anguswit

Globed

2006-02-05T20:45:00.000-05:00

My first article in the Boston Globe appeared today. Yay!

The Sensible Choice

2006-02-05T20:41:00.000-05:00

Buried in the second-to-last paragraph of Richard Posner's recent essay in The New Republic is the first public expression of a solution I have long proposed to the controversy surrounding government wiretaps of private communications. Let the government wiretap to its heart's content with one proviso: the intelligence gathered can only be used in a terrorism case. Posner fomulates is thus:

Permit surveillance intended to detect and prevent terrorist activity but flatly forbid the use of information gleaned by such surveillance for any purpose other than to protect national security. So, if the government discovered, in the course of surveillance, that an American was not a terrorist but was evading income tax, it could not use the discovery to prosecute him for tax evasion or sue him for back taxes.

Isn't this the perfect solution?

Roots Rock Reggae

2006-01-15T23:07:00.000-05:00

Just when you thought he couldn't get any bigger. Unless you've been living under a rock, you better know who Matisyahu is. If not, click here for my last post about him.

I was impressed a year ago when he showed up in full sartorial splendor on the front page of the Metro section. Slightly more so when he opened for Trey (is that confirmed?) and even more so when he was the only Orthodox Jew to play a reggae festival at Randal's Island (uh, yeah). And since trading my Metrocard for a Jetta, I've grown accustomed to hearing him on WBCN, the rock of Boston, urging on Moshiach.

And now: tomorrow night, Matisyahu is gonna be on Letterman. The first Jewish musician to ever achieve genuine crossover success is a black-clad Lubavitcher from Brooklyn. Whouda thunk?

Scientology's Top Gun

2005-12-17T23:33:00.000-05:00

I was riveted by this story in the Los Angeles Times about Tom Cruise's role in scientology. By far, the craziest thing about this crazy "religion" is the seemingly lucid celebrities it has attracted, like Beck and Jenna Elfman. I once tried to figure out what scientology was about online, and found the experience rather unsatisfying, so I was especially grateful for this little nugget, which seems to sum it all up.

In his own spiritual life, Cruise has continued to climb the "Bridge to Total Freedom," Scientology's path to enlightenment. International Scientology News, a church magazine, reported last year that the actor had embarked on one of the highest levels of training, "OT VII" — for Operating Thetan VII.

At these higher levels — and at a potential cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars — Scientologists learn Hubbard's secret theory of human suffering, which he traces to a galactic battle waged 75 million years ago by an evil tyrant named Xenu.

According to court documents made public by The Times in the 1980s, Hubbard espoused the belief that Xenu captured the souls, or thetans, of enemies and electronically implanted false concepts in them to keep them confused about his dirty work. The goal of these advanced courses is to become aware of the trauma and free of its effects.

Absence makes the heart grow ....

2005-11-12T17:44:00.000-05:00

Reading through some older posts and comments, I realized I miss blogging.

The armpit of New England

2005-09-18T22:54:00.000-04:00

All the news and pictures coming out of New Orleans in recent weeks have made the region's poverty a major issue in the Hurrican Katrina saga. I was surprised to discover, however, that New Orleans is hardly the most impoverished city in the country. My own hometown of Hartford, CT, is actually poorer than New Orleans, according to a study cited in this Boston Globe story. (Yes, I have been reading the Globe since moving up here, but not for long).

To be sure, it is easy to read too much into the ''Southernness" of Katrina, and some historians warn that such a focus simply reinforces what they see as the centuries-old effort to use the South as a scapegoat, focusing on its ills while ignoring what are in fact national problems. There are other parts of the country, they note, that are just as poor-according to the 2000 Census, for example, Hartford, Conn., is poorer than New Orleans.

Anybody still listening?

2005-09-12T20:30:00.000-04:00

Well, if you are, clap your hands and say 'yeah'.

So I took a little break from blogging. And I didn't make any announcement, which isn't cool. But I had a good excuse: Last week I moved to lovely Cambridge, Mass. to become the editor of a small (but soon to be legendary) newspaper on the north shore of Boston. I'm not going to offer the name, so as to maintain some boundary between my writing lives.

But I have not given up blogging and this post is to serve notice that I'm climbing back on the horse. My new responsibilities are manifold and I cannot make promises as to the frequency of my posts, but if any of my readers are still out there, please make yourselves known as I'm sure that will encourage me to check in more regularly. And as I do, I hope you will too.

