LAGNIAPPE: Derek Lowe has the neat post on why it's hard to test drugs for psychiatric ailments like schizophrenia. and also has developed an interest in the insolvency of Japan. (So has Mark Byron, actually.) I think Charles Murtaugh is right about the bloggersphere needing more scientist bloggers, they bring the goods.

LADLING BOWLS OF SWEET CREAMY JUSTICE: The Canadians get the gold too. As dangerousmeta said, "it'll shut some people up, but doesn't solve the problem."

MORE CURLING: Swen Swenson has the coverage. And Richard Bennett quotes Slate on the subject. And via the DVDVR links page I get my first look at curling.com, which, in retrospect, is an obvious place to start with the curling appreciation.

HOCKEY: Starts today in earnest. And it's all over the tv. Check Puck Hog and his links section for the hockey insights.

INSTAPUNDIT: Watched CNN and saw something I wish I had seen. I take that back, for I was watching figure skating and the Curling National Broadcast Company and have nothing to be ashamed of, though that Greenfield thing sounded pretty cool. Curling, Sport Of Kings And Queens.

BELATED VALENTINE'S HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: Here's Tony Adragna on the pagan origins of Valentine's Day. Don't all our holidays have pagan origins? Besides Thanksgiving, I guess.

ME AND MRS. STAMPLEY: Ginger is also psyched about A Scanner Darkly on the big screen. She wants Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which I endorse, though I would fear that somebody would art-film the heck out of it and make it way bleaker than it should be --all you really need to do is get some good actors and just film Archer, since its story rests entirely on its characters. She also wants UBIK, which would be fun and cool in a more cynical version of X-Men the movie way; I always thought UBIK was what the Justice League would be like if Dick wrote them. The Dick books I've always wanted to see as movies are Martian Time-Slip and The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch. Stigmata especially --Robert Duvall was born to play Leo Bulero. I also always saw Gabriel Byrne as Norbert Steiner from Time-Slip, but that's just me. Considering how much of the Dick oeuvre has been translated into movies already, this probably isn't idle speculation.

HEMP, HEMP EVERYWHERE, AND NOT A BUD TO SMOKE: This Time article is a good explanation of the differences between hemp and pot, and the federal government's inability to tell the difference. Found via American Samizdat.

MAGAZINE WATCHING: Here's Bruce of Flit (after the apocalypse when we all live online he'll shorten it to Bruce O'Flit or something) on the greatness of the New Republic. Meanwhile I saw the new Atlantic today and it had a real cool story on our revised understanding of what pre-Columbus Americans were like; it suggested that there were a lot more of them than we used to think, that they were in some respects more advanced than the Europeans who supplanted them (with disease mostly), and that the Amazon rain forest might be a human artifact and certainly not the pristine Nature In Its Glory it has always been portrayed as. Neat stuff. And I got the new Vanity Fair and yes, it had the idiot Attack Of The Clones cover and the WTC horror coverage inside. Vanity Fair, covering everything with equal seriousness --kind of like this blog, except I cover everything with equal goofiness. And so it goes.

RETURN OF THE DONKEY: Ken today has the latest of his much-loved Salt Lake Dispatches, his take on the objective-subjective view of sports and a crossblog wrapup of the same, and the link to the high-yuks "Sound Of New Jersey Made Him Snap" story. Wisconsin made him go crazy too, but Reuters isn't putting that in its headline. Oh no, not that --because the world needs one more cheap Jersey joke. It's Jersey. It's funny. It's JERSEY. It's FUNNY. HAHAHAHAHA. Thhpt.

REPORT FROM THE ANTI-ANTI-DRUG WAR: Rand Simberg links to this story about the latest DEA raids of medical marijuana clubs. Here's a clip:

DEA agents arrested three men in two cases. A fourth man, Kenneth Hayes, a former executive director of the San Francisco pot club CHAMP, is in custody in Vancouver, B.C. His attorney, Bill Panzer, said Hayes has petitioned the Canadian government for political refugee status.

Panzer, an Oakland lawyer who co-wrote California's medical marijuana initiative, had the more amusing take on the day's events. Since the feds are pushing the message that buying drugs aids terrorists, he said, it seemed strange they would crack down on people who are cultivating marijuana for the state's sick people -- a perfectly legal enterprise under Proposition 215.

Voters approved the initiative legalizing medical marijuana in 1996, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled several months ago that its use was a federal crime. Local marijuana dispensers swore at the time that they would continue to remain open until federal officials shut them down.

"Now, since they can't buy it from people producing in state, sick people have to buy it from drug dealers, who are aiding the terrorists," Panzer said. "I feel it's a shame that this administration is helping to aid terrorists."

I mean, I'm sure we all understand the hypocrisy involved here, so the above is just more proof of the misplaced priorities of the drug war.

I BRING THE CUTENESS: Here's a website for a cat with a cat wheelchair. Via the Boing Boing Guestbar --it's the little blog on the right side there.

LAYNE TO EAST COAST: GO BACK TO EUROPE: I feel like Drudge with that headline. I hope he's not basing that on one trip to Baltimore.

MORE SCANNING DARKLY: Boing Boing has the news that A Scanner Darkly has been picked up by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh --which is cool, they did Out Of Sight which I really liked, though they may not make the movie in a creative sense though. The movie could be a cartoon in either traditional or computer animation. Huh.

THAT'S WHAT I WANTED TO POST ABOUT: Steven den Beste picked up on these weird comments made in the swirl of the Skategate that I noticed too:

[T]onight the head of the French Olympic team told the Associated Press that French judge Marie Reine Le Gougne had acknowledged feeling pressure before casting her vote for the Russian team.

Didier Gailhaguet denied any wrongdoing on the part of the French skating federation and said of Le Gougne: "Some people close to the judge have acted badly and have put someone who is honest and upright, but emotionally fragile, under pressure. She is a fragile person and I think she has been somewhat manipulated."

Weird that the guy is psychologizing her by way of explanation. Maybe, weirdly French.

MEANINGLESSNESS OF RACE UPDATE: The Scientist does the job this time. The scientists they profile are kind of agnostic on the subject:

Harold Freeman, director of the National Cancer Institute's Center to Reduce Health Disparities, said at a recent meeting, "Race disappears when you look at the human genome."

But scientists know that they cannot ignore the clinical data that show, for example, that African Americans die at a higher rate from coronary heart disease than do whites. Moreover, population genetics has long shown that certain single-gene disorders are more prevalent in some populations, such as Tay-Sachs disease among Ashkenazi Jews. Polygenic disorders also tend to be more common in some population groups. So, it isn't surprising that epidemiological studies show that certain drugs have a better efficacy rate in some groups than others. The controversy arises over what to do with this type of information. For some scientists, the question now is, "Do different ways exist to organize people?" So far, researchers are exploring a few ideas, including studying the human brain and identifying gene combinations that control drug responses. Says Freeman, "Race doesn't exist, but yet it does."

