A 2,000 GB FIREWIRE DRIVE! Heck, I need one of those just to hold my email.

“HONEST JIM” TREACHER has stuff to sell you. ‘Nuff said.

CHARLES PAUL FREUND points out some interesting developments in the Mideast.

THIS BBC REPORT says that the rescue of Jessica Lynch was fake, and that the soldiers were firing blanks:

“It was like a Hollywood film. They cried ‘go, go, go’, with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital – action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan.”

Now, even if the whole thing were staged, who would shoot off blanks in a war zone, thus attracting the enemy without doing any good?

Nobody, according to Warren Smith, who notes:

American troops use three main infantry weapons.

First, there is the M16A2, a modern derivative of the old Vietnam era M16.

Secondly, there is the M4 carbine, a shortened version of the M16, often used by special forces troops.

Third, there is the Minimi Light Machine Gun.

None of these weapons can be converted from firing blanks to live, or back again, in a speedy manner.

Blank ammunition, when fired in these three weapons, is not powerful enough to force the weapons mechanism through its full cycle of operations. Because there is no live projectile, the build up of gas in the barrel is much less. When the weapon fires, there is no way that the mechanism will re-cock and chamber a fresh round. . .

American troops would be put in an awkward situation. Suppose, in the midst of this staged event, some Iraqi troops or Fedayeen irregulars appeared? How would they defend themselves? Clearly, converting the weapons from blank to live, in the heat of a battle, would be disastrous. It would take, at best, 2-3 minutes to remove a BFA, then vital more seconds in order to replace the belt or magazine of blank ammunition with live. In the dark, it would be very easy to get the blank and live rounds mixed up, too.

It is very hard to imagine how any Special Forces soldiers would agree to enter a combat zone with their weapons primed for blank ammunition.

Things are looking bad for the BBC’s story, but it gets worse. Much worse.

The BFA is large and brightly coloured. It’s a safety feature; a visible way of proving in training that no one is pointing live ammunition at you by mistake.

I don’t have the video footage of the rescue to hand, but I do recall seeing it. I didn’t see any weapons sporting BFAs.

Furthermore, fired blank shell casings look very different to live ones. Blank shell casings have a crimped end to them that is still clearly visible after the round is fired and discarded. So if the BBC wants to prove its story, it can visit the scene of the rescue and produce some discarded blank shell casings. Unless, it wants us to believe that the American troops picked them all up. In the dark. Behind enemy lines. In a war zone.

So how do blank rounds work in the movies? Well, the weapons used are not real. They are specially produced replicas, often based on the mechanism of a real weapon, with the barrel partially sealed. They cannot fire live ammunition under any circumstances whatsoever. This is how film makers create realistic scenes of automatic firing without attaching a BFA to the end of the weapon.

Clearly, no one will be carrying that sort of a ‘weapon’ into a combat area.

So what does this mean to overall importance of the BBC’s story?

Well, the BBC’s witnesses cannot be trusted.

And the BBC has made a huge error that a couple of quick phone calls could have put right.

The BBC may be guilty of seeing what it wants to see in another area too.

Early on in the story they make the astonishing statement that “Witnesses told us that the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital.”

According to the BBC, the witnesses somehow magically know what American Special Forces knew or thought. How they managed this effort of mental telepathy is not explained.

At 1135 hrs GMT, Saturday, 17th May, I e-mailed a correction detailing my concerns to the comments section of the story at the BBC. I look forward to them posting it in their comments page unedited.

I just checked, and the comment doesn’t seem to be there.

UPDATE: Here’s an earlier critique of the BBC story that I had missed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more criticism of the revisionist version.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a picture of the BFA that he’s talking about. Hard to miss, I’d think. Is the rescue video on the Web somewhere?

STILL MORE: The BBC’s report gets some rather intense journalistic criticism here, here, and here. Excerpt (from the last link):

This really, to me, is adding up to the big lie. Tell something in the worst way possible, imply or infer that really bad things happened and/or that it was a sham on one or more levels, and trust the doubt to grow. The absence of checks and balances is a clue, but it is just one of many.

Was Jayson Blair moonlighting for The Beeb? I’d certainly be interested in hearing BBC correspondent John Kampfner’s response to these points.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Hmm. Erik says that this story started with the same crackpot Austrian blog that peddled the original (bogus) museum looting story. Oh, well: how much harm could one crackpot Austrian do?

