Ninth place? It’s no Fahrenheit 9/11. A reader dissents:
The movie was in 440 theaters and still came in at 9th (all of the top 8 were in 2000+ theaters). After three days it’s now the 14th highest grossing documentary of all time. $10,000 per theater average for an opening week is a hit for any movie, not to mention a non-fiction film.
The worrying aspect of the British terror-rash is that it’s obviously an amateur effort, inspired rather than organized by al Qaeda. This means we are likely to face more of these things, but that most of them are not going to be massively successful. They can still be deadly, of course, and we should be vigilant. But it seems to me we shouldn’t grant them the capacity to terrify us. That’s one happy consequence of 9/11. It’s hard to top; and every time they fail, they look sadder. A reader points out another salutary observation:
You can’t watch the response of UK police authorities in their public statements without being impressed with the careful balance they strike between exorting the public to vigilance and resistance to being stampeded into premature conclusions. And particularly their restraint in talking about those who were arrested. "Out of respect for proper process, we will avoid comment," they say. And indeed, that’s exactly what responsible law enforcement in a democratic society should say. It couldn’t contrast more sharply with the conduct of the Ashcroft and, still worse, Gonzales Justice Department which engages in hysterical rants, leveling charges that almost never pan out, and screaming "terrorists!" at the top of their lungs – on a manifestly partisan political message. Let’s call it department of calm heads vs. department of headless chickens. In any event, our friends in Britain are providing a model on this.
Stay calm and carry on.
Hillary is now basically in the same league as Romney and Rudy when it comes to money, maybe a bit stronger. Edwards just fell off the face of the planet this month, shading Richardson. Both the Hillary and Edwards number show us that the Dem money edge is not a Democrat thing. It is an Obama thing.
More Dish and Ambinder reax to Obama’s money blowout here. Oh, and why Hillary can’t win.
Here’s an idea for July 4. In the next two days, please send me any favorite quote, YouTube video or photograph that sums up for you the best of America. I’ll post the most original entries all day on July 4. Think different. Passages from favorite novels or poems, YouTube comedy sketches or flash videos, or just a simple photographic image – if they sum up the best of America for you, send them in. Put "July 4" in the subject line of your email and a very brief description. All I have so far is Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock "Star-Spangled Banner." But Jimmy Stewart is just as welcome. Special priority goes to anything that will piss off Jihadists. Bottom line: The best of America, in your opinion. One day of celebration. Raid YouTube. Raid your book shelves. Check your photo-album. No schlock please. Unless it’s so bad it’s good.
7-11 transforms a few stores into Kwik-E-Marts for the Simpsons movie.
"Our members just wish this thing would be over. People are tired of him. There’s nobody there who can stand up to him and tell him, ‘Mr. President, you’ve got to do this. You’re wrong on this.’ There’s no adult supervision. It’s like he’s oblivious. Maybe that’s a defense mechanism." – a senior House Republican, in the Washington Post.
It’s really about Pakistan and the countless connections between Britain and its former colony:
Despite the efforts of Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, to clamp down on Islamic extremists, scores of young British Muslims are known to have received terrorist training at Taliban-controlled madrassas in Pakistan.
An estimated 60,000 youngsters travel from Britain to visit relatives in the country every year, and it is a monumental security challenge to identify the dozen or so who might be susceptible to radicalisation.
All you need is a handful. And Bush’s inept occupation of Iraq has only made matters worse, providing a critical training base for mass murder.
Darwin Dating needs to know the answer to this question: Why Doesn’t Evolution Get Rid of Ugly People? Scientists have a few new theories.
It’s not their image but new research is showing a Hayekian bent to the little buggers:
"One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one’s in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing."
It’s called "swarm theory." Spontaneous order, anyone?
Johann Hari makes a persuasive case that both Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani are right – and that the only effective strategy against Jihadist terror is a fusion of the two explanations, blowback and totalitarianism. Money quote:
This is a reminder the bombers are not only reacting against the worst in our system of government: the torture and the use of chemical weapons in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, support for Arab dictators. They oppose the best in our system of government too: the intellectual freedom to write novels that question religion, the sexual freedom of women to pick their own partners. When I receive my own tedious drizzle of jihadi death-threats, they always mention my homosexuality long before they get to my views on foreign policy. In his "Address to the American People" in October 2002, Osama Bin Laden said "the worst kind of event" committed by America was not a foreign policy atrocity – of which there are many – but "your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval Office" with Monica Lewinsky. To them, this is a war against blowjobs and novellists as much as a war against occupation.
So what can we do to defuse the ticking bomb of British jihadism? On all fronts, the solution lies not in abandoning the values of liberal democracy, but in adhering to them much more scrupulously. If we restrain our leaders whenever they try to violate our values by using torture, or chemical weapons, or arming tyrants – indeed, if we put them on trial for it – we will choke off the more obvious blowback. But that’s not enough. We also need to unpick the totalitarian ideology of jihadism by democratically opening up Islamic theology, so that over a generation, fewer and fewer young men can convince themselves they are "good Muslims" when they murder innocents.
Both require a long, generational slog. It will not be without casualties. But we can win, if we do not sacrifice our core values and confront without illusions the pathologies that now infest Islam.
