The New York Times reports that the Los Angeles Times—a news-gathering organization—has a Net Nanny.

The software blocks access to…”sex sites” and to sites that could compromise network security, and filters out spam that contains pornographic images.

Also from the New York Times: Some people at the ACLU claim that the organization doesn’t need to be transparent.

A lawyer in the New York state attorney general’s office informally warned the American Civil Liberties Union that his office had concerns about proposed standards that would limit the group’s board members from speaking publicly about policies and internal operations, according to three board members.

First you got your Soccer Jew (”that intellectual, kvetchy, Granta-reading guy who also happens to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of Ronaldinho’s every kick,” according to the New York Observer), who has unshackled himself from the People of the Book with a vengeance—if not on the athletic field, then in his imagination.

“I think that nerdy kids have a classic response to their sporting disasters as kids: What they can’t master physically they try to master intellectually, and certainly that’s the case with my soccer experience,” said [Franklin] Foer, whose 2004 book, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, is a clear testament to that impulse. “I think a lot of it is, the thrill of soccer, to me, was like the thrill of opening up an atlas, where you were exposed to all these foreign countries, foreign names—and that was the appeal.”

Interestingly, there’s a hint of a political component to the appeal, too:

Soccer Jews are big on geopolitical analyses of the game (though they also tend to deny that it is a particularly “intellectual” one). Much like that earlier generation, the Baseball Jews, they enjoy the chatter around the sport almost as much as they enjoy the sport itself, though there is a key difference: While baseball is the American-as-apple-pie game of assimilation, soccer is a post-assimilation sport (in the U.S., at least, if not the rest of the world). It’s about internationalism, and daring to enter a world where anti-Semitism is still raw, as the presence of protesting neo-Nazis at this year’s tournament has shown.

Then you got your Smart Ashkenazi Jew ["meinstein": my son, the Einstein], who just may be genetically advantaged, says Steven Pinker in the New Republic ($$). Pinker analyzes recent studies by a team of scientists from the University of Utah who “recently strode into this minefield [of characterizing Jews, and other groups, in biological terms] with their article ‘Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.’ ”

Of course danger lurks in the singling out of any group for its biological distinctness Pinker notes. And yet, there are advantages to be reaped too:

In recent decades, the standard response to claims of genetic differences has been to deny the existence of intelligence, to deny the existence of races and other genetic groupings, and to subject proponents to vilification, censorship, and at times physical intimidation. Aside from its effects on liberal discourse, the response is problematic. Reality is what refuses to go away when you do not believe in it, and progress in neuroscience and genomics has made these politically comforting shibboleths (such as the non-existence of intelligence and the non-existence of race) untenable….

[T]here are positive reasons to study the genetics of groups. Until the day that every person is issued a CD containing his or her genome, medicine will need the statistical boost of data on group differences when targeting tests and treatments to those most likely to benefit from them.

That’s my takeaway from Peter Brown’s “Hillary Smart to Take on the Anti-War“:

Taking on the anti-war left within her own party to show her independence would be taking a page from her husband’s 1992 playbook. Bill Clinton made a point of criticizing Jesse Jackson, the onetime presidential candidate and then the de facto leader of black America, as a signal to middle-class whites that he was a “different” Democrat.

The strategy worked since Bill Clinton retained the vast, vast majority of African-American voters that November and did better among whites than any Democrat in decades.

President Clinton made his stand six months before the 1992 general election, after he was already assured of the Democratic nomination and while the country was paying attention. Sen. Clinton is now almost 30 months before the election, and presumably will have a bevy of opponents for the Democratic nomination.

Yet, refusing to kowtow to the priorities of anti-war Democrats could turn out to be a smart political move come November of 2008.

I know I’m in the minority—I frequently am, on all sorts of things—but I agree with Brown.

It may not get her elected, but it will put her closer to the country…if things improve in Iraq by 2008.

The New York Times’s David Carr picks up on the documentary trend that I began writing about here (in “Michael Moore, Eat Your Heart Out”) and elaborated on here (in “Of the Documentary Persuasion”).

Carr talks specifically about advocacy films (mostly liberal), whereas I also noted feature-length hagiographies (or “biopics,” to use Andrew Sullivan’s much juicier term) of Rudy Giuiliani and Cynthia McKinney and Al Gore.

Carr speculates about the reason for the trend.

But the cluster of serious, point-of-view documentaries may also represent something else, a coup d’etat on the status quo. Just as those big books of the 60’s took on the elites of the day (chemical companies, Detroit engineers) these films betray a disaffection with their postindustrial counterparts (Hollywood, the traditional news media) for filling theaters with brain-dead blockbusters and neglecting important stories.

HBO’s Sheila Nevins nails it:

“I don’t think the evening news is doing a good job of expressing the confusion about the state of the world, and this is a soapbox that a lot of people are turning to.”

Yep. Documentaries are, in part, a reflection of the failing TV news business.

(Don’t be confused by the name of my blog. That “infotainment rules” is merely an observation about the state of the news, not a hearty endorsement of the sound bite and the publicity stunt and the emotional storytelling and the slugfests and the takedowns and the tug at the heartstrings or the kick in the gut delivered by infotainment, which has all but replaced the “news” on television.

When I call for better infotainment, it’s not because I don’t like serious news. Indeed I do. I’m a geek. I think Frontline is the most valuable program on television. But I recognize that I am in a tiny minority. I know that if the mass audience liked that documentary series much as I do, TV would be wall-to-wall Frontline clones.

Television, however, delivers what sells, and what sells is entertainment—or stuff that is packaged like entertainment. Infotainment doesn’t have to be bad or stupid or crass. High-quality infotainment may in fact be superior to dry “news” as a vehicle for delivering information to audiences.

Good documentaries are, in fact, high-quality infotainment. More, please.)