The dogs at the Gray's Papaya on 72nd and Broadway are, in fact, superior. Plus, it was in The Warriors.

This weekend’s Financial Times has an excellent article on how, in these tough times, the humble hot dog is back in favor. There’s one serious error, however: the omission of the Papaya King on 86th and 3rd, home of the best hot dogs (“tastier than filet mignon”) anywhere, particularly when washed down with a delicious papaya 'tropical drink'.

Sean Penn has been complaining that he’s losing work for his stance on Iraq. The (un-named) producer quoted in this week’s New York Observer makes this response:

“Sean Penn has a constitutional right to speak out about the war. Good for him. But don’t whine about the repercussions. I have a constitutional right not to go bankrupt hiring him. If there’s a black list, it’s not going to be created by the studios; it’s going to be created by the American public.”

Secretary Rumsfeld has, as the New York Times notes, been hinting that some American units should leave South Korea. He’s right. South Korea is wealthy, well able to pay for its defense and, apparently, increasingly unappreciative of its US military presence. The withdrawal of some its American military support might be just the sort of wake up call that the country needs.

While Rumsfeld is thinking about such matters he should also look at the US bases in Germany. With Germany effectively no longer an ally, it might well make sense to start redeploying those forces in Poland. The Poles could do with the economic boost that this could mean and something tells me that it is they, not the Germans, who are likely to be better friends to the US in future.

Designer weasel Dominique de Villepin is profiled in today’s New York Times. As a picture of arrogance, incompetence and intellectual pretension it is hard to beat, but the following extract made truly remarkable reading:

“Describing Napoleon’s philosophy as “Victory or death, but glory whatever happens,” Mr. De Villepin added, “There is not a day that goes by without me feeling the imperious need to remember so as not to yield in the face of indifference, laughter or gibes” in order to “advance further in the name of a French ambition.”

And they call George W. Bush a cowboy?

According to a report in today’s New York Times, the North Korean MIGs that intercepted an American plane over the Sea of Japan were trying to force the aircraft to land in North Korea and seize its crew. At one point, apparently, one of the MIG pilots “made internationally recognized hand signals to the American flight crew to follow him, presumably back to his home base.” The Americans correctly (and bravely – their plane was unarmed) ignored the gestures.

Lets hope that they also made a few “internationally recognized hand signals” of their own.

Nurse Bloomberg is a coward as well as a bully. It turns out that his ludicrous new anti-smoking law is going to be enforced selectively. The New York Post is reporting that health inspectors will issue tickets to the owners of bars and restaurants that ‘permit’ smoking, but not to the smokers themselves. This is nonsense, and it puts the proprietors of these businesses in an untenable position. Why should they be solely responsible for enforcing this law? Either smoking is illegal in such places or it is not. The law should be enforced properly, and that means by police, not barmen. Bloomberg has championed a grotesque, intrusive and expensive piece of legislation. He should now be made to enforce it.

And if that makes him a laughing stock, that will be exactly what he deserves.

The contradiction at the heart of Tony Blair’s foreign policy lies in its combination of firm support for the US with an obsessive desire to take the UK deeper into the EU. Such an entanglement with ‘Europe’ would make a repeat performance of Britain’s current stand alongside this country quite impossible. The shambles of the last few weeks should have led Blair to realize that the EU was not all that he had hoped. Unfortunately, this may not be the case. Here are some comments from Peter Mandelson, the individual most often credited with the rise of ‘new’ Labour and the creation of ‘Tony Blair’. Mandelson, by many accounts still a confidant of Blair, is now suggesting that the Prime Minister should use any post-war popularity to propel Britain into the Euro. Such a step would be a disaster, a defeat stolen from the jaws of victory. Blair should know better than to listen to his old friend.

Perhaps his new friend, George, could have a few words.

I'm so happy to hear TBL is cancelled. I'm very happy with my relationship with CNN but I loathed Talk Back Live. As Ramesh once said "it's the black hole of the intellect." He should know he was once on to talk about the pros and cons of breast-feeding in public.

Meanwhile, the EU’s dodgy and disreputable constitutional convention continues its deliberations, briefly summarized in this Cato piece. There have been efforts to suggest that the document that emerges will be comparable to the US constitution. Over at Airstrip One, Blogger Philip Chaston reckons that this is like comparing Kumbayah with The Battle Hymn of the Republic. He’s too kind to the Eurocrats. Kumbayah is an inoffensive, if insipid, tune. The proposed EU constitution is altogether worse. If it were a piece of music it would need to combine menace, incompetence and a self-important tinpot grandeur.

Perhaps the boys of Spinal Tap have written something appropriate.

