I won’t be watching the HBO series Addiction,*** which producer Sheila Nevins calls “didactic television.” Yuck. Not my cuppa. Besides, I’m happy to report that I conquered my worst addiction about 8 years ago (the second—and final—time I quit).

Once upon a time, I also used to smoke these.

The boy who introduced me to them in college is dead now. Of cancer.

I’m still addicted to this:

————–

*** Here’s what the NYT’s Virginia Heffernan (not my favorite critic—barf) has to say:

The program is part of a solemn project, something that Sheila Nevins, the enterprising president of HBO Documentary Films, has called “didactic television.” It is also devised to be more accessible than past HBO projects, with some cable systems, including RCN in the New York City area, showing it free during its first four-day run.

Intended to do more than entertain or alarm, then, “Addiction” is meant to sober people up. To that end, its message is this: Drug and alcohol addiction are diseases of the brain, and they can be treated, at least partly, with medicine.

This straightforward message is remarkable for at least two reasons. First, it’s intrinsically controversial, since A.A. for a long time expected its participants to refrain entirely from drug use, even prescription pills. The model of addiction presented here — addiction as a brain disease — is somewhat at odds with the cognitive model used in classic 12-step programs.

Second, it’s remarkable that so many top-notch filmmakers have consented to push someone else’s point so hard. It’s almost ominous. The sameness of the films in “Addiction” might aid its effectiveness as propaganda, but as art it’s monotone; it’s hard to believe it’s the collaborative work of so many otherwise individualistic artists.

Andrew Sullivan posted one of Thomas Mallon’s provocative questions the other day:

“Are American writers, artists, and thinkers truly prepared to admit that Islamofascism is a real, and even imminent, threat to everything they are accustomed to thinking, saying, and creating?”

I would say the answer is no, judging by the “response” Sullivan received and posted, which referred exclusively to the threat from Islamist-fueled terrorist-generated random violence.

Our societies, cultures and economies are just too strong to be even mildly shaken by this lame bullshit. Just because some gaggle of religious lunatics manages to kill a bunch of westerners once every 6 months, does anyone really believe that “everything we are accustomed to thinking, saying and creating” is under threat? I call bullshit.

The threat of Islamofascism is not the same thing as the threat from Islamist terrorism and nukes. This is Islamofascism, and it’s taking place in Britain, while everyone is sleeping or drugged on our wonderful, pleasurable escapist way of life:

Freedom of speech row as talk on Islamic extremists is banned

A leading university has been accused of “selling out” academic freedom of speech by scrapping a talk on links between the Nazis and Islamic anti-semitism after allegedly receiving emails from Muslims protesting about the event.

Matthias Küntzel, a German author and political scientist who specialises in the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, was told yesterday by the University of Leeds that a talk scheduled for yesterday evening, and a two-day workshop, on Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Anti-semitism in the Middle East, had been cancelled because of security fears.

Let me repeat myself in case I wasn’t clear—and in case Sullivan and his lazy reader didn’t get what Mallon meant when he said [e.a.] that Islamofascism is “a real, and even imminent, threat to everything they are accustomed to thinking, saying, and creating.”

Islamofascism doesn’t manifest itself primarily as the desire to nuke us, though that would be good for them, too, I suppose. It manifests itself as the threat to shut down our way of life, preferably by persuading us that we are “insulting Islam” when we exercise our hard-won freedom of speech.

I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel like doing nothing but insulting Islam from morning to night, every day, seven days a week.

At the end of a very long report on the details of the unity government deal worked out between Hamas and Fatah and what it means, the NYT’s Steven Erlanger writes:

Separately, there remained no public progress in securing the release of a BBC reporter, Alan Johnston, who was kidnapped on Monday in Gaza.

The most important word in that sentence from Erlanger–the code word– is “public.” I take this to mean that there are rumors of a behind-the-scenes deal.

It’s a sad day, though, when the New York Times has to mimic Pravda in order to report the “news.” Also it’s the first mention of Johnston’s abduction in three days.

