Explanation here and here: "Yes, the European Union really does have a law that states that bananas must not be too curved." (Photo via Google Images, from now-defunct site.)

Apple Computer said Wednesday that about 5 million free songs have been given away through a Pepsi promotion, far fewer than the 100 million tracks that could have been redeemed.

An Apple representative said the music giveaway was probably the biggest ever of its kind but admitted that the company gave away fewer songs than it had intended.

"We had hoped the redemptions would have been higher," said Katie Cotton, Apple's vice president of worldwide corporate communications. Customers with winning bottle caps have until Friday to redeem their free music tracks.

I'd love some "free" tunes, but not at the cost of drinking Pepsi or buying Ben & Jerry's.

The cab driver who took me to LAX this morning told me cops had broken up the usual cab stand at the Westside Pavilion (pictured in the MSNBC report). He also said the place was deserted, but since he picked me up at 10:25 and most mall stores open at 10:00, that doesn't necessarily mean much.

Too bad the LAT's own story, headklined Kinsley, Veteran Commentator, Is Named Times Opinion Editor, doesn't recognize Kinsley's real genius--as an editor. The MSNBC piece is better.

Three months after the war began, a New York newspaper bitterly attacked the administration's handling of unpleasant military news. "Their 'information' is treacle for children," thundered the angry editorialist, who compared the military's growing edifice of information control to the work of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Other publications agreed that war news was being "dry-cleaned" by the Pentagon, which had yet to release a single image of an American military death. Indeed, there were rumors that a paranoid White House was planting informants in newsrooms, and even tapping reporters' phones. It was 1942.

A year and a half later, the White House and much of the press reversed their views on publishing casualty photos. Why? And what happened? Read the article.

At the same time, more and more Americans in a highly mobile society are choosing to live among like-minded people. University of Maryland political demographer James Gimpel has documented the rise of a "patchwork nation," in which political like attracts like, and ideologically diverse communities are giving way to same-thinking islands. A recent analysis sponsored by the Austin American-Statesman, comparing the photo-finish elections of 1976 and 2000, made this clear. While the nationwide results were extremely close, nearly twice as many voters now live in counties where one candidate or the other won by a landslide. Person by person, family by family, America is engaging in voluntary political segregation.

Bush and Kerry embody the role of mobility and personal choices in creating the Red-Blue nation. Two Establishment scions, similar in background and education, who parted ways after being at Yale University together, one headed to Red country and the other to Blue. Millions of voters have now made similar choices, which in turn echo and reinforce their initial beliefs and preferences.

As John Kenneth White, author of "The Values Divide," put it in an interview, "The reds get redder and blues get bluer."

The following two articles are profiles of families in super-red Sugarland, Texas and super-blue San Francisco. What's striking to me is how similar they in fact are, despite their political differences. Even more striking is how happy they are. Neither thinks America is going to hell in a handbasket. Neither engages in the cultural pessimism you hear from more official voices of left and right.

Maybe it's the Post's selection bias, but my sense is that the selection represents something true about the vast majority of American voters right now. They think their political opponents complain too much and perhaps threaten their happiness, but they aren't the angry, fearful voices of politics past.

The danger, of course, is that people will believe the stereotypes of their political opposites, because they don't actually know anyone on the opposite side of the red-blue divide. Why do both families see their political opposites as people who complain all the time, who are (my words) essentially anti-American? They aren't thinking of neighbors or family members they disagree with. They're thinking of the voices they hear on TV and radio, where conflict and explosive, extreme statements sell.

While attention remains riveted on the rising count of Americans killed in action -- more than 100 so far in April -- doctors at the main combat support hospital in Iraq are reeling from a stream of young soldiers with wounds so devastating that they probably would have been fatal in any previous war.

More and more in Iraq, combat surgeons say, the wounds involve severe damage to the head and eyes -- injuries that leave soldiers brain damaged or blind, or both, and the doctors who see them first struggling against despair.

For months the gravest wounds have been caused by roadside bombs -- improvised explosives that negate the protection of Kevlar helmets by blowing shrapnel and dirt upward into the face. In addition, firefights with guerrillas have surged recently, causing a sharp rise in gunshot wounds to the only vital area not protected by body armor.

The neurosurgeons at the 31st Combat Support Hospital measure the damage in the number of skulls they remove to get to the injured brain inside, a procedure known as a craniotomy. "We've done more in eight weeks than the previous neurosurgery team did in eight months," Poffenbarger said. "So there's been a change in the intensity level of the war."

Numbers tell part of the story. So far in April, more than 900 soldiers and Marines have been wounded in Iraq, more than twice the number wounded in October, the previous high. With the tally still climbing, this month's injuries account for about a quarter of the 3,864 U.S. servicemen and women listed as wounded in action since the March 2003 invasion.

About half the wounded troops have suffered injuries light enough that they were able to return to duty after treatment, according to the Pentagon. The others arrive on stretchers at the hospitals operated by the 31st CSH. "These injuries," said Lt. Col. Stephen M. Smith, executive officer of the Baghdad facility, "are horrific."

There's no point in pretending that war isn't horrible--flag-draped coffins are, in fact, a rather pristine symbol of those horrors. There's a good reason societies honor their warriors.

An aside: I've long thought that prettifying World War II for domestic consumption contributed to both the media shock of Vietnam and the generation gap. WWII and Korea vets, who knew war first-hand, didn't understand just how shocked their doted-on boomer kids were. "The Good War" wasn't any more pleasant when you were experiencing it.

WeAttract.com, which developed the personality test for Match.com, takes the view that "lasting relationships are those that can live with quirks ï¿‘ and those that might even make the partner more adorable to the other," says Mark Thompson, president of WeAttract.com and developer of the test.

"Most of us are 6 or 7s (on a scale of 10), so maybe they're not an A but really a B. But we want to be with someone who thinks we're an A," he adds. "The beautiful thing about the Internet is that even if that person [who appreciates you] is one in a million, you can find [that person]."

He recalls a Rubenesque woman some years ago whom he thought was beautiful ï¿‘ but who complained that no one wanted to date her. If Internet dating were available back then, she likely would have found plenty of men who appreciated her beauty and personality.

Or, as I wrote in this 1999 Forbes ASAP column:

The Internet means you don't have to be alone -- no matter how unusual you seem to be. On the Internet, people on the tails of the bell curve can find one another.

