You'd think barbecue from a place called "Heavy's" somewhere near Sparta, South Carolina, would be pretty delicious. You'd be wrong. I took three bites and threw my BBQ sandwich away. Had to settle for a granola bar from the BP. Barbecue is so simple -- how can some people do it so wrong?

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Some advice from a retired Navy admiral:

In November 1979, when our embassy was sacked and our diplomats were taken hostage, I recommended to the then-acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Tom Hayward, that our only good option really was to capture Kharg Island, Iran's principal oil export depot. If we did this, we could negotiate from a position of strength for the immediate return of our embassy and our diplomats.

Unfortunately, the Carter administration rejected any offensive operations as a means of responding to this blatant act of war against the United States. We were humiliated and seemed to the world to lack the courage to defend our honor. Thankfully, we were not faced with a Falklands Island situation because we did not have a Margaret Thatcher but surely needed one.

Still seems like a good idea.

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Here's a report from Penn & Teller on anti-Wal-marters. At the end, Penn expresses my thoughts eloquently.

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Say what you will about President Bush, but the man's got good joke writers:

Tell us, Mr. President, how have things changed since the last broadcasters' dinner?

"A year ago my approval rating was in the 30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn, and my vice president had shot someone," President Bush said Wednesday night during the annual gathering.

"Ah," he said, "those were the good ol' days."

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Check out this Web site from a direct marketing company. Click on "You are where you live" and then enter your zip code.

The site will tell you the demographic data that advertisers know about your neighborhood. It's frighteningly specific. For instance, some of my neighbors are in the highest wealth category, spend $3,000 per month on foreign travel, shop at Bloomingdale's and watch the Golf Channel.

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The decline of newspapers appears to be accelerating:

Revenue from advertising was in striking decline last month, compared with February a year ago, and were generally weaker than analysts had expected.

And while there was one piece of good news for the industry — ad spending on newspaper Web sites rose — many industry watchers were wondering whether the February declines were part of a short-term slump or whether they signal a deepening systemic problem.

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A friend of mine sent me a link to this NY Times article about the spying conducted by the New York City Police Department on anti-Bush activists prior to the RNC convention in 2004. It's a good article and the Times should be commended for their reporting. I'm not sure I object to all intelligence gathering in the United States (given our present circumstances), but the Times is doing its job in making the public aware of the practice.

In the accompanying note to myself and another former newspaper colleague, my friend wrote: "No wonder Matt is so restrained on his blog. This is something you expect in North Korea and Zimbabwe, not in the United States of America."

He's right about one thing -- my blog is much more restrained than it once was. I scrolled through my archives the other day and was amazed at how much more punch my posts once contained. Check out my archive from January 2005. I certainly had more to say.

I think this George Will column offers some explanation. He talks about Americans' "infatuation with anger." It's a good piece about how Americans are constantly seething over something -- be it partisan politics, reckless drivers, or bad customer service. I once shared this infatuation, but I find I'm mellowing in my old age. This effect is fantastic for the well-being of me, my family and my friends -- but it wreaks havoc on a blog.

In addition, I'm rather worried that my comments will one day affect my ability to get an academic job. I feel I may have crossed a boundary a couple of years ago with this post. Since then, I've decided that I don't want to engage the academic debate too much, too early. I've decided to go ahead and pursue a PhD in Mass Communication. Eventually, the battle will be joined.

So, combine the two elements, and you've got the makings of a restrained blog. My apologies. The "Fearless Critic" moniker has become my own personal oxymoron.

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This column sums up my feelings on the subject:

We live in a world in which oral sex is now second base.
In which girls dress like porn stars.

In which the kids you see at the airport this weekend heading for spring break will wind up topless in Girls Gone Wild, Fort Lauderdale '07 videos.

Are you cool with this?

Frustrated American Christians aren't. They want girls to sign purity pledges in which they promise to stay virgins.

They're against mandatory immunization of girls against sexually-transmitted viruses that cause cervical cancer because they're afraid it'll encourage promiscuity.

These are heavy-handed solutions. But I understand the impetus behind them.

Rampant slut culture is making everyone crazy.

Yeah. When did dressing like a stripper become female empowerment? Why does my seven-year-old daughter need to buy clothing with words written on the ass? Why do little girls play with toys that stress the importance of "how hot you look"? At the risk of sounding too much like my grandfather -- what is the world coming to?

Read the whole column -- perhaps this pendulum will start to swing back to the center.

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I still find this hilarious.

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I don't know how long this will video will remain on youtube, but it's pretty incredible. It's director David O. Russell losing his mind while working on the movie "I Heart Huckebees." He accuses Lily Tomlin of acting "like a baby" while going on a profanity-laden tirade and trashing his own movie set.

Enjoy.

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Interesting:

France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades.

