A HERD, NOT A PACK: Jeffrey Collins points to this not-very-encouraging story from Newsday:

Several government security screeners at LaGuardia Airport said that moments before they took a certification test to operate machines that detect bombs in luggage, instructors told them answers to all or most of the questions.

Four screeners interviewed separately described nearly identical scenarios from classes last month: an instructor taught material for several hours and then read and answered a series of 25 multiple-choice questions that were on an exam the screeners took immediately afterward.

“He read the questions right out of the test, word for word, answer for answer,” one screener said, adding that the 25 people in his class wrote down the correct answers on note paper and copied them onto their tests with the instructor out of the room.

A second screener, in a separate class in mid-December, said the instructor stayed in the room during the test but that the exam questions “were the same questions he asked orally just before the test.”

“It was pretty much set up so that you shouldn’t have any way to fail,” said a third screener, who, like all screeners interviewed, asked not to be named fearing retaliation. “The guy read all 25 questions to you just before he gave the test. To tell you the truth, as he gave the questions, I wrote the answers down, because he read them exactly in order.”

Jeez.

ARROYO GRANDE UPDATE: A reader said below that the story of the two high school students who tackled a gunman was talk-radio material. Talk-show host Michael Graham emails that he agrees, and he’ll be talking about it on his show on Cincinnati’s WLW, today from 12-3 Eastern. The URL for online streaming is here, or you can click the button on the stations’ website during the show.

SHORT-TERM ENLISTMENT: Here’s an article on a new short-term enlistment plan designed to produce more enlistees without resort to the draft. I’m not sure what I think about this — I’m not encouraged by one backer’s statement that it’s just a step along the way to compulsory “national service,” which I don’t support, and I’m concerned about the creation of a two-tiered military. On the other hand, there are a lot of military specialties that don’t require the kind of extensive training or commitment that combat arms tend to, and — in fact — we’ve already got a sort of two-tier system, as Tom Ricks noted in comparing the training regimen at Parris Island and Fort Benning with the less rigorous training provided to support troops at Fort Jackson. And it’s likely that a non-trivial number of short-term enlistees will decide to stick around for longer, which should help with recruiting.

Anyway, it’s an interesting development. There’s also a paper from the Progressive Policy Institute, Citizen Soldiers and the War on Terror, endorsing the idea.

Speaking of recruiting, somebody sent me a link to an article saying that Northern California was producing military recruits at a higher rate than anywhere else except (of course) Nashville, but I’ve lost the link. If you read this, can you send it again?

UPDATE: Reader Anthony Kim sends the link, but notes that the headline, “suckers for a uniform” is rather insulting.

AXIS OF WEASELS UPDATE: This article reports a sign at the antiwar protests last weekend reading “Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield – Axis of Weasel” — meaning that Scott Ott didn’t come up with the term first. But, of course, that makes the Scrappleface use of the term all the more impressive: not just creating a meme, but turning the opposition’s term against it, to the point where only geeky bloggers such as myself note the prior usage.

UPDATE: “Axis of Weasels” has made Maureen Dowd’s column for tomorrow. She also has a kind-of retraction of the Jefferson Davis wreath story. I’m calling that two triumphs for the blogosphere, with extra points for degree-of-difficulty.

NEW YORKISH is sort of like the offspring of a drunken roll in the hay involving Gawker and The Onion.

MICKEY KAUS ARGUES that if you’re anti-war, you should support Medicare reform!

I’m not sure I’m buying this, but it’s amusing.

JOHN COLE’s Balloon Juice has moved. Drop by, say hello, and adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

And via Balloon Juice, I noted that this Norman Borlaug oped — which appeared in the for-pay Wall Street Journal earlier this week — is now online at OpinionJournal. It’s a must-read on the subject of genetic engineering and third-world hunger. Borlaug won a Nobel Peace Prize — and, unlike some more recent recipients, actually deserved it.

VENEZUELANS ARE STAGING A 24-HOUR RALLY AGAINST CHAVEZ:

The rally – intended to last 24 hours – was called in protest against a court decision to block a referendum on President Chavez’s rule, which opponents say is dictatorial.

Venezuela, the world’s fifth largest oil exporter, has been gripped by the eight-week strike, which has caused severe fuel and some food shortages.