Mark Steyn says he's running out of things to say about the coming war with Iraq. Of course, he's full of it; Steyn's as sharp and witty as ever. Here, from his newest column, is Steyn on certain anti-war nincompoops:

Even more telling than the human shields scramming out of town is the alarming failure of recent "naked protests" to get naked. Many of my fellow warmongers have mocked the nude protests mounted by the women of California's Marin County, cruelly pointing out that many of the bits on show are excessively saggy. But I'll take what I can get. If we have to have an incoherent, anti-Western "peace" movement, then women showing off their hooters in support of a culture that would stone them to death for showing off their ankles is about as good as it's gonna get.

I wrote a column.

I can't even begin to tell Cosmo about the beagle story, not when Cosmo is still in a purple rage over this story.

The Russian Army held a beauty contest for women in the military, aimed at attracting women to the forces. "Beauty in Epaulets" judges rated women on firing kalashnikovs, singing, ballroom dancing, and cooking. "'Woman are a decoration,' said Vitaly Gusak, spokesman for the Moscow Military District. . . . After reading out the results of the shooting contest, Nuzhdin handed out the prize, a small, white pennant, saying 'Take this pennant and hang it in the kitchen so that the food for your husband will be very tasty.'"

[A]n FBI agent named Gamal Abdel-Hafiz seriously damaged the investigation. [FBI Agent Robert] Wright says Abdel-Hafiz, who is Muslim, refused to secretly record one of al-Kadi's suspected associates, who was also Muslim. Wright says Abdel-Hafiz told him, Vincent and other agents that "a Muslim doesn't record another Muslim."

"He wouldn't have any problems interviewing or recording somebody who wasn't a Muslim, but he could never record another Muslim," said Vincent.

Wright said he "was floored" by Abdel-Hafiz's refusal and immediately called the FBI headquarters. Their reaction surprised him even more: "The supervisor from headquarters says, 'Well, you have to understand where he's coming from, Bob.' I said no, no, no, no, no. I understand where I'm coming from," said Wright. "We both took the same damn oath to defend this country against all enemies foreign and domestic, and he just said no? No way in hell."

Far from being reprimanded, Abdel-Hafiz was promoted to one of the FBI's most important anti-terrorism posts, the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia, to handle investigations for the FBI in that Muslim country.

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Thursday the stationing of U.S. troops near the border with North Korea has become intrusive to South Korea, and said forces could be moved southward or out of South Korea altogether.

Rumsfeld said Army Gen. Leon LaPorte, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, and others are considering ways to realign American forces on the Korea Peninsula. This comes as the United States is engaged in an increasingly tense crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

This is huge news and I've been convinced for a while now this is the right call. Our troops have made South Koreans lazy about their own self-defense. I don't think we should abandon our commitment to South Korea, but we could certainly make them a security guarantee the way we do with Taiwan. Stationing 37,000, increasingly unwelcome, troops just so we'd be committed to fight if they were slaughtered strikes me as, at least, a doctrine which has outlasted its usefulness.

(Actually, I'm off to the shower) Doing an 8:30 AM (EST) segment. Haven't figured out what G-File will be about yet. You'll know when I do.

There's a method to his somber somnolence. Maybe this was a press conference for foreign consumption -- signaling to the French, Chinese, Russians et al that he's made his mind up about this. That's still the best way to get the Security Council Gang Who Couldn't Vote Straight to go along. He certainly seemed resigned to the idea that he's going to go ahead and do this. One of the main messages here, after all, was: Saddam's a threat to the US and therefor the UN can suck eggs if it's not going to get our back.

And...it's the best way to put the fear of God in Saddam Hussein and his generals.

But with the exception of a few lines -- "we like freedom and we're not changing" -- I don't know that he's moving any numbers here. He seems very tired and he seems like he hasn't had to justify his plan to a critic in quite a while.

But his response to Jim Angle's question about "what are you waiting to hear to declare war" and what do you think of the protests, was pretty awful. Trade? I get the point he was trying to make, but it sounded awfully rambling.

Andrew - I certainly endorse your Euro-skepticism, but I'm not sure I see it the same way. If you asked an American to name the greatest Europeans he'd probably name Galileo, Newton, Churchill, Descartes, Voltaire, (boo hiss!) etc. I doubt the suggestions would be contingent upon the ethnicity of the American being questioned. What's necessary to remove the bias is to remove the person from his sense of nationality. That's not creating memories, it's abolishing one sense of identity and nationality and replacing it with another. That is outrageous, but I'm not sure it's Orwellian. In a sense its Stalinist. He loved playing games with nationalities in order to encourage a "Soviet" identity among the populous.

Opinion pollsters have been asking Europeans to identify the greatest
Europeans in history. To the obvious disappointment of the organizers,
the Brits have chosen Brits, the French French and so on.

