BuzzMachine

What’s so bad about looking good?
: You have to love the hooha over the “sexy” Paula Zahn commercial.

I see this as a very hopeful sign:

Perhaps this is the indication that we have finally arrived in the post-PC world where we can finally just say what we think. If someone looks good, what’ s the harm in saying it? What’s the harm in looking? What’s the harm in getting ahead because of it? What’s the harm in just telling the truth about it? Sexy is good. Good-looking is good.

This is the world where Howard Stern is king. And it’s a fine world. As they said on West Wing last night, what we need right now is a little more honesty.

Maureen Dowd was honest about it this week: Of course people are hired on TV because they look good. The Atlanta Journal Constitution, in CNN’s backyard, admits this, too. I admitted it a few weeks ago when I said I’m happy that NBC hired Nora O’Donnell; she’s a damned good reporter but she also looks great on camera and they were smart to grab her from print. Ashleigh Banfield is this war’s distaff version of the Scud Stud and it’s time we got a little equal opportunity there. What’s wrong with any of this? It’s OK to look good on TV. It’s a looking medium.

In the bygone PC era — still alive on National Public Radio — people with speech impediments are hired to talk. That drives me nutty. This is radio. It’s your job to talk. It’s your job to sound better than anybody else. It’s OK if radio hires the people who sound the best. But NPR must think that would be un-PC, so it seems they go out of their way not to hire people with good voices. That would be like not giving Paula Zahn a good job or promoting her because she looks good. That would be silly.

Civilization
: I know I’ll get brickbats for this, but here is just one example of why I’ve long thought that libertarians are crackpots. It’s a rather embarrassing libertarian argument that, gee, what’s so wrong with incest that we should have laws against it? Well, because society has norms and laws enforce those norms and that’s what makes us civilized. No, we don’t enforce some extreme version of made-up morality like the Taliban. We enforce commonly accepted standards for proper behavior: don’t kill, don’t sleep with your relatives, don’t steal. Reasonable laws and rules reached through democratic process are not bad things; they are the hallmarks of civilization. Sheesh.

: More libertarian lampooning from William Quick.

He IS human!
: So good to see that superposter Glenn Reynolds is human and does have a life: “I’ve got to teach Constitutional Law this afternoon, so you won’t be hearing any more from me for a while,” he said, apologetically this afternoon. One hour and six minutes later, he did post again. And posted. And posted.

: Make that two hours and six minutes. Layne and I can’t add or subtract. This is why I’m nowhere near the academe.

Charity begins at home
: A survey says that 75 percent of Americans gave charitably somehow after 9/11.

Taking bullets for the boss
: A very good post from Thomas Nephew on Tom “Do Nothing” Ridge:

Jeff Jarvis, Ken Layne and others complain that Tom Ridge isn’t doing anything. Jarvis has a poll asking, “Is Tom Ridge doing his job?” I’d say “Of course!” It seems to me the Office of Flak-catching Defense — excuse me, Homeland Defense — is working precisely as it was designed to. You want progress, get after his boss.

: I just saw Ridge on Fox News (my new favorite channel) talking about Olympic security. His mere wardrobe shows that he doesn’t get it: Polo shirt under casual tweed jacket before a cozy fireplace. He should look like his boss and colleagues on the cover of Vanity Fair, all grey-suited sternness. An unfair nitpick? Of course. But if he can’t get the substance you’d think he’d at least get the style.

One or two attacks
: In an arcane but expensive argument over the insurance coverage for the World Trade Center attacks, the landlord is insisting it was two attacks (yielding two payments) but the insurers are arguing, of course, that it was one attack (one payment). Their current argument in court, via Newsday, is that one jet would have brought down both towers (which goes to their argument on one attack v. two) since the two towers shared a basement foundation and balanced each other. This brings new nightmares to mind: What if one tower collapsed and then the foundation of the other gave way — would the second tower collapse straight down or would it fall over, causing much more damage and death? If bin Laden had succeeded in bringing down the WTC in his first bombing there, is this what would have happened?

They call it fiction for a reason
: Pardon my former-TV-critic ghosts arising… Last night’s West Wing was an exercise in wishful thinking — charming, perhaps, but a light-year from reality. It was the creators’ wish for how the Clinton scandals had turned out. They had the Republican scandal-mongers in Congress backing down (fat chance) in part out of sympathy to save the reputation of a Presidential aide (fatter chance) and promising to drop everything if the President would just allow a Congressional resolution to go through criticizing the President for lying about his MS; the President goes along (equally fat chance) because he knows he may not have lied but he was wrong and it’s time for leaders to show moral leadership. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful world? Let’s move the capital to L.A., the land of morality and humanity, the land of fantasy.