President Chavez is refusing to step down, saying his opponents are being manipulated by Venezuela’s wealthy elite. . . .

The protesters have accused Mr Chavez of behaving like a dictator and mismanaging the economy and have called on him to resign or call early elections.

They flooded a four-kilometre stretch (2.5 miles) of the major highway, chanting Until he goes! and waving the national colours of the Venezuelan flag.

There are blog-pictures here.

THE U.S. MARIJUANA PARTY has formed. There’s even a branch in Tennessee.

I was tempted to make the usual Stoner joke, but, actually, I wish them success. The “War on Drugs” is a horrible disaster that will, I think, be looked back on as an episode ranking somewhere between Prohibition and slavery on the scale of institutionalized evil.

LOTT UPDATE: So is the Lott affair over, or not? A few days ago, it looked as if it had been laid to rest, but people are still talking. I’ve been waiting for Jim Lindgren to do a wrapup on this, which he was going to do last week but which he’s now promising for sometime next week. Lott critic-in-chief Tim Lambert summarizes the whole affair here, and while his dislike of, and distrust of, Lott is quite evident, he’s got all the links pro and con. There is now substantial evidence that Lott did in fact conduct a survey in 1997 — some factual corroboration and one person who says he was surveyed, which seems to be enough to satisfy most people, if not all. And certainly there’s no evidence presented, beyond inference and questions, that Lott didn’t conduct the survey. If that changes, I’ll certainly let you know.

But for now, the surest sign that this issue is largely settled is that Lambert is now arguing a different question — not whether the survey was conducted, but whether the 98% figure is accurate. I have no opinion on this at all. I’m not qualified to judge the statistical merit of this stuff, and at any rate, the question originally presented wasn’t whether Lott is a poor scholar, but whether he’s an honest one.

I’ve been uncomfortable blogging on this subject because I’ve been involved in trying to get to the bottom of it, though chiefly in the form of repeated and forceful admonitions to Lott to make as much information public as possible, as soon as possible. Lott has released his income tax data and all of the information on his forthcoming survey replicating the 1997 study to scholars for examination. They seem satisfied. (Interestingly, Lott, like Lambert, seems to think that the real question is whether his figure is ultimately right. They’re both wrong, in my opinion). Unlike the Bellesiles affair, where I was on the outside wondering why it was getting no attention, here I was (somewhat) on the inside — enough, at any rate, that blow-by-blow blogging felt wrong, especially on side issues like email pseudonyms.

I’ve been a bit annoyed by the efforts on behalf of many to make this into a Bellesiles-payback case. First, the Bellesiles case was in the email-list and scholarly inquiry phase for over two years. When I first blogged it, on October 3, 2001, the Bellesiles case had already been the subject of extensive detective work by Clayton Cramer, investigative reports in the Boston Globe and National Review Online, and over a year of back-and-forth on the same email list where people have been discussing Lott. My first post was, in fact, occasioned by Emory University’s demand to Bellesiles that he explain himself. I hadn’t blogged the issue earlier because it seemed premature; people were still looking into the matter.

As I said in my first post on this subject, even Lambert stated up front that this question didn’t call Lott’s main argument into question. Bellesiles was accused of, and eventually shown to have engaged in, outright fabrication of major data crucial to the essential argument of a major published work. Lott was accused, and not shown to have engaged in, false reports of conducting a study that was never published anywhere. The Bellesiles process went on for two years. The Lott process, by that standard, has taken place in an eyeblink. It’s also notable that Tim Lambert wasn’t ignored or dismissed in the way that Clayton Cramer was for years, and that some of those (including me) who have leaned hardest on Lott to explain himself are those who generally favor the results that his work shows. That’s in notable contrast to the Bellesiles case, too.

Greg Beato, who sometimes takes it upon himself to lecture me on fairness and decorum, has demonstrated his commitment to fairness and decorum by photoshopping Lott in drag and conflating Bellesiles’ false claims that a critic had forged emails attributed to him, with Lott’s use of a pseudonym in chat groups, two rather different things, on the dubious basis that both were “Internet-related.”

