August 25, 2007

FLORIDA VOTERS DISENFRANCHISED? "Florida officials complained that the DNC was going to 'disenfranchise voters,' as it says on the state party's home page."

More here:

Florida lawmakers angrily assailed the Democratic National Committee and its chairman, Howard Dean, saying he is threatening to "disenfranchise" the state's voters by considering a plan to invalidate the state's presidential primary.

Reader John Underriner emails: "They said if Bush was elected Florida Democrats would be disenfranchised -- and they were right!" Funny how those predictions keep coming true.

AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE: A report from Lima.

SO YOUR COMPUTER IS hostage to Microsoft's "Genuine Advantage" servers? Which don't always work. That's a selling point.

IS IT THE PRESIDENT'S JOB TO BE role-modeling what good families look like?

IRAQIS PROTEST TERROR in a rally at the Saudi Embassy. Good for them.

THE ULTIMATE ALL-IN-ONE BREWING MACHINE: It's quite an achievement, but I can't help but feel that at the end of the day, it makes homebrewing so easy that it's almost like buying your beer at the store . . . .

CALLING FOR A MILITARY COUP at The Huffington Post. Ed Morrissey is appalled. I think it's a new high point for Bush Derangement Syndrome. Which is saying something, especially at the HuffPo.

UPDATE: Perhaps it's all part of the new urgency on the left that Tom Smith notes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bill Quick is unimpressed.

HITTING SPAMMERS WHERE THEY'RE VULNERABLE:

Between July 1 and the end of the year, spam jumped to nearly 60 percent of all e-mail traffic monitored by Symantec, and many administrators say it makes up an even greater percentage of e-mail now.

Spam filtering is not the answer, said Garth Bruen, who runs a volunteer project focused on taking down the Web sites run by spammers. Bruen tracks down the ISPs and domain name registrars used by spammers and arranges to have their sites shut down.

"This problem is not going to go away if you ignore it. Blocking and filtering is just a jacked-up technological form of ignoring," he said. "What you want to do is report it and make it difficult for these people to exist on the Net and do their transactions."

Earlier this month, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, endorsed Bruen's position, saying that anti-spam fighters could really hurt the spammers' bottom lines by targeting their Web sites.

This seems plausible to me.

RALPH PETERS ON JOHN WARNER: Peters, writing from Fallujah, isn't impressed:

Although this trend has been reported, our battlefield leaders here agree that the magnitude of the shift hasn't registered back home: Al Qaeda is on the verge of a humiliating, devastating strategic defeat - rejected by their fellow Sunni Muslims.

If we don't quit, this will not only be a huge practical win - it'll be the information victory we've been aching for.

No matter what the Middle Eastern media might say, everyone in the Arab and greater Sunni Muslim world will know that al Qaeda was driven out of Iraq by a combination of Muslims and Americans.

Think that would help al Qaeda's recruitment efforts? Even now, the terrorists have to resort to lies about their prospective missions to gain recruits.

With the sixth anniversary of 9/11 approaching, how dare we throw away so great a potential victory over those who attacked our country?

Forget the anti-war nonsense you hear. The truth is that our troops want to continue this struggle. I know. I'm here. And I'm listening to what they have to say. They're confident as never before that we're on the right path.

Should we rob them of their victory now and enhance al Qaeda by giving them a free win? How can we even contemplate quitting now?

I've been sitting down with Iraqis, too - including former enemies. They don't want us to leave. They finally cracked the code. They need us. And although they've got a range of their own goals (not all of them tending toward Jeffersonian democracy), they're unified in their hatred of al Qaeda.

I'm not either, but for a different , or at least additional, reason. First, Warner's been saying similar stuff for quite a while, and it's funny that the press is making a big deal of it -- perhaps to overshadow the more significant about-face by Democratic Rep. Brian Baird. And Petraeus has talked about a troop pulldown already too. This looks like Warner trying to take credit for something that will probably happen anyway. In other words, Washington as usual. Warner, it's true, doesn't come off that well.

Meanwhile, notice that pretty much all the reporting from Iraq is more positive than the talk in Washington? As Damien Cave of the New York Times observed:

I talked to a commander the other day who said that the political debate at home is bizarro-land and something that he doesn't connect with at all. . . . it's funny, one of the things that comes up a lot here among commanders and among the press corps is the way that the debate at home seems to be mainly focused on the impact on Washington or among constituents.

Well, that's how they look at everything, I suppose. But you expect better when a war is involved.

ATTACK OF THE fake bloggers.

PLAYING VIRTUAL ARMY EXPERIENCE:

I didn't play it -- no, that's not a picture of me -- but the gamers playing it didn't seem too impressed, coming out. The "controller," if you will, was pretty awesome, but the game itself wasn't nearly as sophisticated as even the Xbox version of America's Army outside. They complained of low accuracy. Then again, maybe it's just a really accurate simulator of how hard it is to fire a giant metal rifle in the back of a military vehicle?

I wonder how the Army is doing, with their "recruit gamer nerds" strategy.

You can probably track that by looking at military purchases of Jolt! cola. . . .

DON SURBER ROUNDS UP the week that was.

BILL MAHER IS DISAPPOINTED, but I'm not surprised. I've known Damien Cave since long before the InstaPundit days, and he's an honest reporter.

IN THE MAIL: Hanna Rosin's new book on Patrick Henry College, God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America. There's already a good deal of discussion going on in the book forums.

HIGHWAY ROBBERY: "Should people who carry large sums of cash just assume that there's a small chance the government will simply steal it from them at gunpoint?"

JEFF EMANUEL REPORTS FROM IRAQ: Southeast of Baghdad, the Surge is working.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

ILYA SOMIN on dating across ideological lines.

MICKEY KAUS MATH-CHECKS THE NEW YORK TIMES: Shockingly, when 2700 dealers sell a car at about half the rate of 440 dealers, the 2700 dealers still sell more cars! Go figure!

No, really -- go do the figures next time. Because apparently those layers of editors and fact-checkers don't do math either.

'HANDS OFF MY ANALOGY!"

THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, CONT'D: Jackass is now a video game. "Fans of Jackass and people who always wanted to plummet from a skyscraper but never got up the nerve will love the game."

MIDWIFE TRAINING saving lives in Afghanistan. "Afghan women die more often in childbirth than women anywhere but Sierra Leone -- one in nine will die during or after being pregnant. But the rapid training of midwives and spread of essential health information suppressed during Taliban years is beginning, perhaps, to change this." More at the link.

August 24, 2007

A LOOK AT THE GUNS OF BRITAIN:

Following the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, in which seventeen people were killed by a man armed with two 9mm pistols, Britain passed a law outlawing the ownership of most handguns, despite researchers finding "no link between high levels of gun crime and areas where there were still high levels of lawful gun possession." It's a law so severe that the Britain's Olympic shooting team is forced to train abroad, lest one of its members try to shoot up a grammar school. So how effective has the law been? A doubling in gun-related crimes since the ban, naturally.

Read the whole thing.

BOB KERREY VS. CHUCK HAGEL: I'm okay with that.

UPDATE: Reader John Tuttle emails: "Chuck Hagel vs Bob Kerrey ain't gonna happen ... Hagel won't make it thru the primary." He does have opposition.

BUT HIS BROTHER HAD A GREAT BAND: "Attorney Geoffrey Fieger and one of his law partners have been indicted by the U.S. government, which accused the pair of making $127,000 in illegal campaign contributions to the 2004 presidential campaign of John Edwards."

MONEY: Not evil, after all.

POLITICIZING TERROR.

BUSH, HITLER, AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC. "Comparing Bush to Weimar would only be apt if you thought Bush was the weak and frail President Hindenburg, unable to take decisive action to keep his nation from sliding into chaos... "

LIBERTARIANS IN DEADLY SNEAKERS: "This is even worse than little old ladies in tennis shoes!" Well, the model I run in is called "The Beast." And a 14EE is surely extra-deadly.

FAMILY VALUES: "The kind of family values that sustains a middle class - rather than an underclass - in a society like the United States aren't necessarily the kind of family values that you find in socially-conservative societies at very different stages of socioeconomic development, and any transition from the latter to the former is likely to be bumpy."

THEY CALL IT A M.U.L.E., but it sounds more like the grandpappy of one of Keith Laumer's Bolos:

Lockheed Martin’s MULE (Multifunction Utility/Logistics and Equipment) has autonomously clambered over a 5-ft.-high obstacle. The Humvee-size vehicle uses six independently powered wheels and an articulated suspension to navigate rubble-strewn terrain or, as in a recent promo video (see below), to climb buglike over a car hood. Three types of MULEs are planned, all intended to dutifully follow dismounted infantry units. A heavily armed 2.5-ton version could be deployed by the Army by 2013.

Video at the link. I can't help but feel, though, that we need a different Laumer character more than we need bolos at the moment . . . .

BARACK OBAMA GETS THE COVETED ENDORSEMENT OF Jimmy Carter's foreign policy guru, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Take that, Hillary.

Plus, a line that Republicans will quote against her if she's in the general election: "'Being a former first lady doesn't prepare you to be president,'' Brzezinski said."

JAMES WEBB ON WHAT HAPPENS when you pull out too soon.

