SEX AND THE BRITISH....Sometimes the stereotypes are true:

A new offence of sexual activity in a public place, carrying a maximum jail term of six months, was proposed in legislation published by the Government yesterday. For the first time, the law would define the circumstances in which sex in public could happen....

Sexual activity in a "dwelling" would be exempt - even if it could be witnessed through open curtains - whereas a couple engaging in sex in their own garden which could be seen from the road would be guilty of an offence.

....Hilary Benn, the Home Office minister, said homosexuals meeting in a public lavatory would avoid prosecution provided the participants were not seen.

"If the cubicle door was open then clearly an offence was committed. If it's closed, it's different," he said.

Don't you think this is a case where "I know it when I see it" might have been sufficient?

(Via Jim Miller)

YET MORE PC MADNESS IN THE ACADMY....Erin O'Connor seems to spend her entire life searching diligently for PC outrages in the educational community, but even by her rather loose standards today's outrage is a stretch:

A Missouri schoolteacher has been fired for voicing controversial opinions. Last fall, a student in Jendra Loeffelman's eighth-grade class asked her what she thought about interracial marriage. The question grew out of a discussion about an assignment the student had been given in another class. Loeffelman answered honestly, telling her class that she disapproved of interracial marriage because it produced children who are likely to be persecuted. Some of Loeffelman's students are of mixed racial origins.

Erin thinks that Loeffelman was fired solely because she refused to "pander to [students']--or their parents'--sensibilities."

Yeah, that makes sense: approval of mixed race marriage would have been just another case of "pandering" to those damn reverse racists in the Democratic party. Why are they so hypersensitive about this stuff, anyway? Does everything have to be about race?

Here's the lesson, Erin: if you're going to be a racist, you better shut up about it. We've made at least that much progress.

And please: no emails suggesting that this isn't racism. If disapproval of interracial marriage isn't racism, then the term has lost all meaning.

MATT'S BACK....Matt Yglesias is finally back and has sent everyone a shameless, pathetic email asking us to link to him. These Harvard kids will stoop to anything.

However, he's got a good post from the trenches of the Howard Dean campaign, so all is forgiven. And I'm with him on this: if Dean is genuinely a protectionist, he's lost my vote too.

He also comments on my creationism post — well, the headline of my creationism post, anyway:

CalPundit asks is creationism science?, but I think it's a bad question. The so-called "demarcation problem" between science and non-science is, I think, so context-dependent that it's not really answerable. A better question to ask would be "are there good reasons to think creationism is true?" and my answer would be "no."

Sheesh. Trust a philosophy major to bollocks things up....

MORALITY IN FOREIGN POLICY....Today in the Weekly Standard William Kristol celebrates the return of morality to foreign policy:

It is true that regimes don't exist apart from the various material interests and geographical and historical characteristics of nations. So "morality in foreign policy" is always limited. Necessity has its claims. And the freedom and security of one's own nation come first. But our freedom and security turn out to be inextricably linked to the character of regimes elsewhere in the world.

It's funny, though, he attributes the origin of our concern with the "character" of a regime to Ronald Reagan, the man who mined Nicaragua's harbors, sold arms to Iran, and supported Saddam Hussein for the better part of a decade.

At the same time he absent mindedly fails to remember the real origin (in recent years, anyway) of U.S. concern with morality in foreign affairs: Jimmy Carter's insistence on judging nations according to their respect for human rights. And unless my memory fails me, Carter was roundly castigated for his diplomatic naiveté by neocons like Kristol — until Reagan discovered that "human rights" was actually a pretty good cudgel to use against the Soviet Union. Then it suddenly became OK.

Funny how memory plays such tricks on us....

IS CREATIONISM SCIENCE?....Shazam! If you want to generate traffic and email, just blog about either (a) France or (b) evolution. Today's subject is evolution.

Here's the nickel version of the story so far: Michael Dini, a biology professor at Texas Tech, says that he won't give students recommendations for "further education in the biomedical sciences" unless they can "truthfully affirm" a scientific explanation of how humans originated. Since many fundamentalist Christians don't believe in evolution, he's being accused of religious bigotry.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth: creationists have gone out of their way — most recently using the sophistry of "Intelligent Design" — to insist that creationism is a scientific theory, not a religious belief. The problem is that there is simply no credible scientific evidence for this, and it's perfectly reasonable for a professional biologist to point this out. In Dini's case, what we have is a scientist asking a science student to provide a scientific explanation of human origins, and evolution via natural selection is the answer he's looking for.

To make the distinction clearer, let's try a thought experiment (it's a "thought" experiment because we're trying to read Dini's mind). Here is Dini's question and three possible answers to it:

How do you think the human species originated?

Answer #1: Humans evolved from apes....blah blah blah [insert adequate explanation of evolution here]. Verdict: Thumbs up.

Answer #2: Humans evolved from apes....blah blah blah [insert adequate explanation of evolution here]....but I also believe that the key mutations that created the species H. sapiens were guided by God. Verdict: Thumbs up.

Answer #3: Humans were created in a spontaneous act by an intelligent designer and are separate from the rest of the animal kingdom. They are not members of Class Mammalia. Verdict: Thumbs down.

A "scientific" answer to Dini's question does not rule out religious faith (including a belief in occasional divine intervention), but it does rule out creationism as a defensible model within the scientific tradition and it does require you to understand that Darwinian evolution is overwhelmingly the best known explanation for human origins. It is perfectly reasonable for a scientist providing a professional recommendation to be unwilling to vouch for someone who doesn't understand this.

And a note of caution: anyone who believes that high school biology textbooks should teach evolution, not creationism, should oppose Dini's position with trepidation. If Dini is required to recommend students who defend creationism as a reasonable scientific theory, then what possible argument is there for not including it in our textbooks as well? (It is worth noting that Dini's primary research interest is in the "pedagogy of biology.")

POSTSCRIPT: I think this story really hits you in the face with one of the biggest problems fundamentalist Christians have: they have decided to argue that creationism is a scientific theory, and in doing so they have implicitly accepted the ground rules of the scientific community. This is a disaster for them, since there is simply no way that they can win this battle using the other side's rules.

