Alan Dershowitz has little nice to say about Arafat:

Yasser Arafat was the godfather of international terrorism who dashed his people’s hope for statehood, stole billions of dollars intended for the relief of their suffering, and indoctrinated their children with so much hatred that they willingly turned themselves into human bombs.

He did manage to leapfrog the Palestinian cause over equally or more deserving causes

Here’s an interesting article in the NY Times, “What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers’ Habits.” Nothing is really earth-shattering in this article, but it is an interesting read to learn about Wal-Mart’s use of data mining. Plus, there’s this fun fact:

Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.’ That much information results in some interesting data-mining. Did you know hurricanes increase strawberry Pop Tarts sales 7-fold.

Christopher Hitchens has written a blistering article in Vanity Fair about “U.S. complicity in the dark deeds of right-wing dictators” in South America. Hitchens writes:

New and democratic governments, assisted by principled lawyers and judges and forensic investigators, are disinterring and identifying the maimed and twisted corpses of men and women, and of boys and girls, who were lost to their friends and families about a quarter of a century ago. [...] At the same time, in Washington, D.C., the declassification process for government documents is entering the disclosure phase. And, in a horrible way that is not being faced, the two excavations have begun to converge. From the standpoint of their victims, the death squads of Argentina and Chile were going about their busy work with the approval — no, the encouragement — of the secretary of state of the United States of America. [...]

We sometimes like to sneer at the “banana republic” political culture of Latin America. But here’s how things now stand. Argentinean courts have incarcerated Videla. The Chilean courts have just lifted the immunity of Pinochet, who has additionally been accused of using Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., to stash a fortune in stolen money and other loot. The families of the disappeared have begun to receive a measure of justice and honor. The graves are being exhumed. But these inquiries can go only so far. Judges in Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Paris have asked for Henry Kissinger’s testimony, since it is only in his papers and memos that the answers to many vital (and lethal) questions can be found. He persists in refusing to cooperate. The Bush State Department, to its shame and ours, continues to say that such questions should be addressed only through official diplomatic channels. This makes us complicit in the criminal behavior of a man who was in his time the (naturally, unelected) chairman and patron of the international dictators’ club. A suit has also been filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C., by the family of General Ren

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason has something to say about hypocrisy and city-funded wireless Internet in San Francisco:

When cellular carriers attempted to outfit the city of San Francisco with new antennas to improve poor cell reception, the local government nixed the proposal out of hysterical concerns that cellphone towers would give brain cancer to children. When dotcom mania gripped and enlivened the city, the local legislature fought the boom with on-the-fly zoning regulations and efforts to close the “loopholes” that allowed businesses and workers to set up shop in town.

Now, however, the City By the Bay’s executive and legislative branches appear to have found a communications technology they can get behind: The kind that requires government fact-finding studies, has no visible means of paying for itself, probably won’t work, and may only be conceivable through the creation of a wasteful new bureaucracy.

Back in September, city Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Chris Daly, proud veterans of the anti-dotcom backlash, proposed a $300, 000 study to find out whether the city should provide internet, cable TV, and telephone services to residents; the heart of the proposal is a scheme to lay new fiber optic cable during an upcoming sewer dig. Then last month, Mayor Gavin Newsom marked his first state-of-the-city speech by proposing a municipal WiFi network that would allow everybody in the City of St. Francis to download porn without paying for a web connection.

Quite possibly.

Today, not only is WSJ.com free, but they have a review of Turduckens. Their favorite is Cajun Grocer’s for both taste and value.

Here’s the WSJ’s take on Kofi Annan ordering the flags at the UN to be lowered to half mast to honor Arafat:

Kofi Annan ordered United Nations flags at half-staff yesterday in tribute to lately departed Palestinian supremo Yasser Arafat. This, the folks at Turtle Bay tell us, is standard operating procedure whenever the head of a member state dies in office. Excuse us for asking, but what U.N.-member state did Arafat lead?

Well, none: “Palestine” has observer, not member, status. But Mr. Annan amended protocol in order to give Arafat the same recognition in death as the U.N. accorded him in life.

Say what you will about Mr. Annan’s decision, it is certainly true that for 30 years the U.N. did what it could to elevate Arafat from terrorist to statesman. That’s something Americans might bear in mind when next told the war on terror must be conducted under U.N. auspices.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post reports that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, responsible for more than a score of suicide bombings, has renamed itself the Arafat Martyrs’ Brigades. Now, there is a fitting tribute.

Palestinians will be better off with Arafat gone. Here’s Max Boot from the LA Times on Arafat:

There has been no more successful terrorist in the modern age. Yet his biggest victims were not Israelis. It was his own people who suffered the most. If Arafat had displayed the wisdom of a Gandhi or Mandela, he would long ago have presided over the establishment of a fully independent Palestine comprising all of the Gaza Strip, part of Jerusalem and at least 95% of the West Bank. In fact, he seemed well on his way toward this goal when I met him in 1998 as part of a delegation of American scholars and journalists.