Ghost train
: A chilling picture on the front page of the NY Post today: an empty PATH train uncovered 65 feet below ground-level at Ground Zero.

The price of happiness
: Via Metafilter, the Guardian’s Neil McIntosh has a scoop on the future of blogger: a premium service. Obviously, since I’m pushing that below, I’ll pay up (and, apparently, get a bargain; I’d charge more; this is the service I use more than any other online):

Here’s a little Onlineblog.com exclusive: it’s the beginning of the end of free at Blogger. I’ve just been interviewing Evan Williams, brains behind Blogger.com, the weblog site which powers this and hundreds of thousands of other blogs. I’d dragged him away from development of Blogger’s first premium service: fast-responding servers. Blogger, as Jack’s posting below suggests, has been under great strain since October, when the US terrorist attacks prompted a surge in people wanting to create their own weblogs. Now Evan plans to start building up a premium service: in the next few hours, he’ll launch a $30-a-year membership scheme, which will offer faster and more reliable service. The free Blogger will remain, but other – quite compelling – premium services will be rolled out quick-fire after that.

Put your money where…
: So Blogger has had a bad day and the world around, pundits are now grumpy, suffering verbal constipation. What can we do about it? We love Blogger. Blogger, however, rests on the back on one man, Ev.

I paid $12 a year — an incredible bargain — to get rid of the ad.

What would I pay to know that Blogger is going to be around (saving me the hell of installing CGIs and losing a weekend or a week)?

I start the bidding at $100/year. You vote in the poll at the right….

Fly high
: POWs are likely to be drugged for the flight to Cuba. Damned good idea. Maybe that’s an alternative to flying naked for the rest of us. Solves problems of jet lag and gabby neighbors.

Tacky Terror Tourism (con’t.)
: Yesterday, I complained about the ticket scheme at the World Trade Center observation platform — not about the tickets and the need to control the crowd but about putting the ticket booth across town at the tourist trap, the South Street Seaport, just to try to drive sales of tourist shlock. (They now protest that they just wanted to get people to a place where they could use the bathroom and have lunch.)

Today, the New York Post takes on the “OUTRAGE” of tacky terror tourism shlock being sold around the World Trade Center itself. Here’s the story; here’s a Steve Dunleavy column.

Most disturbing is the picture that goes with the Post story: two tourists wearing Ground Zero hats, as if this were just another tourist attraction that should spawn human bumper stickers: a DisneyWorld, a Seaworld, or, yes, the World Trade Center itself when it stood. What’s next: “I Survived Ground Zero” T-shirts? Cans of “Ground Zero Contaminated Air”? Snowglobes with ash falling around the financial district?

This is still a burial ground. It is the site of the worst mass murder and attack in our history. It should be treated with respect.

When I went to Dachau, I found no Dachau KZ hats and T-shirts. I found no attempt by the town to drive me to its stores.

Our heroes and victims deserve at least that much respect.

: I will write in a few days about my own view of a proper use of the World Trade Center site.

I stand corrected
: I just found Mark Steyn‘s “correction” regarding credit for the Fly Naked campaign. Actually, there was nothing to correct; it’s an idea that makes universal sense. But there is an art to writing a “correction” anyway:

CORRECTION: On Thursday, I credited the Naked Air concept, claimed by Tom Friedman of The New York Times, to Ken Layne. Ever since, I’ve been barraged by counter-claims: Internet pundit Jeff Jarvis says it’s his idea; the leggy lovely commentatrix Ann Coulter, of Politically Incorrect, CNN et al., mentioned it in a November column; and in the early Seventies, at the dawn of the hijack era, the late Archie Bunker suggested it on All In The Family. Kudos to them all, though, if I had to fly naked with any of them, I’d pick Ann. Naked Air: We love to fly. And it shows.

Wear it proudly
: Robert Wright in Slate calls us all a bunch of “hawk triumphalists.” He’s trying to bring back his good-old-days of anti-war whining, saying that all our victory in Afghanistan doesn’t stop the Richard “Maxwell Stupid” Reids of the world. Logic alert. So we shouldn’t fight in Afghanistan to defeat bin Laden just because it isn’t one-stop-shopping for terror-stopping? No, we needed to defeat bin Laden and we need to root out terrorists wherever we find them and we need to (listen up, Tom Ridge) bolster our homeland defenses.

