McPheet.com

• Netflix now offers, as its primary plan, unlimited streaming over the internet but no DVDs for $7.99. I say this is their primary plan, because it’s the one they list on their home page — and you can add unlimited DVDs starting at only $2 a month more.  More evidence that cable TV is on its way out. Meanwhile, Blockbuster Video declared bankruptcy in September.
• Homefront is a new game from THQ in which Korea invades and occupies the US mainland in 2026. North Korea fired shells into an island claimed by South Korea yesterday.  Reality imitates art.
• There’s snow all over around here — it fell yesterday.  Yesterday I talked with colleagues and clients in Toronto, New York, Baltimore, and central Pennsylvania.  These are all places I expect to have snow before Seattle. None of them had any — in fact, they all had temperatures in the 40s or 50s.  That’s just not right.

An open question: Does the new full body scanner -OR- enhanced pat down constitute an unreasonable breach of privacy?

This story is exploding all over the media and the blogosphere. But this is just the latest expansion of the intrusiveness of security screening at our airports. I travel by air a few times a year for work.  Every time I go through security, I want to ask how long this is going to continue.  I never do bother asking, though, because I know the answer: it’s never going away.

However, this is the first time that we’ve seen such an outcry against security procedures.  It’s gone so far that Saturday Night Live ran a sketch mocking TSA this past weekend.

I listen to Ricochet’s podcast every week, and one of the people that appears regularly is Claire Berlinski.  She always seems to have interesting things to say, partly because she lives in Istanbul.  You get an unusual perspective on American politics and society when you live overseas.

Berlinski has noted several times that we don’t pay enough attention to Turkey, and I suspect she’s probably right.  Turkey doesn’t break the surface of American attention very often, most recently because of the so-called Gaza Freedom Flotilla incident last May. Israeli soldiers boarded several vessels bound for the Gaza Strip, breaking a blockade imposed by Israel.  Nine of the activists (eight Turks and an American of Turkish descent) were killed. The flotilla was organized in part by a Turkish humanitarian organization.  Turkey also caught my attention during the run-up to the Iraq War, as the Turkish Parliament failed to pass a measure allowing American forces to move through Turkey in order to invade northern Iraq.

Turkey is an unusual country — a primarily Muslim country in Europe, ruled as a secular democracy, with a strategically-important location. We should know more about it.