FEMA Not Functioning

I got an unintentionally funny email at work. At least I find it ironic. It seems there is a Unix server around here named FEMA that is just not functioning properly and had to be recycled. Well, what else would you expect from a FEMA? Coming right on the heels of all the 6 months after Katrina news coverage, I think this is too funny.

Canadian Health Care

Cafe Hayek comments on the Canadian health care system:

The New York Times reports that the Canadian system is imploding. A recent Candian Supreme Court decision allowed private health care (oh, the shame, the horror) and as a result, Canadians tired of waiting for radiation therapy, eye surgery and hip replacements have turned toward private alternatives springing up under the new legal environment.

But isn't this a good solution, a hybrid of government funded and privately funded health care? Why is the emergence of privately funded care the death of anything?

Having a cost-controlled, single payer system will certainly have some limitations. But it has the key benefits of (a) controlling the skyrocketing costs of health care, which as I have tried to point out many times is more than just the cost of insurance, which is destined to be in the not too distant future a serious dead weight on the economy and (b) providing needed care for everyone. Including privately funded health care in addition, will allow those better off to get care that would otherwise be limited.

This is not an either-or situation. One of the problems in addressing the looming crisis of health care costs is that we try to find a single solution that will address all needs, and such a solution does not exist.

Critics of a single-payer system will point to the limitations and delays found in countries that have implemented such a system, concluding that it's not a good thing. They point to the benefits of our privately funded system, ignoring the fact that Americans pay more for health care than anyone else, that the costs of that care are already dragging down the economy and those effects are going to get dramatically worse in the coming years, and that a large percentage of the population does not have the insurance to cover these costs and therefore get inadequate health care.

Advocates for a single payer system will point to those limitations of the current system, but ignore the price tag, both in terms of money and quality, that comes with their system.

The reality is we need both. We need absolute controls on costs, that would come by having a government agency provide coverage for all Americans at agreed upon prices. But that should not preclude the affluent from getting private insurance. Those who can afford it should certainly be able to get it. So, contrary to Cafe Hayek's view, this development in Canada points the way to a good solution to the problem here in the US.

Saddam Hussein Ends Hunger Strike

It seems Saddam has ended his hunger strike, for health reasons. Uh huh. That everyone around him was probably cheering him on and wishing him full success in his starvation had nothing to do with it.

Free Server

Want to get a free server from Sun? They're giving them away on a trial basis for evaluation, and if you blog a review of the machine and send the link to Sun, they might let you keep it.

Kallahar's Place: Is Yahoo Banning Allah?

Kallahar's Place documents her struggles to get Yahoo to allow her a user ID with her name in it. You see, her name contains the string allah, which they ban. She can be jehova or yahweh, but not kallahar. She can have an ID like iloveadolfhitler293409, rapeismyhobby1, or jewskilledjesus999, but not kallahar. She can have any number of obscene IDs, but not kallahar. I guess Yahoo doesn't want to offend anyone, and that offends me.

Update Apparently Yahoo has reversed course and will now allow IDs with allah in the text.

Torture, a Transformative Issue

Andrew Sullivan is looking at a piece in the New Yorker on the torture of American victims military detainees. In one post, he quotes Alberto Mora, former general counsel for the Navy:

To my mind, there's no moral or practical distinction. If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America —— even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles. It's a transformative issue.

That may sound idealistic, but this country is supposed to stand for something. It is supposed to espouse the basic values we want the rest of the world to embrace. (And I think the places of the world we want to emulate us have already mastered the art of torture, so they don't need us to show them how to do it.) When our president twists and perverts some of our more basic values, and we the people accept it, we are changed. It's not just the Constitution that crumbles under the boot of a president who feels himself above the law and bound to no standard of morality or legality. It is the very heart of our nation, of who we are and what we say we believe that crumbles.

Balkin on Fuguyama

Making a similar point to what I was trying to make yesterday, Jack Balkin comments on Fuguyama's article:

What struck me though, in reading it, was how many of his claims about what was wrong with the Bush Administration's policies were available in 2001, and, indeed, were stated over and over again by critics of the Administration in the run up to the Iraq war. People in power simply didn't want to listen, or if they did listen, they discounted the advice because they were completely convinced of the correctness and righteousness of their own world view. They ridiculed their critics as naive, cowards, sore losers, weak-willed conciliators, unconcerned with America's national security, and sometimes even as traitors. And much of the country, which likes strong leadership, simply went along, trusting that its leaders had the knowledge, the wisdom, and the expertise to back up their bluster.

