June 14, 2004

FRANCE IS NICE this time of year. I think this is another argument for early elections in Iraq.

THERE'S LOTS OF INTERESTING STUFF over at EconoPundit.

Meanwhile, Ann Althouse has multiple posts on the Newdow decision, and Dean Esmay has a suggestion for discouraging terrorists that clearly falls in the "what would Bugs Bunny do?" category. I think it's worth a try.

MORE ON AGING AND EXTENDED LIFESPANS: Here's an interesting Slashdot thread about the Methuselah Mouse Project and related items. But this post is my favorite bit:

Whenever the subject of interfering with nature / the divine plan comes up, I refer to this response which I heard one day in an interview: the single development in recorded history which has most vastly extended lifespans was the invention of the toilet... yet you don't hear people going around debating the morality of having toilets.

This reply is pretty funny.

OUTDOOR LIFE praises gay blogger.

IRAQIS RESCUE AMBUSHED CONVOY: Via BlackFive.

FRANCE reportedly faces an African quagmire in which it has lost the trust of, well, everyone.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF has an interesting survey of how media are spinning the European elections.

REGISTRATION-REQUIRED NEWSPAPER SITES: Jeff Jarvis notes a growing controversy. Here's the advice I offered them a while back. Doesn't look like they followed it.

DIGITAL SLR WARS: Here's a review of Canon's latest offering. However, given its near-$4500 price tag even at a discount, I think I'll stick with my D70. Meanwhile, here's an interesting item from Technology Review on how this stuff works.

TALKING PIGS AND JETSONS CARS -- via the blogad on the right, I just watched this flash ad from the AARP. I'm a lot less skeptical about social security privatization than they are (in fact, I'm cautiously in favor of it) but the cartoon somehow kept making me think of James Lileks. And I'll endorse any policy if the AARP will make sure it delivers a Jetsons-style flying car.

BACK IN THE OFFICE, and facing the inevitable stack of mail. On top is what looks like an interesting book from Oxford University Press, by Abigail Kohn: Shooters: Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures. Obviously, I haven't read it yet, but it looks like an effort to take an honest sociological look at gun owners in America, in opposition to the rather cartoonish and negative view generally found in mass media. Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

According to some of the top journalists in the country, gun enthusiasts and NRA members are racist, stupid, ignorant about history an dpolitics, apathetic to violence, bellicose, and jingoistic. They are, quite simply, evil.

It's difficult to imagine the media promoting these kinds of characterizations of particular ethnic or religious groups without a political firestorm. Yet these are routine characterizations of gun enthusiasts. . . .

When I began my research into gun enthusiasm and gun ownership in the mid-1990s, I learned that a number of my academic colleagues held very similar views.

The book looks quite interesting, and I'll try to say more about it later. Now I'm off to a faculty meeting I didn't know I had until just a few minutes ago. Sigh. Vacation's over. . . .

I'M STILL PLAYING CATCH-UP ON THE NEWS, but Winds of Change has its war roundup and Iraq roundup features posted.

A HARDY PERENNIAL -- law professors whining that their students make more than they do even before graduation.

I took a whopping paycut when I left law practice, and the gap continues to widen. Guys with my seniority are making well over a million bucks a year at big firms.

Best money I ever spent.

LAST WEEK'S COLUMN on aging research led Clayton Cramer to write that life is so bad it's not worth extending. Or something like that.

I don't agree. Meanwhile, here's an interesting post on opposition to anti-aging research. My column for this week will take a further look at the subject.

UNSCAM UPDATE: It looks as if U.N. staff may have been involved:

Washington --- An independent investigation of the United Nations' controversial Iraq oil-for-food program is close to releasing an interim report this summer that is expected to focus on U.N. staff involvement in the program.

But critics and supporters of the United Nations will likely have to wait about a year before the three-member committee releases its findings to the public on a wide array of allegations of corruption and mismanagement in the massive program.

I'm shocked.

UPDATE: William Safire writes "Tear down this U.N. stonewall!"

