MICKEY KAUS is ahead of the curve on the John-Edward-backlash front. (“Who?” you may ask. “I am asking!” And well you may.) Kaus has the skinny in a piece long enough that I’m surprised it didn’t run in Slate. Maybe Jacob Weisberg’s a closet Edwards fan?

TAPPED, the American Prospect’s in-house blog, now has a stable URL so that you don’t have to go hunting around for it. Check it out — and scroll down to note TAPPED’s response to the Max Power porn-star incident.

SALON SEXWATCH — SPECIAL NOSTALGIA EDITION: Okay, I quit doing this feature a few months back because (1) I got sick of reading the lame Salon sex-advice column in search of actual sex; and (2) everyone knew about Rachael Klein’s column anyway, and I figured interested parties could go there on their own.

But a reader wrote to say that there’s actual sex in today’s Salon column. Well, kinda: there’s some advice how to kiss a woman, anyway, and later on some advice on how to avoid losing your erection. For the Salon column, that’s big progress. But it doesn’t really hold an, er, candle to Rachael Klein’s column on how to bring a woman to orgasm. Advantage: Klein. Some things never change.

CHRIS BERTRAM suggests that it’s kind of hard to be an anti-globalization, anti-bourgeois Marxist. If, that is, you’ve actually read Marx.

The problem isn’t that the far right is adopting leftist themes, but that the left, still as hostile to capitalism as ever but lacking a clearly articulated modernist alternative of its own since the failure of the Soviet experience and the Hayekian critique of central planning, has been drawn into adopting traditionally reactionary and conservative positions and a celebration of the very “idiocy of rural life” that Marx condemned. That doesn’t mean that we should be passive in the face of environmental destruction, but it does mean that we should think harder about how to combine a modern urban and diverse civilisation with greater social justice.

Yeah. But “thinking harder” isn’t a hallmark of the antiglobalization movement, is it?

MORE ON BELLESILES: There was actually another letter in the Emory Wheel today defending Bellesiles, also from a psychology professor who is affiliated with the Violence Studies program that Bellesiles founded. (Here’s a link to the Violence Studies faculty page). Unlike the letter from Patricia Brennan, mentioned below, this letter is entirely sensible: it doesn’t compare Bellesiles to an anti-lynching activist from 1902, and it doesn’t attempt to defend his work; it merely says that Bellesiles is entitled to keep his job until the University has investigated and come to a conclusion about whether he’s guilty of fraud.

JUST A THOUGHT: Maybe Israel should send some investigators to Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone to investigate claims of rape and child abuse by U.N. empoyees.

BELLESILES UPDATE: A letter in the Emory Wheel from Emory psychology professor Patricia Brennan suggests that Michael Bellesiles is the victim of a political witchhunt (she actually compares Bellesiles to an anti-lynching campaigner in the Old South), and says that Emory should be supporting him. Brennan asks some questions: “Exactly how many errors were found in Bellesiles’ work? Is this a large number of errors in light of the number of data points that he has provided? How many other books and research projects would fare better than Bellesiles’ when met with the same level of scrutiny? Where, and from whom, did this campaign against Bellesiles originate? Could this attack have been politically motivated?”

A response from Clayton Cramer (scroll down and click on the link) answers these questions: (1) Hundreds and hundreds; (2) Yes; (3) Nearly all of them; (4) from Clayton Cramer. The best part of Cramer’s response is this:

If this isn’t fraud, then it is presents an interesting opportunity for the psychology department to examine Professor Bellesiles, and explain about how someone with such a severe reading disability managed to earn a Ph.D. in History from University of California, Irvine, then become a full professor at Emory, without this serious reading disability being noticed.

Another reader, Don Williams, writes:

If Brennan is looking for a covert agent of the NRA, she might look at Bellesiles –he has made fools of our country’s gun control intelligentsia. The NRA could never have accomplished so much.

