This isn’t writing, it’s typing.

Could cereal be the Next Big Thing?

These folks seem to think so. (Click on the picture to watch the video.)

So does Daniel Drezner.

Clearly, the nascent Cereality chain (with stores in Tempe, AZ, and Philadelphia, PA) is betting heavily on the idea that Americans want to nourish their inner child. Seems that the Cereality magic is in the toppings—which range from raisins to Pop Rocks. (I thought they took Pop Rocks off the market when some kid exploded after washing down a couple of bags with a six-pack of Pepsi. But, hey, what do I know?)

I think it would be better if the Cereality stores had television monitors running Saturday morning cartoon shows.

Then I'd never want to leave.

An intelligence reform bill? Crikey!

In his column in the National Review, Mark Steyn dares to ask (and answer) the $64,000 question about intelligence reform:

Be honest. Do you think this intel "reform" bill will reform intel in any meaningful way—i.e., by reforming what's the near 100 percent failure rate of recent years down to, oh, 93, maybe 86 percent?

I don't, and I don't know anyone from the sharper end of the "intelligence community" who does, either. But who cares? The Democrats are in favor of it, because reshuffling the bureaucracy is their preferred way of demonstrating that they're not soft on national security. And that means the media are in favor of it, and so, as we're constantly told, are "the 9/11 families," as if it's some kind of national-security Megan's Law on which they have an inviolable proprietorial claim.

I don't think U.S. intelligence can be reformed in any meaningful way without abolishing the principal agencies and creating entirely new structures with none of the baggage. Like their fellow intelligence operative, Austin Powers, in The Spy Who Shagged Me, the CIA seems to have lost its mojo, and nothing proposed by Tom Kean and the other showboaters is likely to help get it back. And, in fairness to the Dems, the CIA's present incarnation as a seething swamp of obstructionist desk-jockeys is far more useful to them than the old cloak-and-dagger types ever were. Consider, for example, how many of Bush's election-year difficulties derived, one way or another, from Langley—WMD, lack thereof; uranium from Niger, Iraqi acquisition thereof; Joseph C. Wilson IV, absurd media over-inflation thereof; Valerie Plame, likewise thereof; August 6th 2001 Presidential Daily Brief, Bush's irresponsible ignoring thereof. Take the CIA-derived material out of the Democratic Bush-bashing of the last two years and there wouldn't be a lot left. The old Left were paranoid about the CIA. The new Left have cheerfully let the CIA make them paranoid about the president. They've finally found a CIA they can love.

As I've mentioned before in this space, the CIA has been fighting a paperclip war with the White House that began almost as quickly as Bush took office in 2001. That seems to have distracted them from the real war they should have been waging with America's enemies. Steyn again: "Some weeks before 9/11, in The Atlantic Monthly, Reuel Marc Gerecht quoted a young CIA man explaining the problem: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen." Not when there's a nice air-conditioned office in Virginia where you can monitor e-mails by satellite all day long. How ya gonna keep 'em out in the field after they've seen Langlee? As was made plain soon after Gerecht's article appeared, for the next few years much of the intelligence action will be in Diarrhea Central."

Porter Goss should start ordering Imodium® by the truckload.

What do you say to that, Mr. Smartypants?

More street wisdom from UbuWeb.

ABMM

Anybody But Michael Moore, that is.

The People's Choice voting has begun. Michael is clearly looking at this as another Ohio:

The People's Choice Awards are considered, among all the awards shows, to be the one which most accurately reflects the "mainstream" public opinion in the United States.

OK, now, here's the best part: YOU get to vote! Online. Now. Just go to http://www.pcavote.com/voting/film/f01.shtml, click on the little circle next to "Fahrenheit 9/11" in the "Favorite Movie" category and press the "vote" button. Voting is going on now and continues only through this coming Monday, December 13, at 3:00pm ET, so send an e-mail to your friends and let them know they can vote, too. Winners will accept their awards live on CBS on January 9.

Now, normally I wouldn't make a very big deal out of something like this. It's nice and I'm honored, but it's not exactly the number one priority on any of our minds these days. In fact, when we found out we were nominated over a week ago, I didn't even think to tell you about it or put it up on our website. [We believe you, Michael. Millions wouldn't. But we believe you.]

But then a group of top Republicans took out a full page ad in USA Today (and placed a similar one in the Hollywood trade magazine, Variety) proclaiming that "An election is over, but a war of ideas continues." The point of the ad was to say that while they, as right wing conservatives, were proud of getting rid of Kerry, there was still one more nuisance running around loose they had to deal with -- me! They also issued a not-so-subtle threat to the Academy Awards voters that, in essence, said don't even THINK about nominating "Fahrenheit 9/11" for Best Picture. And Bill O'Reilly recently bellowed that if the Oscars recognize my work this year, Middle America will boycott Hollywood.