Every aspect of human identity, from size, shape, and color to sexual proclivities and intellectual gifts, comes in a wide range. Most of us cluster somewhere in the middle of most statistical distributions. But there are lots of bell curves, and pretty much everyone is on a tail of at least one of them. We may collect strange memorabilia or read esoteric books, hold unusual religious beliefs or wear odd-sized shoes, suffer rare diseases or enjoy obscure movies. Our distinguishing trait may be good or evil, important or trivial, transitory or permanent.

Having spent a century discovering the middle of the bell curve -- the mass market, the mass media -- we are only now realizing that this "mass," by its very massiveness, guarantees amazing variety. By lowering transaction costs, the Net makes it easier for businesses to serve the entire distribution rather than just the middle. It can offer every book in print, for instance.

By giving unsual people an easy way to find one another, the Internet has also enabled them to pool rare talents, resources, and voices, then push their case into public consciousness. The response, in many cases, is a kind of hysteria. Media gatekeepers yearn for the good old days of a "common culture," as defined by three TV networks and near-monopoly newspapers -- a culture in which no one could see the outliers. The Internet, we're told, is a place of scary hate groups, strange religions, bizarre sex, and way too little editing.

But far more significant is the happiness engendered by a medium that is sociable even when it is merely supplying passive information. On the Net, the bell curve reclaims its tails. The uncommon is as accessible as the common. The very fragmentation of the Internet allows us to find ourselves in other people--and to know that we are not alone.

Update: Here's the link I get directed to when t-Mobile mail bounces.

Why? Not because there's anything wrong with them, even in the imaginations of EU regulators. No, the bureaucrats just didn't know about them when they wrote the laws. Any class of tomatoes that isn't mentioned is forbidden. Tim's post must be read to be believed. Here's just one little snippet:

we are also protected from acquiring undersized tomatoes. And here we have a second reason why grape tomatoes are illegal. They're too small ( freedom from size limits is only for cherry tomatoes or those in trusses ) and they are not sold in trusses.

Two-thirds of children in Los Angeles do not live within walking distance of a public park, according to a report to be released today by a national land conservation group.

The comparative analysis of seven major American cities by the Trust for Public Land found that 66% of Los Angeles children, or more than 716,000 youngsters under 18, did not live within a quarter-mile of a park. Los Angeles County as a whole fared even worse, with only 31% of children living close to a park, the study found.

In Boston, by contrast, 78% of children live within a quarter-mile of a park. In New York, 59% do, while in San Diego, only 32% can walk to one ï¿‘ the lowest rate among the cities studied. San Diego County as a whole fared significantly better, with 58% of children living near a park.

Now, I've lived in Boston and I've lived in L.A., and "walking distance" doesn't mean the same thing in the two cities--at least not in the wintertime. In L.A., I routinely walk a mile or more, year-round. Not so in Boston, where my walk to work was so cold and windy on some days that I often paid a cab to take me, despite being broke. (The public transit alternative involved three different train lines to go a relatively short distance.) So I don't believe that "walking distance" and "a quarter mile" are the same thing, especially since L.A. and San Diego, both weather paradises with beaches that don't count as "parks," got the worst scores in this "study."

But even if you accept that definition, the study is garbage, and the article on it is a disgrace to supposedly skeptical journalism. The study compares the vast region of L.A. County with the tiny city limits of Boston. It picks seven cities arbitrarily. What, any sensible reader would ask, are the criteria for looking at these seven and not another group? This list isn't what comes to mind if you say, "Name seven American cities." And why seven? Would a larger list get different results?

Finally, the conclusion is laughable: Kids have it better in those Garden State garden spots, Camden and Newark, than in Los Angeles and San Diego???!!!! This "study" doesn't pass the laugh test. But the article doesn't mention Camden and Newark, except in the chart. And it never explains just how tiny Boston is.

I'm not against neighborhood parks. Indeed, I'm sympathetic to the view that L.A. has unduly emphasized giant preservationist sanctuaries like the Santa Monica mountains, much beloved of affluent Westsiders, at the expense of cheaper, smaller neighborhood parks that would give kids places to play. (I'm not, however, against backyards.) But the report, and the "reporting," make me less sympathetic to the cause they supposedly serve. If they've got such a great argument, why do they need such obvious propaganda? And why doesn't the LAT expect its reporters to ask the most basic questions? Reporter Miguel Bustillo and his editors should be ashamed of themselves.

The press release is here, along with information on how to download the report. (You have to give them your email address, but most of the form is optional.)

Scott Helvenston's chiseled movie-star face flashes through my mind whenever I run on the beach. It's mainly because of him that I stay in shape.

Every morning before I head out on my run, I read the paper. Early this month, I stared at the photograph of the charred bodies dangling from a bridge over the Euphrates River. Thank God that isn't anyone I know, I thought selfishly, and turned the page. Two days later my friend Ciaran e-mailed me.

She forwarded the story of the four civilians working for a private company, Blackwater Security Consulting, who were killed by rocket-propelled grenades during an ambush. I read the article, and pieces of it sunk in—Scott had gone to Iraq to work for the contractor to the U.S. government charged with protecting the delivery of food in Fallouja, and to make a large amount of money in a short amount of time for his two children. It couldn't be the same man—but, of course, it could.

"Isn't this your Navy SEAL?" Ciaran asked.

I stared at the name—Scott Helvenston—and remembered the grisly photo. Suddenly I felt sick. Then I burst into tears. It was definitely my Navy SEAL.

Read it all. My thanks to LA Observed, which I rely on when I don't see the LAT--and need even when I do.

The problem isn't that conservatives or libertarians are missing (though they mostly are) but that liberals--the non-socialist, non-Marxist people who make up the mainstream of the Democratic Party and, for that matter, American journalism--are so dramatically underrepresented. While you can find exceptions, the LAT Book Festival, like the LAT Book Review, represents the world according to David Horowitz, in which there are no liberals, only the left and a few token anti-leftists for "balance."

Last month in Jonizi, South Africa, I watched my friend Jocky Gumede happily bounce his grandchild on his knee. The recent malaria epidemic had subsided, and Jocky was relieved that the child had escaped death -- for this year, anyway. Jocky can't erase the memory of the toll the disease has taken on his family. Still, he is relatively lucky. In South Africa, the malaria rate is falling. In the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, the disease is on the rise. This development has more than one cause, including factors such as insufficient insecticide use, the malarial parasite's resistance to widely used drugs, and malnutrition. But the main cause is the failure of the very campaign organized to combat the disease....