The sad thing is that lesson has yet to be learned. To this day, anyone who dares criticize the administration are deemed weak-willed and unconcerned with national security. What was the president's response to questions about the legality of his domestic spying program? To imply that questioning him and trying to force the President of the United States to obey the law would undermine national security. (Law? We don't need no stinkin' law!) To the outrage over this administration's torture policies? Well, we're trying to protect the country. And people just lap it up.

Evolution And Mistakes of Neoconservatism

Frank Fukuyama has published a lengthy article on the development of neocon ideology and the errors that have resulted from that movement. Andrew Sullivan has a good summary of the mistakes portion.

In retrospect, neoconservatives (and I fully include myself) made three huge errors in the last few years. The first was to over-estimate the competence of government, especially in extremely delicate areas like WMD intelligence. The shock of 9/11 provoked an understandable but still mistaken over-estimation of the risks we faced. And our fear forced errors into a deeply fallible system. The result was the WMD intelligence debacle, something that did far more damage to the war's legitimacy and fate than many have yet absorbed. Fukuyama's sharpest insight here is into how the near miracle of the end of the Cold War almost certainly lulled many of us into over-confidence about the inevitability of democratic change, and its ease. We got cocky. We should have known better.

Sullivan lists two others: narcissism and not taking culture seriously.

The biggest problem was that the neocons thought in the rosiest of terms, always assuming the best possible outcome and never seeming to consider that things might not work out as well as they thought. The neocons were filled with visions of the Paris liberation, of joyous Iraqis filling the streets in rapturous celebration of their liberation. (Or, as Fukuyama illustrates it, Romania after the fall of the Ceausescus.) It didn't seem to occur to anyone that this might be a tad over optimistic, that after years of economic privation brought on by US-led sanctions of Iraq and relentless propaganda from the Baath regime against the United States, the people of Iraq might be a bit skeptical of their new rulers.

The neocons failed to think ahead. They thought only as far as the joy in the streets, not how groups like al Qaeda might exploit the resultant power vacuum, a vacuum exacerbated by our own incompetent preparation for post-war occupation. After all, if the Iraqis would be so deliriously happy after the fall of Saddam, there would be no vacuum and preparations would be unnecessary. The Iraqi people would simply accept the mantle of responsibility and govern themselves, magically accepting democracy and immediately filling the void left by Saddam. The lack of any organized opposition to Baath rule, of a nascent democratic movement to build on and accept this role was ignored.

The neocons failed to consider the Iraqi and Arab cultures. It was assumed that any democracy that would take root in Iraq would automatically resemble Western democracy in its acceptance of basic rights and its essential secularism. It was not considered that the people, particularly the long oppressed Shi'ites, might embrace their religion and give rise to a more Islamic democracy whose natural tendency would be closer relations with Iran.

And, of course, the neocons refused to believe their own eyes. Every piece of hard data on the ground before the war indicated that Saddam did not have WMDs. We supposedly knew exactly where they were being manufactured, but every time an investigatory team went to those locations, they came up empty. As a scientist, I understand the desire to continue believing your theory, even when experiment is raising questions. But sooner or later, you have to accept what the facts are showing. Not the neocons, who never let facts get in the way. (Reminds me of an MIT professor--tenured, of course--Irving Segal who came up with a theory called chronometrics that challenged general relativity. Astronomers tested his theory against their observations repeatedly, and the theory always came up short. The professor's response? The data and experiments are wrong. If they don't verify the theory, the facts are wrong. I still remember how totally absurd and pathetic it all was when he tried to defend this theory at a conference I attended, claiming the scientists were not analyzing the data right, or understanding the theory correctly. He would have been a good fit in Bush's intelligence community.)

Lefty Hate Versus Righty Hate

Andrew Sullivan has a good post, comparing his personal experience of hate from liberals and from conservatives.

Glenn Reynolds has an interesting post, citing Marshall Wittman, about how both the religious right and the religious (i.e. intolerant, doctrinaire) left have polarized discourse in this country, and policed dissidence from the party line. Marshall thinks the left is worse. Like Marshall, I've experienced vitriol from both sides in my time. I will say this: the hate and viciousness directed toward me from the left in the 1990s for daring to be a gay man who was not a liberal does indeed exceed the hate and viciousness of the right for a small-c conservative who has become alarmed by the excesses and errors of the Bush administration. No right-wing group has picketed a book-signing with posters depicting my face behind the cross-hairs of a gun, as the gay left did. No one on the right has gone nuclear on my private life, as the gay left did. No one on the right has threatened to find me in Ptown and split my skull open, or called me the anti-Christ, as some on the gay left have. Yes, I get homophobic hate mail from the right all the time; and many conservative blogs have blackballed or slimed or smeared me in various ways. But that's, sadly, what you get for being provocative and opinionated on the web. Bottom line: Hugh Hewitt is not as hateful as Eric Alterman, as any reader can see for themselves.

