Military blogger Bob Zangas has been killed in Iraq. Please click here to see his last post, and then click here to leave a message of condolences.

Few higher compliments can be paid to our country than to say that it produces men such as Bob Zangas. And it can suffer few greater losses than of a man like him.

(Link via Instapundit.)

One year ago, Rachel Corrie crouched in front of an Israeli bulldozer and was crushed to death. Ruhama Shattan, an Israeli writer, delivers a proper memorial:

I want to thank Corrie for the explosives that flow freely from Egypt to Gaza, via the smuggling tunnels under the Gaza homes that she died defending.

Perhaps her help in fanning the flames of violent anti-American sentiment led to the October 2003 bombing of the Fulbright delegation to Gaza to interview scholarship candidates, killing three. There will be no new crop of Palestinian Fulbright scholars this fall.

Ouch. But not nearly enough.

Mindles H. Dreck has a very important post on recent trends in corporate regulation spawned by the last few year's scandals. Go read the whole thing, and also follow the links in the post - especially these posts on regulatory capture, and this gem about the ways professional service firms and securities firms try to play "pass-the-liability."

Though I'm an interested party (as an attorney), I believe that Mindles is incorrect when he predicts the imminent death of attorney-client privilege, for reasons he implies in his post: while the confidentiality of attorney-client communications are threatened by court decisions threatening privilige in certain situations, a more fundamental problem is the potential adversarial relationship contemplated by the attorney conduct rules under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. While legal academics such as Eugene Volokh or Glenn Reynolds (it's too late for me to find the link, but I remember they were in favor of the idea. Or at least one of them was. Maybe.) or non-lawyers think it sounds self-evident, they ignore the realities of practice: once a new risk is introduced, it takes a while for the players to allocate the risks amongst themselves (as Mindles says, it's a game of pass-the-parcel) and communication is hampered while the players try to protect their own interests. These types of calculations are exactly the opposite of what is supposed to characterize the attorney-client relationship. The rules threaten to undermine the representation that lawyers are supposed to provide on a normal basis. And I don't think that will stand as a matter of practice. (And while beleagured clients might want to go after the trial bar, they will also want to retain the protected services of their own counsel - and it's pretty hard to subvert one side's privilege without harming the other's.)

Alternatively, it's possible that the attorney conduct regulations will have little effect, as a widely-held opinion of the NY securities bar (from my tiny corner of it) is that the SEC does not have the jurisdiction to regulate the attorney-client relationship. But if the best defense of a regulation is that it will be ignored, that's not much of a compliment.

I'm not a huge fan of Adam Gopnik, but in his most recent New Yorker piece (a review of a book on Times Square) he makes some very important points:

There are, of course, people who miss the old Times Square, its picturesque squalor and violence and misery and exploitation. ... Which just proves, as with the old maxim about belief, that people who refuse to be sentimental about the normal things don’t end up being sentimental about nothing; they end up being sentimental about anything, shedding tears about muggings and the shards of crack vials glittering like diamonds in the gutter.

One of my pet peeves in the media - bloggers included - are those who wax nostalgic for the "old Times Square," a stand-in for the pre-Giuliani city -sometimes otherwise phrased as "when the city had character," or "vitality," or some other intangible quality that ignores the massive amount of crime, breakdown and despair that were part of the "character" or "vitality" for anyone who actually lived in the city at the time. Even normally sensible people like Apt. 11D's Laura sometimes fall victim to this syndrome of inappropriate nostalgia. (And she's a Washington Heights resident - some areas of which, as I know from my sojourns to the inconveniently situated Yeshiva University, could still use a second helping of the Giuliani treatment.) Yes, gentrifying neighborhoods mean out-of-sight real estate prices, with the discomforting turnover. But it beats the hell out of landlords inviting drug dealers and arsonists to their properties to force out rent-controlled tenants, as was common in the 1970s. And blackouts from that era weren't nearly as fun as last summer's.

Nostalgia is often advertised as a sign of maturity and perspective. As often as not, it's exactly the opposite.

Apparently the Palestinians recently used a 10-year old boy (without his knowledge) to try to carry an explosive belt (to be used by a suicide bomber) into Israel:

Abdallah Quran, of the Balata refugee camp east of Nablus, makes a living by transferring bags from one side of the road block to the other. He told the soldiers that every day after school, where he attends the fourth grade, he takes his cart to the Hawara barricade to help invalids and women transfer their bags in his cart, while they wait in line for the security checks.

"A few people piled on their bags, and I waited for a few more because I get paid for every bag. A few people put their bag on my cart, and I don't remember who put the bag with the bomb," he said.