Microsoft Corp.'s new MSN China Internet venture is censoring words such as "freedom," "democracy" and "human rights" on its free online journals, Microsoft said on Tuesday, putting itself in the middle of a major Web controversy.

From a reader:

Simple solution...Make it known that all Gitmo detainees will be housed in minimum security facilities in the home state of any Senator or Representative that calls for its closure....

Who knew the Senate was so cheeky? On Monday, a mere three weeks after the centrist, bipartisan Gang of 14 agreed, ever so proudly, to save the institution's fabled filibuster, senators passed a resolution apologizing for the chamber's failure to enact anti-lynching legislation.

Astonishingly, Senate Resolution 39 makes no mention of the f-word, which denotes the mechanism that allows a minority of legislators to block votes. The resolution duly notes that at least 4,742 people, mostly African Americans, were lynched in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968; that nearly 200 anti-lynching bills, backed by seven presidents, were introduced in Congress during the first half of the 20th century; that the House of Representatives did pass three strong anti-lynching measures, but that the Senate never did, thus failing its "minimum and most basic of federal responsibilities" to those who were "deprived of life, human dignity, and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States." As Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat who sponsored the resolution, said, the Senate was "uniquely culpable" for Washington's failure to protect U.S. citizens from a type of domestic terrorism often orchestrated by local authorities.

What wasn't said is that the Senate was "uniquely culpable" because it cherished the filibuster — a procedural rule that enhances each member's individual power — over the Constitution. The Senate's failure to acknowledge the cause of its homicidal negligence robs its apology of much meaning or sincerity.

Those unfamiliar with history today, or generations from now, might blame the American people for sending senators to Washington who were evil or out of touch. But there were 70 senators willing to sponsor anti-lynching legislation as far back as 1938, and lives could have been saved if the federal government had taken action then.

Members of the other party have worked with us to achieve important reforms on some issues. Yet, too often, their leadership prefers to block the ideas of others. We hear 'no' to making tax relief permanent. We hear "no" to Social Security reform. We hear 'no' to confirming federal judges. We hear "no" to a highly qualified U.N. ambassador. We hear "no" to medical liability reform. On issue after issue, they stand for nothing except obstruction, and this is not leadership. It is the philosophy of the stop sign, the agenda of the roadblock, and our country and our children deserve better.

Political parties that choose the path of obstruction will not gain the trust of the American people. If leaders of the other party have innovative ideas, let's hear them. But if they have no ideas or policies except obstruction, they should step aside and let others lead.

LEST WE FORGET, today is also the 20th anniversary of the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 by terrorists affiliated with Hezbollah, aka "the Party of God." The flight from Athens to Rome was diverted to Beirut, on to Algiers, and eventually back to Beirut. There, the hijackers demanded the release of 435 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel...

Fine, books can be very dangerous. I agree. Please defend the inclusion of Origin of Species on such a list - even in the "Others Receiving Votes" category. I don't mean to direct this to you, since you didn't put the list together and haven't defended it substantively. But in my mind including a book which created a new branch of science and which has been proven in most important ways to be absolutely correct about the nature of our origins renders the entire list useless and, in fact, dangerous. I say dangerous because it adds legitimacy to current movements in this country that seek to undermine science (e.g., the intelligent design movement). (I suspect we might both agree that the intelligent design movement is dangerous - I personally would include the current administration's environmental policies as a similarly dangerous movement, but on that I suspect our opinions differ.) I might go so far as to consider this one of the 10 most harmful Top 10 lists of the past century.

A reader writes:

Jonah, Are you defending the list and ideas put forth by Human Events? Chait's getting all huffy over something silly I think. But you don't mention whether or not you agree w/ Human Events. Chait attacks Human Events ideas. You are criticizing Chait, does that mean you support Human Events? Where do you stand? Is Darwin a danger to society? Should the Theory of Evolution be minimized in public education? The Corner did this w/ Deep Throat too. Fine Mark Felt might have been a disloyal pr*ck and Woodward is a boorish whore, but that doesn't excuse Liddy, Colson, Nixon etc. Fine Chait cannot write or argue well, but where do you stand? Those who put that list together are a danger to reason and democracy, the only time a book is harmful is when it is thrown at someone's head. All ideas must be heard (not necessarily paid attention to but heard).

Me: This strikes me as hyperventillated nonsense. Some very quick thoughts in response.

I didn't say Chait can't write or argue well. If that were true, I wouldn't bother criticizing him. He can do both quite well which is why his piece vexed me so.