Montessori

2005-08-26T11:05:00.000-04:00

My long-awaited piece on Jewish Montessori schools came out in the Forward this week. Read it here.

(sorry -- it requires registration)

Restricting Speech

2005-08-25T10:01:00.000-04:00

In the era of terrorism, both critics of the left and right acknowledge the existence of a continuum between civil liberties and effective counter-terrorism measures-- if you increase one you tend to get less of the other. Most of our debates boil down to an argument over where the line between the two should be drawn.

After London, the conservative punditocracy was outraged at how lax the Brits had become, allowing home-grown terror cells to germinate on English soil. But these criticisms, justified as they may be, fail to recognize the difficulty in acting against individuals who haven't actually done anything other than talk (a difficulty substantially reduced by Britain's new list of deportable terrorism-related offenses). Freedom of speech is a cherished ideal in Western democracies -- arguably, it is the ideal upon which all others rest.

Thankfully someone has finally acknowledged the problem. In an op-ed two weeks ago in the Times, Geoffrey Stone argues that even radical Islamists who rail against the government and extol the virtues of terrorism should be protected under the law. The distinction he draws is between speaking admirably of suicide bombing and outright incitement to violence. The former should be protected, the latter outlawed.

Stone's distinction is a hollow one. Islamists have declared war on the West and the growing roster of terrorist atrocities attest to their seriousness. A Muslim cleric who encourages suicidal terrorism is virtually indistinct from one who merely praises it. And yet, with those restrictions in place it becomes nearly impossible for a Muslim to severely criticize the government lest he be accused of inciting violence. But still, I think, it needs to be done. Noam Chomsky might make equally radical claims about the evils of British foreign policy or the legitimacy of terrorist grievances, but the fact is he has no followers with a distinguished history of putting those ideas into bloody practice. As is often the case, context matters.

This rather uncomfortable truth rubs up against another cherished democratic value, namely equality before the law. We shudder to think that a person's race or religion might be a factor in a court of law, or determine what views that person is permitted to express -- and rightly so. Guilt should be guilt, regardless of the ethnicity of the criminal.

What we are essentially weighing here is two competing democratic values -- free speech and color-blindedness -- and it is no simple matter to determine which should take precedence.

Dropping the Bomb

2005-08-19T22:19:00.000-04:00

Here is Krauthammer's plan for dealing with Palestinian rocket attacks following the withdrawal from Gaza:

Israel should announce that henceforth any rocket launched from Palestinian territory will immediately trigger a mechanically automatic response in which five Israeli rockets will be fired back. There will be no human intervention in the loop. Every Palestinian rocket landing in Israel will instantly trigger sensors and preset counter-launchers. Any Palestinian terrorist firing up a rocket will know that he is triggering six: one Palestinian and five Israeli.

Israel would decide how these five would be programmed to respond. Perhaps three aimed at the launch site and vicinity and two at a list of predetermined military and strategic assets of the Palestinian militias.

The idea of automated bomb launches is frighteningly Strangelove-esque, but the principle of massive retaliation is the correct strategy, and the only one. Israel's only other recourse would be to reinvade Gaza and go after the rocket launchers itself, thus negating the significance of the withdrawal it is now completing, at great costs to the treasury and Israeli morale.

As almost everyone seems to agree, the withdrawal is an enormous opportunity for the Palestinians to demonstrate they can responsibly govern themselves. Whether or not Gaza becomes even more of a haven for terrorists than it already is will be a pretty reliable benchmark of their success. Unfortunately, as they have time and again throughout their tortured history, the Palestinians are setting themselves up for failure, seemingly so comfortable playing the victims that they are incapable of taking responsibility for their own future. Their two most articulate spokespeople have been assiduously laying the groudwork for the excuses to come when the PA fails to step up to the plate, telling the media all week that the disengagement is meaningless -- at best an empty gesture while Israel continues to control the borders and airspace; at worst, a cover for a major landgrab in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Hamas has been busy claiming victory for bombing the Israelis out and promising more of the same, while the UN has been so preoccupied with financing anti-Israel propaganda that they have neglected to explore the development opportunities posed by Israel's abandonment of miles of prime Gaza beachfront real estate. And Abbas, well, where the hell has Abbas been?

