PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Rich Galen traces the connection between pork and corruption. Plus a suggestion on what to do.
PorkBusters action has slowed down since Congress is out of session — but if you’d like to call your Congressmember’s local office and stress your opposition to pork spending, and your desire for cuts, there’s nothing stopping you. Since most of them are home in their districts now, it might even get noticed more.
UPDATE: Read this, too.
I DON’T CARE MUCH ABOUT THE OSCARS, but Roger Simon does.
LOTS OF UPDATES TO THE HDTV POST, including a video camera endorsement from James Lileks.
BILL ROGGIO CONTINUES HIS REPORTING FROM IRAQ.
JOHN HAWKINS interviews Tammy Bruce.
UPDATE: Reader Frank Wilson forwards this review of Tammy Bruce’s new book.
A FEW INTERESTING WAR-RELATED ITEMS: “Indonesians ask why Muslims turn to bombs.” They’re not the only ones asking.
“Assassination in Samarra Backfires.” Austin Bay notes that sometimes terrorists experience blowback.
“Dems Determined to Ignore Progress in Iraq.” Mark Steyn says that antiwar Democrats have their heads in the sand. (Meanwhile, the Columbia Journalism Review seems to have its head in the sand regarding Democrats who aren’t antiwar.)
UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein uncovers a new war plan.
CARNIVALESQUE is a carnival of medievalist blogging. (Via ClioPatria.)
UPDATE: The Carnival of the Cats is up, too.
DISAPPEARING MEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION:
The trend of females overtaking males in college was initially measured in 1978. Yet despite the well-documented disappearance of ever more young men from college campuses, we have yet to fully react to what has become a significant crisis. Largely, that is because of cultural perceptions about males and their societal role. Many times a week, a reporter or other media person will ask me: “Why should we care so much about boys when men still run everything?”
It’s a fair and logical question, but what it really reflects is that our culture is still caught up in old industrial images.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: GirlintheLockerRoom says Gurian’s numbers are wrong.
MOVEON STRIKES OUT: “ZERO calls, emails, or letters resulting from the ad.”
BILL QUICK’S weekend cooking thread is up!
UPDATE: So is this week’s Haveil Havalim.
HUGE PRO-DEMOCRACY PROTESTS IN HONG KONG: Gateway Pundit, as usual, has a roundup, with photos.
Publius has more, too.
HERE’S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE FROM WIRED on efforts to reinvent the 911 emergency-call system to take advantage of more modern technologies. The conclusion seems right:
If national safety – the ability to respond to hurricanes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes – depends on the execution of explicit plans, on soldierly obedience, and on showy security drills, then a decentralized security scheme is useless. But if it depends on improvised reactions to unknown threats, that’s a different story. A deeply textured, unmapped system is hard to bring down. A system that encourages improvisation is quick to recover. Ubiquitous networks of warning may constitute our own asymmetrical advantage, and, like the terrorist networks that occasionally carry out spectacular attacks, their power remains obscure until they’re called into action.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: The author of the Wired article, Gary Wolf, has more on this topic on his blog.
THE OFTEN-IRASCIBLE MATOKO KUSANAGI thinks I’m exaggerating the threat from avian flu. (“My friend that’s a post-doc in biochemistry says probably we have 5 to 10 years before the virus can mutate for airborne human-to-human transmission, and that it may never happen.”)
Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to be alarmist: I’ve repeatedly tried to make the point that avian flu may not amount to anything, but that preparations for pandemics in general are a good idea. (See, just for example, this post and this one. Oh, and especially this one.) And I’ve certainly never been as, um, dramatic as the scientific journal Nature, which published a fictional journalist’s weblog reporting on the course of an avian flu epidemic.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that the assurances of a friendly post-doc in biochemistry are the end of the matter, either. The truth is, it’s impossible to predict with certainty when or if avian flu will mutate to spread easily among humans. But it’s clear that we’re not prepared for that, or similar, threats. If we wait until it’s clearly underway, it’ll be too late. Pointing that out hardly seems alarmist to me.
UPDATE: Here, by the way, is the Wall Street Journal’s avian flu newstracker. It’s free to nonsubscribers, I think. (Since I subscribe, it’s sometimes hard for me to tell.)
Meanwhile, here’s a poll. What do you think?
(Go straight to the results by clicking here.)
MORE: Reader Eric Kuttner emails:
“If we wait until it’s clearly underway, it’ll be too late. Pointing that out hardly seems alarmist to me.”
Uh oh! Now they’re going to say you claimed the threat was imminent, just like Bush!
Heh. I think they already did. Meanwhile, William Aronstein emails: “Any appeal to authority should be rejected in a scientific discussion. But the appeal to ‘my friend that’s a post-doc in biochemistry’ takes the cake.” I thought so, too.