STILL MORE: Here’s the longest video I could find on the web — let me know if there’s something better out there somewhere — showing the actual rescue. The quality isn’t great, but I don’t see any conspicuous BFA’s on the end of the guns, a few of which you can see pretty clearly starting about 50 seconds in. Flash hiders, but nothing else. In fact, I don’t see any firing at all, and come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing any guns being fired when this aired on TV either. So why shoot off blanks as part of a “Hollywood” extravaganza if you’re not going to use the footage? Was there footage of gunfire that I missed?

LAST UPDATE TO THIS POST: There’s more here, in case you’re following a link from some other page.

MORE CRITICISM OF THE BBC for left-wing bias:

Speaking to GMTV yesterday, Mr Jenkin said: “When you talk to Conservatives who work in the corporation, they say there is an institutional bias, but it’s very subtle, it’s not even a conscious bias.”

He added: “Just look at the fact that the BBC recruits entirely from advertisements in the Guardian. Obviously, media jobs are advertised in the Guardian, but it says something about where the centre of gravity in the BBC is.”

Mr Jenkin continued: “Of course, it is a nationalised industry. It feels threatened by all the change that has taken place around it, in terms of the growth of commercial broadcasting, the contractualisation of jobs. I think there is a cultural disaffinity with free markets, freedom. It sticks to what it thinks is the centre ground and the centre ground in its mind is rather to the left of where most people in the country regard the centre ground.”

Indeed.

MICKEY KAUS says that “blame Pinch” is the new Times watchphrase.

MORE CYBER-BUSKING: Dr. Frank has a new song up for free download, though with cybertipping encouraged. You can read the lyrics here, and you can even buy a CD that also has “Democracy, Whisky, Sexy” on it here.

Be generous — Dr. Frank is trying to encourage Ken Layne to do the same thing, and my guess is that Layne’s more likely to go along if there looks to be a lot of money involved. . . .

I DON’T CARE. I want my flying car, dammit.

WHAT WILL AMNESTY SAY? Is the Barney song torture?

Ask any parent. . . .

DAVID APPELL wants you to hire him as your freelance journalist! This is actually a pretty cool idea, which I came to a bit late — he’s already raised enough money to pay himself to do the story.

In an unrelated development that I just happened to notice on his site, he’s skeptical of the recent secondhand-smoke study.

UPDATE: Arthur Silber has more on the smoking study.

I DON’T LIKE THE SOUND OF THIS:

I have to admit that it is a strange experience to watch a Holocaust film in Germany. It’s even stranger when you’re the only American in the midst of about 200 Germans. But perhaps the strangest thing of all is to watch the reactions of the Germans as the events of the movie unfold. You hear a lot about how Germans are so ashamed today of the behavior of their countrymen during the Nazi period and about how much they’ve done to atone for their past sins. Don’t buy that bill of goods. If the audience of the screening I attended is any indication of German attitudes in general, it doesn’t augur well for the future. Remember, this wasn’t an audience composed of skinheads from the neo-Nazi enclaves in Karlsruhe and the former DDR. This was a group of Germany’s best and brightest: educated, middle class, sophisticated denizens of a major cosmopolitan city.

One scene in particular is seared into my consciousness. It happens about halfway into the film. The Jews of Warsaw have been herded into the Ghetto. A street used by the Germans bisects the Ghetto. While a group of Jews is waiting to cross to the other side of the street, several Nazi thugs force some elderly Jews to dance at an increasingly faster tempo. Weakened by malnutrition, hobbling on crutches, riddled with heart and lung infirmities, many of the Jews fall to the ground in sheer agony. It’s a sickening scene. It’s the kind of scene that makes you ashamed that your last name is Grim. Hell, it’s the kind of scene that makes you ashamed that you listen to Beethoven. If an American soldier had done the same to a German or Jap POW he would have been thrown into the brig for life or cashiered out of the service on a Section 8. But there they were, today’s educated, freedom-loving, let’s-all-hold-hands-and-love-one-another Germans, laughing at torture.

If there is a more sickening spectacle than Germans finding humor in what their fathers and grandfathers did to the Jews, if there is a more perfect example of the utter lack if humanity at the core of the German nation, I am unaware of it. There is something terribly wrong with Germany and the German Volk.

Read the whole thing, and hope he’s wrong.

