MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, as the Daily Cal is shut down by people who don’t like its exercise of free speech. No doubt Tim Robbins will be sounding off in its defense any moment now.

AFGHAN UPDATE: The Taliban are trying for a comeback. This is nuisance-level stuff, but (as Osama would have realized if he hadn’t suffered delusions of grandeur), nuisance-level stuff is in some ways more effective than big, splashy attacks.

The way you beat it is to show that people who side with the bad guys don’t prosper, and people who side with you do. That takes patience and close attention. Are we providing that in Afghanistan? I don’t know. Here’s a not-very-encouraging story from the Christian Science Monitor.

I think that Afghanistan was relegated to holding-action status during the Iraq buildup because attention was on Iraq. But, you know, it shouldn’t stay in holding-action status because attention is on Iraqi reconstruction.

It’s likely, of course, that much of what goes on in Afghanistan has to do with various diplomatic efforts involving Iran (which is surely stirring up trouble there) and Pakistan (which is likely doing the same). Russia and China are likely interested in seeing that things don’t go too smoothly there, too. I don’t pretend to know what’s going on, but the Administration needs to make sure that someone does, and that we’re providing sufficient resources to get the job done.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Daniel Drezner.

COULD THE NEXT SECRETARY-GENERAL OF NATO be a pro-American Norwegian woman? She even does cheesecake in American-flag gear. (Well, sort of.)

Sounds good to me.

HE WASN’T READY TO DECLARE WAR ON SADDAM, but “antiwar” MP George Galloway is declaring “war” on Tony Blair.

Hmm. Maybe Blair should have just paid him off — though, by all accounts, he doesn’t come cheap.

DAVID PLOTZ OFFERS SEVEN SUGGESTIONS FOR REBUILDING IRAQ: The Oil Trust idea is one of them. Read ’em all.

RADLEY BALKO IS CONTRASTING conservatives’ treatment of the Rick Santorum and Bill Bennett affairs.

And, to continue his hypocrisy-busting activities, he also points out a “living wage” group that’s shafting its employees.

NOW HERE’S A PILOT WHO KNOWS HOW TO REASSURE PASSENGERS! Well, I’d be comforted.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST TALMUD: “Somewhere, Noam Chomsky is writing his next book.” And it’s coauthored by OSCAR!

(Sorry, I was channeling Walter Monheit there for a moment).

I’VE GOT SOME THOUGHTS on the Ninth Circuit and the right to bear arms, over at GlennReynolds.com.

Sorry that blogging has been so slow — I’m home with a sick kid today.

AUSTIN BAY LOOKS AT the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

UGH: A grading screwup on the Multistate Bar Exam.

DAVID APPELL SPANKS BILL MCKIBBEN:

McKibben makes no real argument why we should stop now except that he likes his life, his running, his humanity just the way it is now. But many people do not have McKibben’s life. Some, instead, live a life of great physical pain for which medicine has no answers, or mental torment for which psychology offers no solution. Billions yearn to live at the standard McKibben lives, yet doing with today’s technology–even our best technology–would wre[a]k havoc on the planet. Yet McKibben has the audacity to say that our answers can be found in the world as it exists today, as if scientists, engineers, policy makers, and technologists just haven’t been trying hard enough?

McKibben, I believe, would be making this argument whenever he happened to be alive — 5,000 B.C., a century ago, or two thousand years from now. Preying on fears sells news, articles, and books, and offers a shot at piety at the same time. Finding real honest-to-god solutions does not do as well.

Read the whole thing.

THIS SOUNDS WORSE THAN GUANTANAMO — so how come nobody’s been howling about it?

Some of the last 59 Iraqi soldiers to be held in Iran, out of 60,000 captured, had been imprisoned for more than two decades without communication with the outside world. “Saddam gone?” one former prisoner asked.

He was dressed in a lime green sports jacket that hung from his thin shoulders, the new clothes a parting gift from his Iranian captors. As he stood, he swayed, and then said, “I’m sorry. I have psychological damage in my brain.” . . .

Hassan’s hands trembled so severely that he could not light a cigarette without help from a comrade. He said he was tortured routinely — forced to squat for hours, beaten with lengths of cable and rope, shocked by car batteries and had what he thinks was dirty water injected with a syringe into his penis. . . .

Hassan, who was sent to the front for what his superiors in the police department promised would be a three-month tour of duty, described his daily rations: “Four spoons of rice. A half cup of water. A piece of bread.”

He said he saw hundreds of prisoners die, most from diseases like dysentery and tuberculosis, others from heart attacks. One of the camps had previously been a stable for animals, he said.

I don’t recall any of that happening at Guantanamo, which has gotten a lot more condemnation from the human-rights establishment. And don’t bother sending me a link to a press release somewhere. They “go on record” deploring this sort of stuff. But they don’t launch major PR offensives about it. And that’s because complaining about this sort of brutality doesn’t get donors to open their wallets. Criticizing the United States does.

And that’s a form of corruption, no less than oil contracts are.

SALAM PAX IS BACK: Or at least, there’s a new post on his blog. He was blogging while Internet access was down, and has delivered a bunch of posts to Diana Moon, which are now posted.

UPDATE: [Previous item removed, at Diana Moon’s request. I disagree, as I don’t think keeping Salam’s parents in the doubt about his sexual orientation is in the same category as protecting him from the secret police, but I’ve done it.]

AIR TRAVEL UPDATE: My flights to and from Palo Alto went fine. Security was okay at this end, but at San Jose’s Norm Mineta International Airport it was just about what you’d expect at an airport named for underperformin’ Norman: slow, with long lines, and screeners who didn’t seem very good.

