A WHILE BACK I noted a stupid censorship effort at Harvard Business School. Now Thor Halvorssen of FIRE emails that Dean Kim Clark of the Harvard Business School has apologized in writing.

That’s good. Better still, of course, would be not doing this sort of thing in the first place. But maybe they’ll learn, eventually.

MICKEY KAUS is slamming the Congressional Republicans for being pigs at the trough.

MORE DIET-BLOGGING! With, ahem, topless photos!

TRIUMPH OF THE BLOGS: I (sort of) already blogged this story, but I missed this angle.

HERE ARE SOME PICTURES from the San Francisco area bloggers’ bash, courtesy of Stefan Sharkansky. And here are some observations on the greater diversity of the blogosphere as compared to traditional media. The two, um, reinforce each other. . . .

JEFF JARVIS has more on vlogging, — including an Italian vlog. It’s a global phenomenon now!

EUGENE VOLOKH has blogged a very interesting summary of the Hamdi decision.

BUSY with hardware / software installation. Result: Hardware and software work fine, but I need more cables.

I always need more cables.

In the meantime, go here for more on the Los Alamos scandals, something I’ve been meaning to write about. But now I don’t have to!

UPDATE: Reader John Dellapa emails:

You hit the nail on the head with the cable comment.

While Bill Gates and Mike Dell get all the attention, the guys laughing all the way to the bank are at Belkin.

Ain’t it the truth. I’ve got a whole cabinet full of cables, and I always seem to need something else.

JOHN BROCKMAN asks experts to tell the President what’s important in science. You can read the answers, from people like Stephen Pinker, Freeman Dyson, David Gelernter, Ian Wilmut, Jaron Lanier, Ray Kurzweil, and many, many more.

MISSY IS diet-blogging now. More fiber!

HERE’S MORE on the Orwellian tactics used against drinkers in Northern Virginia.

Sorry, but this is inexcusable, and some of the examples make clear that this is really just an in terrorem effort, not serious law enforcement. I hope a bunch of people sue. Could it be another Houston in the making? We’ll see.

UPDATE: And here’s the latest from Houston: paying outside lawyers big bucks to expunge the records.

Well, I imagine there are some Enron lawyers down there with good document-expunging expertise. . . .

KOS’S POLITICAL STATE REPORT seems to be going great guns. I just wish this thing had been around during the runup to the elections.

Oh, wait — this is America in the 21st century. It’s always the runup to an election!

COLBY COSH IS charmingly irritable about everything from nasty e-mail to dumb car names. Though I think the Pontiac would sell. Mickey Kaus, call your office!

GREGORY HLATKY writes about the racism of Hollywood “progressives” — though, to be fair, I’m not sure how much of this is racism, and how much is just contempt for non-Hollywood America. If that’s any better. . . .

HERE’S AN INTERESTING STORY:

BIG SANDY, Texas – In a terror scene reminiscent of Sept. 11, an armed man threatening to kill Americans aboard an Amtrak train had to be subdued by passengers.

“All Americans will die!” suspect Gerardo Bedia was quoted as shouting, along with a host of obscenities before being overpowered by fellow travelers Sunday.

According to Big Sandy police, the man spoke English, Spanish and “some kind of Middle Eastern language.”

Chief Ronnie Norman said the weapon – a black, all-plastic polymer folding knife – is typically used to defeat metal detectors, the Longview News-Journal reported.

“It could have been a lot worse,” Norman told the paper. “The passengers did a fantastic job of restraining him.”

Henry Hanks wonders why this story isn’t getting more attention. Beats me — I just looked for the would-be killer’s name on the AP search engine and found nothing.

UPDATE: Here’s another report, courtesy of reader Chris Lawrence.

CANADA’S GUN REGISTRY: Not only an expensive failure, but social and political poison:

We now know that the government’s gun-control policy is a fiscal and administrative debacle. Its costs rival those of core services like national defence. And it doesn’t work. What is less well known is that the policy wasn’t designed to control guns. . . .

Which is precisely why it appealed to those putting together the Liberal Red Book for the pivotal 1993 election. If the object of the policy exercise was to appear to be “tougher” on guns than Kim Campbell, they had to find a policy that would provoke legitimate gun-owners to outrage. Nothing would better convince the Liberals’ urban constituency that Jean Chrétien and Allan Rock were taking a tough line on guns than the spectacle of angry old men spouting fury on Parliament Hill.

The supreme irony of the gun registry battle is that the policy was selected because it would goad people who knew something about guns to public outrage. That is, it had a purely political purpose in the special context of a hard-fought election. The fact that it was bad policy was crucial to the specific political effect it was supposed to deliver.

And so we saw demonstrations by middle-aged firearm owners, family men whose first reflex was to respect the laws of the land. This group’s political alienation is a far greater loss than the $200-million that have been wasted so far. The creation of this new criminal class — the ultimate triumph of negative political alchemy — may be the worst, and most enduring product of the gun registry culture war.

Personally, I think that anything that inspires large numbers of Canadians to engage in civil disobedience can’t be all bad. But Canada’s gun registry was an example of the kind of cynicism that inspires most gun-control efforts in America, too. And the results here would be far, far worse.

UPDATE: Reader Jonathan Gewirtz emails:

One reason why Bill Clinton was such a bad president is that, to a much greater degree than other recent presidents, he treated political opponents and their constituents as class enemies. His cynical alienation of gun owners and small-business people will take years to undo, even if the federal govt shows unprecedented goodwill, which it hasn’t. The Canadian left has done the same thing, but worse. These kinds of political tactics don’t work in the long run, as is now becoming obvious. Bush Jr., for all his flaws and triangulations, appears to understand this, which accounts for much of his political success in Texas and as president.

I think that’s right.

THE JOYS AND HAZARDS OF interviewing bloggers. Interesting piece.

TRF is all over draft proponents in a multi-post Fisk-a-thon. Fisk-a-rama? Fiskfest? Well, anyway, he’s against it.

THE ALGERIAN CONNECTION: I’ve been suggesting one for quite a while. Now an article by Jake Tapper in The Weekly Standard (yes, you read that right) explains the Algerian connection to terrorism in general, while this article in the Daily Mirror suggests that the alleged ricin terrorists arrested in London yesterday had — drum roll, please — an Algerian connection.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting link, courtesy of the indispensable Sophie Brenner, purveyor of many interesting links.

MR. BLACKWELL is pointing out the worst-dressed celebrities, but Web Pages That Suck is pretty hard on Mr. Blackwell.

RADLEY BALKO explains how you can make 20 bucks at the expense of Big Music.

ROUTING AROUND IDIOTS: My TechCentralStation column is up.

PLEASE SEND YOUR SYMPATHIES TO SHILOH BUCHER.

MICKEY KAUS BLOGS from the L.A. Auto Show. Maybe I can pick up a Maybach for cheap!

CHEMBLOGGER DEREK LOWE has a lengthy post on ricin.