SORRY FOR THE LIMITED BLOGGING: I got my stomach scoped this morning. Everything’s fine, but still a bit groggy from the drugs. Back later. Meanwhile, there’s a new post up over at GlennReynolds.com.

CHRIS MUIR’S DAY BY DAY is starting to get the attention it deserves.

TEHRAN now has a blog cafe.

MILITARY READER JOHN KLUGE sends a link to this story from the Washington Post, about what he calls the most important aspect of Iraqi reconstruction:

This is the key good news story of the rebuilding of Iraq. Without the commander’s emergency response fund, nothing would ever get done. It’s good to see that someone is finally noticing. Note the international aid groups whining in the article about how the military is not qualified. The genius of the CERPS was that it took the money out of the hands of the bureaucrats and aid groups and gave it directly to the military to use on the ground. If it were up to the aid groups nothing would have ever gotten done.

Wait for someone to attack this procedure, now. . . .

Meanwhile, Iraqis are condemning suicide attacks and blaming foreigners. The Bush plan to establish Iraq as a counterweight to the rest of the Arab world seems to be working. . . .

BLOGGING WILL BE LIMITED this morning. But Virginia Postrel has a lot of new posts up. And don’t forget the Carnival of the Vanities. And Stephen Green has been more active than usual. That should be enough to keep you busy for a while.

INTERESTING PUTIN RUMORS: Are they true? Beats me.

MORE REWRITING OF HISTORY: Andrew Sullivan explores the newest bogus claim by war opponents.

RICH BLOGGY GOODNESS: Carnival of the Vanities is up.

JOHANN HARI writes in The Independent that the real threat to Iraqis comes from Western defeatists. The column requires a subscription if you want to read it in The Independent, but you can read it for free on Johann Hari’s blog. Excerpt:

These attacks are calculated to undermine our will to carry out a proper transition to Iraqi self-rule, along the path that has already been travelled by the Kurds in the North. A hasty withdrawal would give Islamic theocrats or recidivist Baathists a far better chance of seizing power than free elections. All decent people – including those who opposed the war – must now work to establish a consensus in Britain and the US behind the path that Iraqis, in every single poll of their opinion, are begging us to take: stay for a few years to ensure a transition to democracy, resist the fascistic bombers attacking those who have come to help, and gradually accord more and more power to the Governing Council in advance of elections.

A bomb will always get bigger headlines than a slowly refilling marsh or a burgeoning school, but we must keep focusing on the big picture. Nobody wants the occupation to continue indefinitely. Iraqi democracy is getting closer every day. We must keep siding with the Iraqi people, not the bombers who want to drive away their doctors and peacekeepers.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

JAMES MILLER thinks that American hegemony could last quite a while.

A PRELIMINARY NANOFACTORY DESIGN: This is interesting.

RAND SIMBERG has an oped on space policy that is, as always, worth your time. He’s also got a clarification on his blog. Aren’t blogs useful?

FIREBLOGGING AND LAWBLOGGING: Over at The Right Coast.

CAN THIS BE TRUE? Reportedly, Don Luskin is threatening to sue Atrios. That’s utterly bizarre. Whether or not Luskin has a claim against Krugman, suing Atrios seems entirely over the top to me.

I’ve emailed Luskin asking if this is true. If it is, I agree with Armed Liberal: “this is just embarrassing.”

EVERYBODY’S DISSING CAMILLE PAGLIA: Mickey Kaus, Roger Simon (and his commenters), even Brendan O’Neill. But Andrew Sullivan is offering qualified praise.

OF COURSE, KIM DU TOIT WOULD JUST MAKE A RUG: David Baron, with whom I used to do a radio show at Yale, now has a book out entitled The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature. It’s about the way in which low-density residential patterns and animal-protection laws are bringing people into close proximity with dangerous animals.

I’m glad that animals like cougars are making a comeback (here’s an interesting article on reports, possibly true, that they’re back in the Smokies), but I don’t want them around my house. And if they were, I’d be inclined to make a rug, too.

UPDATE: Reader Jayson K. emails:

I can back up reports of cougars in Tennessee. A friend of mine who built the house I live in now bought some land near Gatlinburg. On day while walking his land, he saw a cougar. He was really startled and a little in awe, while he half-expected to run into a bear, he never thought he’d run across a cougar. So be ton he lookout when you go walking into the woods deep in TN.

