MICKEY KAUS admits error as part of his new “trustworthy blogging” initiative. I credit Diane E.’s “SmarterKausfiles” initiative.

WARBLOGGER FFM CRITICIZED THE ISRAELIS, but warblogger Eric Alterman isn’t having any of this pantywaist stuff:

I don’t know if killing the military chief of Hamas, together with his family, is an effective military measure-as surely someone will rise to replace him and it will make a lot more people angry, perhaps even angry enough to become suicide bombers. It may not bring Israel and the Palestinians any closer to peace or mutual security. But I don’t have a moral problem with it.

Hamas is clearly at war with Israel. Hamas feels empowered to strike Israeli civilians inside Israel proper and not just on the war zone of West Bank. Sheik Salah Shehada could have protected his family by keeping away from them. He didn’t and owing to his clear legitimacy as a military target, they are dead too.

So tough luck, fella.

War is hell.

John Podhoretz agrees.

UPDATE: Alterman is sounding even more warbloggerish in today’s entry:

If you ask for war, you are asking to have your civilians slaughtered, unless you can keep the war on the other side’s turf. Well, Hamas asked. I have always believed that if Israel were to do the right thing — for itself as well as for the Palestinians — and uproot the settlements and turn the entire West Bank and Gaza (with minor modifications) to a demilitarized Palestinian state, it would probably require a Palestinian civil war to enforce the peace.

Hamas is an irredentist force that will not settle for half a loaf, one of many on both sides, unfortunately. They must be defeated militarily in, in order to do this, it is necessary to kill a great many innocent civilians. It’s an unpleasant fact of life to admit, but there it is.

Yep.

UPDATE: Warblogger N.Z. Bear is chiding Alterman for excessive bloodthirstiness. Well, sort of. I see where The Bear is coming from, but I took Alterman to mean that, well, war is hell, and lots of bad stuff is going to happen once you start one. The legal analogy is estoppel, where certain conduct means you’re not allowed to make certain arguments. Here, Hamas wanted a war, so while the IDF may be morally responsible for its actions, Hamas and its supporters won’t be heard to complain about those actions.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Bear has responded. Note that I’m using a legal analogy, but I understand this is a moral issue. Meanwhile, The Idler has a piece on why Israel did it.

BEST OF THE WEB reminds us that the demonstration at the Saudi Embassy in Washington is tomorrow at 10 a.m. Details on their site.

SMALLPOX APOCALYPSE: Some disturbing stuff from Tom Holsinger at StrategyPage. He echoes my view that, bad as it would be for the U.S., a smallpox epidemic would hurt the rest of the world more. Unfortunately, that may not deter people in the grip of a psychotic death cult, as the Islamoterror crowd tends to be.

HEY, FBI — DON’T YOU KNOW THERE’S A WAR ON? Apparently not:

Editor — Al Qaeda has the upper hand in the war against terror because the security agencies responsible for protecting us act like a bunch of sissies.

Case in point: I was recently hired for an FBI counter-terrorism position based on my ability to speak several foreign languages, my thorough knowledge of Middle Eastern culture and my extensive travel abroad. Each FBI employee who interviewed me told me, “We’re desperately in need of language skills.”

I’m a blue-blooded American, 44 years old, who has taught college several years for the Department of Defense, and I was excited my skills would be helpful in the war against terror. Then came the FBI’s lie detector test.

I admitted I’d smoked marijuana about 20 times when I was 18. I’ve never used drugs since. But within five minutes I was put out on the street.

I told the FBI agent who kicked me out that “I doubt very seriously that Bin Laden screened any of the hijackers for drug experimentation when they were kids.” The FBI agent confided, “You wouldn’t believe the number of super- qualified individuals we’ve turned away. Just last week we let go a highly qualified psychologist for the same reason. It’s very frustrating.”

Moral of the story: Don’t hold your breath for the FBI to save you.

Message to the homeland security crowd: If the war is important enough to justify a new cabinet-level department, sweeping powers for law enforcement, and (you know it’s coming) higher taxes, then it’s important enough to get rid of these pantywaist just-say-no rules. If it’s not important enough to get rid of those rules, then it’s not a war, and you guys need to turn in your badges.

Homeland security remains a joke, and the people in charge remain unserious.

(Via email from Stefan Sharkansky, who also has the letter on his blog, I notice).

TALKLEFT has joined the Ninth Amendment discussion.

UPDATE: And Jeff Cooper has a response to my earlier post.

