PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH has a column on nanotechnology in today’s TechCentralStation.

SHARDS OF HONOR: Austin Bay writes that the United Nations is destroying what little credibility it has left.

MAX POWER writes:

It’s appallingly symptomatic that an anti-war group is appropriating the spectre of nuclear war in a commercial against stopping Iraq’s attempt to obtain nuclear weapons. I’m not a W fan, but there’s something wrong with someone who has more faith in Saddam Hussein’s control of nuclear weapons than Bush’s.

Yes, but then I remember when the left was actually opposed to fascist dictators.

I’m not the first to ask this question, but why aren’t there antinuclear protests outside Iraqi and North Korean embassies?

WELL, WE NOW HAVE A REDONE WALK-IN CLOSET off the master bedroom. The redo gives us a lot more space. Of course, so did throwing away all the stuff we threw away when we emptied the closet out, and the other stuff we threw away when we put the stuff back.

I don’t want to think about which part — the free part, or the expensive part — did the most good. And I shouldn’t, anyway, because the free part wouldn’t have happened without the expensive part. Hmm. There are whole sectors of the economy built on this phenomenon.

I’VE MEANT FOR DAYS TO LINK to Ted Barlow’s endless lightbulb-joke blogging but I kept getting distracted. It’s been a pretty distracing week. But go, read, and laugh.

HERE’S A LONGER ARTICLE about the Racine rave raids’ inglorious end. Great work by the ACLU and the EMDEF.

UPDATE: I’ve got more on this case over at GlennReynolds.com.

MICHAEL MOORE has been rejected as commencement speaker at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. There was quite an email debate over the subject. Here’s my favorite line:

One student chimed in that the speaker should be Chris Rock: “I’d be happy with a comedian, just not a comedian who poses as a journalist.”

I don’t really think that Michael Moore is a comedian. But I don’t think he’s a journalist, either.

UPDATE: Reader L. Neil Swanson writes: “Perhaps Moore is best described as an ‘inadvertent comedian’. ”

HOWARD KURTZ WRITES:

Of course, the folks who seem most upset by affirmative action don’t seem terribly concerned about preferential treatment for children of alumni.

You hear this all the time. But I think it’s a bogus comparison. The reason why we have laws against race discrimination, rather than laws demanding strict meritocracy in all things, is — or at least so I thought — that race discrimination is much, much worse than merely favoring alumni.

The logical implication of statements comparing racial discrimination with legacy preferences for alumni is that racial discrimination isn’t uniquely bad. But is that true? But for an accident of history, might Martin Luther King have been leading marches against legacy preferences, or athletic recruiting? I don’t think so.

UPDATE: In a related matter, SpinSanity says that Democrats’ charges that Bush “opposes civil rights” are unfair.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steve Verdon has a question about this.

MEGAN MCARDLE, who has now seen the Media Matters show on weblogs (I have to wait until Sunday), has been getting email from people wanting to know how to start a blog. She has advice that is, characteristically, useful and clear.

WHY I DON’T HAVE COMMENTS: Because past a certain level of traffic, comments turn into a chatboard. Or even a trollboard. And I don’t have the time to police them. But I can’t beat this response from Colby Cosh to people who complain.

DON’T CLICK ON THIS LINK unless you’ve got a high-speed connection, or a lot of patience. It’s a four-minute film by the Marine Corps on Afghanistan, with hints of an unspecified war to come. Very well done.

The reader who sent the link says it will be playing in movie theaters later this month.

EARLIER TODAY, I posted a photo and blurb about the Pink Pistols, but here’s the whole story. Excerpt:

The alleged intruder survived the neck wound last March and was charged with breaking and entering. Miner said she doesn’t know if she was targeted because she lives openly with her girlfriend in the Boston suburb of Arlington, Mass.

But like other members of a burgeoning group called the Pink Pistols, she’s challenging the notion that gays and guns don’t mix. . . .

Read the whole thing.

RACINE, WISCONSIN HAS FOLDED, as it should have, and is dropping its dumb rave prosecutions as well as promising not to do it again, in exchange for not being sued into bankruptcy. Maybe the Houston example did some good.

(Via TalkLeft).

DONALD SENSING WRITES that the “peace movement” doesn’t deserve credit for good intentions, because it doesn’t have good intentions. His brush is perhaps a bit broad — there are certainly people who are well-intentioned and honorable who oppose the idea of war in Iraq, though I think that they’re wrong — but in terms of the organized movement, well, he’s more or less on-target.