After nearly four decades of occupation, dismantling the Palestinian culture of victimhood is proving far more difficult than dismantling the terrorist networks that pose the greatest threat to Palestinian self-governance and Israeli security. At this rate, I predict 5 rockets will be landing somewhere in Gaza by the middle of next week.

The Vanishing

2005-08-05T02:19:00.000-04:00

Take 100 Orthodox Jews, 100 Modern Orthodox Jews, 100 Conservative Jews, 100 Reform Jews and 100 Unaffiliated Jews. In four generations, how many will be left of each?

According to a new study based on current intermarriage and birth rates, 100 Orthodox Jews will yield a staggering 2,588 Jews! Modern Orthodox fare slightly less well, with 346 Jews. For Conservative, Reform and Unaffiliated, the projections are downright disheartening. After four generations there will be 24, 13 and 5 left respectively.

There are a couple of obvious problems with this study -- current intermarriage and birth rates will not necessarily remain constant; there is no evidence that the offspring of each denomination will remain in that denomination; there is no accounting for other factors that might actually lead to growth in the numbers of Reform and Conservative Jews.

And then there's the biggest problem of all -- this is not news. Even with its methodological and conceptual flaws, the thrust of the study is basically correct. Orthodox Jews are far better at increasing their numbers than non-Orthodox Jews. A far more interesting question is therefore what effect this will have on the demographics of the Jewish people. Over time, the Orthodox will substantially increase their representation as a fraction of total world Jewry, a development that has serious implications for Jewish communal life. The authors of the study would have contributed much more to our understanding by addressing that question than by interpreting the numbers as an ode to the virtues of Orthodox education.

Bad News

2005-08-03T01:01:00.000-04:00

If there's any doubt that Richard Posner is one of America's most indispensible public intellectuals, his essay in this week's Times Book Review should dispel it. Posner expertly untangles the issues surrounding the decline in both the reputation and the audience of the mainstream media (or MSM in blogger parlance), and he does so with a shrewd cost-based analysis. It is not fundamental biases or the general coarsening of our public discourse that have degraded the news media's reputation, but shifting cost structures. In short, given the declining costs of putting out a newspaper of producing a news broadcast, media outlets can turn a profit with a smaller audience. That in turn leads them to abandon their longstanding attempts to capture the elusive middle ground, making it inevitable that they will be more niche-oriented, more partisan, and more polarized. And increased polarization explains the most curious aspect of the current media wars -- both liberals and conservatives feel the other side is biased against it.

The proliferation of media outlets means the market is more competitive, and markets being what they are, more options means a greater likelihood that consumers will have their needs catered to. Those needs, the evidence suggests, is less for informed commentary than for entertainment and for validation of pre-existing prejudices. Hence, Fox News. Or blogs.

Journalists accuse bloggers of having lowered standards. But their real concern is less high-minded - it is the threat that bloggers, who are mostly amateurs, pose to professional journalists and their principal employers, the conventional news media. A serious newspaper, like The Times, is a large, hierarchical commercial enterprise that interposes layers of review, revision and correction between the reporter and the published report and that to finance its large staff depends on advertising revenues and hence on the good will of advertisers and (because advertising revenues depend to a great extent on circulation) readers. These dependences constrain a newspaper in a variety of ways. But in addition, with its reputation heavily invested in accuracy, so that every serious error is a potential scandal, a newspaper not only has to delay publication of many stories to permit adequate checking but also has to institute rules for avoiding error - like requiring more than a single source for a story or limiting its reporters' reliance on anonymous sources - that cost it many scoops.

Blogs don't have these worries. Their only cost is the time of the blogger, and that cost may actually be negative if the blogger can use the publicity that he obtains from blogging to generate lecture fees and book royalties. Having no staff, the blogger is not expected to be accurate. Having no advertisers (though this is changing), he has no reason to pull his punches. And not needing a large circulation to cover costs, he can target a segment of the reading public much narrower than a newspaper or a television news channel could aim for. He may even be able to pry that segment away from the conventional media. Blogs pick off the mainstream media's customers one by one, as it were.

Posner also makes quick work of the most frequent criticism of blogs, that they play fast and loose with the facts:

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek's classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It's as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.

The Sky is Falling

2005-07-22T01:33:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, New York City police officers are set to randomly inspect bags being brought onto the subway. It is an unprecedented move in the face of an unprecedented threat. Unfortunately, political correctness ensures that the NYPD will be looking at elderly grandmothers just as carefully as twenty-something Muslim men, according to this Times account.

