could do worse. And we very well may.

WOW. The turnout at the D.C. Bloggerfest last night looks pretty impressive. Wish I’d been there. Oh, well. At least I can look at the pictures.

UPDATED FALLOUT MAPS for an India / Pakistan nuclear war are available through Shoutin’ Across the Pacific. As long as it’s not “irradiating across the Pacific.”

Actually, the fallout generated by Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons appears to be relatively minor anyway, and there’s no reason, as far as I know, to suspect that anyone has done anything to modify the weapons to create more fallout.

BILL HOBBS has an update on the Trummel case. Paul Trummel is being kept in jail for something he said on his website. The judge, King County Superior Court Judge James A. Doerty — who appears to be a blithering idiot who should be removed from the bench immediately for incompetence — says that Trummel doesn’t get First Amendment protection because he isn’t a paid journalist. Funny, I missed that “paid journalist” clause in the First Amendment.

UPDATE: William Sulik objects to my use of the term “blithering idiot” to describe Judge Doerty. He says it’s unfair to blithering idiots worldwide. He suggests instead: “It is clear that Judge Doerty has just ‘stopped watching wrestling because it’s too complicated’ so he needs some other amusement.'”

Well, okay. I want to be fair after all — but this decision is so far outside the zone of reasonableness that it makes me wonder if Judge Doerty ever actually attended law school.

MARS NEEDS WOMEN, writes Jonah Goldberg. And women need Mars, he adds. Nice column.

HOW UNFORGIVABLY INEPT are the Washington, DC police? Pretty damn unforgivably inept, according to Josh Marshall. This is mind-boggling.

HERE’S AN ANALYSIS PIECE ON THE HOMELAND SECURITY REORGANIZATION, from the Washington Post.

A U.S. HOSTAGE DIED AND ANOTHER WAS RESCUED during a raid on Muslim extremists in the Philippines, according to this report. The report doesn’t say who the hostages were. The Burnhams?

UPDATE: It was. Here’s a more recent update.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Well, it’s really a Garry Wills update. Northwestern University professor Jim Lindgren sends the following on Garry Wills, who has apparently disavowed Arming America in scholarly settings, but not in public:

The continued criticism of Garry Wills for not changing his mind on Arming America may be somewhat off base. Wills was approached about a panel on the Arming America controversy to be held at the Criminology meetings next fall in Chicago. In response to the organizers’ request for him to appear or to suggest another defender of the book, Wills replied by email in March with only four words: ‘no one defends it.’ In April when I spoke briefly with Wills at a campus lecture (we are Northwestern University colleagues, though I have met him only twice), I asked Wills what his current view of Arming America was. His reply was blunt and used harsher language in its negative assessment of the book than anything that Randy Roth, Joyce Malcolm, Gloria Main, Robert Churchill, Eric Monkkonen, Randy Barnett, Eugene Volokh, or I have said in any of our public statements. From his two recent statements, it appears that Wills is like several historians who have changed their positions on Arming America and have said so (apparently on the record) to scholars involved in the controversy, but who are not yet willing to discuss their current views fully with the press. Just because Wills has not been as public in his statements as former Bellesiles’ supporters Roger Lane, Don Hickey, and Sandy Levinson does not mean that he still supports Arming America. One should recognize that most historians’ views on the book did not gel until after the William and Mary Quarterly forum came out in late February.

Um, okay. Perhaps some intrepid reporter should call him up and give him the opportunity to speak on the public record. Or he could simply write a short addendum to his glowing New York Times review of Bellesiles’ book.

MOHAMMED ATTA sought a government loan to buy a spray-equipped airplane and get started in the “crop dusting business” according to this report.

She said she rejected Atta for a loan because he was not a U.S. citizen. Before he left, Atta tried to buy a panoramic photograph of Washington, D.C., that hung on her office wall. He pointed specifically to the White House and Pentagon and called the photo “one of the prettiest” he had ever seen of the capital. . . .

“His look on his face became very bitter at that point,” Bryant said. “I believe he said, ‘How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it’ like the cities in his country had been destroyed?”

She also remembers Atta mentioning al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, saying bin Laden “would someday be known as the world’s greatest leader.”

The good news is, these guys (who were presumably among Al Qaeda’s finest) weren’t exactly slick about maintaining their cover. The next guys will have to be a lot slicker. I hope.