UPDATE: James Webb's website at JamesWebb.com has some quotes about Vietnam that may embarrass some people today:

"Vietnam should teach us an important lesson. Hanoi [is creating] a collectivist society . . . likely to produce greater welfare and security for its people than any local alternative ever offered, at a cost in freedom that affects a small elite." -- Stanley Hoffman
The New Republic
May 3, 1975

"The greatest gift our country can give the Cambodian people is not guns but peace. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now." -- Rep. Chris Dodd (D., Conn.)
Congressional Record
March 12, 1975

"It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated." -- Producer Bert Schneider
Academy Awards
April 8, 1975

To some people, the good guys won in Vietnam. And what happened after, "didn't happen."

ANOTHER UPDATE: James who?

REPORTS THAT CASTRO IS DEAD: It will be nice if they're true, but we'll see. I'm not so sure.

UPDATE: "Hades can wait."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dave Barry says that speculating on Castro's death is "what we do for entertainment here in Miami."

MORE: Fausta Wertz has been listening to Cuban radio.

A BUNCH OF HIGH-CHAIR RECOMMENDATIONS: We're past that phase in my household, I think.

MORE THOUGHTS ON "Hyper-parenting."

RETIREMENT ADVICE: "Save more. Work longer."

NOW THEY KNOW HOW MANY HOLES IT TAKES TO FILL THE . . . oh, never mind:

The universe has a huge hole in it that dwarfs anything else of its kind. The discovery caught astronomers by surprise.

The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it's also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.

Astronomers don't know why the hole is there.

Star-devouring space monsters.

THE CHICKEN AND THE EAGLE. Dueling economic stories.

MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF MAKING TIM RUSSERT LOOK LAME: The latest Corn & Miniter Show is up! Only without either Corn, or Miniter. Instead it's Eli Lake and Michelle Cottle.

UPDATE: Video quit working. Got new embed code. This seems to work now. Sorry -- don't know what went wrong.

USING NANOTECHNOLOGY TO prevent pollution.

TURNING UP THE HEAT ON FRED THOMPSON: "If the sweltering 96 degree heat in Nashville at a fundraiser/reception this week for Fred Thompson is any indication of the political heat he’s taking from faithful supporters to get on with it and announce his candidacy for President, then it doesn’t seem like it can stay this hot much longer." Only 96? It was 102 here yesterday. 96 is brisk.

THE BLOGOSPHERE HITS THE 100 million blog mark. Another "grim milestone?" Some will see it that way . . . .

LAW AND ORDER? "There are new allegations against embattled Miami Police Chief John Timoney by his own police officers' union as we learn that the investigation is widening into his use of a free car." Plus, this: "The President of the Miami FOP, Detective Armando Aguilar, said Timoney permitted crime statistics to be altered to reflect a lower crime rate." At least the free car was a hybrid.

YAHOO, MSN, KOWTOW TO CHINESE BLOG CENSORSHIP.

DEMOCRATIC REP. BRIAN BAIRD has an oped on listening to the troops:

As a Democrat who voted against the war from the outset and who has been frankly critical of the administration and the post-invasion strategy, I am convinced by the evidence that the situation has at long last begun to change substantially for the better. I believe Iraq could have a positive future. Our diplomatic and military leaders in Iraq, their current strategy, and most importantly, our troops and the Iraqi people themselves, deserve our continued support and more time to succeed. . . .

As one soldier said to me, "We have lost so many good people and invested so much, It just doesn't make sense to quit now when we're finally making progress. I want to go home as much as anyone else, but I want this mission to succeed and I'm willing to do what it takes. I just want to know the people back home know we're making progress and support us."

Read the whole thing. It won't get the kind of Big Media attention that John Warner's comments will, because it doesn't fit the preferred narrative. And some interesting observations about Baird's background here.

RECREATING OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES without drugs.

TV IS DEAD. Long live TV. "The unspoken subtext — Madison Avenue still hasn’t figured out the how to make buying new media as profitable as as buying traditional media, so they are going to continue to push traditional media on their clients, come hell or high water."

J.D. JOHANNES, who's recently back from Iraq, looks at the new National Intelligence Estimate and observes: "This NIE is catching up to conditions on the ground that were developing months ago." The full document is here in PDF, but J.D. notes this paragraph from the conclusion that hasn't gotten much media attention:

We assess that changing the mission of Coalition forces from a primarily counterinsurgency and stabilization role to a primary combat support role for Iraqi forces and counterterrorist operations to prevent AQI from establishing a safehaven would erode security gains achieved thus far. The impact of a change in mission on Iraq's political and security environment and throughout the region probably would vary in intensity and suddenness of onset in relation to the rate and scale of a Coalition redeployment. Developments within the Iraqi communities themselves will be decisive in determining political and security trajectories.

Doesn't sound like what John Warner is talking about.

NOTHING NEW ABOUT THIS: A homophobic anti-Giuliani ad produced by a gay Democrat. Because sometimes it's necessary to save the homophobia in order to destroy it.

RESTRICTIONS ON WI-FI in Europe.

IN THE MAIL: Norman Podhoretz's World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.

JOHN TAMMES ROUNDS UP news from Afghanistan that you probably missed.

GOTH DAY at Disneyland.

WHAT THE NEW YORK TIMES doesn't think worth publishing. It's all about the narrative, remember.

MEN: THREAT, OR MENACE?

When children get lost in a mall, they're supposed to find a "low-risk adult" to help them. Guidelines issued by police departments and child-safety groups often encourage them to look for "a pregnant woman," "a mother pushing a stroller" or "a grandmother."

The implied message: Men, even dads pushing strollers, are "high-risk."

Are we teaching children that men are out to hurt them? The answer, on many fronts, is yes. Child advocate John Walsh advises parents to never hire a male babysitter. Airlines are placing unaccompanied minors with female passengers rather than male passengers. Soccer leagues are telling male coaches not to touch players.

Child-welfare groups say these are necessary precautions, given that most predators are male. But fathers' rights activists and educators now argue that an inflated predator panic is damaging men's relationships with kids. Some men are opting not to get involved with children at all, which partly explains why many youth groups can't find male leaders, and why just 9% of elementary-school teachers are male, down from 18% in 1981.

People assume that all men "have the potential for violence and sexual aggressiveness," says Peter Stearns, a George Mason University professor who studies fear and anxiety. Kids end up viewing every male stranger "as a potential evildoer," he says, and as a byproduct, "there's an overconfidence in female virtues." . . . One abused child is one too many. Still, it's important to maintain perspective. "The number of men who will hurt a child is tiny compared to the population," says Benjamin Radford, who researches statistics on predators and is managing editor of the science magazine Skeptical Inquirer. "Virtually all of the time, if a child is lost or in trouble, he will be safe going to the nearest male stranger."

If you stereotyped on race the same way, you'd be regarded as a hopeless bigot. More here.

HEH: "Warner: Show Qaeda U.S. Commitment Not Open-Ended."

ANDREW BREITBART TALKS TO PAT DOLLARD ABOUT embedding with the troops in Iraq, and talks to a caller about the relationship between radical Islam and radical Christianity.

STRATEGYPAGE: "But the most compelling bit of news on al Qaeda's demise in Iraq is the changing composition of the hostiles there. At the beginning of the year, about 70 percent of terror attacks were by al Qaeda, and their Sunni Arab allies. Now, only about fifty percent of , a lower number of, those attacks are al Qaeda. The rest are Iranian supported Shia Arab groups, who are also trying to establish a religious dictatorship in Iraq (one run by Shias, not by Sunnis, as al Qaeda wants.) . . . Iran has backed Shia Arab militias even before the 2003 invasion. Iranian involvement goes back to the 1980s war with Iraq (and even earlier)."

OUR NEW PRIVILEGED CLASS:

So I guess once you're elected to Congress, you're immune from drunk driving laws; you can stash the evidence that you've committed a crime in your office, because investigators aren't allowed to search it; if you kill someone because you've got a lead foot and blew a stop sign, the taxpayers will cover your financial liability; and, we learn today, you can commit whatever Internet-related crimes you please, because the police aren't allowed to search your computer.

Meanwhile, the same Congress that has immunized itself from much of the law is also responsible for the ever-expanding federal criminal code, which we can thank for our shamefully enormous and still-soaring prison population, which is by far and away the largest in the world.

You have lawmakers who feel they're above the law. And who at the same time are criminalizing anything and everything they find tacky, repugnant, or immoral.

No wonder they're polling so badly. But what are we going to do about it?

A PREVIEW of the new Nikon D3. Sounds extremely cool. Price is a bit out of the InstaPundit range, though.

BRIAN MAY completes his doctorate. Congratulations! More here.

AARON HANSCOM: Confessions of a perpetual adolescent.

AND HE SAID IT, NOT ELIZABETH: "Sen. John Edwards, in a campaign theme speech about the culture of Washington, became the first Democrat to refer to the correlation between major Democratic fundraisers circa 1995 and their subsequent overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House."

It's the people vs. the powerful.

DAVID CODREA wonders why the tracing reports don't show all those "assault weapons" allegedly used in crime. More interesting trace data here.

DON SURBER: "I am amused by how often the Brits get the obvious things about America that we Americans cannot see."

VIRGINIA POSTREL on Science glamor and DNA style.

August 23, 2007

BERKE BREATHED: CENSORED? "The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus' host paper The Washington Post. The strips may be viewed in a large format on their respective dates at Salon.com."

