ARTIFICIAL ANTIBODIES? CELL-PENETRATING NANOMATERIALS? All this and more news about nanotechnology can be found on NanoDot, a Slashdot-style collaborative website.

SCOTT ROSENBERG has posted a Salon Blogs progress report — on his blog, naturally.

LYNNE KIESLING SAYS THE MARKET WORKS — and right now it’s working on Perot.

MORE ON MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL’S ATTACK ON A FAN WEBSITE can be found here. Here’s some good practical advice from trademark lawyer Martin Schwimmer:

Finally, as a practice pointer for folk with clients in the sports and entertainment field, you have to be really careful how you deal with fans, because you never want to see your demand letters posted on a website.

Indeed.

AQUAMAN UPDATE: Ted Barlow has more evidence that Aquaman don’t get no respect. “Aquaman sucks” t-shirts?

HESIOD THEOGENY is upset that Egypt is basically a dictatorship, and rightly so.

Me, I’d like to see democratic capitalism and a secular consumer society spread across the entire Middle East, rather than barbarously thuggish governnments who “cooperate” with Washington while looking for ways to undermine it, and who kowtow to fundamentalist religious wackos who want to turn the clock back to the 12th century.

I think that makes me an Evil Imperialist. So be it.

YET ANOTHER REASON TO THINK THE FBI ISN’T UP TO THE JOB OF CATCHING TERRORISTS:

When Web operator Jon Messner gained control of one of al-Qaida’s prime Internet communication sites, he offered it to the FBI ( news – web sites) to use it for disinformation and collecting data about sympathizers.

What followed, he says, was a week of frustration.

FBI agents struggled to find someone with enough technical know-how to set up the sting. By the time they did, the opportunity was lost as militant Islamic Web users figured out the site was a decoy, said Messner of Ocean City, Md.

“It was like dealing with the motor vehicle administration,” said Messner, who runs Web sites, many of which sell pornographic materials. “We could have done something that could have seriously impacted things. It took me so many days just to get somebody who understood the Internet.”

That’s just plain pathetic. There’s no point talking about massive bureaucratic reorganizations, or sweeping new law enforcement powers, so long as this kind of screwup is a regular occurrence.

UPDATE: Here’s more bad news. Louis Freeh — who as many have mentioned has gotten pretty much a free pass — looks quite bad here.

CATHY YOUNG is savaging Bill O’Reilly over his attacks on attorney John Pozza.

I haven’t seen O’Relly in quite a while (I don’t watch much TV, especially at that time of night — well, I do, but it’s usually PowerPuff Girls or SpongeBob) but I also heard Neal Boortz saying that O’Reilly was over the line here.

STATELY INSTAPUNDIT MANOR has been taken over by a film crew, which is shooting some sort of safety video for the state. (The guys making the film overlap with the guys who are shooting my wife’s documentary, so somehow we’re now a film location).

I escaped the noise and confusion by going to Border’s for a while, where I ran across the July/August issue of The Atlantic, which you should immediately go buy. Here’s one reason.

STUART TAYLOR says you do not have the right to remain silent.

DAVE KOPEL AND ROBERT RACANSKY propose gun control for police. Among other things.

UPDATE: The shooter in this heaven-or-hell case that’s getting a lot of attention around the blogosphere turns out to have been “a corrections officer.” Good timing, guys!

AQUAMAN says he’s a superhero who gets no respect.

Me, I think that post is probably taken by The Elongated Man — though at least he gets plenty of dates.

NO, NO, WE’RE YOUR REAL ENEMY, DON’T FORGET US! Some weirdness from the Chinese:

I left China impressed that China’s defense establishment would sooner instigate a cross-strait dust-up than seriously help the United States in the war against international terrorism. Indeed, the terrorist threat is but an annoying distraction from the game of balance-of-power politics. They urgently want to resume full military-to-military contacts and resent any hint that China is no longer central to American foreign policy. For reasons that may relate to defense spending, they would rather be perceived as a growing threat than be ignored. In short, the PLA is concerned about the relative de-emphasis on the China relationship in the United States and is apparently eager not to be deprived of an enemy.

Hmm. Sounds almost like an episode of rope-a-dope.

JAMES LILEKS reflects on Stalinism and vomit.

ANTITERRORISM STRATEGY: I don’t think he meant it this way, but Jeff Cooper has a post that offers some possibilities. It’s sort of “what would Bugs Bunny do?”

