Some weeks ago I posted a commentary on net neutrality (Verizon bellyaching about Google's "free lunch"), a group of issues that have to do with how much control your Internet Service Provider should have over the content that you choose to access on the Internet.

Today, a committee of the US House of Representatives voted down an amendment that would give the Federal Communications Commission the right to enforce principles of net neutrality on the big telecommunications and cable companies that own the fiber-optic and co-axial pipes on which the Internet is built.

This is bad news. If that previous posting interested you, then you might like to have a look at the following:

On Salon today, Andrew Leonard comments on the net neutrality issue.

And for a more comprehensive analysis of the problem, have a read of Farhad Manjoo's excellent Salon article about net neutrality from a couple of weeks ago.

Patti Dinkle always got what she wanted.

At some point she wanted a new name, and so now she is Pepper Dennis, the star reporter for Chicago's WEIE News. The new show starring Rebecca Romijn is making a splash this spring. It is an appealing combination of light romantic comedy and slapstick, even though in this writer's humble opinion the slapstick needs some work: after four episodes it still feels a little kooky. Last night the screenplay called for Pepper to drag herself into an ode to Roxette by singing "Listen to Your Heart" to a bolting bride that would have been less painful had it consisted of a capella fingernails on a juicy blackboard.

But Pepper Dennis's primary comedic material is the news business, and in this area she has serious potential. Last night the serious journalist had to suck it up and cover Chicago's wedding of the year, between her activist friend, Callie Merrill, and a banking family's heir apparent named Connor Blanchard. When Pepper screened her profile of Callie for them, dwelling on her Peace Corps work and left-wing protests, both of them were equally horrified. But it was left to Connor to deliver one of the most amusing lines that has come out of the idiot box this week:

"Our families have been in the public eye since the city was founded. Why? Because we represent the life others dream about. Wealth, glamour, let's give them the fairy tale. No one wants to see the Third World--everything's covered in dirt."

As is her husband, Daniel Palladino. These two created and have spearheaded Gilmore Girls for the last six seasons, and although the show has been picked up, they will not be following. In this interview with Entertainment Weekly, the Sherman-Palladinos discuss what happened to make them decide to leave. One interesting comment from Amy is that she is certain next season will not be the last, especially since the new CW Network to be formed by the merger of The WB and UPN will want to keep a great show with a great audience.

I just hope what happens in Star's Hollow post-Amy is not what happened at the Bartlet White House post-Aaron.

I have just come across a fascinating review from the 2 April edition of the New York Times Book Review, about EARTHLY POWERS: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe From the French Revolution to the Great War, by Michael Burleigh.

The book explores the decline of religion in Europe during the 19th century, the consequence of which was total war in the 20th. But the review by Mark Lilla, Godless Europe, is itself worth the price of a book.

Here is an excerpt:

Among the many stories Europeans tell about themselves, none is more tenacious than the legend of Europe's secularization. It goes something like this. After many dark centuries of cultural backwardness and political tyranny sanctified by Roman Catholicism, followed by a period of maniacal confessional conflict set off by the Protestant Reformation, Europe in the 17th century began a slow but steady exit from religion. By the 18th century the leading lights of the Enlightenment had issued a public declaration of independence from God and his priests, which then became a battle plan for the war of attrition against religion that began with the French Revolution.

The outcome of this conflict was settled from the start, and already in the early 19th century the center of gravity in European life had shifted from problems of faith to those of class, industrialization, urbanization, nationalism and colonialism. The "long" 19th century, from the French Revolution to World War I, culminated in a crisis involving all these new factors, and the result was total war in the 20th. After this catastrophe, Europe was divided geographically and ideologically, but still unified in believing that the challenge of religion was over. Since World War II, Europeans have stared in blank amazement across the Atlantic at a new global power whose citizens and even leaders seem to believe myths about the old bearded man in the sky. They call this American "exceptionalism," on the assumption that living without God is the ultimate destiny of the human race.