Once, quite a few years ago, I saw what looked like cougar tracks not too far from Happy Valley. But I’m no expert tracker — though if they were bobcat tracks, it was one damn big bobcat. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jay Manifold emails:

Glenn – You’ll probably get tons of e-mails like these. There have been multiple reports within the past year of cougars appearing (for the first time in over a century) in or near the KC metro area, population 1.8 million; see, for example, Link.

I’d say that David Baron’s book is quite timely!

Yes. It’s very well written, too. Here’s a bit from the introduction:

This book tells the story of a death that was not supposed to happen and the forces that made it inevitable. It is a tale of politics and history, and ecology gone awry, all come to life in feline form. It is the chronicle of a town that loved its own version of nature with such passion that its embrace ultimately altered the natural world. The comparison may seem far-fetched, but much as the Aztecs hauled prisoners up high pyramids and cut out their beating hearts as an offering to the sun, the human mauled five centuries later on a frozen hill in 1991 was, in effect a sacrifice, killed by a community embracing a myth: the idea that wilderness, true wilderness, could exist in modern America.

I’ve just glanced through it so far, but it looks quite good.

MORE: Reader Herbert Jacobi emails:

Re The Beast in The Garden. I have hunted Cougar, both in Utah unsuccessful) and Arizona (successful). They are amazing. If you don’t hunt them with dogs your chances of getting one are close to nil. Even with dogs it’s a challenge. They blend in with their background perfectly. You could walk buy one five feet away and not notice. People tend not to believe that but it’s true. I think it is a mistake not to hunt them at all. They gradually lose their fear of people and follow the deer and other edibles into back yards.

Yes, it seems rather obvious to me that “fear of humans” is usually acquired, not inbred. Predators fear humans because humans are dangerous. If people stop acting dangerous, predators stop fearing humans. Then the predators become dangerous.

I, FOR ONE, welcome our new robot overlords. Heh.

ZELL MILLER IS ENDORSING PRESIDENT BUSH for reelection. I’m not sure that this really guarantees that Bush will carry Georgia, as the reader who sent the link suggests, but it’s surely bad news for the Democrats when one of their own Senators endorses an incumbent Republican a year before the election.

I RAN MY TECHCENTRALSTATION COLUMN THROUGH THE GENDER GENIE and I got a divided score:

Female Score: 777
Male Score: 931

A strong feminine side — I guess I’m a metrosexual like Howard Dean!

I’m pretty sure that means that it’s no longer cool to be a metrosexual. . . .

FIREBLOGGING: Joi Ito has some cool links. And Citizen Smash (formerly LT Smash) continues to blog.

ROGER SIMON has more comments on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s sliming of Rep. Nethercutt.

WILL SALETAN CHARGES WESLEY CLARK with hypocritical obstructionism over Iraq. I may be wrong here — my political-prediction track record isn’t that great — but Clark’s campaign seems to be foundering. And it seems to be foundering not so much over tactical missteps as over the character of the candidate himself. Saletan concludes:

I don’t know whether we’ll win the postwar if Congress approves the money Bush asked for. But I know we’ll lose it if Congress doesn’t. That’s what happens when a nation at war starts to think like the Wes Clark of 2003. Just ask the Wes Clark of 1999.

Ouch.

DISHONEST JOURNALISM at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “Sliming” Rep. George Nethercutt.

Miserable behavior.

MORE EUROPEAN FINANCIAL SCANDALS:

The European Commission was facing a crisis last night after its auditors found Brussels had failed to shut down a network of slush funds and that abuses had spread beyond a statistics office at the centre of the scandal.

MEPs called for the head of Pedro Solbes, the economics commissioner, after a final audit report leaked yesterday said missing records and the total breakdown of financial control at Eurostat, the statistics agency, made it impossible to know how much taxpayers’ money had vanished or what it was used for.

Investigators identified the loss of £3 million in “a vast enterprise of looting” by senior officials in Luxembourg, mostly through inflated contracts with outside firms.

Obviously, there should have been enough American troops to prevent the looting.

I LIKE THIS CARTOON.