Now a colleague who travels a lot — a big Democrat, by the way, not a government-hating conservative — just stopped by my office to rant about having to wait in a long line only to see, when she got to the gate area, 17 (she counted) uniformed TSA agents sitting in chairs watching the NBA playoffs.

She said she wished she’d had a digital camera with her so that I could post the picture. Me too.

UPDATE: This happened in Austin, Texas, for those who are wondering.

EUGENE VOLOKH is pointing out the difference between statistics and lies.

IT’S A HOWELL RAINES FEEDING FRENZY: Stephen F. Hayes is accusing the New York Times of deliberately getting things wrong in its coverage of Iraq.

And Donald Luskin is stalking Paul Krugman — claiming that Krugman is feeling the heat over errors in his columns (Luskin calls them “lies”), but still blowing smoke. Luskin has lots of quotes and links.

Meanwhile, the Times itself is reporting that the Baghdad looting story was false:

A top British Museum official said yesterday that his Iraqi counterparts told him they had largely emptied display cases at the National Museum in Baghdad months before the start of the Iraq war, storing many of the museum’s most precious artifacts in secure “repositories.”

The official, John E. Curtis, curator of the Near East Collection at the British Museum, who recently visited Iraq, said Baghdad museum officials had taken the action on the orders of Iraqi government authorities. When looting started, most of the treasures apparently remaining in display halls were those too large or bulky to have been moved for protection, Mr. Curtis said. . . .

Such measures would mirror actions taken in Iraq before the Persian Gulf war in 1991, primarily as a protection against bombing of Baghdad.

Mr. Curtis’s remarks may help explain recent reports by both Iraqi officials and American authorities that losses at the National Museum are less extensive than previously feared. For instance, Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting, said recently that Baghdad museum officials had listed only 25 artifacts as definitely missing.

So this happened in 1991, and nobody bothered to check to see if it had happened again? Why? Because they were too anxious to find a story that would make Rumsfeld look bad? It looks that way to me. There seems to be a bit of smoke-blowing here, too, as the Times now says that an undetermined number of never-cataloged items may have been stolen from the basement.

But we were told that 170,000 priceless antiquities had been looted. (Ken Layne has a nice post here.) Now the number of items considered important enough to catalog is 25. Rand Simberg’s earlier prediction that this would turn into another bogus story along “Jenin massacre” lines is looking pretty good.

The Times fired Jayson Blair for plagiarism. But at least plagiarists write things that are probably true.

UPDATE: A reader notes that the Times story I quote above was buried on page 20. No surprise there. Meanwhile Jim Miller notes his early and repeated skepticism of the looting story early on. And, for what it’s worth, Jonathan Foreman reports that claims that the Oil Ministry was guarded while the museum was ignored are bogus.

UPDATE: And now it’s Maureen Dowd who’s being savaged for leaving out some crucial truths.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And don’t miss this piece from the Washington City Paper about the NYT’s sniper coverage.

Hmm. Scandals, inaccuracies, falling circulation, and declining influence. Sounds like bad news to me. How long can Raines last?

MICKEY KAUS on Stephen Glass’s new novel:

So Glass writes non-fiction and it’s fiction, and he writes fiction and it’s non-fiction! The man’s a transgressive genius. Subtly subverting all Western literary categories! … I’d say the “it’s all performance art” defense is still open. Glass must be playing a deep Kinbote-like game. The book can’t be as flat and cheesy as it sounds.

Heh.

NANOTECHNOLOGY VISIONS: My TechCentralStation column is up with a report from the Foresight Institute conference, and it features exclusive video interviews with Larry Lessig, Eric Drexler, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA, Science Comm.) and more. I knew that being an A/V geek would come in handy eventually. . . .

THIS is kind of embarrassing:

Canadian soldiers are back in Afghanistan, but this time, they don’t have any weapons to help protect them. In Ottawa’s rush to put Canadian troops on the ground, 25 elite Canadian soldiers arrived in Afghanistan only to find that they are not allowed to carry guns. What makes the situation particularly embarrassing is that the troops have been assigned German bodyguards to protect them. A Global National exclusive report.

Ouch.

“LIKE DOONESBURY, BUT FUNNY:” Here’s a story on Chris Muir’s excellent Day by Day strip, which is finally starting to get the attention it deserves.

JOHN LEO WRITES about an anti-war protester who seems to have been unjustly hassled by the Secret Service.

This has been a problem for a while. I think that it started after Reagan was shot, and it seems to have gotten steadily worse over the years. And the Secret Service seems to have serious management problems, something that I’ve noted here before. Leo’s right, though, to note that this is a problem that goes beyond the Secret Service.

ARUNDHATI ROY, ENVIRONMENTAL MENACE: Jayakrishnan Nair has the story.

HEH. Indeed.

KEN LAYNE NOTICES SOMETHING:

The New York Times’ circulation fell 5.3 percent, nearly triple the drop of the next biggest loser (the Washington Post at 1.92 percent). In six months, the NYT’s weekday circulation dropped by more than 60,000 copies. That means the number of papers sold dropped by an average of 10,000 every month between October 2002 and March 2003.

This was not exactly a slow news period: North Korea admitted it had a nuclear weapons program, the D.C. sniper was on the loose, a French tanker was attacked off the coast of Yemen, terrorists killed hundreds in Bali and the Philippines, Republicans swept mid-term elections (save for the Democratic sweep in California), ANSWER led protests around the world, “Old Europe” fought its last battle, there were massive anti-mullah demonstrations in Iran, Trent Lott went down, UN weapons inspectors went nowhere, Venezuela went crazy, Columbia didn’t make it home, the Axis of Weasels was exposed, everybody got worked up about a nightclub fire, there was that little War in Iraq, etc.

Of course the NYT was mostly busy whining about a golf tournament ….

The New York Post saw its circulation grow.