My two-DVD "Director's Cut" copy of Pearl Harbor arrived in today's mail. The two DVD's in the Director's Cut: Tora! Tora! Tora! and Love Story.

Reason #437 Why I Love My Wife:
Tonight, driving home from date night, encountering a few potentially homicidal drivers, I asked my wife
TC: Would you rather be happy or smart?

W:         Rich.

Without missing a beat. Beautiful!

"I came from a place where you had to
be crazy to go to a crazy doctor."

Ummm, will the 10 O'Clock appointment work for you?

Photo Courtesy Yahoo!

I wonder if the fix is in on a Skakel appeal. In what could be a Freudian slip, or perhaps a poorly worded sentence, a Skakel mouthpiece just said the following at a press conference:

"He did not do it, he wasn't there, and he never confessed. I believe in him, I will believe for the next six months, three years -- or however long it takes."

It occurs to me that the most fictional thing in Tom Clancy's novels are not the scenarios or futuristic technology, it is the efficiency of government. Bureaucracies in Jack Ryan's world are filled with bright eyed servants of the people, clever folk who synthesize practically unreachable conclusions out of a menagerie of intelligence sources. Given the way the real system works, perhaps his books would be more accurately shelved in fantasy.

[Found at The Hub] Anyone who has lived in, near or around Washington, D.C. knows the joke that is the Metropolitan Police. (Aside -- Hell, the whole D.C. government!) Their incompetence reached new levels, and will likely reach a new audience, though, given their failings in the Chandra Levy case. Writing about the piss-poor search conducted by the D.C. cops, Josh Marshall pens, "Well, today the two Levy family investigators -- former DC cops -- went to scene to see what they could find. And what did they find? A sock? Panties? Some hair that might have been Chandra's?" For the nigh unbelievable answer to what they found, go read the rest of his post.

Henpecked? [link requires registration]

The wife of the European Central Bank chief has left Amsterdam for her holiday home in France after outraging her Jewish neighbours by draping a Palestinian flag over her balcony and blaming Palestinian's woes on an "elite club of rich American Jews".

Senator Tom Harkin (D-Labor) seems to have a screw loose. In the midst of a possible nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, Harkin took time to urge the U.S. World Cup team to make sure that the balls used it its games were not made by child labor in Pakistan. Stranger still, he made this request during an appropriations subcommittee hearing.

Displaying pictures of young children producing soccer balls for typical third world wages, Harkin wants to take their jobs away in the face of a possible war with India.

Now how's that for a kick in the shins.

(Harkin missed the real story about the balls at the World Cup. This year they switched to an extra-lively ball that doesn't fly straight. The latest reports, however, say that the balls are being underinflated.)

[Later in day update - 3:20PM] Upon further reflection, this should not have surprised me at all. Most of our elected representatives seem more than comfortable squabbling over domestic policy during a time of foreign conflict. The next logical step was for them to start squabling over other nations' domestic policies during their time of foreign conflict.

The Brits have their heads up their asses about guns, as evidenced by this news story:

Gun-mad teachers jailed

TWO gun-mad teachers were behind bars last night after hiding a sickening arsenal of weapons at their homes.

The Brits seem to think that wanting to own an effective means of self-defense is some sort of mental illness. How very Soviet. These teachers never hurt anyone, and so far as was reported never trafficked in guns. They simply kept possession of their property after the ban, and for this they are portrayed as evil gun nuts. A police source further compounded their apparent insanity for not towing the party line on guns.

“We were shocked that two teachers, one at a primary school, should be involved given the horrors of Dunblane.

There may, however, be hope for at least some of the Brits:

“But what is more shocking is that this appears to be the tip of the iceberg. We are finding weapons turning up all over the place as a result of this investigation.
...
“We are sure that a great many firearms are still being held illegally by gun obsessives such as these and that is obviously a danger to the public.”

And you sir quite obviously have your head up your ass.

WW II era image courtesy Hodgdon.com.

Luckily the Brits seem to lack a social stigmatization against nudity as news.

I missed King Imbecile's speech tonight, though I did find the Homeland Security proposal over at the hub.

