FUTURE WHOPPER OF THE WEEK from the Bush administration.

I KNOW EVERYONE IS WONDERING: what would Jackie Mason do about our foreign policy? (via Johnson)

I GOT A COMPLAINT from Kevin Vukson that my retelling of an anecdote from the New York Times reflected a condensation of a forty-minute interview. I offered to print any additional facts, but didn't receive any, so I'm not sure what the nature of the objection was; I couldn't find anything in the FlyerTalk.com forums one way or the other on the subject. But it's a useful reminder that if you see something zany in the paper, it may well reflect the spin of the reporter, rather than the reality of the situation.

Speaking of the Times, they issued a correction to the much-blogged story about Cobb County's approach to evolution.

An article yesterday about a debate in Cobb County, Ga., on the
teaching of evolution referred incompletely to action by the school board
on Thursday. The board tentatively approved a requirement for teachers
to give equal weight to evolution and biblical interpretations about the
origin of life. But the policy will not take effect until the board
votes again on Monday; final adoption did not occur on Thursday.

This, however, I am told, is still wrong. Here's the Atlanta newspaper's take:

The seven-member school board voted unanimously to spend 30 days
reviewing a proposed policy that states the district believes "discussion of
disputed views of academic subjects is a necessary element of providing
a balanced education." Johnston said he did not know how the policy
would change current classroom practices and he wasn't sure whether the
new language allows creationism to be discussed. The next 30 days will be
used to study precisely those matters, he said. The board is expected
to vote on the policy at its meeting Sept. 26.

Compare and contrast this parody of NY Times corrections.

ANOTHER Smarter Harper's Index, this one with some nice details about Trent Lott that Harper's left out for purposes of innuendo.

IT DIDN'T GET A LOT OF BLOGOSPHERE attention since it was pre-Bashman and pre-Volokh, but Konop v. Hawaiian Airlines was another wacky Ninth Circuit case, this one holding that an employer who read an employee's web page violated the wiretap laws. Friday, the Ninth Circuit corrected that opinion over Judge Reinhardt's dissent.

CAPTAIN SPAULDING criticizes the part of the announcement where I say "who Captain Spaulding dubbed The Blazing Blogger." Spaulding thinks I should've used "whom." That's just piffle and tosh. Steven Pinker agrees:

In reply, one might point out that the who/whom distinction is a relic of the English case system, abandoned by nouns centuries ago and found today only among pronouns in distinctions like he/him. Even among pronouns, the old distinction between subject ye and object you has vanished, leaving you to play both roles and ye as sounding completely archaic. Whom has outlived ye, but is clearly moribund, and it already sounds pretentious in most spoken contexts. No one demands of Bush that he say Whom do ye trust?. If the language can bear the loss of ye, using you for both subjects and objects, why insist on clinging to whom, when everyone uses who for both subjects and objects?

As a December 1983 article in Atlantic Monthly noted,

These are word-lovers who live to catch out the mighty in a misused whom; though their zeal is commendable, their authority is suspect.

There was a similar controversy at Indiana University where the forces of modernity won against the fuddy-duddies.

BERNARD LEWIS ON Osama.

ANOTHER GOOD COLUMN from Mark Steyn.

TODAY'S INNUMERACY is in the Washington Post.

Between 1977 and 1980, the U.S. highway death rate was 3.3 million fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles of travel.

Wow! Good thing I wasn't making my six-mile commute 25 years ago, or I'd be dying twice a week. The number is off by about six orders of magnitude.

IN DEFENSE OF Rush Limbaugh. Well, not a big defense. I don't listen to the man's show at all. But if you've ever listened to talk radio or sportstalk radio, you know that the most tiresome aspect of it is the time wasted at the beginning of each phone call when the yahoos, thrilled to be on the radio, genuflect at length about how much they enjoy listening to the show and what an honor it is to be talking to the host, etc., etc. Much like the joke about the prisoners who number their oft-repeated jokes to save time, Limbaugh came up with the idea of a signifying device "Ditto" to stand in for the fulsome praise. For that innovation alone, Limbaugh deserves his millions, regardless of how oversimplified his politics are.

I don't know much about the fax marketing lawsuit, but Mark Eckenwiler has a nifty piece about the use of the junk fax laws against e-mail spammers, which references a Ninth Circuit case, Destination Ventures, Ltd. v. FCC, 46 F.3d 54 (9th Cir. 1995), that rejected the First Amendment argument.

Anyway, Judge Limbaugh is a federal district court judge. That a state court circuit judge disagreed with him isn't of much relevance. The real question is whether the Eighth Circuit upholds Limbaugh's ruling, though even that wouldn't necessarily preclude suit outside of the Midwestern states where the Eighth Circuit holds sway.

YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED that the top-left blogroll no longer mentions Combustible Boy, who Captain Spaulding dubbed The Blazing Blogger. That is because we are pleased to announce that Combustible Boy will be blogging for The Sound And Fury. Do not think that the duo of "Max Power and Combustible Boy" has not gone unnoticed.

COBB COUNTY IN GEORGIA is the latest place where ignoramuses on the school board refuse to teach undiluted evolutionary theory.

THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE COURT'S decision. The Legal Times had a great article on the FISA court on April 14, 1997, but I can't find it on the web.

GOOD GLENN REYNOLDS PIECE on airport security. (via everyone)

HOWARD BASHMAN TAKES the time to explain one of the many reasons why Atkins v. Virginia is a bad decision.

NEW YORK TIMES: U.S. Announces New, Tougher Look Into Why the Towers Collapsed.

The new investigation — which will look at everything from the strength of the steel in the twin towers to how more than 1,000 people were trapped on their upper floors to how firefighters responded to the emergency — will not only try to pin down the step-by-step mechanisms by which the buildings fell and occupants lost their lives. It will also recommend changes in how other high-rises are built to make them safer in a terrorist attack, an out-of-control fire or a natural disaster.

This strikes me as potentially a bad idea. The WTC collapse was a unique situation. Adding billions of dollars of construction expense to reduce the likelihood of another skyscraper collapse in case terrorists intentionally aim a fuel-laden airplane at high speed at it is akin to the Simpsons episode where the citizenry demanded a government-funded Bear Patrol.

Homer: "Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm."
Lisa: "That's specious reasoning, Dad."
Homer: "Thank you, dear."
Lisa: "By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away."
Homer: "Oh, how does it work?"
Lisa: "It doesn't work."
Homer: "Uh-huh."
Lisa: "It's just a stupid rock."
Homer: "Uh-huh."
Lisa: "But I don't see any tigers around, do you?"
Homer: "Lisa, I want to buy your rock."

There doesn't appear to be problems with construction standards generally: American skyscrapers have withstood earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, and fires. That the Bush administration is even considering mandating billions of dollars of additional safety requirements to protect skyscrapers against planes instead of simply allowing pilots to protect themselves against hijackers by, say, carrying guns, is ludicrous.

UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT. The head of the Congressional Black Caucus complains about Jewish money coming in to unseat two pro-terrorist incumbents.

"To have non-African-Americans from around the country putting millions into a race to unseat one of our leaders for expressing her right of free speech is definitely a problem," Ms. Johnson said.

Fascinating. I imagine CBC opposition to Joe Lieberman was also inappropriate just because he "expressed [his] right of free speech" to express reservations against affirmative action? McKinney and Hillard lost because they don't represent the African-Americans who vote.

Ms. McKinney, a five-term incumbent, and her supporters expected negative reaction from Republicans and Jewish voters, but political strategists said they might have underestimated the negative effects her positions would have in the black community.

Ron Lester, a Democratic pollster who conducted a survey of voters after the Hilliard-Davis primary in Alabama, said that within that district, black support for Israel had increased markedly since Sept. 11.

Concerning Ms. McKinney, he said that she registered a job approval rating of 70 percent among her black constituents in a poll conducted in June, but that on Tuesday such approval was apparently not enough to override larger worries about her political allegiances.

"Black voters are as emotional about 9/11 as any other voters," Mr. Lester said. "They were happy with the way she served the district, but a certain segment of black voters were very wary of her remarks and the controversy surrounding her."

It did not help that prominent black figures, including Julian Bond, the chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., and former Mayor Maynard Jackson of Atlanta — who had supported Ms. McKinney in the past — distanced themselves from her this time.

"People in the black community still think of the comments she made after 9/11, and they are still a little apprehensive," said Alfreida Capers, 51, a DeKalb County resident who campaigned for Ms. McKinney.

AMY ALKON TAKES ON SUVs, with hilarious consequences. Good thing I drive an electric car.

NEXT TIME SOME BOZO claims that the US gave $43 million to the Taliban, you can point them to the State Department announcement of the aid package:

SECRETARY POWELL: Good morning, everyone. Afghanistan is in crisis. After more than 20 years of war, and now the third year of a devastating draught, the country is on the verge of a widespread famine. Nearly 4 million Afghans are at risk. If the international community does not take immediate action, countless deaths and terrible tragedy are certain to follow.

At the direction of President Bush, I am today announcing a package of $43 million in new humanitarian assistance for the people of Afghanistan, including 65,000 tons of wheat, $5 million in complementary food commodities, and $10 million in other livelihood and food security programs within Afghanistan.