Here’s what’s new on Google News at 6 p.m.:

BBC journalist ’still missing’ in Gaza
Manchester.com, UK - 4 hours ago
Alan Johnston was first reported missing on Monday evening by his employers, the BBC, who refused to confirm media claims that he had been kidnapped. …

Palestinian PM urges effort to free abducted BBC journalist
Ha’aretz, Israel - 5 hours ago
Alan Johnston, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s correspondent in Gaza for the past three years, was seized on Monday while driving his car in the

[[What follows is an attempt to reconstruct a post I wrote earlier today and deleted because I'm a klutz.]]

Jacob Weisberg tries to nail down the neocons’ coffin:

whether or not the neocons are ready to face it, their moment has passed. At the Defense Department, their apostles and allies are largely gone. Donald Rumsfeld has been replaced by Robert M. Gates, a member of the Iraq Study Group and of the realist school associated with the previous President Bush. Paul Wolfowitz, the architect who tried to raise a new Middle East on Saddam’s rubble, has moved to the World Bank, where he observes a McNamara-like silence on the failure of his war. Another formerly key official, Douglas Feith, is under investigation from Sen. Carl Levin’s armed services committee for misrepresenting intelligence data to make the case for the invasion.

Mickey Kaus notes the premature eulogies for the neolibs:

Is Neoliberalism dying–or only The New Republic?

…

P.P.S.: I’m not saying there isn’t a large movement of bloggers, activists, etc. who (as Brooks says) want “a Democratic Party that fights” Republicans rather than attacks itself, who are substantively “further to the left”–concerned more about wage stagnation than the problems of adversarial unionism–and who regard neolibs like Joe Klein as contrarian Fogies. What I deny is that we Fogies have lost–that what Peters called neoliberalism deserves the smug, mutually-reinforcing obituaries from Jonathan and Ezra and Ben. More on this later. …

Matt Yglesias says neoliberalism won, which is why it’s dead. 

I am one confused Fogey. So, apparently, is Hillary Clinton.

(edited for clarity)

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in a confession in which he also likened himself to George Washington, says that in addition to planning 9/11 and Bali and a long string of other atrocities that shocked the conscience of civilized people everywhere, he butchered Daniel Pearl.

“I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,” Mohammed is quoted as saying in a transcript of a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, released by the Pentagon.

“For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head,” he added.

Before Mohammed did it, Daniel Pearl gave him the finger:

Judea Pearl: ‘We have to defeat the hatred that took Danny’s life’

Rest in peace, Daniel Pearl.

I managed to delete the wrong post. It was a good one too.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

update: this is a re-post, with a new and correct title (part 3).While everyone focuses on the Palestinians’ unity government, BBC correspondent Alan Johnston remains missing.

There is only one new report on Google News since I last checked 12 hours ago. It’s now day three, 8 a.m., March 15:

Hunt continues for BBC Gaza correspondent
Radio New Zealand, New Zealand - 4 hours ago
Renewed attempts are being made to find BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston, who has been missing for a third night and is feared kidnapped. …

In contrast to the massive denial with which Johnston’s kidnapping is being treated, former hostage “journalist” Jill Carroll—a naive young woman who got herself into harm’s way in Iraq—is getting the hero/celebrity treatment here at home. Radar—yes: Radar-–reports:

Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor freelancer kidnapped in Iraq last January, was released a year ago this month. And what a difference 343 days make. Promoted to staff writer during her eleven weeks in captivity, she’s enjoyed a cache of consolation prizes since returning home. There was the international award for courage and the sprawling 10-part Jill Carroll Story, which became the Monitor’s most popular and profitable series ever. Then the 30-year-old nabbed a $30,000 Harvard fellowship reserved for “distinguished experts” in media and spent the fall on-campus crafting a widely-cited report criticizing cutbacks in foreign news coverage.

This is also an interesting and revealing report about, among other things, the shrinking number of slots in news organizations for full-time foreign correspondents. Read it.

I’m good with words, but I can’t count. So I gave two posts the identical title. I’m going to delete the mistitled post and repost it as “following the abduction story, part 3.” And after I post it, I’ll link it here.

Clumsy.