MY BROTHER'S BOOK is now out in China.

ILYA SOMIN WRITES ON Systematic shortcomings of broad Executive power in times of crisis.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF Middle Eastern civilization. "They are 'unknowingly making themselves look like homosexuals.'"

And this is pretty funny.

MICHAEL TOTTEN LOOKS AT the worst terror attack since 9/11.

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN LOOKS AT Hugo Chavez and his enablers.

TRUE CONFESSIONS.

VLADIMIR PUTIN: "He is now actively courting the Russian Gay Vote. Bless."

THOMPSON'S CAMPAIGN: Looking shaky? They've had a rough summer; it'll be interesting to see how they do over the next month or so.

HEH: "With Bloomberg out, candidates vie to woo his supporter."

ANOTHER SATISFIED READER: Bill Sheldon emails from Baltimore: "Thank you. After recently reading your posts and the comments from readers on knives, I found a local sharpener of commercial kitchen knives today and picked up three very good and sharp used knives for $4.20 total with tax." Can't beat the price! But you should really thank John Morgan.

STEVE CHAPMAN: "The crucial message of his article is not how much Obama would change President Bush's approach, but how little."

BLAMING EVERYONE BUT BEAUCHAMP. More thoughts here.

WHOLE-AIRFRAME PARACHUTES meet very light jets.

DO FACULTY MEMBERS HAVE A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO SLEEP WITH STUDENTS?

THOUGHTS ON "dumb kids' toys."

CHINESE BLOG-SERVICE PROVIDERS AGREE TO "SELF-DISCIPLINE" -- or, in other words, to censor their users so the government doesn't have to.

WELL, GOOD: Survey: Seniors Have Sex Into 70s, 80s.

A RASMUSSEN POLL ON THE WAR ON TERROR: "Republicans, by a 58% to 19% margin, believe the U.S. and its allies are winning. Democrats, by a 43% to 24% margin, believe the terrorists are winning. Among unaffiliated voters, 38% believe the U.S. team is winning while 32% say the opposite. A separate survey found that American voters are evenly divided as to whether they trust Republicans or Democrats more when it comes to handling the War on Terror."

FRAUD CHARGES: "Special prosecutors appointed by a federal judge on Tuesday hit nationally known plaintiffs attorney Richard Scruggs and his law firm with criminal contempt charges over his handling of insurance documents related to Hurricane Katrina claims." More at the WSJ Law Blog.

ADVICE ON raising a strong-willed child and setting limits for one.

MICHAEL SILENCE HAS QUESTIONS on newspapers and proper blog attribution. I think the lesson is that people who work at newspapers -- even some people who blog at newspapers -- don't follow links the way that bloggers do, and don't expect readers to do so, either.

OPENING UP AMERICAN LAWBOOKS? From Tim Wu: "I wanted to write to tell you about the launch of the world's first completely free and public domain legal search engine: altlaw.org. Right now, legal search is dominated by a duopoloy -- Westlaw and Lexis -- that charge hundreds of dollars an hour for searching the nation's laws. Altlaw.org is a pilot project to make the nation's caselaw freely searchable by anyone. The nation's laws are supposed to belong to the people, yet they are amazingly hard to get access to."

CRISPIN SARTWELL SAYS THAT ACADEMICS ARE on the wrong side of the copyright wars.

The Glenn and Helen Show: Richard Epstein on Drugs and Health

Richard Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and the author of Overdose: How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation as well as Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Right to Health Care?

These are topics of particular interest to us, as Helen is kept alive by Tikosyn, a somewhat unusual anti-arrhythmic drug. We talk to Epstein about the pharmaceutical industry, its critics, and what to do to promote new drugs and treatments for problems that people are dying from today. Epstein also discusses some criticism in The New Republic, something he has answered at greater length here.

You can listen directly (no downloading needed) by going here and clicking on the gray Flash player. You can download the file directly and listen at your leisure by clicking right here. And you can get a lo-fi version suitable for dialup by going here and selecting "lo-fi." As always, you can get a free subscription via iTunes and never miss another episode. You can't beat free.

This podcast is brought to you by Volvo USA. Music is by Mobius Dick.

UPDATE: That was fast.

CLINTON, THE CIA, AND BIN LADEN: Clinton didn't actually authorize the CIA to kill Osama, as he's claimed, according to Newsweek. Someone should ask Sandy Berger about this. (Via Don Surber).

UPDATE: More thoughts from Captain Ed. "I've written before that pursuing partisan blame for 9/11 is a waste of time. It gets in the way of determining where failures occurred and developing the proper approaches to avoid them in the future. The truth is that the issues that created these failures stretched back for years, probably decades in terms of interpretation of intelligence law. However, it gets difficult to remember that when former presidents essentially lie about their roles on national television. Given Clinton's unique history, this prevarication and self-aggrandizement comes as no surprise, but it is still pretty disappointing." This won't help Hillary.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts from Ron Coleman.

U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT: Momentum shifting to GOP in Iraq debate.

UPDATE: Useful roundup here.

MICKEY KAUS: "It's not bloggy to let a few little disagreements get in the way of mutually beneficial traffic-sharing. Enmity is so print. The Web's win-win!"

FLIP-FLOPS CAN BE bad for you.

CAPE WIND UPDATE: A television spot from Greenpeace that's running in Massachusetts:

More here. And some background here. Also -- non-video -- here.

UPDATE: Okay, actually I like this one better:

THE RISE OF THE MACHINES: Arm-wrestling machine recalled for breaking arms.

Combine one of these with an electronic voting machine and you'll have something that breaks your arm if you vote for the wrong guy. That could prove popular in some quarters.

A VIRTUAL EPIDEMIC mirrors the real world:

An outbreak of a deadly disease in a virtual world can offer insights into real life epidemics, scientists suggest.

The "corrupted blood" disease spread rapidly within the popular online World of Warcraft game, killing off thousands of players in an uncontrolled plague.

The infection raged, wreaking social chaos, despite quarantine measures.

The experience provides essential clues to how people behave in such crises, Lancet Infectious Diseases reports.

In the game, there was a real diversity of response from the players to the threat of infection, similar to those seen in real life. Some acted selflessly, rushing to the aid of other characters even though that meant they risked infection themselves.

Others fled infected cities in an attempt to save themselves.

And some who were sick made it their mission to deliberately infect others.

Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: "Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour.

"The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game."

Read the whole thing.

IS THERE A LIBERTARIAN THEORY of animal rights?

CITIZEN INITIATED Infrastructure.

CONTROLLING THE NARRATIVE. But, er, not very well, apparently: "Me, I post about doing yoga and wearing bike shorts. I could care less whether Neiwert or Marcotte or David in Austin or Tbogg find me 'masculine' or not. In fact, I tend to poke fun at the fact that they seem to think I actually care about such things."

It's that cognitive simplicity of theirs.

JAY ROSEN ON THE JOURNALISM THAT BLOGGERS DO: And he doesn't even get to things like Rathergate, Eason Jordan, the debunking of Reuters and AP photo-fakery, or numerous other examples.

UPDATE: Oops, I'm wrong. Bill Ardolino emails: "Jay Rosen did get to Rathergate in his article; he just highlighted Joseph Newcomer as a 'blogger' that drove the story. (no Powerline, etc.)." Yeah, the absence of references to Dan Rather, Powerline, Little Green Footballs, etc. caused me to miss it. In my defense, I was still on my first cup of coffee.

WANT TO HELP BILL ROGGIO SUPPORT INDEPENDENT REPORTING FROM IRAQ? Then go here.

Unless you're, you know, happy to get your news from Scott Beauchamp. Me, I just sent 'em 20 bucks. (Bumped).

August 22, 2007

JULIETTE OCHIENG HAS SOME DOUBTS about a report on VA hospitals I linked earlier.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON on things that used to be true, and still are.

"COME BACK, SHANE!"

ANNE RICE: "Christianist?" Does that go with the whole vampire thing?

A READER EMAILS: "I'm curious why you didn't mention the NYT Op-Ed written by seven American foot soldiers (not officers, mind you) about their recent experiences in and perspective on Iraq. I realize you don't like to link to stories that are 'widely covered' but this seems to have gone largely under the radar. Is it because their views don't conform to yours or the majority of your readers? Why not link to it anyway and at least provoke a debate?"

I pointed out that I actually had linked it, and he was kind enough to reply: "A huge (and sheepish) apology. I searched the main page and didn't check the archives."

I'm mostly amused that something that appears on the New York Times oped page is "under the radar" when it's not mentioned on InstaPundit. Has TimesSelect done that much damage to the NYT's influence?

Probably not. But if one reader could miss it, others might, and there has in fact been some debate, though more from milbloggers with Iraq experience -- who have more to say -- than elsewhere. Blackfive had a post, and here's one from Greyhawk. And Fred Kaplan wrote about it, and echoes some of my concerns at the end of his piece. Plus, here's a guest post at Altercation, focusing in part on whether they should have written the piece. And Kaplan has a piece coming out later this week -- in Times Select, meaning that it probably will be under the radar -- on tension between junior and senior officers.

UPDATE: Hmm. I kind of doubt this explanation. But who knows?

DON'T TUG ON SUPERMAN'S CAPE. I'd say that The New Republic's defenders haven't helped its position any. Or their own.