This also makes me wonder about Al Qaeda’s resources. A government loan? Either Al Qaeda didn’t have the money, or they weren’t allocating a whole lot to this mission. Both seem like interesting bits of information.

Or perhaps they simply thought it poetic to let American taxpayers subsidize an attack.

UPDATE: Reader Phil Fraering has this interesting observation:

Just wondering, but you reported he said something along

the lines of “how would Americans feel if their cities

and monuments had been destroyed, like the ones in my

country were?”

I thought he was from _Egypt_?

Hmm. Interesting point.

ANDREW SULLIVAN is invoking the Alexa rankings to show that The New Republic gets more traffic (with a ranking of 22,840) than The American Prospect does, with a ranking of 23,581 . But I’ve always been suspicious of Alexa — and rightly so, it seems, since it gives InstaPundit a ranking of 1,825.

This seems deeply suspicious to me. And rightly so, as Slate shows up at a miserable 161,025. That actually made me wonder if the rankings were somehow backwards, but Drudge is 396, which destroys that theory. And, I think, the credibility of Alexa.

UPDATE: Boy, lots of people sent email on this one. Turns out ALL Blogspot sites (Alexa still thinks InstaPundit’s on Blogspot) return a rank of 1,825. That’s apparently the rank for Blogspot as a whole. And Slate returns at 2 if you enter its address as slate.msn.com instead of www.slate.com, because it aggregates all the MSN addresses. Jeez. Jon Garthwaite has more on this if you’re interested.

I DON’T KNOW WHY THESE GUYS ARE COMPLAINING. My class voted for Mr. T, and got Howard Baker and Marion Wright Edelman instead.

LOU DOBBS IS RIGHT.

REPLAY TV USERS are suing the television and movie industry to have their use of Replay TV declared legal.

WHAT WAS MISSING from Bush’s speech.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the Department of Homeland Security proposal.

N.Z. BEAR has a roundup of lefty blogs, with helpful commentary.

Wasn’t TAPPED working on something like this?

WHAT IF APOCALYPSE NOW STARTED OFF IN KNOXVILLE? It might look something like this. If Coppola were having a really good day.

DEEDEE RAMONE IS DEAD. Damn. “I wanna be sedated” makes my top-ten list.

BLOGGERS AND BLOG READERS ARE MORE ATTRACTIVE than the average, so they may not need advice on how to flirt. But just in case you’re an outlier, there it is.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Kimberly Strassel blasts the historians:

But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of L’affaire Bellesiles is that despite the enormity of the scandal, nearly every institution involved–from Emory University, to Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize Committee, to the publisher–has refused to take a professional or moral stance. The silence of these bodies–groups charged with maintaining the standards and ideals of the academic profession–has been so deafening, that even the traditionally closed-mouth world of scholars is calling for some public disclosure. . . .

The American Historical Association, which might have been best placed to undertake a scholarly inquiry, instead limited itself to passing a “resolution” on Mr. Bellesiles’s behalf. “the Council of the American Historical Association considers personal attacks upon or harassment of an author . . . to be inappropriate and damaging to a tradition of free exchange of ideas and the advancement of our knowledge of the past.”

Strassel does note that individual scholars, such as James Lindgren of Northwestern and Jerome Sternstein of Brooklyn College have worked hard to set the record straight. Interestingly, Eric Alterman sort of agrees:

I don’t doubt that Michael Bellesiles’ “Arming America” is fundamentally flawed. But I wonder how so many in the media can continue to write about academia as if it is populated by nothing but sixties-style radicals when in fact, it was these very academics who undertook to judge the book and find it wanting when questions about Bellesiles’ research methods were raised.

Despite the highly charged nature of the argument over whether America really is, historically, a nation of guns, historically, Bellesiles has not enjoyed a closed-ranks defense of his work from the counterparts of the people who feel compelled to defend say, the racist pseudoscience of Charles Murray. I feel certain, moreover, that those institutions that rewarded Bellesiles will, after careful consideration, act on the question of whether to rescind those awards.

Careful consideration, after all, is what academia is good for.

In truth, though, Bellesiles did enjoy that sort of defense until the evidence became overwhelming — as the AHA resolution Strassel cites demonstrates. But ultimately, the evidence does seem to have won out — as the fact that even an antigun lefty like Alterman has written off Bellesiles’ work proves beyond any doubt.

Only Garry Wills is still in denial — or at least in seclusion — on this one. So far nobody’s been able to get a comment out of him, as far as I can tell.