CHRIS MOONEY has an interesting piece in the Boston Globe on Tyler Cowen and globalization. Excerpt:

It’s no cliche to observe that the 40-year-old Cowen – author of 1998’s ”In Praise of Commercial Culture” and director of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center – is what he eats. Cowen’s guide opens with the proclamation, ”Restaurants manifest the spirit of capitalist multiculturalism.” On a similar note, his books celebrate the dynamism and creativity that market forces introduce into the arts and culture. Cowen champions such detested entities as Hollywood, megastores, and Brit pop while sharply criticizing snobs, purists, and government subsidies to arts organizations. ”There’s no National Endowment for the Arts that subsidizes good food,” he told an interviewer last year. ”Yet we have a wonderfully diverse selection.”

True enough.

MERDE IN FRANCE points to a report that Iraqi civilians are mostly afraid that America will wimp out again, like it did in 1991.

AT THE BLOG CONFERENCE, people were talking about the dangers of “ideological coccooning,” though the only concrete example that anyone could think of was that British guy who didn’t want warbloggers to link to him. Now Rick Heller says he’s found another.

WHAT WOULD JESUS DRIVE? The Rev. Donald Sensing writes on why the question is nonsense.

MICHAEL MOORE, RACIST? Well, maybe not, but the American Prospect accuses him of racial blindness, at least:

My beef with Moore is this: He has managed to make a movie about gun violence in America — where 53 percent of the gun murder victims are black — without interviewing a single black victim of gun violence, or even asking black community leaders, who have spent decades successfully trying to combat the problem, for their insights. . . . He went to South Central in Los Angeles, to the very corner where the Los Angeles riots started in 1992 — but didn’t bother to ask that neighborhood’s black or Latino residents about their lives. Instead, he stood on a street corner, accompanied by Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear, who is also white, and said, in effect, Look how brave I am for coming here, and man, isn’t there a lot of smog? He spoke to a white Los Angeles Police Department officer. He spoke at length with a young white teen in Oscoda, Mich., who openly admittedly to selling stolen handguns to the folks in Detroit (where 395 people were murdered in 2001) but did not interview any of the people who were on the buying — and shooting — end of the transactions. How can you make what is essentially a movie about murder without speaking to murderers? . . .

Sure, it will be less glamorous to take on the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs over the more than 4,000 abandoned and neglected buildings that blight the city than it was to harass a stooped and elderly Charlton Heston at his Hollywood home. And it might not make you an international hero to challenge principals and teachers at persistently failing high schools — you know, the kind where half the students drop out and the ones that graduate at, say, age 21, can barely read or do simple math. But in the end, it might make a hell of a lot more difference.

Any guesses why Moore didn’t take this approach?

BRUTAL AND CORRUPT, BUT CLUELESS: Here’s an unflattering portrait of the Saudi ruling class.

A PACK, NOT A HERD: Jonathan Rauch has a great column on this:

Suppose President Bush called for volunteers in the war on terror, and thousands of people came forward. Suppose they created volunteer networks for disaster relief, emergency preparedness, and civil defense. Suppose they did most of this work at the community level, under the radar of the national media. And suppose it all happened not in the massive, militarized, top-down mode of WWII but in the networked, decentralized, bottom-up manner of WWW.

Well, brace yourself. Americans have heard the call. . . .

I caught up with Alan E. Imhoff, a retiree who is helping organize hundreds of the county’s retired doctors, nurses, and other health personnel into a volunteer medical-reserve corps. “Basically,” says Imhoff, “our whole focus is on what we do locally for the first 72 hours, until state and national assistance reaches us.” He adds that preparedness programs are sprouting in Maryland so fast it’s hard to keep up with the acronyms.

The jihadists of militant Islam are reported to believe that as they toppled the Soviet colossus, so, in time, they can topple the American one. What they do not understand is that the Soviet state made war on civil society for most of its 70-year rule. Americans, meanwhile, have nurtured their churches, charities, and clubs. The Soviet Union fell because it was brittle as well as brutal. America, with its countless nodes of activity and authority, is somewhat more vulnerable than the USSR, but it is infinitely more robust. More robust than Al Qaeda realizes. More robust, even, than many Americans realize.

Yep. But we need to go on the offensive.

WONDER WHEN TOM DASCHLE WILL WEIGH IN ON THIS THREAT:

After a tense 30-minute segment finished taping at WDSU’s studios in New Orleans, the two candidates were preparing to leave. According to witnesses, Landrieu looked over her shoulder and told Terrell, “This is your last campaign.”

A stunned Terrell replied, “She threatened me.”

No other words passed between the two New Orleans women, but moderator Alec Gifford said Landrieu appeared peeved.

“She just kind of stalked out of the studio,” Gifford said.

I think that if somebody tries to assassinate Terrell, it will be Landrieu’s fault. And if somebody tries to assassinate George Bush, it will be because of all the claims that he’s a “boy emperor” who was never elected, and seized power in a “coup.” Will we hear criticisms from Daschle then?