Meanwhile there’s a march on Washington this weekend (yeah, another one, and it’s organized by A.N.S.W.E.R. again, apparently.) If any bloggers are attending and posting accounts and pictures, please let me know. Meanwhile, here’s more about A.N.S.W.E.R.

I wonder if the Washington Post’s Evelyn Nieves will write another piece quoting antiwar protesters about how successful their movement is?

UPDATE: Christopher Johnson has comments, too. And Steven Den Beste responds to some conspiracy theories.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Justin Katz has some comments, too. And Christopher Hitchens has some tart observations.

SHOULDER-FIRED MISSILES are a threat to airliners, and not much is being done about it. Maybe someone should tell TNR.

THE SNOW WAS FUN. We got about three inches, which the local media treated like the blizzard of the century. When I got home my wife and daughter were outside — my wife went in, I went back out, and we walked in the snow and had a snowball fight with some local kids. Got back and my wife was making homemade chicken soup. The only downside: my daughter’s bummed that she won’t get out of school tomorrow because it’s already a holiday. Oh, well.

I’m going to sit in front of the fire and drink a cognac later. That’s what snowy weather is for, right?

THE DISSIDENT FROGMAN OBSERVES:

Maybe some chaos theory (no pun intended) could explain the convergence.

Nonetheless:

– Socialists invented the death camps.

– Socialists developed the death camps.

– A bunch of Capitalists “cow-boys” liberated some death camps and wiped out some (National-)Socialists.

– Other Socialists still run death camps.

And guess who’s going to take care of the problem again?

Most probably the same bunch of Capitalist “cow-boys” (their sons actually).

God bless them.

And their daughters, too. (Parallel French blog entry omitted).

ON WEDNESDAY, GlennReynolds.com debuts on Microsoft’s MSNBC.

On Thursday, Microsoft announces a dividend and stock split. Coincidence?

Er, well, of course. But I appreciate the emails suggesting otherwise.

IT’S SNOWING HERE. That doesn’t bother me, but it’s set off the predictable panic, so my 4 o’clock appointment has been moved up to 3:00. Back later.

CAN YOU SAY “MATERIAL BREACH?” I knew that you could. I don’t think that this excuse will fly.

I’VE GOT A LONG POST ON ELDRED over at GlennReynolds.Com. I suggest that this is a blow for the limited-government wing of the Court. You may also be interested in this earlier piece on a related topic.

MICHAEL BARONE writes about waging post-industrial war in Iraq. It’s a good piece, and I especially agree with this conclusion:

Our last line of defense must be those high-skill, high-tech, and high-initiative strengths. The heroes who brought down United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania and the alert truck driver who engineered the capture of the alleged beltway snipers used cellphones and ignored centralized authorities’ rules (the truck driver acted on leaked information) to stop determined killers. We can fight today’s wars with fewer troops than we used to need. But every citizen should stand ready to fight at any time in any place.

Absolutely. A pack, not a herd.

HOWARD KURTZ writes on the psychological quirks that lead people to run for President. My favorite quote:

“Anyone who is going to run for president has to be weird,” says Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.

I think there’s something to this, and here’s an excerpt from a post on the subject that I made back in September of 2001:

But if Kaus is right, our system actually selects for people who love the job. And since, as most people (perhaps even Kaus) would agree, being President is a job no sane person could really love for eight years then what does that say about our Presidential selection system? Is it selecting for kooks? Certainly a lot of our Presidents have been, er, mentally less than admirable: Kennedy, with his risk-taking and narcissism, LBJ with his megalomania, bullying and, well, LBJ-ness, Nixon with his paranoia, depression and obsessive-compulsiveness, Clinton with his narcissism, sexual compulsiveness, and compulsive lying. Carter was/is clearly sane — and also stands as evidence for Kaus’s position. Ditto for Papa Bush. Reagan is a tougher question: he certainly wasn’t crazy. And as an actor, I suppose he was able to play the President in a way that made the experience more enjoyable for him than it would be for many others. (Yes, I know, there’s some reason to think that his mental faculties were already beginning to fail before he left office — but I don’t think that’s the same as the sort of personality-disordered thing that Nixon, Clinton, etc. had going on).

I guess I’d have to call the crazy-President corollary to Kaus’s theorem unproven, but with a lot of suggestive evidence. Hmm. Here’s a slogan for ’04, for whatever candidate wants it: ” ______ in ’04: JUST CRAZY ENOUGH TO WANT TO BE YOUR PRESIDENT!”

The slogan’s still available. . . .

MORE ON THE PINK PISTOLS.

AZIZ POONAWALLA has a post comparing Christian fundamentalism and Muslim fundamentalism.