THE WESTERN DHIMMIS: Nick Denton is sounding almost like Pim Fortuyn:

Let’s turn the system around. In the West, it is the Muslims who are the dhimmis, the tolerated minority; they should be free to practice, so long as their Islam is a diluted Episcopalian version, expressed in a sabbath on Fridays, holidays at unusual times of the year, traditional names for children, and an annual parade through Brooklyn.

In other words, Western governments should make clear that the toleration of Muslim minorities is conditional. The West is a package deal: the prosperity that has attracted Muslim immigrants is a function of the Western tradition. Fundamentalist Islam is not, as the morally ambivalent would have it, as valid as any other system. Here’s the Western dhimma: accept the supremacy of Western humanist values — equal rights for women and sexual minorities, freedom of speech, and family law — or leave.

Leave? Isn’t that a bit harsh? Well, according to the Moroccan jurist al-Wansharisi, it is the duty of an orthodox Muslim to emigrate rather than remain under infidel rule. Bernard Lewis writes: “If the infidels were tolerant, this made the need to depart more rather than less urgent, since the danger of apostasy was correspondingly greater. Even Muslim tyranny, says al-Wansharisi, is better than Christian justice.”

Nick’s sounding more Warbloggerish than most Warbloggers. Kinda like Eric Alterman. I see this as a good thing.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE on The Nation’s internal debate over 9/11 conspiracy theories.

MATT WELCH says the red/blue divide is back, in a column at TechCentralStation.

Gee, since I’m plugging a column at TCS, should I disclose that I write for ’em too? After all, otherwise you’d never know unless you (1) read this weblog, or (2) read TechCentralStation.

There’s probably some idiot who’d say I should, or who at least would be prepared to argue that I should if it were politically useful to do so.

BOGUS ETHICS-CLAIM ALERT: Dave Kopel is under fire because the tagline at the end of his Rocky Mountain News media criticism column doesn’t mention that he works for the Independence Institute, which receives tobacco money.

Ho hum. Paul Krugman’s tagline doesn’t mention that he got Enron money, and the media-ethics watchdogs haven’t been too hot on that. And despite his truth-in-blogging campaign, Mickey Kaus still hasn’t disclosed that he’s really a Rhinoceros. In the interest of full disclosure, though, I should disclose the following:

(1) Although Kopel and I have never actually met, we’ve coauthored law-review articles and op-eds together (including one on the rave issue), thanks to the miracle of the Internet; and

(2) Though I included a tagline with my latest FoxNews column criticizing Joe Biden’s dumb RAVE Act that disclosed this, Fox went with the usual one instead. It should have said:

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee and produces the techno band Mobius Dick.

Big whoop. These sorts of charges are what Peter Morgan and I called “Petty Blifil” in our book The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business and Society — the use of trivial ethics charges as a means of discrediting someone whose real crime is disagreement with the maker of the charges. (The “Blifil” part is from Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, which has striking resonances for today’s political environment).

Special bonus deepthink point: All the stuff disclosed above is discoverable in moments on Google. (Here, for example, is what you get when you search “Dave Kopel.” Actually, I think you could find all that stuff out just by following links from this page.) Does the wide availability of Google reduce the obligation to affirmatively disclose potential conflicts of interest when anyone can find out about someone’s affiliations, etc., with very little effort anyway?

UPDATE: I should also disclose — in light of my oft-expressed hostility to the House of Saud — that East Tennessee is poised to become a rival oil producer:

According to Pryor, the drillers encountered oil pressures at 2,500 feet underground that they would not normally expect to find at less than 10,000 feet. The well’s flow rate was calculated at 12,000 barrels of oil in the first 24 hours with a flowing casing pressure of 1,750 pounds per square inch.

“This is a huge well for anywhere in the United States, but dwarfs anything ever discovered in Tennessee,” Pryor said.

Oil. Black gold. Texas tea. I may go out on the back 40 and see if I can pull a Jed Clampett.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hesiod Theogeny emails that Douglas Adams was a Rhino, too! Hmm. With company like that, maybe I should be convert to Rhinism myself.

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, I was joking about the oil and conflicts of interest, but it turns out that one of my environmental-law colleagues, nationally known as a big green, owns some land very close to that well. “I’m sure there are environmentally friendly ways to extract the oil,” he said. I think he was joking. . . .

OKAY, THIS IS THE LAST UPDATE, I PRACTICALLY PROMISE: Kaus is reporting on a deal between The American Prospect and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that sounds, well, a lot fishier than anything Kopel’s been accused of. Will it make Romenesko?

WELL, MAYBE THIS WILL BE THE LAST: Here’s a piece on the comprehensiveness of Google that supports my observation above.

DID THE MUSIC INDUSTRY CAUSE THE TELECOM CRASH? Interesting analysis.

ANNATOPIA HAS MORE on the dumb Biden/Hatch RAVE Act. It’s a righteous Fisking.

DAVE WINER is blogging about Andrea See and sex.

ERIC OLSEN has the story behind the story on Steve Earle, complete with email from the reporter, who turns out be a musician himself. Interesting.

EUGENE VOLOKH reports trouble with Dell, too.

IT’S HARD TO HAVE A FAMINE in a fertile country like Zimbabwe. But Claudia Rosett says that Robert Mugabe is up to the task.

Maybe the United States should declare Mugabe our ally in the war on terrorism — thus ensuring that the international human rights community will go into high gear condemning him.

