WHEN DIGICAMS ATTACK: Love the title.

WALTER OLSON is profiled in an interesting article. Via email, however, I learn that Olson has a minivan, not an SUV as the article states.

HUMAN SHIELDS, ICY ROADS, CLONING AND BUFFY: It’s another issue of Virginia Postrel Magazine.

Also, she has this fascinating article on “Neuroeconomics” in The New York Times. If it interests you, I recommend Robert Frank’s Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions, which I think is far and away Frank’s best book, though hardly his most famous.

I GAVE BLOOD at the law school blood drive right before my Constitutional Law class. I’m not sure how good an idea that was. Giving blood never makes me dizzy or faint, but I was just a touch lightheaded — it was sort of like having downed a shot right before class. For all I know, it was an improvement. . . .

Aside from my secretary (who had donated just before me, and who kindly snapped this picture) and one male student, the crowd donating and waiting was entirely female. I don’t know if that’s representative or not, but it seems as if every time I donate on campus it’s that way.

Anyhow, there’s apparently a non-trivial blood shortage in most of the nation, and even those places with plenty on hand are having to send some of theirs elsewhere to make up the difference.

Part of the reason may be (as I blogged here and here back when InstaPundit was young) that they’re getting more and more picky about who they’ll take blood from. In particular, they seem extraordinarily worried about mad cow disease, with ever-more-stringent limits on blood donation by people who have spent time in the UK. Perhaps the reasons for that are better than I realize (which is a bit worrisome, if so), but I wonder how many lives it’s saving, versus lives potentially lost because of blood shortages. Has anyone looked into that lately?

In the meantime, I guess the rest of us in the ever-dwindling group of approved donors should roll up our sleeves. It’s virtually painless, and no big deal. Plus, I got a free cookie!

NATHAN NEWMAN has discovered something rather A.N.S.W.E.R.-like in the affirmative action protest organization. He has lots of links, too.

I SUSPECT THAT THIS JONAH GOLDBERG PIECE on McCarthyism will generate a lot of, er, discussion.

Kevin Drum has already responded.

UPDATE: Apparently, by linking this piece I’ve produced a flood of hatemail to Jonah Goldberg. I guess more of my readers are civil libertarian types.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steve Verdon says that now Kevin Drum is subjecting me to neo-McCarthyism. Or something like that.

There are also replies up from Silent Running and Arthur Silber.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I read Kevin Drum’s post again and — though it really didn’t register with me the first time — I think it is kind of a cheap shot.

But I want to be clear where I stand here. I don’t hold any brief for McCarthy. He was a buffoon and a thug. But if McCarthyism was bad, it was because he accused innocent people, not because he pursued Communists. Communists were — and are — comparable to Nazis. Being one is as bad as being a Nazi. Supporting Communism is as bad as supporting Nazism. And calling Communists Communists isn’t McCarthyism — as Kevin Drum himself agrees.

And if you disagree, and think that Communists aren’t as bad as Nazis, well, that’s your opinion. But don’t expect me to be impressed, or to think that you hold any sort of moral high ground. So what part of my position is different from this passage in Kevin’s post?

I can’t pretend to speak for the entire liberal community, and certainly not for liberals of a generation before me, but I’m not sure anyone really denies that there were indeed communist spies in the United States back in the 50s. The problem with McCarthy — and McCarthyism — wasn’t that he uncovered lots of communist spies, but that he didn’t uncover many communist spies. While other, more careful investigators had some success, McCarthy himself was extraordinarily unproductive.

What McCarthy did do was accuse everyone under the sun of being a communist. If you had belonged to the communist party as a student in the 30s, you were a communist. If you belonged to the ACLU, you were a communist. If, like Fred Fischer, you belonged to the Lawyer’s Guild for a few months after you graduated from law school, you were tarred as a communist on national TV.

It’s not McCarthyism to accuse a communist of being a communist. It is McCarthyism to accuse someone of being a communist who has only a vague association with communist friends, groups, or ideas.

As I said in this post about A.N.S.W.E.R. that Kevin links disapprovingly:

It’s not McCarthyism to call people who are communists, communists. Communists, as devoted followers of murderous totalitarianism, deserve to be called to account every bit as much as their Nazi colleagues. And in the 21st century, they can hardly pretend to be ignorant of their ideology’s true nature.

Sounds to me like Kevin and I are on the same page — except that, somehow, he’s accusing me of McCarthyism. I guess it’s not McCarthyism to accurately charge 1950s Communists with Communism. It’s just McCarthyism to accurately charge 2003 Communists, like A.N.S.W.E.R., with Communism. That doesn’t make much sense to me.

