MY TECHCENTRALSTATION COLUMN today has thoughts on self-employment, the growth of “cottage industry,” and what it might all mean for economics, politics, and society.

JIM PINKERTON WRITES on Eurolateralism in international trade.

IRAQ: “Old women: going in. NGOs: running away.”

DAMNED PRESIDENTIAL WARMONGERING: Read this simplistic and bloody-minded statement:

Our target was terror. Our mission was clear – to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama Bin Laden, perhaps the pre-eminent organiser and financier of international terrorism in the world today.

The groups associated with him come from diverse places, but share a hatred for democracy, a fanatical glorification of violence, and a horrible distortion of their religion to justify the murder of innocents.

They have made the United States their adversary precisely because of what we stand for and what we stand against. . . . We’ve worked to build an international coalition against terror. But there have been and will be times when law enforcement and diplomatic tools are simply not enough. . . . countries that persistently host terrorists have no right to be safe havens.

Such simplisme.

UPDATE: On a more serious note, read this Austin Bay column about what we knew, and didn’t imagine, back in 1998.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Thomas Conway emails:

So why did Bush get so much grief from the press for 16 words in his SOTU address and Clinton got a pass for these 12 words defending a cruise missile attack against a factory in Sudan: “The factory was involved in the production of materials for chemical weapons.”

Everyone knows these intelligence estimates can turn out to be wrong, Thomas, so criticizing him for that would have been unpatriotic Monday-morning quarterbacking. Oh, and he was a Democrat.

PETER WORTHINGTON WRITES IN THE TORONTO SUN:

Bill Sampson, recently released from a Saudi Arabian prison, has been telling his story in the National Post and on Global television, and as horrific as his ordeal was, even more appalling is the Canadian government’s behaviour throughout. The Canadian government, first through John Manley as foreign minister and then his successor Bill Graham, was not only reluctant to believe allegations of torture but sided with the Saudis. After Sampson’s release, the most conceded by Mr. Graham has been that there was “mistreatment.”

Mistreatment! Good Lord!

Sampson’s accounts are graphic: Strung upside down and beaten, the soles of his feet whipped, being forced to squat, arms tied around his legs and a bar pushed under his knees and then hung between chairs and spun and beaten, his genitals hit, testicles stamped on, and more.

“No evidence of torture,” insisted the Canadian government for 31 months of his imprisonment on trumped up charges.

Funny how so many people who criticize the U.S. criminal justice system take a “what can you expect from the wogs?” approach to this sort of thing. The Saudis, of course, deny everything. But then, they also claim to be our allies in the war on terror. . . .

UPDATE: Reader Brian Dunn emails:

Yet the Canadian government is filled with people who still think Guantanamo Bay is a torture center. I bet Mr. Sampson wishes he faced our tender mercies rather than the Saudis’.

And then the Canadian government would have complained loudly!

HEY, IT’S NOT ANY DUMBER THAN SUING MCDONALD’S: There’s talk of suing the New York Times for “journalistic malpractice.”

The article introduces the novel legal theory of “journalistic malpractice” whereby, in the Times’ case, “the continued publication of Blair’s stories, despite the serious doubt about his work entertained and expressed by his direct supervisors, points to reckless disregard for the truth by key personnel at the newspaper.”

Maybe Ralph Nader should be worried, after all.

CLAUDIA ROSETT WRITES on William Faulkner and the war on terror.

WISCONSIN IS ONE OF ONLY SIX STATES STILL BANNING CONCEALED WEAPONS permits, but there’s talk of changing that, now.

WHAT I’D BE DOING IF MY LIFE WERE VERY, VERY DIFFERENT: Accepting the offered free tickets to go see Reid Speed in Miami this weekend.

JOSH FIELEK WRITES that for-pay wifi providers could learn a lot from cellular companies in terms of interoperability and roaming. I’ve thought the same thing, though I’m not convinced that for-pay wifi is a workable business model anyway.

INSTAPUNDIT’S SPIES HAVE OBTAINED A COPY of the RIAA’s file-sharing “amnesty” form for your perusal.

