IT’S WORKING:

The Syrian Ba’athist regime is struggling to prevent a rising tide of agitation for across-the-board reform and democratisation from turning into a flood.

For one of the last fraying Arab versions of the theoretically socialist, one-party state, repression is proving less and less effective. . . .

Addomari was in the thick of it, but Farzat simply went too far. He continued to attack a perennial target of his, Saddam Hussein, even as Americans and British prepared to invade his country.

He portrayed Saddam and his portly generals stuffing the Iraqi people, as cannon fodder, into the barrel of a gun, and haranguing a crowd of hungry and ragged citizens: “They have come to plunder your palaces, your riches, your businesses and your oil.”

The Ba’athists weren’t happy.

APPARENTLY, IF YOUR S.A.T. SCORES ARE GOOD ENOUGH, you’re entitled to go to college even if you flunk a bunch of classes in your senior year. At least, that’s the theory behind a lawsuit in North Carolina that probably shouldn’t have been filed. Begging to Differ is channeling Sam Kinison in response.

UPDATE: Kimberly Swygert has much more on this.

JOHN LOTT has posted a lengthy response to the Ayres and Donohue letter I mention below, on his website. “Despite their continuing claims to the press, Ayres and Donohue’s own papers do NOT provide any statistically significant evidence that violent crimes increase. . . . Ayres and Donohue’s tone is extreme, especially in comparison to my language.”

UPDATE: Read this, too. Lott emails:

Given Ayres and Donohue’s claim that “”correcting his errors did eliminate his finding,” one can readily see from the corrected tables and figures that this statement is false. The coefficient estimates do change somewhat, but the basic point is still clear. Whether one uses the types of statistical tests that Ayres and Donohue use for all their regressions or whether you use the the type of methodology that Plassmann argues for because of the truncation issues and the nature of the data being count data, you still get a drop in crime.

I expect that there will be more discussion on this topic.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING PROFILE of recently captured Jemaah Islamiyyah terrorist Hanbali, featuring literally dozens of links.

DEREK LOWE HAS A NANOTECHNOLOGY ROUNDUP POST that’s a must-read if you’re interested in this stuff, though it’s mostly bio-nanotech.

He also has a post about a drug that makes people have orgasms when they yawn. I love the potential implications of this — suddenly the most boring professors would become the most popular. C-SPAN would have a 30 share. Tax lawyers would be sought out at cocktail parties. . . .

YEP, THIS EMAIL VIRUS OUTBREAK IS THE WORST EVER:

Sobig.F, which is the sixth and latest strain of a virus that first emerged in January, spreads through Windows personal computers via e-mail and network file- share systems. Besides clogging e-mail systems full of messages with subjects like “Re: Details” and “Re: Wicked screensaver,” the virus also deposits a Trojan horse, or hacker back door, that can be used to turn victims’ PCs into spam machines.

“It’s a seeding,” said Mr. Czarny. “All they’re looking to do is plant that Trojan.”

Sobig.F can overwhelm e-mail servers, and deleting all those messages can consume users’ time, said Mr. Ellis. “I think Nachi’s really going to be the one that hurts us from the volume perspective — us being the Internet.”

I can’t believe how many virus emails are hitting my system. They’re getting blocked at the server, but hundreds of 100K attachments per hour is a lot of traffic, and if this spreads it’ll really bog down the Net.

MORE ARIANNA HYPOCRISY, once again unearthed by her nemesis, Matt Welch.

NOW THAT’S PUNDITRY:

At least one pundit is saying that this is a match between a Clinton surrogate (Davis) and a Reagan imitator (Schwarzenegger). But Davis is an inferior Clinton while Schwarzenegger may actually be a superior Reagan.

He shoots, he scores.

WELL, THE ANSWER IS YES, at least sometimes.

MICHELLE MALKIN:

While Katie Couric complains about GOP candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger being “the son of a Nazi party member” and international media outlets assail Schwarzenegger adviser Pete Wilson as “anti-immigrant” and “racially divisive,” the liberal press has been stone-cold silent on Bustamante’s connection to one of the nation’s most virulently racist organizations. . . .

MEChA has been dismissed by some as a harmless social club, but it operates an identity politics indoctrination machine on publicly subsidized college and high school campuses nationwide that would make David Duke and the KKK turn green with envy. MEChA members in the University of California system have rioted in Los Angeles, editorialized that federal immigration “pigs should be killed, every single one” in San Diego, and are suspected of breaking into a conservative student publication’s offices and stealing its entire print run in Berkeley.

MEChA’s symbol is an eagle clutching a dynamite stick and machete-like weapon in its claws; its motto is ” Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada (For the Race, everything. For those outside the Race, nothing).” . . .

Why should Bustamante, a public figure already known to have used a racial epithet in the past (he infamously used the word “nigger” while addressing a Black History Month event two years ago) get a pass?