I think the scientific view on race is that it's something so fluid as to be meaningless, especially in the long timeframe studying evolution requires. None of these articles have mentioned Jon Entine yet, though. Is he a crank and nobody told me? How embarassing.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY: I was scouring my links for some kind of post for the lovelorn and found nothing; the bloggersphere appears happy and contented where the romantic feelings are concerned. All is as it should be. Tony Pierce has a shout out to the ladies, a sentiment I agree with. The Daze Reader, which should be read daily, brings the history of kissing. Ed Mazza has the penguin lust. Andrea See lives in a place where Valentine's Day is already over. I think. But to those of you who are still in the 14th, have a happy hearts day.

ENTIRE OLYMPICS PREDETERMINED: New Scientist article on these economists who had a 96 percent success rate in Sydney in terms of predicting numbers of medals won. They use no information about the athletes themselves to make their predictions:

Their accuracy is uncanny, considering they have never taken any athlete's sporting prowess into account. Johnson and Ali base their predictions on little more than a country's GDP, political situation, and its population, latitude and climate. They created their predictions by investigating how these factors were related to past Olympic achievements. The aim was to analyse how economic and political conditions can affect a nation's sporting achievements.

As you might expect, they found that the probability of success is closely related to a nation's wealth. But there were also surprises in the data. Athletes from communist and single-party regimes excel at winning medals, Johnson says. Contrary to popular belief, these nations don't send disproportionately many athletes, but they consistently outperform other nations with the same economic and geographic attributes. The difference is, on average, 18 summer medals and 10 winter medals.

You can read the actual paper here.

SKATEGATE: I don't know if ESPN came up with that title or not --someone was bound to-- but their figure-skating page has the poop.

HIPPER THAN THOU: Interesting and funny piece on the Dido Demographic, who are way hipper than you are despite their advancing age. Via the null device. I have three of those albums (Moby, Lauryn Hill, Macy Gray), which apparently puts me in the safe area. Whew. The Dido Demographic reminds me of the Bobos in some half-realized way.

POSTREL: Has the link to the overlooked Financial Times special report on the corporate funding of the anti-globalization movement. Then I get more on the same subject when the nefarious American Samizdat collective leads me to this Working For Change thing on a Reebok award for human rights --kind of the same thing.

A SCANNER CRUMBLY: What I dig about the Crumb Dick comic is what I dig about Crumb when he does Harvey Pekar stories: he conveys the story well yet the comic remains unmistakably Crumb. I think Crumb was and is infinitely more jaded than Dick, so even in the midst of illustrating and illustrating well Dick's mind-altering religious experience he still manages to make Dick an average-looking mortal person. I think Dick would have approved.

SPORTSFILTER: Has a thread on subjectivity in sports, and a link to a Times article on the same subject. Vis-a-vis my own thoughts on the subject, I have to disagree with these comments that the more objective you get, the truer a sport is; I think they're all sports, ranging from man or woman versus nature to man in collaboration with man or woman to produce a neat, nature-defying effect --in an athletic way, of course. Or everything ESPN covers plus pro wrestling is a sport. Take your pick.

The Times writer says this, which I found odd:

Boxing might seem to be the least subjective sport of them all — after all, you don’t worry about marks for artistic impression when your opponent is lying concussed at your feet. But what about Lennox Lewis? He was given a draw — which meant that he failed to become world champion — after outboxing Evander Holyfield over 12 rounds.

I don't think anyone anyone has ever thought boxing is an objective sport, because it's so obviously manipulable in a pro-wrestling way. Like I said, the closest thing to perfectly objective sports is something like billiards or bowling, things where it's clear to everybody, athlete and audience, what victory constitutes, and there is no third person --the referee-- to decide what has atually happened. So I guess for me objectivity is inversely related to the influence an official, referee or promoter has on the contest under discussion.

VOTE TRADING: Both the Globe and Mail and ESPN are reporting actual allegations of vote trading between the French and Russian judges, to be paid back at the cretinous ice dancing competition. The Globe and Mail piece adds another factor:

Sources also say Ms. Salé and Mr. Pelletier weren't the only skaters not judged fairly in the pairs. Yang Jiasheng, the judge from China, went with the Russians ahead of the Canadians too. Sources are suggesting that the Chinese judge gave the first-place vote to Ms. Berezhnaia and Mr. Sikharulidze, hoping that the judges from the former Eastern Bloc countries would help in giving the Chinese pairs team the country's first medal in the event. All nine judges ranked Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo third, despite a shaky performance in the long program.

Meanwhile the ESPN article suggests this story "has legs, " according to Christine Brennan:

The scandal already is drawing comparisons to figure skating's most famous pair of all -- Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. The story could grow if the United States were to get involved because it's conceivable that if Sale and Pelletier should have won gold, Americans Kyoko Ina and John Zimmerman could have won bronze, Brennan said.

"This is really starting to remind me of Tonya and Nancy, but it's not there yet," Brennan said. "There's something about this that's starting to build and there's the sense that the pace with which it's starting is like it was with Tonya and Nancy. Now there's an investigation and the story has legs."

Here's Brennan on the decision.

THE TONY PIERCE OLYMPICS RUNDOWN: Is a fun read.

MORE ICE SPORTS: Here's a Globe and Mail piece on ice dancing, where the fix is already in, apparently. Ice dancing has had a bad rep for this sort of thing, much much worse than figure skating, for years. Via Doug Corti. The Globe and Mail has a bunch of stuff on Sale and Pelletier, by the way. And a neat opinion piece on the state of women's hockey.

FREAKING A: Go read this Rod Dreher post excerpting an article about two brothers who witnessed first hand the WTC horror. It's one for the Never Forget file. And the article was in Vanity Fair, which continues to have my vote for weirdest magazine going, covering celebrity gossip, politics and world events with equal seriousness, and publishing Christopher Hitchens on a regular basis. Editorially schizophrenic, in a very good way.

ORNPAY UPDATE: Kevin has a summary post in the latest chapter of Blog Wars II: The Search For More Pornography.

FLIT: Bruce, as usual, has the stories nobody else does, like this one about Canadian Falun Gong guys getting thrown out of China. Follow-up here. Bruce's theory is that these guys are just trying to remind people about what a cruddy government China continues to have.

NEAT STUFF: Here's the Quirky Japan Homepage, about all the weird and cool stuff to be found in Japan. Pictures are kind of slow-loading, though. Via the always worthwhile Aqua Hydro.