Lott has not covered himself with glory in this matter, and the pseudonymous-posting thing is kind of weird (though, um, certain bloggers are not in a position to criticize pseudonymous argument too much, and raising it after the main claim seemed to have been laid to rest seemed a bit cheesy to me). And I think that Lott’s reputation will suffer from all of this, and it probably should. But the desire of many people to have a Bellesiles-payback-on-the-cheap has done them no credit either. Accusing an academic of fraud is a serious matter, best done by those who — like Clayton Cramer, or Jim Lindgren — have done actual work, and have actual evidence relevant to the matter at hand. That’s one reason why I’ve waited on Lindgren, since everyone seems to agree that he’s honest, and he can hardly be accused of wanting a Bellesiles payback. And when Lindgren posts his findings, I’ll report those, of course.

UPDATE: David Levy, an economist at GMU, emails:

I’ve known John Lott for a long time and he’s been really good about data sharing. I require students to replicate published worked in my econometrics classes and one of them had the guts to get data from John. “Guts” only

because the data set is huge. It came on a zip disk (if I remember correctly) and probably in Stata format. No one at George Mason was using Stata then so it was a mild pain to get it converted.

People reviewing their own work and neglecting to sign their name has a long, wonderful tradition. One of the best reviews of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is by … yup … WW himself.

Levy also edits the excellent Library of Economics website.

MORE FRIENDS OF PEACE AND DEMOCRACY in San Francisco.

DAVID WARREN WRITES THAT:

next week is the crunch. I expect we will come to look back on this as we do now upon the League of Nations in its last moments — the League’s failure to act on Abyssinia, and so forth, in the gathering clouds of World War II.

The U.N. has manoeuvred Mr. Bush into a position where he cannot advance towards Baghdad without pushing them over. It follows he will push them over — and let the world know why. As I see it, we have reached the end of the road, either for Mr. Bush or for the United Nations. I expect Mr. Bush to prevail; but if he doesn’t, I’ll tell you. I expect Mr. Bush to be blamed for the convulsion that then seizes the U.N., but in the longer run I think it will be seen that the U.N. killed itself.

The North American media are if possible overplaying the soap operatic performances of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, as they strew thumbtacks along the road to Baghdad. If you turn to the European media, you see that the French and Germans themselves hardly take their leaders so seriously. They are used to this kind of cynical posturing, and it doesn’t make the front page. What scares them is rather the American earnestness, the possibility that Mr. Bush means what he says. They expect politicians to lie to them — it is part of the “social contract” as in Canada — and when one of them starts putting his money where his mouth is, they are naturally alarmed. . . .

Here, in microcosm, is the real battle, the one reflected in macrocosm in the contest between Mr. Bush and the United Nations. It could be summed in one sentence:

“Do we think that what we ARE is worth defending?”

Yes.

HERE’S A RATHER UNDER-COVERED DEMONSTRATION: 40,000 Koreans demonstrating in favor of the United States, and getting next to no coverage in the United States.

ELECTRONIC BALLOT-BOX STUFFING isn’t very hard in Canada’s NDP elections, according to David Artemiw. More proof of the general superiority of paper ballots.

MORE ALGERIANS: This just keeps happening:

Four Algerians are being investigated over possible terrorist links after being stopped leaving a bureau de change with thousands of pounds in cash.

The men held outside a London bureau by Customs officers were carrying more than £16,000 in US dollars.

Security services were alerted and are investigating where the money came from, what it was for and the possibility it was linked to terrorist funding in the UK or abroad.

The cash, which Customs believed to be linked to criminal activity, was seized on January 9 following an intelligence operation.

When stopped, the men claimed the money had been withdrawn from a bank account in Algeria and that it was going to be used for clothes shopping in the UK and US.

They produced copies of bank slips and invoices but investigators established through officials in Algeria that the account did not exist.

“I’m shopping for clothes. My size? I wear a ‘C-4’ — see, that’s why it’s on my shopping list for the Semtex mall. . . . It’s somewhere in New Jersey, I think.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES IS WAY BEHIND THE BLOGOSPHERE, but it’s finally onto the International A.N.S.W.E.R. story:

Answer, whose name stands for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, was formed a few days after Sept. 11, 2001, by activists who had already begun coming together to protest policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Some of the group’s chief organizers are active in the Workers World Party, a radical Socialist group with roots in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The party has taken positions that include defense of the Iraqi and North Korean governments and support for Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugolav president being tried on war crimes charges.