POSTSCRIPT II: Lots of people have been blogging about this. For other opinions pro and con try the following sites:

• Eugene Volokh
  

• Mark Kleiman
  

• Tapped
  

• Steve Verdon
  

• Ricky West
  

• Chris Mooney
  

• Clayton Cramer
  

• MinuteMan
  

• Electrolite (lots of good comments, too)
  

END THE VETO POWER?....I've noted many times that I think the UN has shown pretty good judgment in matters of military action by its members over the years. Not perfect judgment, mind you, but it has a pretty respectable record, and that's one reason why working through the UN on Iraq is a good idea.

But here's a question: isn't it about time to get rid of the veto power of the five permanent members? The U.S. has been one of the loudest defenders of this privilege over the years, but it's not clear to me that it has ever worked in our favor, let alone that it continues to do so.

Consider: if 14 out of 15 Security Council members approved of an invasion of Iraq but France vetoed it, it's hard to argue that this should be allowed to prevent a military action that obviously has virtually unanimous international support. In this case, international action would indeed be held hostage to the unilateral action of one nation.

On the other hand, if the U.S. can't persuade 10 out of 15 Security Council members that we should invade Iraq, I would argue that we should seriously consider the idea that we're making a mistake. In the extreme, of course, we reserve the right to act on our own, but significant opposition suggests that at the very least we should take a step back and reconsider things.

The veto power of the permanent members makes the UN like a sort of crap game, where any of the permanent members can block UN policy at any time for any reason. Is it any wonder, then, that the UN is often ineffective? Get rid of the the veto power, place more trust in our diplomatic efforts, and I suspect that while we would lose a few arguments, we would win a lot more. And overall, the UN would probably become a friendlier place.

UPDATE: Bryant Durrell at Population: One proposed the same thing last week and included a link to this cool table, which shows which countries have been the biggest users of the veto power over the years.

DO AS WE SAY, NOT AS WE DO....The Los Angeles City Council voted this week to uphold a new police department policy regarding residential burglar alarms. From now on, police will not respond to burglar alarms unless they also get a phone call verifying a problem. Too many false alarms, the LAPD says, and we're wasting police resources responding to them all.

Ah, but it turns out that certain people are exempt from this new policy: City Council members. The LAPD explains:

"Because they're the most visible representatives of city government, they should have the benefit of some security system in their homes and offices," said Lt. Debra Kirk of the Police Commission's investigations division, which is responsible for enforcing the alarm policy.

What's more, they don't have to pay the annual alarm permit fee or the false alarm fees. Isn't it lovely being a Los Angeles city councilman?

VACATION IS OVER....OK Matt, it's January 31. Where are you?

CHESS UPDATE....Kasparov has now punted two games in a row. In game three, playing white against Deep Junior, Kasparov played strongly until the end, when he slipped and looked headed for a draw — but then missed a crucial play and allowed Deep Junior to pull out a last-minute win.

This seems to be the pattern in the three big-time man vs. machine chess matches since 1997: the human plays well for the first two or three games, but then folds under the pressure of the computer's unblinking eye. Is that going to happen again this time?

The score is now tied at 1.5 to 1.5. The next game is on Sunday.

THE FUTURE....Every once in a while, while I'm all caught up in the middle of some furious political blogging, I suddenly blink and wonder if any of it really matters. Here's why:

• Quantum computing
  

• Artificial intelligence
  

• Infinite clean energy from fusion/solar/etc.
  

• Nanotechnology
  

• Genetic tailoring
  

Plus a couple of other new technologies that we haven't even thought of yet.

It's possible that none of these things will ever become practical, but I bet most of them will sometime in the next 50-100 years. And it will make all the stuff we're arguing about today simply irrelevant, assuming we can refrain from blowing ourselves to bits in the meantime.

That list is one of the reasons I have a hard time getting too worked up about projections of Social Security deficits in the year 2078....

I JUST CAN'T TAKE MUCH MORE OF THIS....I've got a deal for conservatives: we'll stop claiming Bush is dumb if you'll stop pretending that every administration fuckup is actually part of an intricate master plan of Brobdingnagian proportions.

Sheesh.

FROM THE "CAN'T WIN 'EM ALL" DEPARTMENT....Is art a reflection of life, or is it the other way around?

One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor
where the Shadows lie.

DOES IRAQ HAVE NUKES?....Knowledgable people who talk honestly about "weapons of mass destruction" usually differentiate between chemical and biological weapons — bad — and nuclear weapons — horrific. The all-purpose acronym WMD often obfuscates this, leaving us to wonder: does Iraq really have a nuclear program? Or just chemical and biological?

Today Josh Marshall publishes an interview with Kenneth Pollack, author of The Gathering Storm, that asks that very question. Here is Pollack's reponse:

One of the things that has been most important to me is talking to the inspectors, the inspectors who were responsible for this program during the 1990s. Every one of which I've spoken to believes that the Iraqis somewhere have a clandestine centrifuge program. And that's very meaningful to me because the experts, the guys who are in there doing it themselves, they also believe that the Iraqis are still pursuing this. It's just that we can't find what they've got.

Is there more? Tune in tomorrow for Part 2 of the interview.

LIAR, LIAR, HAIR ON FIRE...Does George Bush dye his hair? Maybe, but Megan McArdle thinks the whole question is silly:

Left and right: you have taken leave of your senses when you are trying to interest journalists, or the reading public, in the question of the president's dye job.

Surely, Megan, you haven't been blogging all this time and not noticed that hair is practically an obsession with journalists? Just off the top of my head:

• Remember when Jimmy Carter started parting his hair on the opposite side?
  

• Remember when people asked if Ronald Reagan used hair color?
  

• Remember when Bill Clinton supposedly shut down LAX in order to get a haircut?
  

• Remember the endless fuss over Hillary's ever-changing hairstyle?
  

• Remember when John Kerry was accused of getting a $150 salon cut?
  

• Remember when Gerhard Schröder went to court over reports that he used hair dye?
  

