ORKUT appears to be inspiring hatred despite its meaning “orgasm” in Finnish. (Via Joi Ito).

THANKS to the folks who donated via Amazon or PayPal this month! Thank-you emails will be forthcoming shortly.

THIS SEEMS PROMISING:

The United States has ordered the expulsion of dozens of Saudi diplomats suspected of helping promulgate Al Qaida ideology, diplomatic sources said. The State Dept. has refused to either confirm or deny the action..

The State Department revoked the diplomatic credentials of the Saudi diplomats in Washington over the last month in an effort to crack down on Saudi efforts to promote Al Qaida interests in the United States.

The diplomatic sources said about 70 diplomats and embassy staffers were expelled in late 2003 and dozens of others were ordered to leave the United States by mid-February. Many of those expelled were said to have worked in the office of the Saudi defense attache.

Remember — Iraq was just one phase of the war.

SCORE ANOTHER ONE for sophisticated European diplomacy.

BRUCE SCHNEIER writes that we’re slouching toward Big Brother.

I’m not as gloomy as he is, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read his piece. I could be wrong, you know! I do think, though, that the most important thing in preserving civil liberties is to maintain a firewall between the treatment of noncitizens and citizens. Mistreatment or surveillance of noncitizens may be bad, but it doesn’t offer the temptation toward political abuse that such conduct offers where citizens are concerned.

A NEW BLOGOSPHERE SPORT: Googling the reported recipients of Saddam’s oil-bribe money! Stephen Green has gotten started. Salon’s Wagner James Au emailed with this suggestion, too, and thinks it’ll be interesting to see whether their public statements prior to Saddam’s fall indicate any special solicitousness toward Saddam’s interests.

MICKEY KAUS: “Next: Kerry claims to have secretly ghostwritten Joe Klein’s novels!”

Meanwhile David Adesnik says the debate’s real loser was Tom Brokaw.

UPDATE: But Wonkette pronounces Brokaw the winner — though on grounds Adesnik may not share.

WHY DOES PRINCE CHARLES WANT TO HURT POOR PEOPLE?

A report published today on the Institute of Physics website Nanotechweb.org will say that Prince Charles’ claims about nanotechnology could widen the chasm between have and have-not countries and damage the emerging nanotechnology industry in the developing world. This new analysis comes from a leading bioethics think-tank, the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics and is the first-ever survey of nanotechnology research in developing countries.

Dr Peter Singer, Director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics and Dr Erin Court, the lead author of this report, argue that concerns over the legitimate risks of nanotechnology should be addressed through a new international process and not by resorting to a moratorium on research that promises vast improvement in the lives of five billion people in developing countries.

Dr Singer said: “Opposition from Prince Charles and pressure groups around the world should not be permitted to diminish the health, environmental and economic opportunities of the poor in Africa, Latin America and Asia.”

This report outlines for the first time the health, environmental and economic benefits for developing countries of nanotechnology (NT).

The report is here. Note that this is not the animal-rights Peter Singer. It’s the one who cares about human beings. . . .

COMCAST: You’ve overused your “unlimited” service! But we won’t tell you what the limits are. . . .

This is miserably, pathetically, lame.

DENIAL ISN’T A RIVER IN EGYPT: It’s a walkout in London.

AMIR TAHERI WRITES that Iraq is becoming a normal society. Let’s hope.

HERE’S A SOUTH CAROLINA DEBATE ROUNDUP from Jeff Quinton.

I DON’T FEEL SORRY FOR JOE TRIPPI ANYMORE: Taegan Goddard finds a report that Trippi got up to a 15% commission on Dean’s ad buys. Can this be right? I’m in the wrong business — I could lose two states, spend $40 million, and walk away a millionaire as well as anybody else! Sheesh.

UPDATE: Steve Verdon has a trenchant observation on Dean’s web-based donation program.

ANOTHER UPDATE: D’oh! It’s not Steve, above. It’s Dave. The SteveVerdon.com address always lulls me into forgetting that it’s a group blog now.

SPELLBOUND, OUTBOUND, AND SCHOOLBOUND: As I promised yesterday, today’s GlennReynolds.com post ties together the movie Spellbound with the question of outsourcing.

UPDATE: More on outsourcing here and here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Virginia Postrel continues to call me “coy” on the outsourcing issue. I’m still confused as to why. Here’s what I wrote in the original column on this topic, which I’ve linked in most of my posts since:

With all sympathy to Mr. Paris, people usually conclude that foreign competition has “gone too far” when it threatens their job. (And if we could import foreign politicians to compete with domestic ones, you’d see tariffs and protectionism that would make Napoleon’s Continental System look like free trade.) Nonetheless, this sort of competition can certainly cause dislocations, both political and economic. (For more, here’s a report that outsourcing to India increased by 25% last year, and a somewhat sunnier view of the situation from the Hindustan Times.)