SADDAM HUSSEIN: Media lord!

THERE’S MORE ON LOS ALAMOS SECURITY (OR THE LACK THEREOF) over at DefenseTech.

I SHOULD HAVE LINKED TO THE DIXIE FLATLINE BLOG before, but I kept forgetting to. But I think you’ll like it. Here’s an excerpt from his close reading of the G.I. Joe cartoon show:

This base, as befits America’s premier, top-secret military force, is amazing, and has a truly gigantic laser cannon mounted in the center of the main building. Extremely impressive, the cannon must be at least two hundred meters long, and can only move on a vertical axis. This illustrates one of the greatest problems with the Joe force. Formed and equipped under Reagan, it never wanted for funds, and accordingly it never had to be cost effective. Rather than use or modify existing weapons platforms and systems, the Joes were forever relying on custom designs, often introducing next-generation systems that, while quite novel and impressive, never quite justified the cost.

This Super Cannon is an excellent example of this problem. No other military organization in the world, then or now, has the ability to make a laser cannon that, to judge by its size, was capable of vaporizing entire city blocks. The Joes could, because money was truly no object, and the prestige of working in Joe R&D attracted the finest creative minds in the military world. But rather than place the weapon in a traversing mount, they chose a static position. All Cobra would need to do is move likely targets out of the Super-Cannon’s firing line. Perhaps there were technical limitations of which we are unaware that required the static position, but on the face of it, it seems a terrible design decision.

There’s more in a similar vein.

CONDI RICE AS A CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR in California? Interesting.

PROTESTERS WITH BLOODY HANDS:

The demonstrations are thereby making war more — not less — likely.

All this should be no great surprise, considering the ignominious history of peace protests over the last century. The record is fairly clear: When the demands of protesters have been met, more bloodshed has resulted; when strong leaders have resisted the lure of appeasement, peace has usually broken out.

If you want peace too much, or too visibly, prepare for war.

HERE’S AN ARTICLE ON LAW-BLOGGING from the ABA Journal. Howard Bashman is prominently featured, with a picture. Funny, he looks nothing like I’d imagined.

BLOGS AT HARVARD: Here’s an interview with Dave Winer about his new role as Blogger-in-Residence.

SCOTT GANZ has an idea for a “pledge drive across warbloggerdom.” Sounds good to me.

RUSSELL WORKING is reporting from Turkey via blog. Lots of interesting stuff, but this passage really grabbed my eye:

There is a reason for the intensity of reaction to an American in Europe. It can be summed up in a cartoon that ran in Greek paper To Ethnos. A befuddled chairman of the board—he is Greece’s prime minister and EU president Costas Simitis—sits before a company board reading from a report: “Dear Shareholders: It’s my impression you still have reservations about the prospects of the company.”

Meanwhile, his board members are scurrying about, finding ways to kill themselves: rigging up nooses, leaping out of windows, firing guns through their heads. On the wall is the name of the corporation, which Greece happens to head during this six-month period: The European Union.

My advice: sell.

DONALD SENSING WRITES THAT Afghanistan was a Southerners’ war. Iraq, on the other hand, will be a Northerners’ war.

He’s also got a transcript of Bush’s speech.

ROGER BOURNIVAL reports that bogus-casualty-figure purveyer Marc Herold has a book coming out — and promotional literature has inflated the death toll again!

AN INSIGHTFUL COMMENT on the demise of Salon and many other dot-coms:

The biggest thing that killed the dot-com boom was the exorbitant cost structure the companies put in place, especially in real estate.

Let’s look at the major epicenters of dot-com activity: Boston, Manhattan, San Francisco, and Seattle. What do those cities have in common? Some of the highest rents in the country (as well as inflated costs of living, which required higher salaries).

The great benefit the Internet was supposed to bring was the complete de-emphasis of physical location. Salon could have found a home in, say, Springfield, Mass., where rents are cheap, there’s a strong supply of intellectuals (the Five Colleges in Hampshire County), New York and Boston are close at hand, and the cost-of-living is lower.

The fact that sites which avoided getting the priciest digs (I’m looking at you, Kuro5hin) have survived and maybe even thrived is a testament to the folly of Salon, Inside, Slate, and all the other online media startups.

InstaPundit, of course, survives largely via low overhead.

AGAINST THE AXIS OF EVIL, AND THE AXIS OF WEASELS: The Axis of Hygiene.