A Welsh inventor has come up with a little safety device that will keep bottled drinks from being tampered with while the drinker is away from the table.

The “Drink-guard” is a key-lockable plastic seal that prevents any date-rape drugs from being slipped into the bottle. It also has a little red warning light that lights up if anybody has tried to remove it.

Why is the ODE running this nonsense? Have they run out of lunatic cartoonists? Why is someone named Jeff, from Virginia Tech, pleading with us to THINK OF THE CHILDREN on the commentary page?

Making website owners or ISPs legally liable for the audience they attract is a logistical nightmare, entirely dodged here in favor of some hand-wringing over “pornographers who prey on the children out there who make innocent mistakes in their typing of Web sites.” (Another great turn of phrase: it’s “a step backward in the fight to protect children and other unsuspecting innocents from unwanted invasion of moral decency.”) If we’re going to have to put up with the likes of Jeff, I think it should be via a reciprocal agreement in which Shakra gets sent on tour.

In the TNR roundtable discussion, Jonathan Chait has the best line I’ve seen so far:

In fact, here’s my ideal plan for the Kerry campaign. At an upcoming rally, an anti-Kerry protestor starts to burn an American flag. Kerry leaps down from the podium and starts strangling the protestor with his bare hands, then hurls him to the ground and rescues the flag. In the course of putting out the fire, he suffers minor burns that, the campaign announces, will force him to be hospitalized and inaccessible to the media and the public until mid-October. In the meantime, Edwards is dispatched to present the Democratic message for the next three and half months.

Meanwhile, the surprising thing is not that kerrypicksedwards.com was picked up by the RNC; it’s that kerrypicksgephardt.com points there as well. Poor old Dick.

Of course, it’s about more than just fireworks. It’s about illegal fireworks.

Brando is dead.

The only channel that had anything on this while I was flipping around this morning was Fox, who were running a phone interview with insufferable “Inside The Actors Studio” host James Lipton. Lipton’s tribute was very, very long and featured much wanking about the Method. It culminated with the following exchange (not quite verbatim):

LIPTON: …but I think I know what’s happening in heaven – if there is a heaven – I’m pretty sure I can say what’s happening…

ANCHOR: Can you say it in ten seconds?

Naturally, he couldn’t.

On an unserious note: over at Tomato Nation there is the third instalment in what is by now a fully-fledged mythology. Read this. Then this. Then this. If they start calling for nominations, I’m saying Prefontaine all the way.

It’s not a new sentiment, but it bears repeating: some pre-journalism students are more “pre” than others. Here‘s Susan Goodwin in the ODE, who after a column’s worth of confusion over the difference between choosing to wear a burqua (or not) and being forced to wear one, offers this rallying cry:

To women who already do not wear provocative clothing, tell others why you don’t! To women who do wear provocative clothing, evaluate why you do and what tells you to. Then decide if you still want to participate in the overt sexuality of our culture.

Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? You have a choice. And please, women of the world: refrain from explaining your reasons for not wearing provocative clothing to me. To the very limited extent that I care, I can probably figure it out. That goes for the guys, too.

Ryan Nyberg has a very Nybergian review of Michael Moore’s film in today’s Pulse section. Although Nyberg doesn’t have the appeal of his predecessor, he nonetheless makes some amusing points about the film:

“Moore is often correct in his assertions (his accuracy can be fairly well judged by which claims conservative critics have not bothered to challenge, such as that Bush is cutting war veteran services and soldiers pay at the same time he is sending more soldiers to die) and his falsehoods are his to right to make. It is his movie …”

Indeed. And this is my blog, so …

Breaking News: According to reputable sources, Pulse editor Ryan Nyberg shoots rattlesnake venom strait into his jugular. He also molests children, kills the homeless, eats kittens and masturbates to Victorias Secret.

I will not apologize for any falsehoods that may be presented above; they are mine to make.

I hopped in my truck yesterday and turned on the radio to the words of some New York professor-type discussing Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn’s Gulag Archipelago. My ears perked up, as Stalinism is one of my favorite topics, academically speaking.

After going on for several minutes about the untold millions of people who had been sent to fester and die in the Siberian gulags, the speaker asserted that the age of the gulags did not end with the death of Stalin or even Brezhnev, but continued up until the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989. Interesting, I thought. Maybe he’s talking about a book he’s written with some new information.