People who do not submit to a search will be allowed to leave, but will not be permitted into the subway station. The police commissioner said officers would take pains to avoid singling people out for searches based on race or ethnicity.

"No racial profiling will be allowed," Mr. Kelly said. "It's against our policies. But it will be a systematized approach."

He added, "We'll give some very specific and detailed instructions to our officers on how to do it in accordance with our laws and the Constitution."

This confounds the brain. It is an indisputable fact that the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks of this type are committed by young Muslim men. How is it racist to be more concerned over a young Muslim with a bag than with a middle-aged white woman? Ray Kelly is way smarter than this and I can only pray he was saying what reporters want to hear.

Lucky for Kelly, his critics are even more insipid.

"The police can and should be aggressively investigating anyone they suspect is trying to bring explosives into the subway," said Christopher Dunn, associate legal director at the New York Civil Liberties Union. "However, random police searches of people without any suspicion of wrongdoing are contrary to our most basic constitutional values. This is a very troubling announcement."

Please explain this one to me. When you board an aircraft, they search you even if you haven't done anything wrong. But doing it in the subway is unconstitutional? As I've confessed before, I'm not a constitutional lawyer, so perhaps it is, though I can't for the life of me imagine why. It's one thing to stop someone walking down the street, quite another when they try to enter the mass transit system. And if, due to some unimaginable legal precept, it is in fact unconstitional, that should merely serve to accelerate a long overdue debate we must have over the applicability of principles drafted over 200 years ago to the fight against terror. If checking bags when you enter the subway is counter to the Constitution, then it's the latter that has to bend.

craigslist

2005-07-19T23:43:00.000-04:00

I had a succesful sale of an old bookshelf today and the guy sent me this nice note:

Subject: Thank you

For being patient, and more than reasonable. Two tortoises have a bigger apartment now. Happy living!

~Kevin

Modern Love

2005-07-19T18:39:00.000-04:00

Some dedicated readers may recall a post from several months back that inagurated my infatuation with the Modern Love column in the Times Style section. The piece that did me in was a tale of one blogger dating another blogger who was cheating on blogger #1 with still a third blogger. Blogger #1 tracked blogger #2's infidelities on the website of blogger #3. Confused?

This week's installment is a similar tale, this time of a woman who tracks her nannies drug use and sex adventures on the nanny's blog. The story is here, the nanny's blog here. Quick link to nanny's fantasies of Tucker Carlson here.

New Republic

2005-07-12T11:38:00.000-04:00

TNR has had a string of great content on its site, particulary these two pieces. The first is a chronicle of the murderous career of Che Guevara, the poster child for leftist revolutionaries the world over and now the favored icon of capitalist chic. Though there is little in this piece that hasn't been known previously, its publication is particularly prescient at a time when celebrities of all stripes have taken to wearing Che's likeness on t-shirts despite his history of cold-blooded killing.

In January 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: "I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain.... His belongings were now mine." Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. While he wondered whether this particular victim "was really guilty enough to deserve death," he had no qualms about ordering the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes: "He had to pay the price." At other times he would simulate executions without carrying them out, as a method of psychological torture.

The second piece is a roundup of contemporary conservative opinion on evolution. Some representative snippets:

Tucker Carlson, MSNBC

Whether he personally believes in evolution: "I think God's responsible for the existence of the universe and everything in it. ... I think God is probably clever enough to think up evolution. ... It's plausible to me that God designed evolution; I don't know why that's outside the realm. It's not in my view."

William Kristol, The Weekly Standard

Whether he personally believes in evolution: "I don't discuss personal opinions. ... I'm familiar with what's obviously true about it as well as what's problematic. ... I'm not a scientist. ... It's like me asking you whether you believe in the Big Bang."

How evolution should be taught in public schools: "I managed to have my children go through the Fairfax, Virginia schools without ever looking at one of their science textbooks."

Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform

Whether he personally believes in evolution: "I've never understood how an eye evolves."

What he thinks of intelligent design: "Put me down for the intelligent design people."

How evolution should be taught in public schools: "The real problem here is that you shouldn't have government-run schools. ... Given that we have to spend all our time crushing the capital gains tax I don't have much time for this issue."

And finally, as evidence of why the non-ideological Charles Krauthammer is one of the very few conservative writers worth reading, I offer this:

Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post

Whether he personally believes in evolution: "Of course."

