NICE DEBUNKING of the anti-Semitic myth that Israel deliberately attacked the U.S.S. Liberty. The author is a bankruptcy judge in Florida.

HA'ARETZ INTERVIEW with Michael Oren, author of "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East."

INNUMERACY OF THE WEEK. The New York Times reports on a Justice Policy Institute study complaining that there are more black men who are incarcerated than enrolled in colleges or university. It has the right disclaimer:

Some criminal justice experts said it was misleading to compare the two categories because the number in jail and prison includes all adult black men 17 years or older, while the number in institutions of higher learning is confined to a narrower student-age population in their late teens and early twenties.

But then the Times goes ahead and gives a platform for precisely this kind of misleading statement:

But Todd Clear, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, said the study's findings were still significant and "tell us there has been a public policy far overemphasizing investment in criminal justice instead of in education for this population."

"It tells you that the life chances of a black male going to prison is greater today than the chances of a black male going to college, and it wasn't always this way," Professor Clear said.

Now, perhaps the Times misrepresented Professor Clear's words. But, if not, the man has no business commenting on quantitative facts: "the life chances of a black male going to college" is not equivalent to the life chances of a black male being in college. There are millions of black males who have gone to college and who are no longer there, and it's an insult to black males to say that a random selection of black males is more likely to be convicts than to be college educated. One more interesting point from the article:

Justice Department figures show that from 1990 to 2000, 50 percent of the growth in inmate populations at state prisons was for violent crimes

In other words, don't blame increased drug enforcement. It's not racism that's putting black men in prison, it's dysfunction within the community.

NICE PIECE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE on Barry Bonds. Among the revealing anecdotes is how the same San Francisco press that lambastes Bonds coddles his inferior (and white) teammate, Jeff Kent.

Last year, while Bonds was on the verge of breaking the home-run record, [Kent] told Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated: ''I was raised to be a team guy, and I am, but Barry's Barry. It took me two years to learn to live with it, but I learned.'' Although Kent was publicly taking a teammate to task during a pennant race, which isn't quite the act of a ''team guy,'' there was little criticism of this in the sports media.

One day when I was in the locker room, not long after Kent and Bonds came to blows in the dugout in which Bonds appeared to put his forearm in Kent's throat, Kent, about to take off his towel, asked a pack of reporters if there were any ''queers'' or ''women'' among them -- a remark that, especially in San Francisco, would have created a certain stir. Although he was surrounded by at least a dozen reporters who half have seized upon any number of Bonds' remarks, none, as far I know, reported this. ''Is there a double standard because Kent talks to us?'' one sports radio announcer told me. ''Definitely.''

The story notes that McGwire was similarly protected; it doesn't say, but I know from my Chicago sports-connected friends that Sammy Sosa gets lots of breaks from the media, too. For some reason, Barry Bonds, who, after having the greatest season in the history of the game, is doing it again at the age of 38 after signing the last contract he'll ever sign, and single-handedly keeping his mediocre team in the pennant race, still doesn't get the respect he deserves.

Ted Williams was hated when he played, too, and only in the last twenty years did he reach mythic status. Will Bonds undergo the same transformation of perception? Will our grandkids wonder how the heck did Bonds miss out on three or four more MVP awards? Bonds is the greatest left fielder of all time, he's playing now, and we're missing out on history because a handful of sportswriters resent that he purchased a leather recliner for his locker.

THE NCSE HAS some interesting observations about the Freudian slips underlying the creationist Discovery Institute's logos and slogans.

WE'RE REACHING A NICE CRITICAL mass of readers now where even on days I haven't had time to surf the web, I get good pieces sent my way. Here's a Washington Post piece on "yogic flying" for peace. (If you haven't seen yogic flying, it's sitting in a lotus position, hopping with your thigh muscles, and claiming that you're levitating.) They have a scam where they're selling unsecured zero-coupon bonds at a lower interest rate than they'd ever be able to get from a bank.

