R.U. SIRIUS INTERVIEWS BRUCE SCHNEIER ON SECURITY:

I think we should ratchet passenger screening down to pre-9/11 levels. I like seeing positive bag matching. That’s something that was done in Europe for decades. The U.S. airlines screamed and screamed and refused to do it, and now they are.

Really, I would take all the extra money for airport security and have well-trained guards, both uniformed and plainclothes, walking through the airports looking for suspicious people. That’s what I would do. And I would just give back the rest of the money. If we secure our airport and the terrorists go bomb shopping malls, we’ve wasted our money. I dislike security measures that require us to guess the plot correctly because if you guess wrong, it’s a waste of money. And it’s not even a fair game. It’s not like we pick our security, they pick their plot, we see who wins. The game is we pick our security, they look at our security, and then they pick their plot. The way to spend money on security – airport security, and security in general — is intelligence investigation and emergency response. These are the things that will be effective regardless of what the terrorists are planning.

I think that Schneier — who’s an occasional correspondent here — is right about the above, and much else. Read the whole thing.

WHEN MASS KILLERS meet armed resistance. (Via Gail Heriot).

MATTHEW YGLESIAS MOVES to The Atlantic Monthly.

SHERYL CROW AND HER TOILET PAPER: I think this is an example of “negative branding.” As I drove home, I heard a local DJ saying that no one will ever be able to listen to her music without thinking of butt-wiping, and then speculating that maybe Lance Armstrong had left her because “she wasn’t diligent enough with the paperwork.” That was the first of many similar jokes.

I don’t think it was part of a well-thought-out PR strategy. . . .

FLYING CARS!

“ALL I WANNA DO, is wipe my bum.”

A LOOK AT kleptocracy and politics in Romania.

OKAY, I’M POSTING THIS AGAIN before moving it to the sidebar. If you’ve installed compact fluorescent bulbs, why not join and note it here? I promise I won’t be asking anyone to go without toilet paper.

If you want to join, go here.

D FOR DEFEATISM: Another call for Harry Reid to step down, from Investor’s Business Daily:

In aiding and comforting the enemy in wartime, Reid has betrayed the office he holds, shamed the Nevadans he represents and made the Democratic Party he leads synonymous with surrender. There is one way he can repair the damage he’s done to the nation: step down.

I don’t see Democrats jumping onboard with outrage here the way Republicans did over Trent Lott’s racial statements. But I suppose I could be wrong.

BOWLING FOR VIRGINIA TECH: Is it really about class envy?

3 TRACTOR TRAILERS, 4 BUSES, 6 CARS: Sheryl Crow’s going to have to do without toilet paper for a long time to offset that.

AN IPOD AND AN AK-47: Equipped for anything!

MICHAEL BARONE REPORTS ON what’s happening with troop funding.

What’s curious is that congressional Democrats don’t seem much interested in what’s actually happening in Iraq. The commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, returns to Washington this week, but last week Pelosi’s office said “scheduling conflicts” prevented him from briefing House members. Two days later, the members-only meeting was scheduled, but the episode brings to mind the fact that Pelosi and other top House Democrats skipped a Pentagon videoconference with Petraeus March 8. How long this fight will go on is unclear. Some Democrats predict that it will go on for months. But their dilemma remains the same. They want to be seen as acting to end the war. But they dare not be seen as not funding the troops.

Read the whole thing. The goal, I think, is to ensure that the war is seen as a failure, but to make sure that Democrats don’t get blamed.

BILL KRISTOL: “What Harry Reid said is much more disgraceful than anything Trent Lott said. And I do think Democrats should ask Harry Reid [to] step down.”

PRAISE FOR BILL RICHARDSON:

The other day, I turned on the radio in my car and heard someone discussing some important foreign policy issue, and I was impressed by his intelligence and expertise. After the segment ended, I was amazed to hear it was Bill Richardson. I hadn’t been able to tell that I was listening to a presidential candidate.

But that last sentence is pretty damning for the political system as a whole, isn’t it?

IRANIAN POLITICS: Interesting.

IN THE MAIL: Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Christianity. Blurb: “The relationship between science and religion has long been a tenuous one. Some have worked to put these disciplines in ‘dialogue’ with each other, while others have dismissed any possibility of a collegial relationship. To his credit, Tipler, professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University, attempts the former. He proposes that Christianity can be studied as a science, and its claims, if true, can be empirically proven.”

I haven’t read his previous book, The Physics of Immortality, which was well received, but I did like The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.

THE ROUGH DRAFT of the rough draft of history? The Memphis Commercial Appeal is liveblogging the John Ford corruption trial.

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE DUNCAN HUNTER is guest-posting on pork over at PorkBusters.

MUSLIM CLERIC WANTS AYAN HIRSI ALI KILLED:

Imam Fouad ElBayly, president of the Johnstown Islamic Center, was among those who objected to Hirsi Ali’s appearance.

“She has been identified as one who has defamed the faith. If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death,” said ElBayly, who came to the U.S. from Egypt in 1976.

