I’M HEADING OFF ON VACATION: I’ll be off laundering the millions in tipjar contributions scuba diving in the Cayman Islands until July 3d.

Anyway, I’m not taking a computer, and I won’t be blogging unless something big happens. Really big. Email sent while I’m gone will likely be be unanswered and unread. But Eugene Volokh will be guest-blogging over at GlennReynolds.com, and my TechCentralStation column will run on Wednesday as usual. It’s about mind uploading.

Have a nice week, and enjoy the many fine blogs linked over on the left.

And in keeping with Dan Drezner’s post, here’s a list of some books I’m taking with me, though I’m afraid it’s a somewhat less elevated list — but then I am going to a tropical island, while he is on a “working” vacation.

Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division — I’ve read the earlier parts of his future history, now looking alarmingly accurate in some ways, and so I’m continuing the cycle.

The Lost Coast and The Straight Man by Roger Simon. ‘Nuff said. (I’ve already read his newest book, Director’s Cut, which sucked me into the Moses Wine world and then sent me back to start from the beginning with The Big Fix.

And, finally, on the off-chance that I feel like doing something constructive, I’m taking the manuscript for Jeffrey Stout’s forthcoming book, Democracy and Tradition. I’m rather a fan of his even though we come at things from a different perspective.

So long — have a good week!

J’ACCUSE: John Sweeney writes: “I accuse John Pilger of cheating the public and favouring a dictator.”

PRESIDENT BUSH IS CALLING ON CHARLES TAYLOR TO QUIT:

“President Taylor needs to step down so that his country can be spared further bloodshed,” Mr. Bush said in Washington during a wide-ranging speech on his administration’s Africa policy.

The president is scheduled to travel to Africa on July 7 for a five-day visit that will take him to Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda, and Nigeria.

In his speech, he also urged the formation by June 30th of an interim government in Congo. He urged leaders of neighboring governments to assist the creation of an integrated national army. A war in Congo has killed more than 3 million people in the past four years.

It’s nice to see Africa get some attention.

MORE ON SABINE HEROLD, FRENCH HEROINE:

She is a political science student, very beautiful and speaks perfect English. She has also just become the most famous 21-year-old in France.

Dubbed France’s Lady Thatcher by the newspapers, Mademoiselle Herold has been leading the rallies against the unions who have been crippling her country. Standing on a telephone box in her pearl earrings and high heels, she addresses crowds of 80,000, urging them to rise up against the striking teachers, Metro workers, rubbish collectors and air traffic controllers who are ruining people’s lives. With her student friends, she has set up an organisation: Liberte J’Ecris Ton Nom, which has thousands of members, demanding that France reforms.

Now, she wants to come to Britain. Her email is simple: “I would like to spend my time meeting politicians. I don’t wear jeans; I like red meat; please could I bring a camera crew?”

Here, she has been called Joan of Arc. “That is stupid,” she says. “I love Britain. I love Margaret Thatcher. I love the way you have overcome the unions and are not afraid to privatise. I love the way you work so hard. In France, we have become lazy and staid. We think only of weekends, holidays and how great we once were. We need a dose of Thatcherism.”

Good sense has not died in France.

MARK GLASER REPORTS ON SOFTWARE FILTERING:

Blocking legitimate Web sites for minors is bad, but blocking these same sites for adults is even worse, which led to the American Library Association’s suit in the first place. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Online Policy Group released a study that coincided with the Supreme Court decision, showing just how much gets blocked by the top two filters, N2H2’s Bess and SurfControl. The study focused on a broad number of subjects that a student might research online.

“We found that for every page blocked correctly, filters block one or more pages inappropriately,” said Will Doherty, EFF’s media relations director. “We thought a lot of pages would be blocked because of ideological views of the software companies — and they were — but what surprised us were the random pages that were blocked for seemingly no reason. There was a punctuation site blocked, and a theater arts site blocked. We don’t know why.”

I don’t trust filters very much, but I suppose that they will improve with time. I hope.

RON BAILEY HAS BEEN COVERING the Bio2003 conference. Here’s a link to his latest piece, which has links to the earlier coverage. It’s all worth reading.

AN INTERESTING TAKE:

For the last few years, top executives from all the major record companies have been giving interviews in which they criticize consumers for doing exactly what the execs have been doing for years – getting music for free. I was “in the loop” for a couple years, when I was writing about music for a free weekly, as well as a major daily newspaper, in Los Angeles, many years ago. And I can tell you – none of these characters paid for anything, ever.