Let's hope the Daily Kos crew shows a little more class this time around and doesn't try to hack the vote the way that did with the Blog Awards.

Go here and make your voice heard.

UPDATE: While you're at it, why not send Michael a Christmas card?

FURTHER UPDATE: Lots of comments on the subject at Little Green Footballs.

The politics of the personal

A bit of found art from UbuWeb.

The site's author, Kenneth Goldstein, writes:

This collection of street posters, mad scribblings, political screeds, religious rants, and paranoid raves was collected on the streets of New York City from 1985 to the present. Some time ago, it occurred to me that the streets are as full of art as, say, thrift shops are full of great paintings. So, inspired by Jim Shaw's collection Thrift Shop Paintings, Adolf Wölfli's visionary scrawls, and outsider music, I began carrying a portable razor with me whilst out on casual strolls. What began as a hobby has remained an obsession and this obsession is brought to you in living color here on UbuWeb.

It's worth a visit.

Take off, you hoser!

A Canadian radio station once sponsored a contest that challenged listeners to come up with the equivalent of the phrase "as American as apple pie."

The winning entry of the "as Canadian as" contest was: "As Canadian as possible, under the circumstances."

Now, an enterprising American company has come up with an idea to exploit the insipidness of Canadian culture for the benefit of the U.S.-passport-bearing members of the United States of Canada.

The Associated Press reports:

For $24.95, T-shirtKing.com offers the "Go Canadian" package, full of just the kind of things an American traveler needs to leave their country and its politics behind.

There's a Canadian flag T-shirt, a Canadian flag lapel pin and a Canadian patch for luggage or a backpack. There's also a quick reference guide -- "How to Speak Canadian, Eh?" -- on answering questions about Canada.

It's the brainchild of employees at the Mountainair, New Mexico-based company known for novelty T-shirts it sells worldwide on the Internet.

"It's not meant as a slight against the United States or Canada," explained T-shirtKing.com President Bill Broadbent. "It was meant as something Republicans could give their Democrat friends to say 'C'est la vie.' ... But maybe not c'est la vie because that's a French word."

Mr. Broadbent is right. C'est la vie isn't quite le mot juste. It's more along the lines of je m'en fiche—as in "I don't give a ___."

Now that's French with a Canadian accent.

Blogs I'd like to see

The recent creation of the Becker-Posner blog (which I discussed earlier) has led me to think about other heavyweights whose voices would be welcome in the blogosphere.

Here are a few random thoughts:

The Harold Bloom Blog. The author of The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, The Western Canon, How to Read and Why and Where Shall Wisdom be Found? is nearly as prolific as Richard Posner. He's semi-retired, so you'd think he could find the time. And talk about a "culture" blog.

The John Lewis Gaddis Blog. He teaches what is probably the most popular undergraduate course at Yale. He's also the greatest scholar of modern U. S. foreign policy and national security. And he can write about complex subjects in an engaging and approachable way.

The Thomas Pynchon Blog. Yes, we know you're notoriously reclusive. But there's probably enough firewall protection somewhere to keep your private life secure behind a blog. And your conspiratorial mindset would fit right in here in the blogosphere.

The Dalai Lama Blog. Millions around the world could use a daily dose of spiritual guidance and good humor. And it would make the Chinese government crazy.

The Anthony J. F. O'Reilly Blog. Okay, he's not exactly a household name. But, trust me, Tony's a heavyweight. A former Rugby legend, he was CEO of the H. J. Heinz Company for many years. He may also be the most literate business executive with whom I've ever worked. (How many clerihew aficionados can there be in the corporate world?)

The Teresa Heinz Kerry Blog. She's been muzzled long enough, people. It's time the lady was given a real chance to speak her mind. (Maybe she could call her blog "Shove it.")

The Martha Stewart Blog. Of course, this will require a little cooperation from federal prison authorities. But we can't depend indefinitely on dribs and drabs from Protein Wisdom. We need the real deal.

Those are my preliminary nominations. Any other suggestions?

Honor killing spawns a backlash

The Muslim practice of honor killing—which I discussed in a post last week—has begun to turn off even the most politically correct of Europeans. Graham Lester at Point2point has a horrifying roundup of honor killings in the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile, across the Channel, The Times of London reports on a growing backlash against these barbaric rituals:

Days before she was due to be married, Ghofrane Haddaoui, 23, refused the advances of a teenage boy and paid with her life. Lured to waste ground near her home in Marseilles, the Tunisian-born Frenchwoman was stoned to death, her skull smashed by rocks hurled by at least two young men, according to police.