UPDATE: Deconfabulation. And a related item here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kaus weighs in. And there's this: "The New Republic is clearly out of friends just as surely as it is out of ammo." They do seem to have trouble finding defenders from outside the TNR family, and even the defenses they're getting are oblique -- attacks on the critics, rather than defenses of TNR. Big roundup on TNR here.

A NEW SITE DESIGN FOR CAPTAIN'S QUARTERS: Ed Morrissey wants to know how you like it.

I ONCE HAD A GIRLFRIEND WHO QUIT JOURNALISM and went into P.R. because she said public-relations work was "more ethical." I thought of her when I read this:

Media credibility takes another hit: Fishbowl DC's hottest reporter contest wasn't on the up-and-up, reports Farhad Manjoo. "What's surprising is not that anyone cheated -- online polls are about as trustworthy as Soviet Bloc elections -- but how brazen, and how easy, the cheating was," he writes. Friends of this year's two oh-so-hot winners built software "bots" that voted thousands of times for each of them on the Mediabistro site.

Sigh. (Via Michael Silence).

UPDATE: Dave Weigel says this is all backwards: "The media didn't rig this silly popularity contest: Some dudes with websites did. Be proud of that."

I HOPE THAT JONAH GOLDBERG WILL use his powers for good, and not for evil.

OVER AT OPINIO JURIS, they're having a symposium on Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule's Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts.

THOUGHTS ON CONGRESSIONAL "RECALIBRATION" from Bob Krumm.

UPDATE: More thoughts from Captain Ed.

RELIGION AND BOBBY JINDAL.

SURF'S UP! In Gaza.

DANIEL DREZNER: "Quiggin wants international law to be a powerfully binding constraint on state action. That's nice, but what Quiggin wants and what actually happens are two very different animals."

OOPS:

The front-runner for a $2 million NASA competition to build mock lunar landers has lost one of its two main vehicles in a fiery crash. The company, Armadillo Aerospace, says it will enter a smaller vehicle instead, but outsiders say the upset will level the playing field and add suspense to the upcoming contest.

The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge is designed to spur innovation in future vehicles that could take off and land vertically on the Moon. The event will be held on 27 and 28 October at the X Prize Cup in Alamogordo, New Mexico, US.

Nine teams have signed up for the competition, but Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite, Texas, US, is by far the leading contender for the prize. The company, led by Doom video game creator John Carmack, nearly won the 2006 contest, in which it was the only entrant.

Here's a picture of the Pixel that I took a few months back. And as I've noted before, it's not a failure if you've learned something useful.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts from Rand Simberg. "I don't think it's a disaster for Armadillo. These kinds of things are going to happen along the way, as we start to understand how to develop operable and affordable space transports (a goal that has eluded both the military and NASA, almost half a century after the dawn of the space age). I also find it interesting (and I have to confess, somewhat amusing) that the failure was fundamentally a software failure, given the pedigree of the company that provided the funds that created the vehicle."

MEGAN MCARDLE: "I don't know why people think I'm pro-torture, except that I suspect they are angry that the morality of torture can even be discussed; they want to put it in the same basket of questions we dismiss with visceral horror, such as 'Child pornography: good for society?' So even though I agree with them as a policy matter, and even as a moral matter, they are angry that I don't agree with them in the right way."

Yes, I've had similar experiences. It is not enough to have the right opinions. You must have them at the right time, and you must express them in a way that reflects people's desire to feel good about themselves.

BUSH'S DEMOCRACY-PROMOTION AGENDA: Now you see it, now you don't!

ROGER SIMON: TNR changing the story.

UPDATE: "The New Republic still has not responded to Richard Miniter’s PJM article on the Scott Beauchamp scandal and the facts therein."

IT USED TO BE "LISTEN TO THE GENERALS:" Now it's "don't listen to the generals." The story keeps changing; only the motivation remains the same.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

ARNOLD KLING ON THE CURRENT ECONOMIC SITUATION: "Sebastian Mallaby calls this 'irrationality' on the part of investors. Instead, I think of it as a breakdown in trust of the financial intermediation process. This breakdown is occurring not so much at the level of the average consumer, but among large institutional investors."

SARKOZY "CORRECTS" CHIRAC'S ERRORS.

OMAR FADHIL REPORTS ON the political scene in Baghdad. Their politicians seem as bad as ours.

THE PURGES BEGIN. "Twenty-six out of thirty-eight (68%) of these targeted Democrats are from Southern or Southeastern regions, which makes sense, since it’s primarily Blue Dogs we’re talking about here. That makes this another netroots war against regions of the country that elect these Democrats precisely because they are Blue Dogs."

KOSOVO UPDATE: "Remember when the world-wise, honest, well-meaning Europeans used prudent, multilateral diplomacy rather than American-style brute force to resolve that pesky little Kosovo problem? Apparently, it didn't take."

POLITICAL PROGRESS IN IRAQ? Maybe. Bringing the Baathists on board. Hmm, and the French changed their position last week.

THE GHOSTS OF ANBAR: A new dispatch from Michael Yon.

A BACK TO SCHOOL Blawg Review.

KNIFEBLOGGING, THE DENOUEMENT: I wound up buying the Henckel's Twin Cuisine. Tried 'em out at Williams-Sonoma, where they were cheaper than Amazon actually, and liked the way they felt in my hand better than the others -- I tried the Global and the Shun, but I have rather big hands and they felt a bit small; the Wusthof Grand Prix was nice but the Henckel's can tolerate being put in the dishwasher, which is inevitable around here sooner or later. So far they seem quite nice -- they were a bit pricey, but I had a book-review check from the Wall Street Journal burning a hole in my pocket, so they didn't seem too pricey.

A MUSLIM MARTYR IN IRAQ: Via Jules Crittenden.

ANDREW BREITBART is guesthosting the Dennis Miller show right now.

MOOSE FARTS CAN BE PRETTY NASTY, YOU KNOW:

The poor old Scandinavian moose is now being blamed for climate change, with researchers in Norway claiming that a grown moose can produce 2,100 kilos of methane a year -- equivalent to the CO2 output resulting from a 13,000 kilometer car journey.

No, really. A Moose farted at my sister once . . . . . (Via Bob Krumm, who draws the obvious conclusion).

THE L.A. TIMES: Clueless, or crazy like a fox?

EDITORIAL PRIORITIES at the BBC.

DON'T GET CANCER IN BRITAIN.

Of course, to be fair, the VA hospitals in Los Angeles don't look so hot, either. Hmm. What's the common factor?

UPDATE: Questions about the VA story.

THE WAR ON DRUGS VS. the war on terror.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION for Congress's low poll numbers, from Extreme Mortman.

ROGER SIMON: What's the big deal about a National ID card?

I remain opposed to the idea. Here's an old column opposing it, though I seem to recall that I got the cost figure wrong. But just multiply our current passport woes to accommodate the entire population.

BOOSTING SOLAR CELL PERFORMANCE, with nanoparticles.

YEAH, THAT'S THE TICKET: Why's Congress polling so badly? Because they haven't launched enough investigations. Uh huh.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

After reviewing the latest critique of the CIA's failures to foresee the pre-9/11 dangers of radical Islam, and while reading the final sordid details surrounding the Pvt. Beauchamp fables published at The New Republic, and viewing the latest phony wire-photos from Iraq (the poor victimized Iraqi woman holding unfired cartridges as 'proof' of coalition bullets that hit her home), I was wondering who will monitor our self-righteous monitors?

The answer, like it or not, in the post-Plame, post-Scheuer, post-Tenet era is that no one believes much what the CIA says any more about the Middle East; no one believes that a wire-photo from there is genuine or its caption accurate; and no one necessarily believes anything in once respected magazines, whether the Periscope section of Newsweek or anything published in The New Republic. The common gripe is that the administration lied to the public about WMD in Iraq; but what is lost is that once revered institutions proved disingenuous in their accusations and unreliable in their performance.

Yes. Can't anyone here play this game?

UPDATE: Related item here.

WOULD YOU TRY AN untested cancer drug?

MICHAEL VICK FINDS A DEFENDER: Well, sort of.

HMM: Gadafy's son calls for free media and judiciary.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Ban-Ki Moon's ethics test, and the UNDP: "So far, amid a welter of U.N. delays, denials, evasions, and broken promises, it looks like Ban is about to flunk."

AT CAPTAIN'S JOURNAL, a report from Fallujah.

ADVICE ON LAW REVIEW SUBMISSIONS for the August window, from Daniel Solove. I sent out a piece via ExpressO last week. Upside: An acceptance within 24 hours. Downside: Many of the top reviews aren't actually reading articles yet.

MORE BAD PRESS FOR CHINA: "A Beijing factory recycled used chopsticks and sold up to 100,000 pairs a day without any form of disinfection, a newspaper said on Wednesday, the latest in a string of food and product safety scares. Counterfeit, shoddy and dangerous products are widespread in China, whose exports have been rocked in recent months by a spate of safety scandals, ranging from pet food to medicine, tires, toothpaste and toys." Bad for the brand.

POLL: 66% of voters oppose new gun controls. That explains why the Dems aren't talking about it, I guess, and suggests that Giuliani's stance may be trouble for him. No wonder Fred Thompson chose this topic for his latest effort. (Via Jeff Soyer, who has more thoughts).

