HAVE A GOOD weekend, everyone. Keep an eye out for the September 11 documentary on CBS Sunday night.

I DON'T KNOW ABOUT you, but I find it comforting, rather than chilling, that the administration has nuclear contingency plans against several countries. The implicit and ambiguous threat of nuclear war (then-Secretary Cheney's promise of "devastating and overwhelming" response) was what kept Saddam from using chemical weapons against US troops in the Gulf War. The LA Times article is uniformly critical, focuses on the reaction of arms control-niks, and makes very little effort to explore reasons for such a contingency plan; it is shocked that the US has plans for a nuclear war against China, but doesn't acknowledge the infamous Chinese diplomatic remark that American leaders "care more about Los Angeles than they do about Taiwan." It's a terrible article, and it's abhorrent that someone in Congress leaked the plan to the press.

HAWSPIPE finds an example of an emoticon trademark. Who knew?

TRUE CRIME AFFICIONADOS will want to read the 79-page opinion from the Anna Nicole Smith trial. You normally don't see such things unless both sides are afraid that they're too unsympathetic to go before a jury.

YOU WON'T SEE THIS ON Robot Wisdom. The New York Times has been running a poignant series of obituaries of victims of the WTC attack. This amateurish site catalogues Israeli casualties of terrorism, including photos and short biographies.

THE JERUSALEM POST has an interesting article about a change in urban tactics by the Israeli army, which raises almost as many questions as it answers, such as how come it took over fifty years for the Israeli army to learn the tactical lessons of World War II?

FROM WALL STREET JOURNAL Best-of-the-Web: Suicide bomber thwarted by citizens.

BLOGROLLING SMACKDOWN. One of the Irish Samizdatans got conned into reposting bogus tax protestor theories that the income tax is unlawful. Charles Kuffner takes him down a notch, but missed the link to Daniel Evans's Tax Protestor FAQ.

E-MAIL LORE. I'd be happy to credit the original author, but I don't know who it is.

French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan To Convince Taliban of Non-Existence of God

The ground war in Afghanistan hotted up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of Taliban zealots by proving the non-existence of God.

Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or 'Black Berets', will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris's Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of pavement cafes at strategic points near the front lines. There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature of life and man's lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will further spread dismay by sticking their tongues in the philosophers' ears every five minutes and looking remote and unattainable to everyone else.

Their leader, Colonel Marc-Ange Belmondo, spoke yesterday of his confidence in the success of their mission. Sorbonne graduate Belmondo, a very intense and unshaven young man in a black pullover, gesticulated wildly and said, "The Taliban are caught in a logical fallacy of the most ridiculous. There is no God and I can prove it. Take your tongue out of my ear, Juliet, I am talking."

Marc-Ange plans to deliver an impassioned thesis on man's nauseating freedom of action with special reference to the work of Foucault and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to condemn the operation as inhumane, pointing out that the effects of passive smoking from the Frenchmen's endless Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll on civilians in the area.

UPDATE: This apparently comes from one Michael Kelly.

ALEXANDRA PELOSI. Journeys with George debuted yesterday, but no new news from the AP. Spiegel has a good photo, but I can't vouch one way or the other about the article in German.