I guess I should be surprised that this story has gotten so little attention, but I’m not.

UPDATE: Here’s a DeWayne Wickham piece on Bustamante’s use of the n-word. Bustamante apologized, but it’s what slipped out. One can only imagine how people would respond if Bush — or Schwarzenegger — made a similar slip. And it doesn’t explain MECha.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Pedro Cardenas emails:

I attended Cal-Berkeley and although MeCHA’s politics are backward, as a group it’s rather harmless. It’s all bark, no bite. Just clueless college kids playing revolutionary and for what it’s worth, you get that a lot at Cal from many groups. (At a high school level, they weren’t that much better. I attended Garfield High in East Los Angeles and didn’t know of its existence until after graduation. I’m sure most people were surprised as well).

Not surprising — but the point is the group’s racism, not its effectiveness. Most white-supremacist groups are equally ineffectual, but a major-party candidate’s membership in one would get a lot more attention than this has gotten. That’s a double standard.

JACOB T. LEVY WRITES IN THE NEW REPUBLIC:

Agricultural protectionism–the combination of quotas, tariffs, and subsidies for farm products–may be the purest example of destructive special-interest politics ever created. . . .

Still, the costs agricultural policies impose on their own societies are manageable in the huge economies of the developed world. The costs they impose on the rest of the world are often devastating.

Yes. This is why they should be abolished. As the Nebraska Guitar Militia sing:

They’re just payin’ us to live here
Payin us not to go
Bribin’ us to take the place of
Sioux and Buffalo

Or, as elsewhere in the song, “Other folks get welfare, but we get ‘aid’ — don’t care what you call it man, long as I get paid.”

MICHAEL FUMENTO IS CHANNELING BILL O’REILLY in a way that doesn’t become him. Fumento’s schtick — which is sometimes on target and sometimes not, though I’ve generally admired his work — is that he overcomes elitism and political correctness by having the arguments and the facts. Yet he responded to criticism from blogger Rich Hailey with insulting but largely fact-free emails, and now he’s following it up with more insults in place of argument on his own website. (The Atkins diet doesn’t work because Rich Hailey’s picture looks fat? Yeah, that’s a winner. And if blogs and bloggers are as insignificant as he says, then why is he so angry?)

Hailey’s picture may be unflattering, but this style of argument doesn’t make Fumento look good, though I suppose it does prove him right when he says that anyone with a website can go ahead and post just anything. An editor would have restrained this embarrassing outburst. And, based on this churlish post, Fumento needs one. Perhaps he should leave web-punditry to those who are capable of restraining themselves.

UPDATE: According to a couple of readers Fumento also appears to be guilty of photo-dowdification. If you’ll compare the photo on Hailey’s page with the one on Fumento’s page, you’ll see that Fumento has squashed the rectangular photo into a square, having the effect of making Hailey look rather more portly than in the original.

I’m not sure that this is intentional — the “fat” image shows properties of 169 x 169 pixels, while the original image shows 200 x 250, and there hasn’t been any cropping. But when I saved the “fat” image to put up here for a comparison, it popped back to the original dimensions, suggesting that some sort of weird formatting thing on Fumento’s page is responsible.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I looked at the source HTML for the page, and both height and width of the image are set at 169, which has the effect of forcing the original image into the less flattering square when it’s displayed on a browser.

Intentional, or accidental? Beats me, though it’s probably the latter — the “typing monkey” image on the page has the same formatting. I think it’s just sloppy coding. Note to Fumento: if you specify only a height or width dimension, the image will automatically be displayed at the size you specify, with the other dimension automatically adjusted to keep things in proper proportion. If you specify both height and width, then if the proportions are different from the original image you’ll distort it.

Hey, maybe this web stuff isn’t quite as easy as it looks. . . .

UPDATE: John Hawkins has some numbers.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bigwig has some advice for Fumento, who he says is trolling:

If Mr. Fumento really is that popular, proving it is easy. All he has to do is put a publicly accessible web counter on his front page.

I’ll just note that I have an open counter.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Fumento has responded to this post, and quite politely. But I don’t have an opinion on the Atkins diet; I just thought he was being rude. Everybody I know who has tried Atkins has lost weight. Nearly all of them have gained it back. But, of course, that’s true of every other diet. . . .

BILL HERBERT CRITIQUES a post by Kevin Drum that itself criticizes Josh Chafetz’s Weekly Standard cover story on BBC bias.

It’s a never-ending conversation here in the blogosphere!

HERE’S AN INTERESTING THEORY on the motivation behind the U.N. bombing in Baghdad. I think it’s quite plausible.

BILL WHITTLE HAS A NEW ESSAY: It’s on responsibility.

DANIEL DREZNER HAS MORE ON NORTH KOREA, where there’s a lot of interesting multilateral diplomacy going on.

