MATT WELCH HAS MORE ON WHAT CASTRO IS DOING in the unsung part of Cuba that’s not Guantanamo.

HERE’S MORE on new legislation relating to nanotechnology, from The Hill.

OKAY, THIS STILL DOESN’T MAKE IT RIGHT, though it does make it less unique. Here’s another picture of Clinton in military garb on an aircraft carrier.

I still don’t think that Presidents should do this. Nor do I think that it’s wise for Republicans to set standards based on what Clinton did.

UPDATE: John Cole has more. And then there’s this.

ANOTHER UPDATE: All right, already! Here’s more, and yet more again.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Bruce Rolston says I’m not wrong. Woohoo! He hardly ever says that!

MADONNA IS THANKING THE FRENCH for opposing the war.

I’M PRETTY WELL OVER THE WHOLE BILL BENNETT GAMBLING FIASCO, but there’s lots more over at The Corner.

As a libertarian, I’m against bans on gambling. But, that said, I actually think that gambling is probably more socially destructive than many things that morals-types crusade against, like, say, sodomy.

Gambling, after all, sends the signal that the best way to get rich isn’t to work long and hard, but to look for the quick score. (Even worse, that message is specifically a lie in the context of gambling, where long-term players generally wind up cleaned out.) Call me crazy, but that seems to me to do more to undermine society than gay people getting married.

Justin Katz, however, disagrees.

KEN LAYNE HAS SOME HIGH POINTS from the recent update to Salam Pax’s blog.

THE E.U. — HAVEN FOR CAT-SKINNERS? Apparently so:

BBC News has seen evidence which suggests that cats are being farmed for their skins in the European Union.

It is thought that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of cat and dog skins are traded in Europe each year . . .

A video seen by BBC correspondent Tim Franks shows one Belgian furrier displaying a blanket he says was made from cats farmed in Belgium.

What is more, he says that stray cats and dogs are rounded up and skinned.

That would seem to contradict the assertion from the officials who help run the EU at the European Commission that there is no cat or dog farming inside the union.

You can’t make this stuff up. God knows what Margaret Drabble would be saying about this if America were involved.

TENNESSEE’S LEGISLATURE IS CONSIDERING A HORRIBLE BILL, modeled on the DMCA. Bill Hobbs has been blogging about it, (be sure you read this post of his in particular,) but you should check out the Tennessee Digital Freedom Network for more information on what looks like a miserable sellout to Big Entertainment at the expense of Tennesseeans’ freedom and prosperity.

HEY, thanks to all the folks who hit the PayPal and Amazon Honors buttons over the past week. It’s much appreciated.

BILL HOBBS HAS A LONG POST ON THE “Bush was AWOL” story, and says it’s bunk.

THE ILOO WEB-ENABLED TOILET doesn’t provide much of a blogging platform, according to this report.

MORE VIDEO STUFF: Over at the University of Tennessee Law College website we’ve got a streaming video of interviews with students. We did a poll and focus groups on student attitudes and discovered, interestingly enough, that our students are happier than we thought, and that they generally like law school better, and for different reasons, than they expected when they decided to come. So we’ve got a couple of dozen of them talking about what they like and why. The rather high degree of diversity shown, by the way, wasn’t deliberate: the Student Bar Association put out a call and this is who showed up.

I think we may break this down into several shorter elements, as it’s a bit long, but it’s not bad as a first effort.

SILENT RUNNING has moved. Drop by, say hello, and luxuriate in the fact that the permalinks will probably work now.

ROD LIDDLE WONDERS WHY THE BBC CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH:

Where did this political correctness come from, and why is it swallowed and then spat out so unquestioningly? It’s a sort of terror of the truth, arrogant in its assumptions because it believes ‘ordinary’ people cannot cope with the truth and need it either sweetened or altered entirely.

You could see it at work during the war in Iraq. Now, I was opposed to the war but I was aware that the military campaign was carried out with devastatingly brilliant precision and speed. And yet, watching television — Channel 4 or the BBC or, for that matter, Sky — there seemed a determination to present at every juncture the worst-case scenario as if the war, because it was inherently ‘immoral’, could not therefore possibly be expedited with success. Maybe it is just my imagination, but I seem to remember being told, every night, that the prospect which awaited our troops was a ‘quagmire’ of ‘hand-to-hand street fighting’. Where’s the quagmire, huh? Where are the fights? I don’t object to the speculation; just the one-sided nature of the speculation — as if it were in some way indecent to have someone suggest that the war would be over by the end of next week and very few people would be killed. . . .