[...]

We distribute our assistance in Afghanistan through international agencies of the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations. We provide our aid to the people of Afghanistan, not to Afghanistan's warring factions. Our aid bypasses the Taliban, who have done little to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, and indeed have done much to exacerbate it. We hope the Taliban will act on a number of fundamental issues that separate us: their support for terrorism; their violation of internationally recognized human rights standards, especially their treatment of women and girls; and their refusal to resolve Afghanistan's civil war through a negotiated settlement.

UN sanctions against the Taliban are smart sanctions and do not hurt the Afghan people, nor do these sanctions affect the flow of humanitarian assistance for Afghans.

A BLOG GETS a reporter fired. (via LA Examiner)

KESHER TALK points out that the Council for American-Islamic Relations' latest poll is bogus. (via Volokh)

Two other important points that Howard doesn't hit:

1) There's no definition of "bias or discrimination," so the fact that "57%" of the respondents felt it is rather meaningless. Keep in mind that CAIR brought a lawsuit against AOL alleging "bias and discrimination" because there were people in AOL chat rooms that blasphemed Mohammed.

2) Not to put too fine a point on it, but CAIR is fundamentally dishonest when it comes to quantitative reporting of polling results.

GREGG EASTERBROOK, the best football writer around, points out that Terrell Davis ran up his numbers because of what was basically cheating by the Denver offensive line:

Through the 1990s, Broncs OLs were coached by line boss Alex Gibbs, now a team "consultant", to try to injure the knees of the defensive front. Broncos faithful protest that opponent injuries weren't much more common than in anybody else's game, but this is because the defenders were not cooperating with their attackers the way people do in kung-fu movies, but were sidestepping. The whole point of the tactic was to distract defenders by forcing them to sidestep to protect their knees. Now that the league has cracked down on this tactic -- flagging the Broncs often last year and fining OLs Dan Neil and Matt Lepsis for deliberate injury attempts -- Denver running backs suddenly look human again.

He's not thrilled with the Houston Texans' uniforms, either:

Getting the jump on J. Crew, officially Houston says its colors are "Liberty White, Battle Red and Deep Steel Blue." To TMQ, the hues sure look like Copy-Machine White and On-Sale Mascara Red.

The only disadvantage to Easterbrook is that he writes only once a week--it's exhausting to go through one of his dense columns, which could be broken down into several entertaining columns a week, but worth it.

THREE CHEERS FOR US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, for publishing the most substantive fluff around: this issue features debunkings of crop circles and other hoaxes, including a link to this entertaining, but entirely fictional, tale of an 1890's robot. (The site's still worth it for the photos of the 1893 World's Fair, which did introduce the Ferris wheel, if not a robot.)

ONE OF THE MORE persistently stupid ideas I see is a suggestion that "total free agency", where all baseball players become free agents instead of just the ones with six years experience. Somehow this will lower salary.

Except it clearly won't. Every time an unproven rookie has gotten himself to free agency, be it through a draft loophole or Cuban defection, they've been subject to a huge bidding war that paid them far more than they would've gotten as a draft prospect. The idea that it's arbitration that raises salaries is also ludicrous: if a team really thought that arbitration increased salaries, they can simply refuse to offer arbitration under the current rules, and then resign the fellow as a free agent. Even if one accepts that arbitration overpays the mediocre, it's plain that it underpays the superstars for more than the former -- every star who has become a free agent has gotten a substantial raise. Vladmir Guerrero was paid $11 million between 1998 and 2001, and easily would've made $40-$70 million in the same time frame as a free agent. It takes a lot of $2 million utility infielders who should be paid $250,000 to make up for that.

Mediocre veterans aren't overpaid because of "shortages," they're overpaid because of mediocre general managers who panic. Newsweek asks

Why sign a mediocre reliever for a few million bucks when five other lefty zhlubs are available for a fraction of that?

But the secret of baseball is that there are five lefty zhlubs available now for a fraction of the price. Successful teams like the A's and Braves pluck them out of the minor leagues for minimum wage. Other teams make trades like Jeff-Bagwell-for-Larry-Andersen or Brian-Giles-for-Rincon, and still others fail to trust their minor league systems and make multi-million dollar signings of relievers with injury histories. (It is a testament to the virtuosity of Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling that the Arizona Diamondbacks succeed despite the fact that upper management has made incredibly foolish signings at every infield spot. But it wasn't the players' union that made the Diamondbacks decide to spend $24 million a year on Grace/Bell/Womack/Williams instead of $2 million on the better infield of Durazo/Spivey/Batista/Counsell.)

