IT’S THE 28TH BLOG MELA, presented in a very cool, newspaper-like layout.

Meanwhile Pontifex is back from Iraq. Drop by and tell him thanks, and welcome home.

A PACK, NOT A HERD — and more evidence of the value of duct tape!

A Texas man who disrupted a United Airlines flight from Hawaii was subdued with the help of passengers and duct tape, authorities said Sunday.

No one was reported injured, said Sgt. Carl Sansbury of the Los Angeles International Airport police. . . .

“They let him wander back and forth in the plane until he started to move forward,” Gugerty said. “Then they surrounded him and pushed him to the floor.”

About a half-dozen passengers were involved, he said.

Remember: if it can’t be fixed with tape, it can’t be fixed. . . .

UPDATE: You can read another interesting pack-not-a-herd story here, with an update here. This would make an interesting story for a major-media outfit, I think.

IN A MAJOR DEFEAT TO TRANSNATIONAL BUREAUCRACY, Sweden has decisively rejected the Euro.

UPDATE: David Carr writes:

On any reading this is a blow for the EU project and the coming weeks will see a deluge of federast seething, threatening and whining. . . . I quite like the idea of a ‘Euro-Watch’ sweepstake: who will be the first to bail out of the Euro?

For the record, my money (sterling!) is on the French. The Germans will stick with it because they have always had an emotional investment in the European project. It enables them to be ‘Europeans’ and thus serves to expiate their guilt about being German. They will endure a lot more economic pain before they begin to think the unthinkable.

But not the French. For them, the EU has always been about advancing their national interests.

Maybe some other people are figuring that out.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Polipundit points out that five out of six Swedes in this BBC on-the-street interview supported the Euro. He suspects bias. At the BBC?

A MADE-FOR-THE-MEDIA MOMENT: Scores of photo-journalists surrounding a rock-thrower, and photographing him from angles that don’t make the context clear. I wonder how many of the resulting images were as accurate as this one in reflecting what’s really going on? This photo — like one from the West Bank that I saw a few years back — provides a context that is sorely lacking in most news coverage. It certainly seems consistent with Kevin Hassett’s observation from Cancun that the media are glorifying protesters who are, in fact, utterly irrelevant to what is going on.

Question: If it’s dishonest to boost the contrast in a photograph to make the sky look better — and some news agencies say that it is — then why isn’t it dishonest to show protesters without the wide shot, like this one, that shows the manufactured nature of the protest? Or to report on a protest without providing the context that illustrates the unimportance — and, often, viciousness and ignorance — of the protesters?

But at least this photo shows giant puppet heads used for good and not evil, for a change.

UPDATE: Good grief — check out the caption to this AP photo:

From left, Samir Shakir Mahmoud, Abdel-Karim Mahoud al-Mohammedawi, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, Mohammed Bahr al-Ulloum, Jalal Talabani, Ahmad Chalabi, and Mouwafak al-Rabii sit in the hall for a news conference after their inaugural meeting in this July 13, 2003 file photo in Baghdad, Iraq (news – web sites). In the five months since U.S. forces rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein (news – web sites)’s rule, the country’s ethnically and religiously diverse people have, in one giant leap, overturned decades of social and political injustice, replaced a brutal one-party system with a multitude of groups advocating a rich range of ideologies and created a free press. (AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel, File)

(Emphasis added.) It’s like a wave of honesty has broken out! Will Reuters be next?

DOUG SANDERS in the Globe and Mail:

Six months before, the world had cheered as the statues of the dictator came crashing down. The Americans had seemed heroic. But now things were going very badly. The occupation was chaotic, the American soldiers were hated and they were facing threats from the surviving supporters of the dictator, whose whereabouts were uncertain.

Washington seemed unwilling to pay the enormous bill for reconstruction, and the president didn’t appear to have any kind of workable plan to manage the transition to democracy. European allies, distrustful of the arrogant American outlook, were wary of co-operating. To many, it looked like the victory had been betrayed, since the American values of democracy, equality and well-being seemed unlikely ever to emerge.