And he’s got a point. Note that Cramer and Williams both provide numerous links to support their positions — Cramer even links to a page showing actual copies of the original documents that Bellesiles misrepresents. Bellesiles’ defender Brennan does not provide any similar support, but merely spins conspiracy theories. Typical, I’m afraid.

UPDATE: Judging by this webpage, Prof. Brennan appears to be affiliated with the Violence Studies program that Bellesiles founded with the help of anti-gun scholar Arthur Kellerman. Her call for support is thus not exactly selfless.

HOWARD ANGLIN reports on the New York Sun’s front page today. Since you can’t get the Sun on the web yet, his regular posts are as close as you can come.

THOR VS. SPIDERMAN: With auxiliary insights into the worlds of religion, journalism, law, and politics. All courtesy of James Lileks.

SPEAKING OF WOMEN AND GUNS, Wendy McElroy takes on another bogus public-health study on guns. I’m sorry, but these guys should either start looking at actual public health issues, like anthrax, AIDS, or smallpox, or they should just go out of business. The junk science coming out of the public health community has gotten more and more atrocious, and more and more obvious in its political biases, over the past couple of decades — and the result is that these guys won’t have credibility even when they’re telling the truth, and when we need to hear what they’re saying. Er, if such a time ever comes.

UPDATE: Say, it’s worth noting that one of the stars of “violence studies” is none other than Michael Bellesiles, who, as this article in Salon reports,

came up with the idea of violence studies four years ago, “over a bottle of wine” with Arthur Kellerman, head of emergency medicine at Emory’s medical school. As Bellesiles recalls, “We were having dinner one night and fantasizing about what a perfect program for undergraduates would look like.” . . . The 3-year-old Emory curriculum has become a model for other universities.

Bellesiles, it appears, has an active fantasy life. Kellerman, it’s worth noting, is the author of what might be regarded as the seminal fatuous and misleading public-health study on guns, a long-debunked piece that gave rise to to the oft repeated (but false) factoid that “a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder.” Steven Milloy has a recent FoxNews piece that brings readers up to date on the many abuses of “public health research” in pursuit of a gun-control agenda.

UPDATE: Turns out Fritz Schranck was ahead of the curve in criticizing this study. I hadn’t seen his post until someone pointed it out — I don’t actually read all the weblogs every day, despite what it seems like (even, sometimes, to me).

ACCORDING TO THIS REPORT, a lot more women are taking up shooting. Couple this with the growth of women interested in the militiary (which the Washington Post has covered recently) and I think you’ve got the beginnings of a major cultural shift. Hmm. Where have I heard that before?

SET THE WAYBACK MACHINE FOR SEPTEMBER: You can see the posts via my archives, of course, but if you go here you can see InstaPundit in all its pre-redesign, uh, splendor.

OKAY, as a parent I understand — better in some ways than non-parents — why deciding not to have kids is a reasonable thing. But those “childfree” list folks just seem like a bunch of wackos. As Katie Granju writes: “Please note that these people are not just folks who have decided not to have kids. They are also not people who simply prefer adult company and become annoyed when parents allow their children to bother other people in public places. They are people who HATE children and amuse themselves by spending their time posting disgusting, often-violent fantasies of what they would like to do to babies and kids on their newsgroup.” Well, that’s free speech. But so is calling them wackos.

THE POWER OF INSTAPUNDIT: Forget all the linkage stuff from Eric Olsen and Max Power. One permalink and Media Minded has to come out of retirement. Yes, it was part of the Vast Blogging Conspiracy. Buwhahaha!

BLAME AMERICA! Naturally, that’s been the first instinct of a lot of people writing about last week’s school shooting in Germany. But here’s a particularly dumb example by an American who used to live in East Germany. The problem, you see, is the absence of the “cradle to grave care and oversight” that the communist East German government provided.

Well, it was comprehensive. They even helped you along with the “grave” part, if you caused them any trouble, or tried to leave. And say what you will, the Stasi was damned good at “oversight.”

ANDREW HOFER has a bunch of links for those interested in the Scientific American / Bjorn Lomborg debate.