France has a space agency? What've they been doing for the last 50 years?

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Long post from Michael Yon in Iraq. He complains that the military makes it tough for journalists to report on the war:

But considering all the planning, organization, logistics and resources that went in to putting up what amounts to a food court in a surburban mall, how hard would it be, really, for there to be a clean, well-lit press trailer, open 24-7, with some desks, chairs and lockers, wired for the internet? Not on every base, but on enough of them so that stories from everywhere else could get out on a regular basis. For a military that is the first to gripe about not getting enough press–in a kind of war where the press can determine the outcome–it seems fairly obvious that the first step would be to at least make sure there is a place for the press to work. If this were a few months into this war, I could understand it, but to not even be at square one this far in?

Seems a valid complaint.

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Not sure what to make of this, but the Wall Street Journal is now offering annual Web subscriptions for $20 a year. Normally that subscription costs $100 per year and the WSJ was noted as the only newspaper in the business that could charge that much for Web-only content.

The WSJ may have reached a ceiling with business-type subscribers who could afford the price because their companies were footing the bill. But will those subscribers still be willing to shell out $100 per year? This seems like a pretty drastic change to their online business model.

When they announced the combination of online and print circulation numbers in 2005, the WSJ reported 764,000 online-only subscribers. Since then, they don't appear to have broken down online and print circulation figures. Perhaps those online numbers aren't as impressive as they once were.

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Good column from Walter Mossberg on the need for Congress to update copyright law:

Most honest people wouldn't consider it piracy to buy a CD, copy it to a computer and email one of the song files to a spouse or friend. But the record industry, backed by the laws it essentially wrote, does. Most honest people wouldn't think that uploading to YouTube a two-minute TV clip, which they paid their cable company to receive, is piracy. But Viacom, backed by the laws its industry essentially wrote, is demanding that Google remove all such clips.

To be fair, Viacom, unlike the misguided record labels, isn't suing the actual consumers who posted these clips. It's suing Google because it claims Google is making money from them and refusing to pay for that privilege.

Google isn't blameless here, either. It does make money, at least indirectly, from other companies' copyright material, for which it didn't pay, even though it has negotiated some paid deals and says it is willing to negotiate others. And while Google says it diligently removes all copyright clips for which it hasn't secured paid rights, every YouTube visitor knows that this system is, at best, imperfect.

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Don't expect these photos of anti-Iraq war demonstrations to make it into the newspaper.

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A man barely alive.

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Because benchmarks of barbarity had not fallen far enough:

Insurgents in Iraq detonated an explosives-rigged vehicle with two children in the back seat after US soldiers let it through a Baghdad checkpoint over the weekend, a senior US military official said Tuesday.

The vehicle was stopped at the checkpoint but was allowed through when soldiers saw the children in the back, said Major General Michael Barbero of the Pentagon's Joint Staff.

"Children in the back seat lowered suspicion. We let it move through. They parked the vehicle, and the adults ran out and detonated it with the children in the back," Barbero said.

The general said it was the first time he had seen a report of insurgents using children in suicide bombings. But he said Al-Qaeda in Iraq is changing tactics in response to the tighter controls around the city.

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Interesting post on corrections in the New York Times. Looks like they need to hire more copyeditors over there.

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Overview of the new Assignment Zero site, founded by PressThink's Jay Rosen:

A new experiment wants to broaden the network to include readers and their sources. Assignment Zero, a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism site established by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, intends to use not only the wisdom of the crowd, but their combined reporting efforts — an approach that has come to be called “crowdsourcing.”

The idea is to apply to journalism the same open-source model of Web-enabled collaboration that produced the operating system Linux, the Web browser Mozilla and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Not sure it will work, but certainly exciting.

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Good article on how global warming is being taught in Vermont schools. I'm concerned with some of the stuff my second-grader hears in her classes as well. Read the first couple of comments -- there's clearly a lot of dissent out there.

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Very good primer on the issues in the Viacom vs. YouTube case:

For most of the history of copyright law, it was Congress that was at the center of copyright policy making. As the Supreme Court explained in its 1984 Sony Betamax decision, the Constitution makes plain that “it is Congress that has been assigned the task of defining the scope of the limited monopoly,” or copyright. It has thus been “Congress that has fashioned the new rules that new technology made necessary.” The court explained that “sound policy, as well as history, supports our consistent deference to Congress when major technological innovations alter the market for copyrighted materials.” In the view of the court in Sony, if you don’t like how new technologies affect copyright, take your problem to Congress.

The court reaffirmed this principle of deference in 2003, even when the question at stake was a constitutional challenge to Congress’s extension of copyright by 20 years. Challenges are evaluated “against the backdrop of Congress’s previous exercises of its authority under the Copyright Clause” of the Constitution, it wrote. Congress’s practice — not simply the Constitution’s text, or its original understanding — thus determined the Constitution’s meaning.

