MUSICIANS ARE REVOLTING against record labels.

“The record companies are like cartels, like countries, for God’s sake,” singer/songwriter Tom Waits says. “It’s a nightmare to be trapped in one.”

Like countries? North Korea is a country. . . .

SHILOH BUCHER IS BACK BLOGGING, and she’s dissing the French. But of course.

WHAT THE HELL is wrong with Blogspot now? Some sites work fine. Some won’t open at all — they seem to hang waiting for the ad to load. And every once in a while it takes me to a different site than the one I entered.

INCONSTANT MOON: Jay Manifold thinks he’s got the Iraq attack plans all scoped out.

KOFI ANNAN DELIVERS peace in our time. And there’s a reason why you should be worried.

UPDATE: Steven DenBeste has an analysis.

GARY MILHOLLIN says that inspections won’t work as long as Saddam Hussein is in power. (Here’s a direct link to the op-ed.)

NOW GREG BEATO has taken up the cudgel in Bob Greene’s defense, while simultaneously offering some legal/journalistic advice to Rod Dreher. And Eugene Volokh thinks the Trib is overhasty, too, while Orrin Judd thinks it’s hypocritical. With all these defenders, I’m starting to wonder if Greene wasn’t a bit hasty resigning. I’ll bet he’s wondering too.

Hmm. Old thinking: resign fast to nip a scandal in the bud. Possible new thinking: let the word get out and see if people start defending you.

UPDATE: Count Dale Amon among those who think that Greene got, er, screwed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Max Power weighs in, too.

I SUSPECT THAT AL JAZEERA REPORTER YOSRI FOUDA is being made an example of. Fouda refused to cooperate with U.S. intelligence, so (according to a Bloomberg report that someone emailed me, and that doesn’t seem to be on the Web) they tapped his phone and captured Ramzi Binalshibh anyway. Now Fouda is in bad odor with, well, a lot of people.

I imagine that, had he cooperated, his name would have been left out of the reports. I also think that this is bad for Al Jazeera in general. Notice how many people who have given interviews to Al Jazeera have either (1) disappeared without a trace; (2) been killed; or (3) been captured?

You’d almost think that Al Jazeera was a stalking-horse for the CIA.

JAMES LILEKS WRITES ON THE GRINCH AND THE WAR OF THE WORLDS as competing foreign-policy metaphors. Which one is right?

Both, some of the time. The key is to figure out which story you’re in.

TOM MAGUIRE RESPONDS regarding an “October Surprise.”

JESSE JACKSON isn’t getting the respect he used to get. Especially when Carey Gage is involved. In addition, Scott Ott is helping Jackson with plans to celebrate America’s 40th anniversary.

“ALL THE YALE THAT’S FIT TO BLOG” isn’t much of a slogan, but there’s actually some stuff here that might be of interest to non-Yalies.

JOHN SCALZI IS DEFENDING COLUMNIST BOB GREENE: Well, against the charge presented, anyway:

Be all that as it may, I do have to wonder what the problem is here. Greene’s sleeping with a teenage woman is gross to think about, but they were both of legal age, and even if she was just barely so, “just barely so,” counts as legal. So far as I know, Greene applied no coercion other than his not-especially-dazzling celebrity, and as everyone knows, if a great many celebrities didn’t do that (especially the not-especially-dazzling ones, and especially ones, like Greene, who have a face for radio) they wouldn’t get any action at all; they’re just as lumpy and furtive as the rest of us. . . .

I think Greene should have been cut as a columnist years ago, not because he’s morally tainted, but because he’s a boring columnist. He stopped being interesting and started being filler long before he did his questionable after-school activities. From a purely utilitarian point of view, there’s no downside to Greene hightailing it out of town, excepting that there will be the painfully rationalized mea culpa six months down the road as part of Greene’s inevitable comeback (America loves a reformed sinner).

But based on what we know now, this isn’t the way Greene should go out.

Address all feedback to Scalzi.

THE NATION now has weblogs. Well, sort of. As TAPPED points out, they don’t seem to have any links in them. Hey, guys: linkage is what makes a weblog interesting and useful. Otherwise it’s just an oped in pixels.

Maybe The Nation just needs to teach its staff how to make a link in HTML. It’s not rocket science.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis emails to note that the Nation weblogs have permalinks — if you click on “more” it takes you to what appears to be a unique page. Yeah, but what I meant was links to other pages. The ones I looked at were entirely link-free. They need to read what Henry Copeland says.

EVERY MAN’S WISH COMES TRUE: Orchid had a dream about me.

It’s a sign that one of us needs to blog less, probably. Then again, based on past posts I think Orchid spends more time dreaming about Asparagirl and Condi Rice. But those are, er, different sorts of dreams.

LIBEL.COM — Rod Dreher offers some legal advice for bloggers.

From the facts stated in Dreher’s article, the suit in question doesn’t sound very strong, but I’m sure that there’s more to it than I’m aware of. Anyway, it’s the general subject that interests me, not the particulars of one case.

There’s been some discussion of this in the blogosphere, and the article and the items it links to are must-reads. Some webloggers are a bit quick on the draw with accusations of plagiarism, etc. — which particularly when aimed at a professional journalist are serious in the extreme, and likely to fetch a strong response — and need to remember that publishing on a weblog is no different from publishing elsewhere: you shouldn’t make accusations unless you’re reasonably sure they’re true, and could back it up if challenged. You’re not required to be right about everything, but some degree of responsibility and care is required, just as with Big Media. (And webloggers who publish things that turn out to be false should publish a correction swiftly once they learn of the error — whether or not anyone threatens a libel action).

