THESE PROPOSALS for giving the military law-enforcement powers are a dreadful idea. Soldiers make lousy police. After a while acting as police, they make lousy soldiers, too. That the idea comes from the unimpressive Tom Ridge doesn’t make it any more, er, impressive.

The home front in the war on terrorism has been a pathetic morass of dumb PR moves, incompetence, and vaguely Orwellian proposals. This is another example, combining elements of all three. (And, of course, there’s this one, too.)

We’d better win this war on the ground in Iraq — and Saudi Arabia — because it’s not going to be won at home. Nobody ever won by playing defense. And our homeland defense team looks to be junior-varsity, at best.

UPDATE: This story from the Washington Times makes it sound more like a Biden initiative. He’s behind the dumb and dangerous RAVE Act too. Biden’s turned into a civil-liberties menace. Good thing Dick Armey’s standing up for civil liberties.

KEN LAYNE: Fashion guru to the stars.

ANDREA SEE had some words of wisdom on the economy back on 9/3 that alarmist journalists and pundits should remember now:

Anyone with half a brain (and did a basic class in economics) would know economies move in cycles. We’ve had the high point, now it’s time for the low. Sucks as it does, it really needs to happen.

The same guys who hyped the upturn are now tut-tutting as they hype the downturn. Me, I’m meeting with my broker this week. When the blood runs in the streets, buy.

And, by the way, it’s not as if financial fraud is an American innovation, you know, despite what the New York Times suggests.

A GROUP OF EUROPEAN ACADEMICS, including two Nobel laureates, is organizing opposition to the anti-Israel academic boycott.

WORLDCOM IS FILING CHAPTER 11. You don’t say.

UPDATE: Now it’s official.

ANDREW SULLIVAN writes in the New York Sun that Howell Raines is playing poll politics.

It’s nice to see the Sun running pieces like this.

I HAVE A NEW BLOGCHILD: It’s AgendaBender, a gay-issues group blog, one of whose authors says he was forced to start his own blog by my limited posting while on vacation.

Ve haff vays to make you blog. . . . Bwahahaha!

DOW FALLS, POLITICS RISES: PunditWatch is up!

TED TURNER GULLAH LAND-GRAB UPDATE: Democratic weblogger WyethWire has more information on Ted Turner’s efforts to wrest a parcel of land on St. Helena Island, S.C. away from a group of descendants of slaves who want to keep the land from being developed. (If the second, permalink, doesn’t work — as has been all too common with Blogger sites lately — follow the first link and scroll if needed). He has links to maps and all sorts of other information. Excerpt:

And to add insult to injury, the island that Ted Turner wants to turn into his own playground is home to the Penn Center, where Dr. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference planned the March on Washington.

I’m quite surprised at how little attention this story has gotten beyond these reports in local papers. Is it because of some sort of professional courtesy among media barons?

BOY, the Royal Marines are looking a lot better these days.

UPDATE: Robert Pupkin emails that the Royal Marines don’t have a monopoly on attractive female soldiers, and sends this link as proof.

“GREAT MAXWELL’S DEMONS!” Here’s some interesting stuff about the Second Law of Thermodynamics at small scales, with implications for nanotechnology.

Me, I want a Maxwellian air-conditioning system.

LEFTIES FOR SCHOOL CHOICE: Katie Allison Granju joins this growing club. She also promises to resume regular blogging.

MY LINK TO Stuart Buck’s revived webpage was bad — I was exhausted when I posted it last night. It’s fixed, but here it is again in case you missed it. Buck had an interesting blog going early last fall, but was forced off the Web by officious types at the D.C. Circuit, where he was clerking. Since he’s Blogger-powered, I’m not even going to try to link to the individual post, but he makes an excellent point in what is his top item at the moment:

The New York Times’ prominent treatment of an article on civilian casualties in Afghanistan makes me want to ask: Has there ever been another war in history where civilian casualties were so few that journalists could track down virtually all of them individually?

Buck notes that, paradoxically, this individual treatment may make civilian casualties actually seem greater than if the people involved were subsumed in a huge faceless mass.

One hopes that journalists and pundits will bear Buck’s point in mind as they do their jobs — because if they don’t, it’s possible that politicians and the military will bear it in mind as they do their jobs.

UPDATE: Bill Herbert has more on this, and also notes that the Taliban were using civilians as shields, something that more recent reports tend to leave out.

DICK ARMEY: DEFENDER OF FREEDOM. Jay Caruso emails this link to a story that I had missed, saying that Dick Armey won’t allow the TIPS program, or a national ID card, to pass.

That’s great news. But what will we do when he’s gone?

