KATHY KINSLEY reflects on the “war on terrorism” and concludes that she’s all in favor of war, so long as it doesn’t look like the “war on drugs” or the “war on poverty.”

Question is, does the creation of a new Cabinet department tell you which direction we’re headed in?

LOTS OF HADAYET COVERAGE at the L.A. Examiner. I notice that I’ve started going there first for my Los Angeles news, rather than the L.A. Times. The Examiner has better coverage, and no annoying registration requirement.

BRITISH STUDENTS ARE PROTESTING THE FIRING OF TWO ISRAELI ACADEMICS:

The sacking of Israeli academics from two scholarly journals is “nothing short of racist”, says the National Union of Students. . . .

The union said the action had “shocked and horrified” the student movement – and it said that individual academics could not be held accountable for the actions of their countries.

“To target individual academics for the actions of a government will lead to a complete loss of academic freedom of speech, irrespective of the issues.

“To target these two will eventually lead to a biased representation of the situation, therefore stifling debate and discussion at all levels,” said the union’s Michelle Codrington.

Maybe there’s hope after all.

UPDATE: Nick Denton emails:

This is actually quite surprising. When I was at university, NUS was always far left, and very anti Israel. They probably still are, but at least consistent enough to attack racism.

Bravo for that.

SALON SEXWATCH UPDATE: Yes, I’m bringing back this once-popular feature to point out that Cary Tennis is losing it: “I get so many letters about the sex not being good in long-term relationships that I’m sort of fed up.”

Uh, dude, it’s a sex advice column you write, remember? People don’t write to tell you that their sex lives are great — they’re too busy enjoying the sex.

The best thing I ever read was that when the sex is good, it’s ten percent of the relationship; when it’s not, it’s ninety percent of the relationship. You’d think a sex-advice columnist would know this kind of stuff. . . .

WHILE I WENT ON VACATION, the Christian-Pacifism debate continued, mostly (natch) among Christian bloggers. Here’s a recent post with links back to others.

UPDATE: Damn Blogger Archive Bug. Go here.

I’ve scrupulously avoided criticizing Blogger, since it’s free and it led to the Blogosphere explosion. But it seems to get less, not more, reliable as time goes by.

MORE ON THE MURDEROUS-FAILED-ARTIST PROBLEM: Here’s a piece in Salon on Mussolini’s artistic pretensions. And don’t miss this argument, from Slate:

Bad artists with political views are always picking on Giuliani and calling him Hitler. Yet in truth, our last century’s worst disasters came from bad artists with dumb political views (Hitler (lousy art), Stalin (bad poetry), Mao (worse poetry), etc.). Perhaps the resemblance between our neo-conceptualists and Hitler is greater than they imagine. Consider the following behaviors alluded to in the piece, and then consider who besides exhibitors at the Whitney and Brooklyn Museum routinely engaged in them:

Dressing up in dumb costumes and having picture made in public places (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Pol Pot)

Filling warehouses with severed body parts and icky stuff (Above except, mostly, Mussolini)

Portraying political opponents as subhuman (all of the above)

Spouting mind-numbing political cant while imagining they are saying something original (all of the above)

Thinking that they speak for the masses when they are really playing out own neuroses/psychoses (all of the above)

Genocidal Fascist/Communist dictators or Conceptual Artists? You decide.

Art kills.

TAPS FOR TAPPED? The Prospect’s popular blog announced that it was on hiatus (actually, it said it was en vacances) back on July 3, with a promised return of July 8. But here it is July 9, and still no Tapped. Could Mickey Kaus’s darkest fears be true? Could there be no one left there at all?

Or maybe it’s Chris Mooney, hanging on solo like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man, battling mutants and wondering about the future. Take it away, Mickey!

HEH. I just found the Martin Devon post where he discovered that it’s not easy to be me. But he did try to drain the keg in a single swallow. . . .

I FINISHED REBECCA BLOOD‘S new book, The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. I liked it very much, and recommend it to anyone interested in the subject: bloggers, blog-readers, and journalists writing about weblogs. (Full disclosure: I have a book with the same publisher — Perseus. At some places this would disqualify me from writing a review. But not here at InstaPundit, where we don’t need no stinkin’ codes of ethics! And trust me, Perseus won’t be paying me off for this good review; they barely pay me off for my book.)

“Rebecca’s Pocket” isn’t much like InstaPundit, in conception, execution, or politics. But I’ve always liked it, and I like her book even more: somehow, to me, her voice comes through more clearly in longer increments.

Her comments on weblog etiquette, self-promotion (and the excesses thereof), flamewars, etc., are likely to be useful to just about everyone, and the history of the early days of weblogging (you know, like, three years ago) is very interesting. There’s also a lot of practical advice (even basic HTML and domain-management stuff) in the appendices. So go buy it!

I can’t help but feel that the publication of a how-to book about blogging marks an important milestone in the Blogosphere’s development, though I’m not sure exactly what it means, for good or ill. What do you think?

UPDATE: Wow. The book was ranked 5,209 on Amazon last night; now it’s up to 734. Did I do that? Regardless, it’s pretty damned impressive. You go, girl!