And Big Media organizations have lawyers already on salary or retainer to deal with such things. Most bloggers don’t, and defending a libel suit, even if you win, is expensive and stressful. You can get insurance to cover the expense, but the stress will be there regardless.

More importantly, it’s not that hard to avoid libeling people. Just try to get things right — and be quick to correct errors that are pointed out. On the latter point, webloggers have Big Media beat hollow.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has some related observations.

SCIENCE AND ISLAM: James Rummel has a reply to my Star Trek post below.

MORE ON THE TRAIN DERAILMENT: I didn’t say much about this yesterday beyond this post because, well, I thought it was mostly a local story and no one would care. (Post-9/11, I’m somewhat desensitized to such things.) I was wrong, apparently. First it’s a lot bigger than I realized yesterday afternoon — one local TV station says 30,000 people were evacuated, which seems high to me, but if you add the mandatory-evacuation and the voluntary-evacuation areas together there may be that many people involved. Other accounts say “several thousand people,” which seems closer. And it’s gotten a lot more attention nationally.

The derailment is a mystery — the track is straight through that section, and there’s not obvious reason why it should happen. One eyewitness said the train was braking when the lead engine abruptly stopped and the rest of the train telescoped into it. (The train crew seems to be okay). This suggests track problems. There’s nothing in any news reports about terrorism or sabotage, but people are speculating darkly, of course — though it’s not as if trains don’t derail all the time in the absence of sabotage. (Here’s a link to the Knoxville News-Sentinel’s coverage, which has links to other information and streaming video.) And sulfuric acid is nasty stuff, but if I were a saboteur, I’d target a train carrying something worse.

Local talk-radio host Hallerin Hill is doing a terrific job (as he did on 9/11/2001) of putting together and relaying information on his program. I think that disaster-recovery and terrorism plans should take account of the important role that talk radio can play in relaying information and educating people; as callers have raised questions, he’s gotten the answers together very rapidly and has done a better job than the regular news broadcasts. I also notice that a lot of people who were evacuated actually evacuated themselves — I heard a couple of callers say that they checked the location of the wreck in relation to their own house “on the Internet” (probably via Mapquest) and then decided to leave on their own.

We learned on 9/11 that distributed information and communications play an important role in dealing with attacks or disasters. It’s important to take that into account when planning. People can self-organize if they have the information and means.

You can smell it as a faint acridity, and I notice that my eyes are a bit bloodshot, as are a lot of other people’s, but they are reporting that the air quality is a lot better now and some people will be able to get back to their homes today, while others will have to wait until tomorrow. In general it’s being taken in stride, and the local authorities, at first glance at least, seem to have been quick and efficient in their response, and I saw one representative saying that the incident is “good practice” for the terrorism-response teams. I guess after 9/11 this sort of thing seems a lot less shocking to everyone.

UPDATE: Fellow Knox-blogger SKBubba has more. I like his dig at MSNBC for its utterly erroneous statement that the derailment occurred in a “rural area.” I guess Tennessee = rural to those guys, population density notwithstanding.

SOMETHING EVEN WEIRDER THAN USUAL is going on with Blogger/Blogspot. Sometimes when I follow a link I get some code but no page, and just now I tried to go to Atios (and the link in my address window was to Atrios) but wound up at UggaBugga instead.

ANDREA SEE has gone 100 days without smoking. I’d buy her a drink, but (1) she’s in Singapore; and (2) judging by her weblog entries for the weekend, she’s had quite enough already.

IRAQ WILL HAVE THE BOMB BY CHRISTMAS? Maybe. I’m sure Saddam would like to find one under his tree — or leave one under ours. But I think this story’s appearance at this particular moment is more informative as evidence of when the administration is planning to take military action than as evidence of exactly when Saddam will achieve his lifelong dream.

EVIDENCE OF A SADDAM / BIN LADEN CONNECTION may be coming out a bit sooner than Gerhard Schroder had allowed for. I don’t think it’ll matter much with the German elections so close, but Papa Scott is right to say “Germany can forget about a permanent UN Security Council seat for a while.”

Then again, the value of those may have been inflated, like so much else, in the 1990s.

PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS ASKING why there are no Arabs in Star Trek. (Dr. Bashir is apparently a Punjabi.) This may explain it. The Vulcans must be one of the Lost Tribes.

UPDATE: A reader points out that Prince Abdullah of Jordan had a cameo in an episode of Voyager. I’ll bite down sarcastic remarks about Voyager not counting and admit that he’s right.

MICKEY KAUS HAS DISCOVERED “blindered Upper West Side rubes” and “creeping Zabarsism” at the Times. Say it ain’t so, Mickey!

I was more of a Balducci’s guy myself.

STEPHEN GREEN has discovered the peace movement’s newest manifestation: “Masturbate for Peace.”

Of course, some of us think that’s been pretty much the slogan all along. In a related development, Green also answers Rep. Ron Paul’s questons about the war.

UPDATE: This item by Eric S. Raymond suggests it’s nothing new. So that’s what all those Che posters were about. . . .