So… did he or did he not reappear on May 16th as promised, twenty years to the day after his ‘death’ ? LA Weekly

‘Verbivore’ Richard Lederer debunks an annoying riddle. This certainly has persistence; it is circulating in my son’s gradeschool, from which he just came home and posed it to me last night.

Profile of the supposed mastermind of the Madrid bombings and Nicholas Berg’s murder by two Nixon Center analysts, whch concludes:

Significant in my reading is that this analysis by conservative anti-terrorist hawks essentially concludes, as I have, that administration claims that he is “al Qaeda-related” are empty rhetoric. Indeed, the entity of “al Qaeda” has no fixed meaning except to western thinkers desperate to have an enemy they can grasp by naming it. Instead, there is a shifting alliance of zealots opportunistically coalescing when their missions conveniently converge.

“The figures in Fremont’s ‘Waiting for the Interurban’ sculpture were hooded yesterday, a reference to the recent prison-abuse photos from the war in Iraq.

A witness said the hoods were placed on the statues around noon. A chair next to the sculpture was also wired with jumper cables to look like an implement of torture, and a sign was duct-taped to a statue’s leg announcing weekly peace vigils at Green Lake.” — Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Good, provocative epidemiology which, as always, raises more questions. A team looking for an explanation for the puzzling and dramatic rise in the incidence of esophageal cancer in the industrialized world suggests that it correlates with the equally alarming rise in the consumption of carbonated beverages, finding that in places like China and Japan where the one hasn’t happened, the other hasn’t either. As always, critics caution that ‘correlation is not causation’ (to use the mantra we are all taught when we learn to decipher research findings). — BBC

Harry Potter and Left Behind are more alike than you might think.:

Steven Waldman, editor in chief of Beliefnet, goes on to compare and contrast. — Slate

Christopher Hitchens on what he refers to as the flaws in Seymour Hersh’s theory that bureaucratic and ‘butt-covering’ obstacles which so stymied the Pentagon’s terrorism-fighting tactics engendered frustration that top-level secret policy to apply ruthless methods resulted:

If I understand Hitchens correctly, he does not want so much to dispute Hersh’s analysis as to use its premises to preen and gloat about what he perceives as a devastating inconsistency in the anti-war left’s stance — that it both wanted to hold the Pentagon to the rules of engagement in the WoT® and hold the Pentagon to human rights standards in the detention and interrogation of prisoners-of-war. Where is the inconsistency? Actually, I am using a bit of the same sophistry here as Hitchens does; the real inconsistency he finds is that the left castigates the administration both for its lack of adherence to standards of humanity and for its lack of alacrity and success in capturing terrorist leaders. And for evidence of this he uses… one snide statement by Michael Moore, whose heart may be in the right place but who is surely a sort of loose cannon. Hitchens comes off simpering, and adds to it when he claims that the discovery of the supposed sarin-containing warhead proves there were WMD in Iraq all along.