MICKEY KAUS: "I've been looking for the fabled 'darker postings' of now-fired, cease-and-desist-lettered New Republic leaker Robert McGee, but I haven't been able to find them. Maybe they don't exist! ... The best I can do is a now-unlinked blog reference to an 'interview with Jeff Gannon's penis.' But really, doesn't everyone's penis blog these days?" I know mine does. And it's a big blog! But that goes without saying, I guess.

UPDATE: A blog named Blunt Instrument -- hmm. Is he trying to tell us something?

THE EXAMINER: "Now, other Democrats are injecting some much-needed realism into their party’s debate on the war."

MEGAN MCARDLE'S BLOG: The Peyton Place of the blogosphere! But with health care economics thrown in!

August 21, 2007

AL QAEDA'S LATEST PROPAGANDA EFFORT: threats against David Beckham and Justin Timberlake just may be working. . . .

ELVIS'S STOLEN HANDGUN RECOVERED in a portable toilet.

HEY, THEY'RE RIGHT: The rich really are getting richer in the Bush economy:

Harvard University’s endowment earned a 23.0 percent return during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2007. With FY07 being one of the best performance years since the inception of Harvard Management Company in 1974, the overall value of the University’s endowment grew to $34.9 billion. . . . The endowment stood at $29.2 billion on June 30, 2006.

Obviously, this obscene wealth should be subjected to windfall profits taxes.

ASIA TIMES: THE U.S. HAD BETTER GET ITS ACT TOGETHER: Its competitors are.

FOREIGN LEADERS? Swapping Harper & Calderon at MSNBC.

FRANCE SHIFTS ITS STANCE ON IRAQ: Will this amount to anything?

UPDATE: Reader Jane Meynardie emails: "If I were an Iraqi political player, I'd play along with the French at least long enough to enjoy a nice junket to Paris." But of course!

A COLD DAY IN NEW YORK: Fifty-nine degrees in August? As the high? Was Al Gore visiting?

He sure wasn't here, where it flirted with triple digits again.

FRED THOMPSON GOES AFTER RUDY ON GUN CONTROL. This is strong ground for Fred.

UPDATE: A weak ad hominem response from the Rudy camp. This round goes to Fred.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Curtis Overbo emails:

I appreciated the post regarding Fred Thompson's statement about Rudy on Gun Control. I also agree that the response from Rudy's team is basically useless as something those guarding 2nd Amendment rights, for example, might take comfort with. It's "little things" like this that can cost Rudy so very much among the voters who maybe want to believe his heart & policies are good, while already having disagreed with some or many of them. Fred makes it even clearer to them, me included, that it's a "leap of faith" to go with Rudy if the end point of Fred's statement isn't actually addressed -- that point is Federalism.

Rudy can side-step the discussion, but he knows his own record offers very little to address Fred's observations, which resound with many.

Rudy was quick to invoke federalism on abortion, but he's missed the point here. And this issue will hurt him if he makes more responses as weak as this one.

EUROPE AND CARBON EMISSIONS: "Since 2000, emissions of CO2 have been growing more rapidly in Europe, with all its capping and yapping, than in the U.S., where there has been minimal government intervention so far. As of 2005, we're talking about a 3.8% rise in the EU-15 versus a 2.5% increase in the U.S., according to statistics from the United Nations."

WATCH OUT, TIM BLAIR: John Birmingham, better known to InstaPundit readers as a science fiction author, now has an Australian newspaper blog gig.

Today's topic: "Who'd have thought a drunken night at a strip club could be so much fun!"

WELL, DUH:

A CIA inquiry has accused the agency's ex-chief George Tenet and his aides of failing to prepare for al-Qaeda threats before the 9/11 attacks on the US.

"The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner," the CIA inspector general wrote in a scathing report.

The document was completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now. Its release was ordered by Congress.

One of Bush's biggest mistakes was not firing Tenet, and others, early on. (See older posts on that here and here). Plus, fighting accountability at the CIA?

UPDATE: On a related front, dysfunction in high places.

SECRET BALLOTS ON ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES: Not so secret. Can I say I told you so? Well, kinda sorta, anyway.

DEAN HITS MEXICO HARD, but no death reports initially. The oil industry faces some problems, though.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS JOINS THE CROWD complaining about misleading incomes reporting:

"More Americans making ends meet with less money," was the headline atop a Boston Globe story Tuesday morning. The newspaper went on to tell its readers that Americans in 2005 earned a smaller average income, when adjusted for inflation, than in 2000, $55,238 vs. $55, 714.

What the story notably failed to tell readers is that incomes have been on the rise since 2002, a fact I gleaned from a different version of the story on the New York Times website. (The original version of the Times story had a misleading headline "Average Incomes Fell for Most in 2000-05," but it was later changed to "2005 Incomes, on Average, Still Below 2000 Peak." The Globe story also said that Americans' total income in 2005 was $7.43 billion. I'm pretty sure it's "trillion," not "billion.")

It might have also been nice had either story mentioned the great likelihood that the Internal Revenue Service data the newspapers relied on will show further income gains for 2006 and 2007, given the state of the economy and the continuing rise in real wages.

Read the whole thing. And there's more stuff here.

SO I GUESS M.A.D.D CAN QUIT ASKING FOR MONEY: "Incidentally, if you adjust for only those accidents where a clearly drunk driver caused the death of someone else, the real number has traditionally been about a fourth of what NHTSA reports. So figure the real number of drunk driving deaths to be around 3,000."

IN THE MAIL: Nathalie Mallet's The Princes Of The Golden Cage.

GUARDING AGAINST KILLER SPACE ROCKS: A report from Popular Science.

FIGHTING GOLIATH: An eminent domain success story.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: How to Spy in Iraq.

POPULAR MECHANICS INVESTIGATES 9/11 MYTHS, and posts responses to frequently asked questions. It's a followup to their book debunking 9/11 myths. Check out our podcast interview on that topic, here.

WESLEY MORGAN IS BLOGGING WITH GENERAL PETRAEUS IN IRAQ. (Via Rightwingsparkle).

IN THE SUMMER WE GRILL, and cook a lot of light meals featuring fish, etc. The Insta-Daughter, however, is a fan of soups and stews, and last night was looking forward to me firing up the crock-pot. (Excuse me, the "slow cooker" -- mustn't violate trademarks). Anyway, while I like my recipes I want to try some new stuff, so I ordered this cookbook on soups and one-pot meals, which looks pretty good. Here, for those who are interested, is my recipe for lamb and guinness stew. And, of course, you can do the Insta-Chicken in a crock pot slow cooker, too. They're pretty good recipes, but I'm looking for something fresh for the coming year.

BIZZYBLOG SAYS THE NEW YORK TIMES gets it wrong on personal income data.

UPDATE: From John Wixted, an I told you so: "In an earlier post, I confidently predicted that misleading income statistics would soon be coming your way. The New York Times delivers the goods." Lots of useful charts. Read the whole thing, especially if you're David Cay Johnston. Or his editor. Or a New York Times shareholder . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Times has changed the headline, and Johnston has responded in the comments at bizzyblog.

MORE: Tom Maguire comes to Johnston's defense on the question of agenda-driven journalism, though he has other complaints.

MORE STILL: Johnston responds in Tom Maguire's comments, too. Bravo to him for engaging his critics.

STILL MORE: He's also in Wixted's comments. Bravo again!

NOT MUCH LOVE FOR CONGRESS: "A new Gallup Poll finds Congress' approval rating the lowest it has been since Gallup first tracked public opinion of Congress with this measure in 1974. Just 18% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, while 76% disapprove, according to the August 13-16, 2007, Gallup Poll."

UPDATE: A spin prediction.

THE FRANKLIN FOER/RICHARD GERE connection. Plus this: "The bigger story is that The New Republic is hardly an outlier in the world of modern 'journalism.' Many other media outlets also care a lot more about 'influencing the influentials' and 'pissing people off' than getting a story right."

TOP SECRET WAR NEWS: Leaked by Gateway Pundit.

THE TOP TEN transhumanist technologies.

JAMES LILEKS ON GETTING OLD: "I don’t know if I’d want to be 114 years old, frankly. People say they’re interested in what you have to relate, but they’re not. They lack context. You’d say things like 'Why, I remember when Netscape had a total lock on the browser market,' and they’d smile and roll their eyes – oh, he’s off on the browser wars again, whatever that was - and offer you a little more cake. But not too much." I want to be 114 someday -- but 114 as it will be, not 114 as it is now.

POLICE SPY CAMERAS IN CALIFORNIA: And yet they get snooty when you take pictures of them.

A LOOK AT THE MEDIA MOB.

UPDATE: Danny Glover takes exception to the piece. "Were a journalist to write something like that about blogs, the blogosphere would be up in rhetorical arms, and rightfully so."

A LOOK AT THE POLITICS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM, from John Fund.

JAMES JOYNER NOTES MORE HISTORICAL REVISIONISM ABOUT THE WAR:

Media Matters economist Duncan Black set off a mini-firestorm among lefty bloggers three weeks ago when he asked, after a few choice expletives "Why is there a foreign policy community?" The premise of that question is that, since so many of the experts, even on the left, argued passionately for intervening in Iraq and for continuing a failed strategy long after amateur pundits in the blogosphere had soured on the war, why should we take their expertise seriously? . . .