Let's advance this story. Two BNP Paribas sources tell me this: in a storage facility in Lower Manhattan, the bank had a large room containing some 5,000 oil-for-food file folders.

Each folder contained a copy of the bank's letter of credit authorized by a U.N. official to pay a contractor for its shipment; a Notice of Arrival monitored by Cotecna at the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr if by ship, or the Jordanian border crossing of Trebil if by truck; and a description of the contract. The original paperwork went to the Rafidain bank in Amman, Jordan; copies of the damning documents are stored by BNP Paribas in New Jersey.

Though the U.N. purchases were supposedly to supply desperate Iraqis with food or medicine, most of this evidence deals with items like construction equipment from Russia, hundreds of Mercedes-Benz limousines from Germany and thousands of bottles of perfume from France.

The money trail grows cold; won't some lawful authority (Hyde? Snow? Spitzer?) issue a subpoena that would start "due judicial procedure"?

Read the whole thing. And read this, too.

BACK HOME: Regular blogging will resume later.

UPDATE: Various vacation questions: No, we weren't on Pawley's Island, though that's a good guess. It was St. George Island, Florida, near Apalachicola. One reader writes:

Where's the fish?

It would help put me in the mood - I go fishing in a few weeks, in Scotland. Hooray!

Your wish is my command! That's my brother, who agreed with my brother-in-law that it was the best fishing they'd done.

The InstaDaughter caught a shark, too, but I don't have a picture of that. Or of her eating her first raw oyster straight out of Apalachicola Bay. (She loved it.) The Insta-Mom learned to sea kayak, and I took my 13-year-old nephew for his first open-ocean scuba dives. I hadn't been diving in the Gulf of Mexico before, and it wasn't bad. Visibility was about 30 feet, and there were lots of fish -- spades, amberjack, mackerel, and grouper. Not the wild diversity of Grand Cayman's reefs, but a lot of fish. We dove three wrecks: the Lumber Ship, the Kaiser Tug, and the Mexico Beach. Couldn't do the Empire Mica, which is the premier wreck in the area, because it was too deep for a 13-year-old diver.

And, yes, I wish I were still there. . . .

June 12, 2004

THIS IS THE VIEW from the other porch. Front? Back? A matter of perspective, I guess.

June 11, 2004

A PICTURE FROM MY FRONT PORCH this evening. (Or maybe it's the back porch, since it's the side away from the ocean).

Anyway, hope you're having a nice weekend.

VIRGINIA POSTREL REMEMBERS THE 1960s AND 1970s as they really were. Meanwhile Andrew Sullivan offers some historical perspective of his own.

And here's a historical perspective roundup from Oxblog.

Finally, here's perspective of a different kind. Heh.

UPDATE: And here's a perspective that some people won't like.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: A new paper suggests that the danger of runaway replicators and "gray goo" is rather exaggerated.

DONALD SENSING has lots of interesting posts. Just keep scrolling.

A BLOG-ONLY NEWS DIET? Interesting report, but I don't see blogs in general -- and certainly not InstaPundit -- as a primary news source. InstaPundit is an opinion blog (see, er, the name and the motto), not a news service. I do try to call attention to stories that I think deserve more attention than they're getting from Big Media outlets, but that very effort means that InstaPundit isn't going to be "balanced."

Of course, reading about the stories that the Poynter report linked above treats as undercovered in the blogosphere also tells you something about the seriousness of Big Media in that regard. Paul McCartney and Harry Potter? Love 'em both, but there's not much actual news in those stories. . . .

UPDATE: Related thoughts here. And, perhaps, here.

June 10, 2004

WILL COLLIER looks at the latest Pew Poll and observes: "For all intents and purposes, more than half of the populace (everybody except partisan Democrats, and even their numbers for credibility are nothing for most of the press to brag about) has written off the vast majority of the national press. And they're doing so because they believe that the press has written them off."

And an example of what he's talking about, here.

(Here, too.)

June 09, 2004

I'M NOT THINKING ABOUT THE WAR this week, but The Belmont Club is.

LONG LIFE AND ITS ENEMIES: My TechCentralStation column is up.