Can the sarcasm here get any thicker?

I do think, though, that Daschle will wish he’d kept his mouth shut last week, because those remarks of his have primed to pump to make Landrieu’s “threat” a big issue in the coming week. Another Democratic Senatorial candidate on the defensive because of bungling by Democratic Party bigshots –go figure! It’s as if they just don’t want to win.

UPDATE: Reader Robert Racansky sends this link in answer to Daschle’s remarks.

WHILE I WAS AT THE GYM, one of the chat shows involved the “what would Jesus drive” discussion. Let me offer a perspective:

Who cares?

And as for what preening churchmen think we ought to drive, well, my sentiments are unprintable. And I think it’s pretty lame that people who would never in a million years let some preacher tell them who to sleep with somehow think it’s cool when preachers start telling people not to drive SUVs.

Given the notorious inability — and unwillingness — of the religious racket to police its own members’ behavior lately, I have zero interest in their opinions on the war, the environment, “social justice,” evolution, or any of the subjects on which they desire to opine, and about which they typically know nothing.

PUNDITWATCH is up!

TALKLEFT has some interesting observations about the Left’s ball-dropping on civil liberties during the Clinton Administration. That was one of my main reasons for breaking with them, and it’s nice to see someone talking about the problem. Maybe Bob Barr’s new role with the ACLU (no, really!) will inject some new life into them.

BEST OP-ED MISSED WHILE I WAS ON TRAVEL: This one by Michael Glennon. It explains how the U.N. Charter’s provisions on military force have ceased to bind nations, because they’ve been so widely and thoroughly flouted. Excerpt:

This record of violation is legally significant. The international legal system is voluntary and states are bound only by rules to which they consent. A treaty can lose its binding effect if a sufficient number of parties engage in conduct that is at odds with the constraints of the treaty. The consent of United Nations member states to the general prohibition against the use of force, as expressed in the Charter, has in this way been supplanted by a changed intent as expressed in deeds.

The United States is therefore correct: it would not be unlawful to attack Iraq, even without Security Council approval. It seems the Charter has, tragically, gone the way of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact which purported to outlaw war and was signed by every major belligerent in World War II.

Somewhere at my office (where I’m not at the moment) I have an article saying that a majority of the U.N.’s members have violated its use-of-force provisions since its establishment. That would seem to bolster Glennon’s argument. I’ll try and find it and post the link tomorrow.

MICKEY KAUS REPORTS from the road, with astonishing observations. I noticed the friendly New Havenites myself, and I’m at a loss. It wasn’t a place known for friendliness when I was there — more like a place that wanted to be as surly as New York, but didn’t quite have the moxie to pull it off.

“I AM AS BELOVED AS ATHLETE’S FOOT” — Gerhard Schroeder isn’t winning any popularity awards.

JIM HENLEY has a long post on the efforts of moderate Muslims that’s well worth reading. There is opposition to Wahhabism within Islam. We should encourage it. Scroll up to this post, too. And, of course, there’s lots of stuff by Aziz Poonawalla that’s worth reading.

ROOT CAUSES: Tacitus explores why they hate us.

WORRIED ABOUT THE FUTURE ON EARTH? The Lifeboat Foundation is working toward building space colonies to save humanity. Well, I’m glad that someone is.

HERE’S MORE ON THE SAUDI 9/11 CONNECTION from the Washington Post. It’s likely, of course, that the Bush Administration is pursuing a one-terror-supporting-nation-at-a-time strategy that will address Saudi Arabia later. It’s also possible that it isn’t. I think that either way it’s in the public interest for people to keep pointing the problem out.

Colbert King is pointing out some problems with the Saudis, too.

UPDATE: SKBubba is a Democrat, and he’s making noise. But that’s not quite what I meant.

MARK STEYN IS ALL OVER THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION in a fashion that you’d think the Democrats would be emulating:

For over a year now, nothing has been asked of Muslims, at home or abroad: you can be equivocal about bin Laden and an apologist for suicide bombers, and still get a photo-op with Dubya; you can be a member of a regime whose state TV stations and government-owned newspapers call for Muslims to kill all Jews and Christians, and you’ll still get to kick your shoes off with George and Laura at the Crawford ranch.

This is not just wrong but self-defeating. As long as Dubya and Colin Powell and the rest are willing to prance around doing a month-long Islamic minstrel-show routine for the amusement of the A-list Arabs, Muslims will rightly see it for what it is: a sign of profound cultural weakness. Healthy relationships require at least some token reciprocity.

This is Bush’s Achilles’ heel, but the Democrats are ideologically unable to exploit it. Otherwise they’d be making noise about everything from the stealthy evacuation of bin Laden’s relatives just after 9/11 to this account of Saudi funding for the 9/11 attackers.