These cases together signaled a very strong and sensible policy: The complex balance of interests within any copyright statute are best struck by Congress.

But 20 months ago, the Supreme Court reversed this wise policy of deference. Drawing upon common law-like power, the court expanded the Copyright Act in the Grokster case to cover a form of liability it had never before recognized in the context of copyright — the wrong of providing technology that induces copyright infringement. It announced this new form of liability even though at precisely the same time Congress was holding hearings about whether to amend the Copyright Act to create the same liability.

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More counter-intuitive polling data:

MOST Iraqis believe life is better for them now than it was under Saddam Hussein, according to a British opinion poll published today.

The survey of more than 5,000 Iraqis found the majority optimistic despite their suffering in sectarian violence since the American-led invasion four years ago this week.

One in four Iraqis has had a family member murdered, says the poll by Opinion Research Business. In Baghdad, the capital, one in four has had a relative kidnapped and one in three said members of their family had fled abroad. But when asked whether they preferred life under Saddam, the dictator who was executed last December, or under Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, most replied that things were better for them today.

Only 27% think there is a civil war in Iraq, compared with 61% who do not, according to the survey carried out last month.

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Well, the first round of the NCAA tournament is over, and I'm second-to-last in my own bracket challenge. Oh, and the guy in last place didn't make any picks.

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This is pretty big news:

SACRAMENTO - California jolted the time-tested presidential primary schedule Thursday, moving its 2008 contest to Feb. 5 and setting the stage for a potentially decisive one-day, mega-primary across the country.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation shifting the state into make-or-break prominence from its position as a June straggler in the presidential nominating process.

"Now California is important again in presidential-nominating politics and we will get the respect that California deserves," Schwarzenegger said during a bill-signing ceremony.

California - and its roughly 17 million registered voters and 55 electoral votes - joins a handful of other states that already have scheduled Feb. 5 primaries.

But 15 other states - including Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Texas - are considering moving their contests to the same day.

The presidential candidates will be locked up on Feb. 5 next year. That means the general election campaign will start on Feb. 6. Gonna be a long year.

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Write your own caption.

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Drop what you're doing and join my NCAA bracket challenge. Click here and follow the instructions. The password is Duffy2007.

I've only gotten 5 entries so far, and that includes my wife and myself. Now, that's lame. Come on, it only takes a few seconds. It'll be fun.

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I can't identify the object at the top of that telephone poll. I'm pretty sure it involves the military or alien technology.

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Here's a New York Times piece addressing the scientific misgivings on the global warming hype:

Although Mr. Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority of science in “An Inconvenient Truth,” which is why scientists are sensitive to its details and claims.

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.

Given this acknowledgment that some scientists see "natural variation as more central to global warming," the New York Times should make sure that all subsequent articles on the topic mention this fact. I doubt they'll live up to that standard.

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The Project for Excellence in Journalism just released their annual State of the News Media report. Always good reading. Scroll down and check out these believability numbers for the nation's major newspapers. Ooof! Hovering in the mid-20s.

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I'll have to see this documentary of Michael Moore:

As documentary filmmakers, Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine looked up to Michael Moore.

Then they tried to do a documentary of their own about him - and ran into the same sort of resistance Moore himself famously faces in his own films.

The result is "Manufacturing Dissent," which turns the camera on the confrontational documentarian and examines some of his methods. Among their revelations in the movie, which had its world premiere Saturday night at the South by Southwest film festival: That Moore actually did speak with then-General Motors chairman Roger Smith, the evasive subject of his 1989 debut "Roger & Me," but chose to withhold that footage from the final cut.

As someone once swayed by "Roger & Me" (in 1989, I was young and idealistic), that last detail seems patently dishonest.

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Interesting video. I think the press has generally given Democrats a free ride to change their original positions on supporting the Iraq war.

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Good column from Anthony Lewis on the First Amendment fallout of the Libby verdict:

Prosecutors used to shy away, generally, from pressing journalists to name sources. But lately they are doing so with increasing frequency. Why? Perhaps because the press does not have as much support in public opinion as it used to. Whatever the reason, the danger of crippling the investigative function of journalism is increasing.

When the New York Times was printing the Pentagon Papers, the press received almost unanimous support from the public. What happened over the next 35 years to lead the press to such a level of disdain?

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From Reuters:

An Iraqi national wearing wires and concealing a magnet inside his rectum triggered a security scare at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday but officials said he posed no apparent threat.

The man, identified by law enforcement officials as Fadhel al-Maliki, 35, set off an alarm during passenger screening at the airport early on Tuesday morning.

A police bomb squad was called to examine what was deemed a suspicious item found during a body cavity search of the man. Local media reports said a magnet was found in his rectum.