Since the connection between mosquitoes and malaria was first made in 1898, many methods have been developed to control the disease. But the key lesson that has been learned, and perhaps must be relearned, is that overreliance on any single method of combating malaria leads to inevitable failure. There are tried-and-proven methods that in combination are highly effective, but WHO and other aid agencies seem reluctant to fund them.

Preventing malaria means creating a barrier between the mosquito, which is the carrier of the malarial parasite, and the parasite's primary host -- humans. Since malarial mosquitoes bite only between dusk and dawn, WHO's campaign has promoted bed nets, which can protect those who sleep beneath them. But this policy has had limited success. Nets for a whole family are expensive, and mosquitoes can take many blood meals between dusk and bedtime. Also, nets work best if treated with insecticide. But a recent survey in Kenya found that 21 percent of households had one single bed net, and only 5.6 percent of these were insecticide-treated. Moreover, mosquitoes are growing resistant to the type of insecticide with which the nets are coated.

The article points up the importance of having one malaria-plagued country, South Africa, that is rich enough to go its own way rather than depend on international health aid. The difference isn't all about DDT--better drugs are also important--but using DDT makes other tools more affordable and effective.

The article's author, Roger Bate is a health economist and director of a South African health advocacy group, Africa Fighting Malaria,which has a rich website here.

When I wanted a contemporary light fixture in copper, I used Google to find a specialty retailer that had one I liked. I recently did the same thing to find a particular brand of Velcro-sealed envelope that I use for receipts when I travel. I regularly turn to Amazon.com and Alibris for books I cannot find in local bookstores or even libraries.

Online shoppers are not just buying the same stuff for less money. They are buying different stuff. And they are much more likely to be getting exactly what they want than are off-line shoppers. Wal-Mart has low prices, but Walmart.com carries six times as many items as the largest Wal-Mart store, the article says. [Source inserted by copy editor, before the first mention of said article.--vp] "Amazon's slogan is world's biggest selection, not world's cheapest prices," said Professor [Erik] Brynjolfsson, who has done pioneering research on information technology and productivity.

All this variety could be overwhelming. But consumers do not have to sort through item by item. Online shopping includes tools like search engines and customer review sites, or Amazon's many referral services.

You are not only more likely to find what you are looking for online. You are more likely to discover something you like that you did not already know about, Professor Brynjolfsson said. [Attribution again demanded by unusually anal copy editor because God forbid the NYT should let columnists draw conclusions without citing Authorities.--vp] Partly through links and referrals, the Internet increases sales of obscure products. In 1997 and 1998, in the early days of Internet commerce, The MIT Press reported 12 percent annual increases in sales of backlist books, thanks to Internet retailers.

"In effect, the emergence of online retailers places a specialty store and a personalized shopping assistant at every shopper's desk," write Professor Brynjolfsson, Yu Hu, and Michael D. Smith in a November 2003 article in Management Science. "This improves the welfare of these consumers by allowing them to locate and buy specialty products they otherwise would not have purchased due to high transaction costs or low product awareness." (The article, "Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers," is available at http://ebusiness.mit.edu/erik/.)

Naturally, I'd like you to read the whole thing.

DEPENDING on one's perspective, the struggle to gain dominion over malaria can be seen either as a primer of the possible in infectious-disease control or as classic tragedy. All but obliterated in the developed world half a century ago, and suppressed in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s, malaria has since returned in full force to North Africa, India, Southeast Asia, China, South America, and the Caribbean. Worldwide incidence of the disease has quadrupled in the past five years, and resistance to available drugs for prevention and treatment is growing rapidly. Nearly 40 percent of the world's population lives in regions where malaria is endemic, and millions more live in areas that are encountering the disease for the first time in decades. Europe has had outbreaks, and in the United States 1,000 to 1,200 cases annually have been reported in recent years. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that cases reported in the United States represent only about half the actual incidence. Every year approximately seven million American tourists and business people spend time in regions where malaria is endemic, as do military personnel and foreign visitors to the United States, and it is likely that thousands arrive here with malaria parasites in their bodies. As a consequence, locally transmitted malaria, absent from the United States for roughly thirty years, has returned. Since 1988 locally transmitted malaria has appeared in California, Texas, Michigan, Florida, New Jersey, and New York City. Anopheles mosquitoes -- members of the genus that carries malaria parasites -- are common almost everywhere in the United States and, for that matter, in most populated regions of the world.

The article is long, comprehensive, and pretty depressing.

I haven’t read the NYTimes article yet, but I spent many years as a graduate student studying malaria. It’s true that DDT is a tool that should still be available given its efficacy and low cost, but it is not true that were it widely used we could save 2 million lives a year. The challenges to eradicating disease in a third world country are vastly greater than doing so in one such as ours, and DDT is just one piece of that puzzle. Having fewer restrictions on its use would no doubt save some lives, but if the article suggests that all malaria deaths in Africa could be averted by DDT use, then the author is pushing fantasy, not good science.

This mistake is mine, not Tina Rosenberg's, and was inadvertent. (Please read the article.) I didn't mean to suggst that all deaths from malaria could be averted by DDT, just that the cumulative death toll of not using DDT is enormous and infuriating. When you throw in the indirect deaths from malaria's depressing effects on economic productivity, which are hard to estimate, the numbers are even greater.

Most of these funds are earmarked for the request made by the Marines for equipment needed to establish Iraqi-owned television stations in Al Anbar Province Iraq (described here). Our initial goal for this request was $100,000. The Marines are as stunned as I am. I’ll remove the expletives of joyful surprise and forward some of their comments to you next week. They are also developing ideas for the expansion of this initiative. More on that soon.

There's lots more info on the SoA blog, including copies of Dan Henninger's articles and commentary. The TV project is its most ambitious undertaking, but SoA has a number of less sexy but equally worthy projects that deserve support.

I had the species of malaria, falciparum, which is the most aggressive. It kills you either by clogging up the arteries to your brain or by simply killing enough blood cells to cause extreme anemia.

Parasites had taken over 4 percent to 5 percent of my blood cells. A pathologist at Sibley told my wife Kathleen that he'd never seen so many parasites on one slide.

With all those rioting bugs racing through my brain, no wonder I was delirious. The bottom line is that I'm a very lucky fellow. I had great doctors. I was given quinine, antibiotics and that wonderful intravenous that kept running fluid into me. I was in an air-conditioned hospital so nice they call it "Club Sib."