The bookcases in their offices and their homes were (and are) filled with “product” that they receive for free as a matter of course. They would not dream of ever paying for recorded music, themselves, with very few exceptions. But now that the average consumer can download a ripped file from the Internet, you’d think it was the end of Western Civilization, from the way they talk.

The false piousness of their pronouncements on this subject really offends me. I assure you, back in the day, if somebody at Record Company A wanted a copy of the new LP by so-and-so and the such-and-suches, they would shout at the secretary to call their good friend at Record Company B and have it messengered over, with the fee for the messenger charged to the artist signed to Company B! Maybe it took a little longer than getting an mp3 off the web now, but my point is that they did not go down to their local record store and pay list price to nobly support the artist who they claimed to be interested in.

I made money selling the promos I received. It never paid my rent, it was more like a meal here and there, but I knew of other journalists who were much more handsomely rewarded for pumping up certain labels’ artists by being double or triple-listed on the promo mailing list. And, back then, many records were released each month, and there were far more record companies, so if someone got that privilege at five or six different publicity departments, it could really add up.

Basically, if you were connected to the teat, you waved your magic wand and any music you wanted came to you free of charge.

Heh. I love the part about the messenger fee. (It’s, er, “promotion.”) Read the whole thing.

JEFF JARVIS is shameless. I mean that in the nicest possible way, of course.

LOCALBLOGGING: Ed Cone writes that the blogosphere recapitulates geography.

PHIL CARTER THINKS that the Lawrence decision will open the path for gays in the military.

Hey, maybe it was all that talk about diversity in the “green brief” that did it.

ARTHUR SILBER thinks Justice Scalia is really Rick Santorum:

SANTORUM=SCALIA??!!: I think they’re the same person. Santorum said:

“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything,” Santorum, R-Pa., said in the interview, published Monday.

And in his dissent, Scalia says:

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding.

Has anyone ever seen them together at the same time?

But James Taranto thinks Scalia is really Jerry Seinfeld:

Scalia Imitates Seinfeld

” ‘The court has taken sides in the culture war,’ Scalia said, adding that he has ‘nothing against homosexuals.’ “–CNN.com, June 26, 2003

“We’re not gay! Not that there’s anything wrong with that . . .”–Jerry Seinfeld, “Seinfeld,” Feb. 11 1993

He looks a bit like George Costanza. But only a bit.

RAND SIMBERG MUSES on the question of names and meaning.

PROF. ERIC MULLER writes that Justice O’Connor shouldn’t have given the interview (linked here earlier) to the Chicago Tribune‘s Jan Crawford Greenburg in which she talked about the affirmative action case.

A WHILE BACK I LINKED TO THE BURNING ANNIE movie website. They’ve got some new stuff up, and I’m trying to persuade them to start selling videos online. If you liked the trailers and might be interested in buying one, drop by and let ’em know.

JEFF JARVIS, AS USUAL, has rounded up blog posts from Iraq.

THE SUPREME COURT JUST STRUCK DOWN the Texas sodomy law in Lawrence. That’s all I know at the moment.

UPDATE: Here’s a story from the Houston Chronicle. Excerpt:

The 6-3 ruling reverses course from a ruling 17 years ago that states could punish homosexuals for what such laws historically called deviant sex.

The case is a major reexamination of the rights and acceptance of gay people in the United States. More broadly, it also tests a state’s ability to classify as a crime what goes on behind the closed bedroom doors of consenting adults.

Today’s ruling invalidated a Texas law against “deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.”

The law “demeans the lives of homosexual persons,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority.

These early reports are often unreliable as to the reasoning or reach of the case, but it certainly sounds like the end of Bowers v. Hardwick, which I see as a good thing.

Here’s what I wrote about the case back in December, and here’s a law review article that Dave Kopel and I wrote that’s relevant, too. It will be interesting to see if the Court followed our suggestions.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I’ve given the majority opinion — which is mercifully short — a quick read. No big surprises, except perhaps the weight given to decisions by the European Court of Human Rights, etc. Fundamentally, though, the opinion holds that Bowers was wrong in both its history and its law. State decisions under state constitutions get a good deal of attention, and the upshot is that there seems to be a general right of consenting adults to engage in non-commercial sexual activity without the interference of the state.

My only real complaint is that this is couched solely in terms of the scope of a liberty interest, and not — as many of the state cases the Court cites do — in terms of limits to the legitimate exercise of state power. That’s largely a matter of rhetoric, but it’s an important one, I think.