THERE'S BEEN A BIG controversy because Jackie Mason cancelled an opening act, and the guy is claiming that it was because he was Palestinian. I hope Captain Spaulding chips in to the debate with his experience as a Jewish comic who got bumped from opening for Jackie Mason.

WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED? Mobile phones don't cause tumors:

The research on 1,600 mice, by the Adelaide-based Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science, follows another Australian study on mice five years ago that concluded cellular phones could foster tumor growth.

The 1997 study fueled consumer concern about the safety of mobile phones but the Adelaide scientists said they could not replicate the findings in their mice, half of which were genetically engineered to be extremely susceptible to tumors.

"That then gives you confidence that if you don't find an effect in these animals you are probably not going to find an effect in normal animals, humans being a normal animal," said Tim Kuchel, a spokesman for the Adelaide research team.

JOE LIEBERMAN IN New Hampshire.

WALTER OLSON'S ON VACATION, but when he gets back, he'd want to comment on this proposed lawsuit against baseball. Utterly bogus. And when California rejects a plaintiffs' theory, you know it's ludicrous.

HOW COME I HAVE to learn from the New York Times that the largest vending machine in America is right here in Adams Morgan?

"JOURNEYS WITH GEORGE" finally has a website and apparently an HBO deal.

MORE TALK SHOWS THAN EVER, but Charles Nelson Reilly can't get a gig.

THE NEW YORK TIMES, having already covered subway pigeons, turns its discerning eye to the Fulton Street Subway cat.

WHO'DA THUNK THE NY TIMES would give editorial page space to Bjorn Lomberg?

FOR LAN3 AND THE OTHER three readers who care: KCRW's Inside the Cult of Kibu interview. That's what bloggers need: media coaches! The author suggests that the Internet companies that survived were the "ones who took it slow," which is exactly backwards.

"THE MLBPA's LUXURY tax proposal is bogus," says Ted Frank in today's Baseball Prospectus.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN FOR DUMMIES, Parts one and two.

AND HE HAS A FAQ page:

Do you drive to all these places by yourself?

For the most part, yes, because I don't know others than can afford the time or expensve of taking road trips for weeks at a time. Additionally, nobody would want to follow me around from Starbucks to Starbucks, so if I had company, I would have to split my Starbucks time visiting other things, and for the moment my focus is to visit all the stores.

NOW HERE'S A FELLOW WHO HAS visited 3182 Starbucks stores. I think everyone should send him an e-mail and tell him he's cheating by not including the kiosks in Barnes and Noble, and that the American people won't recognize his attempt to visit every Starbucks until he visits every Starbucks, rather than an artificially circumscribed subset. (via Beam)

ISO 9000 DUH AWARD. Grading Disparities Verified in D.C. (washingtonpost.com):

The school has changed its procedures because of the forgeries, Tarason said. Previously, students who said a grade on their transcript was inaccurate were given a grade-change form to be signed by their teacher and returned to administrators by the student. Now, Tarason said, the student will not be given the form. The teacher will be responsible for filling it out and delivering it to administrators.

ONE OF THE nicest mainstream pieces I've seen on the baseball labor negotiations, perhaps because it wasn't written by a sportswriter, in the New York Times:

Making a demand that would be anathema to most labor unions, the Major League Baseball Players Association wants to let salaries rise and fall as market forces dictate.

And in a demand that flies in the face of notions of free enterprise, the club owners are pushing a proposal that smacks of socialism. They want to soak the richest owners and redistribute income to poorer teams to level off team payrolls.

"In baseball, collective bargaining has been turned on its head," said Charles P. O'Connor, the owners' chief negotiator in the late 1980's.

Typically in labor negotiations, management wants a free market in salaries so that it can pay more to its best employees and less to its least productive ones, while unions oppose such merit pay to avoid subjectivity and favoritism.

And historically labor, not management, is intent on squeezing the rich and redistributing income.

A FRIEND WRITES ME:

My new catchphrase: "What you need is an inflatable church!"

THE REAL-LIFE Doonesbury is running for Congress as a Green, and getting lots of publicity (like this blog entry!) from people fascinated by the trivia. His politics are cartoonish, by coincidence.