The positions of some of Answer’s members have caused rifts in past antiwar movements as well. In January 1991, at the onset of the Persian Gulf war, two coalitions of protesters marched separately, on consecutive weekends, because one refused to align itself with the other, whose members included current Answer officers who would not criticize the Iraqi government or support economic sanctions against it.

In an interview today, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a spokeswoman for Answer, said questions raised about the group’s role were “classic McCarthy-era Red-baiting.”

It’s not McCarthyism to call people who are communists, communists. Communists, as devoted followers of murderous totalitarianism, deserve to be called to account every bit as much as their Nazi colleagues. And in the 21st century, they can hardly pretend to be ignorant of their ideology’s true nature.

I think it’s interesting, though, that today’s antiwar movement hasn’t maintained the separation from the communists that it maintained before. Some people are catching on, though:

The next national rally is scheduled for Feb. 15 in New York, and it is being sponsored by United for Peace, a coalition of more than 120 groups, most of them less radical than Answer.

It’s pretty hard to be more radical than a group whose key members think that the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, are both just fine. These guys don’t seem to have gotten the word, though.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll notes that the Times story has proved James Lileks right: “McCarthyism” today doesn’t mean false accusations of communism; it apparently means calling self-identified communists by their proper name.

ANOTHER UPDATE: David Adesnik criticizes my blanket condemnation of communism, and there’s an interesting debate going on over on Oxblog. Nelson Ascher, who informed me of the debate, sends this answer to Adesnik:

A communist in America today who in his way endorses the Gulag is every bit as much an apologist for totalitarianism and genocide as any rightwing nut who denies the Holocaust. In a way, we could say he/she is even worse, because there is no Nazi extermination camp in activity anywhere, but there are Gulags in places like Cuba, North Korea or China. Thus, while a German neo-Nazi, for instance, is directly responsible at most for some immigrants killed in Europe, a communist is backing exisiting regimes that keep exterminating hundreds of thousands as we discuss.

Then, his idea that they or some of them may have been justified because of “their passionate commitment to social justice” is rather hard to defend. We could even say that at least the Nazis were sincere (though nobody would take them at their word in time) while the communists gave even hypocrisy a bad name. Murdering in the name of lofty ideals is, for me, an extra perversion once, besides the human corpses, they littered the discourse with the corpses of the ideas and ideals they’ve instrumentalised and debased. That, by the way, is exactly what many in the left are doing nowadays when they use terms like “peace” and “human rights” to promote Saddam’s dictatorship or the cold blooded massacre of Israelis. And what was exactly the kind of social justice they actually preached? Hunger for all, except for party members.

It’s because there are people trying to show that, well, the worst the left did wasn’t as bad as the worst the right did, that our European friends keep denying that leftist synagogue burning is anti-Semitic. What’s the next step? Looking for the righteous roots of Islamicist anger? The Muslims too have their own ideas about social justice, right?

When, during the Russian civil war, the Finnish whites were threatening to intervene against the Bolsheviks, Lenin warned Mannenheim that the distance from Henlsinki to Petrograd was the same as the distance from Petrograd to Helsinki. Thus, “the gulf that separates America from Europe” because of “simplistic” American anti-Communism isn’t smaller than the gulf that separates Europe from America because of simplistic European apology of communist crimes.

The Western European communists backed their Eastern European, Cuban, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Chinese counterparts until the bitter end and even after that. For God’s sake: the Trotskyites nowadays do back lunatic Stalinist/Maoist regimes such as that in North Korea! They’ve also backed the fascistic military in Argentine during the Falklands war as well as the Talibans.

Yes, the only unifying thread I can find is opposition to America if possible, and, failing that, opposition to Western ideas of freedom. To call such an ideology evil is no exaggeration. To defend it is to defend, well, evil.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meryl Yourish responds to the defenders of A.N.S.W.E.R.’s role in the protests.

I’VE HAD TROUBLE REACHING A LOT OF SITES TODAY, and Oliver Willis emails that this fast-spreading Internet worm may be the reason. He says he can’t even reach his own site. I hope the first-class tech people at HostingMatters are on the ball; so far, InstaPundit seems fine.

If it goes down, don’t forget the backup at http://instabackup.blogspot.com. And those of you who run your own servers, well, be careful.

UPDATE: Dave Winer notes that blogs beat Big Media on this one.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Of course, if I’d bothered to check the support forum I would have seen that the geniuses at HostingMatters were already on top of it.