Liberal tolerance on the march again.

Health Care: Barrier to Hiring

A poll of CEOs of large US multinational corporations came out yesterday. The results are generally optimistic, and the media coverage mirrors this. But buried in the results is something that should give everyone pause:

Health-care costs retained the top spot on a list of domestic policy concerns, with 86 percent of CEOs calling them very important or the most important issue. Most predict benefit costs will rise further over the next year, and 42 percent called health-care costs a "major obstacle" to hiring.

(emphasis mine) Eli Lily CEO Sidney Taurel seperately expressed a similar concern.

Separately, Taurel, echoing the findings of a new survey of U.S. corporate leaders, agreed that the soaring cost of health care is the biggest single U.S. policy concern for the coming year and threatens the optimistic mood of American chief executives.

I've argued before that the skyrocketing cost of health care is a serious economic issue, as well as a philosophical and moral consideration. When the heads of nearly half of the US large companies consider the cost of providing health coverage to employees a barrier to hiring them, and that that concern alone could change the economic mood in the country, there is a problem.

Obsession with Shooting

I just visited the Think Progress blog. It's amazing. There were 20 postings on the main page, including the small little quote-type postings, 11 of which dealt specifically with Cheney's hunting accident, and one more that describes the accident as cover for the domestic spying scandal. Three posts in a row and four total dealt with the probing question of whether or not the VP had had a beer earlier that afternoon. Is this really what we need to be talking about?

This is one of my big complaints about lefty blogging, particularly the premier sites like Think Progress and Talking Points Memo. They grab little scandals and scadalettes that put conservatives in a bad light and put all their attention on them rather than discussing issues. Another example would be TPM diving into the minutia of the Abramoff scandal (I count 63 uses of Abramoff's name just in one week at TPM). Now he's on the shooting beat too.

Surely there's more to discuss than just the ways the Republicans can be made to look bad. Surely liberals have something to offer America other than, hey the conservatives are bad. Don't they?

My favorite moment of the State of the Union was when the president mentioned the defeat last year of his plan to address social security. The Democrats went crazy cheering this achievement. The president's reply was dead on: the problem is still there. (I liked the moment because it provided the only break from the carefully stage managed performance that was the speech and introduced, however briefly, a real human element. It reminded me of British politics, with a roudy Parliament questioning the PM.) Surely the Democrats have something more to offer than merely shooting down whatever the Republicans come up with. Don't they?

Post 9/11 Quails

Too funny. The Daily Show, via Political Wire:

Jon Stewart: "I'm joined now by our own vice-presidential firearms mishap analyst, Rob Corddry. Rob, obviously a very unfortunate situation. How is the vice president handling it?

Rob Corddry: "Jon, tonight the vice president is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Wittington. According to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush.

"And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Whittington's face."

Jon Stewart: "But why, Rob? If he had known Mr. Whittington was not a bird, why would he still have shot him?"

Rob Corddry: "Jon, in a post-9-11 world, the American people expect their leaders to be decisive. To not have shot his friend in the face would have sent a message to the quail that America is weak."

More jokes at Cheney's expense at WSJ. Another favorite, from Jay Leno: "When people found out he shot a lawyer his popularity is now at 92%." (It must be great to be a lawyer, knowing your profession is the butt of so many jokes.)

Game Review: Jade Empire (Limited Edition)

Yes, I am a bit behind the times in gaming. I don't usually get to a game until long after it's been released. Why spend $50 for one brand-new game when you can wait a while and get 3 games for the same $50? Anyway...

My first experience with the RPG genre was Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic. It was, and remains, my favorite game. What I didn't realize at the time was just how good that game was. I keep playing other RPGs, expecting to find what I liked about KoToR, and finding they don't have those elements, the biggest being story telling. Rather than work on the sequel to KoToR, Bioware chose to follow up with a brand new game, Jade Empire. Surely Bioware could provide a game every bit as good as KoToR.

Did they? Not really. The game is very good, but still falls short of KoToR.