Things change. Today we can be forgiven for thinking that Europe, not the United States, is the exception. Wherever we now cast our gaze around the globe, we are met with the spectacle of individuals and whole cultures set spiritually ablaze, and eager to spread the flame to others. The Old World is different: though Christian belief remains strong in some European countries, like Poland, and Islam is a potent force among Muslims across the Continent, contemporary Europe is the closest thing to a godless civilization the world has ever known. Does this place it in the vanguard of world history? That is what many Europeans think, which is why they have been caught off guard by the challenge of radical Islam even in their own backyard. They find it hard to believe that people can still take God seriously and want to shape society according to his dictates.

And this is simply genius.

Cool Tools: World Time Clock

Economist's View has posted the following 60 Minutes transcript from Sunday night. Enjoy.

60 Minutes: Bush, Cheney, Rice Told Iraq Had No WMD Program Before War

With the summer movie race about to officially wave the green flag, I thought you would like to see someone's predictions for this year's upcoming films. I just found this posting (PRODUCERS GAME 2006) from this past February, where Piker lists the movies she (or he, can't tell) believes will be the big ones in 2006.

This is more than just Academy Awards picks. One error here, I believe, is Piker's conviction that Pixar's Cars will outpace Superman Returns at the box office. Not a bad guess, given that no Harry Potters are coming out this year, but I think Superman Returns has a better chance of beating Titanic's all-time box office record than any movie in the past nine years.

You can also see the other picks from past years.

New Economist today references an appreciative portrait of John Stuart Mill, the father of modern liberalism, in Prospect Magazine, a British current affairs and culture periodical. Mill grew up as a child prodigy in the heart of rational utilitarianism--his father was Jeremy Bentham's closest disciple and Bentham was Mill's godfather. Utilitarianism promoted "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," and by the age of 15, he was already an accomplished logician and political economist. When, at 20, he underwent a mental crisis, the result was his gradual rejection of the caustic utilitarian philosophy and an increasing concern with human freedom. His most famous work, On Liberty, is one of the most influential philosophical statements on free speech and the importance of each individual's independent search for truth: "He who lets the world . . . choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation," he writes. "He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties."

In May is the 200th anniversary of John Stuart Mill's birth. If you are not familiar with Mill, Richard Reeves's Portrait offers a highly readable introduction, if in a somewhat glorifying tone, to the main thrusts of Mill's life and work, including his optimistic view of human nature and his championship of free speech, women's suffrage and freedom for Ireland. And if you already know him, get ready for a refreshing reacquaintance with the thought of one of the nineteenth century's most compassionate and influential thinkers.

Believability. Not all movies need it, but those that are attempting to depict realistic events do. The Sentinel, starring Michael Douglas, Kiefer Sutherland and Eva Longoria does well on this count, almost all the way through the film.

Douglas is Pete Garrison, a US Secret Service agent on the Presidential detail who once took a bullet that saved Ronald Reagan's life. But when an agent is murdered and it is discovered that there is a traitor within the service, Garrison fails a polygraph and becomes the prime suspect though he insists he is being framed. Enter Jack Bauer as a Kiefer Sutherland who has remembered how to dress decently since his last shoot on the '24' set. Agent David Breckinridge is a loyal, by the book company man who does everything properly and is the lead investigator, with a rookie field trainee played by Eva Longoria, who doesn't do very much more than show up for her scenes. Such is the recipe for a snappy spy movie that excels in the believability column.

Until they get to Toronto.

The President is attending the G8 at Toronto City Hall, and this is where the assassination attempt will take place. First, the real mole in the service (who may or may not be Garrison, I'm not telling) decides to stand up to the terrorists and says that he won't go through with it, and he doesn't care if they expose him or kill him: checkmate! But this man apparently hasn't seen many movies, because he is flabbergasted when the bad guy takes out three pictures of his family and says, "Oh, we're not going to kill you, we're going to kill her, them, and her."

Then the summit begins, and the American President gets up to the podium and says, "We must ratify the Kyoto Protocol." Righhhhht. They cut to the streets where a big angry mob is attacking police and storming the barricades: are we sure that this is supposed to be Toronto? And finally the attempt is made, in the stairwells of City Hall no less, by assassins dressed in Canadian military fatigues complete with bright red maple leafs on their shoulders.

