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., wher