MORE FIGURE SKATING: Here's the Rabbit on why she likes figure skating, and Michelle Kwan:

When figure skaters get carried away, so do I. This is why I like the sport - it's all about overwhelming emotions like pure joy and grace and the desire to bust someone's knees in with a baseball bat. You can practice all your life, but get a little bit distracted, just for a second, and you won't be nailing that triple, which means no gold for Goldilocks. This is why we like Michelle Kwan - when she's in the zone, not only does she do everything right, but she has that look of thrilled happiness on her face that really gets everyone within 100 square miles into it. I am growing tired of her pure joy signature move, I have to admit - that slightly skewed one-legged arms-outstretched thing? But I like the red necklace, and I want her to win. That little weasel Tara Lipinski made her stay in the game for another four years, and it had better fucking pay off.

Go read the whole thing, Heather appears to be a legit figure skating fan. Her hatred of Lipinski mechanistic cutey-pooness I find pleasing, I must admit. I believe I hate Britney Spears in a similiar way. That's right --BRITNEY SPEARS.

HAPPY LINCOLN'S BIRTHDAY: If you work for the Postal Service I think you get the day off. Lincoln is such a weird and towering figure in our national consciousness, what with the sickle cell anemia and the nutty wife and the personal tragedy and of course the assassination. He also presided over what is supposed to be the event that made America America --the Civil War-- so I guess he's earned his holiday and the penny and the five dollar bill and all that.

HEY: Airstrip One has gone collaborative. Their new guy, Hadrian Wise, has a big post on his and others' pereceptions on the situation in Africa. AND he use the expression "tinker's cuss," known to all right-thinking Americans from the Architects Sketch.

RICHMOND REDUX: The DVDVR playaz have their report on the Richmond adventure up. It is, of course, much funnier than mine, and displays the vast wrestling knowledge the playaz command. Enjoy.

ARTICLE: About the one Indian athlete at the Olympics.

THROUGH THE BLOGGING GLASS: Charles Dodgson has the post on Enron and Bush. I mean, it's a real good post.

ED MAZZA: Has a post today on the Port Authority officers found in the WTC wreckage along with the body of the person they were trying to save --whom Ed calls a Fat Person and draws attention for his newer readers the troubles he's had with these people over the years. The clinical term for Fat People is the morbidly obese, and there is a way to fix it, though it's pretty drastic.

BY THE WAY: The below inspires me to seek out the secret Rand-Nietzsche connection; I enjoy this old Lingua Franca piece. I am moved to blog the final lines of said piece:

Was Ayn Rand just a writer of pulp-fiction sensibilities with a knack for euphemizing greed in a spirit of self-help profundity? Or was she the last of the nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals--a novelist-sage who was able to address the problems of freedom and domination in terms that readers are likely to appreciate well into the next millennium (whether their teachers want them to or not)?

If value and judgment are grounded in objectivity, it should be possible to reach some definitive conclusion. But at the risk of metaphysical evasion, the answer may be: both.

The article describes Objectivism in quasi-religious terms. Here's the part where I talk out of my ass: Ayn Rand is the A.E. van Vogt of philosophy. There you go.

ONE FOR NATALIE SOLENT: Without further ado, here's the 50 fantasy and science fiction novels socialists should read. Hey, Atlas Shrugged made the list. Wanna know why?

Know your enemy. This panoply of portentous Nietzcheanism lite has had a huge influence on American SF. Rand was an obsessive "objectionivist" (libertarian pro-capitalist individualist) whose hatred of socialism and any form of "collectivism" is visible in this important an influential -- though vile and ponderous -- novel.

Via Boing Boing. Of course. Somebody should make a list of the 50 F&SF novels for libertarians.

BWAHAHA: Rutgers football renaissance? That'll be the day.

LINK SPEAKS FOR ITSELF: Oldest fossilised vomit pile discovered.

OLYMPICS: Here's Jim Caple on last night's figure skating flap. I was reading Oliver Willis on the Olympics and he, like a lot of us, feels that figure skating is not a sport. I have to disagree. Figure skating --on the vast continuum of sports, with, say, pro wrestling on one end (an entirely fictional, and hence entirely subjective sport) and, say, billiards or bowling on the other end (sports with minimal or no human judgement as to what constitutes victory, and hence entirely objective sports)-- lies on the subjective end, toward pro wrestling. The great American team sports would lie in the middle, with maybe the NFL right in the middle and the NBA and MLB heading towards subjectivity. Anyway, the subjectivity of figure skating is no reason to say it isn't a sport. It's just more subjective than most.

STEPHEN MITCHELL: The New York Times also has a review of his book. Via Reductio Ad Absurdum. This one is a little less high on Mitchell than the Salon one.

ORNPAY UPDATE: Mark Byron joined the debate on Saturday and I just noticed now.

HOLY CRUD: The R. Crumb adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1974 religious episode is online. Via Boing Boing.

ONE MORE: Here's the story of what is said to be the first racial murder in Ireland.

BBC ASIA SECTION: Another girl was suspended for wearing a head scarf in Singapore. And I got to it before Andrea See. Awright! (Can you really legislate racial harmony, by the way? My guess is no.) Meanwhile over in Thailand the first female Thai Buddhist monk has been ordained. I can't imagine it'll be that much longer before the Catholics do that too. As for the celibacy thing, in Thailand and in Rome, that I think'll stick around, if only because it's always going to appeal to some people. Meanwhile here's a little piece on the 60th anniversary of the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. You want an evil axis, you got it, sixty years ago.

MORE ON UTAH: The Economist does his/her usual even-handed job on Utah and Mormons. Not only have they stopped with the polygamy, but the socialism as well:

In the early years, the church was almost communist in its attitude to private property. It required Mormons to hand over their goods to the church, which then handed them back but gave the former owners only “stewardship” over them. This meant that the church's leaders could make discretionary demands on the faithful for the greater good. Like polygamy, this system was abandoned long ago, as the church's embrace of corporate capitalism shows. Yet vestiges remain.

Worth reading as an introduction to the current state of the Church of Latter-Day Saints.

PAT BUCHANAN --WRONG! WATCH: Rod Dreher on NRO deflates Death Of The West . Dreher's main point is Pat seems to think Latin America isn't part of Western civilization, which it clearly is. What I found interesting in that article is Dreher adding Japan to the developed world, which it obviously is a part of. Unlike the rest of the developed world, Japan to my knowledge does not have much of a history of immigration, which is a large part of our American economic engine. Maybe the weirdo Japanese racial-purity ideals and the subsequent immigrant fear are another reason why they aren't getting out of recession anytime soon.

One more Dreher tidbit:

Still, France's birth rate remains below replacement level, and perhaps 10 percent of its population comes from African and Arab countries, whose migrants have relatively high birthrates (and, worrisomely, have proven strongly resistant to assimilation, even over two or three generations).

Do American African and Arab communities have a similar tendency to not assimilate? I never noticed one.