First thought: If the plan is as well thought out as the .pdf is laid out, we are all in big trouble. Check out the top of page three to see what I mean.

Funny how sometimes an article will scoot by without you noticing it, then when you find it you cannot believe it managed to stay off of your radar. Ann Coulter has such a piece from last week. Here are some highlights:

In congressional testimony last week, Mineta mercifully spared the senators a recap of his experience in a Japanese internment camp and allowed his assistant, longtime Bush crony and ATF apologist John Magaw, to explain the department's key security improvements. The reason Magaw decided to prohibit pilots from having guns is -- and I quote -- "they really need to be in control of that aircraft."

This is literally the stupidest thing I've heard in my entire life.

It is like saying women walking home late at night in dangerous neighborhoods shouldn't carry guns (or mace, for the gunphobic) because they "really need to be getting home." If the undersecretary for transportation security thinks we need to debate whether pilots "really need to be in control of the aircraft," someone other than him really needs to be in control of airline security.

The scenario under which a gun might become useful for a pilot is this: The hijackers have penetrated the locked cockpit and thwarted air marshals, passengers and crew. It's going to be difficult for the pilot to fly the plane after the cockpit has been stormed by Arabs. Whatever could go wrong at that point -- a wounded passenger, a hole in the side of the plane, terrorists wresting control of the gun -- is better than the alternative.
...
Amazingly, President Bush has actually found someone even dumber than Norman Mineta to secure the nation's airlines. The secretary of transportation is the only person on the face of the globe who thinks the airlines face no terrorist threat, and his deputy -- by his own admission -- hasn't the first idea which airline passengers can be "trusted."

Isntapundit writes:

Volokh dismissed your notion that there's a dichotomy between measures taken against implements and measures taken against terrorists. I think he's right in theory but wrong in practice. We could go after both, but we don't. "Taking measures against terrorists" would in practice mean profiling, some of which would be based in race, which we don't dare do, so we concentrate on the implements. If we shed our racial profiling compunctions, we'd probably allocate our resources best by forgetting about the implements and concentrating on the enemy.

I think you could have hit him a little harder on this.

I think I made my point, though not quite as well as you did.

As for not "hitting him a little harder on this," all I can say is that I learned long ago to allow good teachers to go off on tangents. When a teacher the quality of Professor Volokh picks one point and hammers you on it, there is usually a valuable lesson to be learned where they take the discussion.

In this case I learned that my plan would likely be unworkable in today's society. How and why we got to a point where so few people provide for their own self-defense on a day to day basis is a debate for another day. And heck, does it surprise anyone that a law school professor wanted to drive the direction of a conversation?
[Isntapundit also has a piece on racial profiling.]

I should know better than to drink and blog. Attempting a second round with the as-yet-unindicted leader of the Volokh Conspiracy left me bruised, battered, and lacking the sense to throw in the towel.

Professor Volokh reasonably infers that I consider the human right to self-defense to be a very important right. Further, I believe not only in people’s right to take care of themselves, I believe in people's ability to provide for their own self-defense. I do not, however, believe in my own ability to organize a cohesive essay out of my varied thoughts on this topic, so instead I present the following:

Disorganized Ramblings

• As it is now most anyone can avoid being chosen for boarding gate searches by timing their position in the boarding line so that someone not too close in front of them gets chosen for a search before they get to the head of the line, and will still be tying up the security personnel while they board the plane. This method works at all six of the U.S. airports I have traveled through since 9/11.
• Why do so many people cling to the use of the term box-cutters when referencing the weapon of choice for the terrorists? Some (one?) victim reported that a terrorist used a box-cutter to stab another victim, and now it is assumed by many that box-cutters were the sole weapon used by the terrorists. Box-cutters are more a slashing weapon than a stabbing weapon. If you argue that the caller was imprecise in his choice of injury descriptions, why place so much faith in his description of the weapon.


