PHILADELPHIA MAIL-BOMB UPDATE: Reader Alan Swanson writes:

So maybe it is the anthrax guy but the NE Philly pipe bomb is much more likely related to the 19 pipe bombs or look-alikes that have been found in suburban Philadelphia over the last two years. I read about it in the local paper when I was visiting my mom a few months ago and couldn’t believe that it hadn’t gotten any national media exposure. Maybe it’s because nobody has been injured or maybe because it started prior to 9/11. Who knows?

It’s news to me. And, oddly, comforting news. We’ll have to await more information.

HMM. MATT LABASH IS branching out.

IT’S SAD WHEN legends hit rock bottom.

CHRIS BERTRAM takes on British philosopher Simon Blackburn and American talking head Francis Fukuyama and finds them both deficient in candor.

ACTIVISTS FOR FOOD POISONING: Nader group Public Citizen is unhappy with a provision in the Farm bill that allows irradiated food to be labeled as “pasteurized.” Never mind that food irradiation is well established as harmless, while Salmonella and other foodborne pathogens (which irradiation eliminates) kill surprisingly large numbers of people every year. Yeah, these guys care about consumers.

UPDATE: Okay, a couple of people think this is unfair, noting that irradiation isn’t the same as pasteurization. That’s true, I suppose — but since the anti-irradiation folks have been making bogus claims about its dangers for years, they’re not really in a position to now claim that “irradiation” is a neutral term.

AARON SCHATZ, who tracks traffic for Lycos emails some interesting observations on Pim Fortuyn:

Hi. I thought it might interest you, and your readers, that Pim Fortuyn came out as the #32 most-searched topic on the Internet this week, according to the Lycos 50. That is quite astonishing, given that our user base is almost entirely English-speaking (mostly American, with a clear amount of Canada, UK, and Australia traffic) and news stories rarely make it onto the Lycos 50 because people go to specific news sites rather than searching for news topics in the search engine.

Fortuyn received as many searches as Daniel Pearl’s murder, for example, and Pearl only received that many searches after rumors surfaced that the videotape of his execution was available online (video, particularly video not available elsewhere, drives Internet news searches). Even the Andrea Yates case only peaked at #44 on our list.

In addition, Pim’s assassin Volkert van der Graaf received more searches on Lycos last week than popular celebrities like Alyssa Milano and the Dave Matthews Band.

I think this is another demonstration that Fortuyn’s murder was a very big story, even outside of Holland.

As the Rainmakers say, it’s a little tiny world, just like a little tiny town.

THE ISRAELI DRIVERS WITH EXPLOSIVES STORY has turned out to be a dud.

THE U.S. COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT has just upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policy.

UPDATE: I’m too busy on a major writing project to say more about this, but don’t miss Judge Boggs’ appendix.

NEW YORK TIMES V. SULLIVAN: That’s the very clever title to Nick Schulz’s very clever column on the Howell Raines / Andrew Sullivan feud. Charles Murtaugh is less cheerful about the situation, though. Stanley Kurtz writes that Sullivan is more influential than The New Republic and that his success is a vindication of blogging. One thing’s for sure: Sullivan’s the master of buzz-generation, as all these stories prove.

A MAILBOX BOMB with a note reading “free Palestine” and mentioning Al Qaeda blew up yesterday as it was being defused.

If the palestinians want us to enter this war, well, they’d better be ready for the consequences.

UPDATE: Reader Patrick Campbell offers these thoughts:

I don’t know if you’re interested in a crackpot theory about this, but here goes anyway: I think it’s the same guy as the anthrax guy.

I have actual reasons for thinking this, so hear me out.

The anthrax attacks were through the mail. The anthrax attacks occurred or originated along the US Route 1 corridor between Philadelphia and New York. Yesterday’s bomb was also deposited in a mailbox. Yesterday’s bomb was deposited just off of Route 1 in a quiet residential neighborhood in Philadelphia. The diction of the note left in yesterday’s bomb is very similar (OK, it’s sketchy) to that in the letters; from the Philadelphia Inquirer: ‘The message attached to the package urged, “Open this now,” and demanded, “Free Palestine now. Al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda.”‘ Note the same usage of imperative sentences ending with the word “now” (i.e. the anthrax letters’ “you die now”).

I really wouldn’t be surprised to find out it’s the same guy.

Interesting. The geographic angle had occurred to me. The others hadn’t. Meanwhile Rand Simberg emails: “I think that there’s an excellent chance that this has nothing to do with the Middle East, but is simply an opportunistic bomber, who sees it as a way of deflecting attention from himself with spurious leads.” Maybe, though that would be out of character for an “opportunistic bomber,” wouldn’t it?

HOWARD KURTZ writes on the Andrew Sullivan / Howell Raines feud .

EVERYBODY HATES THE FARM BILL: I’m going to chime in with some words from an alt.country song about farm subsidies (no, really) called “Farmin’ the Government,” by the Nebraska Guitar Militia:

Other folks get welfare,
But we get aid
Don’t care what you call it
Long as I get paid

They’re just payin’ us to live here
Payin’ us not to go
Bribin’ us to take the place
Of Sioux and Buffalo — Don’t go!

Farmin’ the government
Plantin’ long green
Welfare for white folks
Keeps us buyin’ machines

The forthcoming CD is titled “Four Pickups of the Apocalypse.” It’s one of the projects I’m supposed to be mastering in my nonexistent spare time (because, unlike blogging, mastering takes big blocks of concentration) but maybe I’ll try to put up an MP3 of the unmastered version somewhere.

