THIS PIECE ON FANTASY IDEOLOGY AND AL QAEDA has been linked by a lot of blogs, but people keep emailing me asking why I haven’t linked it. So here it is.

HERE’S A NASTY LITTLE BIT OF HATE from Juan Andrade in the Chicago Sun-Times. Mr. Andrade is not only hateful — he’s ignorant. Here’s what he says about Charlton Heston:

In his taped remarks, Heston compared himself and his own resolve to John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ronald Reagan: three of the most revered names in America. He has nothing in common with any of them, save for Reagan, with Alzheimer’s.

No, nothing in common at all — except that Heston marched with King. (Here is a photo of Heston with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte during the 1963 March on Washington).

As the antigun folks get more desperate, they get nastier. And this is pretty nasty. (Thanks, I guess, to reader Zachary Barbera for pointing it out).

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has a much lengthier post on this piece, which he characterizes as “blind hatred.”

And just to make Mr. Andrade’s day, I’ll link to the Charlton Heston Online Shrine and to Heston’s speech at Harvard Law School on culture wars. I usually don’t like the “war” metaphor there, but Mr. Andrade’s piece certainly sounds like something coming from the bunker, doesn’t it?

UPDATE: Some people have been sending polite letters to the U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute, with which Andrade is affiliated, suggesting that this piece reflects badly on the Institute.

I’VE JUST DELETED ABOUT A THOUSAND unread emails as part of the effort to clear out the mess in my inbox. If you’ve sent me mail and I haven’t replied, well. . . sorry. I really do try to read them all, and reply to as many as I can. There’s just so much email. And as Newman said “the mail never stops!”

UPDATE: Um, several people have resent emails “in case I deleted them.” This defeats the purpose. Unless your email was earthshatteringly important, please don’t do that.

SO MANY ISLANDS, SO LITTLE TIME, is an Indonesian blog with lots of interesting links, many of them related to Islamist terror. (Found via Sassafrass).

UPDATE: Joe writes that the terror information is just because of recent events, and not really the intended focus of his blog.

Of course, I could say that, too.

I DON’T GENERALLY LIKE FLASH INTROS, but this one, on the website for Canadian breakbeat/house/jazz-funk band The New Deal is pretty cool.

HMM. MAYBE THE EUROPEAN UNION SHOULD BE ADDED to the lawsuit against entities supporting terrorism.

JOSH MARSHALL UPDATE: He’s got the latest on his blog.

AIRPORT SECURITY HASSLES are causing flyers to drive wherever possible instead. No surprise there. And anything less than 500 miles is short enough to make driving faster. And often less frustrating.

ACCORDING TO THE GOODBYECYNTHIA.COM WEBSITE, four of the named defendants in the just-filed lawsuit against 9/11 terrorists and backers are also on Cynthia McKinney’s donor list. Expect to hear more about this one.

DAN FARBER has more on the NSF converging technologies report that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

WE’RE AT WAR, and the press just hasn’t noticed, writes Mark Ericson in The Asia Times. I guess somebody forgot to send out a press release.

UPDATE: And I’m beginning to thing that more obvious hostilities may come sooner rather than later.

GEDANKENPUNDIT has some more thoughts inspired by maps, and wonders why breaking Iraq up is supposed to be a bad idea given that it’s an artificial country composed of people who hate each other, and who apparently can be held together only by a brutal dictatorship. Why, indeed?

DC STATEHOOD PROPONENTS have sent me a lot of email with the slogan “no taxation without representation.” Ben Domenech has heard that one too, and he’s got the answer.

SHIRI NEGARI UPDATE: Reader S.E. Brenner was moved by the memorial page to terror-bomb victim Shiri Negari that I linked to the other day. She now sends this link to a BBC story on the human cost of terror, revolving around the Shiri Negari story, and adds this comment:

This was a five-minute piece on the 5:00 pm news. You can click on the link to hear it. Not only did it make me (a right bitch and total non-cryer) cry in the middle of the crowded book store caff, it had a marked effect on the announcers, who are normally quite unsympathetic to all things Israeli alive or dead. They were subdued and gulping too after it played. So, warning: Do not listen if in a fragile mood.

She’s right.

UPDATE: Here are some more victims of “Islamic militants,” who aren’t getting as much attention as they deserve.

