Most commentators doubt that the recent settlement of Major League Baseball's labor dispute will ultimately solve baseball's competitiveness problems; the consensus is that "small-market" teams with relatively meager fan bases and lower revenue prospects will continue to have great difficulty competing for superstars against their "large-market" counterparts with bulging pocketbooks to spend on stratospheric player contracts. But for some reason, none of these analysts seems able to think beyond a few minor variations on the set of gimmicks already contained in the new agreement--that is, revenue sharing and limitations on overspending by wealthy teams. This narrow-mindedness betrays a fundamentally shallow view of the problems besetting the game.

Contrary to popular belief, large-market sports teams are not always dominating powerhouses that make mincemeat of their smaller, poorer opponents. After all, a large market is also often a reliably lucrative one--that is, one that can generate a steady stream of revenue regardless of how badly its team stinks up the joint. (Think, for example, of the Chicago Cubs.) Moreover, even small market teams can play well below their potential when their owners decide to put parsimony before performance (as any number of small-market teams demonstrate consistently, year after year.)

The problem, in short, is not revenue disparity among teams, but rather the lack of a connection between team revenue and team performance. When an owner can make decisions that are in his or her obvious financial interest but bad for the team's winning potential, fans are understandably upset--just as they would be if, say, an individual player took a personal payoff to throw a game. What is needed, therefore, is not a system that artificially evens out team incomes--thus further insulating owners from the effects of their undermining of the quality of their own teams--but rather a system that financially rewards good, skillful, competitive team management, and punishes its opposite.

There's an obvious choice for such a system: pool the revenues of all the clubs, and redistribute them based strictly on team performance. That's how most sports work, after all--whatever you spend, your income depends (almost) exclusively on the "prize money" awarded you for your competitive successes. In the case of baseball, each team's revenues for the year would simply depend on its winning percentage, according to some predetermined formula. Labor strife would likely disappear as a result, since the "value" of a player's services would be directly measurable (or at least estimable) in terms of that player's effect on team performance (and hence on team earnings). Mediocre owners and general managers would also no longer be able to use the economic limitations of their markets as an excuse; they would instead be directly comparable as team-builders, on the basis of their ability to invest shrewdly in "undervalued" players and gain maximum return on their farm prospects. And a dominating team, however wealthy, could always be toppled by a shrewd investor able to build a better team--and thus earn greater returns--on the same invested capital.

This is a radical proposal, of course--probably too radical to be considered seriously by any of the major sports leagues. We can therefore predict with confidence that the problem teams of professional sports--not profligate winners like baseball's Yankees or Diamondbacks, or football's Dolphins or Forty-Niners, but rather fan-ripoff scams like baseball's Cubs or football's Bengals--will continue to eat away at the integrity and popularity of their respective leagues from within for many years to come.

I've just returned from about a week in Israel, most of which I spent listening to a variety of speakers--politicians, journalists, academics and others--lecturing and taking questions about current conditions there. (Believe it or not, that's my idea of the perfect vacation.) I would summarize my main conclusions as follows:

• There is emerging an overwhelming centrist consensus in Israeli politics. The right has for some time now (with the exception of a tiny fringe) given up on the idea of controlling the occupied territories ("Judea, Samaria and Gaza") indefinitely, let alone annexing them. Meanwhile, the last two years of violence have driven the left (again, with the exception of a tiny fringe) to abandon as suicidally unworkable any kind of unilateral withdrawal from those same territories. The consensus, therefore, is that Israel will be happy to accept a Palestinian state--but only within the framework of a sincerely reciprocal, practically enforceable peace agreement that puts an end to the conflict once and for all and offers a solid expectation that organized Palestinian violence against Israel will genuinely, permanently cease. Sadly, that prospect seems distant at the moment.



• Regarding the current two-year-old campaign of terror, the solid majority view is that while it is likely to continue at a low level for quite some time, Israel is now, for all intents and purposes, and barring a major new development, the undeclared winning side in the conflict. Two years ago a divided Israel, desperate for peace, was unilaterally offering an all-but-sovereign Palestinian Authority full, unfettered statehood on virtually all the territories, ceding control over much of Jerusalem, and even considering allowing for a limited "return" of Palestinians to Israel proper. Today, the Palestinian economy and polity are in utter disarray, Israeli troops run unimpeded through the West Bank's largest cities, Yasser Arafat is an international pariah, and nobody (outside the fantasyland of international diplomacy) is expecting Palestinian Independence Day to arrive anytime soon. By adhering doggedly to their twin pillars of terrorism and maximalism, the Palestinians have once again, in Israeli eyes, missed an historic opportunity, and are now paying the terrible price.
  