Second, I said I thought the list was to a significant extent stupid. But not because of the content or the authors, but because it's a list. I once had a book contract to rank in order the 100 most influential conservatives from antiquity to the present day. I know how dumb lists can be. I might quibble with the entries or the ordering or the criteria, but in general I don't have the objection to the Human Events list this reader wants me to have.

This reader wants me to buy into the notion that books -- i.e. ideas -- can never be dangerous. Alas, I think that's bunk. Of course books can be dangerous. Everything important, everything with the power to change mens' minds can be dangerous. How you can believe a book -- or a movie or a play -- can make the world a better place but that it can never make the world a worse place is beyond me. Any medium which can uplift can confuse. Does the reader really think the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is only dangerous when thrown?

The notion that "art" can only be enlightening is a carbunkle of a cliché. The relevant question is, Therefore what? Since most people think censorship is the greatest evil known to man (a belief I've disputed many, many times), I certainly think criticizing ideas is not only fine, but sometimes necessary. Pragmatically, I admit this can backfire (calling a book "dangerous" increases its appeal). But I don't see why, as a matter of principle, we can't say some books made this world better and some books made this world worse.

Michael Jackson's lawyer said the singer will no longer share his bed with young boys, after the star was cleared of 10 child abuse charges.

I saw this column by Jonathan Chait when it came out, but I never got around to commenting on it. Along with some others who commented on it earlier, I think this may be the shabbiest piece I've ever seen Chait write.

He tackles a list of the 10 most harmful books of the last two centuries, published by Human Events. He scores some easy points, with a lot of name-calling thrown in (for exaomple, conservatives are "a gaggle of thick-skulled fanatics"). And I think he's right that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion should have made the list -- though I can see how the contributors overlooked it, since it's more a propaganda tract. But, whatever.

What bothers me about Chait's attack on the list is the seeming disingenousness of it. First of all, he surely must know that lists -- especially those compiled by committees -- are always stupid in one respect or another. It's a journalistic conceit that knows no party affiliation.

Second, he asserts -- simply for the sake of offering insults -- that the contributors in particular and conservatives in general cannot "distinguish between seminal works of social science and totalitarian manifestos" simply because both sorts of books show up on the same list. But he must know that, say, Robert George knows the difference between The Communist Manifesto and John Dewey's Democracy and Education. But conceding this in good faith would detract from the entire point of the column.

Or take his riff on the entry on Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique:

The squib on "The Feminine Mystique" begins with a fairly anodyne summary of Betty Freidan's pioneering feminist tract. Rather than explain what's so dangerous about allowing women the choice of having a career, though, Human Events proceeds to quote a review that "Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist." Not just a Stalinist, but a Marxist to boot!

Personally, I fail to see how Friedan's communist past — she was 42 when she published "The Feminine Mystique" — would discredit her insights about the repressive nature of a world in which women were discriminated against or barred outright from most professions and much of public life. Especially because the conservative movement was itself heavily salted with ex-communists. But then, my mind has already been poisoned by Dewey, Mill and other liberal relativists.

This is thick with bad faith. He creates a strawman by saying that what really offends conservatives is the idea that women have the choice of working (when was the last time you heard a conservative make the argument that women shouldn't have that choice?). He scores a quick hypocrisy charge by mentioning that many conservatives were ex-Communists. He suggests that there's no merit to the idea that Dewey's influence on education has been negative even though this is hardly a crackpot or new argument, even among liberals. And, worst of all, he pretends that he doesn't know the real substance of the complaints against Friedan. The issue isn't merely that she was an "ex"-Communist. The critique offered by David Horowitz, and mentioned in the Human Events piece, was that Friedan was a collosal liar. She pretended to be a middle class housewife when she was really a pro-Stalin activist. Chait willfully ignores this in order to deliver a cheap shot. Call me crazy, but if a conservative were guilty of such propagandistic misrepresentation, I sincerely doubt Chait would write how he failed to see how a famous conservative's pro-Hitler past was entirely irrelevant to his insights.

"Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China"

Have you put this on the web as an MP3? You could charge people to download it.

Or how about a form of blackmail--NRO readers download it, then collect from the neighbors in return for not playing it.

This implies no reflection on your singing, of course: they must simply explain to the (presumably lefty) neighbors that it's a writer at a Conservative publication doing the singing, crank it up, and wait for results. Then send all proceeds to a special fund set aside for that purpose.

Just a thought.

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- The mother of a 12-year-old boy killed in his own home by one of the family's two pit bulls says she had been so concerned about one of the dogs that she shut her son in the basement to protect him.

Maureen Faibish said she ordered Nicholas to stay in the basement while she did errands on June 3, the day he was attacked by one or both of the dogs.

She said she was worried about the male dog, Rex, who was acting possessive because the female, Ella, was in heat.

