ROBERT MUSIL continues his deconstruction of Guardianista Will Hutton’s critique of the United States economy in relation to Europe’s. Excerpt:

Is the “market share” of companies in compared economic systems a good measure of comparative success? For example, Mr. Hutton compares Nokia with Motorola, suggesting that Nokia is the more successful company: “Nokia’s success is legendary; it has 35% of the world market – twice that of Motorola.” But Motorola’s stock price is essentially where it was a year ago while in the same period Nokia’s stock price has lost about one-half of its value.

RAND SIMBERG says that the Oracle scandal involving Gray Davis is going to get a lot worse:

When a Democratic governor can’t get the SF Chronicle behind him, he’s in such deep kimchi that he can’t even see a way out.

This hasn’t gotten a lot of national play yet, though.

ONE DEATH in Ramallah can be a “massacre,” we’re told. But 60 or more murdered by FARC guerrillas in Colombia doesn’t count as one, Richard Jahnke reports. Apparently the Swedes are sympathetic to FARC and are pulling strings on its behalf.

I guess those impoverished third-worlders have to stick together.

WHY IT WOULD BE A DISASTROUS MISTAKE to send U.S. troops to the West Bank as peacekeepers. I agree. I’m all for peacemaking, which one accomplishes by blowing the crap out of people causing trouble. (As one Keith Laumer character remarks, “Nothing so peaceful as a dead troublemaker.”) But peacekeeping is pretty much a game for suckers in any situation where one of the parties feels it has something to gain from war.

MATTHEW ENGEL, AUTHOR OF THE Alabama Olive Garden reportage that inspired so much amusement among the weblog community, is now back doing the same thing for Mississippi. Hey, who knows: maybe someday Sweden will be as rich as Mississippi!

And Lee Ann Morawski doesn’t like Engel much.

JOSH CHAFETZ (of Oxblog) writes to point out an error in the John Leo column on weblogs that I mentioned earlier: Leo seems to think there’s more than one of me, based on his description: “InstaPundit was started by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. Its bloggers chime in on anything and everything related to political happenings around the world.” Well, he was probably just reacting to all my well-informed and interesting reader emails.

JUDITH SHULEVITZ has a piece entitled At Large in the Blogosphere in today’s New York Times. It’s not bad, but it has one omission: Shulevitz talks about how the Blogosphere “convulses” in response to pieces like Alex Beam’s in The Globe — but fails to explain that a lot of people were convulsing with laughter over Beam’s inability to figure out that this page by Bjorn Staerk was an April Fool’s joke. But hey — she’s using Bill Quick‘s word “blogosphere” in the headline, which is tribute enough.

Actually, Shulevitz’s whole column is a rather typical New York Times piece: coming to the topic late, and missing the story. John Leo’s piece is a lot better. What do you think accounts for the difference?

JIM BENNETT looks at why there’s no British Le Pen.

VICTIMS OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS: Though they think of themselves as prosperous, Swedes as a group are actually worse off than black Americans, according to this Swedish study. Swedes are trained from birth to view their society as a compassionate one in which everyone prospers, while the harsh capitalism of the United States makes some people rich and leaves other people destitute. Er, except that what it really does is make some people really, really rich, and leave other people just, well, richer than the Swedes. Best excerpt, highlighted by reader Todd Bass who sent this link:

“Black people, who have the lowest income in the United States, now have a higher standard of living than an ordinary Swedish household,” the HUI economists said.

If Sweden were a U.S. state, it would be the poorest measured by household gross income before taxes, Bergstrom and Gidehag said. . . .

The median income of African American households was about 70 percent of the median for all U.S. households while Swedish households earned 68 percent of the overall U.S. median level.

This meant that Swedes stood “below groups which in the Swedish debate are usually regarded as poor and losers in the American economy,” Bergstrom and Gidehag said.

Between 1980 and 1999, the gross income of Sweden’s poorest households increased by just over six percent while the poorest in the United States enjoyed a three times higher increase, HUI said.

Hmm. Maybe the Mississippi Chamber of Commerce will start agitating to have Sweden admitted as a state, so that there’ll be one that ranks lower than Mississippi.

UPDATE: Reader Marten Barck writes from Stockholm to say that it’s worse than the statistics make it sound, since unemployment and layoffs are hidden behind disability figures:

Hi,
I read your post about Sweden and would like to add some statistics. Sorry for the bad English, but I’ve never used these terms in English. Prepensioned means people who are pensioned before they are supposed to because of illnesses (or because they can’t get jobs).

Sweden is the sickest nation in the world. At least according to statistics and costs for healthinsurances. In reality I would guess that Swedes are among the healthiest populations in the history of mankind. But the rise in costs for healthinsurances are staggering. Longterm notification of illnesses have tripled since 1997. One in six of Swedes of working age are listed longterm sick or prepensioned. That’s about 800 000 yearjobs in a population of 9 million. The cost is 10 billion dollars per year. The
wellfare state has turned into an illfare state.

You’d think that the Swedes would get lower crime out of this, but as this post indicates they’ve got substantially higher crime rates than the United States, too.

OKAY, so it’s been “intermittent,” not “nonexistent.” Back late tonight.

MICKEY KAUS has an interesting observation on why the FBI turns out to have dropped the ball in the pre-9/11 investigation.

RAND SIMBERG WEIGHS IN on the NRA / Gays issue.

JOHN LEO has an excellent column about weblogs in U.S. News & World Report.

BLOGGING WILL BE somewhere between intermittent and nonexistent for the rest of the weekend. Enjoy the many fine weblogs linked over there on the left. And scroll down for the NRA / Pink Pistols stuff.

CHARLES JOHNSON says that cracks are appearing in the Palestinian ranks, as they start to figure out that they’re doing a lot of dying, and not getting anything for it except photo-ops for Arafat. This has been a theme of Fred Pruitt’s for a while.

HULKISM: a multi-cultural approach.

UN INVESTIGATION BEGINS: Well, sort of. Mark Steyn writes:

Anyway, as Kofi’s commission isn’t going ahead, I’m pleased to announce my own fact-finding investigation into – drumroll, please – the UN. Ex-ambassadors, European Foreign Ministers and former presidents of humanitarian organisations are welcome to apply to join my commission, but, if they’re too busy, we’ll make do with jes’ regular folks. Among the issues we’ll be examining: UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia; the UN refugee extortion racket in Kenya; UN involvement in massive embezzlement in Kosovo; the UN’s cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa involving aid workers demanding sexual favours from children as young as four; the UN-fuelled explosion of drugs, Aids and prostitution in Cambodia; the UN’s complicity in massacres in pre-liberated Afghanistan; and, if we’ve any time left, the UN’s collusion in terrorism in the Jenin refugee camp. As the organisation’s own internal investigations usually put it, UN seen nothin’ yet!

I think there’s a lot of investigating that should go on here.

OSAMA’S PLANE FOUND: At the Jeddah airport.

GRAY DAVIS SCANDALS: Joanne Jacobs has links to several stories in one convenient location.