I can hear Maxwell Smart sum it up: "The ole magnet in the rectum trick, chief."

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This is pretty crazy:

The first GM food crop containing human genes is set to be approved for commercial production.

The laboratory-created rice produces some of the human proteins found in breast milk and saliva.

Its U.S. developers say they could be used to treat children with diarrhoea, a major killer in the Third World.

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So, I've officially launched my editing Web site. Check it out here and feel free to give me feedback.

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Another dispatch from Michael Yon, independently reporting from Iraq. Here's an interesting tidbit:

Leaving Ramadi, some of the soldiers couldn’t get over Geraldo’s cool mustache. Many soldiers joke about Geraldo, while others greatly like him, but not even Bruce Willis can approach the cult status of Chuck Norris for combat soldiers. Soldiers love Chuck."

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Interesting read from the Washington Post about a woman in Darfur who publishes a newspaper by posting one copy on a tree:

In this dusty market town in northern Darfur, a lucky few with satellite dishes can get news of the war surrounding them from CNN or the BBC. Others rely on a tree.

For the past 10 years, Awatif Ahmed Isshag has handwritten monthly dispatches and commentary about life in El Fasher and hung them on a short, wiry tree that scatters shade along the yellow-sand lane by her house.

We're not all enjoying the fruits of the Internet age, eh?

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I volunteered to answer the phones at PBS today. Here's a picture from my vantage point.

I'm here to expose the terrible truth. Those phones aren't really ringing that much. During our training, they teach us how to make it sound like the phone is ringing. And if you're on camera, they expect you to act like you're talking on the phone, taking a pledge.

But, I didn't do it. I wasn't about to carry water for the man. Not me, baby. Not me.

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Russia's critics aren't safe even in the U.S.:

An expert on Russian intelligence was critically injured in a shooting in front of his suburban Washington home, authorities said.

The shooting of Paul Joyal, 53, came days after he accused the Russian government of involvement in the poisoning of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. The FBI was assisting in the investigation.

Joyal was shot Thursday by two men in his driveway, police said.

The shooting appeared to be a random robbery and street shooting, a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case told The Associated Press. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person did not have authority to comment on the case.

In an interview broadcast last Sunday on "Dateline NBC," Joyal also accused the Russian government of trying to silence its critics.

Yeah, it was a robbery.

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I think it's time to buy some hubcaps for my van.

Shh. What's that sound? Oh, it's this theme song.

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Please encourage my brother-in-law to join the CIA. How cool would that be?

Or has he joined already? Mwa-ha-ha!

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So, Mars is warming too:

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human- induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory.

Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.

Wow, our carbon emissions sure do have some reach.

Instapundit makes a good point:

Right or not, this doesn't matter to me -- as I've noted before, I think we should be trying to minimize our burning of fossil fuels for lots of other reasons. But it does suggest that people should be wary of getting too far ahead of the science. And if this explanation turns out to be correct, overselling global warming could lead to a backlash in which efforts to reduce pollution lose credibility, which would be bad as we should be reducing pollution regardless of global warming.

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I'm cooling considerably on Digg.com. This blogger paid about $350 to get an incoherent story to the top of the list. This is particularly amusing:

I spent several days creating a blog intended to be as random and boring as possible. Built from templates, My Pictures of Crowds exhibits all the worst aspects of blogging. There's an obsessive theme -- photographs of crowds -- but no originality and absolutely no analysis. Each entry is simply an illogical, badly punctuated appreciation of a CC-licensed picture taken from Flickr. Also, there are a lot of unnecessary exclamation points!

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A modest proposal:

Gingrich and Cuomo chose the location because of its symbolic value as the site of the 1860 address that, historians argue, catapulted Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. Gingrich proposed that the 2008 candidates agree to a series of debates and discussions in the spirit of Lincoln’s devotion to “language, ideas, and reasoned thought.”

“Nothing will take more poison out of the system than requiring the candidates to be in the same room with partisans from both sides, because you cannot biologically be as vicious and as nasty as the current system if you’re face to face,” Gingrich said. “And if you can be, then you’re pathological and you’re disqualified.”

Not sure if this is the answer, but the current system isn't working.

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Here's some interesting news from the oft-ignored particle physics front:

For 20 years he has been searching for one of the most elusive things in the universe, the Higgs boson - aka the God particle - which gives everything in the cosmos its mass. And here, buried in the debris generated by the world's largest particle smasher, were a few tantalising hints of its existence...

... The Higgs boson is infamous as the only particle predicted by the standard model of physics that remains undetected. In theory, every other particle in the universe gets its mass by interacting with an all-pervading field created by Higgs bosons. If the Higgs is discovered, the standard model could justifiably claim to be the theory that unifies everything except gravity.

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