UPDATE: Howard Veit says the article that this comes from is bogus, and sends this link to a denunciation of the author. On the other hand, reader Barbara Skolaut emails:

You end your post with “and hope he’s wrong.” Sorry, he’s not. I lived in Germany from 1970 to 1973 (I worked for the U.S. Army part of that time, and for a German family the other part), and a favorite saying among the Americans was “scratch a German, find a Nazi.”

I think Grim is on to something at the end of his essay, where he says “the Germans are ashamed because they got their rear ends handed back to them by a bunch of Yanks, Russkies and Brits who they considered-and still consider- to be members of inferior races.” When I lived there, 25 years after the war had ended (and we had helped them rebuild into a prosperous country), there were still a few boarded-up, bombed-out buildings in Frankfurt am Main (and I’m sure in other cities as well), reminding them that they had lost. We were told to remember that we were there as guests, but I have no doubt a great many Germans (particularly the chattering classes) still saw us – and see us even today – as occupiers, even as we were keeping them from having to speak Russian. I loved living there, and loved my trips back (though I guess it will be a while before I give them any more of my money), but I never had any illusions. . . I hope we move what bases we still need in Europe to Poland and Hungary. We don’t need the grief.

Stay tuned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Rebecca Shaechter sends this:

I’m currently studying abroad in Germany, and have been here in Bavaria for over 8 months. I have to say that my experience with the Germans has been a LOT different than what was described in Grim’s piece. People here are deeply ashamed of the Holocaust. I have a German last name and speak German pretty fluently, so I’ve been able to get an “insider’s opinion” on a lot of these issues. The thing I hear most is that people are horrified by what happened to the Jews in Germany, are horrified that their country could commit such crimes. When I was back in the States I found a study on the opinions of German youth versus American youth (18-25yrs). One of the questions on the survey was “Are you proud of your country?” Something like 90% of the Americans answered yes, and only 25% of the Germans did so. I guess what I’m trying to say is that from my experience here, it seems like people in my age group at least are profoundly aware of the atrocities that their country/people committed during WWII. They are ashamed and do not want this to happen again.

That said, I haven’t seen “The Pianist” yet, and it will be interesting to see the reaction in the theater and compare it to that of Grim’s. I’m hoping his was a fluke.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Reader Ken Century emails:

I too was shocked upon reading the Grim article several months ago. That is to say, I was shocked because I found it to be so incredibly unbelievable. I am a Jew who lived and worked in Germany from the summer of 1994 to the summer of 1995, and have traveled there no fewer times than twice per year since then. I am also quite fluent in German, have many acquaintances and very good friends there. I am also the type to strike of casual conversations with those around me, and the opportunity to do so presents itself much more readily in Germany with their practice of sharing tables with others. (Something quite pleasant to an extrovert like me!) In all of my time there, I have never hidden the fact that I am Jewish, and in fact it could be said that it was quite often the centerpiece of many of the political and religious discussions that I had there (over a beer), oftentimes with complete strangers. In fact, I just returned from Germany on Friday, and was also there for Bush’s ultimatum, landing here in the U.S. literally hours before the bombs began to fall.

My experiences there tend to reflect very closely those of your other reader Rebecca Shaechter. The knowledge of the Holocaust is much more deep there than here in the United States, and I concur with her that most people there share a deep shame of what happened in their shared past. . . .

All that said, I do feel that while Germany has done a good job memorializing the Holocaust, and that such memorialization has produced a deep common thread within the hearts and minds of its people, I’m not sure that the end effect was entirely all positive. As one can well imagine, many of my recent discussions with friends, acquaintances, and strangers there have revolved around the War on Terrorism and the War in Iraq. What they seem to have collectively learned from their horrible past is a deep sense of pacifism, which while commendable on many fronts, leaves them a bit like a deer in the headlights when confronted with real arguments regarding the U.N., EU, and the general state of world affairs, but more particularly the possibility that “evil” still exists in the world.