MORE ON KOBE HATING: Stephen Smith in the Inquirer picks up on the class reasons for Philly's Bryant hate:

[Kobe] also knows Philly is a blue-collar town, that his eloquence, his style - and the fact that he does not resemble, at least outwardly, the tattooed, braid-wearing, playing-with-reckless-abandon persona of Allen Iverson - contribute to the distance Philadelphia feels for him.

That Michael Lynch thing I just alluded to is pretty high on Iverson, who is pretty much Kobe's opposite in a public-perception way:

Take your hat off to Iverson, who not only kicks butt on the court, (if not in last night's NBA All Star Game) but plays well on paper, too. He's stayed true to his roots, refusing to wear suits and even appearing on NBC's Meet the Press in tattoo-revealing sweats. "People used to always tell me to wear a suit, look this way, look that way, cut my hair and stuff like that," says Iverson, who declared "I did this my way" when accepting last year's NBA Most Valuable Player award.

I prefer Iverson over Kobe in terms of their personas, but that's just me. I'm also not a Kobe fan because a.) he's a Laker and b.) he plays with Shaquille O'Neal and we'll never be able to tell how great Kobe is until he is sans Shaq. I am reminded of these Bill Simmons comments:

Wouldn't it be much more fun watching Kobe carry a team built around his offense, like Vince in Toronto, or T-Mac in Orlando? As his 56-point explosion Monday night against Memphis proved, this would be "MJ in 1988" all over again. Other than MJ, when was the last time a noncenter was a legitimate threat to drop 70 in a game?

Here's the sad thing: Shaq goes on cruise control for 90 percent of the regular-season games, mainly because he can (Shaq doesn't have that crazed desire to dominate every single game, the way Bird, MJ and even Moses did, and that's fine, I guess). And he probably saves Kobe's legs in the long run, as Kobe doesn't have to expend nearly as much energy carrying his team during the season.

But the fact remains that, at this point in his career, the Kobe Experience would be 10 times more interesting if he were forced to carry a .500 team. I watched some of the 56-point game -- coincidentally, the first game of Shaq's three-game suspension -- and Kobe was showing more flair and explosiveness than anyone since the young MJ. He was totally unstoppable, looking like a guy who finally had the chance to let loose.

This isn't another case of Magic-Kareem, or even Bird-McHale or MJ-Pippen, where there was a mutually beneficial relationship that allowed both players to reach even greater heights. In this case, Shaq makes Kobe's life easier, and vice versa ... and I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing. Hey, it might translate to 10 championships before everything's said and done, but I can't shake the feeling that neither player will reach his optimum potential with the other guy hanging around. We'll see.

Reading Simmons on the NBA has made me into a bigger NBA fan. You all should read him too.

THE GREAT ORNPAY DEBATE: Follow it like this: Holtsberry, Radic, Holtsberry, Radic, a Holtsberry aside, an a Dale Amon aside. Ornpay because the adult filter software in the library wouldn't let me read Kevin's initial post as it had too many banned words in it. Wotta development. So I'm limiting my use of the p-word, if I can. Never mind, I give up. Here's a Natlija comment:

People do not use marriage as a marketing devise, they use sex, because that is what people actually think about much of the time. Pornography is just the essence of that. In reality most well adjusted people do not get porn and real life confused, keeping them in different boxes in their heads. Yet I don't read Vogue primarity for the articles anymore than most people read Playboy for the articles (which are mostly crypto-socialist drivel anyway). I read them both for the sex. I don't have a problem with pornography because unlike many conservatives and their socialist-feminist friends, I do not have a problem with the reality of human nature. I just wish those conservatives and their statist allies on the left would stop trying to use the force of law to impose peculiar world views on everyone else.

I don't know from crypto-socialist, but the articles in Playboy really do suck. The only thing that's sometimes okay are the interviews, like the famous Paglia interview, the Parker & Stone one, this month's Iverson one is supposed to be good too. But there's no consistent sort of point of view in Playboy articles; the magazine has no reason to exist apart from the pictures of nekkid ladies. I mean, Penthouse tries to be the magazine about sex (or one version of sex), Hustler tries to be the girlie MAD magazine, Club does porn entirely from within the adult industry and has no qualms about being anything but a dirty magazine. Playboy never does anything consistently well and I suspect its time as a viable cultural entity has long past, much like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

Where I disagree with Natalija is in her assessment of Playboy: the porn sucks too. I don't have a problem with the cheesecake soft-core porn Playboy specializes in --their specials are really great examples of this: excellent production values, good variety of women. But the magazine's formula --centerfold, idiot para-celebrity, group-of-women-related-by-profession where half the pictures are too tiny and cropped to fit the page-- is stale beyond measure, and the magazine itself seems only to exist to advertise the Playboy brand name. And I think Hefner has gone insane. Have you seen him lately? He's always wearing that "iconic" bathrobe. And he lives with like seven identical --I mean i-den-ti-cal-- looking women (blonde, big hooters) who he insists on making into Playmates to the detriment of us, the magazine-purchasing public. Creepy, in an odd way I don't usually associate with creepiness. Hugh Hefner is going Howard Hughes in a way only Hugh Hefner could. That will be my only clever comment for the day.

AND: Good Washington Post review of a book on evolution and religion and futurism. It's the top review. But I think good science fiction always trumps good futurism, as it puts ideas in the hands of (fictional) people and gives you something to indentify with.

SPEAKING OF JUNG: From that same Yahoo list, an interesting London Review Of Books piece on evolutionary psychology explanations for religion, found in this book by Pascal Boyer. I don't get why Jung is never mentioned in these biology of religion things; wasn't Man, The Religious Animal the major plank in his platform? Maybe sociobiologists are nervous about referencing him, for fear of association with some of the goofier Jungians. The title of said book --Religion Explained-- turns me off right away as it reminds me of the we-got-all-the-answers-right-here-right-now snottiness of Consciousness Explained --I mean, come on, make your case and move on. The reviews from the Amazon page say the book suffers from not making its case right away. I still want to read it, though. Anyway, the London Review thing is highly worth reading; here's some speculation on the future of religion:

The future of gods, spirits and ancestors is, however, more problematic. We may not be witnessing the universal trend towards secularisation which was mistakenly predicted by many 20th century sociologists of religion. But there has, all the same, been a good deal of the Entzauberung - 'disenchantment', or literally 'demagification' - which Max Weber took to be one of the defining characteristics of the modern world.

This may run contra that speculating of a Secular North, Religious South found in that Atlantic article I mentioned. Maybe modern life just makes religion a little more comfortable, like it does with the rest of one's life:

Human beings may continue to believe all sorts of things, both metaphysical and ethical, that Boyer is unable to share with them, and to define themselves in relation to those beliefs to the point of being willing to kill other human beings who refuse to share them. But supernatural agency is no longer quite what it was. To put it no more strongly, Hegel had a point when he remarked that 'before the statues of the gods we no longer bend the knee.'