• Pre 9/11 I traveled quite a bit by air, 20-25 return trips per year. On just about every one of my (pre 9/11) trips I carried a leatherman tool, a swiss army knife and/or a folding knife in my computer bag. Air security was such a joke that George Carlin (Video – Text) did a bit in his shows during 2000 about how you couldn’t bring a gun on board but you could bring a “knife, an ice pick, a hatchet, a straight razor, a pair of scissors, a chain saw, six knitting needles and a broken whiskey bottle, and the only thing they would say to you is, ‘That bag has to fit all the way under the seat in front of you.’” The same people that accepted that policy as security are all still charged with the security of air travel.
• Even though government has largely taken away the human right of self-defense, the state and its employees owe no general duty to provide for the safety of the disarmed. They take your rights, but they take no responsibility.
• Is transporting people from point A to point B really “interstate commerce.” Are people mere chattel, the transport of whom is interstate commerce? Should we be required to surrender basic human rights in order to exercise our right to travel freely? (Yes, I know, “the switch in time that saved nine” makes all of this correct under current SCOTUS doctrine, but is it right that it be this way?

  Second, how can the fourth amendment limit the right of government agents to enter private property, yet our government takes for itself the power to force private individuals and businesses to allow others on private property. Agents of each airline, or at least the pilot in command of each flight, should have the right to deny boarding to any person for any reason. Even reasons against “public policy.” If the market does not like it then people will surely vote with their feet. True freedom includes the freedom to be selective, obstinate, crass, bigoted and foolish.

  Third, disallowing airlines to pursue any and all solutions to security that they might come up with removes capitalism power of innovation and efficiently satisfying needs. The prior government plan, which all airlines were forced to accept, failed miserably. If this one fails too, it will simply be replaced by another monoculture approach. People in government service are not productive, nor creative, yet they grab the power to make decisions that require both to be effective.

• Is shooting down an airliner the only forceful response to a hijacking that our government will sanction? Is this some sort of “burn the village to save the village policy”? Would it be so awful if a few hijackers and passengers got perforated in order to avoid dumping an entire airliner into a cornfield?
• On the use and requirement of frangible ammunition in passenger's firearms: I first came across the idea in L. Neil Smith's excellent 1977 novel The Probability Broach. Before that he predicted in the early 1970’s, after the introduction of the disarmament procedures now so familiar to air travelers, that disarming passengers would lead to an increase in the risk of hijacking.
  

  Mr. Smith did not suggest the effectiveness of crashing a hijacked airliner into a building, though Stephen King did so, writing as Richard Bachman, years before Tom Clancy penned what our erstwhile protectors called an “unimaginable” scenario, even though they had intelligence on the thwarted 1995 Operation Bojinka.
  

• Decisions about airport security are being made and directed by people who travel in armored cars, private jets and helicopters while ringed by cadres of armed and armored men on the public payroll. They tell us that this time they are serious, they really mean it, they are going to provide security, though they manage to ignore, stifle, play down, limit and shackle the one thing that helped control the damage of 9/11 – the private individual acting to do good. The Heroes of Flight 93 did not need an air marshal to rally their forces, though they certain could have been helped by having an effective means of defense available.

  “What’s that,” they say, “you want to provide for your own security? No, I’m sorry, we can’t allow that. Please stow your tray table and return your seat to the upright and locked position, and ignore the F-16 off the port bow.”

• Security officials now decide which passengers will face extra scrutiny through what they claim is a completely random process, with not even the simplest of profiling (for example, singling out young males of reasonable physical fitness) being performed. Octogenarians face the same chance of facing a second and third screening as does a 17-45 year old Muslim man as does a seven year old girl. While our constitution should not serve as a suicide pact, does it demand that our employees act as complete idiots to avoid ruffling any and all fliers’ feathers?

(And really Professor, "they say that they are Arab immigrants working at a gas station in Burlington," who is guilty of profiling here?)

Gay? Have a psychiatric history? Feeling lonely? In central New York?

Well, be alone no more because the The Finger Lakes Independence Center (FLIC), supported in part by the United Way of Tompkins County, has a dating service for you. Feel free to comment about this on FLIC's bulletin board.

Old but good, Larry Miller flips Islam on its smelly, backwards head. [Link courtesy Mike Trossman.]

