MIKE SILVERMAN HAS A CATALOG of all the dumb Saddam-portraiture that Iraqis are forced to endure. I like the last one best.

LET THE FISKING BEGIN: John Scalzi has posted a 14,000 word article by Ted Rall arguing that the war in Afghanistan is really about oil. (You might want to start with this debunking from those arch-warmongers at The American Prospect.)

Meanwhile, speaking of Afghanistan, Bill Quick delivers an auto-Fisking of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. by simply repeating what Schlesinger said a year ago.

UPDATE: On the “War for Oil” front, reader Merv Benson writes:

If the US was really going to war for oil why would we waste our time and money on Afghanistan and Iraq. Mexico and Venezuela are much closer and do

not have any of those nasty WMD. The petro-war theory is paranoia for the petrophobes. The same can be said for the War against Islam crowd. If it were really a war against Islam (as opposed to a war against militant Islamist and secular WMD builders) there are much better targets that would be much easier to hit.

Yes, but this requires thinking.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Brian Carnell “fact-checks” Rall.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE on GlobalSecurity.Org, which is functioning almost as a public intelligence agency:

“We’re doing a better job explaining the (American) government’s case (for military action) than the government is,” added John Pike, Globalsecurity.org’s director.

His five-person group, founded in December 2000 and operating out of a basement in the Washington suburbs, has a “pathetic” budget of only a few hundred thousand dollars. The money comes mostly from charitable groups with an interest in preventing nuclear proliferation, like the Scherman and Colombe foundations.

With such meager resources, Pike noted, his group wouldn’t be able to produce a “smoking gun image” definitively showing the state of Saddam’s nuclear program.

But, he said, GlobalSecurity can show that “facilities known to be previously associated with weapons of mass destruction have been rebuilt and are currently active.”

Shouldn’t somebody be troubled that John Pike is doing a better job of making the government’s case than the government is?

THIS REPORT SAYS THAT WATER HAS BEEN FOUND in the atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars. There’s a big universe out there. Let’s go.

HEATHER HAVRILESKY has sound advice for the world’s freakazoids. In other words, still the same at the domain that dare not speak its name.

LUNAR UPDATE: This Boston Globe story by Larry Hanlon gets it right:

Of more concern than China to many space enthusiasts, however, are some questions raised by TransOrbital’s license itself: How is it that the United States has the power to license lunar exploration? Has the country claimed ownership of the moon?

Neither is the case, says Laurie, who reports that TransOrbital’s application took two years to clear hurdles lined up by the US Department of State, Department of Defense, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. ”Whenever you’re sending anything up into space it gets strict reviews,” he says. The scrutiny that led to TransOrbital’s nine-year license was more a matter of proving that Trailblazer posed no military, security, or other threats – the same as for any Earth-orbiting communications satellite, says Laurie.

As for getting permission specifically to photograph the Earth sailing over the moonscape, that came from NOAA, the agency that oversees the National Weather Service. The NOAA review was a lot like that undergone by any weather satellite, although Trans-

Orbital’s ”was a novel application,” says Tim Stryker of NOAA’s Satellite & Data Services Division. ”[But] that’s our regulatory responsibility – looking at imaging of the Earth.”

The matter of the moon’s ownership is not new. Two years before Apollo 11 set down Neil Armstrong on the Sea of Tranquility, the United Nations had adopted the Outer Space Treaty to address the matter. The treaty states that ”… outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation. …” The United States signed the treaty, and NASA worried a bit over the placing of a US flag on the moon, but in the end, no one took the flag hoisting as a ”claim” on lunar resources.

As for how all this will affect lunar science, most researchers are just glad to see more interest in the moon. ”I wish them a lot of luck,” says Spudis, the planetary scientist. The more data from the moon the better, he says, even if it is proprietary in nature. ”If these guys [TransOrbital] want to send a spacecraft to the moon – they own [the data]. That’s the whole point of making a private venture.” All he and other scientists want is more data on long-neglected Luna.

That’s a lot better reporting than Democrats.Com — which is no suprise. Advantage: Globe!

TUMBLING WOMAN UPDATE: The sculpture at Rockefeller Center has been covered up, reports a reader of Susanna Cornett’s. And Stacy Tabb (“she’s not just a webgoddess — she’s a blogger, too!”) has a poll running in which “it’s art” is way ahead.