The place was his Ramallah compound, the time after midnight (Arafat was a night owl). He was wearing his trademark fatigues, and his hands and lips were shaking uncontrollably. Much of the session was conducted via translator, but Arafat broke into English when asked a question about Palestinian violations of the Oslo accords. It was the kind of query a democratic statesman would have batted away without a second thought.

Arafat, however, grew visibly agitated and stammered: “Be careful when you are speaking to me! Be careful, you are speaking to Arafat!” The threat of violence hung in the air as we left. Clearly Arafat had not quite mastered the art of being a politician or, rather, he was a politician in the mold of Mugabe or Mao.

And here’s Tom Gross in NRO:

But in other parts of the world, journalists are less enamored of Arafat. In the Times of India, for example, Lalita Panicker wrote last week that Arafat’s record “has been disastrous.”

“It is cause for celebration for the Palestinians,” she wrote, as he lay near death in a Paris hospital, that he “will never again control their destiny.”

“Dressed in ridiculous battle fatigues,” she went on, ” he has demonstrated that he neither wants nor can he deliver peace. Arafat’s lasting and most pernicious legacy is that he has contributed to completely changing the Palestinian psyche. The Palestinians were once the most secular, tolerant, and educated people in the Arab world. Today, Palestinian classrooms have become the hotbeds of recruitment for jihad… As a result, an entire younger generation has grown up on a diet of hate and fanaticism.”

Even the Arab media were more critical of Arafat than the BBC and others in the West. The profile of Arafat currently on al Jazeera’s website (“Arafat: Man with a Mission”) makes clear in its very first line that Arafat was born in Cairo (not in Jerusalem as he claimed) and that his father had “some Egyptian ancestry.” Al Jazeera added that “Arafat’s governing style tended to be more dictatorial than democratic.”

Writing last week on Islam Online (Arafat: The Enigmatic Leader”) Kareem Kamel spoke of the “the cronyism and corruption that have been rampant in the Palestinian territories since Arafat came from exile” and of the disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars of European Union aid money

Maureen was bad enough, but here’s a video of ABC News Senior Correspondent Carole Simpson portraying the red states as a return of the Confederacy. It’s too bad she is so uneducated to realize that the south was Democratic during the Civil War and it took a Republican President end slavery.

Next week NASA will try get a plane to go Mach 10 (7,200 mph). In my lifetime it would be fun if scramjets became a reality and you could travel to the other side of the planet in an afternoon. Here’s what the Washington Post has to say:

They call it a “scramjet,” an engine so blindingly fast that it could carry an airplane from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., in about 20 minutes — or even quicker. So fast it could put satellites in space. So fast it could drop a cruise missile on an enemy target, almost like shooting a rifle.

Next week, NASA plans to break the aircraft speed record for the second time in 7 1/2 months by flying its rocket-assisted X-43A scramjet craft 110,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean at speeds close to Mach 10 — about 7,200 mph, or 10 times the speed of sound.

The flight will last perhaps 10 seconds and end with the pilotless aircraft plunging to a watery grave 850 miles off the California coast. But even if the X-43A doesn’t set the record, it has already proved that the 40-year-old dream of “hypersonic” flight — using air-breathing engines to reach speeds above Mach 5 (3,800 mph) — has become reality.

Unlike rockets, which must carry oxygen with them as a “combustor” to ignite the fuel supply, scramjets take oxygen from the atmosphere, offering a huge savings in aircraft weight, and researchers around the world would like to take advantage.

In northeast Australia, a scramjet team funded by the U.S. and Australian armed forces will try for Mach 10 next year as a first step in using a scramjet to put satellites in space. The U.S. Air Force hopes to demonstrate within five years a scramjet-driven cruise missile fast enough to drive explosives deep into hardened targets. Other projects are moving forward in France and Japan.

Under NASA’s $250 million Hyper-X program, engineers at Langley Research Center here and the Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., designed and built three aluminum scramjet aircraft, each one 12 feet long and weighing about 2,800 pounds . Controllers aborted the first test flight in 2001 after the rocket booster malfunctioned.

But the second, on March 24, reached Mach 6.83 (5,200 mph), shattering the world speed record for air-breathing, non-rocket aircraft, previously held by a jet-powered missile. The highest speeds by manned aircraft were achieved by SR-71, the U.S. spy plane known as the “Blackbird,” capable of flying in excess of Mach 3 (2,300 mph).

“The idea was to demonstrate these technologies,” said Luat T. Nguyen, deputy manager for the program that designed X-43A. “We’ve done that. This is the first scramjet to work, and it is the only one at this point.”

Next week’s third flight will test the limits of the X-43A. Temperatures will be significantly higher: The leading edge of the aircraft’s nose will reach about 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit, 1,600 degrees hotter than during the March flight.