LOTS OF NEW UPDATES on the basically sad situations in Venezuela and Argentina, over at El Sur.

PATCH ADAMS SENDS LILEKS a scary, Godfatheresque message. No, really: “it’s like finding a severed clown head in your bed.”

ANDREA SEE has quit smoking. She’s even keeping a separate weblog about it. Give her some encouragement, if you’re so inclined. She can only get so many new tattoos to keep herself distracted.

UPDATE: Here are links to more Andrea See tattoo photos, for those who just can’t get enough!

MORE EVIDENCE of Ted Turner’s idiocy and, by extension, that accusations of bias against CNN have some basis.

UPDATE: Some pointed commentary can be found on the Occam’s Toothbrush site. And is that a cool blog name, or what?

GRAY DAVIS UPDATE: Davis just lost what looks to be a major law enforcement endorsement to Bill Simon. (Via Rand Simberg).

BRAD DE LONG says that Noam Chomsky lies a lot. Welcome to the Blogosphere, Brad!

ERIC S. RAYMOND has a long post about gay priests and the Catholic sex scandals, to which Tim Wilson has posted a lengthy response.

UPDATE: Tony Adragna says that lots of priests are taking advantage of adult women, and minor girls, but that people aren’t talking about it.

FORGET JOHN DEAN: JOSH MARSHALL knows who Deep Throat is. He makes a pretty compelling case.

UPDATE: And now he’s got more.

A LOVELY EVENING: Practiced my scuba in the pool –which I was extra careful about after hearing of Scott Shuger’s death — in preparation for a diving trip in a couple of weeks. (I last dove in August, and I like to keep my skills up). My wife and daughter came and played too. The pool was pretty much empty except for us and my dive partner. Then another chapter of Harry Potter; now blogging on the laptop while my wife and daughter watch “Courage the Cowardly Dog,” a truly weird show on the Cartoon Network. It doesn’t get much better than that.

THE SELF-CORRECTING NATURE OF THE BLOGOSPHERE: REVEALED.

SPEAKING OF MATTHEW HOY, he writes to say that I’m probably wrong on the cloning issue below:

Glenn, I might be mistaken, but I think you’ve got this development wrong, at least as it relates to the cloning debate.

To quote from the article you linked to:

The Monash scientists put thymus stem cells into the kidney cavity of a mouse.

“To see the thymus grow, complete and working, was exciting,” Professor Boyd said.

Note it says “thymus stem cells” this would indicate to me that these were taken from a developed organ. Otherwise the reference would likely be to “embryonic stem cells” which are undifferentiated.

Also, according to the theory, if embryonic stem cells were injected into the kidney, they should have turned into kidney cells — not thymus.

I’ll admit I don’t know all there is to know about the science — but it appears to me that this report is fodder for the anti-cloning debate — another scientific success for adult stem cell research — which doesn’t require the destruction of any human embryos.

Well, as far as I’m concerned that’s actually better news if it’s true. I’m more interested in the treatments than in how they’re arrived at, and success with adult stem cells shortcircuits a lot of potential political opposition. And he’s right — I assumed the story was about fetal cells, but it doesn’t actually say that.

UPDATE: Charles Murtaugh emails that he thinks it’s adult cells, too. Fine with me.

WELL, I HAVE A POST BELOW on soccer-induced amity, and NPR had a story on it too. But this story reports that angry Mexican fans rioted in Juarez and attacked American vehicles.

Shame. Certainly similar acts by Americans, directed at Mexicans, would be denounced as evidence of racism, xenophobia, and similar awfulness. Matthew Hoy also has a post on some other problems on the Mexican border.

TRAFFIC WARS CONT’D: Andrew Sullivan is still after TAPPED. But this remark is a bit harsh: “The Kuttner claim that they had 500,000 subscribers to their magazine has been reduced to 50,000. This discrepancy has been blamed on a reporter for the Boston Business Journal.”

Actually, I got an email from the reporter myself, but didn’t get around to posting it before TAPPED posted its own item. But she made clear to me that the error was hers (and proved it by including a similar typo in her email!). I think that TAP is blameless in this.

Here’s the email I got (with the typo corrected — she had originally swapped the 80 / 800,000 numbers):

From: Donna Goodison

Date: 2002/06/17 Mon AM 10:24:07 EDT

Subject: kaus-american prospect

there were two typos (mistakes) in my boston business journal media column that are the basis for andrew sullivan’s and mickey kaus’ most recent attacks on the american prospect.

your web site picked up the andrew sullivan reference, so i thought you should know that the 500,000 number in my article should be 50,000, and the 800,000 number should be 80,000. kuttner gave me the correct lower numbers, and i made the mistake.

the links to our web site now have the corrected numbers, and we’re attempting to put a correction notice at the top of the story saying as much.

donna goodison

boston business journal

She has one thing in common with Andrew Sullivan — that all-lowercase-typing thing.

ARE THE RICH GETTING RICHER? Max Power says the poor are getting richer.

EUGENE VOLOKH has a good piece on the Fourth Amendment and the war on terrorists, in Slate.

UPDATE: He’s got a long post on torture on his blog, too.

SCIENTISTS IN MELBOURNE have reportedly grown a functional human organ from stem cells. It’s a thymus. Cool. Of course, it’s a further setback to the already-reeling anti-cloning effort.