But it also causes moral dislocations, and in various parts of the political spectrum. Bray’s story reports on an “alliance of liberal activist groups and labor unions” that is opposing the outsourcing of jobs. And while it’s easy to see why labor unions might oppose this sort of thing, it’s hard for me to see it as a liberal issue, really. After all, aren’t liberals supposed to be for the redistribution of wealth from the better-off to the less-well-off? These jobs don’t disappear, after all: they go overseas, to people who probably need them more. Isn’t that a good thing? Or, at least, to me it’s not obviously worse than, say, taxing corporations in a way that causes them to cut jobs, and then using the money to pay for foreign aid.

I wrote something similar over at GlennReynolds.com, but it vanished in the MSNBC non-archive black hole. But it should be obvious: I’m against bans on outsourcing, and I think that the moral case for them is as weak as the economic one.

But — and maybe this is what Virginia is picking up on — I do have a certain degree of ambivalence. Arthur Leff, in a review of Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law, famously worried about how many lives would be lashed to ribbons as the supply and demand curves flailed around, “desperately seeking equilibrium.” On policy grounds, it probably is better to be coldhearted where this sort of thing is concerned. But I see how hard this has hit parts of the IT sector, and I think that in many cases it’s more of a management fad than it is a source of real economic efficiency. If Virginia thinks that I’m the one ginning up controversy in this area, then she’s very much out of touch with what tech people are talking about, because the subject has been all over Slashdot (look here and here, for example, and note the number of comments) and the various tech publications for a while — and you hear a lot of it from IT people whose interest in the subject didn’t come from InstaPundit. I’m just passing it along.

TOM MAGUIRE has a good observation on why we should be suspicious of the Saddam oil-bribe reports. The documents may be genuine, but the people who created them may have been lying to Saddam and pocketing the proceeds. As I said before, we should wait to see if this pans out. Just because it’s plausible doesn’t mean it’s true.

UPDATE: Maguire has updated, and ABC has picked up the story now, too. And the Chirac connection may be closer than I indicated below. Still to early to say for sure, but it’s certainly interesting. Stay tuned.

MY FRIEND AND SOMETIME COAUTHOR ROB MERGES has a new paper on compulsory licensing and digital media out. I’m somewhat more friendly to the notion of compulsory licensing than Rob is, but since he’s smarter than me, you should probably listen to him. However, I will note that — as I wrote here a while back — the “hassle factor” involved in non-compulsory schemes, and the burden on creative endeavors that it represents, shouldn’t be underestimated.

JAM YESTERDAY AND JAM TOMORROW: Joe Katzman notices that for some people, the time is never right.

UPDATE: Reader Richard Andrews emails:

Obviously, professor, our policy should be JDAM’d if you do, JDAM’d if you don’t…

Indeed. Justin Katz has some further thoughts on this subject that are worth reading.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: This time at Illinois State.

POWERS OF TEN: This is pretty cool.

ROGER SIMON CONNECTS THE DOTS:

The BBC is unmasked as political liars while French and other diplomats are under accusation for taking oil bribes from Saddam. Meanwhile, another suicide bomb goes off in Jerusalem, while the Europe-dominated World Court in the Hague moves to put the Israelis in the dock for doing the one thing any of them would have done eons ago—build a wall to keep the terror out.

Read the whole thing.

HEADS ARE STILL ROLLING:

BBC director general Greg Dyke today dramatically resigned as the corporation struggles to deal with the biggest crisis in its 82-year history.

He is the second senior figure at the corporation to quit in the past 24 hours in the wake of Lord Hutton’s devastating critique of the way the corporation handled the Kelly affair.

And in a dramatic sequence of events, the acting chairman Lord Ryder issued an “unreserved apology” for the “errors” of the past six months.

But will Andrew Gilligan keep his job?

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis comments on Dyke’s resignation, and takes no prisoners:

This is the same sanctimonious prig who lectured U.S. media: “For any news organisation to act as a cheerleader for government is to undermine your credibility. They should be… balancing their coverage, not banging the drum for one side or the other.” Mr. Dykes, for any news organization to act as a cheerleader against governent is to undermine your credibility, wouldn’t you say?

Next: Bring us the head of Andrew Gilligan.

Note to self: Never get Jeff angry at me.

