DanKohn.com

NYT reports that the Dow hit a 4 year low: “Since President Bush came to Wall Street to reassure the markets on July 9, the Dow is off 13.5 percent and the Nasdaq composite index is down 6.1 percent.”

Many commentators suggested that it was not feasible for our civilian judicial system to handle a man like Zacarias Moussaoui. Dahlia Lithwick reports in Slate on the hearing today:

“I don’t have outside legal assistance,” he sputters (apparently forgetting about the five stand-by lawyers she’s appointed). “I didn’t have a printer until today.” He calls his computer “aging” and says it would take him until the trial simply to load all the CD-ROMs the government has produced for his discovery requests. “This is a farce of justice!” he cries.

The man is either crazy or stupid (he tried to enter a plea of guilty, perhaps, as Lithwick speculates, because he though the judge wanted him to plead not guilty). But, he is no threat to the common law system that has been the right of citizens since Habeas Corpus was guaranteed in the fields of Runymede in 1215.

It is time to fix the travesty of not giving Padilla and Hamdi access to counsel. Finally, a Federal District Court judge today ordered the government to explain within a week how they could hold a man without charges.

Slate on the shopping complex that ate the World Trade Center memorial:

“What is [the site] going to say to a 2-year-old that is going to be 7 five years from now? What are we going to say — ‘Your Daddy died right where the Starbucks is?’ ”

To be fair, though, Daddy did die where the Starbucks is — metaphorically, if not literally. The WTC victims were killed in the middle of the city, in the middle of life, in the middle of carrying out mundane tasks like ordering lattes. Unlike most memorials, the one at Ground Zero will pay tribute to people who died right there on the spot. To entirely strip the place of offices, shops, and other hallmarks of urban life would risk abstracting the slaughter.

Here’s a slideshow of the 6 options. I like #5.

The NYT has a fascinating editorial page biography of Philip K. Dick: “This Generation Needs a Paranoid’s Paranoid”.

The NYT movie review for Tadpole, in which a teenager develops a complicated taste for (older) women, includes this clever turn of phrase to describe his feelings: “milky ardency”.