HAD DINNER WITH RAND SIMBERG: He was passing through on his way to Washington, DC (everyone comes to Knoxville eventually — Jean-Paul Sartre once came here via B-29, a more dramatic means of conveyance than Rand managed). Then home to finish Rebecca Blood’s book. My daughter is off at her great-grandmother’s, while my wife is off in Kentucky with a film crew, interviewing the families of teenage killers for her documentary.

THIS JONAH GOLDBERG PIECE ON STANLEY FISH (spoiler: Goldberg doesn’t like him much) makes an interesting point:

Well, not only did the virus of postmodernism escape Fish’s lab, but he and his henchmen ground it up into fine particles and sent aerosolized packets of it to every magazine, newspaper, publishing house, and movie studio in America. Fish’s hypocrisy is stunning. The PoMo virus has infected millions, destabilizing traditional institutions across the social landscape. And yet when confronted, he says “I’m not responsible for what happens in the real world, I’m just a lab technician.” Well, this high priest of the cult of the twelve monkeys is responsible.

It occurs to me that the political and cultural thinkers have done far more harm than the scientists (Hitler wasn’t a scientist, but a failed artist; ditto much of his regime, as an excellent documentary called The Architecture of Doom explores) — but somehow the “precautionary principle” is only applied to science.

ERIC S. RAYMOND MUSES ON diet and religion.

BILL CLINTON’S LATEST LAW REVIEW ARTICLE isn’t getting much respect. I haven’t read it, and it’s not terribly likely that I will.

MICKEY KAUS HAS MORE ON LEFT-WING POLITICAL VIOLENCE. MediaWhoresOnline and Paul Begala are mentioned.

HACK ATTACKS ON UTILITIES: I published a reader email on this back in the fall, but I can’t find the post now (the “search” doesn’t reach the old archived posts, dammit). But the Los Angeles Times has a story on the subject that underscores the problem: lots of hack attacks on utilities, with some thought to indicate probes by terrorists.

MICROCHIPS MADE OUT OF CHICKEN FEATHERS. No, really. (Thanks to reader Gary Pulsinelli for the heads-up).

HMM. IT’S EASY TO IMAGINE THESE FOLKS working with Al Qaeda, now isn’t it?

“HALF THE WORLD HAS NEVER MADE A PHONE CALL:” Clay Shirky says this statement is bunk.

MORE DUMB ANTI-RAVE EFFORTS in Congress. (Via Sassafrass). This is something that InstaPundit has been covering since almost the beginning, and in fact I worked on the ACLU’s brief in the New Orleans rave case pro bono. (I recently turned down a request from a “major glowstick manufacturer” — no, really — to write a brief for them in a related case).

Instead of this sort of idiocy, why don’t we take some of those obviously-underemployed U.S. Attorneys and DEA agents and put them to work, you know, looking for terrorists?

LILEKS, as usual, says it best:

As much as I feel guilty about light bleatage, I’ve always thought that the phrase “blogging will be light today” is akin to saying “the free ice cream cones will be 27 percent smaller today.” It’s still free ice cream.

Yep. I actually got cautionary emails from people telling me that I’d lose readers (or worse, “market share,” as a couple put it) if I didn’t post new stuff daily while on vacation. Oh no — losing non-paying readers!

I love this, but it’s a hobby, not a job, and the responsibilities that go with it are those that accompany a hobby, not those that accompany a job.

I think that most readers realize that — but some don’t. And a lot of the blogger-critics seem to forget that blogs aren’t bigshot media operations that claim to cover all the news that’s fit to print and to do so (chortle) in an unbiased fashion, but rather personal operations run in someone’s spare time, by people who have an axe to grind and plenty of fury to turn the wheel.

That blogs often outperform the big guys anyway doesn’t change that. It just makes it sweeter.

PS: Extra bonus points if you can identify the source of the turn-the-wheel phrase.

N.Z. BEAR says that we’re really at war with a meme but that our strategy doesn’t reflect that fact. He has some suggestions on what to do about it that are very much worth reading and pondering.

TONY WOODLIEF figures out the whole corporate-cheating thing: It’s not that colleges and B-schools aren’t teaching values — they’re just teaching other values than, well, not cheating and stealing.

LAWMEME points out an interesting New York case setting a short statute of limitations for Web defamation cases.

NICK SCHULZ WRITES THAT FRANK FUKUYAMA HAS LOST IT:

Now, in his effort to regulate biotechnology — and his ambitions in this regard are global and not just limited to the United States — Fukuyama has made common cause with an odd bedfellow for him: the most extreme elements of the environmental left.

While his politics until recently had been generally conservative/libertarian in thrust and tenor, Fukuyama now issues a call to arms to radical greens.

Yeah, he does seem to have fallen victim to creeping Luddism.

THE JOURNAL OF LAW AND ECONOMICS HAS A SYMPOSIUM ISSUE on Guns, Crime and Safety. The articles are available online, and the introduction provides something of a summary. Check it out if you’re interested in this topic.