The game is set in a world that looks and feels very much like ancient China. The characters all have Chinese-like names and there is a strong focus on martial arts. The empire has stood for centuries with the emperors all but worshipped. Decades ago, the empire was afflicted by a severe drought, but the emperor was eventually able to solve the problem, though no one knows exactly how. In the process of solving the drought, the Emperor found a new right-hand man, Death's Hand, who leads the Lotus Assassins, who are essentially the secret police of the empire. The game begins with the player as a student in a provincial martial arts academy. The Lotus Assassins attack the school, kidnapping the instructor. And the adventure begins.

As with KoToR, the player moves through the empire, tracking his master, and picking up followers along the way. The followers will aid in the quest and in combat. But not everyone or everything is as they appear to be.

What worked? The biggest improvement in Jade Empire is the combat system. KoToR had a glorified turn-based combat scheme in which the player chose one move at a time, queuing up to three moves to be executed in succession. The scheme had a bit more of a real-time combat system than true turn-based combat, as in Gladius. But it was still awkward and lacked the excitement of a more combat-oriented game. Empire improves on this approach resulting in a feel that is much closer to adventure games like the Lord of the Rings games than previous attempts. And there's plenty of fighting to be done.

There are also plenty of styles and techniques to choose from, from martial arts and swords to "demon" styles in which you transform into something else. So, there are plenty of ways to approach the myriad fights in the game. And one style won't work against every enemy. In KoToR, a light saber with master flurry or force storm destroyed just about everything in the path. You have to be more versatile in this game.

I played the game on my new XBox (first game I have played on the platform), whereas I played KoToR on a PC, so it's hard to compare graphics and performance. But the game looked and sounded fantastic. Having said that, there are some amusing exceptions to this. Occasionally, the player will be given interludes in which he has to engage in aerial combat, equivalent to those interludes in KoToR where you man the guns on the Ebon Hawk. These segments felt very retro, reminding me of the very old days of Defender on the Atari 2600. 2-D graphics with a little flyer icon moving back and forth across the bottom of the screen shooting enemies that come down from the top. (Defender meets Space Invaders.) And then there's a sequence late in the game where you have to defend a bridge while a follower sets some explosives. The character moves across the screen but the camera doesn't, so you end up fighting at the very edge of the screen against enemies you can't really see because they are off screen.

What didn't work? I have one complaint about the combat system, an element they seem to have incorporated from Enter the Matrix. In battle, the player's character moves as if to circle the enemy rather than simply moving in the direction the player directs. This makes it quite awkward to try to move the character around, for example to pick up a power up, or to simply get away from an enemy for a moment.

Like KoToR, the game has a morality element in which the player can choose to be a good guy (Way of the Open Palm, the equivalent of playing the light side in KoToR) or an evil guy (Way of the Closed First, equivalent of playing the dark side in KoToR). Unlike KoToR, there seemed to be little value in this. In KoToR, one's appearance changed according to alignment and one got a bonus to certain character attributes if mastery was achieved. Sith Lords expanded on this to have alignment affect interactions with the followers. In Empire, it didn't really seem to make much of a difference. There was a bonus earned late in the game (a new essence gem), but that's about it.

Speaking of followers, they add little if anything to the game. One of the things I loved about KoToR was interacting with the supporting characters and uncovering their stories. In Empire, they don't have stories. Or, if they do, the game reveals the stories as part of the plot; there is little purpose in talking to the other characters. The only real outcome was that one character fell in love with the main character and they kissed.

More generally, there isn't much of a story. Certainly, things didn't go the way I expected them to, with a surprising twist about two thirds of the way through. But overall, there really isn't much to the plot.

The game is billed as an RPG, but it's really RPG-lite. Most RPGs are built around giving the ability to customize and alter just about everything, from abilities and attributes, to clothing, appearance, etc. Empire gives you a choice among a handful of pre-built characters to begin the game, with no customization. While you can alter their attributes as the game progresses, as with any RPG, you are stuck with the face and clothing the character had to begin with. The game feels more like an action-adventure game with more choices about combat style than a true RPG. That's not necessarily bad. I happen to like action-adventure games. But it something to realize before choosing to play the game.

That's a lot of negatives, I guess, but it really is a good game. It's not much of an RPG, but it is an enjoyable action game with lots of combat and ways to approach the game. That should be more than enough to occupy most gamers' attention for a long time.

Church Burnings

Here's a story I haven't heard much about:

Flames engulfed another Baptist church in rural Alabama on Saturday, raising to 10 the number damaged or destroyed in what the FBI is calling possible hate crimes in just over a week.