I kept thinking, especially in those early days in intensive care, what it's like getting malaria for the average African. You're lying in some hut. It's 105 degrees. You're running a temperature almost that high. You have no quinine, no drugs whatsoever and no clean water. You just lie there sweating and delirious until the lights go out.

Millions of people die this way every single year because Americans disapprove of DDT.

I work 12-hour days, six days a week, and the paper is very unorganized. Reporters are pretty lazy and it’s difficult to get work out of them. I’m trying to organize the national desk and get people to produce work. It’s quite a job and I haven’t had an opportunity to get out around town as much as I would like.

Part of the problem is the Saudi culture. People work from 9 a.m. to noon, do prayers, have lunch, take a nap, then return to work at 4 p.m. And work until 5. The mantra here is anything you can do today can be put off until tomorrow.

There are about five nationalities in the newsroom -- Saudi, Pakistani, Indian, Jordanian, American and a few others I can't identify. Understanding each other is a little difficult. And if you thought newsroom politics can be bad, just imagine a similar situation here, but with newspeople from five different countries trying to get along.

The women reporters work in a separate room on a different floor. I can only communicate with them by phone or e-mail. I'm not sure what the big deal is since they wear full black abayas. The other day I needed to give one of the women a news clipping. She had to go down to the lobby and I had a teaboy -- yes, we have teaboys -- deliver it to her. Teaboys are great, by the way, serving me tea, coffee and what-not at any given moment. They are very class and status-minded here. No need for these poor fellas -- all Indian -- but the Saudis insist that we should have teaboys. There must be about 10 of them on staff here.

The writing is extraordinarily bad. We have Saudis, Indians and Jordanians translating Arabic into English with that very formal, stilted, wordy way of talking. Nothing is conversational here in the writing. I spend a lot of time in rewrite. Teaching reporters to streamline their writing may indeed be impossible simply because they don’t naturally form their thoughts as a native English speaker does.

Bush is hated here with a passion. A passion that borders on real fear. Saudis are completely mystified with Bush’s foreign policy. And his recent shift over the Israeli issue is sending folks in the Middle East through the roof. I may be overstating things, but it’s a real powder keg here. Peace in Iraq or a return to normal relations with any Middle Eastern country is remote at best. This is a long haul kind of thing. Things will get much worse before they get better. Then again I’ve only been here a week, so what do I know?

(Via L.A Observed.)

Interesting tidbit:Kevin Smith has a lot of fans in the military.

Laney's story is particularly sad, because nobody around her knew she was having delusions. She interpreted her mental illness through her Penecostal faith, and neither she nor those around her found the voices she heard particularly crazy.

Mental health experts also found evidence that Mrs. Laney had been mentally ill for three years and had several earlier psychotic breaks that went unrecognized.

They said her problems went unnoticed and untreated because they seemed unremarkable to her and everyone around her, even when she frantically told relatives and tearfully testified in church about three years ago that God had told her directly that the world was ending and she needed to get her house in order.

Mrs. Laney, who home-schooled her children and rarely left Smith County, and her friends and family are lifelong members of a Pentecostal church. Their church, Tyler's First Assembly of God, teaches that God communicates directly with man, the Lord and the devil can test faith, and believers touched by the Holy Spirit can speak in tongues.

With the verdict, Mrs. Laney will be committed to a state psychiatric hospital until its experts convince state District Judge Cynthia Kent that she no longer is a danger to herself or others. Under state law, she could be kept there for life.

In her 6 ½-hour videotaped interview with prosecution psychiatrist Park Dietz, Mrs. Laney tearfully recounted the savage attacks and the torture that followed.

"I didn't want to kill my kids at all....I felt I like I had no choice," she said. "Because God told me to do that, and I was taught you obey God."...

Despite her turmoil, she said, she refused medication until after Joshua's birthday in late July.

She believed he'd be "raised up" from the dead on his ninth birthday, but began wondering if something was wrong with her when that didn't happen. So she finally told a psychiatrist who visited her weekly that she was smelling sulfur in her cell and believed it was a sign that the devil was near.

She said she did not mention it earlier, even when it became so intense that she couldn't sleep, because she believed everything happening to her "was spiritual warfare, and I didn't think he would understand any of it."

She said she was bothered four years earlier by a similar smell – which psychiatrists have now identified as an olfactory hallucination symptomatic of psychosis. "I just thought it was the Lord teaching me. I didn't think anything about it, that it could be some sort of a mental disorder. That never crossed my mind."

The smell vanished a few days after she began taking anti-psychotic medication and antidepressants, she said, along with racing thoughts that "everything meant something" and inner urgings that she believed were direct messages from God.

But she also lost her certainty that what she'd done to her three boys was the Lord's will and test. "I started realizing that he wouldn't do something like that," she said.

It's a terribly sad story. I can't help wondering, however, what pundits would say about similarly ill killers who interpreted their delusions through video games, pornography, comic books, shopping, or movies rather than religion. We don't blame Penecostalism for the deaths of Laney's children, nor should we. But the reason we don't is that there's (fortunately) no loud anti-religion lobby looking for any excuse to blame Penecostalism for all the troubles of the world.

Yet what really merits outrage about DDT today is not that South Africa still uses it, as do about five other countries for routine malaria control and about 10 more for emergencies. It is that dozens more do not. Malaria is a disease Westerners no longer have to think about. Independent malariologists believe it kills two million people a year, mainly children under 5 and 90 percent of them in Africa. Until it was overtaken by AIDS in 1999, it was Africa's leading killer. One in 20 African children dies of malaria, and many of those who survive are brain-damaged. Each year, 300 to 500 million people worldwide get malaria. During the rainy season in some parts of Africa, entire villages of people lie in bed, shivering with fever, too weak to stand or eat. Many spend a good part of the year incapacitated, which cripples African economies. A commission of the World Health Organization found that malaria alone shrinks the economy in countries where it is most endemic by 20 percent over 15 years. There is currently no vaccine. While travelers to malarial regions can take prophylactic medicines, these drugs are too toxic for long-term use for residents.

Yet DDT, the very insecticide that eradicated malaria in developed nations, has been essentially deactivated as a malaria-control tool today. The paradox is that sprayed in tiny quantities inside houses -- the only way anyone proposes to use it today -- DDT is most likely not harmful to people or the environment. Certainly, the possible harm from DDT is vastly outweighed by its ability to save children's lives.