DEMOCRATS.COM appears to be low-hanging fruit for the snarky blogger. Which would describe Floyd McWilliams pretty well, judging by his dissection of an article on telephone polls.

RACHEL LUCAS posts a ferocious fundraiser-Fisking in response to a letter from the Brady Campaign that says gun control is the answer to terrorism. Boy did they write the wrong woman.

LYNN SISLO OBSERVES:

One of the favorite tactics of peace activists is to accuse so-called “hawks” of being bloodthirsty and lusting for revenge. I think they know better. If it were true there would be no point in saying it because the obvious response would be something like “so what?” But they know that almost no one actually wants war so they use this accusation in an attempt to make their opponents feel guilty.

Well said.

BLOGJOURNALISM: More actual reporting from In Arguendo.

SHH! DON’T TELL ANYONE, but tomorrow’s FoxNews column is up tonight. It’s about space and euro-critics.

MATT LABASH explores health and lifestyle tips for porn stars. Sounds like a feature fit for the Oxygen Network. . . . Well, maybe not.

CATHY SEIPP says that the Oxygen Network is getting better. It would pretty much have to be, wouldn’t it?

IT’S NICE TO BE QUOTED, but I still don’t get the all-little-letters thing.

DICK GEPHARDT HAS EMAILED ME (er, well, Dick Gephardt’s office has emailed me, er well, okay, actually it’s someone in Dick Gephardt’s office) a link to this Flash commercial on prescription drugs.

No offense — and entirely aside from content — I just think it’s kind of, well, lame. Compare it to this one from FlashBunny, for example. To be fair, it’s longer. But it’s longer because it’s full of facts and arguments. It also has graphics, not just words on a page. And it uses sound better (though only at the end). Maybe the Dems need a new contractor for this stuff.

UPDATE: A reader asks: “The URL is .gov. Are we paying for this? Isn’t that illegal, and ironic considering the ruckus the dems raised over that minor state dept. link.” Beats me. I’ll email ’em.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And here’s the reply:

Thanks for posting the link. We truly appreciate it. I produced the spot which is intended to inform visitors to the site. As a government employee working on government time, the answer to the question is yes it was paid for with taxpayer money. While the Flash format is something new, the function of it is really no different from a number of other efforts by both Democrats and Republicans to inform the public about our efforts on Capitol Hill. From press releases to PowerPoint presentations to websites, House members use a number of different tools to inform the public and their constituents. That is the purpose of this Flash movie.

So there you have it.

A LOW BLOW: I was just talking with the lovely international-law specialist whose office is next to mine. She was talking about the U.N. and seemed surprised that I wasn’t very concerned with its doings. “The U.N. is just the world’s biggest faculty meeting,” I explained.

“Oh, that’s awfully harsh,” she replied. “The U.N. has been called a lot of things, but that —”

MY EARLIER POST ON FLIGHT 93 CONSPIRACY THEORIES generated a lot of mail. There were several points made:

1. The seismic evidence I referred to only demonstrates that the aircraft hit the ground more or less in one piece, not that it wasn’t shot down.

This is true. And the Korean Air Lines 747 that was shot down by the Soviets did stay in one piece. BUT — it was a 747, a much bigger plane with four engines.

2. The government acts like it’s hiding something.

There’s some truth to this. However, the government often acts that way when it has nothing to hide. It’s been refusing to release the final minutes of the voice recordings from the Challenger and I know what’s in them. Nothing especially incriminating.

3. People saw a military plane.

I’ve seen reports of that, but most accounts suggest it was a business plane in the neighborhood that air controllers asked to take a look.

4. There was a story about a passenger who reported an explosion and white smoke via his cellphone just before the crash.

Yes, there was. I linked it here on September 11, as well as here earlier this week. I emailed Dennis Roddy, the reporter who originally filed that story, and here’s what he said in response:

Never cleared that one up, except that he heard some kind of noise and saw a puff of smoke, but the phone went dead just then and by that point the plane was upsidedown, which could have meant any number of things, including smoke, and noise.