"Trying to interest journalists" indeed. Who needs to try? I think that if Pat Nixon had switched to being a redhead in 1973 it would have crowded Watergate off the front page entirely and the Trickster would have spent his golden years as an elder statesman instead of an international symbol of political scandal.

But for what it's worth, I agree with Megan on the substance: I suspect the whole thing is a trick of light. But I wonder if anybody has asked Ari about it yet?

UPDATE: Apparently not. But as I was checking I noticed that sometimes the White House holds "press briefings" and sometimes it holds "press gaggles." What's the difference?

UPDATE II: According to an email from an "ex-White House grunt":

"Gaggles" historically refer to informal briefings the press secretary conducts with the press pool rather than the entire press corps. They used to happen in the morning, they were more or less off the record, and their purpose was mostly to exchange information - the president's schedule and briefing schedule, from the administration side; heads-up on likely topics or early comment on pressing issues, from the news side. Briefings were what everybody knows them to be.

In previous administrations, when the President traveled, sometimes the press secretary would hold a gaggle with the press pool that travels on Air Force One - not every time, but sometimes, and always informally. In this administration, Ari does a gaggle on the plane every time the President goes out of town, and a transcript is made available for press corps members who weren't on the plane. These mid-air mini-briefings are the "gaggles" you can find transcripts of on the White House website.

He goes on to note that "Now you have one additional bit of wholly useless information to find space for." Hell, that's practically the definition of blogging....

EVOLUTION STRIKES BACK....Via Eugene Volokh comes an AP story about a biology professor who refuses to give students recommendations unless they believe in evolution. The Liberty Legal Institute has filed a complaint:

"Students are being denied recommendations not because of their competence in understanding evolution, but solely because of their personal religious beliefs," said Kelly Shackelford, chief counsel for the institute.

I would venture to say that belief in creationism indicates a striking lack of competence in understanding evolution, but hey, that's just me.

Of course, I also wouldn't recommend someone who didn't believe in general relativity to a physics program, or someone who thought the Earth was 10,000 years old to a geology program. Blinkered of me, I know....

POSTSCRIPT: I'm just curious: would the Liberty Legal Institute complain if a divinity professor refused to give a recommendation to a student who didn't believe in God?

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has practically devoted his entire blog to this issue tonight. I don't think I've ever in my life seen so many smart people completely miss the point over and over.

Here it is: if you ask a biology professor for a personal recommendation, it's going to be based on whether he thinks you have a strong knowledge of biology and biological theory. If you don't believe in evolution, you obviously don't understand biology very well. So: no recommendation.

EUROPE AND AMERICA....Yesterday I wrote:

Europe and America largely share a core set of values: democracy, capitalism, religious tolerance, and a dedication to civil liberties.

At the same time, apparently, eight European leaders were writing this:

The real bond between the U.S. and Europe is the values we share: democracy, individual freedom, human rights and the Rule of Law.

Hey, not bad! I'm in pretty good company! Of course, as Sun Tzu Files points out, there are 39 other European countries that didn't sign this letter of support for American policy, but it still seems like a significant show of public support to me. It will surely put some pressure on the Germans and French, especially since the signatories included Britain, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, all of whom are large and longstanding members of the EU.

WHY BLOG?....Why are there so many political blogs and so few culture blogs? Michael Blowhard opines today:

My current suspicion is that it comes down to the sheer fun of drinking some morning coffee, getting pissed off by the morning's headlines, and heading to the computer for a good morning's blogging.

Yep, that's about it, I think.

$45 IN TAXES FOR A FAMILY OF FOUR EARNING $40,000?....Jesse says today:

The long and short of all of this is any family earning $40,000 (and falling) that actually sees their tax burden on predominant, if not total non-dividend income fall the 96% that Bush claims is taking me out to dinner, considering that they will have an effective tax burden of .11%. Now THOSE are some real tax savings.

The thing is, Bush's claim is probably true (or pretty close to true). A family of four with an income of $40,000 only pays about $1200 in federal income taxes, and part of Bush's plan is an increase of $400 in the child tax credit and removal of the marriage penalty. I don't know for sure if this would reduce their tax liability to $45, but it comes pretty darn close.

They still have to pay sales taxes and property taxes and excise taxes, of course, but in terms of federal income tax, Bush's claim is pretty much correct.

(Oh, and if you're single and have no kids — well, you're pretty much out of luck. But that's what we get for electing a "family values" president: if you have no family, you get no value. Tough luck.)

ARE BLOGS THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING?....Nick Denton has been pushing the idea of "nanopublishing" for a while now: blog-like sites that can be profitable because their costs are very low. Typically, he says, these sites employ only one or two people and have very low ongoing costs. Gizmodo and Gawker are two examples that he's been involved with setting up.

Today Nick points to this article in the Guardian about nanopublishing:

Denton says a site such as Gizmodo costs between $1,000 and $2,000 a month to maintain. It is run by one journalist - Peter Rojas - and employs one designer. "Start-up costs were minimal, at around $2,000 for the initial set-up, plus $150 for the Moveable Type software the site uses." So, in other words, Gizmodo and Denton's other sites won't be running up huge debts as they attempt to build a readership. "Some of these new online media ideas are small but potentially profitable little businesses."

I still don't get this. I'm sure these sites can probably build some traffic and attract some advertisers, but why would an investor be interested in funding a "profitable little business"? Or even several of them?

Investors typically want to put their money into a business that has the potential for huge profitability. But even if Gawker turns a profit of $100,000, and even if Nick starts up a dozen similar sites, that's only a million dollars. Sure, that's nice, but it's not going to attract any serious attention, is it?

The only way for a nanopublishing company to make lots of money is to have lots of sites. But there are only so many sites that a single person (or a small management group) can run. And in the end, if each site is run by a single writer, then the attractiveness of the site depends precariously on that one person. What happens when Elizabeth Spiers leaves Gawker and starts her own blog? Does it shut down for a while until Nick finds a replacement? Struggle along until someone new gets up to speed?

