MUGABE IS TRYING TO STARVE THE OPPOSITION by blocking food aid, according to the BBC.

I MENTION THE EVIL OF THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY BELOW, but Dave Winer has a political action plan.

BLOGS4GOD advertises itself as the definitive list of Christian bloggers. In an inevitably-flawed-by-original-sin-but-on-the-other-hand-redeemed kind of way, you know.

UPDATE: Some people thought there was a hint of anti-Christian mockery in the item above, and one noted (angrily, and in all capital letters) that the site nowhere says it’s “definitive.” Nope, but the press release they emailed me did, and I thought my notice matched its tone rather closely:

blogs4God.com announces their “Definitive List of Christian Blogs”

Washington, DC-MD-VA-WV – When Australian author Martin Roth added a small list of weblog-based web sites to his article “Blogging for the Lord” in April of 2002, little did he know that he was planting a mustard seed that would soon branch into a 200+ link forest by June the same year. Nor did he realize the work that it would spawn in the form of dozens of daily emails and site submissions. Enter the geek, Dean Peters.

When Mr. Peters, a computer programmer and technical author visited Martin’s site in mid-May, he immediately realized the need to automate the list and offered to help Mr. Roth maintain the list. By June, not only was Mr. Roth ready to accept the help, he graciously handed the list over to Mr. Peters. On July 29, 2002, with the help of notable “bloggers” Bene Diction, Rachel Cunliffe and Joshua Claybourn, blogs4God.com will open its doors as the “Definitive Portal for Christian Blogs.” The site will offer a variety of user-friendly features such as moderated categories, reviews and ratings, a site-wide search engine, multi-language support and a daily blog on the front page.

As Mr. Peters likes to put it “there is no need for Christian bloggers to hide their light under a basket as long as blogs4God is around.”

Some people have thin skins, I guess. But a mild reply turneth aside wrath. Or so I hope, anyway.

HOMELAND SECURITY is not only a joke, it’s a joke that a lot of people who have been supporting the war aren’t finding very funny. The combination of ineptitude with bureaucratic power-grabbing is looking like a real vulnerability for the Administration.

HOWARD VEIT HAS A THEORY:

The continuing supposed leaks over the past six months from State, Defense, retired Army, etc., makes me wonder if any attack on either Iraq or Iran is in the cards at all.

Back when the Civil War was about to start, General Winfield Scott who won the Mexican War, proposed a strategy called Anaconda. He proposed a total blockade of the South including all shipping. He said the South would be starved out within three years. Most military scholars today say that the strategy would have worked and the loss of life would have been very small.

Nobody wanted that. Everybody wanted blood, so the Anaconda was dumped. What we are doing now is an “Anaconda” on Iraq and quite a bit on Iran. We are squeezing their governments and their economies. Iran is about to blow sky high and Saddam is a raging paranoid with an economy in free fall. My feeling is that we are seeing a very good show being put on by the administration: battle plans, bombing raids, mystery troop movements, CIA operatives, shipping interdictions, and today’s so-called “leaks” to the Washington Post all seem to state that this squeeze is policy right now and that it is working.

Yeah, but when it was over the South knew it had been beaten, and was never any trouble again. Anyway, I don’t believe it. To make a plan like that work, you’d need people as smart as Donald Rumsfeld, or Condi Rice, or Colin Powell.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias disputes my “no trouble” assessment, citing Jim Crow, etc. Well, as seemed obvious to me, I was talking about Civil-War type trouble. Nor was Jim Crow “trouble” to the North, which didn’t mind it at all. Indeed, Washington, D.C. (which was, you know, the capital of the North during the Civil War) was probably the most segregated city in America during the first half of the 20th century.

FREE CDs FOR BLOGGERS and a distributed-music-journalism model that just might work, all from Eric Olsen.

MATT WELCH has new posts including an AOL I-told-you-so and a reflection on San Francisco’s filth.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES? OR ROPE-A-DOPE? Al Qaeda suspects were sent to Guantanamo. There was lots of condemnation, before it turned out the place is Club Med. Now, very quietly, Al Qaeda suspects are being sent to Arab countries where the conditions are decidedly un-Club Med-like. But there’s not much complaint since (1) the Guantanamo fracas used the story up; and (2) human rights groups and Euro-government types aren’t willing to make as much noise about the practices of Arab countries.

So is this state of affairs an unintended consequence of making too big a deal about Guantanamo? Or was the whole Guantanamo brouhaha a giant sucker play on the part of the Pentagon — one that worked?

BLOGGING IN 2014: A CAUTIONARY TALE from N.Z. Bear.

Just call me Mr. Slippery.

MARK SHIELDS’ STRANGE FONDNESS FOR SHEEP REVEALED: Punditwatch is up!