Aronstein has more to say, below the fold. Click “more” to read it.
I KEEP SEEING FOX NEWS doing its “War on Christmas” things. Why don’t they just give John Gibson the month off and replace him with Foamy the Squirrel?
UPDATE: Uh, oh: “Vandals burn Swedish Christmas goat, again.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Related post here.
MORE: Reader Aram Hagopian thinks I’m mocking Christianity. But while there’s mocking going on here, that’s not it. I find the whole thing kind of bemusing: Merchants who desperately want people to spend money because it’s Christmas are afraid to say the word, while those who are complaining are basically demanding that we commercialize Christmas more openly. Sigh.
Ann Althouse, meanwhile, thinks that Christmas doesn’t belong in commercials for judicial nominees.
Related stuff from Fox, with video, here.
PLAME UPDATE: Tom Maguire is all over the latest developments. And Mickey Kaus observes: “The upshot may be that, despite Joseph Wilson’s dramatics, his wife’s outing didn’t really cause such national security damage–something a few scandal-poopers have claimed all along.”
Gee, do you think?
UPDATE: A “flock of pouting spooks.”
GREG DJEREJIAN IS correcting Maureen Dowd on Iraq. That’s kind of the Bunny Slope of blogging, but he handles it with panache.
UPDATE: In a similar low-challenge vein, Rand Simberg notes dishonesty about the war at the Los Angeles Times. Easy, but as always, worthwhile.
WHEN ZOMBIE SOLDIERS ATTACK: The Mechanical Eye looks at the latest in over-the-top anti-Bushiana from Joe Dante. The Insta-Wife is also writing about the veteran Zombie voters some folks fantasize will get Republicans out of office.
One of her commenters isn’t impressed with Dante’s originality: “Dead people voting for Democrats? That’s just art imitating life.” Heh.
Zombies do seem to be making a comeback lately. I don’t know if Dante’s follow the rules laid out here, but I’m planning to be prepared, just in case. You can’t be too careful!
Meanwhile, for the opinions of actual, living soldiers, try starting here.
UPDATE: Will Collier doesn’t like the Slate review by Grady Hendrix much.
ANOTHER UPDATE: If the dead start rising over the Iraq War, a lot of them will be rising from Saddam’s mass graves. Why not a movie about that? And who would they be haunting, if they did . . . .
MORE: We’ll be seeing this clip on Fox News, I’ll bet. I think Dante’s leading with his chin, here!
STILL MORE: An email from reader Sam Wilkinson suggests that Max Brooks will be the big winner in all this. And reader Michael Becker writes:
My son is a recently retired Marine. My inner circle includes about a zillion Marines (all of the “door kicker, combat” variety) and the families of those Marines. My point here is to note that should Iraqi Freedom fallen show up as zombies the list of people who should be screaming in the streets does not include Bush. Kerry, Clinton (both), Boxer, Pelosi, Reid, Dean, Murtha (especially him) will find themselves in a world of hurt. I don’t have the time or space to pass along the venom that those people, and their fellow traveling ilk, are subject to from the military folks. It’s kind of a shame that active duty military are prevented from expressing their real opinions about politicians.
Actually, I think it’s a good thing. I do wonder, though, how a movie in which zombie soldiers attacked antiwar types for “betraying” them would play in the Village Voice and Slate. Well, okay, no I don’t.
MORE STILL: Okay, there are zombies in this film, but at least there’s sex.
SONY’S DRM-SPYWARE — not just bad for business and consumers, but bad for national security:
A high-ranking Bush administration official weighed in Thursday on anti-piracy efforts domestically and abroad, indirectly chastising Sony BMG Music Entertainment for its digital rights management (DRM) software, which computer security analysis say uses tactics typically employed by virus writers to hide its components and resist their removal. . . .
Seated on a panel that featured entertainment and technology executives Mitch Bainwol, chairman and chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), as well as Susan Mann, director of intellectual property policy for Microsoft, Baker wrapped up his opening comments with the following admonition for the industry:
“I wanted to raise one point of caution as we go forward, because we are also responsible for maintaining the security of the information infrastructure of the United States and making sure peoples’ [and] businesses’ computers are secure. … There’s been a lot of publicity recently about tactics used in pursuing protection for music and DVD CDs in which questions have been raised about whether the protection measures install hidden files on peoples’ computers that even the system administrators can’t find.”
In a remark clearly aimed directly at Sony and other labels, Stewart continued: “It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it’s important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.
“If we have an avian flu outbreak here and it is even half as bad as the 1918 flu, we will be enormously dependent on being able to get remote access for a large number of people, and keeping the infrastructure functioning is going to be a matter of life and death and we take it very seriously.”
It’s the new Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, Stewart Baker. Follow the link for video. And I love that line: “It’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer.” People need to be reminded of that.