I dunno. The dead-tree world is chock full of nanopublishing enterprises too, and they're called newsletters. These can be quite profitable if they're run by someone whose advice is valuable, but people like this run their own show and pocket all the profits themselves. The vast majority of newsletters, conversely, are just freebies distributed by enthusiasts. Like blogs.

Count me as a skeptic for now. The business model still seems pretty iffy.

AMERICA VS. EUROPE....A few days ago I wrote a throwaway post about Europhobia, and David Adesnik at OxBlog suggested that I should explain myself. "Throwaway posts are often the most revealing aspect of a blog," he said in an email.

I've been meaning to do this anyway, but today I discovered there's not much point: Timothy Garton Ash has written a terrific essay on the subject in the New York Review of Books and you should just go read that instead. It's long, but well worth your time.

So instead I'm just going to throw out some miscellaneous thoughts about American and European attitudes toward each other. Here they are:

• European countries frequently disagree with American policies — Iraq is currently Exhibit A — but that's not the same thing as being anti-American. It's important to keep that distinction in mind. That was what I meant when I asked, "Are Europeans even allowed to disagree with U.S. policy anymore?"

• At the same time, it would be foolish to pretend there is no anti-Americanism in Europe. There certainly is, especially among the lefty intelligentsia, but that doesn't mean that it's especially deep or widespread among everyone. Keep some perspective here.

• There's a big political dimension to this whole thing too. Europeans on the whole tend to be more liberal than Americans, so it's natural that liberal Europeans would dislike a lot of American culture. But at the same time, it's also natural that conservative Americans dislike a lot of European culture, and they do. Jonah Goldberg, for example, has practically built a career out of the word "euro-weenie." There is at least as much Euro-bashing in the United States as there is anti-Americanism in Europe.

• Don't treat Europe as a monolith. Not all European countries are opposed to our Iraq policies, and the ones that are have different reasons. Germany, for example, has had a strong pacifist culture since the end of World War II, and this is probably what's driving their opposition.

• France, on the other hand, really does a strong anti-American strain, and it is one of their most unattractive features. But even here it's worth keeping in mind that their attitude is not completely irrational. Charles de Gaulle was snubbed by Roosevelt during WWII despite the fact that he was practically the only prominent Frenchman to be both staunchly anti-Nazi and anti-communist, and he held this against America to his dying day. In 1956 the French were infuriated when Eisenhower humiliated them in the UN and forced them to withdraw their forces from the Suez Canal. And in 1996 France's nomination for the post of UN Secretary General was denied a second term after Britain and America ganged up to nominate their "own African," Kofi Annan. They haven't forgotten these things, and legitimately feel that France — and Europe — have their own unique interests and have as much right to an independent foreign policy as the United States.

• Americans do have a legitimate criticism of Europe's unwillingness to spend money on their military. This was made all too clear in the 1990s, when Europeans were utterly unable to deal with a civil war in their own backyard until America finally agreed to become involved in the 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo. Since then, Europe has talked vaguely about upgrading their military capabilities but there's been virtually no real action.

• Americans tend to feel that Europe doesn't feel enough gratitude for our efforts to defend them against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But there's another side to this story: many Europeans feel that they were the ones on the front lines and America was there solely because of our hatred of communism. Americans showed their true colors and began breezily dismissing European concerns once the Soviet Union fell and Europe was no longer important to them.

• The United States — and especially George W. Bush — has treated Europe rudely over and over. Look: Clinton didn't ratify Kyoto either, but Bush just brushed it off, saying "Kyoto is dead" and refusing to discuss it further. Europeans bent over backward to address American concerns over the International Criminal Court, but in the end America sent them packing anyway. And when George Bush decided to pull out of the ABM treaty, he didn't even bother consulting European leaders. Whether our policies are right or not, it is any wonder that Europeans feel slighted by this behavior?
  

Why does all this matter? After all, it's not like we're going to go to war with Europe.

It matters because rogue nations and terrorists are genuine problems, and we can't fight them alone, even if we are history's first hyperpower. We need Europe — and they need us — in order to win this battle, and instead of magnifying our differences, both sides should be doing their best to smooth them over. We should agree to disagree when we have to, but work together over the long haul. This is as true for Europeans as it is for Americans.

Europe and America largely share a core set of values: democracy, capitalism, religious tolerance, and a dedication to civil liberties. So, hard as it is, conservatives and warhawks should suck it up and stop the name calling. We need all the help we can get in the war against terror, and Europe is our best ally in this fight.

It may feel good to rant and call each other clever names — "Old Europe," "Axis of Weasels," "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" — but in the end the laughs are hollow and the transatlantic bickering does nothing except help the terrorists. Anyone who is serious about this ongoing battle should knock it off.

POSTSCRIPT: My original post was a comment on a post from Lincoln Plawg. His response is here.

WORDS MATTER....ESPECIALLY THE LITTLE ONES!....The Washington Post ran a headline today that said, "Sutton Pleads With Senators at Hearing," and Eugene Volokh was puzzled:

So here's my question, which I can't answer myself because I didn't watch the hearing and haven't read the hearing transcript -- is it quite right to describe Sutton's conduct as "pleading"?

Probably not, but surely Eugene has noticed that variations on the verb "said" are among the most popular ways of making someone look vaguely foolish without actually saying something that's overtly untrue or unfair?

As a public service, here's a list of favorites (mostly used by columnists, which is why it might have seemed so jarring in the news story above):

• Prattled ("As Hillary prattled on about healthcare, the rest of us....")
  

• Muttered ("'We need to hear some proof,' the Democrats muttered helplessly....")
  

• Cackled ("'Bush's poll numbers are really slipping,' Kennedy cackled....")
  

• Whined ("After Daschle finished whining about Rush Limbaugh, the subject turned to....")
  

• Bellowed ("'The Enrons of the world need to be reined in,' Wellstone bellowed....")
  

• Sneered ("'Bush just isn't telling the truth about tax cuts,' Pelosi said sneeringly....")
  

• Droned ("As Al Gore droned on about tax policy, the audience seemed restless....")
  

• etc.
  