"I fear the things, since they are easily concealed and lethal," dribbles Richard Cohen, from somewhere deep inside his Panic Room.

"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity," wrote Sigmund Freud in his "General Introduction to Psychoanalysis."

Advantage: Siggy.

Matt Guckenheimer sent a letter to editor of the Ithaca Journal clarifying his statements last week. For posterity I am reproducing the entire letter below.

Recently your paper quoted me as saying that my unit was ordered to kill women and children.

I would like to clarify this quote and provide more context.

Prior to the operation, we were made aware of the fact that the hostile forces of the Whaleback might include women and children. In that event, if those women and children showed hostile intent, we were ordered to kill them as hostile forces, just like any other hostile force we encountered. However, this does not mean that we were ordered to slaughter noncombatants such as babies.

We were further informed that some of these children are trained starting at a very young age to be soldiers. Knowing this, we could not afford to just dismiss them as noncombatants.

However, I do not want anyone to get the idea that we were ever sent out to kill anyone and anything that moves. We are better than that, both as a military unit and as a society.

Matt Guckenheimer

Cayuga Heights, May 31

:: how jedi are you? ::

UPDATE: Mostly unbelievable Pvt. Matt Guckenheimer's interview [Original post on this topic] got picked up by Fox News. [Last of 4 items.] Unlike the highly doubtable Kandea Mosley, Fox actually bothered to contact the 10th Mountain Division to follow up on the story.

[Response to Eugene Volokh's response.]

I'm not convinced that what I presented is a false dichotomy. There is, even post 9/11, a limited amount of political capital to be burned on the issue of airline security. So far it appears to be primarily used pursuing chasing implements, with only a small remainder leftover for profiling and cockpit security. I am convinced Bush's historically anti-gun SecTrans, former head of the BATF director of air security, and prototypically clueless Tom Ridge simply do not want the answer to this problem to include arming anyone that they do not directly control. Quite frankly I believe that higher-ups in Washington do not want citizens relying on themselves, instead of government, for effective self-defense.

An incident of getting a weapon onto a plane and attempting a hijacking is covered in the book Hijacked: The True Story of the Heroes of Flight 705. The aircraft was a Fed-Ex DC-10. The failed hijacker in that case, an off duty pilot, managed to get "hammers, a spear gun, and a knife on the plane," though it should be noted that commercial cargo flights do not maintain the same security procedures as do commercial passenger flights.

As far as passengers getting guns on airplanes (not just by FAA inspectors), since September 11th, see Douglas Miller, Barry L. Burnstein, and an unnamed Southwest Airlines Male Passenger. Pre 9/11 incidents include at least one Unnamed AA passenger, though I do not think the fact that pre-9/11 security was a joke is contested. These are of course only the incidents that we know about.

I like the thought of removing blanket security screenings and replacing them with a system of simply looking for suspicious behavior, suspicious individuals, and yes, males of Arab/Muslim appearance. Young men with dark complexions of do deserve more scrutiny than octogenarian grandmothers. Harassing everyone evenly so that you can harass individuals without complaint wastes security resources, and it provides political cover for do-nothing bureaucrats to give the appearance of doing something.

Pilots should have the option to carry effective weapons. (Heck, FAA regulations on 9/11/2001 did allow this, but none of the airlines bothered to get a training program certified.) Private citizens should have the same option, perhaps after passing a rigorous screening and training program, or maybe just upon showing their CCW (or VT driver’s license, since VT doesn't require a permit).

"True, there's always the chance that someone can smuggle a gun on board" writes Blogger Extraordinaire Eugene Volokh in defending the creation of disarmed victim zones in the sky. I think he underestimates the chances of successfully getting a gun through airport security, or to have it brought in around security. Disarming victims serves only to disarm victims. It does not make anyone safer, except perhaps the terrorists.

National Lampoon's Terror Map is pretty damn funny.