  (I would add as an aside here--and this is not part of the reigning consensus--that the turning point in the conflict was "Operation Defensive Shield", in which Israeli troops invaded the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority and began dismantling the "terrorist infrastructure", thus proving the absurdity of the left's mantra that "there is no military solution" to the problem of Palestinian terrorism. It is widely believed, in Israel and elsewhere, that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon acted with wise and shrewd restraint during his year or so in office preceding the military operation, waiting until support among the Israeli public and in the White House for military action reached a level that made it politically feasible. In my view, Sharon simply waited a year too long, and the ultimate success of the operation in vastly reducing the rate of terrorist attacks actually generated support for the military approach, rather than relying on it. Had Sharon acted sooner, the consensus I described might well have been built right away, and hundreds of lives might have been saved in the interim.)



• Although terrorism is obviously still a top priority, the current lull in the violence, and the emergence of the aforementioned two-pronged consensus, have shifted the attention of the Israeli populace somewhat towards other matters--most notably, the rapidly imploding Israeli economy. The collapse of the high-tech bubble has coincided with the sudden absence of war-shy foreign tourists, and the consequences of these roughly simultaneous shocks have been devastating, with businesses closing en masse and laying off workers left and right. The economic crisis, many argue, presents both a danger and an opportunity: while the increasingly straitened circumstances may exacerbate internal political and social tensions, they may also provide the impetus to resolve simmering conflicts over resource allocation and force needed reforms in areas such as welfare, sectoral subsidy and military burden-sharing. Meanwhile, the long-term problems--the demographic time bomb of Israel's Arab population, and the inevitable, devastating water shortage--are likely to go unaddressed for some time to come.

I expect I will elaborate further on these ideas in future postings, but for now I will let this summary suffice.

I'll be taking a roughly-10-day break from blogging. Details when I resume.....

Dahlia Lithwick's "Letter to a Young Law Student" in Slate is interesting less for the advice she gives--the usual "don't take it so seriously, stop and smell the roses, you'll look back on this years from now and be as cloyingly sentimental about it all as I'm being right now" blather--than for her characterization of the typical modern law student. According to Lithwick, the vast majority of them "applied to law school simply because [they] took the LSATs", and "took the LSATs simply because the MCATs were too hard". They "graduated college with the generalized sense that they ought to be doing good works on this planet but were uncertain how to go about it", and "went to law school hoping that the experience would be stimulating and/or mind-expanding; a liberal-arts grad school for political people."

Well, we saw what a couple of generations of that sort of aimless, unserious student did for liberal arts undergraduate education: it now consists mostly of ignorant, lazy, illiterate slackers pausing between parties to collect their gift A's in a collection of joke courses in vacuous subspecialties, earning worthless degrees that signify with high probability that the bearer possesses no discernible job, life or intellectual skills. Certainly there aren't many liberal arts graduates these days who feel the need to admonish this year's freshmen, as Lithwick does the incoming "one-L" class, to "ignore your grades" and "have a life".

How long, then, will the law schools be able to continue to absorb a stream of applicants who are uninterested in law, hard work or career advancement, before the pressure on them to cater to student demand for "stimulating and/or mind-expanding" experiences forces them to eviscerate their own curricula and turn themselves into summer camps for spoiled post-undergraduate "permafrosh"? Can the law schools possibly have the spine to stand their ground and force all those future proto-Lithwicks to find their three-year vacations elsewhere, should they rise up one day soon and, like their undergraduate counterparts, start demanding "relevant" courses, "fair" grading, and all the rest?

Steven Levy's Newsweek article on blogging tells the depressing story of 18-year-old Zack, "an insecure kid who clowned around in high school and felt that no one really liked him." So he started a blog, and now he has "28 readers a day".

Why is this story depressing, you ask? Well, I haven't been getting anywhere near 28 hits a day--even when you include the occasional random Google search for strings like (just to give a few examples from my hit counter's referrer log) "marijuana infrared scanning", "mossad interrogation", or "paternal filicide".

Regular ICBW readers (I know you're out there--both of you!) are encouraged to let me know by email whether they think I should follow Zack's lead, cut down on the public affairs commentary, and use this blog more to "express [my] feelings and share [my] songs, poems and artwork". Hey, the kid must be doing something right....

Richard Cohen has said it. Hendrik Hertzberg, too. Cokie and Steve Roberts have said it together. E.J. Dionne has (more or less) said it. Michael Kinsley was among the first to say it. Thomas Friedman and Zibigniew Brzezinski have now both said it on the same day. Foreign policy guru Senator Richard Lugar has said it. The conventional wisdom is unequivocal: the Bush administration has yet to make the case for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein.

Taken literally, this assertion is complete nonsense. The administration has laid out a clear and compelling case for the use of military force to get rid of Saddam Hussein. His regime is one of the most brutal in a generally brutal region; he has a long history of invading neighbors, building weapons of mass destruction (including biological, chemical and even nuclear weapons) and using them (in the case of chemical weapons, at least) against both internal and external enemies. He is a longtime supporter of international terrorism, including, most likely, Al Qaida. His agents have attempted to assassinate a former US president, and may even have been in direct contact with the September 11th hijackers. Numerous regimes with far less damning records than that have been targeted--quite sensibly and justly--for violent overthrow by past US governments.