Two million people a year, most of them little kids, are dying because of the West's anti-DDT superstition. Two...million...people...a...year.

Anti-DDT taboos undoubtedly kill even more than that, since the debilitation caused by malaria helps keep Africa desperately poor. But, hey, they're Africans. We got rid of malaria here, so we don't give a damn. I bet the NYT Mag gets letters from people outraged at Rosenberg's audacity in pointing out the problem.

Again, the problem is not the particular bill, which is a trivial solution to a trivial offense. The problem is systematic. If you pass a new regulation every time some citizen finds something he or she doesn't like, pretty soon you have a terrible place that discourages enterprise--and encourages exit.

Jim Hake's organizational insight is to deploy the best practices of the modern U.S. economy--efficiency and speed--around the margins of the Iraqi war effort. The Amazons, Best Buys, FedExes and DHLs can get anything anywhere--fast. Why not use the same all-American skill at procurement efficiency and quick distribution to get the soldiers in Iraq (and Afghanistan) the stuff that government red tape will never provide in time?

His operation, in Los Angeles, is wholly New Economy. For past projects he's gotten the word out via Web loggers such as Glenn Reynolds's InstaPundit.com, windsofchange.net and hughhewitt.com. Mr. Hake finds low-cost suppliers on the Internet and negotiates prices. His donor network also suggests suppliers.

Earlier projects for the Marines flew over cargo planes of school supplies, basic medical equipment and toys (turns out Iraqi children love Frisbees). One anecdote: The day before the school equipment was to ship, they found that all the pencils broke easily. On a hunch, Mr. Hake made a morning call to a Staples manager in southern California. By midafternoon the Staples man lined up sources for 120,000 pencils--cheaper than the original buy. Mr. Hake bought and shipped them. Spirit of America is all-volunteer. The accounting for its projects, down to the penny, is listed on the Web site.

Spirit of America's buy-list for the Marines' TV-stations project includes digital video camcorders, desktop PCs for video editing, video editing software, televisions, 21-inch satellite dishes, KU-band universal transponders, satellite decoder/receivers, Philips audio/video selectors (4-in/2-out), VCRs (PAL and NTSC compatible), DVD players (multiregion compatible), step-down voltage converters (220 to 110) and lighting sets. The cost of this equipment is about $100,000.

Mr. Hake, incidentally, insists on paying for all the goods in his projects. He says donor relationships with big companies waste time getting sign-offs by senior management. I asked if he thought they could get the TV stations under way by the June 30 handover: "Absolutely. My goal is to have the gear at Pendleton by May 7. The Marines will fly it over and they are ready to get going on this. Needless to say, plans can always change in a combat zone but this is an undertaking to help turn the tide there." If this works, the Marines and Spirit of America hope to rebuild TV stations elsewhere around Iraq.

I've been making a donation to one Spirit of America project each month and I urge you to do the same.

Having revived the Western with Deadwood and the gangster genre with The Sopranos, HBO is taking on science fiction/fantasy. Looking For Fidel, Oliver Stone's latest round of pattycake with Fidel Castro, resembles nothing so much as one of those old the-land-that-time-forgot movies, with a couple of lumbering stop-action dinosaurs wrestling harmlessly in front of a crowd of natives that's trying hard not to look bored while it waits for evolution to take its course....

Stone occasionally prods Castro with an uncomfortable question about free speech or secret trials. But followups are non-existent, and mostly Stone allows the dictator to stage his own little set pieces for the cameras. In one, Castro generously meets with some accused hijackers, who with straight faces say 30 years in prison would be a generous sentence.

In another, he walks among adoring throngs of Cubans, whose burbling praise for the Revolution was so wildly delusional (they claim, among other things, that Cuba is the only country in the world where blacks are permitted to own businesses) that I had to wonder if they weren't a deliberate attempt at sabotaging the documentary.

At times, it's hard to tell who is less lucid, Stone or Castro.

Stone, halting and distracted, seems to be reciting a list he learned 20 years ago as he ticks off the Latin American countries supposedly less democratic than Cuba -- including Brazil and Chile, both now governed by socialists.

Castro, meanwhile, suffers through some seriously senior moments. What are we to make of this impromptu little speech? ''Today, with a computer and a dozen compact disks, you can hold all the literature ever written,'' he tells Stone. ``So many things have changed. I do not know why the world has been making so much progress to end up in this. I am so sorry for the younger generation.''...

The Dallas Morning News, by contrast, has an article by the Cuba bureau's Tracey Eaton that is so puffy that I have to wonder whether the editors appear to have been too embarrassed to put it on the DMN website. The headline pretty much sums it up: "Stone puts tough questions to Castro for documentary." I guess articles like that are why the DMN gets to have a Cuba bureau.

Update: The DMN story is finally online.

About six months before national economists announce a positive change, [the service's head Dev] Bickston notices that companies increase their inquiries about new technology and new products. Before the economy slows, businesses cut their research to the basics. Bickston's current workload may be an indicator of better times to come--business for his staff of four is better than it's been in five years, he says.

This service is also a good example of corporate outsourcing--contracting out functions that used to be done entirely in-house and thereby spreading the costs of, for example, maintaining a specialized staff and large library over many different organizations. In addition to providing research services to clients who don't have libraries, SMU works with about 60 corporate librarians:

Laurie Crim, law librarian at Texas Instruments, often orders technical articles related to the semiconductor industry for TI attorneys and engineers. A TI librarian for 20 years, Crim says the firm had many corporate libraries at one time; however, now she manages the corporation's only library. Other clients include small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Above all, the defeat of violence and terror in Iraq is vital to the defeat of violence and terror elsewhere; and vital, therefore, to the safety of the American people. Now is the time, and Iraq is the place, in which the enemies of the civilized world are testing the will of the civilized world. We must not waver.

The violence we are seeing in Iraq is familiar. The terrorist who takes hostages, or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid, and murders children on buses in Jerusalem, and blows up a nightclub in Bali, and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew.

We've seen the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241 Marines in Beirut, the first attack on the World Trade Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in the attack on the USS Cole, and in the merciless horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent men and women and children on September the 11th, 2001.

