YEAH, I KNOW, I promised a followup on the Iraqi Oil Trust idea. Unfortunately, I neglected to file the massive quantities of email that I got on that idea separately, and now the stuff is buried. If you sent me thoughts on that, will you resend them with “Iraqi Oil Trust” as the subject line? Sorry about that.

In the meantime, this post by Jeff Jarvis asks why charities aren’t lining up to help Iraqis. Telford Work, along with some others (read the comments to Jeff’s post) says that quite a few Christian charities are in high gear. Howard Owens, meanwhile, offers a charitable effort that he personally vouches for.

Several people have emailed me to say that the usual NGOs are basically boycotting Iraq as part of an ongoing war with the U.S. government. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I have to say, though, that the internationalistas of the NGOs don’t seem to do all that much good. In fact, they seem rather, well, colonialist, really. I suspect a lot of people agree, and would like to see a better alternative.

UPDATE: And in a sort-of-related note, Tacitus has some thoughts on the Iraqi political scene. He says we’re demonstrating way too much forbearance toward fundamentalist Muslim clerics. The Turks, meanwhile, seem a bit nervous.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Eric McErlain emails:

I’ve been exchanging email with a friend of mine currently working out of Amman as part of a Disaster Assistance Response Team, or DART. A number of these teams were dispatched by the U.S. Government to the region (Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia , Jordan) in anticipation of the flood of refugees that never came. She’s mentioned in a number of emails that the NGOs are refusing to work with anyone or anything attached to the governments of any of the countries in the coalition that invaded Iraq.

Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff I’m hearing, though I haven’t seen much news coverage on it. There’s a good story for someone in this if it’s true: “NGO’s put politics before people,” etc. McErlain goes on:

One other note — she also mentioned that the only folks she encountered fleeing Iraq were something she called “third-country nationals” — which I’m guessing means citizens of countries not directly involved in the conflict. You have to wonder if those folks are simply non-Iraqi terrorists just getting out of Dodge through Jordan.

I suspect that quite a few people were keeping an eye on those folks.

ONE OF THE SUBJECTS I TEACH IS ADMINISTRATIVE LAW, and I always have the students draft comments on a proposed regulation, which are then actually filed with the agency in question and become part of the rulemaking docket. I don’t tell them what position to take, but just grade them on the quality of their work, which is often very good. (One of my students some years ago actually got a job offer out of her comments.)

The topic from last year (well, year-before-last now, I guess) was hours-of-service regulations for truckers. Now the new rules have been released and InstaPundit reader (and trucker) Gerald Dearing observes:

They slipped this in “under the radar”, so to speak, while we were all distracted by other events. But these are not as bad as the Clinton era reform proposals that had the whole industry up in arms.

Of course the teamsters complain. That’s what they do. But their routes are negotiated by contract, and I don’t see their routines changing much.

And of course the “safety experts” will bitch. That’s what they do, too. Will the average truckers life change? Very little. I rarely take just an eight hour break. When I stop, it’s often for ten or twelve hours.

And I don’t hit the maximum ten driving hours every day. Now I won’t hit the eleven maximum every day. The big limitation is the “Seventy Hours in Eight Days” rule, and that’s virtually unchanged. (If you take 34 hours off, you then have hours to run anyway. Why bother!) I don’t foresee the savings in lives predicted by the D.O.T. nor do I foresee the dramatically increased carnage forecast by the “safety groups”.

Notice that there is still no requirement that the driver actually sleep. Ten hours playing Video Poker (or ‘net surfin’) makes one eligible to drive another eleven hours. ;-)

“Net Surfin’?” Hmm. InstaPundit: Menace of the motorways!

UPDATE: Reader Skip Oliva emails:

I think it’s great you have your students submit actual comments to the agencies. I pretty much draft public comments for a living (more on agency consent orders than rulemaking) and I find a lot of ignorance even among the bar about this process. I’m always looking for law students to help with research and writing, but most of the students I have spoken to didn’t even realize there are public comment processes in administrative proceedings.

Yeah, I’m surprised how many lawyers don’t realize this — or, even if they do know it at some level, don’t act on it. I drafted comments on a matter I was interested in back when I was a law student (not as part of a class, just on my own) and learned a lot from the process. Then I did a lot of work relating to the rulemaking process when I was in law practice, where I found that useful. That led me to try this out when I first started teaching Administrative Law, and it’s worked well enough that I’ve kept it up.

DIXIE CHICKS VS. TATU? Yep. And Daniel Drezner has been inspired to offer a suggestion to other antiwar celebs.