"I put him down there, with a shovel on the door," Faibish said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. "And I told him: 'Stay down there until I come back.' Typical Nicky, he wouldn't listen to me."... [KJL: He's a child. They do that.]

Faibish found her son's body in a bedroom. He was covered in blood from several wounds, including a major head injury.

..."It's Nicky's time to go," she said in the interview. "When you're born you're destined to go and this was his time."

UNITED NATIONS - Investigators of the U.N. oil-for-food program said Tuesday they are "urgently reviewing" new information that suggests U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan may have known more than he revealed about a contract that was awarded to the company that employed his son.

The December 1998 memo from Michael Wilson, then a vice president of Cotecna Inspections S.A., mentions brief discussions with Annan "and his entourage" at a summit in Paris in 1998 about Cotecna's bid for a $10 million-a-year contract under oil-for-food.

If accurate, the memo could contradict a major finding of the Independent Inquiry Committee — that there wasn't enough evidence to show that Annan knew about efforts by Cotecna, which employed his son, Kojo, to win the contract. Cotecna learned it won the contract on Dec. 11, 1998, days after the meeting....

From a reader:

Mr. Goldberg,

First, let me state that I think the existence of The Corner reduces our real GDP figures somewhat. Here's a short, oversimplified explanation:

Assuming the following:

- 10,000 people monitor The Corner regularly at work.
- "Monitoring regularly" means hitting the refresh button every 15 minutes.
- Stopping work to refresh the page and glance at new posts takes 1 minute.
- Starting back into the project you were working on takes 1 minute.
- Average productivity $ value per minute of the 10,000 viewers = $5.
(Yes, I pulled that out of thin air, but you can do that in economics.)

That would figure out to be 8 minutes per person of lost productivity every hour, or $400,000 of lost productivity each hour. Assuming a 40-hour work week, that's $1,600,000 lost per week, or $83,200,000 per year. That brings our GDP figure down just a bit.

Now whether comparing GDP figures between China and the US is good or bad, I'd say it's probably more irrelevant. The West has turned into one big shopping mall, and sees everything through economic glasses. China and our other enemies do not. They have not forgotten that it is power, and power alone, that rules history. We believe that our economy is what gives us power. That is a pretty fragile belief, don't you think?

Anyway, I don't care what my nieces and nephews say....math is fun!

We are here to urge our colleagues to allow the Bolton nomination to come back to the floor for an up-or-down vote. That's the purpose of John McCain and Bill Frist today spending a few minutes with you. And I believe we can accomplish that. There's a lot going on in terms of negotiations and letters and talking.

But now we're at a point where the filibuster against Bolton -- and, yes, I'll call it a filibuster, because that's where we are until we get it to an up-or-down vote on the floor of the United States Senate -- is continuing.

Just looking back at the data and the statistics, it was over 200 days ago that the position of the U.N. ambassador came open with the resignation of our former colleague, Jack Danforth, who was then ambassador at the United Nations.

On March 7th, the nomination was announced. On March 17th, the nomination was sent to this body, the United States Senate. On April 11th, the Foreign Relations Committee held its hearing. On May 12th, sent to the floor, to our executive calendar. But on May 26th, through a cloture vote, this filibuster was begun.

At the same time, we have seen a whole sequence of events over the last 200 days. We've seen the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the vote in Iraq, the vote in Palestine, the hope of opening the presidential elections in Egypt.

It's been 200 days that this vacancy sign above our U.N. ambassador's door in New York has been blinking. It is now a time to end that.

In addition, we're seeing reports come out almost daily calling out for reform in the United Nations. We see the oil-for-food program. We've seen the problem with refugees. We've seen the human rights questionable commission there in terms of participation.

It is time to reform the U.N. It is time to bring Bolton to the floor for an up-or-down vote. We're confident that he will be confirmed if we're allowed to do so.

From a few readers:

On China and the US and growth:

1. The calculation that you are doing is total GDP; when US and Chinese
total GDPs are even there will be around 250 million Americans earning,
say, $50,000/head and 1.25 billion Chinese earning $10,000 each. So you
may want to think about per capita GDP as well. The smaller, richer US
population will be able to afford things that the more numerous, poorer
Chinese will not.

2. Chinese growth statistics are at best back of the envelope
estimates. There is a staff of something like 15 people calculating
Chinese GDP, and a large fraction of the country is not well measured.

3. Most of Chinese growth involves getting people out of peasant villages
(where they practice more or less subsistence agriculture) and into factory
jobs. It is unclear how long this will last (it is possible that to move
another 100 million into factories will require building more factories
than are needed to build all the stuff needed by the world's
consumers). There is a lot of pressure in the US and Europe to reduce
purchases (or maybe the growth in purchases) of Chinese goods, which will
limit future Chinese growth.