REID STOTT has some interesting perspective on Afghan civilian casualties. The proper standard for comparison, he suggests, isn’t just how many civilians were accidentally killed by Americans, but how many more would have been deliberately killed by the Taliban had there been no intervention:

Whatever the number killed accidentally by the US, each death is a tragedy. That cannot be denied. But it also can’t be denied that the Taliban went on a four year killing spree, with estimates of up to 500,000 killed during that time. Even if we were to accept only one fifth of that number as “legitimate,” that would mean the Taliban deliberately killed more civilians each and every month than it is estimated the US killed by accident in the entire war.

And that monthly Taliban-generated death toll stopped cold, last November. Eight months where there was no four figure death toll. But you don’t hear about those numbers. There will never be a story about the 12,000 Afghans (my guesstimate, 8 months x 1500 per month) still alive today that would be dead at the hands of the Taliban, if not for US military action.

I wonder why we won’t be hearing about that?

UPDATE: Well, The Boss has it right: “‘I think the invasion in Afghanistan was handled very, very smoothly,’ he says.”

THE BRITISH SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL NATURE has disavowed a study it published last November that purported to show DNA cross-contamination of native Mexican maize by genetically engineered corn. The study has been cited by many opponents of bioengineered agricultural products as evidence that genetically engineered crops pose a threat of unsupervised gene transfer. The linked story explores the controversy.

UPDATE: Edward Boyd notes that he was on this story in April. Uh, yeah, but by being slower I brought more, er, perspective to the piece. Yeah that’s it, perspective. Like they do at The New York Times, you know? Anyway, advantage: Boyd.

ARMSTRONG WINS AGAIN. And Jeff Cooper has unflattering comments for some idiot sports columnist who said Armstrong isn’t an athlete.

DAN GILLMOR TELLS IT LIKE IT IS:

If you or I asked Congress for permission to legally hack other people’s computers, we’d be laughed off Capitol Hill. Then we’d be investigated by the FBI and every other agency concerned with criminal violations of privacy and security.

Then again, you and I aren’t part of the movie and music business. We aren’t as powerful as an industry that knows no bounds in its paranoia and greed, a cartel that boasts enough money and public-relations talent to turn Congress into a marionette.

That’s why I don’t doubt that the just-introduced bill, dubbed the “Peer to Peer Piracy Prevention Act” and co-sponsored by the representative from Disney, will get a respectful hearing. Howard Berman, D-Mission Hills, whose campaign coffers are loaded with money from Disney and other entertainment companies, wants to confer on the entertainment cartel the legal right to hack PCs it believes are part of file-sharing networks.

What Berman is doing is a breach of trust every bit as bad as any business executive stands accused of.

THE GUARDIAN REPORTS that Saudi Arabia’s ruling family is in an undeclared war, and that British officials are worried that it may fall to factions sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Perhaps we should hope for that, since I believe that those factions wield considerable unacknowledged influencee already. This would get it out in the open, and allow corrective action.

UPDATE: Hmm. We have seen the untimely deaths of a couple of important Saudi princes recently. And the not-always-reliable Debka is reporting an assassination attempt aimed at King Fahd on July 14.

SAN FRANCISCO’S TOURIST INDUSTRY IS HURTING: I wonder if it’s because people are turned off by the various displays of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism over the past eleven months or so?

RUSSIA IS DEVELOPING A SUBORBITAL SPACECRAFT for space tourism purposes. Interesting.

BRENDAN NYHAN’S LATEST SpinSanity piece is called “Bear Market for Bullsh–t.” Um, but doesn’t he mean a bull market here?

SOME INTERESTING THOUGHTS ON regime change in Iraq and Iran, and on the Bush strategy for the region:

The Bush administration–and it is perhaps accurate here to underscore, the president himself more than his foreign-policy team–appears to be trying to grapple seriously with an American response to tyranny in the Muslim world, particularly in Iran. The president’s “axis of evil” speech, his July 12 address on Iran, the subsequent delivery of this statement in Persian over Voice of America radio by the National Security Council’s Zalmay Khalilzad, and the Captive Nations Week proclamation of July 17 have revealed a man who obviously believes that certain Western ideas have universal range and roots. The president, who is probably the most sincerely religious commander in chief since World War II, has stated repeatedly that faith does not countenance despotism, that Muslims, too, have the right to “liberty and justice . . . the birthright of all people.”

Stepping away from the “realist” world of his father–where a vision of regional stability, not a belief in individual liberty and democracy, drove foreign policy–George W. Bush has sliced across national borders and civilizational divides with an unqualified assertion of a moral norm. The president declared, “The people of Iran want the same freedoms, human rights, and opportunities as people around the world.” America will stand “alongside people everywhere determined to build a world of freedom, dignity, and tolerance. . . . America affirms . . . its commitment to helping those in captive nations achieve democracy.” These are, at least to Iranian ears, truly revolutionary words for an American president. One has to go back to Woodrow Wilson to find an American leader who so clearly directs his message far outside the West. And Wilson’s call for self-determination, made in the declining years of European empire, addressed collective, “national” ethnic aspirations more than the liberal rights of individuals.

Very interesting.

UPDATE: Diane E. at Letter from Gotham says she was posting on this months ago.