WAR AND PEACE, PACIFISM AND SIN: Donald Sensing has some observations.

BLOGROLL UPDATES: The blogroll is huge. It’s almost beyond my control to keep updated (but Matthew Yglesias’s link finally goes to his new site!). I do my best, though. I’ve added a few new ones, too. In response to popular demand (well, several emails) I’ve moved a few people up from the general blogroll to the big-journalism section, where they’re easier to find and probably really belong. (What, Postrel writes for the New York Times and isn’t “big journalism?” asks a reader. Good point.) If you notice any errors, let me know.

WHY AM I BLOGGING SO MUCH? My daughter (whose computer is in my study) has a new computer game, and she’s so into it I don’t want to make her quit.

ALPHECCA WEIGHS IN on the whole Conservative Media Bias issue. On the other side of the question, I got a long, thoughtful email from Dave Roberts, endorsing this piece on the Daily Howler.

It seems to me that there are three issues here. One is that the media world is very different than it was the last time we had a Republican President. (This is the gist of Alphecca’s comments). Another is that any President has a lot of power to set the media agenda — most of the anti-Bush complaints along these lines seem to me to be near-verbatim echoes of what I heard conservatives say about Clintonian media control. And finally, and most interesting, is the extent to which a lot of journalists and pundits, including many who lean left, seem to despise Al Gore as a phony at a very personal level. So far I haven’t seen a piece that pulls all three of these threads together.

NICK DENTON SAYS I’M UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT.

MY SHARIA AMOUR: Mark Steyn on the new, culturally-sensitive Miss World pageant.

But you just know that he wrote the whole column to have an excuse for the pun in the title.

LOTS OF VENEZUELA UPDATES at El Sur. Just keep scrolling.

CHARLES OLIVER has thought about Mary Daly’s support for a world with only 10% men and he likes the idea: “A 9:1 ratio? Heck, Hugh Hefner insists on a mere 2:1 ratio of women to men for his parties. So in essence, this arch feminist would turn the world into the Playboy Mansion with spares. Sounds good to me.”

Of course, Charles is assuming he’d be one of the men left. . . .

Meanwhile, Jim Miller reports on a nation that had a ratio leaning that way, but with results that Mary Daly probably wouldn’t endorse.

ANOTHER BLOGOSPHERE WEDDING is in the offing. Congratulations and best wishes!

BELLICOSE WOMEN ARE A PROBLEM FOR THE DEMOCRATS, reports Thomas Edsall:

Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, found a dramatic shift in women’s views about the creation of a national missile defense system. Just before the attacks, his polling showed that 29 percent of women and 42 percent of men agreed that “we need a national missile defense system right now.” In October, after the attacks, support among men grew only slightly, to 47 percent, while among women the percentage soared to 51 percent, with 59 percent of women with children backing immediate creation of such a system.

Similarly, a post-9/11 survey by the Winston Group, a Republican firm, found that a higher percentage of women than men backed the idea of arming commercial airline pilots (76 percent as compared with 73 percent).

All of these findings point to the increased receptivity of women to the generally more aggressive and tougher stands of Republicans on issues of military preparedness and dealing with foreign adversaries. These shifts may be temporary, a product of the terrorist threat. But while a war with Iraq might come and go, no one knows how long the threat of terrorist attack will continue. There is no reason to believe that this aspect of the political environment will change in the near future.

Meanwhile, Al From and Bruce Reed have some advice for the Party:

[S]top pretending that we can win a majority simply by energizing our base. . . .

Half that battle is simply respecting the values of mainstream America in the first place. We will never be the party that loves guns most, but we can respect law-abiding citizens’ rights to own them. We will never be the pro-life party, but we can show that we want abortion to be rare as well as legal.

I think they’re on the right track.

ARE WOMEN MORE LIKELY THAN MEN TO SLEEP WITH INTERNS? This poll says so, for whatever that’s worth.

(Via Amish Tech Support).

AFGHAN WOMEN ARE MAKING DOCUMENTARY VIDEOS — but they’re having trouble getting them on TV. I think we should encourage Afghan state television to broadcast these.

OKAY, THAT’S A NEW ONE: I was doing a post on the laptop, when the cats chased each other across my lap. A paw hit the wrong key and the post got deleted somehow. Heh.

INSTAPUNDIT IS NUMBER ONE! I’m not sure what this means, but it’s nice to be on top. Thanks to reader Michael Safrin for the link.

GEITNER SIMMONS has some observations regarding hate speech, and accusations thereof.

THE SAUDI CONNECTION TO 9/11 GETS MORE ATTENTION in an article by Stephen Schwartz in The Weekly Standard. Wahhabism, the state religion of the Saudi royal family, is intimately bound up with terrorism, he writes.

HATE CRIME IN MINNESOTA.

UPDATE: Juan Gato, channeling Tom Daschle, blames Garrison Keillor.

IT’S “BUY NOTHING DAY” AND — to judge from the crowds at the mall parking lot — this is having about as much impact as similar advocacy-group publicity stunts. Steven Chapman asks:

Why is it that every Left-Green-Christian plan for Saving The Planet (TM) involves individuals spending less and having less, and governments taxing more and spending more? And is it any wonder so many of us think they’re retarded for trying to squeeze the square peg of Less into the round hole of More?

No wonder at all.

INTERESTING REPORT FROM CANADA:

Toronto’s recent wave of street murders — more than 40 since the beginning of 2001 — debunks the claim that Ottawa’s gun registry is making Canadians safer from crime. As the price tag for this colossal bureaucratic mess nears $1-billion, it is clearly time for the federal government to consider shutting it down and redirecting some or all of the resources to real crime-fighting measures.

Nearly all of the Toronto murders have been committed with handguns. Yet handguns have been subject to registration in Canada since 1934. In fact, registration has done nothing to stem the use of handguns in murder: In the past 15 years, the proportion of all firearm murders committed with handguns has nearly doubled in Canada from just over one-third to nearly two-thirds.

Imagine that — just as gun-rights supporters predicted.

WHAT’S MOST INTERESTING ABOUT THIS ITEM on a “mystery contrail” is that it’s evidence of someone comparing satellite images with radar tracks and air-traffic-control information.