For all you screenwriters out there, please do your research.

I have discovered a new blog by Dean Baker, an economist who co-directs the Center for Economic Policy and Research, and who formerly edited a periodical that analyzed the way financial numbers were reported in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

In his blog, Beat the Press, Dean writes about the context of financial numbers and provides insightful yet readable contextual analysis of financial issues. You see, it is one thing to report a financial number in a news story, it is quite another to put it in an accurate context that conveys the proper, precise meaning of the number in the real world. Dean Baker analyzes the context to demystify these numbers for the general reader.

Today, he reports on the real size of the Chinese economy. He explains that even though the press regularly reports that China's economy will surpass the United States' in the next several decades, the actual size of the Chinese economy is regularly underestimated.

In the press, most economies are measured by a process of taking the nation's GDP in its own currency, and then converting it to a standard such as the American dollar. However, economies are properly compared according to "purchasing power parity," which means that if the same product is produced or service delivered in two different countries, the value of it is considered the same. So, he explains, a haircut in Guangzhou is priced the same, for analysis purposes, as the same haircut in New York, even though on the street one costs far less than the other. If you think about it, this makes sense, because why should a New York barber's standard haircut be considered inherently more valuable than another stylist's, who makes the same number of snips somewhere else?

The implication of this simple issue of financial context is profound. Instead of the common ranking of China's GDP as the fourth-largest economy (just below Germany's), Baker demonstrates how it is actually the second-largest, having just surpassed Japan. Furthermore, he estimates that China will surpass the United States much sooner than is popularly imagined: as early as 2015. This change in the interpretation of a single number in context has serious geopolitical ramifications, especially for how the Unites States perceives the rise of a Chinese power more rapidly than expected, and its accompanying political response.

Many thanks to New Economist for reporting on the existence of Beat the Press.

News outlets are reporting today on a new Greenpeace study that says the death toll from the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 is much higher than previously believed.

See the BBC's story here.

Grammatical standards are an essential part of consistent written communications. If you think this is a dry subject for a blog, then go and have some unexpected fun with The Economist's Style Guide.

Good style guides are written by good writers, and some good writers are also hilarious. Here is just a taste from a letter to the editor which is included in the Syntax section of the guide:

SIR—At times just one sentence in The Economist can give us hours of enjoyment, such as “Yet German diplomats in Belgrade failed to persuade their government that it was wrong to think that the threat of international recognition of Croatia and Slovenia would itself deter Serbia” (August 15th 1992).

During my many years as a reader of your newspaper, I have distilled two lessons about the use of our language. Firstly, it is usually easier to write a double negative than it is to interpret it. Secondly, unless the description of an event which is considered to be not without consequence includes a double or higher-order negative, then it cannot be disproven that the writer has neglected to eliminate other interpretations of the event which are not satisfactory in light of other possibly not unrelated events which might not have occurred at all.

For these reasons, I have not neglected your timely reminder that I ought not to let my subscription lapse. It certainly cannot be said that I am an unhappy reader.

—WILLARD DUNNING

My friend has commented on how liberal my blog comments are, and I suppose that's true, but not because my considered views are liberal. I use this blog as a serengeti for my subconscious, somewhere my mind can roam and where I can write in a pre-cognitive fashion. What you get here is unedited reaction, and very few news sources offer as much material for reaction as the very liberal New York Times.

Saturday's edition is an excellent example. Just to prove that comical irony is safe and prospering in our world, how about two stories from the Times today?

Wal-Mart is ending the sale of firearms in one third of its stores. Is it because of public pressure? Have they found themselves in Michael Moore's sights? No, not at all. Believe it or not, the guns are disappearing from the shelves because of a lack of demand! The American public's desire for guns appears to be waning, and Wal-Mart will replace the guns with additional sporting equipment on which they can make money.

