ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY survey of media bias on gun control is up, with a surprising finding.

TED BARLOW has unmasked my secret identity.

A LOT MORE NEWSPAPER WEBSITES are reportedly going to start asking for registration. Do you like that idea? I offer my observations in today’s TechCentralStation column.

LIFE IS GOOD, here at the secure undisclosed location. I didn’t follow the State of the Union speech — I’m at a hotel with the InstaWife and no kids, an opportunity too good to be wasted on political speeches. But Stephen Green and Tacitus provided blow-by-blow coverage, so the Blogosphere was on the job.

From what I’ve seen, Bush did pretty well on Iraq, and got a passing grade (with perhaps an extra point or two for audacity) on the domestic side. However, if you grade on the curve with Gary Locke plugged in, he gets an A. (Andrew Sullivan would give Bush an A outright.) What I saw of Locke in the playback looked weak, and others seem to agree. He came across like a city councilman. Not a bad city councilman, but not somebody ready for primetime at the national level, at least not yet.

UPDATE: Just noticed that they were dissing me for my absence over at The Corner, where they were blogging in realtime, too. Heh. Well, they get paid the big bucks for that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, here is a piece noting the Tolkien resonances in the speech. And Matt Welch assembled a focus group on the State of the Union. Plus there’s a link on his page that’ll let you subscribe to the Los Angeles Examiner! Go for it.

OFF TO A SECURE, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: Blogging will resume later.

AXIS OF NOT-SO-FEEBLE: The Norwegian Air Force dropped its first bomb in almost 60 years in Afghanistan today. (Via Rantburg). And don’t miss this photo of anti-French, pro-American protests in Cote d’Ivoire, with a sign reading “USA is better” and a — non-defaced! — American flag. Bwahahaha!

GARY FARBER on the unlikelihood of “terror bombing” against Iraq.

WILLIAM SJOSTROM POINTS TO THIS ARTICLE BY JOHN KEEGAN on “The New Appeasers.” Excerpt:

Here the new appeasement takes on its second form. It does not seek, as in the 1930s, to appease dictators. The object now is to appease other objectors to war – half-hearted allies such as Germany, the “Arab street”, liberal opinion at home and, above all, the legalists in the UN and other international organisations.

The new appeasers’ cry today is for a “second” (but implicitly a third and fourth) Security Council resolution authorising military action against Saddam and, without that, no intervention. The appeasers believe that they have found, in the UN Charter, means to prevent the democracies resorting to force in almost all circumstances. . . .

The history of appeasement does not change. Hitler was once a weak little man – and it was the concessions of the appeasers of his day that allowed him to grow strong. Once Saddam has his nuclear weapons, he will beat the drum of war. It will be a war that the new appeasers, like the old appeasers who rallied to Churchill after Hitler’s first blitzkrieg, will bitterly regret that they did not fight when they had the chance to win.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

THE EDDIE MURPHY / JOHN MCCAIN CONNECTION. It’s all so obvious, now. . . .

BILL HOBBS has done some research on claims about the cost of war — and on who’s doing the claiming. He also notes:

One of WAND’s five stated policy goals is

Eliminate the testing, production, sale and use of weapons of mass destruction.

Isn’t that what we’re trying to do in Iraq?

Yes, Bill, but I suspect they’re talking about our weapons of mass destruction. Not Saddam’s.

PORPHYROGENITUS says it’s all about ooiiilll at the BBC.

LEE HARRIS writes:

If the international community supported the First Gulf War overwhelmingly, which clearly it did, it is morally committed to supporting the current policy of the United States and the failure to realize this connection can be most charitably ascribed to intellectual dishonesty.

Since the United States is the only nation in the world that is willing to play this role, let alone capable of playing it, there are only three ways that it can relate to the international community: either as its lackey, or as its leader, or as its tyrant.

The world cannot really expect the United States to be its lackey, and certainly doesn’t want it to be its tyrant. And this leaves them only one choice.

Those who are now currently refusing to accept America’s moral right to lead at this point are betraying the very ideals they pretend to champion—you cannot have world peace until someone enforces it; but no one who is powerful enough to enforce it can be persuaded to enforce it like a flunkey—it is utopianism to think otherwise.

I’m not sure “utopianism” is the precise word, but yes.

THERE MAY BE NO LOGICAL CONNECTION between “Free Mumia!” and “Not in Our Name!” — but there is a financial connection. Tom Wolfe must be smiling.

UPDATE: Michele has some thoughts, over at A Small Victory. In another postshe notes that waiting for a “smoking gun” is probably a mistake:

a smoking gun would imply that it is too late; a gun does not smoke until it has been fired.

Indeed.

DOES SADDAM HAVE NUKES? ARE THE FRENCH SPYING FOR SADDAM? Trent Telenko has info on both. I’ve gotten some email from military folks suggesting the latter based on the behavior of French ships and aircraft in the Persial Gulf region.

If it’s true, paybacks should be severe.

GOVERNMENT DATABASES AND MISSION CREEP: Brian Doherty is absolutely right about this.

PESSIMISM ABOUT THE FUTURE: I have to say, this posting by Michael Rogers seems to hit the nail on the head. Most people I know are pessimistic about the future of their professions, too, almost across the board. I wonder if it’s caused by the phenomenon Brad DeLong identifies: better communications technology is creating more competition for people in a wide variety of fields.