That’s how it looked in Germany in November, 1945. In our memories, history tends to become compressed: There was V-E Day, then the American soldiers were cheered by the people of Berlin, then the president announced that hundreds of millions would be spent on the Marshall Plan, then Germany became the prosperous and democratic place it is today.

That is not how things unfolded. The United States has always been good at removing dictators from power, but the tedious, dirty work we now call “nation building” has never come naturally, or quickly. . . .

Meanwhile, the world was outraged by the scenes of suffering and disorder coming from Germany. The people were going hungry: A report conducted in November,1945, indicated that 60 per cent of them weren’t getting the bare ration of 1,550 calories per day (2,000 calories is generally considered a healthy minimum). The world waited for the president of the United States to announce a plan.

Read the whole thing.

THAT’S NO WAY TO WIN ME OVER: Went into the office this afternoon and got phone spam:

Volunteer Fans — come out and show your Tennessee pride in welcoming General Wesley Clark, America’s next President, to Knoxville at the Knoxville Convention Center. . . .

Even more lamely, there was no date given in the message.

MY DAD’S FINE — the main nursing service I provided was offering to refill his drink — but the main therapeutic benefit from my blog hiatus has been the drastic improvement of computer-related pains on my part. Maybe I should start taking weekends off.

Thanks for the many nice emails, though to be honest so far I’ve only looked at the subject lines on most of them. Back later. In the meantime read this, and be sure to scroll through the comments, too. And don’t miss this roundup on Iraq by Den Beste.

THE INSTA-DAD had some surgery, and I’m going out to his house to spend the night and look after him. I don’t know if I’ll blog from there or not.

OVER AT GLENNREYNOLDS.COM I’ve got more on cottage industry and self-employment, with an interesting connection to the war on terrorism in the last couple of reader comments.

Arnold Kling emailed to suggest that this discussion (er, except for the terrorism part) has veered into the territory already pioneered by Dan Pink in his book Free Agent Nation, and although it hadn’t occurred to me, I think he’s right, though — much after the fashion in which Redbook turned into a virtual sex mag — the process was so gradual that I didn’t notice until someone pointed it out. I just ordered a copy of Pink’s book, which I’ve read about, but have never read. Maybe I’ll email him and ask him what he thinks.

IMPOSTOR ALERT: Webmistress Susie of the Alliance Blog emails:

Recently there have been two comments posted to the Alliance blog purporting to be from you. However, after the imposter Dean Esmay incident, I am reluctant to take them at face value. So, if someone is posing as you, I feel you should be made aware of it.

However, if you really DID make those comments, we would be happy to have you join our Alliance against you. You merely need to post one of our logos with a link to HQ on your blog.

After all, as my mentor Pixy Misa of Ambient Irony says: “Consistency is for wimps!”

Good point. And although I didn’t post any comments there, joining the Alliance Against Me would be sophisticated — almost French! Consider it done. Do I get a decoder ring? Or at least a nice mention in Le Monde?

R.I.P., JOHNNY CASH: Blogcritics has a massive, link-filled roundup.

ERROR-CORRECTION UPDATE: Earlier I linked to an OxBlog item suggesting that AP had altered a story. Turns out there were two different stories.

ROBERT KUTTNER HAS LOST IT IN HIS DEBATE WITH JOHANN NORBERG. Here are a few lines from Kuttner’s reasoned argumentation:

But you have a very unfortunate habit of just making things up when the facts don’t happen to fit your nutty theories.

There’s also a rich debate, not resolved by recourse to your kind of fundamentalism

Debating you is like debating a devotee of a fundamentalist religion.

How can an intelligent person who reads the newspapers possibly believe that?

This has been a really depressing exchange, because you are so sophomoric and poorly informed in your extreme views.

You are a utopian and an absolutist. You offer no hypotheses that are falsifiable, which makes you a dogmatist.