Another Blow to Open Source?

Oracle is in the process of buying JBoss. JBoss primarily develops a high end, open source J2EE server--a key component in enterprise computing and in deploying web services--that competes with BEA's WebLogic, IBM's WebSphere, and Oracle's Application Server, among others. I believe JBoss is the most popular of these competing servers. And I think Blogger runs on JBoss.

This is another blow to the open source domain. Just a few months ago, Oracle purchased InnoDB which produced questions about the future of the popular open source database MySQL. As with that purchase, the terms are not clear. Will JBoss continue to be an open source application, just owned and primarily managed by Oracle? Or will Oracle bring JBoss under its big umbrella and cannibalize it for their own commercial product?

The existing code for JBoss is still out there. I'm not sure what the law here is. The code, while open source, is owned by JBoss. As I understand the laws, this means that anyone can download the code and make whatever changes they want for their own use. But official changes, i.e. those with the JBoss brand, can only come from JBoss itself. A developer can submit his or her changes, but JBoss has to decide if they want to incorporate them or not. Consequently, if JBoss were a part of Oracle, I don't think there would be anyway to manage the code changes to the open source code base because the managing authority would be out of the picture. So, the last open source release of JBoss would be out there for all to use, but there would be no organized way to continue developing the application.

That would likely be the purpose of the acquisition. They wouldn't be able to kill JBoss outright, but they would be able to essentially starve it to death by killing future development of the system. Customers, rather than sticking with outdated and unsupported code, would go to competing products, including Oracle's.

My response to that would be Geronimo! No, not jumping out of an airplane. I mean Apache's open source J2EE server, Geronimo.

Michelle Malkin: BUSH REVEALS FOILED TERROR PLOT

Michelle Malkin notes an announcement from the president that the US has foiled a major terrorist attack. Amazingly, this comes right on the heels of a State of the Union address which did not give the usual nudge upwards in presidential approval. And it comes the day after the president changed course and handed information about his possibly illegal domestic spying operations over to Congress. Not that there would be any relationship between these.

Update Sarcasm aside, The Military Outpost reports this threat "was derailed in early 2002." Four years later, the president trots this out and we're not supposed to notice that he deliberately chose to do so right on the heels of releasing this spying information to Congress? It's kind of like Jose Padilla. Right as the FBI is getting reamed for supposed failures to detect the 9/11 plot, Attorney General Ashcroft trots out the dirty bomb mastermind, Padilla, as an example of FBI success.

The BBC's Double Standards

Andrew Sullivan notes the double standard of how the BBC website describes Christianity and Islam. The Christianity page is full of references to "story" and "claims". For example, "The story of his birth to a virgin, Mary in a stable in Bethlehem is told in the writings of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament." Or, " Jesus claimed that he spoke with the authority of God."

The Islam page, on the other hand, is full of statements of fact. For example, "Islam was gradually revealed to humanity by a number of earlier prophets, but the final and complete revelation of the faith was made through the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in the 7th century CE." Or, "From this time on [after the conquest of Mecca] he was generally accepted as the true final Prophet of God (pbuh)."

Stormtroopers?

The president started his administration trying to get more funding for Star Wars missile defense. I guess not everyone understood what he wanted. Now we have defense contractors trying to model new Army facial armor off the stormtroopers' helmets. (Hat Tip: Andrew Kantor.)

Rome Pictures: Coliseum

Some more Rome pictures, primarily focused on the Coliseum.

	Some interesting looking older houses near the Vatican.
	Exterior view of the Coliseum. I am sure this was shot through a polarizing filter, hence the deep blue of the sky.
	Interior view of the Coliseum. You can easily see the similarity with today's outdoor stadia. It took me forever to understand all the structure in the middle of the arena. This was actually where animals were stored, combatants prepared (as in Gladiator), etc. On top of this area was the wooden floor of the arena itself, which was in turn covered with sawdust to absorb the blood.
	Another interior view of the Coliseum. It's a bit hard to see in the picture because it's so busy, but the emperor's box is in the middle. It was here the emperor would sit and take in the festivities, and would give the thumb up or thumb down after a gladiator match, indicating whether or not the loser would be killed. One of the main entertainments in the 2nd century Coliseum was the torture of Christians. In the Coliseum, they were fed to the lions, or crucified, or simply burned alive, to the roaring approval of the crowds and the emperor. In the emperor's box today, as seen in the picture, is a Christian cross. The emperors and their empire have long since died, but the Church they tried to destroy stands.
	A view through an arch in the Coliseum. As I noted in earlier photo posts, I liked the use of natural framing.