While there are several substantive issues within the debate that interest me, what is most striking is that the basic premise - that most foreign policy public intellectuals supported the Iraq War - didn't comport at all with my recollection of the contemporaneous debate. During that period, I was working as the foreign affairs acquisitions editor for a D.C. area publishing house and reading the literature and attending conferences and think tank presentations on a constant basis.

I recalled a security policy community dominated by Realists were almost universally opposed to the war. . . . What's striking, though, is how "business as usual" the article selection remained throughout the entire period. Entire issues went by without an article on Iraq or even the Middle East and most issues continued to have the standard mix of articles on Africa, the global economy, environmental issues, human rights, and so forth. Indeed, it might have escaped the attention of a casual observer glancing at the covers (which list the prominent articles in each issue) that the country was at war.

That's okay. In a decade or two we'll get a new revisionist history in which America was united against the threat, much like we're hearing today about the Cold War.

HOW SOCIETIES COMMIT SUICIDE. Related thoughts here. "Until we regain the fortitude it takes to criticize the Other as vigorously as we criticize those like us who argue for such a necessity, we are, as Dalrymple rightly suggests, well on our way to cultural ruination, and a return to totalitarianism."

UPDATE: The Dalrymple post appears to be based on incorrect media reports.

RED-LIGHT CAMERAS AND IMAGINARY STOP LINES: "Throw out the driver's handbook. There's a new rule in town. When it comes to red light cameras there's a special line that drivers can't cross. Where is it? Here's a hint: it's imaginary." And it's not where you think.

JULES CRITTENDEN WONDERS WHAT'S GOTTEN INTO some members of Congress.

UPDATE: Quote of the day: It’s easy to see why he’s so anti-gun. He thinks we all have as little self-control as he does.

"WE HAVE TO BE PREPARING TO FIGHT THE NEW WAR:" Here's video of Hillary sounding martial. Would she really make an uncompromising wartime President? Maybe it's not so fictional after all? . . .

I think what it really means is that she thinks she's got Obama on the ropes and she can start positioning for the general election.

WE'RE NUMBER FIFTEEN!

SPAIN'S Afghan infantry battalion.

SOME ADVICE TO THE G.O.P., ON DON YOUNG: "When your own partisans (such as myself) are actively rooting for Republican Congressmen to be arrested, you've got a problem."

GIMME BACK MY BULLETS: IS THE WAR CAUSING A SHORTAGE OF LAW-ENFORCEMENT AMMUNITION? Not so much, according to Bob Owens, despite misleading press reports to the contrary. "According to two spokesmen for the world's largest ammunition manufacturer, which runs the military's ammunition manufacturing plant and separately, is a major supplier of law enforcement ammunition, it is a massive and unexpected increase in law enforcement ammunition demand that is causing delays in law enforcement ammunition delays, not the war."

THE POLITICAL ASSAULT ON SCIENCE:

To many of Dr. Bailey’s peers, his story is a morality play about the corrosive effects of political correctness on academic freedom. Some scientists say that it has become increasingly treacherous to discuss politically sensitive issues. They point to several recent cases, like that of Helmuth Nyborg, a Danish researcher who was fired in 2006 after he caused a furor in the press by reporting a slight difference in average I.Q. test scores between the sexes.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

MARTIN PERETZ DOESN'T LIKE Thabo Mbeki: "The fact is that Mbeki is a nut-case and a cruel nut-case besides. To him you may credit his likely successor Jacob Zuma, a demagogue on the old Communist model, and corrupt besides. . . . As for Mbeki's responsibility for Mugabe's survival, he is culpable because he has led other African leaders in deferring to the Zimbabwean tyrant and mad economist. But the UK and the US are also not entirely innocent."

SWEATSHOP COPIES of great art.

August 20, 2007

THE TEN BEST BANDS THAT NEVER EXISTED: But they left out The Blueswailers and The Smoke Packet, two great nonexistent British bands from the Sixties and early Seventies. Actually, the Blueswailers' nonexistent career continues to the present.

THE G.O.P. SHOULD ENCOURAGE HIM TO RETIRE: "A Justice Department corruption task force is investigating whether Alaska Congressman Don Young took campaign cash in return for securing $10 million for construction of a proposed Florida highway ramp that would give a windfall to a local real estate developer, a source familiar with the inquiry said Friday. The controversial funding, which was to pay for a study of the potential highway interchange abutting environmentally sensitive land, was slipped into a massive 2005 Transportation Department bill, congressional aides say." But there's something missing from this story, and Don Surber will be surprised.

UPDATE: Reader Phil Johnts emails:

I'm assuming, when you're talking about Surber being surprised, that you're talking about Young's affiliation missing. Actually, it's there. It just doesn't come out and say "Republican".

"At least $2.5 billion of that money went toward projects in the districts of four top GOP lawmakers at the time, including Young."

It mentions that Young is, indeed, a GOP lawmaker.

I guess I missed that, unless it was added afterward. It's inconspicuous enough, though, that I might have.

MORE PEOPLE ARE PLAYING name that party!

DAN FROOMKIN says that experts are against invading Iran. Well, so am I, and if you've listened to our podcast interviews with Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan, you'll hear that so are they. On the other hand, there's plenty we could do that doesn't involve an invasion.

UPDATE: Hmm.

A LOOK AT LAWYERS' EDITS on Wikipedia.

BOTH ACE and Josh Marshall are pretty down on this blog-bashing column by Michael Skube. Skube's credibility is somewhat undercut as he doesn't seem to actually, you know, read the blogs he writes about. "Perhaps I'm naive. But it surprises me a great deal that a professor of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name claims about a publication he concedes he's never read."

Well, I dunno. This seems to be the modus operandi for the journalistic establishment these days.

UPDATE: A transparency problem.

DEAN IS NOW A Category 5 hurricane. Bad news for Mexico.

FROM BEN STEIN: Advice for the college-bound.

MICKEY KAUS: "Should journalists gag their own leakers?"

It seems quite consistent with their general approach.

THOUGHTS ON MANLINESS FROM Jeff Goldstein. "Those who refer to masculinity without the requisite disclaimers about how it is unmasculine to refer to masculinity can lay no claim to that real masculinity — which evidently comes from recognizing that real masculinity is seldom pointed out by really masculine people, unless they are pointing it out to show how pointing it out is unmasculine. Which, in turn, makes them masculine for the effort." Got that? Plus, this observation.

UPDATE: HEH: "My wife shares in your enthusiasm."

AND NOT THE BLOGGY KIND: Poison pyjamas from China. This is starting to really damage their brand.

LESSONS IN HANDLING ADVERSITY: A comparison of NASA with the space tourism industry.

DAN RIEHL WONDERS WHY DEMOCRATS ARE so scared of Fred Thompson. I can think of a few reasons. Or maybe they're just trying that Karl Rove / John Kerry reverse-psychology thing . . . .

UPDATE: Thompson's campaign would do better to worry about this.

ANOTHER UPDATE: From the Thompson campaign:

Just so you know, we’re not behind that Blogs for Fred Thompson website that linked/copied Stephen Green’s post. I think they’re just blogging newbies who are still learning the ropes.

I emailed them this morning to offer to help them learn standard netiquette for how you should/should not operate in the blogosphere.

Glad to hear it.

CAN A VIRUS MAKE YOU FAT?

Yes, according to scientists at Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge.

At an American Chemical Society symposium this morning, they reported that human adenovirus-36, a common virus that causes respiratory and eye infections, can transform adult stem cells into fat cells. In controlled studies, stem cells that were not exposed to the virus did not develop into fat cells.

An earlier study at Louisiana State showed that 30 percent of obese people were infected with the virus, while only 11 percent of lean people were infected. But until the new study was done, there was no proof that the virus can actually cause fat levels to increase.

So when can we expect a vaccine?

JAMES LILEKS: "To paraphrase Lou Grant: you know how you drive? Don’t drive that way. It’s raining. The roads are covered with a traction-reducing fluid called water. If this 'water' material is pounding down on the freeway, you might want to stay more than half a car length behind me."

Good advice!

HOW DO YOU KNOW THINGS ARE BETTER IN IRAQ? There's less media coverage.

NOW I'M ON A BUMPER STICKER.

LET AFGHAN POPPIES BLOOM: Seems like a good idea to me.

GETTING A VIRTUAL PH.D. on the Web.

MAKING G.I. JOE LESS AMERICAN: Because, you know, people might be offended.

ANOTHER CHANCE TO PLAY name that party! "ABC 7 has learned the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority have charged Representative Robert Filner of California with assault and battery following an incident at Dulles International Airport Sunday night."

UPDATE: Reader Hastings Walton visited Filner's website, which informs us that "Bob is a fearless fighter." I guess so.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Shelby Clark emails: "The lead-in sentence to the ABC 7 report now reads '…Democratic Representative Robert Filner…'" The mystery has been solved!

MORE: Another alert reader emails that Filner's party affiliation has moved down to the second paragraph. The news is a living thing!