QUENTIN TARANTINO'S top ten movie list for "Sight and Sound" appears to be too rich by two. No Terry Gilliam selections, but an eclectic ten from Terry Jones. Among recent movies, Brazil got three votes, seven for Blade Runner and for Pulp Fiction, GoodFellas six.

CYNTHIA McKINNEY (D-Hamas) appears to have lost her primary. Two-for-two, terrorist-supporters have gotten knocked out of Congress. (via the always-excellent LGF -- donate money to Charles today)

MARK STEYN REPORTS that the Islamization of Europe has gotten to the point where leftists are blaming women for provoking the ludicrously high rape rate among Muslims.

Five days before 9/11, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65% of the country's rapes were committed by "non-Western" immigrants -- a category which, in Norway, is almost wholly Muslim. A professor at the University of Oslo explained that one reason for the disproportionate Muslim share of the rape market was that in their native lands "rape is scarcely punished" because it is generally believed that "it is women who are responsible for rape."

So Muslim immigrants to Norway should be made aware that things are a little different in Scandinavia? Not at all! Rather, the professor insisted, "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes" because their manner of dress would be regarded by Muslim men as inappropriate. "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it." Or to modify Queen Victoria's wedding-night advice to her daughter: Lie back and think of Yemen.

Steyn laments:

Once upon a time we knew what to do. A British district officer, coming upon a scene of suttee, was told by the locals that in Hindu culture it was the custom to cremate a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. He replied that in British culture it was the custom to hang chaps who did that sort of thing. There are many great things about India -- curry, pyjamas, sitars, software engineers -- but suttee was not one of them. [...]

As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I'm not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic.

THE SANTA CLARITA SIGNAL pulled Patti Shea's leering column about a locker-room visit to Dodger Stadium heavily discussed on Romenesko's site, but Google, as always, comes to the rescue.

CONFISCATED OBJECTS pile up at airport. If you look closely at the photo, you can see a couple of spoons.

ANOTHER PIECE ON THE proposed space elevator.

ENGINEERS WORKING ON a 100,000 kilometer space elevator suggest that construction will be easier going if they start from the top down. It would hypothetically pay for itself after lifting more than a million kilograms of material into space. Here's the company's web site.

FORBES DEFENDS short selling in the wake of a half-assed Washington Post article on the subject.

The Post, as is typical in stories about short-sellers, implies there is something nefarious in the practice: "Lots of short selling can be a self-fulfilling prophecy: It often drives the price of a stock down regardless of any fundamental change in the company's condition," it says.

Of course, the same is true about buyers (or long-buyers): If they start to buy, share prices will rise regardless of the company's fundamental condition.

I made a nice chunk of change shorting some Internet stocks last year. This year, I out-clevered myself. I shorted Intel at $27, and forced myself to cover at $32. Now it's $19. That's not as bad as the case of ACF, who I thought had fishy accounting. I shorted at $23, I wincingly covered at $37 -- a good thing as it rose to $47. The bad news I anticipated finally hit, and now it's at $13 after a dip below $10. As the joke goes:

"Ask me the secret of successful comedy."

"Uh, ok, what's the secret of suc--"

"Timing!"

Kayaking in NYC.

Israeli bus company to sue Arafat for lost business and damaged buses. The PA response shows the indifference towards the concept of proximate cause in some areas of the non-Western world:

Palestinian Communications Minister Imad Falouji said Egged had chosen the wrong defendant and blamed Israeli policy in the occupied territories for the attacks that caused the damages.

THE MIRACLE OF single-payer government-run healthcare.

A retired New Zealand man chopped off one of his own fingers with kitchen scissors because it was gangrenous and he could no longer stand the pain after months of waiting for surgery.

Unhappy photo.

MALAPROPISM OF THE DAY. The LA Times victimizes an innocent cop by quoting him accurately:

LAPD Det. Scott Sherman said it is common for motorists who hit children to panic and flee. "When you run over a child, there is a certain stigmatism," he said.

For some reason the story is titled "Inequities in Pedestrian Deaths," though if you read through it, the "inequities" are that elderly people are more likely to die if they are hit by a car, and that ethnic groups who walk more are more likely to die as pedestrians.

The story acknowledges in an aside that more than 80% of pedestrian fatalities in LA County occur outside a crosswalk, which makes it questionable whether there is a cost-effective public policy solution, but that viewpoint is barely acknowledged.

RANGERS OWNER Tom Hicks (who bid against himself to give the best player in baseball a $252 million/10 year deal) says that owners will seek a salary cap if players strike. He also says that under the luxury tax proposal, no owner is going to spend above the threshhold at which the luxury tax kicks in. Now, if there's a level at which no owner is going to spend above, isn't that a salary cap?