None of these acts is the work of a religion; all are the work of a fanatical, political ideology. The servants of this ideology seek tyranny in the Middle East and beyond. They seek to oppress and persecute women. They seek the death of Jews and Christians, and every Muslim who desires peace over theocratic terror. They seek to intimidate America into panic and retreat, and to set free nations against each other. And they seek weapons of mass destruction, to blackmail and murder on a massive scale.

Over the last several decades, we've seen that any concession or retreat on our part will only embolden this enemy and invite more bloodshed. And the enemy has seen, over the last 31 months, that we will no longer live in denial or seek to appease them. For the first time, the civilized world has provided a concerted response to the ideology of terror -- a series of powerful, effective blows.

The terrorists have lost the shelter of the Taliban and the training camps in Afghanistan. They've lost safe havens in Pakistan. They lost an ally in Baghdad. And Libya has turned its back on terror. They've lost many leaders in an unrelenting international manhunt. And perhaps most frightening to these men and their movement, the terrorists are seeing the advance of freedom and reform in the greater Middle East.

A desperate enemy is also a dangerous enemy, and our work may become more difficult before it is finished. No one can predict all the hazards that lie ahead, or the costs they will bring. Yet, in this conflict, there is no safe alternative to resolute action. The consequences of failure in Iraq would be unthinkable. Every friend of America and Iraq would be betrayed to prison and murder as a new tyranny arose. Every enemy of America and the world would celebrate, proclaiming our weakness and decadence, and using that victory to recruit a new generation of killers.

We will succeed in Iraq. We're carrying out a decision that has already been made and will not change: Iraq will be a free, independent country, and America and the Middle East will be safer because of it. Our coalition has the means and the will to prevail. We serve the cause of liberty, and that is, always and everywhere, a cause worth serving.

In the Q&A, Bush was much more expansive, articulate, and comfortable than he's often been in the past.

I have the same problem blogging on this topic that I do blogging on every little twitch in the economic statistics: It's too hard to separate the transient noise from the long-run trend, and the long run is what matters. Things are bad in Iraq right now, but is this a last-gasp effort by our enemies, the beginning of a quagmire, or, most likely, something in between whose conclusion depends largely on our response? Rushing to judgment, especially from afar, is a prescription for foolish conclusions and bad policies.

One reason pundits focus so much on the political, as opposed to substantive, effects of economic or military developments is that political effects do take place in the short run. Plus it's easier to understand poll numbers than to peer through the fog of war (or the complexity of the economy).

I'm sufficiently confident about this that I think I can write up the scripts. Here are the buzzwords I expect from both sides. Play bingo at home (or, if you want, make it into a drinking game: one drink for each iteration of one of these words).

Of her demeanor, Rice supporters will say she was: "poised," "confident," "authoritative," and/or "polished."
Of her demeanor, Rice detractors will say she was: "defensive," "visibly annoyed," and/or "brusque" ; bonus (if they feel strongly) "petulant" and/or "schoolmarmish"

On the quality of her arguments, Rice supporters will say: "persuasive," "convincing," "firm," and/or "powerful"; bonus (if they feel strongly) "overpowering"
On the quality of her arguments, Rice detractors will say: "unpersuasive," "weak," "vacillating," and/or "shaky,"; bonus (if they feel strongly) "incoherent"

Overall, Rice supporters will describe her performance as: "a home run," "putting doubts to rest," "answering all the questions," "showing Clarke to be a liar," and/or "letting us get on to the people's business"; bonus (if they are really partisan) "refuting the demagogues on the other side"
Overall, Rice detractors will describe her performance as: "raising more questions than it answers," "a missed opportunity to inform the American people," "vindicating Richard Clarke," and/or "raising troubling questions about this Administration"; bonus (if they are really partisan) "you're the demagogue" (followed by: "am not!"; "are too!"; "am not!"; etc.)

According to the Modernism photo caption, the Link Museum has removed the "Colored" sign. Wouldn't want to remind visitors of just how recent--how modern--legally enforced segregation was.

While most reviews of the book will peg him as a gay writer, Jonathan actually comes to the issue as someone who has been thinking and writing seriously about heterosexual marriage for years and who cares deeply about the health of that institution. His book tour schedule is here. A mutual friend and I would like to get him to Dallas. Anyone with leads on a speaking venue, please email me.

For those concerned about the quality of contemporary public intellectuals, this book provides a nice test case: Can a graceful, careful, and honest writer on a serious yet hot-button issue grab attention if he doesn't have bluster and self-promotional personality of a media-age celebrity?

It's hard to argue with your general point that California is a rough place to do business, but I don't think the paycheck legislation is an example. If I'm reading the story correctly, the legislation is directed only to checks cashed at the banks on which they're drawn. The idea of a check is that it's a _negotiable_ instrument: instead of paying what I owe you in currency, I give you a piece of paper that orders my bank to pay you that amount. If I owe you $100, and I give you a check drawn on Wells Fargo for $100, you have a legitimate gripe if Wells Fargo only pays you $95 when you present the check.

I'm inclined to think that the bill is directed at the wrong target. It looks to me like the current law quoted in the article would give employees a good claim against their employers, and that should give the employers ample reason to do whatever's necessary to clarify the banks' understanding of "negotiable." But your post is off-base. There's no cost-shifting issue, because the relevant customer is the one who's issuing the check (an order to the bank to pay money), not the one who's presenting it. The bank is already well-positioned to put those costs where they belong.

I agree that if there's a problem, it's between the employee and the employer, not the employee and the bank. But I can imagine the shrieks of protest that would emerge from the tax authorities of California if employers started paying in cash. In 2004, money is something that goes through banks, for a minor charge. You can, of course, always get a bank account yourself, and have cash available 24 hours a day for free--contrary to the bad old days when I was a poor college student and used to pay 50 cents to cash a $25 check.

Over the last couple of years, however, delicious tomatoes have hit the supermarkets--in miniature form. Where did these grape tomatoes come from? And could anything that tastes so good actually be low in calories? As I was wolfing some down like candy last night, I wondered about these questions and, using Google, found the story behind them, a long feature by Carole Sugarman of the WaPost. I suspect no one read it at the time (check the date) but it's well worth a read now. The story has all the elements of a contemporary business yarn--globalization, intellectual property disputes, secretive business deals--but no new-fangled biotech. It's all old-fashioned grafting, upsetting to Marvell's mower but no bit deal to today's bio-Luddites. Here are some excerpts:

In a few weeks, when most of the locally grown tomatoes disappear, there will still be hope for the brisk-weather salad. A juicy beefsteak may be hard to come by, a pint of farmers' market cherry tomatoes may be scarce, but commercially grown grape tomatoes -- the bite-size sugary fruit that has gone from novelty to commodity -- will be in abundance.