MEGAN MCARDLE HAS LEFT THE ECONOMIST and is now blogging for The Atlantic Monthly. But is there a sinister undertone to this move? "I am trying not to read any significance into the fact that just as I leave The Economist for this shiny new blog at The Atlantic Monthly, the financial markets melt down. Sure, the timing may be correct . . . the market began tanking about a week before my last day, which is par for insider trading deals. But it would be paranoid to take this as any sort of an omen. Wouldn't it?"

To blame a drop in The Economist's stock would be entirely reasonable. But would the entire market drop? . . . From "butterfly effect" to "blogger effect"!

MORE HOSPI-BLOGGING, sounding a theme I've sounded more than once myself.

SHOULD PROFESSORS REQUIRE STUDENTS TO ATTEND A "TEACH-IN"? And volunteer their time to a cause? Prof. Kenneth Anderson wonders: "I have serious doubts that one ought to be requiring students to attend a conference that starts out from so given a political or policy point of view, much less volunteering them for service in lieu of fees."

FLIP-FLOPPING ON A MILITARY DRAFT. I remain opposed.

UPDATE: Advice on decoding doublespeak about a draft.

WAS THE GDRIVE RELEASE CANCELED?

A LOOK AT TECH POLITICS IN 2008, from the National Journal folks. Free links.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: INCOME TAX FOES REGROUP. It's a free link.

JOHN HAWKINS interviews Robert Novak.

THE "PIVOT" HAS NOW GONE A FULL THREE-SIXTY: "Democratic Rivals Caution Against Swift Iraq Pullout." Not that I'm complaining.

UPDATE: More from Hillary:

Clinton acknowledged that new tactics have brought some success against insurgents, particularly in Iraq's al-Anbar province.

''It's working. We're just years too late in changing our tactics,'' she said. ''We can't ever let that happen again. We can't be fighting the last war. We have to keep preparing to fight the new war.''

I agree. Sounds like she and McCain are on the same page.

UPDATE: Reader Mark Thompson emails: "I think you mean one-eighty. Three-sixty would return it to its original heading." No, that's exactly what I meant: the "pivot" reference is to Democrats who voted for the war trying to seamlessly shift to opposing it; now that they're switching back to support, they've gone full-circle -- hence three-sixty, not one-eighty. It's really two one-eighties that add up to a three-sixty . . . .

Meanwhile, reader John Hench emails: "With success in Iraq facing squarely at the Democrats, expect the next talking point to be along the lines 'If it weren't for the pressure that the Democrats put on Bush to change tactics in Iraq, we would never have seen the success that we are now seeing there.'" And they might be right.

ANOTHER UPDATE: These troops have already "redeployed."

WHILE THERE'S ALARMISM ABOUT CIVIL LIBERTIES, I have to say that things have actually gone better than I feared nearly six years ago. So it's interesting to read this from Geoffrey Stone:

The legislation amending FISA is unwarranted, reckless and possibly unconstitutional. Nonetheless, the overall state of civil liberties in the US, viewed in historical perspective, is surprisingly strong. There are no internment camps for American Muslims, no suspensions of habeas corpus for American citizens, no laws prohibiting criticism of the war in Iraq. This might not seem like much, but in light of past episodes, the intrusions on civil liberties since 9/11 have been relatively modest.

Stone has certainly warned about dangers to civil liberties -- but warning about potential dangers is different from proclaiming that the Constitution has already been abandoned and that we're living in a police state now. And I think the over-the-top rhetoric that we often see on this topic does more harm than good. In that, I think I do disagree with Stone, who thinks that alarmism has actually helped. Perhaps, but there's a major "crying wolf" problem, too. (Via Jonathan Adler). Meanwhile, a point I made a while back: "I'll add this comment, which is only somewhat on-topic: Not so much nuanced discussants like Posner and Stone, but press coverage and political rhetoric generally, tend to suggest that there's a 'trade-off' between national security and freedom. But that's misleading. You don't buy national security by getting rid of freedom; you may, in fact, wind up less secure. (This is a point I was making back on September 13, 2001). Nor is it necessarily the case that improvements in national security burden freedom. They may, in fact, have no impact at all, or even result in more freedom in some ways. It just depends. Programs have to be judged on their merits." Trade-offs sometimes exist, but the notion that they necessarily exist and that less freedom necessarily produces more security or vice versa, is a lazy journalistic cliche, not a fact.

BRUCE BAWER LOOKS AT THE PEACE RACKET: "We need to make two points about this movement at the outset. First, it’s opposed to every value that the West stands for—liberty, free markets, individualism—and it despises America, the supreme symbol and defender of those values. Second, we’re talking not about a bunch of naive Quakers but about a movement of savvy, ambitious professionals that is already comfortably ensconced at the United Nations, in the European Union, and in many nongovernmental organizations." I think he doesn't like them, and I hope that he's exaggerating the problem.

VIDEOTAPING COPS BREAKING THE LAW: We should have more of this.

A LOOK AT POTENTIAL HILLARY RUNNING MATES: Obama doesn't get much traction, but among the others there's "no one who sets the pulses racing." Richardson would be good, I think. I like Mark Warner (our podcast interview with him is here) and any list of Southern Democratic governors who can attract Republican votes should include Phil Bredesen.

MORE THOUGHTS ON TNR AND THE BEAUCHAMP SCANDAL, from Bob Owens.

A QUESTION FOR ROBIN WRIGHT, from Roger Simon.

IN THE MAIL: The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

TAXTROTURF: A "grassroots" gun-control group run by government officials. Shouldn't they at least get the folks from Pew to launder things?

SOME KIND WORDS FOR DDT -- in the New York Times, no less. "Today, indoor DDT spraying to control malaria in Africa is supported by the World Health Organization; the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; and the United States Agency for International Development. . . . Even those mosquitoes already resistant to poisoning by DDT are repelled by it."

The debate over DDT is over. There's scientific consensus. Anyone who disagrees is a DDT denialist and a mouthpiece for Big Mosquito.

GOOD NEWS: "Grand Cayman has escaped what was feared might be a direct hit from Hurricane Dean as the category 4 storm passed some 100 miles to the south of the island on Monday morning." Things don't look so good for Mexico, though.

UPDATE: InstaPundit's Cayman Islands correspondent John Thompson emails: "We're getting some strong winds and gusts right now, but that's about it. Little rain, if any. I think we will be all right."

THOUGHTS ON GENERAL PETRAEUS AND IRAQ METRICS, from Austin Bay.

THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED, if you were out having a life or something over the weekend: Advice on disaster preparedness. Your Congressional representatives at work. And the final round of knife-blogging. Plus, Stephen Green on the Democratic debate. Follow the links, or just scroll down.

THE KNOXVILLE NEWS-SENTINEL WEBSITE made the top ten among newspaper websites. I agree, now that they've dropped the lame and buggy registration scheme.

Another case of I told you so. But better late than never!

BROOKLYNBLOGGING: A pilgrimage to 3d Street. She should get together with Melissa Schwartz!

MORRIS DAVIS: In defense of Guantanamo Bay. In the Yale Law Journal "Pocket Part."

RICHARD MINITER: How The New Republic Got Suckered.

DANIEL DREZNER LOOKS AT the netroots' foreign policy calculus. Plus, Atrios on "that patchouli stinking Greenwald."

MORE ON DEAN, from Brendan Loy.

August 19, 2007

HMM. NOT SURE WHAT I THINK OF THIS: "President Bush's $15 billion anti-AIDS program will begin investing significant money in making circumcision available to African men seeking to protect themselves from HIV, top U.S. health officials said Sunday." There's certainly some research supporting this, but is it really worth the resources?

GERARD VAN DER LEUN photoblogs from Hempfest Seattle.

JAMES FALLOWS: HOW TO PROTECT YOUR KIDS from lead-covered Chinese toys.

ARE THE DRUG WARRIORS helping the enemy in Afghanistan?

MY COLLEAGUE PENNY WHITE gets spotlighted by the CrimProf blog.

DAN COLLINS: "There is something self-deconstructing about this post by David Neiwert. Can you spot it?"

UPDATE: Jules Crittenden weighs in.

IN THE BOSTON GLOBE, a look at the cyberwar against the United States.

GAIL HERIOT: Abuse of power in Missouri? Hey, if you don't like the referendum, change the language to make it less appealing.

IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE, but a bad day for Jamaica. Scroll down on this page for more.

UPDATE: Grand Cayman quiet before curfew.

A SELF-HELP cornucopia.

RON PAUL WINS THE Alabama straw poll.

ZIMBABWE: It's much easier to destroy a nation than to build one. And more profitable, for some.

Plus, a culture of dictatorship?

IT'S AS IF THEY REFLEXIVELY SIDE WITH THE ENEMIES OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: "The BBC is in trouble today for once again allowing ugly antisemitic and anti-Christian slurs to remain posted at the BBC 5 message boards, while instantly deleting any criticism of Islam."

A LOOK AT THE POLICY COMMUNITY, and the fear of being provably wrong.

KOUCHNER IN BAGHDAD: France's Foreign Minister visits Iraq and observes: "Now we have to face the reality, including the American view." Think how much better things would be if the previous French administration had taken that view.

UPDATE: How the French media are responding.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here:

One of the key promises that Nicolas Sarkozy had made during his presidential election campaign last spring was to "correct" foreign policy "mistakes" made by his predecessor Jacques Chirac.