So maybe religion doesn't have the force it once did just because we humans aren't as all red-in-tooth-and-claw (or however that goes) as we once were. And I think having less to worry about to insure one's survival is, on balance, a good thing.

ET TU, ME? THEN FALL ROMANCE: Intriguing little Salon review of the final book by psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell. His theory --which sounds all grand and hifalutin in the best Jung-Freud traditions; thank god the salvationist instinct within within psychology has not completely disappeared-- is that we, consciously, end our more love-like feelings and replace them with steadier ones out of fear:

Why, Mitchell asks, should romance so inevitably wane, to be replaced -- and this is if you're lucky -- by something solid, steady ... and slightly-to-excruciatingly dull? Popular explanations are thick on the ground: Romance depends on mystery, but long-term relationships depend on understanding. Romance gets its fizz from sexuality, but partnership demands tenderness and caring, not lust. Romance is based on idealization of the other, and idealizing anyone is asking for trouble. Freud described his yearning patients neatly: "Where they love, they have no desire; where they desire, they cannot love."

The problem is real, and all the explanations are true, Mitchell says, but only partly, inadequately true. His own view, both warmed and deepened by a 30-year clinical practice of what came to be called "relational psychoanalysis," is that romantic love doesn't die a natural, inevitable death: We kill it, out of fear. It's just too dangerous, he says, to experience erotic currents toward somebody you actually know, somebody who shares not only your bed but the chores and the cable bill. What if he or she stopped desiring you? Compared to the emotional risks of long-term domestic passion, Mitchell observes, the zipless fuck is as daring as oatmeal.

Via the Yahoo evpsych list. Meanwhile I saw Kate & Leopold this weekend voluntarily. I am such a sap.

MORE STERN STUFF: Here's a little AP piece wrapping up Stern comments from the weekend. The big news is possible European expansion, which could work due to much of Europe being basketball-crazy. But would they compete with local Euro-leagues or attempt to work with them? He didn't say. I'm still waiting for one of the major leagues to have a successful franchise in Honolulu.

MARK CUBAN WATCH: His third-party reviews the officials idea got shot down by Team Stern (Team Stern copyright Bill Simmons.) Quoth Cuban:

"No one is saying I'm dead wrong on any issue, that the league is doing all these things right and that I should leave them alone. No one in the league office or outside of it. They only question me doing it publicly, which tells me I am on the right path."

Rose-colored contact lenses must be necessary to be a dotcom billionaire turned NBA owner, I'm guessing.

ALL-STAR GAME: The West smacked the East, with Kobe being a man on a mission to get that MVP. And the Philly fans booed him, like when they booed Destiny's Child during the finals, and when Jim Gray asked him if his feelings were hurt, he was just like "Yes. Yes, they were." Which I found amusing, like that Simpsons episode where Daryl Strawberry was crying after being heckled by Lisa and Bart. Almost as amusing as Michael Jordan missing that open-court dunk.

UTAH WATCH: Boing Boing brings the story of Salt Lake City's hipster mayor. Meanwhile Best Of The Web has a link to this Washington Times story on Mormon bashing by outside media types. D'ya suppose Best Of The Web would ever link to a piece sympathetic to Moonies? Or are newfangled Christian denominations only cool when they're Americans or Republicans or something? Just asking.

AFRO-GAELO HISTORY MONTH: Muhammed Ali is one-eighth Irish.

COMMERCIALS: Jacob Sullum has the rundown on those incredibly manipulative anti-drug commercials I first saw during the Superbowl. He closes with this line: "The war on drugs supports terror. If you support the war on drugs, you support terror too."

EVOLUTION EXPLAINED, MAYBE: The Scientific American has a little story that suggests that scientists may be figuring out how evolution, you know, actually works:

The fossil record contains numerous examples of dramatic evolutionary change in animals through time. Exactly how genetic alterations brought about these macroevolutionary changes, however, has proved difficult to ascertain. Now new research into the developmental biology of brine shrimp and fruit flies could throw light on the matter. According to a report published online today by the journal Nature, mutations in genes that guide embryonic development allowed insects to develop a radically different body plan from that of their crustacean-like ancestors some 400 million years ago.

Via Ian Pitchford. Of course, not everyone is convinced. Then there's this rebuttal.

MORE MAGAZINE WATCHING: Gawd, pick up this month's Atlantic Monthly, there's a really great article about the scientific study of religions and the tracking of New Religious Movements, or NRMs. Or you can buy the article here, it'll set you back two bucks though. Here's a quote from within the article by David B. Barrett, editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia:

"The main thing we've discovered," he said, "is that there is enormous religious change going on across the world, all the time. It's massive, it's complex, and it's continual. We have identified nine thousand and nine hundred distinct and separate religions in the world, increasing by two or three religions every day. What this means is that new religious movements are not just a curiosity, which is what the people in the older denominations usually think they are. They are a very serious subject."

The article also suggests that the future of Christianity may be in Africa, and we may be approaching a secularized North hemisphere defining itself against a religious South. They also introduce me to Cao Dai, which is a Vietnamese religion whose Three Saints are Sun Yat-Sen, a sixteenth-century poet named Trang Thinh, and Victor Hugo. Cripes, sign me up. Check it out, if you can. The article, I mean. Matt Welch is right about The Atlantic being a fine fine magazine.

NO THANKS: To Missy Schwartz for introducing me to Metacritic, an amazing way to waste time. What they do is collate links to movie reviews throughout Old Media webdom and get a composite score based on all the reviewers opinions. I could wander around for days. Here's the Impostor page.

WE ALL GO PORNO: Christian Science Monitor article called "Erotica runs rampant." It's more straight coverage than that recent William F. Buckley thing in National Review but clearly is down on porn legitimacy. The Monitor story mentions that Hustler is lending its brand name to makeup kits for teenage girls. Is that true? I dunno my own exact thoughts on mass pornification, but they're probably of the "if you don't like what's on TV, change the channel" variety.

MAGAZINE WATCH: I don't know if anybody reads the print version of National Review besides me, but there's a big article this month --I think it was by Ramesh Ponneru-- calling out Virginia Postrel and Ron Bailey and some other Reason magazine folks. Maybe the National Review editorial types are serious about making libertarians the next big Threat To Society that conservatives are sworn to undermine. Meanwhile, I know it'll be on their website eventually but Reason has a great defense of vulgarity this month by Charles Paul Freund. Freund's point if I remember it right is that vulgarity is the thing that truly brings the winds of change to old conservative cultures. Reason has the neat cover of an Arab guy drinking Pepsi this month; the Arab love of American goods was one of the neat touches I loved in Three Kings.

MORE UTAH STUFF: Salt Lake City is the number one per capita consumer of Jell-O in the United States, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Says the curator of the Jell-O museum (which is in upstate New York): "The invention of Jell-O democratized an elitist food. Before Jell-O, only the very wealthy could afford gelatins." More tidbits from the article:

--They call it "Mormon Soul Food."
--The Bill Cosby-Jell-O relationship is probably the longest-running pitchman-sponsor relationship ever.