CHIEF WIGGLES WAS ON THE SCENE OF THE U.N. BOMBING in Baghdad, and blogs a firsthand report. He’s also unhappy with the media coverage:

Maybe our efforts for the most part are going unnoticed: the schools and hospitals that have been opened, the playgrounds and housing projects that have been started, and the many jobs that have been created. Where is all the talk about the thousands of good things that have been done? Why is the media not assisting to promote the word that many great things are occurring day after day? Where is the truth in reporting that makes good news as sellable as bad news? . . .

I am fine, if any of you are wondering. Life goes on as usual, these acts of terrorism hardly causing us to skip a beat in the process of reconstruction. Our resolve is firm and commitment in tack, for we will succeed and be victorious.

This is the right thing to be doing; righteousness will prevail over the evil intentions of misguided hate filled people. Keep the faith. Do your part in assisting us to be able to continue until we are finished with our plans. We need your help. Tell everyone you know that we will not give in to their negative reporting and we will not give up until we are done.

Read the whole thing.

TO THE VARIOUS PEOPLE WHO HAVE HIT THE TIPJAR: I usually send a thank-you email (a real one — no bots here!) and I’ve tried in spite of the literally hundreds of virus emails I’m getting every time I open the mailbox. But if your email got deleted accidentally, I’m sorry. This flood is driving even the cool-as-ice Matt Welch crazy. I’m afraid to see what it’s doing to Layne. . . .

ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY CHART OF GUN-BIAS IN THE MEDIA is up, and it’s an especially interesting one.

KIM JONG-IL OUGHT TO BE WORRIED: The Russians have written him off. And I don’t think he should count on the Chinese much, either.

BILL HOBBS NOTES that Nonviolence.org didn’t miss a beat in condemning the bombing of Hiroshima on its anniversary a couple of weeks ago, but that it can’t seem to condemn the killing of Israeli schoolchildren by Palestinian terrorists.

Why is it that it’s always the civilized world that is supposed to be nonviolent?

JOHN LOTT UPDATE: I’ve been slow to believe charges of dishonesty aimed at John Lott. First, I don’t understand the underlying statistics well enough, and second, Lott has been the target of many vicious smears and lies, which tends to make me reflexively doubt the latest charges by his many antigun critics. (For example, because he had an Olin Fellowship at the University of Chicago, antigun people said his research was funded by Winchester, a company the Olin family, which endowed the fellowships, once owned — which is sort of like saying that the Henry Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale is “bought and paid for by Time Magazine.” I don’t think they ever apologized, either.)

Nonetheless, the question of coding errors in some of Lott’s research, discussed earlier on InstaPundit here and here, continues to stand. John Donohue of Stanford sent me a letter to the editor, which he (together with Ian Ayres of Yale) sent in response to something from Lott. I asked him for permission to reprint it here (I got the idea from his email that he wanted me to, but I wasn’t completely certain), and haven’t heard back — but I notice that Tim Lambert has already posted it.

While I suspect that Ayres and Donohue favor gun control, and dislike Lott’s theories on policy grounds, I regard them as honest guys — though I went to law school with them and may be biased thereby. At any rate, while I can’t speak to the merits of the statistical argument myself, it is notable that Ayres and Donohue are now doing something that they have not done earlier, which is accusing Lott of being deliberately misleading, not of mere inadvertence. I expect that this debate isn’t over.

It’s also worth noting something that Mark Kleiman said earlier on this:

At the end of the day, though, it’s pretty clear that if “shall-issue” increases gun violence at all, it doesn’t do so by very much. To that limited extent, Lott was right and the gun controllers were wrong.

Given that anti-gun people predicted, over and over again, that the streets would be red with blood if shall-issue were adopted in various states, that’s no small thing.

UPDATE: Lott phoned me — he’s away from computers but had heard of this post by phone. He emphatically denies any deception, says that he’s made all the data available on his website, and promises to send me an email when he’s online. He also says that the claim of a small increase in crime is wrong.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I want to be clear, here — I think I was anyway, but after the Ashcroft thing my confidence is blown — that neither Lambert, Ayres, or Donohue was behind the bogus “Winchester” claims. Those came from anti-gun groups, and were parroted by sympathetic politicians and journalists.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: John Lott has posted a response on his website.

IF YOU ONLY READ THIS BLOG, or this one and a few others, then you should really branch out. A good place to start is at The Carnival of the Vanities, where blog posts from all over are collected for your perusal. Check ’em out. You may find some new blogs you like.

WILLIAM J. DYER says that the New York Times is playing down key facts about the U.N. bombing in order to make the Bush Administration look bad. Most importantly — that the UN deliberately declined to follow warnings about security, even though its employees have been targeted on previous occasions.

Read the whole thing, which makes the Times, not to mention a number of other critics, look pretty foolish, or pretty dishonest. The U.N., meanwhile, appears to have been fecklessly living in a fantasyland. But that’s not news.

MORE ON DISASTER PREPAREDNESS — and an email from my mom! All over at GlennReynolds.com.