OUCH! THIS IS EMBARRASSING:

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone –– Losing your job, quitting school, going broke and moving back home with your mother after living abroad for years would be tough on anyone.

It’s even tougher when you’re a former military dictator who once had the power to execute opponents at will.

Valentine Strasser became the world’s youngest head of state when he seized power in 1992 at the age of 25. But the limelight didn’t last – four years later, he was ousted in another coup.

“I’m basically living off my mother now. She’s been very supportive,” the 35-year-old said at a neighborhood bar on the outskirts of Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital.

“It’s been tough. I’m unemployed, but I’m coping.”

I’ll bet all the other ex-dictators make fun of him, too. Oh, well. At least he’s not a TimeWarner/AOL shareholder.

UPDATE: My brother writes to disagree:

I don’t think the Strasser story is embarrassing at all. Despite having been the world’s youngest Head of State, he should be a role model for military rulers everywhere. Note… he clearly didn’t steal huge sums of money and stash them in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands, he is not hugely reviled by the populace and bears little grudge for his ouster. His response to being out of power? ‘Maybe I’ll run for president someday, but right now I think I’ll have a beer.’ If more military rulers had such perspective the world would be a better place!

Good point, bro. (He’s the smart one. I’m the cute one.)

THE L.A. EXAMINER is reporting more problems for California gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon, including worries about whether he’s rich enough. No one, however, is accusing Simon of being a large, horned mammal.

HAS ANYONE TRIED correlating stock-market movements with Blogger/Blogspot outages? If there’s any match, we’re in for a rough ride today.

I feel enormous gratitude toward Pyra and Ev Williams for kick-starting the Blogosphere, but I can’t help but feel that the problems there are heading toward a tipping point. At the very least, I recommend getting off Blogspot (hosting isn’t that expensive, unless you use a lot of bandwidth, like, er, me).

HOWARD KURTZ is imagining Martha Stewart in handcuffs. Take a cold shower, Howard.

MICKEY KAUS is denying charges that he’s a rhinoceros. He suggests, however, that Paul Krugman is a cocoon-dweller. My six-year-old daughter informs me that this makes Krugman a moth, “because a butterfly comes from a chrysalis.”

RAVING LUNACY: My FoxNews column is officially up. Follow the link in it for more background, or go here to read a brief by the ACLU and the Electronic Music Defense and Education Fund that I contributed to. We won.

UPDATE: Reader Brannon Denning writes:

One thing that occurred to me about the prosecutions is that this is a great way to make sure that cops have the opportunity to prosecute lots of white, upper-middle-class folks in their war on drugs to make it seem, you know, less racist (not that I believe it is) while not seeming to let up one whit on the “war on drugs.” That probably explains the zeal with which the Dems are signing on.

Interesting. Though the promoters are often non-upper class, non-whites.

DAVE WINER explains the market rally.

SEKIMORI strikes again: I love the graphic on this newly-redesigned blog.

DELLWATCH: An hour on the phone, with two different people, and supposedly another technician is going to be dispatched.

Here’s my question: don’t these companies have computers? I mean, looking me up in a database and dispatching a technician should take 90 seconds, tops. Instead, I spend 20 minutes with one guy, who’s tapping computer keys throughout, only to find that he can’t actually do anything with my “case.” He’s the wrong “center” for me, whatever that means. What’s more, his phone won’t let him (he says) transfer me. I have to call another number and wait on hold all over again. Then the next person took 20 minutes tapping keys on her computer. “I had to transfer all the history,” she said. I don’t know what that means, but if it takes 20 minutes to transfer this history — “we fucked up, send this guy a technician” — then they must be using abacuses, not computers.

Note to auditors: all that money supposedly spent on information technology? Figure out where it really went.

Bonus Lileks-like moment of irony: The on-hold music was Chicago, singing “After all that we’ve been through, I will make it up to you, I promise you.” Michael Dell should make it up to me.

BELLESILES UPDATE: The History News Network reports that the investigation is complete:

HNN has been told that that the independent panel appointed by Emory University to investigate Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America has finished its report and submitted it.

The university told HNN that it will not have a comment “until the end of the summer.”

Mr. Bellesiles has declined to comment.

The names of the panel members are secret. The university has indicated that it may never reveal their names even after the report is made public.

Now that’s a real confidence-builder.

KAUS-WORSHIPPING RHINO ALERT: No, really.

Funny, Kaus doesn’t look Rhinish.

I’M GOING TO BE ON HUGH HEWITT’S RADIO SHOW in about 90 seconds, if it airs in your area.

Here’s the link for live streaming.

JOE BIDEN’S RAVING LUNACY — (and Orrin Hatch’s) and why it means homeland security is a joke. My FoxNews column for tomorrow is up.

JONATHAN LAST says that Grover Norquist is overwrought and Neil Lewis of the New York Times is a bit gullible.

DELLWATCH: After being promised a callback from Dell within two hours last night (never happened), and a technician today (nope) I’m pretty down on Dell. But Dan Hartung emails that my experience is unusual:

Dell guy a no-show? THAT’S unusual, in my experience. Make sure you let them know — they contract the service out and there will definitely be a consequence.

I don’t know what to say about the call. They’ve always called me back, generally well before I expect it.

In my experience, the only company that’s had better support was (defunct) Zenith laptops (and I worked on that support desk!).

Well, maybe their local contractor, BancTec, is just no good. Or maybe somebody died suddenly or something. But I’m pretty disappointed with Dell. I had better luck with my old eMachine.