BIG COUNTRY: Good Ken Layne post on country music, one of the many musical genres I am way too ignorant of.

NATIONAL WEIRDNESS RADIO: Mark Byron brings the partial transcript of the bizarre Terry Gross Gene Simmons interview I overheard on Monday night. Simmons in the transcript comes off like an unfunny Jason Mewes, but on-air what struck me was his complete lack of a sense of humor. Come to think of it, that's the same thing that's always bugged me about Ayn Rand. Huh. So why is the lead singer of Kiss taking himself seriously now? Perhaps he's only telling the truth and the whole Kiss thing was a facade to bag chicks, and now that he's older and ma-toor he's rationalizing it with quasi-philosophical doodoo and a serious tone of voice --he talked almost elegantly, I noticed, of his desire for Terry Gross. Hey --psychobabble. Shnoogans.

FEAR MY DREADED PURPLE MASTER STYLE: Daniel Taylor picks up on the Mark Crispin Miller article. Dan picks up on Miller's Hitler/Bush comparison which --as any Internet user knows-- is the hallmark of a goofy argument.

I HATE YOU DEARLY: Interesting Reuters piece on scientists --after lengthy investigations into what people find attractive in one another-- who are now studying what causes us to reject one another in a romantic sense. The big gender gap revealed itself here in the fact that women have trouble rejecting somebody solely because of looks, where men have no problem doing so, and that women were more discriminating than men in all categories besides the looks department. So okay then. Via the Yahoo evpsych eggheads.

THAT LEVIS SUPERBOWL AD: USA Today has a story on the guy who was in that Levis commercial --the one where the guy's legs were dancing but his upper body was straight. Via rc3.org. For me, the obvious computer-generated superimposition they used completely ruined it; the whole time I was thinking they should had him just do the lower body dancing, upper body serene on his own, in a vein similiar to the John Cleese Ministry Of Silly Walks sketch. But perhaps that wasn't the effect they were looking for.

MARTZ, CRETIN WATCH: Here's Ralph Wiley on how Mike Martz lost the Superbowl.

IMPOSTOR: Was perfectly competent and enjoyable science fiction, worth the 3 dollars spent at the discount theater. I haven't read the Dick story it was based on in a while, but this seemed like a completely straight adaptation. Neat stuff.

And those jokesters at The Christopher Hitchens Web are linking to the upcoming movie version of Dick's Minority Report, which is not to be confused with Hitch's Minority Report. And Hitch is not be confused with the other Hitch. Okay? Okay.

MORE ON UTAH: Ed Mazza links to this story on the money Utah socks away from state-run liquor stores. He also linked to this parody site of this official Utah site awhile back, but he doesn't have any archives so I can't figure out exactly where he mentioned it. But there you go.

ANYBODY UP FOR A ROAD TRIP?: There's a ton of motel rooms still unsold for the Olympics, Ananova reports. Via Drudge. We could hang out with Ken's sister. The article blames the hideous security checks, the sheer distance between events and the complete lack of alcohol. Read this paragraph in the nerdiest voice you can find in your head:

George Van Komen, chairman of Utah's Alcohol Policy Coalition, told broadcaster MSNBC: "Many people associate revelry and partying with alcohol, but that's simply not necessary. Drinks may not be as available as freely as some people might like. But it's a compromise we feel is important to keep drinks away from our young people and to keep the public safe."

But all is not lost:

Bars are banned from selling anything but watered-down beer which has a maximum of 3.2% alcohol, and drinkers wanting anything stronger have to join "private clubs" at a cost of five dollars (£3.50).

Restaurants serve drink, but only to people buying food - and until last year, could not even put alcoholic drinks on the menu, meaning wine lists were banned. And people are not allowed to bring alcohol across Utah's state borders, as its sale is controlled and taxed at 78.l%.......

To get round the restrictions, diplomats from Germany, Italy, Austria, Slovakia and Switzerland have set up temporary consulates which can sell alcohol tax-free.

Our Friends The Europeans is finally a non-ironic and completely true phrase. EUR-OPE! EUR-OPE!

NO IS NO: Interesting, complicated date rape story from the Denver Westword. Via the Daze Reader. This definitely falls into the "fuzzy lines" Ginger Stampley was talking about in regards to the existence of date rape. Ginger also isn't a big Katie Roiphe fan but when someone (who is Roiphe) sums up her article with:

If someone asks you to marry them, just to be safe, you might want to give the idea some thought.

They can't be all bad.

THE ONE NATURAL WORKOUT: Rand Simberg brings the story about the new legality of jogging naked in Maine:

Ms Ballou, 20, asked officer John Ewing whether he saw her genitals during the incident.

"Not that I recall," he replied.

"That's all I have," Ms Ballou told the court.

After he made his ruling, Judge Jesse Gunther, of the 3rd District Court in Bangor added: "I would assume the legislature will probably be addressing this issue."

The judge has been reading too much Playboy and not enough Club, if you catch my drift. And you might.

INTERNET USE IN AMERICA COIN FLIP-ESQUE: The Wall Street Journal reports American internet use is about 54 percent. Via the h20boro lib log. We still have to catch up with the Koreans, who are at --let's see-- 25 million users out of 47 million people-- that's about, um, 53 percent. Never mind.

THOMAS NEPHEW: Reports on German bloggers following the Superbowl. Could that be because of the World League --I mean, NFL Europe?

Golly, did you know Adam Vinatieri is a former Amsterdam Admiral?

MORE FANTASY WRITING STUFF: Good American Prospect appreciation of C.S. Lewis plus coverage of recent flap where paranoid Christian groups thought HarperCollins was going to remove all Christian references from The Chronicle Of Narnia --not that there are any overt Christian references in The Chronicles Of Narnia-- when instead the company was just changing their marketing of the septulogy.

BEYOND BEHE: This Amy Welborn post about Michael Behe (of Darwin's Black Box fame) reminds me that there are actually quite a few respectable books out there that try to raise questions of orthodox Darwinism; check out this Todd Stark list on Amazon. Go through all his lists if you have the time, it's amazing how much the guy reads.

HITCH: I missed this Hitch piece from last week. He makes the point that Enron was paying everybody off --it's been made before, of course, but Hitch does it with Hitch style. Accepting money from companies is where Ralph Nader was right about there being no difference between Al Gore and George Bush, by the way. Via The Christopher Hitchens Web.

SALON AND ON TIL THE BREAK OF DAWN: Salon today is following up on the whole Christina Hoff Sommers war-against-boys thing. It's kind of a state of the debate thing, overviewing all the competing opinions on the persistence of current gender gap which is tilting towards the girls. Sommers has not succeeded in shutting up arch-nemesis Carol Gilligan, but Gilligan is not the only one whose opinion matters anymore either. Worth checking out.