The all-time winner, however, is "shrill," which is the hands down conservative favorite these days for describing any forceful liberal argument. In fact, as near as I can tell, conservatives find it nearly impossible to refrain from talking about Paul Krugman without using the word "shrill" in the next breath. It's almost like it's become part of his name.

This kind of language is remarkably effective: it sets an unmistakable tone, but you can hardly complain about the word itself without seeming petty, despite the fact that nine times out of ten the statement was made in a perfectly normal tone of voice. For example:

Eugene Volokh prattled on today about how "well regulated militia" really refers to the entire adult citizenry.

It's hard to take exception to the factual statement set forth there, but it sure makes him sound like an obsessive crank, doesn't it?

The lesson, as Newt Gingrich could tell you, is that language matters. But remember, liberals can do this too: if you want to make someone look weak, or silly, or just plain dumb, quote them properly and treat the facts with respect, but always hit the thesaurus to find an appropriately sneering variation of "said." It's the newspaper columnist's secret weapon!

ARI FLEISCHER....Tim Dunlop posts an excerpt from a White House press briefing with Ari Fleischer today. Go read it.

Now, I could have picked pretty much any day's briefing to make this point, but is Ari Fleischer the sorriest son of a bitch in this general vicinity of the Milky Way, or what? As near as I can tell, his job is to get up in front of the press corps every day and stay robotically calm while they rain down abuse on him. His boss never holds press conferences, everyone knows Ari's not going to tell them anything, and it's gotten to the point where reporters just sort of vent on him because there's nothing much more they can do. It's sort of like being manager of the complaint desk at Sears.

Why would anyone want a job like that? It probably doesn't even pay all that well.

ROOTS....My mother returned from a trip to England a few days ago and brought back this picture of Parsonage Lane in Bath, a stone's throw from Bath Abbey. This, it turns out, is where my great-great-great-grandfather, William Membry, was born in 1818.

William moved to London as a teenager, where he worked as an apprentice baker, and, in 1839, was married to Mary Drew in the parish church of Islington. The next year, shortly after the birth of my great-great-grandmother, Agnes Membry, the Membry family sailed for America, landing in New York probably in late 1840. They spent eight years there, then moved to Covington, Kentucky for a decade, and finally settled in Marshall, Missouri in 1858.

In Marshall, William became a sign painter and Mary ran a small boardinghouse. The town of Marshall, like the rest of Missouri, was deeply conflicted during the Civil War and William apparently became a well-known Union sympathizer during this time. Well known enough, at any rate, that a history of Marshall records that "Federals preyed upon prominent Confederate sympathizers....while Confederates retaliated upon the households of Judge David Landon, William Membry, Snell, and others."

After the war ended Agnes Membry married a Civil War veteran and in 1884 they moved to Los Angeles, where she opened a boardinghouse of her own — named, fittingly, Olive House, after the Mt. Olive Presbyterian Church back in Marshall.

In 1885 William Membry died, leaving behind about $50 in "paints and paint fixtures" and $205 in two savings accounts. His wife Mary followed in 1896 and the two are buried together in the Mt. Olive Cemetery a few miles outside of Marshall. The gravestone reads, "He did unto others as he would they should do unto him."

NORTH KOREA....It sure has been quiet on the North Korea front, hasn't it? President Bush spent, oh, 30 seconds on it last night, saying basically that "we're working on it" and then moving on to weightier dictators.

So what's the latest? Well, according to CNN, the South Koreans sent an envoy to Pyonyang, but Kim Jong-il snubbed him and refused to meet. The envoy did manage to pass along a letter, however, and claims that Kim "promised to study its warm advice and let us know their opinion later." Uh huh.

Later in the same story, CNN reported that the snub was deliberate:

"They want to deal directly with George W. Bush and tell them basically you guarantee my security and in exchange I may consider dropping my nuclear weapons program," Lee Chong-min, from Seoul's Yonsei University, told CNN.

This is nothing new, really, but it's hard not to wonder if maybe they're actually serious about this. The North Koreans have proven so untrustworthy that it seems foolish to take anything they say at face value, but they sure have been consistent about what they want from the U.S.: a nonagression pact and a guarantee of security.

Assuming for a second that we could negotiate a suitable verification regime — a very big if — is there really anything wrong with this? I imagine there's a catch here, but if suitable security guarantees could denuclearize the Korean penninsula, well, that seems like a pretty good tradeoff to me.

TAXING TIMES....Oregon voters have rejected an income tax increase designed to help balance their budget. Anti-tax sentiment is apparently still stronger than fear of losing services.

CHESS UPDATE....Garry Kasparov got snookered by Deep Junior in the second game of their match and had to settle for a draw after having a clear win in sight. Still, it was a pretty good game since he was playing black.

Kasparov now leads 1.5 to .5. Game 3 is on Thursday.

THE FORTUNE 500 VS. THE REPUBLICANS....Sam Heldman points out today that a lot of big companies oppose President Bush's stand on affirmative action because it reduces the pool of minority graduates they can recruit from.

I've also read a number of articles lately saying that corporate America is rather shaky in its support of war with Iraq due to a belief that "war jitters" are hurting the economy. What's more, they aren't really completely on board with the dividend tax cut because their real concern is stimulating the economy now, not providing shareholders with an incentive to demand ever larger dividends.

None of this is more than background noise at the moment, but it's worth paying attention to. Big business is obviously one of the Republicans' core constituencies, and grumbling in the bleachers today could lead to catcalls from the season ticket holders tomorrow.

AT LEAST "D" WON'T BE COMING UP FOR A WHILE....The chairmanship of the UN's Conference on Disarmament rotates alphabetically. Because of this, the chairman of the next session in May will be Iraq. Co-chair is Iran.

Oh my.

STATE OF THE UNION....Marian and I watched the State of the Union address while slurping down Chinese food tonight, and then played Scrabble. I think the Scrabble was more entertaining.