O’Connor’s concurrence, however, makes clear that a statute based on “moral disapproval” fails even rational basis review, because moral disapproval cannot be a legitimate government interest. “Texas’ invocation of moral disapproval as a legitimate state interest proves nothing more than Texas’ desire to criminalize homosexual sodomy.” That’s exactly right.

Obvious disclaimer: This is based on a very quick reading. My views on further reflection may change.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jack Balkin has a post up. And, natch, Howard Bashman has quite a roundup.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Larry Solum has a lot more on his site, and there’s an ongoing discusson at The Volokh Conspiracy, too.

Clayton Cramer, meanwhile, is unhappy with the decision. I kind of figured. He says that the Court has its history wrong.

MORE: Tony Adragna is unimpressed with Scalia’s dissent.

NOAH SHACHTMAN LOOKS AT the case for mercenaries in Africa. It’s worth reading his article along with this long post by Trent Telenko on contracting-out military logistics.

BLOGTUNEZ: So I was running errands yesterday, listening to Pieter K’s CD Everything All the Time, and then to a mix tape that Kaus sent me a while back (lots of depressed, yet somehow sexy, women singers). And it occurred to me that more and more I get my cues to music from blogs, not from mainstream publications. In my case that’s probably no surprise, but I’ll bet it’s true of a lot of people nowadays. I wonder how much the music industry is picking up on this? Not much, as far as I can tell.

GO TO JAMES LILEKS’ SITE. Read The Bleat. Scroll to bottom of page. (Er, well, you’re already there if you’ve read The Bleat, I guess.) Donate to tip jar. Repeat as desired.

UPDATE: John Scalzi is more eloquent than the above:

If you’ve ever enjoyed the Bleat or one of his books, go leave him a nice tip. James is not claiming poverty or hardship, nor is he suggesting that what’s going on in his household is the end of the world. He’s not even asking people to hit his tip jar (aside from the fact that his tip jar exists at all). My suggestion about you leaving him a tip isn’t about that. It’s just a way to let him know you appreciate the Bleat, and that he and his lovely and talented wife will soon see the backend of this blip, and in the meantime, here’s what you’d pay to buy him that drink you’d undoubtedly have together if you happened to be in Minneapolis at the moment.

What he said. As I can attest, while the money from online donations is, of course nice — it’s money, after all — it’s the fact that strangers like your stuff enough to send you money when they don’t even have to that makes it especially gratifying and cheering. I’m still surprised every time it happens, and the fact that it happens at all is causing me to rethink my view of economics. But that’s another post. For now, go send Lileks money and cheer.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Apparently, enough contributions have gone in to cause Amazon’s computers to seize up. You can always mail him a check care of the Star Tribune of course.

BTW, I should note that I completely misread his post yesterday — I thought he was in trouble over The Bleat. Judging by my email, so did pretty much everyone who read it. I’m glad that’s not the case.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, in New Hampshire this time.

And that’s really what it is.

JEFF JARVIS IS A DIRTY OLD PREMATURELY GRAY MAN. I think this will be a huge success.

ONE OF MY FORMER LAW STUDENTS — with the assistance of at least one other — has started a computer game company. They’ve got a new game going into beta testing called Hostile Intent (you can see screenshots here) that looks pretty cool to me.

Knoxville once had CyberFlix, known for such games as Lunicus, Jump Raven, and Titanic, but its owners sold out and shut down a few years ago. There seems to be another wave of creativity coming, though. I wonder if that means the recession is over?

ANOTHER CLIMBDOWN:

Media coverage of the attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad that killed two television cameramen was “overblown” because journalists were at the centre of the story, BBC and Sky correspondents in the Iraqi capital have claimed.

The head of Sky News, Nick Pollard, today told the MediaGuardian forum on war coverage that on the day of the attack on the hotel – the main centre for western journalists reporting the war – he decided after a few hours to stop running it as the main story.

“It was overblown, but for a very good reason, because that was the centre for the media,” said Sky reporter David Chater.

Well, so long as there was a good reason.

I’VE LINKED TO THIS STORY BEFORE, but Blogcritics has more on the Secret Service’s absurd behavior regarding anti-Bush protesters in South Carolna. This has been a Secret Service problem for about 20 years, ever since Ronald Reagan was shot, and it seems to be getting worse. The Secret Service seems to have serious management problems that don’t seem to be getting the attention they deserve.

WHAT CAN WEB JOURNALISM LEARN FROM PORN? I’ve got a piece on that topic over at the SuicideGirls website.