"Meteoric," is how Tom Mueller, director of sales and marketing for Six L's Packing Co., Inc., an Immokalee, Fla., grower, describes their rise in popularity.

After years of producing flavorless, armor-thick impostors, commercial tomato growers now have a big hit. Grape tomatoes are sold widely, from Wal-Mart to Sutton Place Gourmet. Aside from Florida, they're being grown in Mexico and up and down the East and West coasts, making them available all year long. Six L's, for example, farms grape tomatoes in Virginia in the summer, working its way down the coast to Florida by the end of October.

And their ubiquitousness has changed the landscape of the supermarket produce aisle.

Grapes "have killed the cherry tomato business," says Charles Lester, produce buyer for Giant Food, who added that the chain "very seldom" carries cherry tomatoes anymore. They're "quickly becoming the tomato of choice," says Craig Muckle, spokesman for Safeway, which sells 10 times more grape than cherry tomatoes....

Their success, however, is more than just a triumph of taste. The forces of the global marketplace have growers constantly scrambling to come up with the next great idea. New varieties of produce are being imported "from Holland, Costa Rica, all over the world," says Gene McAvoy, an extension agent with the University of Florida. "If growers don't stay ahead of the pack, they're in trouble. People don't just want a pepper anymore."

They also don't just want a tomato, which is why grape tomatoes hit such a competitive nerve among growers. It also explains how the efforts of a small Florida farmer developed into a legal battle, a seed crisis and eventually an oversupply of the tomatoes.

Andrew Chu, a vegetable grower in Wimauma, Fla., first heard about a grape-shaped variety of cherry tomato in 1996. A Taiwanese friend and specialty produce wholesaler in New York asked Chu to try them, thinking they might appeal to Asian shoppers; they were already being grown in mainland China.

So Chu sent away for the hybrid seeds from Known-You Seed Co., Ltd., in Taiwan. He planted his first crop in the fall of 1996. Asians bought the grape-shaped tomatoes, but the market was limited, says Chu.

"I started thinking about taking them mainstream," he says. So in 1997, Chu Farms packed them up in pint-size plastic clamshells, and shipped them through its regular distributors to the East Coast.

Word travels fast among the farmers, seed salespeople and truck drivers in tomato country. Before long commercial growers such as Six L's and Procacci Bros. got a taste of the fruit and realized Chu was on to something. "I've been in business 53 years and I recognized their potential," says Joe Procacci, chief executive officer of Procacci Bros., who first saw the sweet tomatoes at Chu's initial three-acre plot. He and other growers imported the seeds -- a variety called Santa -- and started planting.

As far as I can tell from online sources, grape tomatoes do in fact have few calories, about 33 in a half cup.

The picture is haunting. The bodies of the dead dangle overhead, twisted and grotesque, while the living frolic beneath them, posing for the camera. The joy and laughter on the faces of the celebrants is unmistakably genuine. These are people exulting in hate, glorying in their own cruelty.

It was taken on Aug. 7, 1930, and it shows the bodies of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two black men falsely accused of rape who were beaten, tortured, mutilated and then strung up by a mob in Marion, Indiana. The picture is remarkably similar to the ones we saw last week from Fallujah, or those we saw nearly 11 years ago from Mogadishu. Mobs reduce human nature to its lowest common denominator, whether American, Iraqi or Somali. They are savage and ugly, but they are not irrational....

Lynching is deliberate. It is opportunistic rather than purely spontaneous, and it has a clear intent: to insult, to challenge and to frighten the enemy, and to excite and enlist allies. The mutilation and public display of bodies follows a distinct pattern. The victims are members of a despised Other, who are held in such contempt that they are considered less than human. Respectful treatment of the dead is the norm in all societies, and a tenet of all religions. Publicly flouting such basic dignities is a communal expression of hatred designed to insult and frighten. Display of the mutilated remains must be as public as possible. In Fallujah they were strung high from a bridge. In Mogadishu, where there were no central squares or bridges, the bodies were dragged through the streets for hours. The crowd, no matter how enraged, welcomes the camera -- Paul Watson, a white Canadian journalist, moved unharmed with his through the angry mobs in Mogadishu on Oct. 4, 1993. The idea is to spread the image. Cameras guarantee the insult will be heard, seen and felt. The insult and fear are spread across continents.

The other message at a lynching isn't as obvious. It is also an appeal. It is a demonstration of potency designed to sway and embolden those who are sympathetic but fearful. It says, Look what we can get away with! Look what we can do! The sheer horror asserts the determination of the rebel faction, and underlines the seriousness of the choice it demands from its own community. It draws a line in the sand; it is a particularly graphic way of saying, You are either for us or against us. With the potential for further such atrocities afoot, critics of the rebels are frightened into silence and acquiescence.

It is a mistake to conclude that those committing such acts represent a majority of the community. Just the opposite is true. Lynching is most often an effort to frighten and sway a more sensible, decent mainstream. In Marion it was the Ku Klux Klan, in Mogadishu it was Aidid loyalists, in Fallujah it is either diehard Saddamites or Islamo-fascists.

The worst answer the U.S. can make to such a message -- which is precisely what we did in Mogadishu -- is back down. By most indications, Aidid's supporters were decimated and demoralized the day after the Battle of Mogadishu. Some, appalled by the indecency of their countrymen, were certain the U.S. would violently respond to such an insult and challenge. They contacted U.N. authorities offering to negotiate, or simply packed their things and fled. These are the ones who miscalculated. Instead the U.S. did nothing, effectively abandoning the field to Aidid and his henchmen. Somalia today remains a nation struggling in anarchy, and the America-haters around the world learned what they thought was a essential truth about the United States: Kill a few Americans and the most powerful nation on Earth will run away. This, in a nutshell, is the strategy of Osama bin Laden.

One thing about posing for the cameras is that you leave a record of who you are. L.A. authorities used those photos, with mixed success, to prosecute cases after the 1992 riots. U.S. authorities should use them in Iraq (not that I'm suggesting that Fallujah is the place for anything as civilized as an American-style trial), and they seem to be.