I don't usually watch political speeches, even the SOTU, because they're just too predictable and tedious. And sure enough, the domestic part of the speech followed the usual pattern: a long laundry list of proposals, all carefully scripted and focus group approved, with little idea of which ones are really important. The AIDS stuff was unexpected, but otherwise it was mostly a yawner.

The Iraq part was better, I thought, a reasonably good summary of the current situation with very little of the bombastic rhetoric that we've heard so often before. I appreciated that he kept it fairly low key.

There was nothing new, though, although now we have yet another new date: February 5. That's when Colin Powell will present new (and presumably more powerful) evidence to the Security Council about Iraqi WMDs. I still don't understand why that couldn't have been done today — or six months ago — but whatever. I'll keep an open mind until then.

I saw Daschle respond to the speech afterward, and I was once again puzzled by the lousy speaking skills of veteran politicians. At one point, trying to emphasize his "credibility gap" talking point, Daschle said something like "we've heard rhetoric before that's good, but then there's a lack of follow through." Crikey. Why not just say, "He talks a good game but doesn't deliver the goods"? And then give a few punchy examples. What's wrong with these people?

UPDATE: Josh, did you really like that "process" vs. "results" line? To me it sounded like a bullet point from some junior McKinsey consultant's PowerPoint presentation. It was the one sentence in the entire speech that I thought struck a completely false note.

CAN CATHOLIC POLITICIANS DISAGREE WITH THE CHURCH?....Blue Streak has an interesting post today: according to the Sacramento Bee, the bishop of Sacramento has publicly told Governor Gray Davis that he should stop taking communion unless he changes his liberal stance on abortion.

Just goes to show how much I know: I didn't even realize Davis was Catholic. You learn something new every day.

The bishop's newfound aggressiveness seems to have been partly prompted by a Vatican document released a couple of weeks ago telling Catholic politicians that they are obligated to follow church doctrine on a variety of topics, including abortion. As Jim Capozzola pointed out last week, the Vatican wasn't really saying anything new, but they were trying to re-emphasize existing doctrine, and it seems to have hit home.

It's hard to criticize the church on practical grounds since it considers this to be a purely moral issue, but it sure seems likely that it's all going to backfire. A majority of American Catholics already reject Vatican teachings on a wide variety of subjects, and even if they didn't church-state separation is a pretty touchy subject here. John F. Kennedy put the "he'll be controlled by the Pope" argument to rest in 1960, and it doesn't really seem like it will do the church any good to have it resurrected. What's more, since it's mostly Democrats who support abortion rights, the church is running the risk of seeming not just political, but of taking domestic political sides as well.

More to come on this, apparently, including an advertising campaign on the same subject over the next few months. Time will tell how it all plays out.

HIDING THE EVIDENCE?....Over at RealClear Politics, Tom Bevan writes:

....the United States has announced it will release more evidence on Iraq's WMD programs.

This has all the markings of a set up by the Bush administration. They may not provide a "smoking gun," but you get the sense they have conclusive proof of Iraqi violations they've been holding back on. Biding their time while military preparations take place and the French and Germans make fools of themselves.

The amazing thing here isn't whether this is true or not, it's that Bevan can write this with such obvious approval. When did deliberately setting up your allies in order to make them look foolish become an admirable part of foreign policy?

ADDRESS CHANGE....O'Toole File has moved to its own site and is no longer part of Political Professional. Update your bookmarks accordingly.

BUSH VS. THE UNITED NATIONS....Yesterday on CNN Bill Schneider reported on the latest poll results:

We asked Americans, who do you trust more to make the right decisions regarding Iraq? The Bush administration or the United Nations? No contest. Right? Well, think again. It's a tie. As many people say they trust the U.N. as the Bush administration.

But TBOGG says it's really closer to 99% support for Bush if you just take the time to interpret the results correctly....

MAN VS. MACHINE....WHO CARES, ANYWAY?....Josh Chafetz wonders why so many people are interested in all these man vs. computer chess matches, and he makes a good point: what's the big deal if a computer is better than a human at chess? After all, computers are already better at humans when it comes to, say, calculating a multiple regression or keeping track of millions of web pages.

And there's more: computers are already better than every single chess player in the world except for maybe three or four. And since chess is a self-contained game with very specific rules and a limited number of pieces, the real surprise is that computers didn't start outplaying humans decades ago. In fact, in 1959 some of the first chess computer programmers predicted that a chess computer would be world chess champion before 1970.

But aside from the fact that lots of computer programmers are also chess fans, the real reason for the ongoing interest is probably that Alan Turing, father of artificial intelligence and inventor of the Turing test, was a (mediocre) chess player himself and predicted in 1945 that one day computers would play "very good chess." In the early days of computing, when hopes for artificial intelligence were higher than they are now, chess was considered an interesting problem that was a step on the road to true AI. In fact, the "chess Turing test" was often used as an example of a limited — but meaningful — Turing test.

Needless to say, no one believes this anymore — in fact, Noam Chomsky once said that a computer beating a grandmaster at chess was about as interesting as a bulldozer winning an Olympic weight-lifting competition. But the interest lives on, perhaps for nostalgic reasons more than anything. After all, John Henry had an entire legend built around his loss to a steam drill, and surely a chess playing computer is at least as interesting as a steam-powered drill?

RACIAL PREFERENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN....Over at NRO's The Corner, John J. Miller comments on a New York Times article about racial preferences at U.S. military academies:

What the article doesn't supply are any actual numbers showing how much preference minority applicants receive. For that, it's necessary to read this report from the Center for Equal Opportunity, which shows that preferences do appear to play a role in admissions--but not nearly the role they play at the University of Michigan, whose admissions process is currently under Supreme Court review. At West Point, for instance, CEO found a 100-point gap between the SAT scores of whites and blacks admitted. At Michigan, that's the difference between whites and blacks on the verbal section alone.

But this is an important point: would the UM program be OK if they gave minorities an extra 10 points instead of 20? How about 5? It's an important distinction, and not one that Miller should dodge.

In another post he says, "The defenders of Michigan's race-driven policies obscure the debate when they try to hide behind West Point," but it's opponents of preferences who obscure the debate when they rattle on incessantly about UM's 20-point bonus. Are they opposed to any effort to help minorities, or only to helping out too much?