What he thinks of intelligent design: "At most, interesting."

Whether intelligent design should be taught in public schools: "The idea that [intelligent design] should be taught as a competing theory to evolution is ridiculous. ... The entire structure of modern biology, and every branch of it [is] built around evolution and to teach anything but evolution would be a tremendous disservice to scientific education. If you wanna have one lecture at the end of your year on evolutionary biology, on intelligent design as a way to understand evolution, that's fine. But the idea that there are these two competing scientific schools is ridiculous."

More thoughts on the London bombings

2005-07-09T12:07:00.000-04:00

There are people out there who maintain that jihadist terrorism against the West is a product of Western policies. Many who advance this line of thinking do so because it reinforces their preconceptions that the West is an exploitative, profit-hungry monster whose every action is intended to enrich itself, or its elites, at the expense of the less fortunate societies of the world. But occasionally, we hear rhetoric of this kind accompanied by genuine arguments. Such is the case with Robert Pape, a professor of political science at Chicago, who penned an op-ed in today's Times. Because Pape's views are grounded in argument, not ideology, they are particularly ripe for refutation.

His essential point is this: most Al Qaeda suicide attacks since 2002 have been perpetrated by citizens of countries allied with the U.S., or in which the U.S. maintains a substantial military presence, and against the citizens of the U.S. and allied countries. He concludes that Al Qaeda's principal aim is to drive America and its allies out of Muslim countries and that Al Qaeda may well collapse if it were not able to draw recruits from such countries.

In other words, foreign occupation by America and its allies is the problem. Ending foreign occupation is the solution.

To begin with, Pape's sample is fundamentally skewed: he considers only attacks that have occurred since April 2002, and only one very specific type of terrorism - suicide bombing. The attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa, the bombing of the USS Cole, both World Trade Center attacks -- all of these occurred prior to the massive American presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. Could it be that Al Qaeda's recent choice of targets is purely tactical? Is it possible that it has assumed the mantle of resisting foreign occupation because it is such a resonant idea in a part of the world that has been regressing for the past 1,000 years? Because it excites the minds of normally secular Arab nationalists? Because it wins them sympathy in certain quarters within the West?

If ending the presence of foreigners in their territory is the goal of Muslim extremists, they have pursued exactly the wrong course of action. Islamic terrorism against the West has brought far greater Western meddling in the affairs of Muslim states than before. It has transformed what should have been (to paraphrase Friedman) a Muslim-Muslim problem into a Muslim-Western problem.

Consider the case of the Palestinians: Hamas and Islamic Jihad are two of the most prolific terrorist groups in operation in the world today. They have successfully convinced many that their actions are a response to Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. But here again, Palestinian terrorism (if not suicide terrorism) long predates the occupation, which began in 1967. Moreover, if the goal is to remove Israelis from the West Bank and Gaza, blowing up busses in Jerusalem is precisely the wrong strategy. The second intifada has destroyed the Israeli peace movement, brought a hard-line general to power, undermined worldwide sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and made Palestinian independence -- in the West Bank at least -- a much more remote possibility. The more pragmatic amongst the Palestinians realized this long ago. But still, the attacks continue. Israeli occupation is not the cause of Palestinian terrorism, it is the excuse for it. Just as Israel's withdrawal from south Lebanon did not quell the Hezbollah terrorists intent on Israel's destruction, so the Gaza withdrawal is unlikely to satiate the blood lust of terrorists there - if anything, it will increase it. (This does not mean I oppose the Gaza disengagement, but that's another story).

Israel's occupation that began in 1967 provided terrorists with a workable justification for their acts. The same is true of Al Qaeda. After Iraq and Afghanistan, any attack on the West could now be construed as a response to American atrocities committed against Muslims.

The fundamentalists who kill and murder masses of civilians are far more ambitious than Pape gives them credit for. Like Palestinian terrorist groups, Al Qaeda seeks the establishment of an Islamo-fascist theocracy, the reinstatement of the caliphate, and the rollback of Western norms of tolerance, pluralism and democracy. We need look no further than the Taliban to see what Al Qaeda victory would bequeath to the world.