According to the London Independent, the historian due to lecture on the findings has explained that the results were the product of the teaching of history and culture, which (the horror!) tended to start from a national, not a European, viewpoint. "Most people went for figures from their own countries," he said. "But there is no reason why a European collective memory should not emerge in time, if you consider how little has been done to create one."

Creating memories? George Orwell would have had something to say about that.

For the record, I've had readers suggest Derb is a Watcher a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a Time Lord a la Doctor Who and one of various characters from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Derb, Kathryn and I were just in her spacious, oak-paneled office looking through the advance copy of your book, and we've decided that it's flat-out witchcraft. I refer you to the equations on pp. 104-05. Come on, admit it, those are incantations in an ancient tongue, which, if uttered backwards by the light of a candle burning in Whitaker Chambers' pumpkin, have the power to turn Noam Chomsky into a Dittohead.

Actually, your grimoire inspired K-Lo and me to hold a ranking contest to see which one of us is dumber in math. It was a disedifying spectacle. As a matter of fact, I was pretty good in math when I went to high school here. Then I went off to this smarty-pants academy, a great school where, tragically, I found myself sitting in trigonometry class with supergenius kids who are probably now working on time travel devices in secret underground CIA labs. The effect of this on my fragile math ego was, to borrow a phrase, "shock and awe." I curled up in a ball and quit going to class.

I flunked, but managed to graduate anyway, thanks to summer tutorials. But I was never the same again, and to this day, can be reduced to a quivering pot of goo by the very word "cosine." I am literally not kidding when I tell you that at age 36, I am still haunted by dreams that my Permanent Record has been discovered to have been falsified, and I am now required to go back and re-do my math classes.

I wasn't going to say anything about the tone and content of last night's Nightline feeding into anti-Semitic conspiracy thought. Some of the leading lights of the Project for a New American Century happen to be Jewish. As I was watching the show, I thought, "Oh boy, the Jew-haters are going to go wild with this." But I didn't say anything about it, not wanting to overreact.

Well, a reader wrote a short time ago:

I just heard a caller to the Diane Rehm show this morning spin out the same theory, with an ugly edge. He noted most of the neo-cons were “Jewish Americans” and implied that their unwavering support for Israel was the prime source of their motivation.

The reader went on to say that last week he was having a beer at a his regular watering hole in Old Town, Alexandria, when he struck up a conversation with a woman who was born and raised in Marin County, California. When Iraq came up, the woman started in with the usual America-bashing. Then things turned ugly.

What eventually caused me to walk away within seconds of punching her lights out was when she said the U.S. got what it deserved on 9-11 because we are a terrorist state, and that you can’t believe anything in the news media “because everyone knows the Jews control this country.” What shocked me was this wasn’t some skinhead from northern Idaho but a cosmopolitan, educated woman from Marin County. Have I been leading a sheltered life?

Yes sir, you have. But then again, we all have. I have heard the same thing recently come out of the mouths of some intelligent, sophisticated, educated people -- the kind of people who should know better. I'm not talking about merely disagreeing or criticizing the policies of the Israeli government. This goes beyond that.

Yes, yes, yes. I know about nakednews.com.

I've always had strong opinions on this subject. If you ask news execs why news personalities have to be good-looking, you'll get lots gobbedygook at first. But after that, they attempt to justify having underwear models read the news by noting -- accurately -- that people like to look at beautiful people (It's a fact, look it up. We tend to trust good looking people more than ugly people). They then say that this is ultimately a public good because, at the margins, it attracts more people to the news, which is socially redeeming because we need an informed citizenry. Fine, fine, I say. But if that's the case, why not have topless anchors? (Just to clarify, I mean anchorettes. Nobody wants to see Dan Rather's pecs every night). Or, if that's too much, why not have a naked woman in a little screen in the corner, like they used to have for sign language translators? That would certainly get teenage boys to watch the news more -- a demographic we desperately need to educate. The naked women could do jumping jacks.

Interesting email from readers regarding yesterday's G-File. Among the thoughtful responses two objections keep coming up. First, that dictatorships are inherently antithetical to an open society and the rule of law. The second is that God is the author of all things and therefor he did create the Buick.

There's a lot of stuff tied up in here and we could get into the nitty gritty of a lot of theology and poli sci if we wanted to. But I'm not over-qualified in this arena and, besides, I've got a syndicated column to write. So let me just make a couple quick points. I agree entirely that as a practical matter, dictatorships have proven to be hostile to open societies and the rule of law. And in no way do I want to live under a dictatorship -- unless I am the dictator, of course. But then I wouldn't be living under it, now would I?