Tags: Rome, photos, travel

More Paris Photos

A couple more photos from Paris.

	This is a shot of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
	This is a night shot of the Louvre, with the IM Pei monstrosity on the left. (I guess some people like it. It doesn't really seem to fit, though.)

One for the Thumb

The Steelers, after 26 years of trying, finally get that elusive one for the thumb. I must say it was a pretty sloppy game, probably the worst Super Bowl since Ravens-Giants. Pittsburgh's offense didn't do much, at least on a consistent basis. They had a couple of big plays, but that's it. Ben looked as bad or worse as he did in last year's AFC title game. The Steeler defense gave up a lot of yards, but stiffened when it had to.

Seattle's propensity for dropping passes, that has doomed them for the last few years, came back and bit them hard. They had plenty of opportunities, but couldn't convert. Add to that the horrible clock management at the end of both halves, and you get a totally sloppy game, so much so that it is hard to argue, even as Pittsburgh played sloppy too, that they should have won. There seemed to be a lot of commuication problems. Near the end of the game, as Seattle is driving, I read Holmgren's lips as he yelled at Hasselbeck, "You got a play? You got a play?" I don't know what it meant, but shouldn't the coach be calling a play at that moment rather than yelling at his QB, asking if he's got one? Given what we heard about Matt audibling away from several plays in a row at the end of the first half, you have to wonder if Mike was just throwing up his hands in disgust, and sarcastically asking if Matt was ready to call a game. He definitely looked angry and disgusted at his QB. There were certainly some questionable calls to end both halves.

Did Holmgren ever congratulate Cowher on the game? Bill went to the middle of the field after the game ended and kept looking around, asking, "Where is Mike?" Bad sportsmanship, in my opinion, if Holmgren just stormed off when it was over.

The game was so unimpressive, even the commercials stunk. Right now, I cannot remember a single one. Well, alright, Go Daddy's bra popping stunts are always memorable. Yes, I do remember them, er ..., her, er ..., the commerical. What do they sell again?

The game was so unmipressive, even the Rolling Stones gave a lousy halftime show. They just didn't sound good. And Mick looked like he knew it has they gathered for a final bow.

During the March of the MVPs, why were Bradshaw and Montana skipped? I assume it was their choice, given that they are two of the biggest figures in Super Bowl lore. But no one ever explained why they weren't included.

It was great to see the response to Lynn Swann. For those who don't know, Swann is running for the GOP nomination for governor of Pennsylvania (and is expected to get it), and it seemed like he got the biggest reaction of all in the March of the MVPs.

Twenty years from now, no one will remember that this was a pretty sloppy Super Bowl. Only that the Steelers won their fifth, the first of maybe a few more as the young guns of the offense mature.

Civilization Versus Barbarians

So the Boston Globe also advocates sensitivity to the rioting Muslims. Again, let's just keep in mind what we're talking about. We supposedly need sensitivity to people like this:



Um... I don't think so. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for sensitivity, and think that anyone who would draw or publish cartoons about Muhammad should consider the reception those drawings will have in the Islamic world.

Be that as it may, this is not about insensitivity. As Instapundit puts it, this is about civilization versus barbarism. A call for people's death because of a drawing or a book has no place in a civilized world.

Just recently in this country, Entertainment Weekly Rolling Stone magazine ran a cover with rapper Kanye West decked out as Jesus Christ. I'm sure many Christians were offended by this. I sure was. But I don't recall any protests outside Time-Warner company headquarters, particularly any with placards calling for company executives to be beheaded or otherwise executed. Fundamentalist Christians protested the airing of the TV show Book of Daniel, again without calls for ABC executives to be murdered. Several years ago, Christians protested vigorously against selling a photograph of a crucifix lying in a pool of urine, yet again without resorting to death threats. (Of course, the papers like The Globe would typically condemn these types of protests as being intolerant and backward. No need for sensitivity there.)

Yet, the Globe's response to calls for beheadings is to simply call for sensitivity and to condemn those who would be so offensive. Ironically, the Globe called things as they were just last year, after the Qu'ran desecration riots.

No one recalled, for example, that American Catholics lashed out in violent rampages in 1989, after photographer Andres Serrano's ''Piss Christ" -- a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine -- was included in an exhibition subsidized by the National Endowment for the Arts. Or that they rioted in 1992 when singer Sinead O'Connor, appearing on ''Saturday Night Live," ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II.