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE INTERNET IF WORLDCOM GOES DOWN? According to this Slashdot post nothing good. There’s also an interesting thread on unauditable voting machines. Jeez.

NOT EVERYTHING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DOES IS DUMB: Check out this NSF/DOC report on the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. (Warning: huge PDF file; dialup users should follow this link only if you’ve got some time). Based on a quick look, it’s uneven — but they’re focusing on the right things, and they’ve got some very interesting things to say.

WATCHING THE WATCHERS: Brad Templeton is taking David Brin seriously in his response to the TIPS program. This is a must-follow link.

I haven’t weighed in on this one, because I’m still not clear on what TIPS will actually be like. It sounds to me like the crimewatch program my town has, in which bus drivers, etc., are supposed to watch for crime and report it. As near as I can tell, that program involved putting some stickers on buses and making drivers sit through a videotape informing them that when guys in ski masks run out of a liquor store, there’s probably a robbery in progress. The program then disappeared except for the stickers and — no doubt — some bureaucrat allegedly tasked with “overseeing” it.

I don’t think it will be much use against terrorism. Our current domestic-security apparatus has shown itself utterly unable to cut through the data fog — it can’t even process tips from freakin’ FBI agents! who think they’ve spotted a terrorist, as the Moussaoui case demonstrated. It can’t possibly handle the vast quantity of low quality data produced by a million active participants, and there’s no indication that anyone is addressing that issue, making the whole thing basically an exercise in PR.

My first inclination is that TIPS is disturbing as much because it indicates that the bureaucracy is still out of touch with reality and pursuing make-work pseudo solutions as because of any threat to civil liberties.

The solution to the terrorism issue is to cut off the snake’s head — which I think is in Saudi Arabia, not America. Everything else is just windowdressing and bureaucratic empire-building.

I warned about this on September 11. To some degree, of course, such empire-building is inevitable. But the danger of bureaucracy-as-usual is greater here than in past wars. That’s because the absence of an obvious battle front means that (1) bureaucrats are less constrained; but (2) public support is harder to maintain. That means that the folks at the top will have to keep the bureaucracy on a short leash, or political support for the war will evaporate, and Bush will be a one-termer.

The last war in which bureaucratic imperatives took precedence over winning the war was Vietnam. That doesn’t seem to be happening in the military struggle, but it seems to be well on the way to taking place on the home front.

This would be a campaign issue for the Democrats — except that, as Joe Biden’s dumb RAVE Act demonstrates — they’re no better at standing up to bureaucratic attacks on civil liberties than the Republicans.

UPDATE: Don’t miss this chillingly realistic example of the TIPS system in action.

LONG-DORMANT BLOGGER STUART BUCK IS BACK! Stuart was barred from blogging when some judges on the Court of Appeals (where he was clerking) decided it was too controversial for a clerk. He’s done clerking now, and offers many interesting thoughts on spectrum, politics, and more.

HERE’S A PRETTY GOOD ARTICLE on weblogs and traditional media, from next week’s SF Gate.

WELL, I’M BACK FROM VACATION. Regular blogging will resume tomorrow and Monday, and continue until I take another vacation. Sadly, that won’t be for a while.

TAPPED is defending cryonics against charges of atheism. Er, make that “silly charges of atheism.” There’s a lot more over at Rand Simberg’s weblog, and at Natalie Solent’s, too, with links there to still more discussions.

UPDATE: And be sure to read this post by Jay Manifold.

SPINSANITY SAYS IT HAS IDENTIFIED ANOTHER “SCHEER SMEAR,” and proceeds to dissect Bob Scheer’s latest column assailing Dick Cheney.

BEST OF THE WEB has information on a planned protest at the Saudi Embassy in Washington next Thursday (if you’ve been reading InstaPundit, or BOTW, you know why).

It also features a link to this letter from eighteen state attorneys general (including six Democrats) in support of the individual-right interpretation of the Second Amendment. Check out footnote 1.

UPDATE: Bill Quick critiques a study on gun safety that the Washington Post rather uncritically hyped today.

HERE’S A WASHINGTON POST article on the dumb anti-rave legislation I mentioned last week. Here’s an earlier piece that Dave Kopel and I wrote on this topic in NRO.

The thuggish idiocy, corruption, and pathetic lack of contact with reality that have marked the War on Drugs are the biggest arguments that our government isn’t up to handling the War on Terrorism.

NICK SCHULZ looks at Worldwatch’s Lester Brown, who seems to think highly of China’s one-child policy, which is effectively a forced-abortion policy.

My position on this is pro-choice: if you want an abortion, you should be able to have one. If you don’t, the goverment shouldn’t make you.

Brown, I think, illustrates the not-so-latent authoritarianism that pervades too much of the environmental movement.