But at an abstract level, I'm not so sure there's anything inherent to dictatorship that would automatically preclude an open society and the rule of law. After all, God is an unelected and absolute dictator. This is particularly so in the Hebrew bible. But I would guess that most Christians would concede that when Christ returns and rules on earth -- I hope I'm getting this right -- he won't be running a democracy. I mean would Tom Daschle require the King of Kings to get sixty votes in the Senate? Surely, if the rule of law and open societies are good things, it would be hard to believe that God would oppose them.

This leads to the second point. Yes, God is the author of all things. But we do have free will -- at least as far as I'm concerned. It is the free will of dictators which tends to make dictatorships unpleasent forms of government and it is the free will of citizens which causes us to favor democracy (in part because we don't trust the free will of others).

I've never been able to reconcile the notion that God wills every single human action with idea of sin. I've read plenty on the subject (so please, no long essays on Calvinism etc) and it always seems to me that if God wills every human action, then God has no right to get angry at people when they mess up. It sounds to me like yelling at a remote control car you made hit a tree.

Note: Nothing in this post should be interpreted as an assertion of authority or expertise on these issues. Whenever I write something about religion or theology I get all of these emails from people who say I should keep my mouth shut etc.

I guess they'd have to change the lyrics to the Iron Man cartoon:

Tony Stark
Makes you feel
He's a cool exec
With a heart of steel.
As Iron Man,
All jets ablaze,
He fights and smite'n
With repulsor rays!
A blaze of power!
Iron Man!
Amazing armor!
Iron Man!

A military chaplain friend writes from the Gulf:

"As a chaplain, this is another of those 'where else but America?' moments.
There's a Muslim chaplain here, an immigrant from Pakistan. The other
day, he and one of the Jewish rabbis made the rounds of the outlying
camps over a Friday and Saturday to visit troops, specifically those who
were Muslim or Jewish but not exclusively so. Nowhere else, but here on
American military camps in the Middle East and on American ships is
there such a spirit of cooperation,mutual respect and collegiality among
these starkly different faiths of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. It
reminds me of the time on the ship when we had the chapel set up for
Hannukah and the Catholic priest and Muslim lay-leader were in there to
say their prayers. Everywhere else adherents to these faiths barely
tolerate each other at best and most often try to kill each other, but
not on an American warship, not in an American military camp. How can
you not think this is a great country when things like that happen?"

For Byron York. He's been following the Estrada brouhaha for months. I watched six minutes of Chuck Schumer piously prattling on and I nearly went on a three state killing spree.

I picked that one up as well, and it *is* an alternate reality, so I just assumed that either Rich had undergone sex-reassignment surgery or that you had ruthlessly seized control of NR, leaving only despair and ruin in your wake, much like Tony Stark (Iron Man) had done for the rest of the world.

The latest issue of the comic "Exiles" (issue #23, on the stands now, by Marvel Comics) features a story about an alternate future wherein the hero Iron Man rules the Earth as "President for Life". During an exchange with some of his staff, he not only mentions National Review but even orders the murder of the editor. She has to be killed, he says, because "...the media is supposed to be our tool, not a soapbox for that woman's damn opinions."

Anybody see Nightline tonight? The show was about a "conspiracy" among neoconservative intellectuals at the Project for a New American Century, who have been pushing for a war with Iraq since 1997. Some of these "conspirators" are named Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. The spin being put on this among hysterics in Europe, and which ABC was rather too eager to play up, is that these sneaky right-wingers have long been plotting American global domination, and now that they're in power, are instituting their nefarious plans. "A blueprint for global domination," as one European newspaper called it.

What rot. This group has been public about its geostrategic vision and objectives since its inception. There's nothing secret about it. What are they guilty of? Having foreseen that America cannot live with the status quo in the Middle East. The Pearl Harbor on September 11 vindicated this view. And we're supposed to think there's something wrong with the fact that some Washington insiders have been thinking boldly and creatively -- and openly -- about this problem for years?

Kathryn, on the program tonight, I looked tonight for an opportunity to point out how odd it is that Kissling is all in favor of us listening to the Pope now, when she has built her entire career on saying that Catholics don't have to listen to the Pope on the matter of abortion. (N.B., it may not be clear to non-Catholics or ill-informed Catholics, but on the matter of abortion, Catholics cannot in good conscience dissent from the Church's teaching that it is evil; on the matter of war, however, the Church does not have the same level of moral authority with regard to the bind it can put on a Catholic's conscience. Don't take my word for it; look it up in the Catechism).

Anyway, I wanted to point out that Kissling has been active in an effort to get the Holy See kicked out of the United Nations, where it has official observer status. But now she's a big defender of the Church and its influence! Hypocrite.