There was no reminder that Jewish communities erupted in lethal violence in 2000, after Arabs demolished Joseph's Tomb, torching the ancient shrine and murdering a young rabbi who tried to save a Torah. And nobody noted that Buddhists went on a killing spree in 2001 in response to the destruction of two priceless, 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha by the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

Of course, there was a good reason all these bloody protests went unremembered in the coverage of the Newsweek affair: They never occurred.

Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don't lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted. They don't call for holy war and riot in the streets. It would be unthinkable for a mainstream priest, rabbi, or lama to demand that a blasphemer be slain. But when Reuters reported what Mohammad Hanif, the imam of a Muslim seminary in Pakistan, said about the alleged Koran-flushers -- ''They should be hung. They should be killed in public so that no one can dare to insult Islam and its sacred symbols" -- was any reader surprised?

The Muslim riots should have been met by outrage and condemnation. From every part of the civilized world should have come denunciations of those who would react to the supposed destruction of a book with brutal threats and the slaughter of 17 innocent people. But the chorus of condemnation was directed not at the killers and the fanatics who incited them, but at Newsweek.

(emphasis mine) What's changed? This new round of protests should meet with no less outrage and condemnation from the West as those last year.

To those protesting, I have to ask, who is the greater insult to your faith? The cartoonist who links your prophet with terrorist bombings or the terrorists whose actions make such an association something to be pointed out? By calling for holy war and the deaths of those who publish these cartoons, you are proving the point the cartoons are trying to make. As the Globe pointed out last year,

what disgraces Islam above all is the vast majority of the planet's Muslims saying nothing and doing nothing about the jihadist cancer eating away at their religion. It is Free Muslims Against Terrorism, a pro-democracy organization, calling on Muslims and Middle Easterners to ''converge on our nation's capital for a rally against terrorism" -- and having only 50 people show up.

Yes, Islam is disrespected. That will only change when throngs of passionate Muslims show up for rallies against terrorism, and when rabble-rousers trying to gin up a riot over a defiled Koran [or a drawing in a newspaper] can't get the time of day.

Will the Arab world join the ranks of civilized nations, or continue in the way of barbarism?

State Department Blasts Cartoons

The illustrious US government is blasting those cartoons running in European newspapers that make mention of Muhammed, on the grounds that they incite religious hatreds. A State Department spokesman is quoted, "We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices." Apparently the call for tolerance does not extend to the crazies who are causing such an uproar over cartoon panels in newspapers. I guess the rioters don't need to be tolerant of non-Muslim beliefs. Tolerance only goes one way?

We're talking about people who riot in the streets, with deadly results, because of a newspaper report that someone mishandled a Qu'ran. Now they riot because of a drawing. I mean, come on now. Grow up! If you want to be taken seriously, stop overreacting to every little thing. If you want us to stop thinking you are crazy, stop acting crazy.

And to the State Department, let's stop pretending these rioters are anything more than grossly overreacting, hyper-sensitive nuts. Christians in this country protest (peacefully) against a TV show that offends their sensibilities, and we treat them like fools. Muslims riot in the streets, burn flags, and threaten death because of a few drawings, and we should be more sensitive? No, we should tell them to grow up and stop acting like little children stomping their feet to assert their will.

Michelle Malkin gives a little summary of what we're talking about here.

Early Friday, Palestinian militants threw a bomb at a French cultural center in Gaza City, and many Palestinians began boycotting European goods, especially those from Denmark.

"Whoever defames our prophet should be executed," said Ismail Hassan, 37, a tailor who marched through the pouring rain along with hundreds of others in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

"Bin Laden our beloved, Denmark must be blown up," protesters in Ramallah chanted.

In mosques throughout Palestinian cities, clerics condemned the cartoons. An imam at the Omari Mosque in Gaza City told 9,000 worshippers that those behind the drawings should have their heads cut off.

"If they want a war of religions, we are ready," Hassan Sharaf, an imam in Nablus, said in his sermon.

About 10,000 demonstrators, including gunmen from the Islamic militant group Hamas firing in the air, marched through Gaza City to the Palestinian legislature, where they climbed on the roof, waving green Hamas banners.

"We are ready to redeem you with our souls and our blood our beloved prophet," they chanted. "Down, Down Denmark."

In face of this, our government says that we should just be more sensitive? This is how we conduct foreign policy now?

The Photo Hillary Doesn't Want You to See

Photos can be very flattering. And sometimes not so much. Thomas Galvin is looking for caption suggestions.