The gem of the story, though, is the response of the gun lobby that has to be one of the most ridiculously stupid things I have ever heard supposedly intelligent people say. From the article: "The National Rifle Association said it was concerned people in rural areas, where Wal-Mart might be the only purveyor, may no longer have access to guns."

Likewise, the front page Saturday ran a story about ExxonMobil, which has now surpassed GE as the most valuable company in the world. Andrew Leonard, in his blog at Salon, has been on the tail of Exxon for some time. They have recently been discounting the peak oil argument; last month they published an advertorial to that effect on the Times op-ed page. As Leonard advises: "When Exxon tells us to relax, Armageddon is undoubtedly right around the corner." "For years," he writes, "Exxon has been the single largest corporate donor to a rogue's gallery of conservative think tanks that make a living pretending that global warming is no big thing."

Exxon's CEO for the last twelve of those years was Lee R. Raymond. Having just retired, he has been the ringleader in Exxon's corporate drive to pile up the money while promoting the destruction of the planet. It is unknown whether or not Exxon has been moving its financial relationships to higher ground, or to what extent the company has investigated the dampness their greenbacks will shortly be exposed to in the vaults of Manhattan's banks. What we do know is his reward for all this.

In the last twelve years, Raymond has received $144,573 in compensation. Every single day. His total compensation since 1993 was $686-million!

Now this is even crazier than the NRA. To put this in perspective, we would have been only slightly more stupid had we given Hitler a pension and a nice winter house near Jericho. In two hundred years people are going to look back in utter disbelief at what complete imbeciles we all were.

At the very least, please, please do a manual spell-check on your last will and testament.

If you would like to deepen your appreciation of this absurdity, you can find the Exxon salary article here, and Andrew Leonard's assessment of Exxon here in Salon's How the World Works.

The Wal-Mart announcement is a reprint from an Associated Press story.

As prosecutors in Virginia try to raise the tragedy factor in their trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, I would like to pause a moment and consider whether or not the man should be executed. Many news reports of the trial relate how Moussaoui seems pleased with every piece of evidence against him, particularly the violent ones: he smiled all the way through the tapes of the planes hitting the towers and today displayed the same attitude when listening to the cockpit recordings of United 93.

Although most Americans probably want the death penalty for him, maybe we should look just a tiny, unsophisticated sliver deeper into this situation.

First of all, this man trained and prepared mentally to be a glorious suicide bomber. He committed himself long ago to this course of action and it became the driving passion of his life. Then he ruined everything for himself by screwing up and getting caught. Nothing could have been worse for him than not being able to carry out his wishes and die for the cause.

But then, lucky for him, a simplistic American public opinion and some shortsighted, inept prosecutors have been pleading his cause for him by doing everything they can to give him his martyrdom on a silver platter. This guy must be delighted!

Why not show just a little intelligence, wise up to his wishes, and just put him in prison to stymie his plans to be a glorious martyr? The last thing he and his Al-Qaeda colleagues want is for his life to be spared by the mercy of the American people, and to live out 50 years in a merciful, cushy prison.

That would be the very worst punishment Zacarias Moussaoui could ever imagine.

Two Saturdays ago I watched Inside Man, a genre film about a bank heist that turns out to be much more than it appears. Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster and Clive Owen star in this Spike Lee joint that critics are calling the best heist movie since Dog Day Afternoon.

Clive Owen's Dalton Russell has planned the perfect crime. One morning dressed as painters he and his team of four enter and hold up a Lower Manhattan bank. The regular hostage negotiator is on vacation, so Detective Keith Frazier, a cop with an internal affairs investigation hanging over his head, gets the gig and leads off with the normal routine: set up a crime scene, call the robbers, find out demands.

Things get interesting when the mayor shows up with a mysterious Jodie Foster who has been hired by the bank's chairman to secure a single safe deposit box in this, his flagship bank, from all prying eyes. She is whom the very rich call when they have a problem that requires absolute discretion, and in this case the chairman, played Christopher Plummer, is really going to need it.