UPDATE: Randal Robinson has more.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I’m not sure where these guys fit in.

ROGER SIMON has some thoughts on blogging from a novelist’s perspective that are kind of interesting. Even if you’re not a novelist!

OKAY, IT’S FROM THURSDAY, but this Online Journalism Review piece about imprisoned Iranian blogger Sina Motallebi is still worth reading if you haven’t seen it already.

It’s also interesting in that it uses the term “blogosphere” without any explanation or self-consciousness at all. Bill Quick should be pleased.

GOOD GRIEF: The Santorum affair has inspired Saturday morning blogging from Andrew Sullivan. Not unprecedented, but unusual.

People have been emailing me saying that Andrew’s gone over the edge on this one, and apparently they’ve been sending him the same thing because his post is in reply to those concerns.

Perhaps because I’m not gay, or perhaps because I’m more cynical, I haven’t been as exercised as Andrew. Santorum’s comments were dumb, and so, in my opinion, is support for sodomy laws. But it’s not a surprise to me that there are people in the GOP who think that way. (Actually, there are Democrats who think that way, too, they just keep their mouths shut.)

My own feeling is that when I look at certain Democrats I like the Republicans, and when I look at certain Republicans I like the Democrats. That’s why I’m a proud member of the anti-Idiotarian party.

UPDATE: This post by Virginia Postrel is worth reading.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader wonders why I’m “sniping” at Andrew with regard to things like Friday-night and Saturday-morning blogging. I’m not “sniping” — I’m “ribbing.” Kind of like the post I meant to put up earlier suggesting that Stephen Green enjoy his rest.

THE VOLUNTEERS WHO FLOCKED TO DEFEND SADDAM from various places in the Arab world don’t seem to be returning home now that the war is over. The suspicion is that most of them are dead. Those who have returned home report that they were surprised at the rather unenthusiastic response they received from actual Iraqis.

MORE TROUBLE FOR JOHN LOTT? In the latest installment of a back-and-forth debate over John Lott’s more-guns-less-crime hypothesis, Ian Ayres and John Donohue accuse John Lott of making systematic errors in support of his hypothesis. (Pp. 1397-98; see also 1392-93). By “systematic” errors, I mean that, according to Ayres and Donohue, the errors appear to all produce results that support Lott’s hypothesis. They don’t accuse him of fraud, and make a point of noting that it’s very easy to make mistakes in this area, but nonetheless the language is, by academic standards, rather strong. They also note (1374) that Lott removed his name from a response that relied on the data in question. (This seems odd to me — if he removed his name because the data were bad, why would the coauthors go ahead? I have no idea, and no knowledge of what’s going on there beyond what Ayres and Donohue say.)

This sort of statistical analysis is beyond my competence, and I’d really like to see what people who know more than I do have to say, but as I read this article it looks to be a substantial blow to Lott’s position. I hope that someone will check the analysis against Lott’s data and see if the coding errors that Ayres and Donohue point out are present. If they are, well, it certainly undercuts the thesis of Lott’s book, at the very least.

Here’s the original article by Ayres and Donohue, and here’s the response by Plassman and Whitley (which Ayres and Donohue say Lott removed his name from; here’s what seems to be an earlier version of the same paper with Lott as the first coauthor). The piece linked at the top is Ayres and Donohue’s reply to the Plassman and Whitley response.

By way of full disclosure, I went to law school with Ayres and Donohue, and regard them both as honest, straight-up guys notwithstanding that they have a political position that in many cases would be different from mine. Unlike some of Lott’s other critics, these guys are real scholars, writing in the Stanford Law Review, which gives their criticism considerable weight. I am, however, entirely incompetent to judge the underlying dispute on its merits, and hope that people who have the relevant expertise will weigh in.

UPDATE: Tim Lambert has a lengthy post on this now, too. One thing I’m not clear on: I believe that these are all new data, not the data presented in Lott’s earlier book “More Guns, Less Crime.” Lambert’s post implies otherwise, but it’s not entirely clear, and looking at my post above, I guess I imply the same. But unless I’m mistaken, the data in question are all new. (It’s the “more guns less crime” hypothesis in question here, not the book of the same title.) Lambert also has this post on a page he’s set up to deal with a different Lott issue — the 1997 survey that Lott was accused of not performing. It’s worth noting that this new Ayres/Donohue issue is a distinct question, with as far as I know no connection to the 1997 survey issue beyond the author. And it’s a question that has a direct substantive relationship with the core of Lott’s scholarship in a way that the survey issue, or the Internet pseudonym issue, did not.