MICKEY KAUS says that the New York Times is biased — even in the automotive section!

It’s not bias, exactly — they’re just stuck in 1969, as elsewhere. You know, back when there really were a lot of capacious rear-wheel drive sedans on the market.

I think that Kaus is wrong, though, when he calls the Pacifica a flop. At least, I’m seeing quite a few of them in my neighborhood, keeping pace with the steadily appearing Cayennes and Touaregs, and of course the endless numbers of Land Cruisers, Suburbans and Escalades.

LILEKS SPAWNS a pro-Dean meme:

Dean, perversely, might have a freer hand – the right couldn’t complain if he moved against Axis O’ Evil countries, and the editorialists would applaud him until their palms bled, because he was one of them, and had redefined Bush’s Whee-Ha- Cowboy Crusade into a struggle for civilization’s survival. (Note: fine by me. If American jets take out Iranian enrichment facilities, I don’t give a tinker’s damn if the man who gave the go-order was a D or an R. I can live with triumphalism from the NYT editorial page writers exhalting President Dean for his farsighted attack.)

This is actually plausible, and suggests a way in which Dean’s biggest weakness — he’s a bit of a jerk — might actually serve him well, by making him look more formidable. Sure the antiwar folks who provided him with his surge would be disappointed (some already are) but hey — the small-government folks who supported Bush are a bit testy, too. In fact, there’s a broader theory here, which is that Presidents always do the opposite of what their supporters want: Clinton reformed welfare (reluctantly) and savaged civil liberties (not so reluctantly), Bush is expanding government and will probably wind up legalizing marijuana or something if he serves two terms.

THERE’S A HEARING ON TENNESSEE’S SUPER-DMCA BILL in Nashville tomorrow. Bill Hobbs has the scoop.

It’s a terrible bill, and it ought to die — or be dramatically amended. As Hobbs notes:

This legislation makes it a crime to connect an “unauthorized” device to the cable outlet – but lets the cable company decide what is unauthorized. If the cable company rents digital video recorders, it can simply declare competing models to be “unauthorized” and then encourage you to unplug your TiVo and rent theirs, under the threat of a felony charge. Ditto with a Wi-Fi hub.

It’s not about piracy — er, except by cable companies. It’s about control.

SOMETHING SMELLS in the retracted Ecstasy study that I mentioned here earlier. Mark Kleiman has more:

The experiment was purportedly intended to represent in an animal model the consequences of human “recreational” MDMA use, and perhaps of therapeutic use of the drug were it ever approved for that purpose. In the experiment, two out of fifteen animals died. The death rate among human MDMA users is no more than one in a million.

Yet it appears that the researchers failed to investigate the causes of those deaths. Moreover, they went on to draw inferences about the effects of MDMA on humans from the observed damage to the brains of the eight remaining animals. That didn’t seem to trouble the reviewers for Science or the administrators at the National Institute on Drug Abuse who trumpeted the findings as evidence of the dangers of MDMA. (Science is published by the AAAS, whose president, Alan Leshner, was the Director of NIDA when the grant in question was awarded; he made MDMA his particular crusade.)

It is hard to escape the thought that many of the people involved were less cautious than they might have been because the results seemed to support their already strongly-held beliefs.

Okay, but that’s not misconduct. That can happen to anyone, and happens to pretty much all of us now and then. But there’s more:

Even before the retraction, then, Ricaurte’s work was under a cloud. One very senior figure in the field had said in an open scientific meeting “I will believe any result George Ricaurte comes up with as soon as it has been independently confirmed.”

The other detail not mentioned in the retraction letter is that Peter Jennings had gotten wind of the controversy, and had a special highly critical of Ricaurte’s work “in the can” and ready to show. (Ricaurte had refused to be interviewed.) That Ricaurte’s group had failed to replicate the now-retracted work is no doubt true; but that the paper would have been retracted had ABC not been ready to make an issue of it is much less clear.

I don’t have Kleiman’s expertise in this area, but I think this demands further investigation. Read all of Kleiman’s post, which contains much more information.