4. India is fast creeping up on China. They speak English and outnumber
the Chinese.

And...

If you are speaking of the date at which you expect per-capita income in China will surpass that in the US, then the following is something to remember. There is something called the “Convergence Hypothesis” which states that under certain conditions, economies that are similar except for their initial level of income, will have their incomes converge over time. The corollary to this result is that economies that are initially poor will gradually approach the level of income of the initially rich, they will never pass them. Another way to say this is that it will take an infinite amount of time for China to pass the US. This is because the growth rate of the poorer economies (e.g. China) gradually slows down and prevents it from passing the richer economies (e.g US).

Of course if the “certain conditions” assumption is not satisfied, then there are other things that could happen in principle. For example, it could then ultimately be that China could surpass the US in per-capita GDP at some future date. On the other hand, the opposite could happen: The differences could stay large forever.

The “Convergence Hypothesis” is something widely studied. People like Robert Barro have made a career out of it. It seems to hold up pretty well in the data, but there are always exceptions. For example, once you include the continent of Africa in your data set, everything gets screwed up since this is a pool of countries that are poor and don’t seem to show any sign of catching up to any developed countries.

And...

Jonah:

While it may be interesting to think about when China might pass us as the largest economy, it is certainly not the whole story. If, in 2056, China has an economy roughtly our size, then it would have roughly one-fourth of the per-capita income, since their population is four times as large. So, even after fifty years of outsized growth, we would still be, on average, four times as wealthy as the Chinese. Now that is interesting.

Hi Kathryn,

I too really enjoyed reading the article in today's NYT on the current crop of Heritage interns. I'm still in close touch with many of my former Heritage intern alums (summer class of 2002) and we're quite jealous that we missed out on living in those luxurious dorms! (although my stipend did allow me to survive living in a basement apartment in a less-than-glamorous section of N.E. Washington).

Although we did predictably break down along libertarian-traditionalist lines, some fissures produced more numerous discussions than others. For instance, we were relatively united on U.S. foreign policy issues, but the question of same-sex marriage and the future possibility (at that time) of a Constitutional amendment, was probably the most popularly debated issue of the summer (especially for those over 21 during the post-softball game victory celebrations). During my time at Heritage we also had an early-morning American political theory reading group that was graciously led by Matthew Spalding. A few of the hardcore libertarians were quite unflattering toward Abraham Lincoln, blaming the origins of "big government" on his administration. Those fans of Strauss and of the American founding period looked more toward the Progressive era for the intellectual origins of the federal government's expansion and for many of the ideas-now-taken-as-axioms by today's Left (which I look forward to reading more about in Jonah's pending book).

We also had many related discussions on whether/ how the state should either exist to promote freedom, virtue, or both. I noticed that those of us from northeastern or secular schools such as Amherst (me), Harvard and Chicago often learned a lot from our peers at Catholic U., Notre Dame, and other similar institutions during these discussions. Political dorks we were, but outside of those discussions great continuing friendships were fostered that still continue.

Throughout my internship, we were able to learn directly from Lee Edwards and former AG Meese as well as hear from some terrific speakers (Dinesh D'Souza included). Overall, my summer at Heritage was a fantastically engaging intellectual and personal experience that my fellow alums still reminisce about when we get together in Washington. I also found that when it came time to seek a post-college job in Washington, the Heritage name was very helpful. Thanks for the link and keep up the good work!

P.S. Before I came to Heritage and with the exception of some wonderful people at Amherst, (Hadley Arkes especially) NR and NRO were pretty much my only links to people who shared my beliefs. Many other interns at Heritage shared my perspective and so it was even more terrific to debate the latest NR article or position stated from up above by the editors.

I don't recall the song Derb was singing in those pics, but looking at them, it seems that it might be "Mr. Roboto."

(top to bottom)

Pic 1 - "You're wondering who I am -- machine or mannequin (manny-can)"

Pic 2 - "With parts made in Japan..."

Pic 3 - "I am the modern man!"

Pic 4 - "Domo arigato Mr. Roboto, domo...domo"

Pic 5 - "The time has come at last, to throw away this mask, so everyone can see, my true identity..."

Pic 6 - "I'm Kilroy! Kilroy. Kilroy. Kilroy."

While madrassas may breed fundamentalists who have learned to recite the Koran in Arabic by rote, such schools do not teach the technical or linguistic skills necessary to be an effective terrorist. Indeed, there is little or no evidence that madrassas produce terrorists capable of attacking the West.