UPDATE: John Lott sends a lengthy email, of which this is the meat:

When I agreed to do the paper for the Stanford Law Review that responded to Ayres and Donohue’s attack on my work, I got a promise both verbally and in writing that “any reaction to your responses won’t be incorporated into their article, but rather will be part of their reply” (see e-mail below dated August 29, 2002 from Ben Horwich). However, after we completed our piece, Ayres and Donohue insisted on making changes to their original paper. Initially, I declined letting them make the change. The Stanford Law Review (due to pressure from the authors) would not take “no” for an answer. In response, I offered a compromise where we could make one change in exchange for allowing them to make their change. That was turned down. We were then given an ultimatum where we either agree to the change being made or Ayres and Donohue’s paper would be published without ours. (Not surprisingly, the issue of a new change for Ayres and Donohue was revisited yet again when Plassmann and Whitley dealt with the final galleys, but I don’t have the e-mails on this.)

I talked with Jeff Parker at George Mason University about this and he suggested that we withdraw the paper from the review and send it someplace else. That seemed fine with me, but I knew that my younger co-authors would be more risk averse and also wanted the Stanford Law Review’s name. As a second alternative, Jeff suggested that I withdraw my name from the piece and hopefully use it as leverage to get the editors to do the right thing. After communicating with my co-authors that is the response that we agreed to take, and I thought that would be the end of the story.

However, the Stanford Law Review allowed Ayres and Donohue to add an addition to their piece commenting on all this.

There’s more, but that’s the gist, I think. Lott adds: “Just for the record, I still believe that ‘Ayres and Donoue have simply misread their own results.'”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Chris Lawrence compares John Lott and Paul Krugman. He has more thoughts here.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Lambert has posted an email from the Stanford Law Review. On the one hand, it makes clear that Lott didn’t take his name off the article because of the data-coding issue. On the other hand, it seems that the data-coding issue still isn’t resolved. There’s an article (subscription require) in the Chronicle of Higher Education on this. Here’s the most important bit:

In the years since Mr. Lott’s first publication, at least six scholars have published studies that tend to confirm his findings, while at least four other studies have tended to cast doubt on his findings. Mr. Donohue noted in an interview that Mr. Lott’s research has convinced his peers of at least one point: No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons causes a major increase in crime. Even Mr. Donohue’s analysis, which is highly critical of Mr. Lott’s, finds only “modest pernicious effects,” in his words.

Mr. Lott’s 1997 paper on gun policy was, “to that point, the most important piece of empirical research that has ever been done in the social sciences,” says Jeffrey S. Parker, a professor of law at George Mason University. “I doubt that even Ayres and Donohue would dispute that point.”

Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue’s critique of Mr. Lott’s scholarship runs as follows: The models used by Mr. Lott and his co-authors have not taken sufficient account of the broad differences between states that permit the concealed carrying of guns and those that do not.

In particular, Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue suggest that the spike in murders associated with the crack-cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s was concentrated in urban areas in states with restrictive gun laws, while states that permitted people to carry concealed weapons in the 1980s tended to be relatively
rural and unaffected by drug violence. That imbalance, Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue say, has given the right-to-carry states an artificial boost in studies by Mr. Lott and his allies.

In their reply, Mr. Plassmann and Mr. Whitley argue that their opponents’ own data, when properly read, demonstrate immediate state-level benefits from the legalization of concealed weapons. They also present new county-level data for the period 1977-2000, which they say further supports the more-guns, less-crime thesis, whether one uses their opponents’ preferred statistical techniques or their own.

It is here, in this new 1977-2000 data set, that Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue claim to have identified a serious set of coding errors. Mr. Plassmann and Mr. Whitley failed to assign dummy variables (which researchers use as place holders, to stand for meaningful variables that they may have neglected to
identify) for the states of Alaska, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania for certain years in their calculations.

Correcting those errors, Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue write, “completely reverse[s]” the paper’s conclusions and “restore[s] the conclusion that concealed-carry laws were associated with increases in crime (or no effect) for all crime categories.” . . .

Mr. Lott replies that the alleged coding errors are irrelevant to the larger debate. “Whether one believes the regressions in the Plassmann and Whitley piece or not, just looking at Ayres and Donohue’s own results — you can’t look at the graphs that Plassmann and Whitley have of Ayres and Donohue’s results and not see a significant drop in violent crime.”

“The basic results are not fragile,” Mr. Whitley writes in an e-mail message. “Minor errors in coding would not undermine them (and an entire literature).” Mr. Whitley says that he could not reply to the charges in detail because he had not yet had time to carefully review Mr. Ayres and Mr. Donohue’s comments. Because the allegations appear in a law review rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal, no third-party scholars have reviewed the claim of coding errors.