JOHN LOTT UPDATE....One of the things that John Lott has complained about is bloggers making harsh accusations without bothering to ask him first for an explanation. There is probably some justice to this, and I've noticed myself that while he has responded via email to bits and pieces of the accusation about his 1997 survey, there's no comprehensive interview where he has responded to everything in one place. So I sent him an email asking if he would do a phone interview with me.

After a couple of emails back and forth, here's what he wrote back:

OK, Kevin, I have a better understanding of what you want to accomplish and it seems like a reasonable point. I have talked to Lindgren and others, but I understand your desire to also ask questions directly. Let me think about it a little. As noted previously, I am way, way, way behind on things and I really couldn't devote any more time to thinking about all this until I finish the paper that is due next week. Thanks.

I hope he'll take me up on this. If he does, I'll publish the results here and also give him space for whatever response he desires. More later.

THE UN REPORT....I know this is easy for me to say since I'm already convinced that we need to get rid of Saddam Hussein by force if necessary, but yesterday's UN report was pretty damning. Hans Blix — hardly a war hawk — said, "Iraq appears not to have come to genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it." And his final sentence was this:

Mr. President, we now have an inspection apparatus that permits us to send multiple inspections teams every day all over Iraq by road or by air. Let me end by simply noting that that capability, which has been built up in a short time and which is now operating, is at the disposal of the Security Council.

He rather pointedly did not ask for more time for inspections.

And the report contains plenty of disturbing details, too. Today's LA Times contains a long, but very good summary of the findings, and I recommend it highly. I think that even war skeptics might find themselves wavering if they read through the entire thing.

And in response to my own post about France right below this one, let me just say straight up: I don't know. I don't know why this evidence is insufficiently convincing to them and I don't know what kind of political game they are playing. But I'll stick to my prediction from two months ago: the French will come around shortly and the UN will approve military action. Saddam Hussein will be deposed by May, at which point the hard work will begin.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall seems to have roughly the same reaction as me: Iraq clearly isn't complying with the UN declaration, but on the other hand, waiting another month or two won't hurt. So, while we can't wait forever, we ought to continue inspections for a while, and we should certainly share as much intelligence information as we possibly can in order to sway public opinion both at home and abroad.

PERFIDIOUS MARIANNE....Glenn Reynolds says:

DOES SADDAM HAVE NUKES? ARE THE FRENCH SPYING FOR SADDAM? Trent Telenko has info on both. I've gotten some email from military folks suggesting the latter based on the behavior of French ships and aircraft in the Persian Gulf region.

If it's true, paybacks should be severe.

Hmmm....let's click on the link to see what's up. Here's the source: a thread at FreeRepublic.com about an interview on Hannity & Colmes that was excerpted at Newsmax. The interviewee is Bill Tierney, a former inspector who was fired during the Clinton adminstration and is, um, bitter about it.

I hope everyone will excuse me if I don't take this too seriously? Especially coming just a few days after Steven Den Beste's breathless speculation that the French have been deliberately helping Saddam build nuclear weapons?

A thought experiment for these folks: if the French really are spying for Saddam, what do they think would be the reaction of the Bush administration? Surely they would know about it, and just as surely they would make it clear to Jacques Chirac that he ought to be voting our way in the Security Council if he wants us to keep his little secret. Right?

The French can be obstinate as hell, their foreign policy is sometimes based on little more than being a counterweight to the U.S., and they are tenaciously aggressive in pursuit of their own national self interest. Fine. But can we please keep speculation within the bounds of rationality?

POSTSCRIPT: Note to Armed Liberal: who the heck are they guys you're hanging out with these days?

PLAYING IN PEORIA....Hesiod provides an assessment of the Democratic presidential field from a....slightly different perspective than his usual one. Check it out.

BUSH, CHENEY, RUMSFELD, AND WAR....Atrios points to this profile of Norman Schwarzkopf in the Washington Post today:

[Schwarzkopf] contrasts Cheney's low profile as defense secretary during the Gulf War with Rumsfeld's frequent television appearances since Sept. 11, 2001. "He almost sometimes seems to be enjoying it." That, Schwarzkopf admonishes, is a sensation to be avoided when engaged in war.

....He expresses even more concern about the task the U.S. military might face after a victory. "What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind. It really should be part of the overall campaign plan."

That pretty much sums up my attitude towards the Bush administration. I'm willing to go to war as a last resort against a dangerous and brutal dictator, but the Bushies (a) seem to relish the thought a little too much, and (b) don't seem to care much about what happens after the war. These are both big mistakes.

JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE PARANOID DOESN'T MEAN THEY AREN'T WATCHING YOU....Just in case anyone thought I was exaggerating a few days ago in my post about ubiquitous surveillance, check out this paragraph from the Economist:

The use of video surveillance cameras is also growing. Britain has an estimated 1.5m cameras monitoring public places. According to one estimate, the average Briton is recorded by CCTV cameras 300 times a day. As cameras have become cheaper, smaller and more effective, they are proliferating and can now be found almost anywhere: airports, aeroplanes, buses, shopping malls, schools, public buildings, offices, factories and increasingly in people's homes too. Digital cameras allow the images collected to be stored and analysed much faster and more cheaply than in the past.

300 times a day. And that's just the beginning.

ALL ABOUT OIL?....Via Body and Soul, here's a truly puzzling story from the Observer:

Facing its most chronic shortage in oil stocks for 27 years, the US has this month turned to an unlikely source of help - Iraq. Weeks before a prospective invasion of Iraq, the oil-rich state has doubled its exports of oil to America, helping US refineries cope with a debilitating strike in Venezuela.

Yeesh. And speaking of oil, yesterday Eugene Volokh criticized Reason's Hit & Run for implying that one of the U.S. government's unspoken war aims was "stealing everything in Iraq that isn't nailed down." Eugene wonders what evidence they have for that accusation.