When you come into the United States you must abide by the laws and customs that prevail here. You’re supposed to leave this kind of medieval idiocy behind. If you keep it up, don’t be surprised if you get thought of as some sort of medieval idiot.

BILLIONS OF BULBS: So I’ve joined the CFL awareness program, and there’s a page where InstaPundit readers can record their bulb purchases. Here’s the calculator, which as I post this contains only the 20 bulbs I’ve replaced.

If you want to join, go here.

As I’ve said before, whether you believe in anthropogenic global warming or not, it makes sense to cut back on burning fossil fuels, for reasons of geopolitics as well as general cleanliness. That’s how I see it, anyway!

UPDATE: Nice work — the InstaPundit group is now the largest on OBB. Short of getting Laurie David to fly commercial, this is as big an accomplishment as I can imagine.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bumped to the top — I’ll stick this widget in the sidebar later. For now, sign up!

MORE “SQUIDWARD” than SpongeBob, if you ask me: “He is well-educated, knows his history, and has a strong anti-capitalist bent.”

MORE CELEBRITY GREENHOUSE HYPOCRISY:

Laurie David, the producer of “An Inconvenient Truth” and global warming activist, told Texas A&M students to change their “individual behavior” in order to consume fewer resources and to help battle global warming. As an employee of Easterwood Airport, I would like to point out that Mrs. David flew to our campus in a luxurious private jet, which could be seen from 10 miles away due to the thick plume of smog it left in its wake. I am neither denying nor confirming the epidemic of global warming, I am simply pointing out that hypocrites such as Mrs. David don’t care about the environment, only their own political agendas. This is proven time and again by these celebrities’ and lobbyist’s “do as I say, not as I do” attitude.

We need a database of private-jet-flying celebrities. Can that be created from publicly available information?

But wait, there’s more:

Even worse is David’s chic but hypocritical environmentalism at her summer home in Martha’s Vineyard. She was issued a “notice of apparent violations” for building a 26-foot-long barbecue station, stone-and-concrete bonfire pit, and outdoor theater on an environmentally sensitive patch of their 14-acre North Road property without the proper permits. They were also cited for tearing up protected vegetation to make way for a lush, sodded lawn, among other crimes against nature.

The commission has since ordered her to remove the offending structures and restore the area to its previous state. All these violations were allegedly done to prepare for a political fundraiser hosted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (another faux Green). Alas, there’s no such thing as cheap environmentalism on the Vineyard.

Laurie David has been labeled a “Gulfstream liberal” by Eric Alterman, himself a proud member of the Left and a regular columnist for the Nation. He recognizes that Ms. David’s brand of environmentalism is nothing more than a facade, a distraction from the financially secure yet intellectually boring life of the fabulously wealthy. But this hobby has dire consequences for the rest of us.

Well, some of them are dire. The rest provide a good, hearty laugh.

MEGAN MCARDLE ON COPYCAT VIOLENCE:

In the wake of the Virginia tech murders, there has been a lot of editorialising about gun control and mental health interventions. But I haven’t found a single editorial addressing one factor we know creates these mass murders: reporting on the mass murders. In the next few weeks and months, even over the next few years, expect to see copycat killings inspired by Cho’s actions. The more saturated the media coverage, the more such events we are likely to get. But as far as I know, few papers have taken to advocating that we cut down on news coverage of these events.

That might cost them money.

UPDATE: Howard Kurtz:

I have rarely seen the kind of angry eruption that followed. Friends and family of the Virginia Tech victims were furious, but so too were millions of Americans who saw the news outlets as giving Cho precisely the kind of notoriety he had been seeking, in precisely the way he had taped it. Why give this madman the posthumous satisfaction? Why immortalize his vicious acts? Why encourage potential copycats? Why take the focus off the 32 innocent people whose lives were snuffed out? (None of the three newsmagazines, interestingly enough, put Cho’s image on the cover.)

Fortunately the networks quickly dialed back on the use of the video — in part, I believe, because they were taken aback by the intensity of the reaction.

Kurtz goes on to suggest, though, that the alternative was not covering things. But that’s simplistic. There’s coverage and there’s coverage. The coverage we got was screaming, pandering, ratings-bait. NBC could have presented the material later, and in a more somber fashion. They could have put the video online instead of broadcasting it in primetime. The reason why people were upset is that the coverage was exploitative.

I also have to disagree with Kurtz’s follow-on:

The media proved, as they did in the days after 9/11, that they excel at covering big, breaking news, freed from the need to pump up a minor melodrama involving Laci or Natalee or Anna Nicole and imbue it with national significance.

Actually, the 9/11 coverage was bad — and don’t get me started on the Katrina coverage, which as Newsday veteran Lou Dolinar noted probably cost lives with its overhyped false reports of snipers shooting at rescuers etc. After every big event, members of the press congratulate each other on their coverage. But in fact, it’s just Anna Nicole Smith with a bigger body count.

THE ECONOMIST: “Innumeracy, thy name is New York Times reporter.”

Apparently, reports of a rise in infant mortality in the South are not all the NYT claims.