On the other hand, the case against toppling Saddam Hussein has been heard only very softly, if at all, in the (mainstream) public square over the last few months. And that's a bit surprising, because there is a fairly strong case to be made. Hussein still has a formidable army that is capable of inflicting serious casualties on an invading force. And he has that arsenal of non-conventional weapons; faced with the prospect of elimination, he may well decide he has nothing to lose and unleash them. The death toll of an invasion could thus be extremely high--perhaps catastrophically so.

There is also a plausible alternative: regimes that are too powerful to destroy militarily are usually handled with a "containment" strategy. When well-executed, such a strategy can control and limit the regime's threat to the rest of the world, at relatively little risk and cost, until such time as conditions for its collapse or removal are more favorable. If "red lines" regarding its external behavior are explicitly drawn and forcefully backed up with harsh military responses short of full-scale war, they can sharply limit the hostile regime's capacity to make trouble. To this day, for example, just such a set of rules has protected the Kurdish sanctuary in northern Iraq from Hussein's troops; a broader version of this arrangement might conceivably succeed in containing him fully until old age, internal dissention or a well-placed rival takes its toll.

It's interesting to consider, then, why so many pundits, instead of stridently presenting this anti-invasion case, have satisfied themselves with carping about the supposed lack of solid pro-invasion arguments coming from the administration. One explanation is obvious: the US military's recent string of three spectacularly easy, relatively painless victories (in the Gulf War, Serbia/Kosovo and Afghanistan) has (probably unfairly) discredited the "body bags" argument. After three instances of worst-case scenario-believers crying wolf, it's much harder to claim--even when it's justified--that this time, the danger is real.

But the "body bags" argument's political problems go deeper than just its recent history of being refuted by events. Many of those past solemn cautions about the threat of huge casualties in Kuwait, Serbia and Afghanistan were in fact disingenuously inflated doomsday predictions coming from reflexive pacifists who wouldn't have supported those military actions even if they had been guaranteed casualty-free. The "quagmire" warning has thus become entangled, in public debate, with a broad geopolitical ideology that includes perennial strong distaste for (American) military action--regardless of the cost--and a preference for multilateral diplomatic "solutions" that amount to inaction and even active appeasement in the face of aggression. A perfect expression of this ideology can be found, surprisingly enough, in Brent Scowcroft's recent WSJ op-ed, which is amazingly retro in tone; like a 1980's peacenik or 1990's paleoliberal, he prattles on about the importance of "international cooperation", a potential "explosion of outrage" in the Arab world over America's placing the Iraq problem ahead of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the need for "pressing the United Nations Security Council to insist on an effective no-notice inspection regime for Iraq".

Since September 11th, that approach has been relegated (in America, at least) to a pacifist fringe; Americans are more likely these days to consider it a cause of than a solution to the resurgent terrorist threat they've been confronting of late. Politicians and pundits are therefore terrified of even appearing to embrace such a discredited worldview--by, for example, voicing more moderate qualms about military action that have been tainted by association with it. (No doubt that's why, as Frank Rich has noted, public doubt about the wisdom of an invasion of Iraq has come primarily from Republicans like Scowcroft, who are presumably more insulated--by virtue of their party's hawkish recent past--than Democrats against the charge of one-world Euroweenie woolly-headedness.) That's a shame, because the tough-minded, containment-based case against massive military action is as legitimate, and just about as credible, as the case for invasion itself, and therefore ought to be made and discussed more seriously--this time, at least.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, of course; the parade of steadily shriller and shriller denunciations of "corporate malfeasance" in the press have clearly all been heading in this direction. But who'd have expected a distinguished economist like Paul Krugman, of all people, to break the taboo by being the first (that I've seen, at least) actually to blame a company's executives directly for the terrible crime of permitting its stock price to rise too high, and then fall too far?

The company in question is Cisco. Says Krugman, "its market capitalization has fallen by more than $400 billion. Nobody from Cisco management — ranked No. 13 in Fortune's 'greedy bunch' — has been arrested." And to think that right here, in America, a stock's price can plummet, and the government just lets it happen!

Not that its current, reduced price is the problem, of course; at its height, admits Krugman, "[s]ome analysts flatly called Cisco a pyramid scheme." In fact, that's Krugman's real complaint: there was an "illusion of profitability" that "sustained the stock price", an illusion that the company conjured up by "using its own overvalued stock as currency — paying its employees with stock options, acquiring other companies by issuing more stock. Thanks to loopholes in the accounting rules — loopholes defended with intense lobbying — these transactions allowed executives to progressively dilute the stake of their original shareholders, without ever declaring this dilution as a business cost."