It is imperative to understand the relationship between American policies and Islamic terror that writers like Pape are so intent on obscuring. American policies in the Middle East may increase the attractiveness of radical theology, but it isn't responsible for its very existence. I might agree that when Israel attacks a terrorist operative, or when America launches an offensive in Falluja, it heightens anti-American feeling in the Arab world. But that anti-American feeling, manifest in terrorist atrocities in Western cities, existed long before. Just as any change in Israeli policy will only whet the appetite of the Islamists (nothing will encourage them more than perceived victory), any change in American policy will only exacerbate the problem. That is not to say that we needn't constantly re-evaluate our policies, particularly when they effect such murderous outcomes. Nor is it to say that American should not push Israel to end its occupation, or that American troops should stay in the Middle East indefinitely, or that America should not end its support for tyrannical regimes, work to end poverty or alienation or any of the other reasons often cited for the anger of many Muslim youth. We should do all these things, but we should do them because they are the right things to do and on our own terms, not because we think they are effective counter-terrorism strategies. And we should begin those efforts in the parts of the world that are the most pacified to show that it is those societies that don't dispatch their youth to kill Westerners that are going to reap the benefits of Western assistance. America must show the world that terrorism is a losing strategy, not an effective way to elicit political changes.

Pape writes that after 9/11, Al Qaeda recognized that "it would be more effective to attack America's European allies, thus coercing them to withdraw their forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and increasing the economic and military burdens that the United States would have to bear."

That is the most compelling reason of all for the Europeans NOT to withdraw.

London Calling

2005-07-09T01:16:00.000-04:00

The bombings in London this week have revived a litany of arguments that ought to be familiar to anyone who was in America on September 11th. I've been following the debates there with a mixture of hope and revulsion similar to that I experienced in New York four years ago.

Even more than back then, the web is awash in punditry, some inspired, some cringe-inducing. There is a notion, popular amongst those Brits who love to talk of how London "saw this coming", that this is the price of collusion with the American behemoth. And indeed it is. The question is what is to be done?

One thinks when hearing such talk that the sensible response is to stop colluding. This thinking mirrors those of the terrorists themselves, who chalk up their blood lust to Western aggression. But it is foolish to believe that by not antagonizing terrorists you won't draw their fire. If Britain goes the way of Spain, the jihadists will add another notch to their belt and set their sights on the next target.

Amir Taheri pretty much nails that thinking to the wall in the London Times.

Friedman had an unoriginal, but generally correct take -- ultimately, Western cities are most secure when Muslims are restraining their own, something they have done a remarkably poor job of, as demonstrated by Joseph Braudie in the New Republic.

Ian McEwan's piece is worth more than all the news accounts combined, but I desperately hope he's wrong. I think London will recover its confidence. And sooner than most people think.

Irrational Optimism

2005-07-06T10:07:00.000-04:00

Thomas Friedman is at it again. As is often the case, he starts off with promise, noting that Israelis and Palestinians are both enjoying the current period of calm as reflected by the "boom" in both their stock markets. But then he gets a little heady, arguing that this tiny crack in the iron wall of Middle East pessimism is enough to revive the peace process. Actually, withdrawal from Gaza and the construction of a security barrier in the West Bank are the most emphatic symbols that the peace process is dead, that no one in Israel anticipates anything resembling a peace settlement in the near future and are thus prepared to act unilaterally to strengthen their security posture.

Then Friedman goes positively wacko with this outrageous speculation:

Will the U.N. confirm the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, as it did from Lebanon, creating an internationally recognized border that will also constitute what a Haaretz essayist, Ari Shavit, calls "an invisible wall of international legitimacy"? (Even terrorists today are deterred by the legality of the Israel-Lebanon border.)

The answer to that question is easy: No. The U.N. will do no such thing. And terrorists are deterred by the legality of the border? This is wrong on so many counts I don't know where to start. Well, yes I do. How about with the fact that Hezbollah terrorists infiltrated the 'border' just last week and have done so consistently for years? Or with the fact that the U.N. itself doesn't even consider the Israel-Lebanon line a border, but in fact adheres scrupulously to its legal definition as a line of withdrawal, or more colloquially as the Blue Line, after the imbeciles in blue helmets that supposedly keep the peace up there. Or how about the fact that terrorists don't recognize the legality of anything - that's what makes them terrorists!! They don't respect the Geneva Conventions, which are the most widely adhered to international treaties in history, but they respect the integrity of an arbitrary line drawn by a feckless international organization? Puh-leeze.

Department of Are-you-fucking-kidding-me?