Eric Raymond gets it, disarming people does not make them safer, even on airplanes. Planes are still at risk of hijacking, and most all the crap done so far has not improved real security one lick. Bruce Schneier told us this a few months ago in Crypto-gram when he wrote:

This five-step process works for any security measure, past, present, or future:

1) What problem does it solve?
2) How well does it solve the problem?
3) What new problems does it add?
4) What are the economic and social costs?
5) Given the above, is it worth the costs?

When you start using it, you'd be surprised how ineffectual most security is these days. For example, only two of the airline security measures put in place since September 11 have any real value: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers to fight back. Everything else falls somewhere between marginally improving security and a placebo.

and David Brin suggested as much, and in even more general application, last year when he wrote:

Following America's worst single day of violent death in this century, pundits have engaged in a relentless tag-team shouting match. Security experts call for new government powers and tighter restrictions, while civil libertarians shout back that we should courageously accept risk in order to prevent "Big Brother" from peering into our lives. While they jostle for air time, both groups are foisting some rather unsavory shared assumptions.

- that there is a basic, zero-sum tradeoff between safety and freedom... we can only augment one by diminishing the other,

- that the tragedies happened because of a "security breakdown" requiring stringent fixes by a protective government,

- that only professionals have a role to play in coping with 21st century dangers.

Amid all the noise and posturing, nobody proposes enhancing the one thing that actually worked well on that awful day.

What appears to have worked, was the initiative and resourcefulness of common men and women.

This may be hard to credit, or even to perceive. Throughout the 20th Century, the trend in our culture was monotonic, toward ever-increasing reliance on protection and coddling by institutions, formally deliberated procedures and official hired guns... none of which availed us at all on September Eleventh. Rather, events that day seem to suggest a reversal, toward the older notion of a confident, self-reliant citizenry.

Of course it's too early to forecast a major counter-trend. But indications are provocative. Rather than diminishing the role of the individual, advances in technology seem to be rapidly empowering average citizens, even as professional cynics forecast freedom's demise.

Steven Spielberg finally earned his bachelor's degree this weekend.

In a statement, (Spielberg) said he wanted to complete his bachelor-degree requirements "as a 'thank you' to my parents...and as a personal note for my own family--and young people everywhere--about the importance of achieving their college education goals."

That message, "Earning a Bachelor's degree is not important. Hell, look at me. I'm talented and successful, and not having a stupid piece of paper never held me back."

Now, before you go thinking that The Comedian (Damn third person is just too easy to use given that I title this blog with "The Comedian") is a bitter non-college graduate, I should point out that I have a Bachelor's degree from one of those Ivy League institutions, and a JD from a lesser school.

I just don't get people's belief that they need a piece of paper, or what it represents, to feel complete. Spielberg would have better spent his time teaching others. He is a gifted and unique individual who should not need external validation of his success.

Some of the most vital work ever done on Capitol Hill will begin behind closed doors this week as efforts to prevent another Sept. 11 type attack compete with election-year politics.

Time for another quiz. Is the preceding passage the opening of:

1) A lead editorial in the NY Times; or,
2) The first blog I scanned this morning; or,
3) The latest George Will Column; or,
4) A Reuter's News Story?

Click here for the answer.

For bonus points tell me why I thought this was blog-worthy.

Caution: the next post contains a spoiler: The spoiler: attack of the clones blows.

I saw attack of the clones today. [Title purposely not capitalized. This movie does not deserve any recognition.] Dreadful. Simply Dreadful. Would have been better off seeing UnderCover Brother.

Save the price of admission and just watch this wonderful Triumph the Insult Dog piece about fans waiting for the opening of the film. Triumph's ten minutes are far more rewarding than Lucas's latest debacle. Meesa wish Me no paya for da filme.

UPDATE: Upon further reflection, I realize that this is a flatly acted movie portraying characters with whom the audience shares no interest. Joyless characters run through beautiful backdrops and I couldn't bring myself to care whether they died or not, knowing full well which characters had to survive until at least episode three. I must admit I enjoyed watching Natalie Portman's in her white bodysuit during the final act, though I think Lucas played a bit with her body, digitally. (No pun intended.) It is of note that I enjoyed watching Natilie, though I couldn't give a crap about Padme...