Now to some people, issuing more stock when it's grossly overvalued and using it to lure employees and buy other companies might seem like an astute way to try to preserve shareholders' long-term value in the midst of a bubble. What were Cisco executives supposed to do, after all, while investors were bidding up its stock price to ridiculous levels--use corporate funds to buy back its own shares at the inflated price? No, if customers are willing to overpay for your product, then you're betraying your shareholders by charging any less than the market will bear. And likewise, if there's a huge market demand for your stock at an excessive price, then creating more of it and selling it to new investors is the only way to fulfill your duty to your current shareholders (and to the new ones, for that matter, once their stupidity in coming aboard is behind them).

Of course, the bubble that carried Cisco stock to such absurd heights also enriched its executives (and other employees), through their stock options. And that really cheeses Krugman off: "the Cisco story...demonstrates just how much self-enrichment corporate insiders can get away with while staying within the letter of the law." What self-enrichment? Cisco's CEO, John Chambers, "was among the world's best-paid executives, receiving $157 million in 2000." Got that? In 2000. When the stock price was high, Chambers' fellow shareholders were all making a fortune along with him, and none of them was uttering a peep of complaint about Chambers' windfall. In fact, either Chambers kept most of his holdings and options too long--in which case he also lost a colossal bundle in the ensuing stock slide--or he liquidated most of his holdings and exercised most of his options at their peak value, in which case anyone who didn't follow his example (which would have been publicized, by law, as an insider transaction) was a fool.

And that's the real point. Nowhere--nowhere--in his column does Krugman so much as hint that Cisco executives falsified or concealed any information from anyone. Rather the felony of which they stand accused is that of failing to stop their stock from skyrocketing, attempting to maximize the company's long-term gain from its own high stock price, and then watching helplessly as that price fell back to earth. To Krugman (and to most of his fellow fulminators about "corporate malfeasance"), the entire stock bubble itself was clearly the fault of "unscrupulous" corporate CEOs, crooked accountants, lax regulators--anybody but the idiot investors who cluelessly poured their money into horribly overpriced stocks during the bubble years. Investors, that is, like a great many of Paul Krugman's (and his fellow fire-and-brimstone journalists') naive, confused, irate, savings-depleted readers, now searching for a scapegoat--and being shamelessly pandered to by a once-respected economist.

I'ts far less contagious than influenza, causes no symptoms in 80 percent of the people it infects, and is a serious threat only to the elderly and immune-impaired (putting it on roughly the same footing as certain fungal infections). So why all the hysteria about the West Nile virus?

My theory: It's all in the name. My imaginary uncle the Beverly Hills doctor ("G.P. to the stars") would almost surely have said (had he actually existed) that to get noticed, a disease first needs a catchy monicker--preferably one with a hint of dangerous-sounding exoticism. I'd say "West Nile" stacks up pretty well on that score, conjuring up images of destitute Egyptian peasants bathing in a highly septic river, or perhaps of adventurous tourists O.D.-ing on Immodium after buying cut-rate local "bottled" water.

Of course, had it been called "West Congo" instead, there'd be panic in the streets by now, even if the illness only involved the tiniest bit of bleeding out the eyeballs in the vast majority of cases. On the other hand, "Westchester" virus could easily have passed into endemic status without anyone even noticing. And "West Hollywood" virus would have everyone lining up around the block to get infected.

Just my two cents, as Larry King would say....

I don't normally link to articles just (or even mostly) to rave about them. But David Brooks' gently satirical sketch of America's "sprinkler cities" and their inhabitants, the species known as "Patio Man", is worth singling out. Its deft prose and dead-on social perspicacity make it the equal of any Tom Wolfe piece, but without any of the potent venom that can make Wolfe so discomfiting to read.

Brooks' subjects are the brand new, carefully planned "exurbs" that have sprung up well beyond the perimeters of the suburbs surrounding America's big cities. Populated predominantly by middle-class families, retirees and post-industrial high-tech and service industries, these communities represent a new and distinct demographic that has yet to be courted and analyzed by political operatives and pundits. In fact, they may well be the main host population for the blogging phenomenon--a neglected political cohort with the means to express itself on its own initiative, using modern technology.

What are Patio Man's politics? Brooks characterizes them as solidly Republican, culturally traditional, focused on entrepreneurial and educational achievement and fanatical about social and community harmony. But they are not the economically subordinate "red state" working-class right I have been claiming represents one half of the bipolar modern American polity. Rather, they seem to be a third, "middle" tier, politically allied with their economic inferiors, but (according to Brooks) fleeing the gradual penetration and downscaling of the suburbs by unruly immigrants and blue-collar workers as much as they're fleeing the snobbery of the new suburban liberal overclass. Patio Man is thus clearly a pure product of the nineties boom, achieving his intermediately successful economic status as a result of that decade's explosive spawning of mobile modern high-tech and service-industry start-ups.