UPDATE: Okay, there’s a somewhat rough version here in several different formats. You may also be able to stream the song directly by clicking here.

DR. WEEVIL wants to set up a specialized Chomsky-debunking blog. But what if Chomsky were a one-eyed pirate, and had his own blog? I know you’ve been wondering that.

LIKE THE SPACE STUFF I WRITE ABOUT HERE? Then — especially if you live not too far from Denver, or just feel like going to Denver — you might want to check out the 2002 International Space Development Conference. If nothing else, it’s a chance to meet Samizdata blogger Dale Amon. Just don’t try to match him drink for drink. Hmm. Maybe I can get Kaus to loan me his Boeing for the trip.

FISK-A-RAMA: Matt Welch is collecting examples of atrocious errors by blogger fave Robert Fisk. Got a good one? Drop by and contribute it!

BELLESILES UPDATE: George Will’s Newsweek column this week is about the Bellesiles fraud scandal. Excerpt:

Bellesiles’s malfeasance, although startling in its sweep, brazenness and apparently political purpose, actually reveals something heartening—a considerable strength in America’s scholarly community. Its critical apparatus is working. Scholars and their journals are doing their duty, which is to hold works of scholarship up to the bright light of high standards.

As a result, when next the Supreme Court is required to rule on the controversy concerning which Bellesiles’s book was supposed to be so decisively informative, the court’s judgment will not be clouded by Bellesiles’s evident attempt to misrepresent the context in which the Framers wrote the Second Amendment.

A number of readers have emailed me that they’re afraid Emory will try to sweep the Bellesiles scandal under the rug. I don’t think so.

UPDATE: In other Second Amendment news, Terry Eastland says that Ashcroft’s new right-to-bear-arms stance won’t make as much difference as either critics or supporters have been saying.

FORGET A WORKABLE REVENUE MODEL FOR WEBLOGS: There seems to be some difficulty in finding one for big media.

PAUL KRUGMAN’S latest column receives its usual Fisking from Matthew Hoy, who’s making something of a career of this.

THE TWO-EDGED SWORD: Lawyers have lodged a complaint for “inciting hatred” against Dutch politicians and press figures who called Pim Fortuyn an extremist, fascist, etc., claiming that those characterizations led to his death. (Via loudmouths).

I don’t approve of “hate speech” laws, but if you’re going to have them, they must be enforced evenhandedly. Which is why I hope SFSU will enforce its policies as strictly against the palestinian rioters as it would against, say, someone who made anti-black or anti-gay remarks.

LOTS OF GOOD STUFF over at Andrew Sullivan‘s site today.

CLONING UPDATE: At 10:00 a.m. today, the Diane Rehm show will have a panel talking about cloning. I don’t get it here, but if you do you may want to listen.

SCAM ALERT: I’ve gotten this message several times now:

Dear eBay member!

Your information in our eBay file, was marked (flagged) as incorrect and/or (fraudulent). To avoid any inconvenience concerning an interruption of your service membership, in future. Please take just a moment and update your eBay billing file. Remember to “doublecheck” all the fields for any possible mistakes.

There’s more, with a link to a page where you can enter the information. Except that the page has nothing to do with eBay, and the message (though it appears to come from eBay) actually doesn’t if you check the headers.

EUGENE VOLOKH responds to Jack Rakove’s New York Times oped on the Second Amendment:

Prof. Rakove’s view doesn’t even specify what the right would mean. . . . It seems that Prof. Rakove’s view must be that the right means nothing, and never meant anything — certainly his op-ed doesn’t say anything about what the right means or once meant. That’s a funny way to read the Bill of Rights. Reading the Bill of Rights, as, well, securing to the people — again, like you and me — certain rights strikes me as a much more sensible approach.

Yes, it’s always startling to me how quick some people are to dismiss one-tenth of the Bill of Rights.

OKAY, NOW THIS IS WEIRD. A rental truck with two “Israeli nationals” in it was found to have residue of explosives. That might not mean anything, as the residues could be from prior renters — explosives are in much more common use than most people realize, and though you’re supposed to have a special license, and execute special rental agreements, to haul explosives even in small quantities, people don’t always do that. On the other hand, while the story says that there was residue from TNT (common), it also says there was residue from RDX plastic explosive, which I think is considerably less common. I’d also be interested in knowing whether these Israeli nationals are of Arab extraction, or not. No information on that appears in the story.

I’m also interested that the authorities thought to test the truck for explosives, which I tend to doubt is a routine thing. Am I wrong about that?

There could easily be innocent explanations for this, but it’s troubling, and warrants further investigation.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

With regards to this story, I just wanted to mention that anyone familiar with moving business in Boston or New York City knows that it is completely dominated by Israelis (some even might be working their without proper documents). So, it does’t strike me as odd to find out about 2 Israeli guys moving furniture in the odd morning hour (for example, my friend used an Israeli company when moving from Boston to Seattle, and I can’t imagine that they must have been driving the truck with his stuff only during the day). As far as explosives are concerned, you listed all the possibilities.

Yes, that’s why I don’t want to make too much of this. This story seems far more worrisome.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader N.D. “Buck” Smith writes: “RDX is pretty commonly used in oil well drilling.” Interesting. I know a lot about explosives for a law professor (where knowing that TNT isn’t identical to dynamite makes you, well, a rocket scientist) but that’s about it.

CORSAIR has some Pythonesque observations on the Catholic Church’s hardball litigation tactics.