HOW COME I NEVER get e-mails like this from blogging?

UPDATE: Well, I got a marriage proposal from David Nieporent. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but he's not my type.

NIKE FIGHTS FOR its free speech rights.

YOU MAY HAVE already read about this in Harper's, but here's This American Life's tale of Jim McManus's trip to the World Series of Poker.

MORE ON THE "$100 trillion lawsuit" against Saudi Arabia. A number of victims are already unhappy with their attorney team who, among other offenses, have hired Jean-Charles Brisard, an idiotarian who claims that the 9-11 strikes were the result of administration pressure to build an Afghanistan pipeline.

ERROR COMPOUNDING ERROR. A California appeals court affirmed a ludicrous $290 million punitive damages award on the grounds that it was "1.2 percent of defendant's net worth and nine days of its profits at the time of trial." (It is extraordinarily unlikely for both statements to be true.) The jury had acknowledged that the plaintiffs were partially at fault for their own injuries, and voted 9-3 to award punitives 58 times the compensatory damages.

It makes sense to assess punitive damages on individuals based on net worth. It makes no sense to do that to corporations: then you're punishing them for being big, rather than for anything that they've actually done wrong.

Take the infamous McDonald's coffee case, where punitive damages were assessed based on McDonald's sales. McDonald's is a huge corporation, not because they sell their coffee for billions of dollars, but because they sell billions of dollars worth of products. McDonald's can be a thousand times safer than Joe's Corner Coffee, which sells a millionth as much coffee, and still face a thousand times more cases. If each of those cases imposes a million times more damages based on McDonald's size, then McDonald's is paying a higher percentage of its wealth than Joe's Corner Coffee, even though McDonald's is *safer* than the corner coffee shop: the punitive damages are double-counted both by the individual case considering McDonald's wealth, and the fact that McDonald's faces more cases simply because of its size.

If the courts hit McDonald's just as forcefully as Joe's Corner Coffee in the individual case (by limiting punitives to some multiple of compensatory damages), McDonald's feels the pain in aggregate just as much as Joe's Corner Coffee when they are as dangerous as Joe's Corner Coffee.

That gets beyond whether punitive damages are at all appropriate for a product that is safer than the average car on the road, but that's a different question.

THIS FRONT-PAGE ARTICLE about the GOP New Hampshire Senate primary somehow fails to mention the earlier controversy over Sununu's pro-Palestinian views.

THE SECRET TO Starbucks' success? Willingness to self-cannibalize. Still at issue for the long-term:

What about those notoriously fickle consumer tastes? Does Starbucks become a classic, like Coca-Cola, or a cult drink, like Moxie?

IF YOU'RE PLAYING no-limit Texas Hold 'Em, and the person to your right makes a small raise, and you make a pot-raise with Ace-Queen of different suits, and the dealer pot-raises you, you can put him all in if you're feeling ambitious, but you definitely should not just call. The better option is to fold, unless the raiser's stack is very small. An ace didn't fall, and the raiser's pair of kings held up.

Because of that mistake, I ended up going out of a tournament a few hands later: three players saw the flop, I had KJ versus when K9 tried to raise me out of a K72 flop, but one of the other three nines hit, and I didn't get any other help. I'm not ready for the World Series just yet.

GEEK ALERT. Okay, we live in miraculous times where I can have a 4-ounce cellphone that looks a heck of a lot like a Star Trek communicator. So, someone out there tell me: where can I download a ring-tone that sounds like the distinctive communicator cricket-chirp? First one to tell me gets a mention in this entry. (OK, there's one for Ericsson, but I have a Motorola.)

CAPTAIN LOUIS RENAULT AWARD. You mean those pop-up ads offering "free vacations" are rip-offs? Quelle surprise!

UPDATE: An Oakland reader writes "We Casablanca purists hold that the CLR Award goes only to those people who express shock at malfeasance that they themselves are complicit in; are you alleging that the Times is complicit in pop-up vacation scams?" I have been out-pedanted.

AN EAST COAST anti-SUV campaign.