Ridge wakes up
: Even though Tom “Do-Nothing” Ridge shrugged at the teen terrorist pilot (and Ken Layne gave him that name as a result), we now read today — thank goodness, at last — that the Office of Homeland Security is looking for ways to improve security surrounding private aviation. Says the Times:

But officials are still groping for a way to control the sprawling general aviation system. The measures under consideration include banning flights made outside the supervision of an air traffic controller, a change that would ban most flights by small planes; increasing scrutiny of pilots, passengers and aircraft at the airports that handle flights other than scheduled airline and military flights; and putting more of the sky off-limits and launching fighter planes to enforce the restriction. One official said the most far- reaching steps were the least likely to be adopted.But short of grounding most private planes, the government’s air defense system is unable to prevent another suicide flight…

Instead of grappling, let me continue my effort to help Gov. Ridge (why does he still call himself Gov., by the way; job-change-remorese?) with a few concrete suggestions.

This is URGENT. I repeat: Terrorists have now shown that airplanes are their weapon of choice. They use flight schools to learn how to kill. They looked at crop dusting as a way to spread death. Now this teen nutjob almost hits a passenger jet with his miniplane.

So I say that all noncommercial private aviation (that is, everything but charter jets — hobbyists, in other words) has to be grounded until pilots can be given background checks and relicensed.

: Update: A great post from an Instapundit reader on Ridge’s bad case of terrorism denial.

Tribute v. tourism
: The World Trade Center viewing platform is already becoming unseemly, as I feared it would. The Wall Street Journal reports today that the city will soon require people to go get tickets before getting in line for the platform. They will be required to walk all the way over to the East Side and the South Street Seaport to get them — and that’s not just to reduce the lines and congestion at the platform but the city also hopes that these people will shop while there and on the way. So there’s the admission that we have turned the World Trade Center into a tourist attraction. That’s just terrible. Yes, I sympathize with the businesses downtown that are having problems. But turning this site of mass murder into a Disney ride is not the answer. That is exploitation in its most distasteful form.

No, it’s not the onions making me cry
: I just heard an officemate say that her husband went to Wendy’s to pay tribute to the late Dave and it was jammed with others doing the same thing. Kinda touching, in a very American way.

Portrait of power
: It’s a conflict of interest for me to deliver this compliment since I work a few floors below Vanity Fair but its February cover by Annie Leibovitz is genius: Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, et al looking stern and so serious you can’t even think of making fun of the Texas presidential belt buckle on GWB. It’s a great magazine cover and very smart PR from the White House. They look like they’re in charge. And we need that.

School’s out
: Pardon me for being a blog-in-the-mud but I really could not care less about the Harvard Cornel West/Larry Summers or Stephen Ambrose alleged literary pilfering dustups. Maybe it’s because I’m not in the academe and haven’t been near it in years (or can’t you tell?).

: See also Oliver Willis

A right to fly
: Considering that airplanes are a weapon of choice of terrorists and nutjobs, maybe we should consider restricting access to the air — and to flight schools — to people who have passed security clearances: No unknown foreigners, no kids, nobody with psychiatric or drug problems. These people can KILL us from the skies. Add that to my list for Tom Ridge.

Do-Nothing Tom Ridge
: That’s the name Ken Layne gives to our head of Homeland Security this morning. Then the all-powerful Glenn Reynolds piles on: “You tell ’em, Ken.” And I’ve been beating this drum with a sledgehammer for a few weeks now (see first, second, third, fourth posts below with a few concrete suggestions about what Ridge ought to be doing).

Meanwhile, Ridge’s own Website does nothing to dispell this impression of inactivity.

And meanwhile, today, we find out that a mere 15-year-old — who may have a Middle Eastern name — got a plane and almost crashed into a passenger jet on behalf of Osama while Ridge denies that he has to pay attention to it. Yes, we feel safe.

Listen: We all know that Ridge’s job is tough. But we have to see him doing something to make us more secure and then make us feel more secure. That’s the job he took on.

So let’s keep the pressure on. Let’s see whether we can create a buzz in blogs that spreads and does some good. Who else is frustrated with Do-Nothing Ridge? Pile on, please. Then when folks like the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal notice the buzz, others in the media will pay attention (that’s how it works: buzz begets buzz) and then Washington will pay attention (buzz is power).