TV COMMERCIALS ARE OLD HAT: Now it’s campaign videogames. Jesse Ventura’s the pioneer, but I like the Al Gore one the best.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis has some political videogames of his own, though the Ari Fleischer game sounds a bit familiar.

NEWSPAPER EXCEPTIONALISM: They got an exemption from campaign-finance laws, now they want an exemption from telemarketing regulations. Newspapers: They think they’re better than you.

DESMOND TUTU UPDATE: Alex Bensky writes from Detroit:

Desmond Tutu was here some years ago. His speech was abundantly and fawningly covered by the local media. A substantial portion of it was the usual Israel-bashing, which I’m sorry to say went down well with the mostly black audience.

At the press conference following the speech a reporter did something quite outrageous and asked Tutu a hard question, namely why he was holding the Israelis to such a high standard. His response was that, “We expect more from the Jews because they have been opporessed.”

I did not notice, then or later, that he asked higher standards of his own people, even though Bishop Tutu’s stock in trade is that he represents oppressed people. I can’t imagine why he would take this approach.

Ah yes, the moral superiority that comes from oppression. It has not been empirically demonstrated, in South Africa or elsewhere.

STEVEN DEN BESTE has an interesting series of posts (it starts here) on the transition from non-zero-sum to zero-sum competitions. He manages to tie together everything from the Burgess Shales to World War III, but unaccountably fails to discuss the implications for weblogs, which are currently still in the non-zero-sum phase but which will transition out of it soon enough.

MICHAEL BARONE says it’s rope-a-dope, and it’s working:

But these predictions ring hollow. The complaints show the weakness, not the strength, of the Saudis and of the Near East Bureau of the State Department, which so often takes up their cause. The accounts of the Bush-Abdullah meeting are very strong evidence that the president ignored the leakers’ counsel and kept to his course of opposing Palestinian terrorism and supporting Israeli resistance to it. . . .

Also, Abdullah did not leave Texas in a huff, and it doesn’t seem likely he’ll call an Islamic summit. Militarily the Saudis have little leverage. Their own armed forces are derisory, and the United States has shown in its campaign against Afghanistan that it can proceed without using its bases in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. can do the same against Iraq. We have forces in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Turkey, and evidently have been transferring troops and facilities out of Saudi Arabia and into other countries. The bitterness of the Saudis’ complaints in the Times shows not that they are strong and we are at their mercy but that they are weak and we are positioned to do what we wish.

You hear from the State Department and various Arab sources that Israel’s attempts to stamp out the terrorist network in the West Bank will just produce more terrorism. But the real fear, among the Arabs at least, is that Israel’s tough response will prove as effective in the medium and long term as it has in the short term. The Arabs are afraid that the Palestinians are losing their terror war and that Israel will be able to go along living in peace, without pressure to make concessions to Palestinians.

One disturbing — though not surprising — quote in Barone’s column comes from a State Department Arabist who says “we’re getting hammered” by the Arabs over our policies. What he means by this is that Arab diplomats are acting unhappy. This suggests that the State Department thinks its role is to get people to say nice things to State Department officials.

The State Department’s role, of course, is to get other countries to do what we want, without the need for going to war. At least, not usually: the Marines, after all, used to be called “State Department Troops.” Would that we had a State Department that understood its role similarly today.

NOW THIS IS JUST PATHETIC. Get a grip on yourself, man!

MATTHEW HOY has, ahem, “obtained” an advance copy of the CAIR report on Muslim civil rights in America. He has his comments and excerpts on his site.

PRIORITIES: Okay, while some people are whinging about the color of other people’s husbands and wives, something far more serious has happened. Ur-blogger Robert X. Cringely says he has lost a son to SIDS. He has a post on it, and a request for help. Go there.

UPDATE: Reader Katherine Snyder sends this link to the SIDS Alliance homepage. She adds: “I lost my son Jamie to SIDS 16 years ago, and if it weren’t for the wonderful people at the SIDS Alliance here in my hometown, I would never have gotten through that terrible time.”