2005-07-01T08:33:00.000-04:00

I would have had trouble believing this story if not for the incontrovertible photographic evidence: A woman has auctioned off on Ebay the advertising space on her forehead. For $10,000, online gambling site goldenpalace.com gets some unusual advertising real estate. According to the CNN story, even the tattoo artists tried to talk her out of it. She claims she did it for her son's education. Hearwarming. (Hat tip: Jewlicious)

The Times becomes eclectic

2005-06-30T10:23:00.000-04:00

The Times magazine had a fantastic feature last week on Los Angeles DJ and pop music tastemaker Nic Harcourt, host of KCRW's 'Morning Becomes Eclectic' (streaming available here). Like virtually every profile I read these days, the writer strains to brandish the subject's Horatio Alger credentials:

Harcourt was raised in Birmingham in the 1960's, the only child of a television-journalist father and a mother who worked in electrical wholesaling. He has few happy early memories, save for the times when his combative parents would put on Beatles records and dance around the living room. When they separated, he was 7. Harcourt remembers that when his mother broke the news that his father had moved out, he asked, ''Did he take the Beatles records?''

Harcourt says he began drinking heavily as a teenager, left school as soon as he could and drifted through his youth in an alcoholic haze, working construction and factory jobs and playing part time in a few struggling -- and, he notes, not very good -- rock bands. He followed a girlfriend to Australia, married her and spent the latter half of his 20's there. By then Harcourt was a dedicated postpunk partisan of the Clash and Gang of Four, and he quickly became enamored of INXS, Men at Work, the Hoodoo Gurus and the rest of the blossoming Australian music scene. When his marriage came to an acrimonious end in the fall of 1988, Harcourt washed up in Woodstock. Intending to visit for a couple of months with an old band mate, he wound up joining Alcoholics Anonymous, sobered up and stayed for a decade. Talking about it now, he says simply: ''My life changed. In some ways, I'm 16 now.''

In Woodstock he discovered his calling. With no prior radio experience, and now in his early 30's, Harcourt talked his way into doing fill-ins on WDST, the area's local progressive FM station. Before long, he was doing a daily show and programming the station. At WDST, Harcourt earned a reputation for identifying hits far ahead of the curve, and was a crucial early advocate of Alanis Morissette, Moby and Garbage. In 1998, when the ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' slot opened up, Harcourt was chosen after a nationwide search.

oh no!

2005-06-26T01:53:00.000-04:00

First their was frumster, the more religious alternative to Jdate, which was itself the Jewish alternative to, well, every other dating site. Now along comes Almost Met Jew, the Jewish version of Craigslist missed connections. Frumster was funny (ever check out those pics? who knew there were so many ways to say orthodox?), but this is just sad.

Holy Shit!

2005-06-25T12:22:00.000-04:00

Never has that seemed like such an apt description.

The first thing that caught my attention at the Billy Graham crusade were the protesters, screaming that god hates faggots, that Billy is the surest road to hell. You know you're in an alternate universe when Billy Graham is accused of being too liberal.

Graham's defenders were not in short supply. "I rebuke you, Satan!" screamed one man, his face flushed with crimson.

From the moment I stepped off the 7 train at Shea Stadium, it was like being swept up in an ocean current. The people came in wave after wave and I, nervously eyeing my watch, tried to fight my way through to the press table.

It was just minutes until the program was scheduled to start and it seemed like I would drown in the whirl of humanity before I had secured a life vest (otherwise known as a press pass).

And then, as if from the heavens came my savior, in the form of a volunteer from a church in Orange County California offering to escort me to the press area. And just like that, the crowds parted like the Red Sea, and I was ushered across the grounds at Flushing Meadow to the check-in table.

Say what you will about evangelicals, but this is one dedicated bunch. Eyes closed, arms raised up to heaven, swaying to the music, accepting of the word, rapturous in ecstatic communion with Jesus. Personally, I can't even begin to fathom it, but for these dudes, it's the real thing.

One of the early speeches was from Billy Graham's finance minister. It reminded me of how often at the beginning of Yom Kippur, after one of the most stirring prayers in all of Jewish liturgy, the service is interrupted to auction off synagogue honors, much like cattle is sold at a county fair. The finance guy offered a lengthy exegesis on the crusade's finances, even promising a full and public audit to be published in that iniquitous rag, the New York Times. He read from Corinthians - he who sows generously will reap generously, or some such thing. And in case the message wasn't clear, he told worshippers to be sure and offer more than they do to their local parish. Billy Graham will accept cash, check, and all major credit cards, and will even offer a receipt for tax purposes. All in all, a rather seamless (and crass) marriage of the spiritual and the material.