We have in our hands the Great Buzzmachine. Let’s put it into gear for our own good.

: Piling on: Will Vehrs says the teen terror pilot isn’t the point and he’s right there. The bigger point is a broader security plan. More from Vehrs here. He’s not fully on-board with, as he wonderfully puts it, my Million Blog March — urging some caution in expecting Ridge to waste his time bragging instead of doing — but he still does want Ridge to start doing.

Kathy Kinsley calls the teen a terrorist.

Add Paradox1x to the pile.

Now Charles Johnson jumps on.

As founder of the Former Pacifists Club…
: Six weeks after Sept. 11 — six weeks into our new lives — I realized — and confessed — that I was now a former pacifist. Facing an evil warmonger instead of an evil war meant that I now saw the necessity of arms.

Then Salon’s David Talbot did likewise (only I did in a paragraph what he did in a megabyte of type).

Now Bj¯rn StÊrk tears apart a document he wrote four years ago to argue that he was a conscientious objector and should stay out of the Norwegian armed forces.

Forget about my wanting to take credit for Naked Airlines. Instead, as my mark in blog history, I want the title of founder of the Former Pacifists Club. The ranks are growing daily. Considering the cause, that is too bad. But it is what it is.

And over at the Never Pacifists Club…
: From the Jerusalem Post: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ‘promoted’ Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat from the status of ‘irrelevant’ to Israel’s most ‘bitter enemy’ yesterday. He and Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer also had some tough remarks about Iran, which they called the ‘center of world terror.’ ”

Killing ideas
: Thomas Friedman’s latest argues that winning this first battle of the war on terrorism means killing bin Laden et al — now our job — and killing his ideas — a job that falls to Middle East nations. Says Friedman:

It was Israel that executed Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. But it was modern Germany that executed Nazism, by writing one of the world’s most democratic constitutions and living up to it. In so doing, Germans transformed Germany from a destructive to a constructive force for themselves, Europe and the world.

The problem is: “To counter his authentic message of hate, you need an authentic messenger of progress, tolerance and modernism.” And there are no such voices, he says, in these authoritarian countries influenced by fundamentalist (read: not progressive) religion.

Unsafe at any altitude
: What Ken Layne says about the 15-year-old sad doofus who crashed his dinky plane into an empty (thank God) building in Florida: “Why does Do-Nothing Tom Ridge insist this has “nothing to do with terrorism”? Somebody commits a terrorist act — a suicide crash of a hijacked plane into an American skyscraper — in support of a terrorist war against the West. It doesn’t matter if the kid acted alone (which it seems he did) or if the kid went crazy (which of the Saudi hijackers wasn’t crazy?). It’s a terrorist act. Deal with it, Tom.”

: Besides all this… What the HELL are we doing letting 15-year-olds get anywhere near the controls of a plane? Oh, yes, I like the idea of pimply faced hormone jobs flying near me up there. We won’t let a kid that age (a) drive, (b) drink, (c) vote, (d) have sex but yet we let him fly? Insane. Unsafe and insane.

Whose God is He?
: Joe Bob Briggs suggests leaving God out of this: “When men in war councils start invoking the name of God thrice daily, every corpuscle of my cigar-wracked body groans like an infidel on the inquisitor’s rack. I have nothing against the Almighty. I think the Big Guy knows what he’s doing. But I’m not sure he’s inclined to delegate this much work to men who have been checked out on M-16s.”

Briggs worries about everyone taking possession of God:

Franklin Graham, evangelical heir apparent to his father Billy’s brand of white-bread Christianity, did his best to get the anti-Islam ball into play. He pronounced Islam “a very evil and wicked religion” — and was promptly ostracized for the remark. But wasn’t he simply paraphrasing the Old Testament curse that the sons of Ishmael would always behave like “wild asses,” destined to be eternally at war? Perhaps he should have said, “Islam is a religion of wild asses,” if for no other reason than to preserve his defense in the original Hebrew.

Briggs cautions that if the Texas Christians in the White House really want to invoke their God, they’re doing to have to deal with Jesus’ admonition in favor of nonviolence, and nonresistance, and forgiveness nine times nine:

I didn’t say it was practical. I said it’s what the man said. That’s why I would recommend leaving God out of it for the time being. They didn’t call him the Prince of Peace for nothing.

[via Relapsed Catholic]