OKAY, OKAY: A couple more on the interracial marriage thing and then I’m quits with it for a while — it’s taking over the page! Reader Kevin Maguire quotes an earlier reader who wrote that interracial marriages are becoming the norm in Hawaii and California:

He’s right about California.

I’m an American with Irish roots married to a Mexican. My wife’s sister is married to a white Jewish guy. Among our friends we have:

– Mexican guy married to a Chinese woman

– Indian woman married to a white guy

– Filipina woman married to a Portugese white guy. One of her
sisters is married to a white guy with Irish roots; the other
is married to a Irish/American Indian dude.

– Filipina dating a white guy and a black guy. Her previous
boyfriend was Moroccan.

– Irish guy married to a Hawaiian woman

– an Italian guy married to a black woman

– a Puerto Rican guy married to a white woman

Reaching out to coworkers I find:

– white guy, Chinese wife

– Hawaiian girl partnered to a white girl

– black girl partnered to a white girl

– white guy, Japanese wife

– Japanese guy, white wife

Written down like that it sounds like a mini UN, but it’s just everyday life in Los Angeles. Finally, a friend of a friend is the future of the California Republican party. Check out the picture.

But it’s not just California: my sister is married to a Filipino guy (whose brother is married to another white girl), and my grad school roommate is a white Spaniard whose wife is a black lawyer soon to enter Jersey City politics.

Yes, you see rather a lot of it here in Knoxville, which is far from L.A. or Honolulu. Knoxville is much-beloved of market researchers because its demographics approximate those of the nation as a whole, and interracial couples are everywhere — not, as a previous writer suggested, just around the University campus. Reader Timothy Sheridon writes:

The comment “Intelligent people seldom marry outside their race because it makes very little sense to do so.” from your e-mailer, is one of the most bizarre statements I’ve seen in a while. My experience from working and living in the Citadel of Geekdom, Silicon Valley, is that interracial marriage of smart people is becoming, if not the norm, a norm. The last six marriage ceremonies I’ve been a guest at involved mixed couples. Most of the newlyweds had at least one spouse who was a engineer. The next marriage I’m scheduled to attend is for an interracial couple that are both engineers. Of all the typical attributes engineers may have, high intelligence is one that is rarely absent.

As an aside, I must give you credit from even touching this issue. I sure your e-mail firestorm has been interesting.

Yeah, interesting — and voluminous. I’m frankly surprised that this is such a hot-button issue.

Of course, one thing that changes are people’s definitions of what’s white and what’s not. Irish/Italian marriages were considered mixed marriages not long ago, and not long before that Irish and Italians weren’t really considered “white” at all. I wouldn’t count as “white” under the Virginia anti-miscegenation statute struck down by the Supreme Court in the wonderfully-named case of Loving v. Virginia, since I’m one-eighth Native American (there was an exception, I seem to recall, for “descendants of Pocahontas,” who were honorary white people by law, but that wouldn’t apply to me). Personally, it’s just no big deal to me.

The most disturbing email I’ve gotten — of which I haven’t posted any — suggests that people only marry across racial lines for exotic sex kicks. Having engaged in my share of miscegenation when I was single, I have to say that that was neither the motive nor (any more than usual) the result, and I have to worry deeply about the psyches of people who think otherwise. Interestingly, most of that email came from people who identified themselves (since it’s the Internet, I can’t tell, of course) as minority women. I’m not sure what’s going on there, but I don’t think it’s anything good. I suppose that such a motivation wouldn’t make for an especially good marriage. But, heck, people who marry purely for exotic sex kicks — and people do in all sorts of ways — aren’t likely to have a successful long-term relationship regardless.

One thing that is clear about interracial marriage, and even dating to a lesser degree, is that it totally screws up the worldview of those who want to divide things into an us-vs.-them dynamic. To me, that’s a good thing. But then I don’t obtain my living, or my self-esteem, by fomenting racial division.

Okay, enough on this. Back to our regularly scheduled program of snide remarks about Fritz Hollings and Michael Moore.