I think our antiterrorism strategies could use a dose of that kind of thinking. Such approaches work best on people who take themselves too seriously, which is certainly the case with angry Islamofascists.

ANOTHER SUSPICIOUS DEATH in the Saudi royal family.

BASEBALL TO FANS: UP YOURS! As reader Bill McCabe puts it: “On the eve of a strike, Major League Baseball shows its love for the fans by sending a Cease & Desist Order to a fan site dedicated to the New York Mets.”

They don’t think of ’em as fans, Bill. They think of ’em as sheep to be fleeced, just the way the folks at the RIAA and MPAA think of music and movie overs.

UPDATE: Slate has picked up on the story.

AZIZ POONAWALLA has posted a response to Adil Farooq’s post on Jihadism I mentioned earlier. (Poonawalla calls Farooq’s analysis “Sunni-centric.”)

EMORY / BELLESILES UPDATE: Well, this isn’t really an “update,” which would involve actual new facts. This is just a followup to my mention below that rumors are swirling about what Emory will do in the Bellesiles affair.

Unfortunately, the rumors are plentiful, mutually contradictory, and allegedly well-sourced (though always at third or fourth hand). One set has it that Emory is planning to hang Bellesiles high, and that the delay has been to get its ducks in a row to withstand a threatened lawsuit.

Another is that Emory will do nothing official but will quietly buy out Bellesiles’ contract, putting him on perpetual (paid) leave while he goes to teach at another institution, perhaps abroad. (I find this one hard to believe, as it would create a gigantic scandal since it would, basically, be a coverup).

I don’t know what to make of these. It seems pretty safe to say that the investigation isn’t going to produce an exoneration of Bellesiles — first, given the evidence already out, that seems very unlikely, and second, one expects that an exoneration would be trumpeted by Bellesiles’ supporters and by Emory, which can’t be enjoying all the negative attention.

The big tipoff will be whether there’s a public announcement and release of the investigation’s report (which Emory has promised) in late August. If so, look for Bellesiles to be fired as the most likely outcome. On the other hand, if nothing is said, and Bellesiles is “on leave” again next year, then the coverup theory will be looking stronger.

“PORNO PATRIOTS:” Bringing Islamic Terrorists to their knees.

NICK DENTON’S Declaration of European Independence isn’t getting the response he expected. Reid Stott captures the mood well: It’s about time you guys moved out of the house, got your own place, and started taking responsibility for yourselves.

But talk’s cheap. Europe may declare independence, but it won’t take up the responsiblities that implies because it can’t afford to without dismantling large parts of its social welfare apparatus, and bureaucracy in general. Really, the whole “Europe” edifice that has been created over the past several decades is grounded on the assumption that the United States will guarantee stability in the region, while Eurocrats get on with the important work of kvetching and pointing fingers.

I’m not an “American supremacist,” except maybe culturally. I certainly see little appeal in notions of imperialism. My ideal would be something like what the United States enjoyed when the British Empire was at its height: a more-or-less isolationist foreign policy while somebody else who posed no threat did the dirty work of keeping the sea lanes open and the lid on international crises. Kind of like what Europe has now.

AN AMERICAN TERRORIST IN IRAN: Ira Silverman has an interview in The New Yorker that’s worth reading. It’s a bit odd, as in places it seems to imply that Salahuddin is, well, a mole who is most useful to American intelligence where he is.

MICKEY KAUS EXPLORES the Bill Clinton / Elizabeth Hurley / John Edwards connection. Steve Bing’s sperm is involved.

SOUTH OF THE BORDER: Michael Barone writes that Mexico is doing better than most people realize, and predicts a dwindling of immigration over the next ten years as Mexican birthrates shrink while the Mexican economy grows.

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN writes that U.N. claims about human rights violations in the Afghanistan airwar are dubious:

A few observations: First, since when has a bombing mistake during a hot war been considered a “human rights violation?” When one refers civilian casualty claims to the “human rights” brigade at the UN, it typically infers intent. There isn’t anyone–save the Z Magazine crowd–that believes the USAF deliberately attacked a civilian target. By this logic, the whole notion of human rights becomes essentially worthless, creating no moral distinction between an errant bomb and an execution pit at Babi Yar.

But, you see, most of those U.N. types aren’t that upset by Babi Yar.