This is the result of institutionalised political correctness; every bit as corrupting as institutionalised racism. It is the result of seminars and workshops (I remember them well) where journalists are instructed time and again that the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly are bloody important and don’t you dare suggest that they aren’t.

Yes, journalism could do with fewer seminars, and more actual reporting. And not just at the BBC.

UPDATE: Reader Chris Thornton thinks its worth noting that:

Up until a couple of months ago, Rod Liddle was the editor of the Today programme, the BBC’s flagship morning news show, which pretty much sets the daily agenda for British broadcasters. He knows what he’s talking about.

Good point. But will anyone listen?

WANT FRESH BLOGGY GOODNESS? Drop over to this week’s Carnival of the Vanities, and enjoy its new, graphic approach.

MORE GUNS, NO DIFFERENCE? Mark Kleiman suggests that rates of legal gun-carrying neither increase nor decrease crime, not least because they neither increase nor decrease overall gun-carrying much.

I don’t know what to make of this, but in my area — where gun-carrying, legal or otherwise, is high — I’ve been told by law-enforcement people that (1) a very high percentage of the populace, perhaps a third, carries guns on its person or in the car; and (2) that the permitting law caused a small number of those people to get permits, and a small number of people who never carried before to do so, to no great effect overall. I don’t know how they know this (but I’ve heard the same estimate independently from several cops, so they at least think they know it), and the number seems high to me — but then, I’m a professor and my friends, only some of whom carry guns, are probably not representative. Around here, though, it seems possible that changes in gun-carrying laws haven’t changed behavior much. But it seems likely that they would make a bigger difference in jurisdictions where laws on the subject were more vigorously enforced.

What’s interesting here, though, is that the “bloodbath” and “Dodge City” predictions made by opponents of liberalized weapons laws have not borne fruit anywhere.

UPDATE: Reader John Kent emails:

I disagree with Mark Kleiman. As long as criminals understand that their intended victims may be carrying a weapon, this is usually enough to prevent a lot of their intended criminal activity. Just look what is happening in England. The criminals know the populace is now unarmed and the crime rate has climbed. I don’t have to actually carry a gun in order to benefit from the law. By having the concealed weapon law on the books, the criminals now know that I’m part of a “pack”, and not just another member of a “herd”.

I don’t know what the crime statistics show for the states that now allow the legal carrying of guns, but I have to believe that the overall perception of the population is that they “feel” safer. Individuals are now able to protect themselves, and not just rely on the state to keep them from harm.

Well, I agree — and on a societal level, recent experience in Britain and Australia, where crime has gone up after firearms confiscations, would seem to suggest that. My point was merely that concealed-carry laws are likely to have a modest effect on crime because they have a modest effect on behavior. If you required law-abiding citizens to carry guns, you’d probably see a greater decrease in crime, because that would be a greater change in behavior. And if you confiscated all guns, you’d probably see a significant increase in crime, because, again, that would be a major change. Complicating these things, of course, is that anti-gun legislation seems correlated with a decreased interest in enforcing laws against actual criminals (again, see Britain) and with a general opposition to self-defense whether armed or not (ditto) and vice versa, and those societal attitudes and changes in official behavior have an impact, too.

That’s my take anyway, though I claim no special expertise on the criminological aspects. My scholarship is all in the area of the Second Amendment, and I’m on record as saying that, for Second Amendment purposes, these kinds of considerations are not significant, just as I regard the contentious issue of whether pornography leads to more rape as unimportant for First Amendment purposes.

A WHILE BACK I suggested that some countries might take the hint that the U.S. victory in Iraq meant that dictatorial regimes were at special risk. Apparently, some people have noticed:

Tehran, May 7, IRNA — Some 154 members of the parliament on Wednesday called on the Foreign Ministry to adopt active diplomacy to restore relations with the United States as a “deterrent approach” to possible threats. . . .