Although the circumstances of the murder are not clear, the horrific “lapidation” of the young Muslim stoked a French belief that the country can no longer tolerate the excesses of an alien culture in its midst.

A few days ago, pop celebrities joined 2,000 people in a march through Marseilles denouncing violence against women, particularly in the immigrant-dominated housing estates. The protest against Islamic “obscurantism” and the “fundamentalism that imprisons women” was led by a group of Muslim women who call themselves Ni Putes ni Soumises (Neither Whores nor Submissive).

The movement, which emerged three years ago to defend Muslim women, is spawning similar groups across Europe, supported by a mainstream opinion that has recently abandoned political correctness and wants to halt the inroads of Islam.

Thus does the road of excess lead to the palace of wisdom. But The Times' most shocking revelation comes in the final paragraph of the piece:

Reluctantly, some intellectuals have lately concluded that the model for Europe should be the US. On Tuesday a writer for Libération, the French left-wing daily, noted that immigrants in the U. S. threw themselves into “the American dream” and prospered. “There is no French, Dutch or other European dream,” she noted. “You emigrate here to escape poverty and nothing more."

America the Model? Zut alors!

Birth of a blog

If anyone one needed evidence that bloggers are more than just "guys in pajamas"—not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you—they got some powerful evidence with the launch of the Becker-Posner Blog, headed by two of the heaviest hitters in the realm of American public life, Nobel-prizewinning economist Gary Becker and federal judge Richard Posner (who has, in fact, been known to wear a robe in public). Between them, they've authored a few dozen books and hundreds of scholarly articles and legal opinions, so I think they can  manage a blog somehow.

Posner's first major post, on the subject of preventive war, is a foretaste of what's to come:

While the probability of a future attack is always less than one, the expected cost of the future attack—the cost that the attack will impose multiplied by the probability of the attack—may be very high, perhaps because the adversary is growing stronger and so will be able to deliver a heavier blow in the future than he could do today. It may be possible to neutralize his greater strength, but that will require a greater investment in defense. Suppose there is a probability of .5 that the adversary will attack at some future time, when he has completed a military build up, that the attack will, if resisted with only the victim’s current strength, inflict a cost on the victim of 100, so that the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), but that the expected cost can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further that at an additional cost of only 5, the victim can by a preventive strike today eliminate all possibility of the future attack. Since 5 is less than 35 (the sum of injury and defensive costs if the future enemy attack is not prevented), the preventive war is cost-justified.

A historical example that illustrates this analysis is the Nazi reoccupation of the Rhineland area of Germany in 1936, an area that had been demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles. Had France and Great Britain responded to this treaty violation by invading Germany, in all likelihood Hitler would have been overthrown and World War II averted. (It is unlikely that Japan would have attacked the United States and Great Britain in 1941 had it not thought that Germany would be victorious.) The benefits of preventive war would in that instance have greatly exceeded the costs.

And I thought The Belgravia Dispatch made for heavy reading at times.

Somewhere, I imagine, Friedrich Hayek is smiling.

UPDATE: Deacon at Power Line comments: "These, then, are bloggers even Jonathan Klein and Brian Williams can respect."

Oh, that smell …

Yet another skunk in the U. N. outhouse, once again involving the ubiquitous Kojo Annan. The Telegraph reports:

The son of Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary-General, lobbied for business contacts at gatherings of UN officials on behalf of a company in the same year as it won an oil-for-food programme deal, it has emerged.

The second disclosure in a week about Kojo Annan's role with the Swiss company Cotecna Inspection Services, which secured the $4.8 million (£2.46 million) UN contract to monitor goods entering and leaving Iraq in 1998, has raised embarrassing questions for his father. The details were revealed in Cotecna company documents handed over under subpoena to US congressional scrutineers who are investigating the oil-for-food scandal in which Saddam Hussein is thought to have creamed off more than $20 billion.

In one billing memo, a US investigator told The Telegraph, Kojo Annan, 29, claimed fees and expenses for eight days' work in July 1998, including six days in Abuja "during my father's visit to Nigeria". On another, he claimed expenses and $500 a day for a 15-day trip to New York and the UN General Assembly in September 1998 for meetings on "special projects".

Kojo was working as a consultant on African business deals for Cotecna at the time.

The company, the UN and Kojo have repeatedly stressed that he had no involvement in securing the oil-for-food contract that was awarded in December 1998.

However, the revelations were awkward for his father, who only two days earlier said: "He is an independent businessman. He is a grown man and I don't get involved with his activities—and he doesn't get involved in mine."

Except when there's a buck (or $5 million) to be made, of course.