Six tables that derive from the same allegedly miscoded data set appear in Mr. Lott’s new book, The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You’ve Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong (Regnery, 2003). James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern University, says, “If Donohue and Ayres’s account is as it appears — and I’m not in a position to judge that — then Lott should withdraw the book for revision.”

Mr. Lindgren adds that he believes it extremely unlikely that any coding errors were the result of a conscious intent to distort the study’s findings. He notes that Mr. Lott has not only shared his data sets with other scholars, but has made them generally available to the public on his Web site. “You tend not to do that if you’ve intentionally miscoded your variables,” he says.

So that’s where we stand now.

SODOMY LAWS? NOT EVERYONE IS AGAINST THEM:

A UN vote on homosexual human rights was yesterday derailed at the last minute by an alliance of disapproving Muslim countries. . . .

UN sources said Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia were doing everything they could to stop the resolution. . . . the sentiments are anathema to many UN states; almost half outlaw gay sexual relations and more than 70 countries keep a total ban on homosexuality – in some cases it is punished by death.

See — proof that banning sodomy doesn’t prevent polygamy!

UPDATE: Reader Michael Dirmeier emails:

How can the Left hold such divergent views in its collective head without having that head explode?

They effectively want the US to give up its sovereignty to the UN, so that we can be ruled by Kofi Annan and a crew of cut-throat kleptomaniacs. And now, the UN has found that it can’t quite agree on laws that would allow sodomy. At the same time, the Left is crying for Santorum’s head, for his comments on sodomy laws.

I have a theory that will explain this, but I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader.

DANG. I MISSED THIS PANEL ON WARBLOGS. Of course, to judge by the program, so did everyone who actually has a warblog. Nothing wrong with the folks he’s got, but they’re observers, not participants, in the phenomenon.

(Via Bennett).

BRYAN PRESTON:

The Santorum deal has me steamed because it proves that Republicans haven’t yet figured out how to make their points in ways that don’t draw fire from everyone in the center and left, uniting them against us. It also proves we can’t win big without immediately squandering that win on something trivial. Yes, trivial. The whole thing is trivial. Win the war, drag your party down because you let some AP hack trap you. Santorum may have ruined his political career over a law that, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter much. It’s hardly enforced, and doesn’t stop anyone from doing anything. It’s just there, like laws about buggy whips and Helen Thomas. It’s not really worth the political capital being invested to save it, for the simple reason that it has zero effect on behavior and because it’s utterly unenforcable. Unless you really do want police in every bedroom, which no one does.

According to my email, it’s not quite “no one.” I like the Helen Thomas line, though. And this issue is hot enough to get Andrew Sullivan to do some rare Friday-night blogging. That alone makes it non-trivial, doesn’t it?

STAR TREK AND THE HOPES FOR MIDDLE EAST PEACE: I discuss the connection over at GlennReynolds.com.

HERE’S MORE on the Iranian Mullahs’ crackdown on bloggers, the Internet, and basically anyone or anything else that might threaten their theokleptocracy.

Jesse Walker writes (in USA Today, no less) that the mullahs will have their hands full.

HERE’S SOME INTERESTING PERSPECTIVE on SARS in Toronto. Meanwhile Colby Cosh has this observation on the hostile reaction to the WHO:

For the individual traveller Toronto is obviously still a safe place to visit, but avoiding large gatherings there is probably not a bad idea; and the WHO has no mandate or reason to protect the economy or the reputation of any individual city. Isn’t that sort of the idea behind having a World Health Organization? Funny how Canadians love squishy institutions of global governance until one of them acts the least bit peremptory towards them.

Indeed.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Given that the SARS situation in Toronto is undoubtedly being overblown by the WHO, this would be a great time for the Canadians to have a big, rich, well-connected friend to give them a hand, wouldn’t it?

Too bad they don’t have one.

Yeah, I can’t see Bush overexerting himself on Chretien’s behalf with the “morons” at the international bureaucracies.

BIG FILE-SHARING WIN: Grokster and Morpheus win in court.

I think this is interesting, too.

MORE GALLOWAY FALLOUT: Daniel Drezner writes:

In the run-up to Gulf War II, I’d commented and linked to comments on the historical parallels between the anti-war movement and the nuclear freeze protests of the early eighties.

Well, another one is emerging — the financial link between these protest movements and totalitarian dictatorships.

Read the whole thing.