I don’t have recent firsthand experience. I remember earnest lectures on racism in the United States — which I found risible even at the age of 9 — from students and faculty at Heidelberg when we lived there in my childhood, but I haven’t spent any real time in Germany since, and certainly nothing that would give me any ability to judge whether Grim’s story rings true. It seems, however, that there’s reason to doubt it. Certainly this reader does:

As another guy with a German last name who lived in Germany, I don’t buy the story by Grim. I was stationed in Germany from 1989 to 1992, patrolled the Intra-German Border, witnessed the opening of the border fence, and got drunk with plenty of Germans. (I also had many visits to Germany to various cities where my US Army uncle was stationed.) Though we soldiers mostly associated with other soldiers, I had some German friends. None were close to the people Grim describes. In my years there, I met one–and only one– German who frightened me. She was a young woman who wanted to know what my grandfathers had done in WWII. She then told me about her grandfather, who drove trucks full of people to Dachau. She initiated the conversation, then angrily defended him saying, “What was he supposed to do? It was his job.” I thought–there is a Nazi. She was a frightening person, but she stands out because she was the only person like that. My landlord was a good-hearted man, who had been an artillery sergeant on the Russian front, wounded a few times. He would not talk about his experience, just sort of stared and said, “It was bad. Bad.”

There is cultural embarassment, and perhaps some defensiveness with people who don’t want to feel the shame of what previous generations have done. One German officer was a liaison to the US Army Armor School. He told my class of officers that he had done nothing, wasn’t alive in WWII, so had nothing to feel guilty about. He was a mouthy idiot, but did not seem anti-Semitic or a believer in a master race. Just a jerk who wanted to move past the collective guilt.

I would be very interested to see a Holocaust film in Germany. But I doubt the reaction would be that described by Grim.

The mail just keeps coming. Paul Music emails:

My sister-in-law lives in Germany, teaches English as a second language, and Bible Studies, in German.

She speaks perfect German, and many are surprised to find out that she’s American, not German. Her experiences, as a white Christian American, are much closer to Grim’s than Shaechter’s or Century’s.

That’s a bummer to hear.

FINAL UPDATE: Okay, I’ve gotten a lot more mail and the consensus is that this story is bogus. I’ve generally found John Hawkins’ site, where this appeared, reliable, but nobody’s perfect. On the other hand, it’s the growth of European antisemitism that makes stories like this believable now, and that growth is, sadly, indisputable.

A.C. DOUGLAS NOTES a study casting doubt on the dangerousness of secondhand smoke. He also wonders why it’s not getting more attention.

THE BITCH GIRLS ARE FISKING A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL on the assault weapons ban. Howell Raines’ paper is subjected to considerable abuse for, among other things, not knowing the difference between the legislative and executive branches, and for treating the Violence Policy Center as objective while calling the NRA “fanatics.”

Plus, there’s only one snarky Jayson Blair reference. Watch out girls, or they’ll start calling you “The surprisingly well-mannered and restrained girls.”

HEY, IT WASN’T ONE TORNADO on Thursday. It was two!

PATRICK RUFFINI has an interesting discussion on his site about left/right partisanship and the Blogosphere.

ROOTING FOR THE HOME TEAM: The New York Times has an update on local blogs in NYC, while the Knoxville News-Sentinel writes about Tennessee bloggers. And while Knoxville may not have Gawker, we do have KnoxPatch.com!

There’s also this piece on the perils of dating a blogger. Ah, but then there are the many indescribable benefits of dating a blogger!

LUKE FORD reports on a night of debauchery with Mickey Kaus, Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, Cathy Seipp, and a host of elite Blogeoisie.

MATT WELCH WRITES on being Ben Affleck for a day.

Matt’s squeeze is much more attractive than Ben’s, though.

BLOGCRITICS has got The Matrix: Reloaded covered from every angle. Here’s the master post with links to all the others.

HOWELL RAINES: Alert reader John Robert Kelly points to John Ellis’s statement of over a year ago, quoted in this InstaPundit entry:

The Rainesian management model resembles a kind of anti-network; in which an ever-smaller number of people are engaged in the guidance and definition of the enterprise. As the network narrows, the center (Raines and his management team) grows in importance. At its worst, this kind of management leads to the Sun God management system, in which The Great Leader is surrounded by adoring sycophants. Raines is a prime candidate to fall into this trap, since his ego needs greatly exceed his management skills.

Here’s the link to the full Ellis post. It works at the moment, but as it’s a Blogspot site, well, no promises.

Meanwhile, given that Ellis proved so prescient about Howell Raines’ management issues, here’s something he noted last week that may prove just as prophetic:

The killer fact: Over the course of the last decade, New York City has added not one private sector job and nearly 100,000 public sector jobs. There’s a tipping point for most everything and New York City is in danger of tipping over.