It thus remains to be seen whether Patio Man can survive the current economic downturn. Mortgaged to the hilt and employed in a "new economy" enterprise of dubious durability, he can little afford higher interest rates, falling home prices or weakening consumer and corporate spending--let alone the impending combined onset of all three. It may be, then, that sprinkler cities will become the ghost towns of the early twenty-first century, as their residents abandon their forclosed or negative-equity homes and shuttered employers in favor of lower-paying jobs with greater stability, leaving the mega-malls to die of customer neglect, the perfectly-kempt lawns to wither unsprinkled, and the dreams of a prosperous white-collar conservatism shattered.

The latest in cosmetic surgery, apparently, involves navel display--converting "outie" belly buttons to "innies".

But what if you want a star on your belly?

Times have certainly changed. A couple of years ago, when the market was skyrocketing and investors seemingly couldn't go wrong, it was often argued that stock-picking was for chumps--after all, why throw away a percent or two of savings growth a year on managers' fees, or gamble everything on an insufficiently broad portfolio, when an index fund virtually guarantees near-double-digit returns over the long term? Well, now that the market's tanking, Daniel Gross is singing a different tune in Slate, criticizing the S&P 500 index for, of all things, being lousy at picking stocks--adding companies to the index just as their share prices peak, and then keeping them on the roster as they collapse.

The charge is, of course, utterly absurd; the S&P 500 is supposed to track the large-cap market, not beat it, and if investors are pumping up dubious tech stocks to absurd valuations, then it's not S&P's place to second-guess their judgment. Moreover, the index investing dogma of the nineties asserted adamantly that such fluctuations shouldn't matter anyway to the long-term buy-and-hold investor, who could look forward to excellent returns by explicitly not timing the market, buying instead at a constant rate ("dollar-cost averaging") year in and year out, and counting on the market's historically reliable high return rate to do its work.

The flaw in this strategy--as we have now all been so painfully reminded--lies in its assumption that stocks' consistently higher return rates are a blessing that simply drops out of the sky into the laps of delighted passive investors. In fact, their true source is the vigilantly skeptical discipline of history's (overwhelmingly active, portfolio-managing) investors, who have made a practice of avoiding stocks whose high prices precluded a sufficient return on their invested purchase price. By refusing to overpay, those finicky investors kept stock prices (relative to earnings) down, and thus returns (per dollar invested) high.

Passive (or uninformed) investors, on the other hand, show no such discipline; they robotically pour their money into index (or, for that matter, actively managed all-stock) funds, regardless of current share prices or prospective corporate earnings. And as their numbers increase, they can exert a significant influence on those share prices, lifting them to the point where the potential earnings (again, per dollar invested) of the companies they represent pale in comparison with the earning power of, say, Treasury bills.

Eventually, of course, sharp-eyed investors begin to notice that they're being fleeced and head for the exits, bursting the bubble and stranding the remaining shareholders with stock worth a tiny fraction of its grotesquely overinflated purchase price. That's exactly what happened to most of the millions of American investors who collectively lost trillions of dollars in the market over the last several years. By comparison, the effects of badly-timed additions to or deletions from the S&P 500 index are a piddling, deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic irrelevancy.

You might have been wondering, during the debate over government subsidies to Amtrak, how the money might otherwise have been spent. Well, here are some relevant figures: Amtrak was granted a $520 million capital subsidy in 2001, plus another $105 in "safety and operations" funding (another $130 million-odd was spent on sundry other passenger rail projects, including "research and development"). The previous year, Amtrak supplied about 5.5 billion passenger miles of rail transportation; total passenger rail subsidies thus amounted to about 13.5 cents per passenger mile.

In 2000 (the most recent year for which figures appear to be available), Greyhound bus lines took in a total of about $1 billion in revenue, while providing nearly 8 billion passenger miles of bus transportation, for a total of about 13 cents per passenger mile (and that's assuming zero profit and zero revenue from non-passenger sources such as its package-shipping service). Meanwhile, Continental Airlines brought in 13.44 cents of revenue per passenger mile; United's figure was 13.25 cents, and American's was 14.05 cents. (Since 2000, airlines' revenues per passenger mile have declined, while Amtrak's subsidy per passenger mile has increased. Greyhound's parent company, Laidlaw, has been granted bankruptcy protection, so Greyhound's recent revenue figures are hard to come by.)

Remember, these are revenue figures--the amount these companies charged for the transportation they provided. (And all were profitable during the year in question.) In other words, the government's 2001 subsidy of passenger rail would have been approximately sufficient to pay for all of Amtrak's passengers the previous year to take a bus or plane instead--absolutely free.