Then comes the rock n' roll. The Latin band Salvador, who had a hit with that insufferable pop-tart 'How far is he-eh-ven?', also had one of the most memorable lines of the evening. "You know," said the lead singer, "if you can't tell by looking at us, we're Latin." Then came Christian superstar Steven Curtis Chapman, winner of like a gazillion Dove awards and possibly the whitest white man to ever pick up an electric guitar.

We were then treated to a testimony from Mel Graham, apparently the black sheep of the Graham clan. A slim, tanned, white-haired southern gent, Mel was apparently a godless real estate developer who tended to drink too much until, in a conversion eerily reminiscent of George W's, on one dark night he let Jesus into his heart. These people make it sound so easy.

Finally, it was time for the big man. Graham, hobbled by prostate cancer and other infirmities, gripped his walker and, with son Franklin's help, made his way to the podium to cries of "Thank you Jesus" and "Glory, Glory, Glory". Graham's sermon, if you could call it that, was funny and light, a sort of rambling old man with a lifetime of stories to tell. The climax came at the end, when he invited all who wished to come forward and dedicate their life to Jesus. It was an astonishing, and highly choreographed, affair. Although I was practically in awe of the whole spectacle, the emotions of the faithful were unmistakable. Virtually everyone who gathered up front had tears in their eyes as they pledged their lives to Jesus.

"You've come to Jesus," Graham intoned. "He loves you. He forgives you. Can you think what he suffered for you?"

The only moment that made me genuinely uncomfortable came at the very end, when the MC introduced a representative of "god's chosen people." And thus came forth Mitch Glaser, who confessed to growing up a nice Jewish boy just a mile or so away in Queens. "Thank you," said Glaser to Graham, "on behalf of Jews who have come to know their Messiah through you."

Glaser then offered a closing benediction, beginning with the Hebrew words avinu shebashamayim, our father who art in heaven. My stomach convulsing, I quickly made my way out, towards the subway, back towards my city, possibly the last outpost of secularism left.

Tom Cruise is a really nice guy

2005-06-23T18:57:00.000-04:00

There was lots of coverage when Cruise recently had water splashed in his face by a paparazzi photographer. But here's the pretty amazing video of what happened next. Maybe all this Scientology stuff isn't so bad after all.

If these guys can't do it

2005-06-22T17:35:00.000-04:00

David Makovsky and Dennis Ross are two of the most seasoned American writers on the Middle East. In the Financial Times today they put forth an utterly unconvincing refutation of the most compelling argument against the Gaza disengagement plan – that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups will see the withdrawal as a victory and, as in Lebanon, be inspired to escalate their attacks on Israelis.

The Makovsky/Ross argument proceeds as follows:

First they try a technical argument: Palestinian terrorism emanates primarily from the West Bank, not Gaza, but it is Gaza that Israel is leaving. Ergo, terrorism is not being rewarded. To the fundamentalists, of course, such distinctions are immaterial - Gaza is just as much occupied territory as the West Bank, as Jerusalem, as Tel Aviv.

Next, they suggest that since Hamas leaders never made Gaza disengagement an objective, this is not a victory for them. Well, technically speaking that might be true. Hamas would like Israel to disengage from all of Palestine. Given that, it's hard to understand how Hamas won't see any Israeli withdrawal as a first step towards ultimate victory.

Finally, they trot out their most important point: if Israel doesn't withdraw, it's headed for demographic disaster because Palestinians are on course to outnumber Jews between the river and the sea before the decade is out. This is very true, and a compelling reason for Israel to settle its borders sooner rather than later. But it is not a reason why Hamas won't see the withdrawal as a victory. Indeed, just the opposite – like terrorism, Palestinian reproductive rates are another way to force Israel onto the defensive.

Besides the muddled thinking, a larger point emerges: If thinkers like Makovsky and Ross can't refute the Hamas victory argument, it probably can't be done. Disengagement will, inevitably, be seen as a victory for terrorism. That has to be accepted and weighed against the very real gains Israel will make in not having to protect 8,000 settlers in their foolish desire to plant themselves amongst 1.3 million hostile Palestinians.