DeLong’s prediction for 2023 reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, in which we’re told that globalization had smeared things out into a worldwide layer of “what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider prosperity.”

Is that really our future? I’m inclined to doubt it. But I could be wrong.

UPDATE: John Nye emails:

I think the trends you speak of would be at work even if there were no globalization. And Stephenson had it wrong. The greatest wage pressure will be on status and goods. Prosperity should easily increase material welfare (no. of cars, clothes, dinners, etc. you can buy) but will adversely affect prestige goods (like the probability of being accepted to the top ten universities or the chance of buying that prime lot in Menlo Park or even getting tickets to Broadway). So the issue is not that standard of living will be at the Pakistani middle class level.

Rather it will feel like that for some because they will be objectively richer but some of the things they cherish which provide status will be unobtainable. This has already been happening in the US. See my article on Irreducible Inequality.

I think this may be right. Reader George Zachar emails:

BY DEFINITION most professions will vanish/evolve into something unrecognizable as time, technology and expertise advance.

Focus on individual capabilities/skill sets/flexibility, and things look brighter/more realistic.

I’ve lost count of the personal career metamorphisms I’ve gone through.

I think this is right, too.

TRANSATLANTIC AXIS OF WEASEL UPDATE: It’s in the title of this piece in The Times (“Paris and Berlin: the axis of weasel”) by Ferdinand Mount, who writes:

In 1963 two ancient titans, de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, were leading two renascent nations out of the ruins of war. Now in their different ways France and Germany are led by two weaklings. Schröder survived the German elections only by resorting to a humiliating pacifist stance which he didn’t even sound as if he believed in. Chirac managed to see off an ancient fascist and now exercises more or less unfettered power, which, as ever, he doesn’t seem to have much clue what to do with except cling to the Franco-German pact.

However, the newer members of the EU, as Le Monde has the grace to point out, don’t think of the Americans as demons at all. After all, if the Yanks had gone home, as those old post-war French graffiti used to demand, half of those new members would not be free today.

In Britain, too, you can feel the change. Whenever Macmillan or Wilson or Heath or Major was “let down” by the French, there was an audible “ouch” throughout the Establishment. Our foreign policy had been derailed again. We didn’t know where to turn.

But now? I haven’t met anybody outside the Foreign Office who gives a toss.

I think the French and Germans may be suffering from imperial overstretch.

UPDATE: This Christopher Hitchens column in Slate on Bush’s alleged “cowboy” ways is good, too. Excerpt:

To have had three planeloads of kidnapped civilians crashed into urban centers might have brought out a touch of the cowboy even in Adlai Stevenson. But Bush waited almost five weeks before launching any sort of retaliatory strike. And we have impressive agreement among all sources to the effect that he spent much of that time in consultation. A cowboy surely would have wanted to do something dramatic and impulsive (such as to blow up at least an aspirin-factory in Sudan) in order to beat the chest and show he wasn’t to be messed with. But it turns out that refined Parisians are keener on such “unilateral” gestures—putting a bomb onboard the Rainbow Warrior, invading Rwanda on the side of the killers, dispatching French troops to the Ivory Coast without a by-your-leave, building a reactor for Saddam Hussein, and all the rest of it.

Indeed.

GWEILO DIARIES IS UNIMPRESSED with E.U. diplomacy regarding North Korea. He’s not that thrilled with U.S. moves in Indonesia, either.

JAY MANIFOLD WRITES on Iraq/Georgia parallels, and why Iraq will suffer less in war than Georgia did under Sherman.

STEPHEN GREEN: Flaming Liberal.

DIANE E. IS GRATEFUL TO THE FRENCH. No, really.

“YOU GET WHAT YOU DESERVE” — Anti-American graffiti on a 9/11 memorial.

My response: be glad you’re not getting what you deserve, buddy.

RAND SIMBERG REMEMBERS THE APOLLO 1 FIRE.

I’ll note that it was memorialized, together with some other tragedies, by the Rainmakers in a great song called “Rockin’ at the T-Dance.”

YOU DON’T FIND A LOT of nice things said about George Tenet on this site, but this article from Time on the “CIA’s Secret Army” has an interesting passage:

It was George Tenet who began rebuilding the SOG five years ago when he took charge of the CIA, but the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, accelerated his efforts.

The CIA folks seem to have done an excellent job in Afghanistan, and I mentioned somewhere that whoever was behind revitalizing them deserved praise. If it’s really Tenet (I suppose this could just be after-the-fact PR puffery) then he deserves considerable credit.

UPDATE: Here’s my old post which was about Special Forces, not just the CIA paramilitary operations. The point still holds, though.

HERE’S MORE ON THE ALGERIAN TERROR CONNECTION, from the Christian Science Monitor. Excerpt:

Over the past six weeks, European investigators in four countries have arrested more than 50 people with suspected links to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. Police have uncovered explosives, chemicals, fake passports, and documents, including maps of the London Underground.

Algerians are consistently among those detained – a fact that Western intelligence officials say points to the formation of a North African network of Al Qaeda that is preparing to act.

Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, referring to the arrests Friday of 15 Algerians and a Moroccan in northeastern Spain, said police had broken up a “major terrorist network” linked to the Algerian Salafist group, a splinter of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which he said had clear links with Al Qaeda. He said the network also had connections with suspects recently arrested in France and Britain.

Interesting.