On the other hand, it's not entirely certain that Amtrak's passengers would have taken this deal, even if they could somehow have been identified and offered the switch. After all, Amtrak is hardly the price-sensitive traveler's first choice; its fares on the most popular routes are typically slightly above the best available airfare (as a bit of experimentation with Amtrak's and Expedia's Websites will show), let alone the cost of a bus ticket. More likely, rail passengers are opting for comfort and convenience--particularly compared to Greyhound, whose highly, uh, "price-conscious" clientele may be exactly what Amtrak's passengers are looking to avoid. Viewed in this light, the massive federal subsidy provided to Amtrak's affluent, luxury-seeking customers is, pace the "egalitarian" mass transit ideologues, an appalling example of expensive, wasteful government favoritism towards the well-to-do.

Bloggers the world over, led by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, are hooting in celebration of John Leo's proclamation, in an entire column on blogging in the oh-so-mainstream US News and World Report, that "[t]he main arena for media criticism....will be the Internet." Now, I'm as enthused about the blogging phenomenon as anyone (okay, as anyone I know), but in understanding its growth and influence, it's important to separate form from content.

A stroll through the "blogosphere", as it's called, reveals that a very large fraction of blogs are nothing more than the appallingly tedious, self-centered ramblings of appallingly tedious, self-centered people (whether "I Could Be Wrong" falls into this category is of course a question for you, the reader, to decide). Many more are simply Web versions of the moderated electronic bulletin board, a medium that has been used for decades now by technical specialists and hobbyist-enthusiasts to disseminate information and host discussions targeted at a particular narrow audience.

The relatively small collection of political and media-critic blogs that have risen to such spectacular popularity and prominence lately are simply new-technology equivalents of the low-budget "alternative" publications that sprang up in the political ferment of the late '60's and early '70's. Like bloggers, "alternative" journalists used the cheapest publication medium at hand to give expression to a nascent political faction that just happened to catch on and mount a serious challenge to one of the dominant political coalitions of the day. Back then, it was a radical-left takeover by educated upscale youth of the previously working-class, mildly populist institutions of the liberal-Democratic coalition; today, educated, upscale youth on the libertarian right are hoping to conquer the distinctly working-class, mildly populist institutions of the conservative-Republican coalition.

If they succeed, then blogs will be the Rolling Stone, Village Voice and urban "alternative weeklies" of the early 21st century--an established, commercially successful media vehicle catering to a particular political demographic. And if they fail, then blogging will likely simply return to its obscure specialist-and-vanity roots, until the next political upheaval--or the next technology--takes over. Either way, it will be the content it carries, not the blog form itself, that will determine its fate.

It's chutzpah week on the Israeli left. Shimon Peres has apparently told the German news magazine Der Spiegel that he has "doubts" about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's commitment to peace in the Mideast, and that he is not certain Sharon can be considered a partner for peace any longer. I had no idea that Peres had officially taken up his post as foreign minister for the Palestinian Authority, but now that he is openly (and negatively) evaluating the Israeli Prime Minister's suitability to reach a deal with him in that new capacity, it would behoove him, at least, to resign from his position in said Prime Minister's government. No such luck: "As long as I can serve as a balancing factor, I'll stay." A nation at war can ill afford a cabinet minister who sees his role as "balancing" the views of his loyal colleagues by representing the enemy within the government. Peres' continued membership in the cabinet is a serious danger to his country, lending credibility to anti-Israel agitators around the world, and undercutting the valid arguments of Israel's defenders in the battle against terrorism.

Meanwhile, Gideon Samet in Ha'aretz waxes furious about the killing of Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh and the supposed ceasefire it supposedly interfered with: "a genuine opportunity to break the cycle of terror and retaliation was buried in Gaza." Putting aside the vague, dubious nature of the alleged ceasefire proposal (Amir Oren, also in Ha'aretz, throws a ton of cold water on all the talk of a "breakthrough"), I don't recall Gideon Samet standing foursquare behind Ariel Sharon's firm policy of "no negotiations under fire", when the latter was refusing to make political concessions to the Palestinians in the face of terrorist attacks. On the contrary, I seem to recall him and his fellow peaceniks arguing at the time that military restraint and willingness to negotiate--even under the threat of terrorism--were necessary to the serious pursuit of peace. Why, then, would Samet believe that Israel's attack on a terrorist leader in Gaza--even one that killed several civilians as a regrettable side effect--can rightly be blamed for scuttling Palestinian ceasefire initiatives this time? Or does he consider "no negotiations under fire" a reasonable position for Palestians to take, but abominably warlike when held by Israelis?

"Instapundit" Glenn Reynolds has been arguing for a while now that "airport security is a dangerous joke", completely incapable of accomplishing anything beyond acute passenger harassment. I've generally been inclined to cut the security folks a little more slack than that, given the difficulty of their job and the constraints (including the political ones) under which they're working. But my experience yesterday at Sea-Tac International Airport (in the Seattle area) has gotten me thinking that maybe Prof. Reynolds has a point. You see, my fellow passengers and I were all subjected to the now-standard thorough security check, including baggage X-ray, before being allowed into the terminal gate area--from the plane. That's right--we were led directly from our overseas flight to the immigration officers, then baggage claim and customs, then the metal detectors, where they carefully searched us for any firearms we might have acquired in Europe and brought on board our airliner (but somehow neglected to use up until that point). They even checked my shoes for explosives, just in case I might have smuggled some C4 plastique onto the plane in the soles of my New Balances, only to change my mind and target the duty-free shop instead.