LAUGH, DARN IT: Here, on Kesher Talk, is at least one version of the 72 Virginians joke.

KMART COLLAPSE UPDATE: Virginia Postrel brings the link to this story explaining something Kmart did do wrong: it began investing in IT about four years too late. Finally, I was getting sick of stories saying that it's WalMart's patriarchal management style that gave it the winning edge.

MONTANA RIGHT-WING HERMITS: Here's another article about imagined enemies within our borders: the citizens of the Mountain West. This one, thankfully, is examining Northeast elitists replacing the Deep South with Idaho and Montana as their Icon Of Backwardness, so the article has a little perspective. Via Reduction ad Absurdum.

BOBOS: Then there's this Weekly Standard piece also brought to me by A&LD. It's by Peter Augustine Lawler. He gets a ton of mileage from David Brooks' "bobos" concept --bougeois bohemians who have "reconciled the modern conflict between bohemian self-expression and bourgeois productivity"-- a species of Americans who may or may not exist, like the anti-intellectuals below. Lawler wants us to think that human nature is dependent on the existence of death; take that away, we're insectoid animals. Or something. Watch him conjure up a dystopia:

As Walker Percy predicted in The Thanatos Syndrome, we may be able to free ourselves from all the stress of self-consciousness, becoming happy and productive animals who in the right environment are never in a bad mood. We could, in other words, make sociobiology's view of man true by eliminating all those perverse features of human nature that have made this view untrue so far.

Unbridled biotechnology could destroy human nature. The result would not really be a return to nature, but rather the human construction of an unalienated human environment. Biotechnological success would then be, from one view, the decisive evidence for and the final act of human freedom: We will make ourselves into what we imagined natural perfection to be. We will make ourselves fully at home in the world.

So his view is that the coming biotech future will be emotionally statist: nothing but happy, no unpredicatable moods, no emotional progress. But, obviously, opposing biotech and happiness-promoting and death-cheating is technologically statist. I guess agreeing with Lawler comes down to believing that your growth as an individual can be derailed by technology. Which is certainly possible --there are over-medicated souls out there-- but probably doesn't happen in a majority of people. He closes with this line:

Perhaps even our Bobos and our experts can come to understand that a distinctively human life, with all its suffering and limitations, is good, precisely because the longing to love others and God is not an illusion, nor does it finally go unsatisfied.

Why is he trying to convert the bobos? Are they laying siege to his house? If I have a beef with Lawler it's with him assuming we'll all go the same path to enlightenment; there's no reason his struggle-upwards-towards-greatness-until-death people can't exist under the same constitution as "bobo" health-and-beauty cultists, and the rest of us, for that matter. Maybe he's just doing his civic duty to prevent any one group from taking over the national consciousness.

Did you ever think neocons are nerds who thought science fiction was too nerdy to take seriously? And so they get all bent out of shape now because they can't psychologically place new ideas in fictional enviroments to sort of test where they might go? So we end up with weighty philosophical pieces that would probably work better as science fiction. Their writers lack a certain internal fiction-making apparatus. I am probably one step from making a science fictional exceptionalism argument --and I'm already making an unsupportable claim-- so let's nip that in the bud there for the moment.

Lawler also wrote a piece comparing libertarians and compassionate conservatives. And he has a book coming out that this piece seems like a primer for.

ANTI-INTELLECTUALS: Here's this Mark Crispin Miller article Arts & Letters Daily linked to. He's trying to make a point about American anti-intellectual tendencies --a point that can be made, surely-- but comes off as paranoid sometimes, like when he's recounting his appearance on Bill O'Reilly:

O'Reilly: With us now is the author of the book, Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University. And in the New York Times, Prof. Miller is quoted as saying, "One of the reasons I reproduce such long exchanges with journalists such as Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly is to show their unthinking complicity in putting President Bush across."

MCM: You find that to be an outrageous claim?

O'Reilly: Well, not outrageous. I just think you're misguided, as many, many academics are these days.

That last shot was, of course, the intended subtext of my whole exchange with Bill, who kept on pointedly addressing me, with faint mock-deference, as "Professor"--an epithet synonymous with "jackass" in minds of many in his audience.

And then here:

Thus, for example, do the goon squads frequently bombard the Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites with hostile fake reviews of books they obviously haven't read, to drive off as many folks as possible.

This from a guy whose book is averaging four stars on Amazon. It sound like he's guilty of the old confusing criticism with repression thing. He also quotes the head of Fox News on why Fox appeals to the red states (they're being ignored) without comment. I mean, tell me why he's wrong (the Fox News guy, I mean).

Miller also wrote the introduction on that J.H. Hatfield book that got pulled when everybody found out Hatfield was a criminal. That book still looks fun.

ON THE OTHER HAND: Count of Monte Cristo was entertaining for seven dollars. It was tinged with true romance, which I like, and it was pretty well-made. Hey, I forgot that Dumas' book was the inspiration for The Stars My Destination. We need a movie version of that.

THAT LOOKS AWFUL: Little AP story about people saying the new Schwarzeneggar flick is anti-Colombian. So it's a drug war movie, at least we know now what it's ostensibly about. It just looks like a terrible movie from the previews, like Arnold has sunk to Seagal-Van Damme levels of B-movie making. Stinky poo.

WAKE UP, TIME TO BLOG: I'm sure we all noted this but Ev posted this Time article on blogging on Blogger.com. The article says what we already know: blogging is easy and worthwhile. The author, Chris Taylor has one blog and then another. The second one hasn't gotten off the ground yet but it's going to be a futurist blog --THAT I would read.

MY WEEKEND: Was spent in beautiful Richmond, Virginia. Saturday I watched the initial card of John Boy and Billy's WrestleForce America, promoted by former WCW guy Lodi (who has adopted a Perry Saturn look, quite a departure from his Billy Idol-lookalike amiable goof days.) John Boy and Billy, it was explained to me, are a pan-Southern radio show phenomenon who have lent their name to this thing, so maybe this is an attempt to get a Southern promotion going. I watched with the DVDVR guys and my friend Churi and had multiple Pabst Blue Ribbons. Churi kept falling asleep; poor lil fella was all tuckered out from being on call at the hospital the night before. Yet she sportingly came out to see the wrestling and we got Church's afterwards --their corn on the cob on a stick is really great. I also met (mul)Doomstone, The Confederate Mack and Acehole for the first time, which was pretty cool. The show itself was decent wrestling. Read the DVDVR report when they post it (the site is down now), they know their shit.

On Sunday Dean took me to McLean's to get fried eggs (Dean said he met Jerry Falwell there once) and then the Hollywood Cemetery, which is long and rambling and full of ornate and weird tombstones combining Christian and pagan symbolism. There's also a bunch of crypts and angels frozen in mourning for the moment of death. As Dean said: "Welcome to the South."