Chief among these was Chirac's desperate efforts to prevent the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussain's regime of terror. Chirac failed to save his friend's regime but managed to do serious damage to relations with the US, Great Britain and more than 40 other nations that joined the coalition of the willing to liberate Iraq in 2003. . . . Kouchner's visit, full of symbolism, shatters one of the key points in Al Qaida's analysis: that the Western powers will never find enough unity to develop a common strategy against terror.

At one point, when Chirac invited German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian President Vladimir Putin to a gathering to forge an anti-American triple alliance, Al Qaida's analysis appeared to have some basis in reality.

Now, however, both Chancellor Angela Merkel and Sarkozy understand the stark fact that the perception of Western disunity may be one of the factors that prolongs the conflict in Iraq.

Saddam thought that his bought-and-paid-for support from Chirac et al. would forestall his overthrow. He was wrong, but the whole invasion might have been avoided had the French been pushing him to come clean, instead of helping him cover things up and giving him hope that he could get away with it.

WE LIKE ELECTRICITY: Indeed.

WELL, GREEN IS THEIR COLOR: "Climate Change Protestors" attack Jews, hoist Palestinian flag.

UPDATE: Heh: "Lefties would make much more progress with the bourgeoisie if they promoted only one revolution at any given rally. We prefer to pick and choose our causes, rather than having them bundled together like pre-loaded software we do not want."

I like this: Leftism as Microsoft Vista -- promises a lot but doesn't deliver, and is kind of bossy. Meanwhile are rightie politics like Linux? You know, fairly efficient, but requiring more work than most people are willing to put in?

DEAN UPDATE: Curfew declared, soldiers patrol streets as Hurricane Dean nears Jamaica.

UPDATE: Dean's northern eyewall punishing Jamaica. Expected to pass slightly south of the Cayman Islands.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More on Jamaica here. And Mexico is evacuating oil rigs.

MORE: Jamaica video from Jim Edds. (Via Newsbeat1).

Meanwhile, reader Alain Gadoury emails: "Are you trying to outdo Drudge? All hurricane, all the time!"

Actually, I think I have outdone Drudge. The Cayman connection got me following this more closely than I usually follow hurricane news. Plus, with Brendan Loy living in Knoxville now, I guess the hurricane-blogging thing is just contagious!

STILL MORE: The latest Cayman outlook isn't too bad: "Hurricane Dean is now moving in a direction between west and west northwest and is expected to continue this motion over the next 24 hours. If the current forecast holds, the maximum sustained winds that will be felt in the Cayman Islands will be between 60 and 70 mph."

DISASTER PREPAREDNESS UPDATE: I mentioned this earlier, but with hurricane season underway people always start thinking about disaster preparedness again -- even when they live out of hurricane zones. Anyway, the Popular Mechanics guide to disaster preparedness is now online for your perusal.

Meanwhile, you can find some previous InstaPundit posts on the topic here, here, here, here, and here. And here's a column I wrote on the subject last year. And a huge disaster preparedness list. And here's a guide to emergency preparedness from Consumer Reports.

Also, here's an item from Wired on the topic. One piece of advice: People tend to focus on buying stuff, stockpiling food, etc. That's good -- you won't be able to run down to Wal-Mart when you really need emergency supplies -- but you should also focus on having a plan, and acquiring some skills, for when things go wrong. A full pantry and some radios and flashlights (and guns, and cash, and bottled water) is very important, but it's what we lawyers call a necessary but not sufficient element of disaster planning. More on that here.

UPDATE: A lot of the stuff on the big list above is out of stock. Try this hurricane preparedness list or this emergency survival kit gear list. Plus, some basic disaster survival items. And Col. Douglas Mortimer emails that no home should be without one of these. Well, duh.

A BLOG-REPORT FROM JAMAICA: "We are currently being affected by the outer bands of Dean,and we've been having moderate rain and slight breezes since 8:00 p.m. last night. . . . Electricity which was supposed to have been shut down at 10:00 a.m this morning will be shut down later and the water supply will be shut down, soon after that. (This is to spare the equipment from damage.) Also, in the case of Jamaica Public Service (JPS): electricity, is also being shut down to prevent electricity from being in lines that will be downed by the hurricane - that could cause injury and loss of life."

UPDATE: Streaming radio from Jamaica.

ANONYMOUS ALLEGATIONS OF NONEXISTENT THREATS.

From a guy named "BinkyBoy." There's a New Republic diarist piece in this, somewhere . . . .

NO ROOM AT THE INN:

The Dionne quintuplets were born on May 28, 1934, to a humble, French-speaking couple in a farmhouse outside of Callander, Ontario, Canada. They were identical sisters and for the first 10 years of their lives, the five girls were the No. 1 tourism attraction in Canada.

Then came free health care for all Canadians. Which is why the four identical Jepp sisters were born in Great Falls, Mont., instead of Calgary this weekend. The Canadian parents flew 325 miles to get to an American hospital. . . . I’m sure most Canadians like their health system. Just remember, though, that Canada’s backup system is in Montana. Americans spend 15% of their income on health care. That’s why Great Falls has enough neo-natal units to handle quadruple births — and a “universal health” nation doesn’t. After all, they didn’t fly Mrs. Jepp to Cuba, did they?

Ouch.

SOME THOUGHTS ON TEACHING HISTORY: "The wrong things are being taught. Kids are interested in the history of how things work, not stories about Indians. And they should be!"

I FORGOT ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC DEBATE, but Stephen Green liveblogged it, in his own inimitable fashion. "Everybody on this stage is running against George W. Bush. I've asked it before and I'll ask it again: Where were these people in 2004?"

IN THE MAIL: ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, by Vijay Vaitheeswaran and Iain Carson. They're not that big on mass transit: "Oil is the problem. Cars are the solution."

PERUVIAN EARTHQUAKE SURVIVORS loot, fight for food. Perhaps, like New Orleans, these reports are exaggerated. But -- as noted here repeatedly in the past -- it's quite important to be prepared to go at least a week without outside assistance. Two weeks is better.

MEGAN MCARDLE: "Did John Quiggin just write that it doesn't matter whether the New Republic ran a false story?"

WHAT BOYS NEED: And why they're getting it from gangs instead of schools, etc.

Some of this sounds a bit familiar.

LOTS MORE HURRICANE-BLOGGING at WX-Man, and at Seablogger. Also Eric Berger and Dr. Jeff Masters.

UPDATE: A further roundup here. And InstaPundit's Cayman Islands correspondent John Thompson emails: "Bright and sunny this morning, if a little windy. The track map has improved for us, but looks pretty bad for Jamaica." Yeah, the eye should miss Cayman with any luck. Jamaica's situation is looking poor.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dean wobbles a bit to the left: Will it thread the needle between Jamaica and Cayman? That would be nice.

YOUR CONGRESS AT WORK: Thanks, guys: "The dispute illustrates how lawmakers, in a frenetic, end-of-session scramble, passed legislation they may not have fully understood and may have given the administration more surveillance powers than it sought. . . . It is possible that some of the changes were the unintended consequences of the rushed legislative process just before this month’s Congressional recess, rather than a purposeful effort by the administration to enhance its ability to spy on Americans. 'We did not cover ourselves in glory,' said one Democratic aide, referring to how the bill was compiled."

Is it too much to ask that they read and understand legislation before they vote on it?

UPDATE: "For a crew that claims a huge advantage in 'competence,' this is a rather extraordinary unforced error."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oops!

Plus this: "I admit that I'm completely at a loss to describe accurately the quality of American political life today."

MORE: Mark Kleiman is suprised that I disapprove, because I'm "a founding member of the partisan lynch mob devoted to forcing such errors." Actually -- as Mark would know if he actually paid attention to what I write, instead of the gibbering voices inside his head -- he'd know that I've opposed the Patriot Act from the beginning. (See this, too). Nor did any "partisan lynch mob" or the gang at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue force Congress to give the Bush Administration more power than it asked for, which was the whole point of the story. Oh, well -- I guess I should just be glad that Kleiman's not engaging in tabloid speculation about my sex life. So far, anyway . . . .

NEW SCIENTIST: It sounds counterintuitive, but burning oil and planting forests to compensate is more environmentally friendly than burning biofuel.

RASMUSSEN: "Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters nationwide favor cutting off federal funds for 'sanctuary cities' that offer protection to illegal immigrants. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 29% are opposed. . . . By a 56% to 31% margin, voters want the government to continue building a fence along the Mexican border." It'll be interesting to see how both parties approach this.

JOHN TIERNEY: Just in case we're living in a computer simulation, leave your messages for the designer here.

Best so far: "Kudos on Jessica Biel."

I JUST ORDERED A NEW COMPUTER FOR THE INSTA-WIFE, and I went out of my way to get XP instead of Vista. Looks like I'm not alone in my doubts. Vista booster Jim Louderback of PC Magazine is disappointed: "I've been a big proponent of the new OS over the past few months, even going so far as loading it onto most of my computers and spending hours tweaking and optimizing it. So why, nine months after launch, am I so frustrated? The litany of what doesn't work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly. . . . I could go on and on about the lack of drivers, the bizarre wake-up rituals, the strange and nonreproducible system quirks, and more. But I won't bore you with the details. The upshot is that even after nine months, Vista just ain't cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too much of a free pass on this operating system: I expected it to get the kinks worked out more quickly. Boy, was I fooled!"