JOHN HAWKINS has found a more murderous and misogynistic stuff over on the ClearGuidance bulletin board for Islamic youth.

MURDERERS ARE DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME: Eugene Volokh responds to the claim that murders result from ordinary people who get angry, and happen to have a gun around. Most murderers, he points out, have rather lengthy and serious criminal histories. And though they may murder “acquaintances,” those acquaintances tend to be other criminals.

BELLESILES UPDATE: James Lindgren has a devastating dissection of the many errors in Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America in the Yale Law Journal. Unfortunately, it’s not available on the Web, and they haven’t sent him the final PDF file necessary to put it online. However, he’s given me permission to put a copy of the galley proofs online here until the final version becomes available. The differences are minor; I believe the final version is available on Westlaw and Lexis for those with access to those services. For everyone else, click here.

A READER FROM DC WEIGHS IN ON DC STATEHOOD:

You are absolutely right on DC statehood. As a resident of the District since 1976 (and also in 1973-74), I am absolutely opposed to statehood. The Framers of the Constitution were aware of what happened to London during the Gordon riots of 1780 and didn’t want the federal government to be intimidated by mobs uncontrolled by local government. It’s sort of like they anticipated Marion Barry.

When statehood advocates first started making noises in the 1950s, the District, with 802,178 people in the 1950 Census, was larger than eight states. Today it is larger than just one state, Wyoming. It is one-sixth of a metropolitan area. Why should one-sixth of a metropolitan area be a separate state? (OK, you could say that Delaware is a smaller proportion of the Philadelphia Consolidated

Metropolitan Statistical Area; but who would create Delaware anew today?) . . .

No one is forced to live in the District of Columbia. Every adult who lives there knows they don’t live in a state. In the 1950s it could be argued that a lot of black people were forced to live in the District because they couldn’t buy houses in the Maryland or Virginia suburbs. Today they can. A majority of blacks in the Washington CSMSA live outside the District of Columbia.

Sorry for venting, but–please, please, don’t make me part of a state. I can move to Maryland or Virginia any time I want to. (Or better yet, establish a 183-day-a-year residence [elsewhere], in which case I would not have to pay the District’s 9 percent income tax.)

Yeah, I remember that income tax. But the sales tax was high, too!

BELLESILES UPDATE: A reader from Emory writes:

As for the investigation into Bellesiles’ scholarship, expect an announcement from the University on that any day now. That’s what the PR folks have indicated. Last week, a faculty member was told by an Emory media relations officer that the University would have a new announcement in the next 7 to 10 days.

I’ve been told that the independent panel charged with evaluating Bellesiles’ work reported back to the university on July 1. It’s not clear why it’s taken so long to release the results from that panel, but the dean of Emory College– Robert Paul, who’s handling the investigation– was on vacation most of last month. It’s likely that they waited for Paul to return to campus before they made their new announcement. Far from a deliberate attempt to delay and obstruct, this may simply be a slow process made even slower by Paul’s summer vacation.

One hopes. Many rumors have suggested that Bellesiles was going to be bought out, with no formal finding of wrongdoing. But they’re just rumors.

TED TURNER LAND GRAB UPDATE: Turner has surrendered his claim to the land on St. Helena Island, owned by descendants of Gullah slaves, that he was attempting to claim. Good move, Ted. But then, when InstaPundit and Michael Moore unite in a good cause, the result is well-nigh irresistible.

UPDATE: Here, courtesy of reader Simon Ashton, is another story on the subject.

HOWARD OWENS has the first review I’ve seen of the new Supreme Beings of Leisure CD, Divine Operating System, due out next month. I’m insanely jealous that he got a review copy. Where’s mine, dammit?

MATTHEW HOY SAYS THAT Eric Alterman is wrong about the Al Aqsa Martyr Brigades, Marwan Barghouti, and the prospects for negotiated peace with the Palestinians any time soon.

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY has Louis Farrakhan stumping for her.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

“I’m worried that just as dryers have a knack of making socks disappear, the federal government has discovered a core competency of losing computers,” Grassley wrote White House budget chief Mitch Daniels.

This time it’s the IRS. And the computers may hold private taxpayer data that would be valuable to hackers and identity thieves.

MORE EVIDENCE that Richard Clarke is right about the need for folks to sniff out computer security holes. This is kind of sad — but not as sad as if nobody were doing this sort of test.