WHICH CORRUPTION SCANDAL? Take your pick. Jeremy Slater has a look at the Parmalat scandal, often called “Europe’s Enron,” and notes that it has punctured a lot of Euro-smugness of the “it can’t happen here” variety. Then there’s the French frigate scandal:

Illegal payments linked to a French defense deal with Taiwan signed in 1991 have placed the French government at risk of being ordered to repay up to $600 million in murky commissions, according to a report published on Wednesday.
.
The deal, involving the sale of six high-tech French frigates to Taiwan, has already linked senior statesmen in both countries with a still-unraveling tale of corruption.

Here’s more from (ironically, these days) the BBC, which observes:

It has been one of France’s biggest political and financial scandals of the last generation.

It has left a trail of eight unexplained deaths, nearly half a billion dollars in missing cash and troubling allegations of government complicity. . . .

A government order banning judicial access to key documents for reasons of state security has twice been renewed, most recently in June last year.

As a result, a criminal inquiry launched in 1997 remains stalled.

But the suspicions continue to grow: who has what to fear from the truth? Why, when the Taiwanese Government is doing all it can to uncover what happened, does France stubbornly refuse to do the same?

I can’t imagine. Of course, all of this is peanuts compared to the reports that Saddam bribed Chirac.

UPDATE: On the Chirac story, reader Augustin Naepels sends this cautionary observation:

As a French citizen with a very critical view of my country’s current policies, my sympathy towards Chirac is very limited. However, I have to point that the recent reports about politicans bribed by the former Iraqi regime do not in fact incrimate Chirac (a translation of the original Iraqi article is available here: Link)

Charles Pasqua, the French politician named as a recipient of the bribes in the article, used to be close to Chirac until he endorsed his opponent during the 1995 presidential campaign. Since then, Pasqua has left Chirac’s political party. To sum up, Chirac isn’t really tainted by these accusations.

I think the Washington Times [UPI] article you linked to had a misleading title, since the original source never mentions Chirac.

Just my two cents..and thanks for your blog that I read with great pleasure every day.

Interesting. Well, as I said before, we’ll have to wait and see how this pans out.

GIZMODO notes that Nikon’s new budget digital SLR, the D70, has been unveiled. I’m in the market for something along these lines, but I’m in no rush. And it’s overkill for web photography anyway, where size, battery capacity, etc., are more important.

HOWARD KURTZ: “The man who pioneered Dean’s Internet strategy is tossed out like the manager of a losing baseball team? Was it Trippi who suggested that Dean start yelling during his Iowa concession speech?”

DAVID BERNSTEIN wonders why liberals hate Bush, when he’s busy enacting all of their policies. Beats me. But then, they hated Nixon, too, and he did the same thing. Bernstein’s probably right about this: “[C]ultural cues are more important than policy and ideology. W just represents lots of things that coastal liberals dislike, and they will continue to dislike him regardless of how he governs policy.”

Bush should worry, though, because his policies are alienating the base. Some of the right-wing mailing lists that I get are turning nearly as anti-Bush as they used to be anti-Clinton. Here’s an example, from one of ’em:

Bush Spending budget breaking for NEA. Another bottle of urine.

One expects this kind of stuff from those FAR LEFT DEMOCRATS but when a supposed *conservative* sits in office and spends more than the known liberals – well, you really have to ask yourself what is going on. You have to realize that you have elected a PRETENDER to the THRONE.

You didn’t elect a conservative – you elected a fraud who pretended to be conservative in order to get your vote so he could do far worse than Bill Clinton -Al Gore – Jimmy Carter – could do as the *conservative element would scream them out of office if they did what George W. Bush is doing and getting away with.

I’ve followed this list (it’s basically a gun-rights list) for a while. It’s a pretty good weathervane for the sentiments of a chunk of the right, and it has shifted notably against Bush over the past few months. I expect that Karl Rove thinks he can hang on to these people, and maybe he will. But from here, it looks like he’s got serious problems with the base.

UPDATE: There’s an interesting discussion on this topic over at The Corner. Start here and scroll up.

ANOTHER UPDATE: David Bernstein has further thoughts, and Dodd Harris is defending Bush:

I’ve certainly taken issue with Bush’s participation in runaway spending – among other deviations from conservative principle – plenty of times. But the fact of the matter is that Bush never pretended to be the kind of conservative these critics expected him to be. In fact, it was always quite clear to anyone who paid attention that Bush was anything but. Everything about “compassionate conservatism” was a pretty obvious announcement that he had no problem with Big Government except its priorities. . . .

I’m all for criticizing him from the right – if no-one does it, he’ll have every reason to assume his base is safely in his pocket. But calling him a fraud is too much. He told us what he would do and we voted him in, thereby endorsing those plans. If one paid attention to what he said, the best one would have hoped for was that he would turn the Leviathan a bit to the right.

Read the whole thing. But I still think that Bush has a problem with the base. Maybe they heard what they wanted to hear in 2000 — but they don’t like what they’re hearing in 2004.