COMPUTER GEEKS AS FIREMEN? Well, sort of. Read this speech by Bruce Sterling on ubiquitous computing over on Winds of Change. Excerpt:

You don’t want to wander into a Kazaa and Napster version of George Orwell. Ubiquitous computation, unlike information, does not “want to be free.” This is not a technology of freedom. Ubiquitous computation wants to make you its slave. Try to remember that, for all our sakes, all right? This is not a water-cooler for gossip, like the Internet is. This is a hard-case, hard-times, hands-on, rather ruthless command-and-control system.

Actually, if we’re going to have a version of 1984 I hope it’s a Kazaa and Napster version, since it’ll go broke before it actually does much. And in fact, that’s more or less what Sterling says:

I rather doubt that the Orwellian version of ubicomp has much of a future. That’s a scenario that I have dubbed “Terrorspace”, which is ubicomp in the context of airports and nuclear power sites. If you’ve been in airports recently, I believe you are seeing a pretty apt, early version of Terrorspace. At any random moment, you can have your possessions rifled through by strangers. Your shoes are scanned, and various small but vital objects in your pockets can be confiscated by semi- educated security geeks. They’re either pathetically under-trained for the job (in which case you certainly feel no safer), or else they are intelligent and capable people (in which case you pity them and wish they had some other job, for the sake of general human happiness and the GNP). Rather than making us any safer, Terrorspace airports serve as political indoctrination centers that humiliate our voting population on a broad scale. They are meant to inure us to ever-escalating levels of governmental clumsiness and general harm.

The difficulty with this Terrorspace approach is that airports and airlines are going broke. Airports are hemorrhaging money trying to maintain this terrorspace apparatus. It is likely to spread to the brittle power of nuclear power plants, nuclear waste dumps, bio-sites, chemical sites, liquid petroleum gas centers and so forth. That will hugely increase the overhead of all these dangerous industries.

That’s a very considerable tax burden. So, though Terrorspace may serve as a full employment program for the loyal and slightly stupid, that’s not going to pay off socially or economically in the long run.

Going broke is the fate of totalitarian societies generally; a computer-run one might just do it faster. Or not. Read the whole thing, which contains both hopeful and cautionary notes.

JUST HAD A GREAT MOMENT IN TEACHING: Nobody’s around today, so I went to lunch on my own with a draft student paper to read. (I don’t teach summer school, but I supervise students writing papers — gratis, I might add, since I don’t get paid to do any teaching in the summer.) But it’s worth it when, as today, the first draft is so good. I bragged on the paper, and the student, to the waitress.

SALON-BRANDED WEBLOGS! N.Z. Bear thinks it’s a good thing. So does Dave Winer.

There seem to be more than a few already. Still no Rachael Klein, though.

WILLIAM PIERCE, Nazi and author of The Turner Diaries, is dead. He will not be missed.

BEFORE I WENT ON VACATION, I asked if anyone could identify the source of my phrase “I have an axe to grind, and plenty of fury to turn the wheel.” Not many people replied, but someone was desperate enough to consult Google Answers, which also came up dry. The source is Arthur Allen Leff’s article, Economic Analysis of Law: Some Realism About Nominalism, in the Virginia Law Review. It’s a pretty famous article within the law, so I thought someone would get it. The cite is 60 Va. L. Rev. 451, 456 (1974).

(Leff, by the way, was the best writer in legal scholarship during the second half of the 20th century, notwithstanding his tragically short career. His Memorandum from the Devil, and Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law, were tremendously funny pomposity-deflating pieces. Sadly, they’re not on the Web, or on Lexis or Westlaw. Somebody should do something about that.)

UPDATE: This is a warning not to get too complacent about the omniscience of Google and other search engines, too. They cover a lot — but “a lot” isn’t the same as “everything,” or even “everything that matters.”

THE L.A. EXAMINER NOTES this report that the feds have arrested top Adelphia executives.

Going after cable company execs for fraud? Now there’s a law-enforcement campaign that Americans can get behind.

Next they should go after the Dell Computer folks who promised me on-site service. I waited around all day yesterday for a technician who was a no-show, and didn’t call. Dell then promised to fix it for me and to call back within two hours. They didn’t.

Dude, I’m gettin’ screwed. Shoulda done it myself, but I paid for the damn warranty.

FFM is criticizing Israel over the bombing attack that killed a Hamas leader.

UNFOGGING THE FUTURE: My TechCentralStation column is up. I praise the federal government.

THE DANGERS OF DECONSTRUCTION. All of a sudden, I’ve got a craving for tacos.