Indeed.

TIM RUTTEN writes that Howell Raines’ efforts to get ahead of the Jayson Blair scandal have been unsuccessful.

JONATHAN RAUCH has this right:

In short, the United States has been on the wrong side of Arab history for almost five decades, and it is not doing much better than the Soviets. The old policy had no future, only a past. It was a dead policy walking. September 11 was merely the death certificate.

Bush is no sophisticate, but he has the great virtue— not shared by most sophisticates—of knowing a dead policy when he sees one. So he gathered up the world’s goodwill and his own political capital, spent the whole bundle on dynamite, and blew the old policy to bits. However things come out in Iraq, the war’s larger importance is to leave little choice, going forward, but to put America on the side of Arab reform.

Reform will take years, decades even, and it will mean different things in different countries. In Iraq, it meant force. In Syria, it means hostile prodding; in Saudi Arabia, friendly prodding. It means setting a subversive example for Iran, creating the region’s second democracy in Palestine, building on change in Qatar and Kuwait, leading Egypt gently toward multiparty politics. Progress will be fitful, at best. But the direction will be right, for a change.

This is a breathtakingly bold undertaking. The difficulties are staggering. Everything might go wrong. But the crucial point to remember is that everything had already gone wrong. No available policy could justify optimism in the Arab world, but the new policy at least offers hope. It offers a path ahead, a future where there had been only a past. It is not dead. It puts America on the right side of history and on the right side of America.

Much of Europe is alarmed by the change, but then, it would be. American troops in Saudi Arabia guaranteed the flow of oil while turning the United States (along with Israel) into the scapegoat of choice for millions of angry Muslims, some of whom live in Europe. From Paris’s or Amsterdam’s or Bremen’s point of view, what’s not to like about that deal? Why must Washington go and stir everything up?

Indeed.

UPDATE: Chris Noble thinks we’ll be better off for the revolution. So do I.

BLOGEOISIE: the “class of people who read and write blogs.” The term’s from the BBC, which seems to have gotten it from Spiked, which seems rather, er, fitting, doesn’t it? Soon that will be their rallying cry: Epater les blogeois! Or maybe it already is. . . .

UPDATE: The Beeb appears to be behind the curve here: the term turns out to be over a year old. On the other hand, I don’t remember seeing it before.

Meanwhile Roger Simon emails wondering when someone will film Le Charme Discrete de la Blogeoisie. Well, Roger, you are a filmmaker. . . .

A NANOTECHNOLOGY BREAKTHROUGH? It’s certainly an answer to those who said it was impossible to manipulate single atoms.

YES, I’VE BEEN BLOGGING LESS LATELY. Thanks for noticing. There are a number of reasons. One is that things have slowed down — in fact, it seems that almost everyone is blogging less. The war isn’t over, but we’re in — as Steven Den Beste notes — a different phase now. The other day I took down the flag I had taped in the rear window of my car just after 9/11. I put up another one, but it seemed to mark a milestone of sorts. Things aren’t less important now, and I think the Iraqi reconstruction is actually very important, but it’s a different kind of importance with fewer day-to-day developments.

I’ve also been quite busy in my real job. I’m grading exams at the moment (ugh — this post by Jeff Cooper captures the essence well). In the last couple of weeks I’ve also finished up an article on applying the “incidents” methodology used in international law to constitutional questions, written a piece for Legal Affairs on legal regulation of nanotechnology, and wound up the work of a major faculty committee that I’m on. You know, the day job. Paypal notwithstanding, it’s what pays the bills.

I’ve also become very interested in video. With my DVD burner fixed (well, replaced), I put together a music-video DVD of my brother’s band. I edited some footage I had from his outdoor concert at “Volapalooza” into a passable music video and made a fancy DVD whose menu page featured a cool photo of the band (taken from their webpage) and an animated menu where the buttons showed short loops of video. It was surprisingly easy, and the results look great. I’m very happy with the Sonic Foundry Vegas Video 4 / DVD Architect bundle. Both programs work well, don’t crash, and are easy and pretty intuitive to use. Plus, with the academic discount the bundle was only about $250, which is pretty cool since it lets you do things that would have required $250,000 worth of equipment not long ago.

So that’s what’s going on here. Blogging will continue, but — all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding — I do try to have a life from time to time.

UPDATE: I guess it’s not just me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Nope, definitely not