Interestingly, depending on the nature of the roll, you can actually turn a plane upside down and not lose gravity. We dug and dug all we could and the best we could verify was:

1. There was an order to shoot the plane down.

2. Pilots got within 14 minutes of the point at which they were ready to take them down.

3. The government adamantly denies any shootdown and nobody has come forth with any eyewitnesses who saw it being shot or burning, and this includes many witnesses who watched it roar up Route 30 before veering off, tipping and disappearing behind the treeline before it hit the ground.

This seems to me to put the shootdown/coverup conspiracy theory as thoroughly to bed as such things can be put to bed.

What’s missing from the analysis is, in my mind, any motivation. Assume the worst: that the passengers had gotten control of the plane, but that it had been shot down anyway because the fighter pilot(s) didn’t get the word in time. Is that really something to cover up?

Now I can spin a better conspiracy theory than that, because I’m an imaginative guy: it was shot down by an experimental military plane that happened to be in the area and that looked like a business jet, and that used some sort of laser or EMF weapon that left the plane intact but out of commission and crashing. And the government’s covering it up because they don’t want to reveal the existence of the weapon.

Great conspiracy theory, except for the total lack of evidence supporting it. (Hey, maybe they used one of Dennis Kucinich’s space-based mind control beams!). Occam’s razor suggests that we might as well stick with the simpler, and far more likely to be true, likelihood that the plane crashed as a result of the struggle.

A couple of readers said they were surprised to see me abandon my usual skepticism. I haven’t. It’s just that I’m skeptical of conspiracy theories, too. You want to convince me? Show me some evidence.

UPDATE: John Hawkins posts a photo I hadn’t seen before.

NON-BLOGGERS probably won’t care about this inside-the-blogosphere stuff, but Dawn Olsen has posted a very handsome apology on her page.

REAL LIFE IMITATES THE ONION.

THE ENRON SCANDAL seems to have reached its final phase.

ARI KNOWS ROPE-A-DOPE: Alert reader Chadwick Brown sends this link.

CLAYTON CRAMER has an interesting bit of history that he thinks will annoy Jesse Jackson.

AS A BIG FAN of Keith Laumer’s “Bolo” stories, I find this report interesting. We’ve still got a long way to go, though, and I’m not sure that even a Bolo Mark XXXIV would be much use in the current conflict.

BRAD DELONG LINKS to a story about stacked scientific panels at HHS. He’s right that that’s a bad thing. He’s wrong, however, to suggest that it’s a new thing.

UPDATE: An email from a reader reminds me that I should probably add a link to this post, which points out that NAS gun study panel member Steven Levitt denies that he’s anti-gun. You might also want to read this post, this post, and this post for more background. As I suggest in the last post, the NAS panel might turn out to do a fair job, but the inclusion of people like Ben Civiletti — whose only real credential is as an antigun politician — makes its posture of scientific detachment dubious.

ANOTHER UPDATE: DeLong’s giving me hell for the NRO piece, but rather rudely doesn’t link back to this post, which is almost surely where he found it since it’s over a year old. That also means that his readers won’t know about the updates, above.

Oh, and Mark Kleiman also doesn’t link to the post, but does link to the NRO article. Also, he has a rather mean crack about a broken link which suggests to me that he hasn’t noticed that the article is over a year old.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kleiman did think that the article was new; he’s corrected this and some other errors. Meanwhile Dave Kopel emails that he met the head of the NAS study at an Institute of Medicine conference, and that he (the study head) promised the study would be fair, but said he could understand how the membership and funding source could have caused us to think otherwise. Dave notes that there’s a Heisenberg issue here — was it always going to be fair, or did the criticism it got from us, and from others, encourage them to look more seriously at their approach? I guess we’ll never know for sure.

Kleiman and DeLong seem to think that we shouldn’t have criticized Levitt, since he’s really smart and they think he’s fair-minded. Levitt, however, wasn’t the point of the piece, and at any rate charges of bias in someone making up a federal study committee that’s likely to influence national policy are certainly of public interest. As a former official in the Clinton Administration, surely DeLong isn’t arguing that only people’s buddies are entitled to discuss questions of whether they might be biased or not. He should know better than that.

I should also note that my various writings about the Kass Council indicate that I’m an equal-opportunity critic where federal study committees are involved.