And of course the Patriots pulled off the upset. U-S-A! U-S-A! I really think Mike Martz is kind of a cretin. You've got Marshall Faulk; when the chips are down, just run the guy. How hard is that? And every Rams game I've seen this season there's always been one questionable challenge or timeout. So I'm not buying the Mike Martz: Supergenius arguments right yet.

NORTH KOREA: AXIS MEMBER UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer suggests why North Korea got the big nod from Bush:

Thank God for North Korea. Mentioning it is the equivalent of strip-searching an 80-year-old Irish nun at airport security: It is our defense against ethnic profiling. Right now North Korea is too destitute and too isolated to be capable of anything but spasmodic violence. But it has the virtue of being non-Islamic.

So we need North Korea in the Axis so we don't come off as un-Islamic --it's a public relations ploy. How amazingly cynical. He also explains the true message of this State Of The Union speech: Iraq is next. Via Best Of The Web.

MORE ON IMMIGRATION: Instapundit has reader mail and comments on the future look of American people. Think current-day Hawaiians. I doubt it will happen in 50 years or ever even as Glenn suggests, as mass Hawaiification would almost have to involve forced miscegenation --bussing carried to some horrible extreme. But a rise in "wildly and overlappingly multiethnic" people is probably already occurring, and will continue.

By the way, did you know Hawaii has an af2 team?

ONE MORE THING: Here's one more paragraph from the U.S.S. Clueless I wanted to talk about:

Each generation in America is strengthened by a new flow of immigrants. Now that flow is from Latin America, and Korea, and Japan, and the Philippines, and India, and Viet Nam, and China, and Taiwan; they will bring with them the best of their nations, and they will leave behind the worst, and America will change again. It will change for the better. And it will become even less like Europe. In fifty years, more than half the population of the United States will not be of European descent.

First thing: is anybody coming here from Japan anymore? I wouldn't think they'd need to, recession or not.

Second thing: the idea of new immigrants bringing the best of their nations, which is pretty true, especially in the case of India, which I think is suffering from brain drain as a lot of its best and brightest find better-paying jobs here. But it is quite a change from that whole wretched refuse yearning to breathe free, right? Not that Steven won't be right about things changing for the better, but we shouldn't think we're getting merely the cast-aside of the world anymore. We as Americans have become victims of our own success in that regard.

REPORT FROM CAMP X-RAY: Ken Layne links to this report from Guantanamo in The Weekly Standard. Cripes, look at the freaks we got stowed there:

When I ask the Marines if they've seen anything weird, they laugh sheepishly, looking at each other. Finally, Sgt. Josh Westbrook, who sports a forearm tattoo of flaming baby heads, steps up. "They know they're being watched," he explains, "so they'll stare at you, and while they stare at you, they'll, uh, masturbate."

According to these Marines, they don't just pleasure themselves to freak out the snipers, but also to embarrass the female Army guards in the camp's interior. The weirdness doesn't end there. They've also eaten their toiletries and urinated on equipment. "The other day," says Westbrook, "one of the guys tried to do a naked cartwheel." In the most bizarre twist, Lance Corporal Devin Klebaur says a few have also been known to "put toothpaste in their ass." "What's the purpose?" I ask. "I'm not sure," he says, puzzled.

And then this:

Their restroom arrangements are pretty spartan. They get a white bucket for emergency squirts, while they are instructed to hold two fingers up for the alternative. At that time, a guard shackles them and takes them to the port-o-loo. While the military has spared no expense in construction costs (in three weeks, they built a completely operational field hospital staffed by 160 medical personnel--two more than there are prisoners), they've saved a fortune in toilet paper. It's the detainees' cultural preference not to use any. "We don't shake their hands," says one camp guard.

No toilet paper? The hey? The article claims these guys are mostly Saudis, by the way. Go read.

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: Go follow the debate between Steven den Beste and Iain Murray on the originality of America. Steven makes the point in no uncertain terms that Europe has no clue about America, Iain points out that America is more Anglo than Western European, then Steven follows up with comments on the Native American origins of our politics, among other points. My own personal take: I was raised in a pretty Ireland-sympathetic family, so I am naturally loathe to give Great Britain any credit at all. But Iain's points about Britain being a special branch of Western civilization (in the sense that Japan is a special branch of "Confucian" civilization, if I remember my Toynbee right) and thus America being an outgrowth of Anglo culture have merit. Maybe I should change the terms of my pet theory slightly: Americans are to British the way Romans were to Greeks.

I find this den Beste paragraph enjoyable:

As long as Europe tries to see the United States as an outgrowth of European culture spawned in the New World, as long as it looks in the mirror when it thinks it looks west, it will continue to be confused by us as we keep acting in ways they cannot explain.

You could replace that first Europe with "The National Review" and it would still be true. I think.

ANTI-GLOBALIZATION PROS: Here's Matt Welch on the good points anti-globalization protesters are making. He also pinpoints the political leanings of The Economist: neo-liberal. He puts it in quotes so I guess it isn't a term in heavy circulation, unlike neoconservative. Who are the neo-liberal bloggers, by the way? I've seen lots of different conservative and libertarian blogs, and much of the pre-9/11 bloggerverse seems pretty dyed-in-the-wool liberal. But neo-liberal? I'm not sure.

I dig Matt's comments on why we should all be reading The Economist:

If the protest kids ever read The Economist, they’d see that most of this six-point program is perfectly consistent with the editorial views of the world’s leading “neo-liberal” publication. If people who described themselves as “liberal” would actually embrace “liberalism,” the left 25% of the American Left wouldn’t strike everyone else as so ridiculous, irrelevant, and (post-Sept. 11) infuriating as all hell.

Well, he's not saying everyone should, just the protest kids who would benefit from it the most. But everyone should; I think I've said this before, but it's the best possible Newsweek.

STAR TREK WRAPUP: I feel like doing this so I can get all the recent Star Trek posts in one place. I am one of those that feels that Next Generation was absolutely the best of the Trek shows. It boils down to the science fiction of TNG being way better than the original, though Voyager had good SF episodes too. And Patrick Stewart is a far far better actor than William Shatner. This, I think, outweighs any problems with the economics or politics of the 24th century.

Here's the article that got Ken Layne talking about Star Trek first here then here.

Then the Samizdata people jumped on it. You can read their stuff sequentially like this: one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Ginger Stampley has a post but more on science fiction in general. She disses Voyager, which was always watchable once The Doctor and Seven were involved. She also refs the Penfield Mood Organ, I've got mine set to My Posts Appear Incredibly Witty And Incisive. Must need new batteries....

MARK BYRON: Has the post on why Japan is so slow to recover in an economic sense. I am reminded of this book which, while a little out of date, gives an excellent overview of contemporary Japan.