JAYAKRISHNAN NAIR WRITES that secrecy about SARS is costing the Chinese dearly: “The Chinese may value secrecy above the life of their citizens. But the Capitalist who trades with China values his life more than money.”

Then there’s this: “One wonders why China was not more proactive in this affair? Its reputation is not actually stellar among fellow Asian countries, many of whom see China as a hegemonic power. But this case will reaffirm the view that China is not to be trusted.”

DID THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SUPPRESS DATA about its affirmative action program? Joanne Jacobs has the scoop.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT. How come the Dixie Chicks get all the attention?

I DON’T DO “EQUAL TIME” HERE — people who want equal time can get their own damn blogs — but so as not to be completely one-sided (even if it’s the right side, in my opinion) on the whole sodomy-law argument here’s a link to Clayton Cramer’s defense of sodomy laws.

I find it unpersuasive — both because sodomy laws were seldom enforced anyway, and because I find this argument absurd:

A rare disease [AIDS] –one that had been kicking around Africa and even a bit in the West for decades–took off because California, in the mid-1970s, decided to repeal its laws against sodomy and oral sex.

The notion that sodomy laws prevent AIDS is ridiculous. Saudi Arabia has quite an AIDS problem — they just don’t talk about it. That’s what sodomy laws accomplish.

There is, by the way, much, much more on this stuff over at The Volokh Conspiracy, where Santorum’s remarks have precipitated much discussion of sodomy, bestiality, incest, etc.

JEFF JARVIS SLAPS DOWN TED TURNER:

Ted Turner complains that too few companies own too much of U.S. media.

But, Ted, you sold your media company to a media company; you singlehandedly reduced the number of media owners in the U.S. Seller’s regret, I guess.

He has some choice words for media-monopolist Greg Dyke of the BBC, too. I think I’m noticing a trend, here. But not, I fervently hope, here.

Tim Blair’s take on Turner and media concentration is hilarious, too.

DAVID CARR OBSERVES THAT “The BBC has yet to undergo Perestroika.“ The Fisking he administers to BBC Director General Greg Dyke’s recent pronouncements on “objectivity,” however, may bring that day just a bit closer.

GUESS WHO’S TRYING TO SILENCE A JOURNALIST! In Ashcroft’s America, nobody’s freedom of speech is safe from assault. Oh, wait. . . .

Washington – The Illinois journalism program that had students try to find the identity of the Washington Post’s “Deep Throat” informant “should be disaccredited” and the teacher who oversaw the project “should be spanked,” said Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters whose stories on the Watergate scandal led to President Nixon’s resignation.

“The last thing students in a journalism class should be doing is trying to find out who other reporters’ sources are,” said Bernstein, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine who broke the stories with colleague Bob Woodward. “They should be learning how to protect sources.”

Heh. Free speech for me, but not for thee. As usual.

ZIMBABWEANS SAY “PLEASE SADDAM US!”

Among the businesses paralysed by the strike was Zimbabwe’s most profitable vehicle company. Its workshops were locked up, 10 new Mercedes Benz E240 saloons inside them awaiting delivery to Mr Mugabe’s cabinet. A further 22 are due to arrive later this week. The total cost of the order has been estimated to be equivalent to two weeks’ fuel supply for the entire country. On the eve of the strike workers at the firm had been seething. “If only George Bush would come here and Saddam us,” said one. “But he won’t and so we will have to strike, and be arrested and beaten. We have no choice. The ministers break the cars that we pay for and get new ones and we pay for those too. We have no fuel, no food, no medicines at the hospitals, and Mugabe doesn’t care.”

It would be better, of course, if South Africa — regarded by many, at least until recently, as a responsible nation — would address this genocidal thugocracy in its backyard. But Thabo Mbeki doesn’t seem to mind the goings-on in Zimbabwe, which makes me wonder about his vision for South Africa’s future.

I know we’re kind of busy right now, but how hard would it be to bring down Mugabe? Liberating Zimbabwe would have the salutary advantage of being obviously not for oil (though Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk could probably come up with some sort of conspiracy theory) — and it would be enough of a surprise that it would make dictators around the world even more nervous, and oppressed populations even more restive.

And it’s interesting, isn’t it, that these guys aren’t looking to the U.N. for liberation?

VIRGINIA POSTREL on sodomy:

A liberal society ought not to use criminal sanctions to punish actions merely because a particular religion, or even many religions, may deem them sinful. Eating live animals and shellfish–hence, eating oysters–is a sin in my religion, it’s damned gross, and it can kill you. But I don’t want to make eating oysters a crime.

Indeed.