Ben Roethlisberger - Official Blog

For you Steeler fans who don't already know this, Big Ben has his own blog.

NFL 2005 Super Bowl Prediction

Before I start with an objective analysis and pick, let me get this off my chest.

GO STEELERS!!!!!!!! (I've been trying to find a better terrible towel icon than that, but this is the best I could come up with.)

Now I will be objective. (And if you think I cannot be, note that I have only been wrong once in these playoffs, and that was picking Indy to beat Pittsburgh.) Picking this game is not easy. First off the teams are very well and evenly matched, and are both sound in all aspects of the game. I'm also haunted by my snide comment before the season when I wrote, in giving up on Seattle to do anything, "Which probably means they will go to the Super Bowl."

Seattle is probably better than any team Pittsburgh has played in the playoffs. Yes, that includes the Colts. Certainly, the Colt offense is better, but the Seahawk defense is far better than the Colts', and the offense isn't all that bad. So, overall the Seahawks are the better team. Plus they are more of a true running team than Indy. One can argue the Steelers faced the Bear defense and handled it well. But, then again, the Seahawk defense handled Carolina well in the playoffs whereas the Bear defense got ripped apart. The Colts and Bengals were all about offense, and the Broncos, really, were primarily about defense. None of those opponents were dominant in both, like Seattle.

On the other hand, Seattle's road to the Super Bowl was beating Washington, whose offense set the record for least production in a postseason win in the wild card round, and the Panthers, who were on their fourth string running back most of the game and whose offense was far too dependent on Steve Smith. They haven't faced all that many good teams all year. So they haven't exactly faced a team of Pittsburgh's caliber, either.

So, it's hard to get a feel for either team's chances. Overall, Pittsburgh seems better prepared. They had the tougher regular season schedule and the tougher route through the playoffs. They play in a tougher division and a tougher conference. More importantly, Pittsburgh has been tested frequently in the last two months, from having to win out the season just to make the playoffs to playing the top three seeds in the AFC in the playoffs, whereas Seattle has had only one high caliber opponent in the same timeframe: Carolina. The Steelers are sharper mentally because of their road to the Super Bowl.

It sounds like I will pick my Steelers, doesn't it? There are some catches.

1. The Seahawk offense is clicking on all cylinders, whereas the Steeler running game, the core of their offense, has struggled in the playoffs. They have won on Big Ben's shoulders, but that isn't the offense the Steelers want to run. I don't think they want to put the biggest game of the season squarely on the shoulders of their second year quarterback, no matter how good he has shown himself to be.
   
2. The Steelers have won in the playoffs by bringing constant defensive pressure on the opposing quarterback. I don't know that that will work so well against Seattle. It worked against Kitna because he was a backup and hadn't had the work with the first string offense, nor the time on the field to get up to full speed. It worked against Indy because Manning would not adjust his play to exploit the holes the blitz left open. It worked against Plummer because, frankly, he wasn't good enough to stand in there and play. Hasselbeck is more mature than Plummer and will be more likely to adjust to what Pittsburgh gives him than Manning. If you force Polamalu into pass coverage, where he normally should be as a safety, and away from the blitz, as he has done so much in the playoffs, how much does that take away from the Steeler defense?
3. Being a more run-oriented team than some of Pittsburgh's other opponents, their offensive line is probably tougher. Pass blocking is simpler than run blocking. You basically get in the way of the defender. It's reactive. You don't care where he goes as long as it's not toward your quarterback. Run blocking is more proactive and physical. You not only get in the defender's way, you have to push him back and out of the way to open the hole. Being more physical, they can probably handle the blitz a bit better.
   
4. Coaching. I love Bill Cowher, but one cannot deny the fact that he has struggled throughout his tenure in Pittsburgh in big games. For all the wins and division titles, he's lost four conference title games, and the one Super Bowl he's been to. Holmgren, on the other hand, has won a Super Bowl and is in his third run. Coaches have to raise their game a notch in the post-season just as players do. And, honestly, Cowher hasn't necessarily proven himself there, whereas Holmgren has.

So where does that leave us? I still have to go with Pittsburgh. Both teams are solid on both sides of the ball, both are well coached, both can execute well on the field, and both are equally inexperienced in a game of this magnitude and therefore they are equally likely to be jumpy to start the game. In such an even matchup, the difference will come down to preparation. Because of their respective paths to the Super Bowl, I have to think Pittsburgh has the edge there, and that will make the difference. Prediction: Steelers.

Two weeks ago: 2-0
Playoffs: 9-1
Regular Season: 165-91