I’ve started to get a significant amount of what’s referred to as comment spam i.e. advertisements, etc. inserted into the comments sections of entries presumeably automatically by bots. Fortunately, a solution to this problem exists: MT-Blacklist. I’ll deploy it later today.

In honor of Bastille Day I thought it might be a good time to clear the air a little about a couple of stories that many in the blogosphere reported—presumeably to cast our erstwhile allies, the French, in a bad light. The more recent story is a story of an anti-semitic attack on a woman in France that has been revealed to be a hoax:

PARIS, France (AP) — Just days after claiming to be the victim of an attack that stunned France, a young mother confessed to making up the story, authorities said Tuesday.

The woman claimed to have been robbed Friday by a knife-wielding gang that mistook her for a Jew and scrawled swastikas on her body.

But police, finding no clues and no witnesses, brought the woman in for questioning Tuesday, police officials said on condition of anonymity.

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Now here’s a thought for the day:

I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.

Bjarne Stroustrup (originator of C++ programming language)

Tyler Cowen has a post about a German performance of John Cage’s ”Organ squared/As slow as possible.” He writes:

Just imagine a German debate over what “as slow as possible” could mean.

That would seem to me to be a pretty good description of Act I of Die Meistersinger.

Over the last several weeks there have been increasingly angry, bitter, and hostile exchanges in the blogosphere on patriotism and anti-Americanism. See here, here (keep scrolling up), and here. Be sure to read the comments. Some of this has been occasioned by the recent celebration of the Fourth of July, some by the release of Michael Moore’s documentary, and some by the increasing temperature of the U. S. presidential campaign.
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The International Court of Justice recently has issued an advisory opinion on the legal implications of the wall or security fence that Israel has been building around the West Bank. Matthew Taylor of The Guardian writes:

Palestinian leaders today said they would seek UN sanctions against Israel after the international court of justice ruled that the barrier being built around the West Bank was illegal and should be pulled down.

Announcing its findings, the court said the “security wall” infringed the rights of Palestinians, adding that Israel should pay compensation for the damage it had caused.

The decision itself is here. This does not appear to be a permalink so get it while it’s hot.
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As you may know there a proposal to increase the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.00. And there’s a pretty interesting discussion going on in the blogosphere about it. As you might expect Brad DeLong is basically for it and Steve Verdon is basically against it.

Steve says:

Also, this issue that Prof. DeLong raises does not address the fact that the minimum wage is basically a hidden tax. Not many people are going to go to the store and notice the price increase and go, “Damn those politicians for raising the minimum wage. That resulted in this $0.30 price increase in this chocolate shake.”

Actually it seems to me that Prof. DeLong touts that as a feature:

The minimum wage, on the other hand, is nearly self-enforcing: its administrative costs are nearly nil, for workers (legal workers, at least) have a very strong incentive to drop a dime on bosses who violate it. From a government-administrative and error-rate perspective, it’s a very cost-effective program.

and

I–and almost everybody else I’ve talked to–think this is dead wrong: the incidence of the minimum wage “tax” falls almost entirely upon the customers of firms that employ minimum-wage workers, and that’s pretty much all of us. It’s not as though the owners and managers of firms that employ minimum-wage workers have no other options. So I believe Landsburg is wrong: the burden of the minimum wage is broadly distributed across all taxpayers.

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Wretchard has written another typically fine and insightful post. I have to admit that I envy both his thinking and his writing.

The transnational liberal project and the dream of radical Islam are alike pursuits after a lost glories. In its eighth century heyday, Islam wielded a two-edged sword. Not only were their mobile tactics superior to those of the petty kingdoms around them, they brandished a creed and social structure which was in many ways superior to the barbarian modes which they encountered. Similarly, while Napoleon wielded the levees en masse; he rode on the greater wave of revolutionary France before whose ideas the dynastic houses of Europe trembled. But at the dawn of the 21st century, these two mighty blades had dwindled into single-edged fillets of rusted iron. Islam no longer the representative of a prosperous and tolerant society and the idea of France shrunken to a kind of petty socialism peopled with legions of pensioners.

I do have a few quibbles about the post. First, although I agree with him in his analysis of the transnational liberal project and that it is, indeed, as dead as the caliphate, can’t we come up with a better name than “transnational liberals”? There’s not much liberal about these Trotskyites and Maoists.
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I haven’t written about Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11 because I haven’t seen the movie, I don’t intend to, and, frankly, it doesn’t interest me. And lots of other people in the blogosphere on all sides of the political spectrum have written about it far better than I could.

In his Bleat this morning James Lileks fisks Michael Moore. Is it thorough? Let me put it this way. The glossary entry for fisk I link to should have a picture of Lileks on it. Moore has been lileksed.