Alas, no — and my first hint should have been that the info in the above paragraph was prefaced with “we are led to believe . . . ” The next words out of this guy’s mouth went something like:

“And if this is true, that these gulags kept millions of people locked up until the Soviet regime fell, then where were all the millions of freed innocent prisoners with stories to tell? Where was the flood of reunions with loved ones?”

He went on to describe how Vaclav Havel had inadvertantly released thousands of hardened criminals he had mistaken for political prisoners, “assuming that if the Husak regime had locked them up they must be innocent.” This, according to him, led to a crime wave.

As I struggled to regain control of my truck, the broadcast went to a station break: “You are listening to Michael Parenti on Progressive Radio at 89.7, KLCC.” Progressive, indeed. This “intellectual” would apparently have us progressing right to the collective farm — and that’s not hyperbole.

Practitioners of Holocaust denial receive instant and vehement opprobrium from all sides of the political spectrum wherever they go. And rightly so; we should censure these creeps. Holocaust denial turning up on the KLCC airwaves is simply unthinkable.

Gulag denial is cut from the same cloth. Parenti’s question “where were all the millions of freed innocent prisoners?” is no different than, say, David Irving or Mel Gibson’s papa asking “where are all the Jews with loved ones who were killed?” The truth, on both counts, is that there are plenty. There are also mass graves. Lots and lots and lots of them. And just as a Holocaust denier can ascribe all the mountains of evidence to the contrary as “lies of the Jewish media,” so too will Parenti chalk Gulag evidence up to the “lies of the capitalist media.”

So why is a local radio station willing to give air time to Michael Parenti’s Gulag denial? And why are leftist broadcasters filing his bloodstained lies under “progressive”? It’s disgusting.

I am indebted to Hit and Run for this piece about Europes disdain for America, written by Bruce Bawer, an expatriate living in Norway. It is an exemplary and spot-on appraisal of anti-American attitudes in Europe. Unlike many writers who have attempted, and failed, to explain the Europeans disgust with the United States, Bawer makes a reasoned, albeit a tad overlong, argument for American values while avoiding the jingoistic wordplay that would make most savvy readers (i.e. Europeans living in the U.S., Americans who have lived abroad) roll their eyes.

As an American who has lived in Europe, I found this quote reflective of my own feelings upon coming home:

Living in Europe, I gradually came to appreciate American virtues Id always taken for granted, or even disdainedamong them a lack of self-seriousness, a grasp of irony and self-deprecating humor, a friendly informality with strangers, an unashamed curiosity, an openness to new experience, an innate optimism, a willingness to think for oneself and speak ones mind and question the accepted way of doing things. (One reason why Euro- peans view Americans as ignorant is that when we dont know something, were more likely to admit it freely and ask questions.)

Bawer also makes the argument that many Europeans, often the most vociferous, will denounce the United States for being a land of uneducated dunces while avouching to the words of so-called experts. Critical analysis of what these highly educated, supremely edified people are actually reciting is woefully lacking; this is extremely apparent when it comes to the media, paradoxically believed to be less slanted and more professional in Europe despite strong evidence to the contrary:

[W]ith the exception of Britain, no Western European nation even approaches Americas journalistic diversity. (The British courts recent silencing of royal rumors, moreover, reminded us that press freedom is distinctly more circumscribed in the U.K. than in the U.S.) And yet Western Europeans are regularly told by their media that its Americans who are fed slanted, selective newsa falsehood also given currency by Americans like Hertsgaard.

A panel of local and state emergency response officials says that the nation’s disaster alert system is a total mess. The panel was formed after September 11 to improve emergency systems in order to give faster alerts to Americans. Some of the suggestions they came up with were cell phone alerts and a reverse 911 system where officials would call people and inform them on the impending danger.

However, because of a slow response by the federal government to implement these and other suggestions, the panel may soon dissolve. What’s been created instead of a strong national system are local and state warning systems that widely range in their funding. Large cities such as L.A. and San Francisco have well-funded emergency response department, but other West Coast cities don’t even have the funds for a tidal wave warning siren.

Perhaps the alternative to a strong national warning system is to let local and state officials decide what warning systems are best for them given that each region faces different threats based on its geographic location and power facilities (i.e. nuclear power).