CHRISTIAN PACIFIST UPDATE: I don’t know why anyone cares who the new Archbishop of Canterbury is, but his views appear rather Hauerwasian:

Dr Williams, who was arrested in the 1980s during a CND demonstration, has described the conflict in Afghanistan as “embarrassing” and “morally tainted”, and said that the proposed war against Iraq would be “illegal and immoral”.

Actually, that’s unfair to Hauerwas. Williams sounds more like a Caldicottian. (Via The Corner).

JASON RYLANDER has very handsomely revised and extended his remarks on Congressional pay raises in light of the fact that I had said the exact opposite of the view he attributed to me. He also addresses Jeff Hauser’s claim that it’s not a raise, but a COLA. I don’t buy that either. I got a three percent raise this year, which was basically a COLA, but it was called a “raise.” Everyone (not just conservative Congress-bashers, of which Hauser too seems to think I am one) has been calling this a pay raise.

My own feeling is that it violates the spirit, and probably the letter, of the 27th Amendment however you choose to characterize it.

BUSMAN’S HOLIDAY: In an update to my post on the Kyle Still / Jeff Cooper debate on the Ninth Amendment, I actually uploaded and linked a couple of my law review articles on the subject. I then posted so much stuff that most people won’t scroll down far enough to notice. So I’m mentioning it here. It’s not often I let the dayjob reach so far into InstaPundit, so I hate to waste it.

ANOTHER THREATENING ASTEROID has been detected:

A preliminary orbit suggests that 2002 NT7 is on an impact course with Earth and could strike the planet on 1 February, 2019 – although the uncertainties are large.

Astronomers have given the object a rating on the so-called Palermo technical scale of threat of 0.06, making NT7 the first object to be given a positive value.

From its brightness, astronomers estimate it is about two kilometres wide, large enough to cause continent-wide devastation on Earth.

Although astronomers say the object definitely merits attention, they expect more observations to show it is not on an Earth-intersecting trajectory.

I sure hope not. Think what that threat would do to the stock market.

CHRIS MATTHEWS has malaria. No, really. Maybe this will be Jonah Goldberg’s next excuse for missing his deadline.

CHOMSKY-MOCKERY hits a new high point in this cartoon. It’s all a CIA plot, of course.

CONGRESSIONAL PAY: Reader Bill Wyatt offers a suggestion:

On your comments concerning Congressional pay, I agree that Congressmen and Senators are not on average overpaid (though there are plainly exceptions; Cynthia McKinney springs to mind). But, their compensation (and that of all elected officials) should be governed by the same rules that apply to the self-employed: quarterly estimated tax payments instead of withholding, inclusion in the social security system and payment of the “self-employment tax”, tax-free retirement plan contributions limited in the same way that HR-10 and 401(k) contributions are limited, no deduction for individual payment of health insurance premiums, etc. Any new burdens on the earnings of the self-employed should automatically apply to elected officials. To effect the change in treatment I would even support increasing their nominal pay by the amounts currently contributed to their pension and medical benefits programs (or their actuarial equivalents, since I’m sure that, like social security, these are simply “pay as you go” schemes).

Assuming rationality on the part of those who generally prefer power to money (or who at least prefer power to work as a means of getting money), this might align the interests of the governing class a bit more closely with those of the most dynamic segment of the private economy. Or at least spread the miseries of our current system a bit more widely.

Of course, if you really want change, just make every American, not just members of Congress, jump through all the hoops that afflict the self-employed. We’d have a revolution in under a year.

JAMES MORROW ASKS: If sanctions are starving Iraqi babies, how come Saddam Hussein is threatening to boycott Aussie wheat?

JACEONLINE isn’t very happy with The Motley Fool today.

AN AMERICAN MUSLIM WHO IS ALLEGED TO BE AN AL QAEDA member was arrested in Denver. The story mentions that another man, a Jordanian-born American, was arrested with a rather large cargo of forged checks, and is suspected of being an Al Qaeda trainee. Here’s more on that case, from the Washington Post.

It’s probably a mistake to make too much of these: Like a lot of the “militia” busts post-Oklahoma City, these may well turn out to be less significant than they appear. The Arab-American and American Islamic communities had better hope so, as this sort of thing is certainly dreadful PR. Groups like CAIR certainly aren’t helping things with their posturing.

UPDATE: Matthew Hoy says it’s not racist to be suspicious of Arab men in light of recent events. He’s talking about foreign nationals wanting visas, not Arab-Americans.