Well, I imagine that "everything" refers to Iraq's oil (what else do they have, after all?), and the Observer article goes on to say:

Richard Lugar, the hawkish chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, suggests reluctant Europeans risk losing out on oil contracts. "The case he had made is that the Russians and the French, if they want to have a share in the oil operations or concessions or whatever afterward, they need to be involved in the effort to depose Saddam as well," said Lugar's spokesman.

And we all remember that article in Newsday a couple of weeks ago reporting that hawks in the White House were advocating "appropriation of Iraqi oil income as "spoils of war," right? What's more, Bush has rather studiously avoided saying what his plans are for Iraq's oil after a war, despite the fact that it would certainly help world opinion to state unequivocally that we have no plans to monopolize their oil production.

Is that enough? In the end, none of this might happen, but it strikes me that there is certainly sufficient evidence to allow Reason to wonder out loud if it's something in Bush's playbook.

POSTSCRIPT: And one more thing: why do we need more Iraqi oil anyway? I thought that whenever oil production dropped off, our pals the Saudis were just supposed to open up their spigots a little. What happened this time?

DO WE HAVE THE GOODS ON IRAQ?....Martin Indyk and Kenneth Pollack have an op-ed in the New York Times today about the Iraqi "inspections trap": how does President Bush avoid having UN inspections drag out forever, with Saddam Hussein forever providing just enough cooperation to convince our allies to give him more time?

In general, they say, Bush needs to change his emphasis: stop talking about "smoking guns" and "cooperation," and instead spend more time demanding that Iraq account for "the thousands of tons of chemical precursors, the thousands of liters of biological warfare agents, the thousands of missing chemical munitions, the unaccounted-for Scuds missiles, and the weaponized VX poison that the United Nations has itself declared missing." Then there's this:

The administration should quickly share whatever intelligence it has with its allies in what Mr. Bush calls the "coalition of the willing," so that these countries will understand we have good reason for using force to do what Saddam Hussein will not do and the inspectors cannot do. And it should immediately publish, even in sanitized form, the large amount of information we have already gained from earlier defections of Iraqi scientists, which was always the most valuable intelligence we could get our hands on.

Bush's unwillingness to do this defies belief. If we don't have the goods on Saddam, we should stop pretending we do. And if we do have the goods, we should share what we know immediately.

If the administration truly has convincing evidence of Iraqi arms programs but has not shared it with either our allies or the U.S. public, then they have needlessly sacrificed many lives for crude political gain. I hope that turns out not to be the case.

DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY....Virginia Postrel — who apparently thinks that permalinks are a part of the future she'd just as soon do without — has a bunch of good posts up right now, including this one about U.S. diplomatic missions:

In small countries at least, U.S. embassy personnel routinely throw their weight around, getting all sorts of special privileges that have nothing to do with our national interest. Special parking places, special escorts through airport security, a thousand minor irritations that tell the locals our officials (no matter how personally nice and well-intended) aren't guests and equals but lords and masters come to call. The State Department needs to remind our diplomatic corps that they should not demand, or even request, privileges unavailable to the locals merely for their personal convenience. Only in matters of serious national, as opposed to personal, interest should the U.S. government ask for special treatment.

There are a couple of good followup posts too.

Also worthwhile is her post about Ritalin, Prozac, and behavioral pharmaceuticals in general. I don't quite understand why conservatives rail against this kind of stuff so much, but, to paraphrase an old saying, I'm willing to bet that a liberal is just a conservative with an ADHD kid.

IS THERE A SECRET TO THIS?....Does CNN offer lessons in how to be a talking head? I mean, where do they find this endless parade of people who are able to talk for minutes at a time without taking a breath?

I'm just asking.

FIGHTING COMPUTER FRAUD....ADVICE FROM AN EXPERT....Über-hacker Kevin Mitnick writes in the LA Times today about the real threat to computer security:

The greatest vulnerability for computer security doesn't come from technological flaws in hardware and software but from the weakest link in the security chain: people. And not just dishonest employees. Trusted insiders can be duped or deceived into giving away the keys to the kingdom. The technique is called "social engineering," and it's a modern version of what I call the art of deception, which con men have been using for centuries.

An attacker, foreign or domestic, can easily take advantage of the trust we have in fellow employees and the respect we have for people in authority. For example: A caller tells you that there has been an ongoing problem with your server and you're in danger of losing all your data. He needs to put you on another server; you'll have to change your password and stick with it until the problem is resolved. He gives you a new password to use and waits while you make the change and verify that it works. You hang up, a little annoyed at the interruption but maybe feeling good that the people in information technology are taking such good care of you.

But was that really a man from IT, or a hacker who now has access to your computer system?

....The hacker who uses social engineer tactics steals your trust in much the same way. Consider: Your phone rings and on the other end of the line is a man from the phone company. He says you have an overdue balance of $63.14, and if it isn't paid by 5 p.m., your phone will be disconnected and you'll be required to make a $300 deposit before service is restored.

You insist that you paid on time. The caller says no payment was received and that a disconnect notice was mailed to you. In the spirit of good service, the man offers to search the records to see if he can locate the payment. This drags on for some minutes while you hear him clicking keys and making occasional comments. He still can't find anything, so he asks you to get out your checkbook and give him the details of your bank, check number and amount of payment. Still nothing. He asks you to read off the numbers printed at the bottom of your checks.

You have just given him your checking account number....

COMMUNIST DUPES?....On Saturday Glenn Reynolds took issue with people who claim that it's "McCarthyism" to criticize anti-war protesters for attending rallies organized by A.N.S.W.E.R.:

It's not McCarthyism to call people who are communists, communists. Communists, as devoted followers of murderous totalitarianism, deserve to be called to account every bit as much as their Nazi colleagues. And in the 21st century, they can hardly pretend to be ignorant of their ideology's true nature.

He's right. But it is McCarthyism to tar people as "communist sympathizers" because they associate — rather vaguely — with communists. It was this tactic that Joe McCarthy became famous for, not for his notable lack of success in finding any real communists.

I imagine that A.N.S.W.E.R. is not my cup of tea. But tagging people as communist sympathizers because they attend a rally organized by a group that has some members