I WAS ALWAYS AMUSED by the Taliban Singles page that was being e-mailed around last year. The real thing, on the other hand, is kind of disturbing.

SKULL FOUND in Rock Creek Park. Immediate speculation that it could be Chandra Levy.

HOW screenplays go bad. (The story waits until the third paragraph to go to the lede.) John Gregory Dunne has also written on the subject; his "life of Jessica Savitch" screenplay got pabulum-ized into "Up Close and Personal."

FOR EUGENE VOLOKH AND ADAM BONIN: Try this with a long gun.

GREAT FALLS (AP) - A 22-year-old Great Falls man shot off his right testicle Friday while stuffing a .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun in his waistband, police said.

Officer Keith Perkins said the man, whom he declined to identify, was upset because a buddy had been cut in a bar fight and several friends, including the 22-year-old, were in a parking lot looking for the culprits in the predawn hours.

"When the group decided not to do what they were going to do, he decided he was going to take the gun back home," Perkins said.

The man, who had been drinking, shot off his testicle, injured his penis and put a hole in his right thigh, the officer said. A friend took him to the hospital.

The officer said police initially thought of ticketing the man for disorderly conduct but likely won't, under the circumstances.

(via Obscure Store)

TODAY'S QUIXOTICISM: a web site is leading an anti-contraction demonstration by encouraging baseball fans to vote for the Expos and Twins players in the All-Star game.

JONATHAN LAST makes a compelling case that we're rooting for the wrong side in the Star Wars movies. (via Dr. Manhattan)

The destruction of Alderaan is often cited as ipso facto proof of the Empire's "evilness" because it seems like mass murder--planeticide, even. As Tarkin prepares to fire the Death Star, Princess Leia implores him to spare the planet, saying, "Alderaan is peaceful. We have no weapons." Her plea is important, if true.

But the audience has no reason to believe that Leia is telling the truth. In Episode IV, every bit of information she gives the Empire is willfully untrue. In the opening, she tells Darth Vader that she is on a diplomatic mission of mercy, when in fact she is on a spy mission, trying to deliver schematics of the Death Star to the Rebel Alliance. When asked where the Alliance is headquartered, she lies again.

Leia's lies are perfectly defensible--she thinks she's serving the greater good--but they make her wholly unreliable on the question of whether or not Alderaan really is peaceful and defenseless. If anything, since Leia is a high-ranking member of the rebellion and the princess of Alderaan, it would be reasonable to suspect that Alderaan is a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents like Leia.

Whatever the case, the important thing to recognize is that the Empire is not committing random acts of terror. It is engaged in a fight for the survival of its regime against a violent group of rebels who are committed to its destruction.

However, I think he's too charitable towards Darth Vader's actions in Episode V: it's at least as plausible that Vader is hoping to use Luke to supplant the Emperor as it is that he's hoping to end the rebellion.

WHAT THE NETWORKS DON'T WANT YOU TO SEE. Not just Mulholland Falls (originally an ABC pilot), but also Heat Vision and Jack. (via Frank)

THERE ARE GOING TO BE A LOT OF upset people over the following David Cay Johnston report in the New York Times:

The classified memorandum written by an F.B.I. agent in Phoenix last summer urging bureau headquarters to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools also cited Osama bin Laden by name and suggested that his followers could use the schools to train for terror operations, government officials said for the first time today.

The memorandum said terrorist groups like Mr. bin Laden's might be sending students to the schools as the first step in what could be a concerted effort to place Islamic militants in the civil aviation industry around the world as pilots, security guards or aircraft-maintenance workers.

There's no question there were security holes: the INS demonstrated its incompetency beyond a reasonable doubt. But before one uses this memo to condemn the FBI for failing to heed its own agent's warnings, let's ask:

1. On what level of actual intelligence and what level of actual speculation did the memo come from, and from how high-ranking an agent?

2. How many memos are produced with similar or lower levels of speculation by similarly-ranked or higher-ranked agents?

3. What level of resources would it take to respond to each of those memos with the effectiveness to shut down a speculated operation in a couple of months?

It's very easy to have 20/20 hindsight and complain that a particular memo wasn't followed. When I litigated automobile products liability lawsuits, there was almost always one feature that, in hindsight, could have prevented grievous injury, and plaintiffs wanted to assess blame that the car didn't have that particular safety feature (even though the feature might have caused harm in other ways). But one has to evaluate these matters ex ante: we can't turn back the clock, so the question becomes, going forward, what's feasible? Or, if you're allocating blame, in the summer of 2001, what was the feasible prevention efforts that could have been anticipated? What probability does one assign to the actual September 11 scenario (close to unthinkable outside of Tom Clancy novels), and how many other scenarios had equal or greater probability x magnitude of potential damage figures? And what level of resources would it have taken to address all these scenarios, and would Congress have allocated those billions of dollars to do so?

One of my favorite trial exhibits was a response to a plaintiff's complaint that, in addition to the warning in the owners' manual, the manufacturer should have put a warning light or buzzer or sticker on the dashboard, and that might have prevented the horrible accident that was at issue in the lawsuit. We mocked up a dashboard that had a cacophony of warning lights and buzzers and stickers for every warning in the owner's manual. If you try to protect against every little risk, you end up protecting against none of them at all. Not exactly analogous, but the point remains: you can't selectively pick the memo that in hindsight was most prescient and complain that everyone else wasn't equally prescient.

The cheapest way to stop terrorist attacks is to (1) pre-emptively take out the terrorist structure that produces the attacks; and (2) make sure the INS (or replacement agency) is doing its job.

A "HOT OR NOT?"-style site that works in two dimensions. (via Rabbit)

IF YOU'RE ONE OF MY handful of readers from MIT and Harvard, here's the anti-divestment from Israel petition, whose signatories outnumber the Chomsky divestment petition by more than 7 to 1.