U.N. INSPECTORS MURDER IRAQI DEFECTOR, FAMILY: How bad is this story? Bad enough to get Chris Kanis to come out of retirement. Excerpt from the CNN Report:

Appearing agitated and frightened, the young man, with a closely trimmed beard and mustache, sat inside the white U.N.-marked utility vehicle for 10 minutes, AP reported. At first, an inspection team leader sought help from nearby Iraqi soldiers, but the man refused to leave the vehicle as the uniformed men pulled on his sleeve and collar.

“I am unjustly treated!” he shouted.

Then U.N. security men arrived, and they and Iraqi police carried the man by his feet and arms into the fenced compound, journalists said. The man was turned over to Iraqi authorities at a government office adjacent to the compound, U.N. officials said.

I guess the U.N. wouldn’t want to give would-be Iraqi defectors the idea that doing so might be, you know, safe. The guy had a notebook. I wonder what was in it?

I suppose he could be just a common garden-variety nut, but he doesn’t look like one in the picture, and we’ll certainly never know. But the message was undoubtedly received by any potential defectors: approach us, and we’ll hand you over.

Can we charge the inspectors with “material breach?”

A PACK, NOT A HERD: I reported last week on the two heroic teenagers who subdued an armed and dangerous classmate in Arroyo Grande, California. Sadly, I was about the only one outside the local media in Arroyo Grande who did. Here’s a local column on the subject:

It’s not often that students jump a gun-toting, teenage nut-ball who’s taken a classroom hostage at gunpoint, then wrestle him to the floor so their high school won’t become synonymous with Columbine and grape Kool-Aid.

Arroyo Grande High students Clay Gheza and Jonathan Griswold did. The kid who’d walked into their sophomore English class on Friday waving a 9 mm pistol with murder in mind was more interested in having a bloody good time than conjugating verbs. If Gheza and Griswold hadn’t grabbed him, we’d probably be attending a lot of funerals this week and I’d be so despairing that you wouldn’t be able to read this column because I wouldn’t be able to write it, and it’d be hard for you to read it anyway, blinking away all those tears.

Everybody in SLO County knows about it, and that’s the problem: Nobody else does. That’s what makes me more annoyed than usual. . . .

I flipped the channels incessantly, endlessly, annoyingly on Friday and Saturday and all this week, hoping to see Gheza and Griswold being interviewed by Connie Chung and Wolf Blitzer about their amazing act of selfless regard on that Friday morning, how they leapt and struggled the kid to the ground, holding the his arm down, the gun waving, struggling more, it might go off, the students screaming, the bullet, the bullet, it might go off, we could all be killed, hold him, hold him–

And the inevitable lame question from our irrepressible, ubiquitous, and oh-so-coifed national news models: “And how did you feel?” Headlines across the nation, “Student Heroics Avert Classroom Murder,” a phone call from the president, “Boys, your braveness and heroicking makes me proud–could sure use your help with that Baghdad bozo,” and the talking heads nodding and blabbing, “McLaughlin,” “McNeil,” “The Capitol Gang,” all bursting with amazed approval, astonishment, and praise, “Gosh, Jim, can you believe it? Amazing, simply amazing, why if they’d been on board those planes, there’d have been no Twin Towers disaster–we’ll be right back with an exclusive interview right after the break … ”

Nope. Nothing. Zippola-nada-noodle. If there was a mention, I missed it, and so did everyone I know who has a TV remote and a national newspaper subscription and the sense to know that this is the stuff journalists stumble out of bed each morning nursing their hangovers over, hoping to find that big old dog with that big old bite for that big old Pulitzer, maybe today, maybe, maybe–Arroyo Grande? Where’s that? How many kids got killed? None? Bummer. Hey, I know! We could go make some ice cubes on the sidewalk!”

“I just thought, ‘I’m going to take him down,’” Jonathan Griswold told the Tribune. “We didn’t want him to hurt anyone,” said Clay Gheza, with humble modesty that makes me feel like a jerk. I could learn from him.

So could Dan Rather, as soon as he pulls his head out of his butt.

I don’t actually believe that there’s a conspiracy among Big Media to constantly present an image of the American public as a bunch of bumbling, helpless boobs in need of constant supervision by the Nanny State, while suppressing all evidence to the contrary. But, you have to admit, its easy to see why some people do think that.

