DOC SEARLS says that Steven Levy should write a book about bloggers to match his earlier works on hackers and cryptographers. Hmm. The Bloggers. I don’t know. . . .

MARTIN DEVON has advice for those seeking a career in music.

RAMESH PONNURU, no pro-cloning apologist, calls Francis Fukuyama’s libertarians-would-endorse-slavery example a “cheap shot.”

“THE BEAUTIFUL NEW INSTAPUNDIT” is #24 on Daypop at the moment. The phrase is from Susanna Cornett, who along with quite a few email correspondents, says the page looks as if it were designed by James Lileks. That’s quite a compliment, but it was Stacy Tabb of Sekimori who did it. She also found me a hosting arrangement that — while considerably more expensive than Blogspot, but what isn’t? — had the features I needed and wouldn’t break me. So far so good — they’ve even been fast in answering support questions. The “HostingMatters” button to the left links to their page.

KATIE GRANJU says childhood is better today than it was when we were kids.

UPDATE: Her archives have succumbed to some blogger/blogspot problem or other (there’s a lot of that today). Just go here and follow the link.

MARTIN PERETZ joins the crowd calling for a Jenin investigation:

Just not an investigation into what the Israeli Defense Forces did in Jenin. Rather, what the United Nations needs is an internal investigation: What role did the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)–which for years has presided over Palestinian refugee camps in Jenin and elsewhere–play in allowing those camps to turn into terrorist havens complete with militias and weapons factories? When relief agencies allowed the refugee camps in eastern Congo to be taken over by the Hutu militias that had carried out the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, human rights types were outraged. But in Jenin the U.N.’s complicity with terrorism seems not to bother anyone at all. And that complicity is of more than theoretical interest. After all, surely the Palestinians didn’t think they could go on making and exploding bombs indefinitely. If the United Nations had policed its own turf, Ariel Sharon might not have had to.

Perhaps we should investigate the U.N. for war crimes and complicity in genocide?

GARY FARBER has the scary inside story on Bush’s cloning plans.

INSTAPUNDIT: VICTIM OF TOO-HIGH STANDARDS! Well, basically. Last week blogger “Godless Capitalist” sent me a link to this post on scientific misconduct at Bell Labs. I didn’t go with it because (1) I couldn’t evaluate it myself; (2) I didn’t know the blog or blogger — or even his/her real name, and hadn’t followed the blog enough to form an opinion as to reliability; and (3) It didn’t have any external references supporting the charge. In light of all of those factors, I was just afraid to put up a post on it.

Well, turns out that there’s a problem at Bell Labs, and that was probably a scoop. But what can you do? I was reluctant to go with charges I had no ability to evaluate.

BELLESILES-O-RAMA: Professor Jerome Sternstein writes on History News Network about the contradictions and implausibilities in Michael Bellesiles’ “My notes were destroyed in a flood” story. He even reports on an experiment in which yellow legal pads bearing pencil marks remained completely legible despite being soaked in water.

Meanwhile, Eugene Volokh (from whose site I got the Sternstein link above) fact checks a minor statement of Bellesiles’ about Justice Scalia’s position on machine guns, and finds it, er, lacking in academic rigor. Volokh asks: “Is it considered standard practice for historians to make assertions — with no qualification or explanation of the possible weakness of the source (either in the text or the footnotes), but merely as ‘Justice Antonin Scalia agreed with . . .’ — based on a single newspaper opinion piece, that uses as its source a high school student who says she heard someone say something at a small luncheon?”

This is a prize-winning historian at work?

FUKUYAMA, YO MAMA! Rand Simberg responds to Frank Fukuyama’s statement, in a Salon interview, that today’s pro-cloning libertarians would have defended slavery in the antebellum South: “Comments like this make it hard to take anything he says about ethics or morality, on the subject of cloning, or anything else, seriously.”

Simberg is too gentle.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH has some concrete suggestions about what we should do to overthrow the mullahs in Iran.

THE GOOD NEWS, THE BAD NEWS, AND THE GOOD NEWS: Good News — The New York Sun has almost a full page on blogging. Bad news: You can’t read it, unless you’re in New York. Good News: There’s a summary of what it says over at Ribstone-Pippin.

What I love are the calls from “professional journalists” for the regulation and monitoring of Weblogs. Jeez. The press is as bad a friend to press freedom as academics are to academic freedom.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Melissa Seckora is reporting that the National Endowment for the Humanities is requiring the Newberry Library to remove the NEH’s name from Bellesiles’ research, which was conducted under a Newberry grant whose funding came originally from the NEH.

Apparently, the NEH has decided that Bellesiles’ work doesn’t measure up.

UPDATE UPDATE: There’s more, including some fascinating quotes from letters in support of Bellesiles. No agenda there! I wonder who wrote those.

DAVE KOPEL says that the new anti-gun ads featuring John McCain and Joe Lieberman are full of obvious untruths. Hmm. McCain and Lieberman are either too dumb to know this, or don’t care. I’m not sure which is worse.

THE SPEED OF THE BLOGOSPHERE: Edward Boyd has a review of the new site design already. He likes it, but is worried that it lacks the appealing low-budget cheesiness that people have come to expect from InstaPundit. Don’t worry — only in form, not in content!

IT TAKES A PECULIAR SORT OF MIND to look around the world and conclude that the biggest threat to humanity is too much freedom. But Frank Fukuyama has that kind of a mind, and it’s on display in Salon today. Personally, I might say — in fact, I did say — this: “Cloning seems frightening now. One day it will seem . . . quaint.”

UPDATE: For responses, look here and here.

THE ANIMAL LIBERATION FRONT has attacked a poultry store to protest the slaughter of chickens. They attacked the store, even though no chickens were actually killed there, “because of its role in the industries of animal exploitation and murder.” Er, and because, dude, like we couldn’t find the slaughterhouse. Check out the pictures on the site.

These guys are bozos, but arson hardly counts as nonviolence.

HERE’S MORE ON THE WHOLE blogs as coffeehouses analogy, from Beauty of Gray. Thanks to reader Ian Cook for the pointer.

ALL THE TITLE IX BROUHAHA hasn’t excited me that much (though it gives me an excuse to use the word “brouhaha,” which is always a good thing). But if you’re interested, George Will has a column on the subject that cites a new study by Jessica Gavora.

Of course, Gavora just married Jonah Goldberg, which you should factor into any analysis of her faculties for judgment. . . .

GRAY DAVIS SCANDAL UPDATE: Reuters has this analysis of the election. Davis is more vulnerable than he ought to be, so long as Simon sticks to Davis’s problem issues. The good news for Davis — he has a lot of campaign cash. Well, yeah.

ERIC ALTERMAN HAS A BLOG, at least kind of. He even says he likes InstaPundit, though he blames me for linking to “nasty attacks” on him. Hey, I gave Alterman space to respond, too, even though they weren’t my attacks. Doesn’t that count for something?

Oh, well, there’s sure to be lots of Blogosphere grist from an Alterman blog.

“UNDERPERFORMIN’ NORMAN” MINETA AND TOM “WHAT IS IT I DO AGAIN?” RIDGE have both agreed not to allow guns in airliner cockpits. Theyd better hope there aren’t any more hijackings — or even any attempts where passengers are hurt — because they’re setting themselves up for a fall.

We’re not serious about the war yet. This is proof.

WELL IT STANDS TO REASON that as soon as I move off of Blogspot, it develops new problems that keep people from finding the new page. I’ve fixed the old page (again) and it’s up (at least for now) to send people here.

STILL MORE ADVICE for Blogspotters, from Web Goddess Stacy Tabb, can be found here.