In the face of a by-the-book police department and rising political pressure, Frazier has to draw on all his instincts to determine that this is no simple bank robbery. Having been unexpectedly figured out by a second-string detective, Dalton tells Frazier during one of their conversations, "You're too smart to be a cop."

The heist is interspersed with interviews held with the hostages after the crisis has ended, and as the story slowly unfolds you realize that they suspect everybody: all the hostages are dressed up identically to the robbers, and all have walked out together. In fact, the bank doesn't appear to have been robbed at all, since nothing seems to be missing.

In the end Dalton's plan works perfectly and he and his team get away with it like they should, but not before the real bad guys get nailed thanks to his genius and the surprisingly quick mind and steely determination of an underrated cop.

The critics are all over Inside Man with praise, and the movie seems to be part of Spike Lee's turning the corner since September 11th in his view and understanding of his native city. Stephanie Zacharek at Salon has written a masterly analysis of this aspect of the film in her excellent review, and comments insightfully on Jodie Foster who, she says, "rules the movie like an ice queen." By way of closing I will quote a few paragraphs for you here.

But as with so many movies set in, and about, New York, the plot is just a convenient device to bring an entertaining jumble of characters together. Lee has always been interested in exploring the tensions between people of different races, to the extent that by the mid-'90s he'd become predictably, and tiresomely, dogmatic. But "25th Hour," a tough but tender love letter to his native city, suggests that 9/11 sparked a change in him: Putting black-white relations under a microscope no longer seemed to interest him; suddenly, united against an enemy outsider, we had no choice but to get along.

Lee's eyes and ears are open to everything the crazy-quilt patchwork of New York has to offer. He sees the way people in the city often cede grudging respect to their neighbors, even when those neighbors annoy the hell out of them. Russell and Frazier are the linchpins of "Inside Man," the characters who need to work hard to fully understand each other in order to "get along." Washington gives an easygoing, casual performance, which is his best kind: He's an intelligent, astute actor, though sometimes a self-conscious one. His line readings here have just the right amount of snap, and he knows how to suggest the hostile or wary undercurrents that sometimes flow beneath seemingly benign encounters.

"Inside Man" cuts backward and forward, so that even though much of the action takes place in and around the bank where the hostages are being held, we also see Frazier and Mitchell questioning them after their release. None of the hostages, for reasons that will become clear if you see the movie, can be presumed innocent, so Frazier grills them mercilessly. In one scene, he and Mitchell pressure one of the released hostages, a Sikh, to give them as much information as he can. He's upset because his turban has been removed, and his religious beliefs demand that his head be covered. Frazier tries to settle him down and soften him up, and the two end up bantering about the kind of indignities people are forced to suffer in a city like New York. Frazier sinks the last ball right in the pocket: "I bet you can get a cab, though."

..."Inside Man" won't ever be considered one of the "great" Spike Lee movies: It's a well-made entertainment, the sort of thing that audiences generally treat as being far less serious than messagey pictures like "Crash." (Even though, in a sense, "Inside Man" is a movie that practices what "Crash" preaches: The necessity of recognizing our differences without allowing ourselves to be confined by them.) There are dozens of little touches in "Inside Man" that capture the craziness, the unexpected delights, of urban life, like the Albanian hottie (the actress who plays her is Florina Petcu) who's called in by the cops to serve as an impromptu Albanian-to-English translator. She's happy to help -- but first she hands Frazier a gold gift bag stuffed with parking tickets, which she naturally assumes he'll fix for her. And that, Lee recognizes, is the kind of give-and-take that this city demands. He is the inside man.

Entertainment Weekly is running a story this week on the top television shows, listed and commented by their film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum. I saw the magazine on the newstand the night before last.

She writes, "The premise is that we're living in a new golden age of television. The proof is in the next six pages, an unassailable argument for the dominance of the medium at a time when the availability of 1000 channels seems justified."

Her list of the top ten dramas is especially interesting:

1. 24
2. The Sopranos
3. CSI
4. Battlestar Galactica
5. Lost
6. Everwood
7. Gilmore Girls
8. The Law & Order franchise
9. Veronica Mars
10. The Shield

Not a bad list.