More silliness from US News & World Report, this time from the editor-in-chief.

To acknowledge our vulnerability is not to be fatalistic or defeatist. It is simply to recognize the magnitude of the challenge. Europe and other parts of the world will not feel the same way as we do, for we are the No. 1 country and thus the No. 1 target. For most of them, terrorism is nothing more than a TV drama. When Bush said, "Either you are with us or against us," many Europeans replied, "We don't accept either option."

Terrorism is nothing more than a TV drama to most Europeans? Right. There's never been any attacks by, oh, I dunno, the ETA, the IRA, LVF, Armata Corsa, FLNC, Red Army Faction, etc., etc., and also, etc. Zuckerman's statement is only the most ludicrous one in an article that veers from the questionable to the laughable. We may be the #1 target for certain terrorist groups, but I doubt Basque Seperatists are really coming after us too much.

A lot of Europeans oppose war in Iraq, some for very good reasons, some for crap reasons. But a lack of exposure to terrorism sure as hell isn't one of them.

Guess this guy shouldn't have stayed in an organization that has belief in god (Pick a god! Any god! But you damn well better believe in one!) when he stopped believing in one. Maybe he should start an Atheist Scouts of America? Seriously, it might be a good thing. Since there's a strong contigent in this country who seem to believe very strongly that being an atheist automatically means you're evil, it would be a good thing.

Has anyone seen anything saying the sniper killings were religiously motivated? I ask because Ann Coulter, John Leo, and others seem to be really pissed that the headlines aren't saying "Evil Muslim Jihadeen Islamic Baby-Eating Killer Caught!". There's a lot of Muslims in the world, and some people who claim to be of that faith are crazed psychos and/or cold-blooded killers. Just like there's crazed psychos/CBKs who claim to be Christians, Buddhists, etc... If these guys had been killing people and leaving messages saying "The Great Satan is punished by Allah!", this would be a different matter. But has there been any evidence that this was done for reasons other than the guy was crazy and wanted money? "I am God" is not a particulary, how should I put this, non-blasphemous statement. Believe me, I'd be happier if most religions went away, but the attempt to turn this into an "us vs. them" with "them" being Muslims has an implict assumption in it that the "us" are Christians. And, seeing as how I don't intend to kill or die for anybody's idea of god, I'm just not down with that.

Argh! I had a rant about John Leo on here, and the site crashed when I tried to post it. Well, in shorter form, then:
John Leo, in his latest column for US News & World Report, trots out some spurious statistics (a pet peeve of mine). He talks about one stat (number of serial killers who are white), and then uses non-applicable stats (number of blacks who are serial killers, number of sniper killers who are non-white) to argue that it is wrong. It's in the second paragraph of his piece. If you have a situation where the majority of serial killers are white, it doesn't matter what percentage of blacks are serial killers. By Leo's own numbers 22% of serial killers are black. He doesn't give stats for other races, but I'm guessing that they don't account for 40% of serial killings in the US (the number necessary to make white serial killers 38%, or not in the majority. I'm using integers.) He also says more than half of all sniper killings are by non-whites. Since not all sniper killers are serial killers, or vice versa, and he doesn't give us any numbers on those who are, this number is fairly pointless, other than it sounds good because he's talking about a serial sniper.

I'm not even going to go into how silly he sounds further on when he trys to talk about hip-hop and Jamaica. There's a long history of any given subculture having whatever characteristics are useful for those who are talking about it, but actually know nothing about the subculture.

So, this is the first post to the Tymblog. I'm going to put some more stuff up here at my lunch time.