ECHELON@HOME — the logical successor to SETI@home! Help fight the war on terrorism by making your spare processor cycles available to the National Security Agency.

(Courtesy of The Indepundit).

SOCCER COVERAGE isn’t really my thing, especially when it provides no opportunities to twit the French. But reader Jorge Schmidt sends this interesting observation:

I’ve been following the latest World Cup games pretty closely on Spanish-language TV and radio in Miami, and I’d like to share the following observation:

TV and radio commentators, and callers to radio shows, call the American team “el equipo de todos nosotros” (the team of all of us). This morning, as I was driving home after the U.S. – Mexico game, there were calls from Colombians, Argentineans, Brazilians, Central-Americans of various stripes, all rooting for the U.S. team, and all expressing the same sentiment, that the American team was the “home” team. This is a marked departure from previous World Cups, where latins tended to stick with other latin countries if their own didn’t make the cut. I had never heard this expression, “the team of all of us,” before this World Cup.

As one caller explained, they feel this way not just because the U.S. is the country that received them, but also because many have U.S.-born children, and they want to teach their children to root for their country. Who would have thought of soccer as a force of acculturation and assimilation?

Hmm. Sounds good to me. And who know? Perhaps the U.S. will exert a quieting influence on soccer hooliganism.

DAVE WINER’S IN THE HOSPITAL, and will be for about a week. That’s all I know. Send him your best.

DON’T YOU HATE IT when married couples go and fight in public?

BRENDAN MINITER says the FBI still isn’t serious about rounding up terrorists. Meanwhile The New Republic says that it’s not just the FBI: the Bush Administration as a whole isn’t serious about terrorism. Excerpt:

All of which is fine, as far as it goes. But sometime over the last month Washington seems to have forgotten that there’s another component to homeland security, and it has nothing to do with removing the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service from the Department of Agriculture: It’s called the war on terrorism.

Bush’s rhetoric, they say, is fine. It’s his actions that need to match it. I agree.

TRAFFIC WARS CONTINUE: TAPPED has another post on the ongoing feud with Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus about traffic. The Boston Business Journal numbers of 500,000 and 800,000 as circulation and goal for TAP were, as many suspected, a typo, and have been corrected. (Link in the post). Kudos to the Boston Business Journal and reporter Donna Goodison for fixing this in what — though slow by blogger standards — is record time by big-media standards. There’s a lot of technical discussion that I won’t bother summarizing about how traffic is measured, too.

All this fuss over unique visitors leads me to suggest that there’s a business opportunity for third-party counter makers who use generally agreed upon methodologies (or at least clearly understood methodologies) and share their results. I’ve tried to be a leader in that with my open counter. You’ll note, though, that my two counters don’t agree! That’s because sitemeter tracks the whole site (including individual posts) while Extreme Tracker counts only the main page. Also, sitemeter tracks “pageviews” and “visits.” I don’t think the “visits” are the same as “unique visitors,” but I’m not actually sure what they are. [UPDATE: Stacy Tabb, who is a goddess, says that they’re unique visitors. She also says that measuring web traffic accurately is basically impossible, even at the server level — which is undoubtedly true, both because she says it (as a goddess, her words are performative utterances), and because of things like firewalls and caches.]

As I’ve said before, I care about this mostly because people keep asking. To me, a reader who’s interested enough to visit the page twice a day is as valuable as two readers who are interested enough to visit it once a day. I guess if I were trying to sell ads or something, I’d feel otherwise.

Extreme Tracker, which counts only the main page, reports 226,916 unique visitors so far this month, for whatever that’s worth.

UPDATE: Oh, and here’s a piece on the subject from The Weekly Standard. Same conclusion: rough-and-ready is about as far as it goes.

HOWARD FEINBERG has a piece on the ethics of smallpox vaccination.

My own feeling is that we should vaccinate. That’s because vacccination doesn’t just have a preventive value, but a deterrent value: terrorists are less likely to attempt to use smallpox if the target population is vaccinated. And that’s important because any effort by terrorists to use smallpox produces a high likelihood that it will spread around the world and once again infect people in places where lousy healthcare and infrastructure will make it hard to get rid of. I think that possibility has to be weighed in the balance: by vaccinating, we’re not just protecting Americans, but Indians, Somalians, Cambodians, etc. (Interestingly, the Islamic world, because of bad healthcare systems and the tradition of the Haj, is especially vulnerable to such “collateral damage,” though I’m not sure the terrorists are smart enough to realize that — or perhaps inclined to care even if they do).

Yeah, the vaccine has (minor) risks. But compared to seeing this horrible scourge loosed on humanity once again, they’re small.

SOME INTERESTING COMMENTS in response to the fraudulent-paternity post below.

HERE’S A RATHER GOOD POST on what blogging is all about:

So it’s not the technology, it’s the people, and “what we’re doing when we blog” is the same thing we do at cocktail parties, except that with blogs we provide evidence. . . .

Bloggers have made the media more honest, and we’ve made it more relevant to people’s lives. We applied technology to a real human need, and we’d best be paying more attention, as technologists, to how the technology is being used, and as citizens to what we’re able to learn through this medium about the world we live in. The medium itself is not the message, never was, and never will be.

I agree — with the minor quibble that the ability to provide links really does make a difference in the quality and speed of discussion. It’s like a cocktail party with Nexis.