Bowden concludes: "The photographic evidence should be used to help round up those who committed these atrocities, and those who tacitly or overtly encouraged it. A suitable punishment might be some weeks of unearthing the victims of Saddam Hussein's mass graves."

I'm told by a high-level Google exec that the way to get more action from Google ads is to write a lot about term life insurance. That's because people shopping online for term life insurance really are interested in the subject--they want to shop right now, and they tend to buy insurance when they do. It's what Steve calls the mattress store principle. Most of the time a mattress store has no customers, but nearly every customer who comes in buys a mattress. The same is generally true of term life insurance and probably of fraudulent term papers.

Now that I'm not going to Saudi Arabia and therefore can actually get term life insurance (insurers don't like those Saudi risk factors), I do indeed need to buy some term life insurance. Does anyone have a good recommendation for a source of term life insurance? How about you folks at Google ads? Will this post get action?

BTW, readers will no doubt notice that I'm now carrying Blogads, which pay much better than Google.

Workers who don't have bank accounts often sacrifice about an hour's wage to cash their paychecks.

State Sen. Dean Florez and Controller Steve Westly on Tuesday announced new legislation that would allow such employees to cash their checks for free.

Senate Bill 1917 would clarify state law to prohibit banks from charging cashing fees on paychecks issued by the bank's clients. SB 1916 would allow state employees without accounts or direct deposit to cash their paychecks without charge at any bank that has a payroll contract with the state.

The predictable result of this legislation would be to hide the cost of cashing non-customers' checks in the fees paid by customers, including payroll account holders. The bill is nothing more than a cumbersome transfer of money from one group of Californians to another. Both the problem and the "solution" are relatively trivial, but the constant accretion of such regulations in California isn't. It's just not a good place to do business. Someone--the Governator, perhaps--needs to stop this nonsense.

But it's really all about the scanners, the little cross-hatched red beams of light, like at the supermarket, that register each package's bar code at least a dozen times during its overnight trip. The scanners mean that customers can check the progress of their packages over the Internet. Plant managers can monitor the nightly flow and prevent bottlenecks. FedEx can manage this gigantic business and still have accessible information on each individual item.

One employee told me that when he started work at the company 17 years ago, he marked individual packages with crayons. But FedEx has participated in the productivity surge that has been reshaping the American economy. If you were obsessed with the political campaign over the past year, you would have gotten the impression that there's no such thing as a service sector of the economy ï¿‘ it's all manufacturing ï¿‘ and that the U.S. is getting trounced by China and India in the competition for global business.

That's a distorted view of reality. Since 1995, the U.S. has enjoyed a productivity renaissance. The McKinsey Global Institute breaks the economy down into 60 sectors. U.S. workers are the most productive on earth in at least 50 of them. Productivity gains cause standard of living increases. Productivity gains lead to employment gains. If history is any judge, yesterday's excellent job numbers could mark the beginning of another surge in job creation.

As William W. Lewis, a former McKinsey partner, writes in "The Power of Productivity," about half the U.S. productivity gains have occurred in just two sectors, wholesale and retail trade. We've gotten really efficient at getting stuff from the hands of manufacturers to the hands of consumers. These innovations have had more important effects on how people really live than anything done in Washington.

Not that Washington is completely unimportant. Brooks alludes to the policy change that made these huge productivity gains possible: trucking deregulation during the Carter administration. But he's absolutely correct that the big economic changes that make for long-term economic growth have absolutely nothing to do with election-year policy debates--which is one reason I find politics less and less interesting and the rest of life more so.

MIT's Eric Brynjolfsson, who was studying productivity gains when most economists thought they were a myth ("the productivity paradox"), writes in Technology Review:

From the 1970s into the 1990s, U.S. labor productivity grew by barely 1.4 percent a year. Many economists thought it would be stuck at that level forever. But the growth rate jumped to more than 2.5 percent in 1995 and has averaged more than 4 percent since 2001.The difference is dramatic. It takes 50 years for living standards to double if productivity grows at 1.4 percent per year, but only 18 years to double at 4 percent growth.

The productivity boom is rooted in a revolution in the way American companies apply information technology. Technology-driven innovation is reshaping the economy, but managers who sit back and wait--assuming that technology alone will quickly or automatically introduce gains--are setting themselves up for failure.

The fruits of technological innovations introduced five years ago are being harvested today as more efficiently run operations. In the short term, this is one of several factors behind the so-called jobless recovery. But over the longer term, the digital revolution will promote sustained business growth and higher living standards for workers and society at large. To achieve this, however, managers must think out of the box--particularly the box that contains all that computer hardware. Capital spending on computer hardware accounts for only a fraction of the total investments powering today’s efficiencies. The biggest investments go toward developing business processes that can reap technology’s benefits. These efforts are less visible than hardware--but they’re more important.

The unsung heroes of the IT revolution have not been the microchip and the Web browser, but rather the creative, diligent, and painstaking work done by those who have been rethinking supply chains, customer service, incentive systems, product lines, and 1,001 other processes and practices affected by computers. Investments of intangible capital constitute the real source of today’s productivity growth. The challenge for managers is to use IT as a catalyst to initiate a wave of complementary innovations throughout their organizations.

That "creative, diligent, and painstaking work" almost never gets credit in public discussions of economics, but it makes all the difference.

In Orlando, the latest numbers are old news because the area has long resisted the national trend and instead has regularly produced jobs.

Take Denise Santiago and her husband, Erick Brazil. The couple came to Orlando from New York in December, and within weeks of starting their searches, both had landed jobs.

"It all happened so fast," said Santiago, a registered medical assistant. She had her pick of jobs in the health-care industry and chose Ob & Gyn Specialists in Winter Park. "I'd fax my resume to a company, and by the end of the day, they'd call me back," she said.

Brazil interviewed at Hughes Supply on a Thursday and started work the next Monday.

Indeed, the state of Florida, with Orlando playing a key role, has been one of the few bright spots during the past year when it comes to job creation.

Consider one staggering contrast: Florida added 131,400 non-agricultural jobs in the 12 months that ended in February, the most recent month for which state numbers are available. During that same period, the United States as a whole generated 209,000, according to revised figures released Friday.

Orlando is the America you rarely see on TV (notwithstanding Disney ads): postindustrial and booming, with new houses its broad middle class can afford. The Sentinel's website even lists "Growth" as a separate category under its News heading. Of course, with "growth" news comes anti-growth backlash, which can turn you into California.