Comparing the popularity of the Islamic Republic of Iran with
the Iraqi 30-year-old dictatorship and Iran’s eight-year sacred
defense against the Iraqi-imposed war, the statement said that the
Iraqi people did not defend their country against the coalition
invasion because they no longer were willing that their national
wealth being put at Saddam’s disposal.

“We believe that the progress and bright prospects will be available with safeguarding the territorial integrity, independence, freedom and the Islamic Republic and that no excuse is acceptable to ignore our recommendation,” the reformist MPs said.

The ripples spread. Read this, too.

NANOTECHNOLOGY IN LIVING CELLS: Derek Lowe calls it unstoppable. Very interesting post.

MORE ON THE TOTALFINAELF CORRUPTION CASE:

An Iraqi-born British billionaire told a French court yesterday how he had paid millions of pounds in kickbacks to French oil executives. . . .

Sweating profusely in the heat of the packed courtroom at the Palais de Justice he confirmed that his company received the money and, more extraordinarily, that 1.4bn pesetas was paid back to Elf, or rather to the senior executives who had set up the deal.

This massive retro-commission, more commonly known as a kickback, first found its way into the bank account of Alfred Sirven, then Elf’s head of special operations, and was then distributed in chunks to various other executives, including the company’s president, Loik le Flock-Prigent.

Both Sirven and Le Flock-Prigent have already received prison sentences for their roles in the Elf affair.

Constantly mopping his brow with his handkerchief, Auchi stated that he was told by Elf representatives that the deal would be “good for Elf and good for France”.

Indeed.

TESTING EXPERT KIMBERLY SWYGERT has more on the Bar Exam misgrading story. Money quote: “I’m not aware of any other large-scale testing program in which an error on the part of the testing company could ever result in scores being changed in a way that disadvantaged the test taker – not after scores were released.”

MALARIABLOGGING is an occasional InstaPundit feature from way back. Now there’s news of a possible genetic breakthrough against mosquitoes that carry malaria.

Question: If we could wipe ’em all out, should we? It would save a lot of lives — and prevent a huge amount of misery. On the other hand, lots of things eat mosquitoes, and they might die off if the mosquitoes did, though perhaps other, nonmalarial mosquitoes would just step in to fill the niche.

Meanwhile here’s yet another promising malaria vaccine candidate — but we’ve had rather a lot of those. And malaria may be making a comeback in Europe. Ugh. I wonder if it was the dreaded transmission via mail that caused this. . . .

HR 766, THE HOUSE NANOTECHNOLOGY BILL, HAS PASSED: Declan McCullagh has a link-rich story on CNET. Here’s another story from Small Times, and here’s one from the Mercury News.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT in John Ashcroft’s America. When will this madness stop?

AHEM:

Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours be degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

Sheesh. What was this guy smoking?

UPDATE: Roger Simon is pretty hard on Robert Byrd: “This man shouldn’t be in the US Senate. He should be in a soup kitchen for the homeless doing penance.”

True enough. But I was really twitting TAPPED (that’s the “smoking” link) for holding him up as a role model for Democrats. It’s like holding Strom Thurmond up as a role model for Republicans. And that would be wrong.

ACTUALLY, IT IS A DISEASE:

I knew that the wave of anti-Americanism that would swell up after the Iraq war would make me feel ill. And it has. It has made me much, much more ill than I had expected.

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness.

Hey, we don’t call it “anti-American bile” for nothing. But admitting to the disease is the first step toward getting help.

UPDATE: Reader Gregory Taylor emails:

Hi Glenn. She vents: “A nation that can paint those faces on death machines must be insane.” Well, apparently we learned that little trick from the famously insane Royal Air Force in World War 2. See: Link “The famous “shark’s teeth” marking did not originate with the Flying Tigers, but was adapted from the markings used by the Tomahawks of the RAF’s No. 112 Squadron in North Africa.”

Actually, it’s the deep loathing for Coca-cola that is the true sign of insanity. Though, personally, I’d like to see smiley-faces and “PLUR” painted on all our death machines. As with the Medes’ babyface makeup, the incongruity would probably unnerve our foes.