As I told them, "you guys are so lucky making jokes about this stuff is illegal."

Just in case anyone might have thought my characterization of the American criminal justice system as a bizarre cult was an exaggeration, the latest development in the Zacarias Moussaoui case should remove all doubt. In a scene straight out of classic film farce, the accused terrorist, having decided for convoluted reasons to confess, shouts at the judge, "I am a member of Al Qaida", and demands to plead guilty. But the judge refuses to accept the plea, and gives him a week to think it over.

One almost feels sympathy for the baffled Moussaoui. He was prepared to die a martyr's death, and probably even to be tortured and executed by the infidels; what he could never have expected was that he would instead be forcibly incorporated into their perverse religious rites. Having firmly and openly declared his guilt, he suddenly finds that guilt or innocence is no longer the issue; rather, he is told that he must follow the holy rules and procedures, which require him to accept the assistance of a cultic acolyte in seeking out instances of ritual impurity in his accusers' performance of the sacred dance of prosecution, and present those instances before a priest of the sect. If they are successful, then the accused wins his freedom; if he fails, he is punished as unworthy, although the choice of punishment is itself a highly ritualized process. (As Judge/Priest Leonie Brinkema tells him, it's "normal, in criminal cases, to plea bargain".)

And if he refuses to embrace this arcane liturgy with all his heart--as Moussaoui is now finding out--he is declared a madman, and is treated as such. For only a lunatic, saith the Priests, would reject any of the true teachings of the Law, or deviate in the slightest from the elaborate ceremonial practices specified therein--by, for instance, blurting out the blindingly obvious truth of his own guilt.

Last December, before this blog came to be, I posted a comment to the Slate Fray about the debate over John Walker Lindh, expressing concern that current American law, with its focus on concrete criminal actions, may not be up to the task of prosecuting terrorist "sleeper" agents stationed in the US, quietly awaiting the command to attack. I suggested the RICO statute, used so successfully against organized crime syndicates, as one possible solution to the problem. Well, the idea (which had unsurprisingly crossed other minds before mine) has finally made it into Slate--as a sarcastic, "Modest Proposal"-style critique of the broad reach of federal conspiracy law. Apparently, Stanford law professor Robert Weisberg considers RICO and its ilk such egregious abuses of government power that merely pointing out that they might cover "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla is enough to discredit them completely. (Not everyone caught his sarcasm, and Weisberg ended up having to explain himself. I suggested in response that if he wanted to attack federal conspiracy statutes, he might consider pointing to at least one specific case of an actual not-so-horrible person who was unfairly prosecuted under those laws, rather than shouting, "they're so vague they could even be used to prosecute Al Qaida sleeper agents awaiting the call to commit murderous terrorist acts!")

Of course, a law professor can be expected to view the criminal justice system as a means to the end of satisfying the quasi-religious abstract aesthetic of civil libertarians. But what about the public response to the now-infamous Inglewood videotape? The whole country has now watched Inglewood police officer Jeremy Morse slam arrested teenager Donovan Jackson onto the hood of his car and cuff him in the face--no prolonged beating with batons, just a slam and a punch--and everywhere the reaction is outrage. Michelle Cottle, while defending the police against charges of racism, concedes without argument that "[t]he tape shows some pretty nasty business", and that it's "abundantly clear" that "excessive force was used". Jack Dunphy, the National Review's resident pseudonymous policeman and a stout defender of his profession, also acknowledges that "it seems plain from watching the videotape" that Morse "used excessive force", and suggests that the deputies on the scene of the incident "were troubled by what they had witnessed." And that's what the defenders of the police are saying. Perhaps that's why there are no fewer than five investigations underway, and the surreptitious videorecorder of the arrest can be heard on the tape commenting about the offending officer, "You just lost your job, buddy."

Now, we don't know all the facts of the incident, and it's possible that it was nothing more than an unprovoked display of sadistic brutality. But the officers in question apparently reported--before knowing about the videotape--that they had had to punch a lunging Jackson to subdue him before he was handcuffed. While the rules do supposedly dictate that once handcuffed, a suspect must be treated with kid gloves, it seems to be common knowledge that the police don't normally follow that particular rule. And in fact, I doubt that such a rule is even workable, for the simple reason that if a misbehaving suspect is treated exactly like a quiescent one once the cuffs are on, then the disincentive to "get one's licks in" before the cuffs are applied largely disappears. Although I don't have the statistics at hand, I would be very surprised, for that reason, if the number of "difficult" arrests hasn't skyrocketed since concerns about police brutality have made it harder for the police to deal harshly with those who resist arrest.