I LIKE THIS STORY FROM AFGHANISTAN:

At the domed mausoleum, near his home village of Jangalak in the Panjshir Valley, about 90 miles north of Kabul, more than 2,000 people gathered to offer prayers and wreathes.

Among them were schoolgirls who had walked six miles to see the tomb. They carried banners that read, “Osama, you martyred our hero!” and “Death to Osama!”

(Via Oxblog).

CALL IT ANTICIPATORY JOURNALISM, I guess.

SORRY FOR THE LIGHT BLOGGING — I’ve been reading resumes, and I’m nearly done with the first batch of 627. When I’m done, I’m going to read a couple of books that I’ve gotten advance copies of: Lee Harris’s Civilization and Its Enemies : The Next Stage of History, and David Bernstein’s You Can’t Say That: The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws. (I’ve actually started the Harris book — the InstaWife snatched away the Bernstein book before I had a chance to so much as open the cover.) More later.

SOME THOUGHTS ON MINDSETS, over at GlennReynolds.com.

THE FRENCH HEATWAVE DEATH TOLL IS NOW UP TO 15,000. The death toll is appalling. So is the French government’s fecklessness in allowing it to happen.

UPDATE: I wonder if it will get a Newsweek cover?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oxblog observes:

[D]ear God. Those numbers would be horrifying coming from a third-world country. Coming from France, they’re just astounding. So far, the only political fallout has been the resignation of a single civil servant, France’s equivalent of the surgeon-general. The fact that there has not been a more serious political fallout from what is, after all, a massive failure of France’s healthcare system, is astonishing.

Astonishing, to say the very least.

MICKEY KAUS has more on Cruz Bustamante’s latest proposal — a permanent rolling amnesty for illegal immigrants?

UPDATE: Meanwhile Brian Linse is still defending MEChA — it turns out, he says, that the slogan was inspired by Castro! Well, then.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Luis Alegria emails:

I am also a native Spanish speaker, and if you note the message from Professor Diaz quoted by Mr. Linse, he also agrees that “For the Race…” is a better literal translation than “United we stand”.

As for context, the rest of the “Plan Espiritual de Atzlan” provides plenty to support the idea of ethnic separatism as embodied in this slogan.

“La Raza” is not a strictly racial concept, but it is a very specific ethnic one – i.e., Mexican mestizos.

Mr. Linse is pretty much torturing the translation.

The whole thing does sound like what your typical radical would have dreamed up in 1969.

Yes, Linse is working this one pretty hard, but that’s half the fun of a blog. And it does sound curiously dated, which makes Bustamante’s unwillingness to renounce it, as so many other Latino politicians have done, seem odd.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Moynihan emails:

MEChA may have stolen its motto from Mussolini, not Castro. According to Joshua Muravchik’s book Heaven on Earth, Il Duce “put forth the motto “Everything inside the state, nothing outside the state.” (p. 157).

Hmm. Well, if nothing else, we’ve certainly established a style.

THE LOVELY AND TALENTED SASHA CASTEL is now at this URL.

JOE CONASON: Not as dishonest as Michael Moore and Ann Coulter! That’s the ringing praise from Spinsanity.

CHIEF WIGGLES SAYS THAT WE’RE DROPPING THE BALL on an important item in Iraq — a bunch of generals who surrendered without firing a shot, and are still in custody:

In their minds they would have been better off had they just ran to their homes like the other 9,000 plus brigadier generals in the Iraqi military. They regret having trusted us enough to turn over their bases, their ships and aircraft, and their men, in hopes that we would reward them for doing so. They just want to see their families and do their part in reconstructing their country.

I don’t know the merits of this at all, but somebody should look into this.

FFM HAS A DEPRESSING ENTRY about how Digital Rights Management will destroy the Internet:

It’s perfectly possible to force people into using only regulated computers, and to compel them to only perform permitted actions with them. All it takes is the eager cooperation of computer hardware manufacturers, and tough federal laws that impose penalties on ISPs who do not comply.

Either that, or bankrupt the computer and software industries by increasing people’s already growing reluctance to buy new computers.