UPDATE: As far as I can tell, the story only got covered in the item I link above, and in these “”news brief” treatments in the Mercury News and the Fresno Bee, where it sat next to stories about community fund-raising dances and too-tall Santa statues. Pretty damned lame.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Scott Boone reports that it got some coverage:

I DID see a national news story on these guys…I think it was on 20/20 the other night (Thursday). I say “I think” because it could have been Dateline, etc (sorry, I was flipping channels, being a “pirate” and not watching the commercials–please don’t rat on me ;)

Anyhow, the one thing about the interview that really caught me was the fact that the interviewer never really tied this act with the acts on Flight 93…that they really are in the same vein. And more importantly, nothing was even HINTED at that it is THIS kind of vigilance and courage that we, as a country, need to promote in order to vanquish our savage enemies and their idiotarian allies. They wryly made more hay out of the fact that the “jocks” did nothing, and that the “rocker” and the “surfer” saved the day…geez, nice time to solidify the foundations of class warfare.

Just wanted to pass along that it was at least news-magazined, if underreported.

Well, sorry, you’re busted on the commercial-skipping thing, you “thief.” Funny that a local writer didn’t know about this (and neither did the Arroyo Grande local who sent me the link), but not actually shocking. Did anyone else see any coverage?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tom Maguire has found some other coverage, though far less than the story deserves.

He thinks the story should be all over talk radio. I agree.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Well, here’s a transcript of a CNN story. Maybe nobody in Arroyo Grande actually watches TV?

And reader Fred Butzen emails:

Many thanks for the posting on Gheza and Griswold. Having a couple of teenagers myself, one of whom has just signed up with the Marines, I appreciate hearing stories like this. There’s a lot of troubled kids out there, but there’s also a lot of kids whose heads are screwed on straight as well.

Their action, though, simply underscores what a woman friend said to me after 9/11:

“It takes balls to live free.”

I can’t think of a better summary of why we fight the Islamofascists – and why we’ll win.

And why the French aren’t interested. . . .

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND THE INDIAN CASTE SYSTEM: An interesting perspective from someone who has seen both.

A READER SENDS THIS LINK to an Iraq Daily column and asks “Isn’t Tupac Shakur dead?”

Ah, but that’s what they want you to think. Actually he became disgusted with American imperialism and defected to Iraq, where he’s producing propaganda to educate the masses.

Coming soon: An explanation of why the American people really don’t support Bush, despite the recent election and Congressional declaration of war, by Notorious B.I.G.

Oh, wait — my mistake: it’s already out!

HERE’S A WHITE HOUSE PAPER on what genuine disarmament looks like. Not surprisingly, it’s rather different from the shell game that Iraq has been running. Put it together with this oped by Condi Rice from earlier in the week, and the White House has made pretty clear what it’s demanding, and what it’s not getting, from Iraq.

I’VE HINTED AT POSSIBLE UNTOWARD FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENTS involving North Korea and South Korean politicians. This story isn’t quite what I had in mind, but it’s fascinating.

MORE ON THE PRIVACY FRONT: I’m deeply skeptical about this program:

Last week, the Transportation Security Agency announced its intent to create a new passenger-screening database that will be the centerpiece of a system to scan for potential terrorists by instantly checking every domestic traveler’s credit history, arrest record and property tax data.

Property tax data? Hmm. I suppose that could be a legitimate way of checking addresses — but only for people who own property. Seems dubious. Or will we — along the lines of other programs — start saying that people who owe property taxes, or child support, will lose the “privilege” of travel by airplane?

There’s this, though, which is comforting as long as you believe it:

Unlike the controversial Total Information Awareness research project, the central database of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening Program II, or CAPPS II, will contain permanent financial records, intelligence reports and law enforcement records only on those suspected of posing a national security risk, according to the Jan. 15 Privacy Act notice.

But how many of these assurances do I believe? Sadly, based on past performance, not very many.

FRANCE AND IRAQ? Trent Telenko says that France has lost it. A reader calls the current self-destructive stand the diplomatic equivalent of WaterWorld (Ouch!) — an expensive bit of self-indulgence that’s effectively going to end France’s position as a Bankable Star.