AndrewSullivan.com: WILL THE FRENCH VETO? No firm statement yet either way. TF1 declares that France is putting aside the idea of a veto for the moment. The Communists and Socialists urge a veto, but Chirac's party, officially repesented in the parliament by Alain Juppe, talks instead of looming "noises of mobilization." Meanwhile, we have this odd statement from the increasingly erratic Chirac, after meeting with Spanish prime minister, Aznar: "We oppose all new resolutions." Huh? I thought France was promoting a new one. Maybe Paris at this point just wants the whole issue to go away. I still don't have a clue what Chirac is up to; but I certainly think there are many subtle signs that the French don't want to veto - especially if the Russians and Chinese simply abstain. Solitary French isolation at the U.N., combined with encirclement of Anglospheric nations in the E.U. is becoming France's nightmare. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch, could it?

Eject! Eject! Eject!: We are a strong nation. We’d damn well better be, because we carry the genes and mythologies of the most confident individuals on the planet, people unwilling to endure repression, persecution and enslavement by taking a chance on a place unknown to them, except perhaps in their dreams. We have come from every country in the world, from the free and prosperous, to the hellish and horrific. Each individual immigration, from the native Indians crossing the Bering Straight, through Plymouth Rock, Ellis Island and LAX – each one an act of optimism and hope for something better.

Common Sense and Wonder: And another Iraqi exile asks what will the protesters do if the liberation of Iraq is thwarted by their marches. I’ll side with Max in saying they really don’t give a hoot about the wellbeing of the Iraqis as long as they manage to diminish the U.S. in any way they can. They didn’t care about the people of the Soviet Union and its captive states. They never marched against Pol Pot or any of the other totalitarian murderers of the past 50 years. But they will gladly march with International ANSWER, a group that still proudly proclaims allegiance to the memory of Stalin, a mass murderer of stupefying enormity. A man who is credited with saying “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”

NYTimes: “Mr. Blix and Dr. ElBaradei cannot be left to play games of hide-and-seek. This is not like Washington’s unproved assertions about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. There is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has the capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and more recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors. The Security Council doesn't need to sit through more months of inconclusive reports. It needs full and immediate Iraqi disarmament. It needs to say so, backed by the threat of military force.”

“People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

--Joseph Cambell, American mythologist

Michael Medved: If we go ahead with war against Iraq, it will represent a betrayal of our values and mark the first time in history that we attacked another country that never attacked us first.

Only those with a truly pathetic public-school education could believe such rubbish, since we fought the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, our campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo, and many lesser engagements – all with no direct attack on the United States. Great powers face great threats – and dangerous enemies. Why would a war prove easier or more appropriate after Saddam develops, or uses, nuclear weapons – rather than before he's completed such deadly development?

Jon Udell: I was shocked to discover a nest of pirates yesterday, operating brazenly right here in my hometown. They were gathered in a large nondescript building, reading and talking quietly and in some cases listening to music. Some kind of social club, perhaps? Yes, but with a profoundly subversive theme: "sharing" content. This establishment houses large collections of books, magazines, audiotapes, videotapes, CDs, DVDs. And it "shares" these with its patrons. I watched in amazement as people left the building carrying armloads of these content assets, which they "borrow" without paying a nickel to the copyright holders. It's frightening, really. Who knew?

Charles Krauthammer: This is truly bizarre. George Bush, extremist? This is a president who passed an education bill essentially written by Ted Kennedy. His tax reform involves the most modest of rate cuts for the upper brackets and is what any Keynesian would have done in the face of a recession. It is, for example, more moderate than the (John) Kennedy tax cuts. The other alleged parts of his agenda--the environmental rape, the imposition of theocracy, the abolition of civil liberties (Moyers: "secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine")--are nothing but the delusion of liberals made quite mad by defeat.

Rebecca Blood: "I think that at some point, turning off information is going to be a huge luxury. But it's clear that a shift has occurred. The game is no longer about access to information, it's about access to reliable, pertinent information. Filters will become more and more important. And, at some point, people will start trying to identify what level of information is optimal. My hunch is that there is a rate at which even useful information moves into diminishing returns. At a certain point, the man who knows less is better equipped to make a good decision."

Cory Doctorow: "Feeding the query string 'http' to Google causes it to barf up all the pages in its database in order of their PageRank value."