Wanna be the captain of the Enterprise

Wanna be the king of the Zulus

Melody: I keep on reading about how you believe in the inherent goodness of humanity, and I was just wondering how someone like Bush fits into that world view... if he does, at all.

Gloria: Well, yeah. He wasn't born that way. As a baby, he probably had a whole person inside him! But that family is enough to turn anybody into a raving power maniac, and they certainly did it with him.

Melody: When I saw the picture, the famous picture of him, with a bunch of other white guys, gleefully signing away our rights as women... all I could think was, "ok, how is that not just pure evil?" [KJL: She's talking about the signing of the partial-birth abortion ban.]

Gloria: Well, you know, there is certainly evil effect. There are certainly going to be millions of women and a lot of men who simply are not alive because he's in the White House. There are going to be whole species of animals, and living things, and plants that are not alive anymore, and will never come back, because: he killed them. So, that's an evil impact. I don't think it's inevitable. He wasn't born that way.

SEXUAL predator women teachers are chasing male colleagues away from the profession, says an official report.

Metaphors are tricky things, dangerous in the wrong hands. Which leads us to Indra Nooyi, president and CFO of PepsiCo. In an address to the graduating class of Columbia Business School, Ms. Nooyi spun out an elaborate metaphor contending that the nations of the world resemble the fingers of a hand, with the U.S. being — can you guess? — the middle finger. Explained the lady: “This is how the rest of the world looks at the U.S. right now. Not as part of the hand . . . but instead scratching our nose and sending a far different signal.” Ah, the Ugly American! Blundering and insulting, the loose cannon among nations, stirring up strife and discord! We must be gentler, more sensitive — then they won’t hate us so much! But who, actually, hates us? Not, presumably, the untold millions who watch our movies and buy our soft drinks. Foreigners could, if they wished, stop watching and stop buying. A lot of European and Third World intellectuals hate us, we know, because their brains are so addled with crackpot ideologies as to make them useless for employment in modern commerce. Who else hates us? Just a few guilt-crazed wealthy elites like . . . well, like the president and CFO of PepsiCo.

Some may find it hard to feel pity for someone as wealthy as Jackson, but if you view wealth, as I do, as a potential prison of pitiless isolation, then the damage to the man's psyche and soul must have been and still is immeasurable. And damaged people damage others - even in the pathetic, sick way in which Jackson obviously wounded some of the children who foolishly came into his care. The parents of these boys should have known better, but they too were mesmerized by the fantasy of eternal wealth and youth. What you see in this case, then, is the cold, heartless core of American celebrity: a Faustian trade-off between instant, fathomless attention and the maintenance of any sort of psychological or spiritual perspective.

Meanwhile, fame moves on. No one cares much about Jackson's music any more. No one cares about his soul or those of his alleged victims. What the culture of celebrity builds it also destroys - casually. In this case, the wreckage is a husk of a human, the detritus of a culture that feeds on exposure and then, bored, moves on to the next victim. It is because we do not want to look at this too long that we finally look away. The world that created Michael Jackson is also the world that will happily forget him.

While madrassas may breed fundamentalists who have learned to recite the Koran in Arabic by rote, such schools do not teach the technical or linguistic skills necessary to be an effective terrorist. Indeed, there is little or no evidence that madrassas produce terrorists capable of attacking the West. And as a matter of national security, the United States doesn't need to worry about Muslim fundamentalists with whom we may disagree, but about terrorists who want to attack us.

At a recent conference of conservatives in Washington, Moore decried [Bill] Pryor as one of the judges ''who say you cannot acknowledge God."

Why is $5mm absurd as compensation for a lost life and in exchange for giving up the right not to sue the airlines and others for their negligence—particularly with respect to security? That's a very typical amount for a lost life. If you look at the amounts of compensation people accept for risk, it's on par with what people take (statistically) for a 1% increase in mortality for instance. So it just seems like a lot to you, but you have no real basis for saying so. Indeed, for a bond trader, the lost income alone is likely in the millions.

Seems like a lot of money to give in one check. Social security pays out over years -- why not pay this out over time also? And the guy was making low six figures when he died -- I don't mean to be disrespectful to him, but he was a long way away from 5 mil. As for it being a payoff for giving up the right to sue -- that's different, and I didn't know that.

But the real problem is that a woman who has lost her husband has had her life thrown into complete disarray. The big government/liberal approach is to throw a big check at her. Clearly, money wasn't the answer.

The former Catholic and star of television's "Dawson's Creek" grew up with a poster of Cruise on her bedroom wall and has said she grew up wanting to marry him.

"We all keep dreaming, and luckily, dreams come true," Holmes said.