But complaints about the Inglewood videotape and the RICO statute are not about the messy practicalities of fighting crime and protecting the innocent. They're about obeisance to a strange American dogma, which requires that law enforcement authorities be assumed to be ruthless, oppressive monsters at all times, however honorable, difficult and carefully-performed their job. The dogma does not make law enforcement any more effective, nor, as the Iglewood incident shows, does it make the police any more gentlemanly towards the public; mostly it just encourages dishonesty and hypocrisy on the part of the authorities, as they struggle to maintain the appearance of adherence to the absurdly unrealistic standards of conduct imposed upon them. But societies are often willing to pay a high price for the sake of clinging to their religious beliefs, and America is no exception.

Tipper Gore apparently told her husband Al she'd like to see him run for president again in 2004. This time, though, he says he'd be less constrained by "polls, tactics and all the rest": "if I had it to do over again, I'd just let it rip....I would have poured out my heart...."

Hmm...one wonders what the happy couple might do on stage to celebrate his next nomination....

In the Washington Post, Afghan women's rights activist Belquis Ahmadi complains that post-Taliban hopes for progress towards equal treatment of women in her country have been "eclipsed by a growing sense of futility in the face of threats, bribes and intimidation by warlords and their supporters." Sure sounds like equal treatment to me....

In her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs skewered the urban planners of the early-to-mid-20th century who viewed cities as, at best, necessary evils, idealized the majestic country estate as the perfect living environment, and hence devoted themselves to introducing rural elements--parks, open spaces, grand buildings--into city life, with disastrous results. The famous "urban renewal" public housing projects of the 1950's, huge high-rises surrounded by large, empty areas of greenery, are typical of the designs of that school, according to Jacobs, and their resounding failure to inspire anything but misery and social disintegration is a testament to the wrongheadedness of the ruralists' ideas.

Steven Spielberg's recent film, Minority Report, is ostensibly about the paradox of free will and moral responsibility in a deterministic universe. But (without revealing too much about the plot) it treats the whole issue in a fairly perfunctory manner; the hero, a futuristic policeman played by Tom Cruise, pursues a resolution to the conundrum of human autonomy pretty much the same way any action hero pursues his designated "McGuffin" (to use Alfred Hitchcock's term for the object--be it a black box, secret document, or missing person--that the hero must find to save the day).

The real focus of the film, in fact, is Spielberg's vision of life in the year 2054, and in Jane Jacobs' old argument about the city vs. the country, Spielberg comes down resolutely on the anti-urban--that is, anti-Jacobs--side. In Minority Report, the city is a filthy, corrupt, brutal place, where herds of soulless people file through soulless public spaces, bombarded ceaselessly with commercial pitches, tracked constantly by identity, and policed by a "department of precrime" that predicts their future offenses, arrests them before the fact, and "imprisons" them by drugging them into a catatonic state that seems little different from their previous urban lives. In an area called "the Sprawl", which resembles a present-day inner-city landscape, the grimy lower classes live squalid lives in decrepit high-rises, hustling to stay alive and ahead of the ubiquitous authorities.

But several times during the film, we see a glimpse of another world entirely: rural settings where happy, fulfilled, emotionally rich characters lead idyllic lives in isolated surroundings of breathtakingly peaceful natural beauty. It's never clear why these people, alone among the hordes, have been blessed with such picture-perfect country estates (there is no suggestion that any of them is particularly weathy, although one of them has a background story that suggests she might be). But it is very clear that any city mouse would switch places with one of these country mice in a heartbeat.

Visions of dehumanizing high-tech urban dystopias and pristine natural Edens are a staple of pessimistic science fiction, of course. But they are normally meant primarily as stylized or symbolic elements; the celebrated rain-soaked futuristic-film-noir Los Angeles depicted in the film Blade Runner, for instance, is more a (magnificently realized) stylistic backdrop to the story than an element of the story itself. The city/countryside dichotomy in Minority Report, on the other hand, is jarring precisely because it appears to be intended as a plausible extrapolation of the present into the future. (The ubiquitous ads pummelling the city folk, for example, are lent verism by the recognizeable real-world products that appear in them.) And as an extrapolation, it is missing the one crucial component that has rendered the city-country debate moot in modern America: suburbia.

Personally, I consider myself an urbanist at heart, and I sympathize strongly with Jacobs' defense of the city. But there's no denying that the suburbs, which already house the majority of Americans and are still growing, provide most people, particularly families with children, with an optimal (to them) compromise between the space and privacy of the country and the convenience and variety of the city. And in a technologically advanced, consumer-oriented world apparently possessed of ample rural space, one would only expect the flight to the security and comfort (not to mention the surveillance-unfriendliness) of the suburbs to expand still further. An imagined future in which suburbia has instead simply vanished without explanation can't be placed front and center in a film--even a science-fiction fantasy--without unduly straining the audience's credulity.