Radley Balko has pointed out Kuttner’s behavior. So has this post from the Catallarchy blog. Kuttner’s not exactly foaming at the mouth here, but Norberg wins the reasonableness battle hands-down.

UPDATE: Julian Sanchez comments on Kuttner’s blown fuse.

ERIC MULLER IS MAD AT ME for posting a photo of a WTC jumper for a while yesterday. He wants to know why I posted it, and why I took it down. (He also says it was a “large” photo, but it was only 180 x 200 pixels).

I posted it because I thought people needed to be reminded of the reality of what this is about, in the face of too many efforts to domesticate it. I took it down because I don’t generally leave big-media photos up on my blog (in fact, unlike many bloggers, I don’t generally put them up on my blog at all unless they’re a link to the original source). I made an exception here because I thought it was especially important. Yes, it’s not pretty. But that, you know, is the point.

UPDATE: Reader Mike McConnaughey emails:

You were exactly right to post the photo. I’m afraid that too many people
have forgotten the horror of that day.

Thanks. Kevin Murphy emails:

I don’t know if you linked to this, but here is an LA Times op-ed from 9/10 by the photographer defending his piece.

No. I would have if I’d known about it. Go there now — but be warned, the dread photo is present, and in a much larger version.

Amy Denham emails:

I am not glad the photo exists, but I am glad you posted it yesterday. I did not expect to see it on your site; when I did, I felt a moment of shock, sorrow, anger. The type of feeling I like to call visceral. It was a bit of a revelation to discover I haven’t become inured to that feeling. Yes, the photo is horrible. But how you could be accused of ˜forcing it into our faces,” to paraphrase Mr. Muller, I have no idea. I think that particular feat was achieved spectacularly by our enemies two years ago.

But I am also glad you took it down. I didn’t want to see it anymore.

I didn’t want to see it the first time. I didn’t want it to have happened, either.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Justin Katz has more on this, and links to a picture he thinks you ought to see:

For my part, the photographs that I find most compelling aren’t those of people actually falling, but of people leaning out of the windows, facing their deaths… deciding. I think of all those times throughout my life that I’ve looked out of high windows and the child in me wondered if I could climb down. Look carefully at some of the pictures from that horrible day, and you’ll see that some people tried.

I think it’s important not to let the memory of that day be sanitized.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Just to be clear, I’m not mad at Eric. But I’m not inclined to apologize for posting the picture, either.

INSIDE THE MIND OF NPR: N.Z. Bear finds an admission by Ann Garrels that, essentially, what I’ve thought I was picking up from her tone of voice was really there. Sheesh.

Of course, I’ve never listened to her reports from Baghdad in quite the same way since she said she often filed them in the nude.

HOLLYWOOD SCREENWRITER ROGER SIMON has some thoughts on the latest bin Laden release, and on the media coverage that it has produced. (“[N]ot exactly a ready for prime time performance.”) But Jim Henley offers a useful point:

Old footage makes us, bin Laden’s enemies, skeptical. But it won’t have that effect on his target audience.

He’s right, of course. Or perhaps we should say, “the target audience,” since I am, indeed, skeptical that bin Laden is in a position to target anyone.

PAY CLOSE ATTENTION — I’m about to actually defend Homeland Security. Or, anyway, to link to Clayton Cramer’s defense, in which he points out that smuggling depleted uranium past security is no great accomplishment since it’s (1) harmless; and (2) possessed of a very different — and much smaller –radiation signature than weapons-grade uranium.

UPDATE: Jay Manifold has more, and notes that there’s really no story here at all. Nice going, ABC!

THE TRUTH HURTS:

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has accused French leaders of suffering from an anti-American “neurosis” leading one tabloid newspaper to warn that Straw had triggered an “astonishing diplomatic row”. . . .

Asked why there had been so much friction between London and Paris over the years, Straw reportedly replied:

“A great many of the difficulties that have faced the relationship go back to the profoundly different experiences that we had in the war, with, quotes, Britain standing alone, and quotes, France capitulating and surrendering to the Germans.” . .