WHAT HATH LINSE WROUGHT? I have more constructive suggestions for the New York Times over at GlennReynolds.com.

HERE’S MORE ON THE RAVE ACT from the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism. Excerpt:

The RAVE Act has no valid law enforcement purpose. The initiative to pass this legislation came after federal prosecutors in Louisiana failed in their efforts to apply the existing crack-house statute to the owner of a concert venue where some illegal drug activity allegedly took place. Federal anti-drug officials apparently believe if they can suppress any gathering where drug use may occur, they will actually win the “war” on drugs. Years of empirical evidence documenting the government’s failure apparently does little to convince them of their error, to say nothing of the obvious violation of individual rights that takes place as officials demand more and more power.

Read the whole thing. If you’re interested, you should also read this brief from the New Orleans rave case (full disclosure: I was a coauthor, working with the Electronic Music Defense and Education Fund — we won). One thing it makes clear is that the DEA has been after not just drug use, but the “rave scene,” and electronic music in general, which it regards as part of a “drug culture” that it sees as a legitimate target.

UPDATE: I don’t approve of this suit against the Federal government, but I have to admit that in light of the Rave Act it has a certain sauce-for-the-gander character. (Via The Curmudgeonly Clerk).

DEFENSE TECH REPORTS that DARPA is being investigated. The question is whether its long-term research operations are being raided to fund near-term operations.

MORE ON HORIZONTAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE NEW YORK TIMES: My TechCentralStation column is up early this week. It contains constructive suggestions, a cautionary note from Nick Denton, and more!

A KIND WORD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES: Well, more than a few, actually. I’m working on a law review article about the regulation of nanotechnology, and I’ve been going through the mainstream media coverage of the subject. The Times is way ahead of anyone else — and I mean way ahead. Not only is the quality of its coverage excellent, but the sheer quantity outstrips everyone else by a mile.

This is the sort of thing that makes the Times great. And I suspect that I speak for a lot of people in saying that if Howell Raines, et al., had focused on this kind of work, excellent reporting on a wide array of topics, taking advantage of the Times’ superior size and scope, things would be a lot better. I hope that the new editors will keep that in mind. People don’t criticize the Times because it isn’t a national treasure. They — or at least I — criticize it because it is one, and recent zone-flooding on Augusta National, etc., has squandered that status.

LEE HARRIS WRITES about “acting too soon.” Meanwhile Juan Non-Volokh writes about acting too late.

ANDREW SULLIVAN is having “Pledge Week” again over at his site. Er, feel free to donate here, too. . . .

WHEN THE GWEILO DIARIES LINKED to this report of starvation in North Korea I was — well, skeptical is too strong a word, given what other news has leaked out of there, but I wasn’t convinced enough to run with it. But now The Telegraph is reporting the same thing. Excerpt:

Aid agencies are alarmed by refugees’ reports that children have been killed and corpses cut up by people desperate for food. Requests by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to be allowed access to “farmers’ markets”, where human meat is said to be traded, have been turned down by Pyongyang, citing “security reasons”.

Anyone caught selling human meat faces execution, but in a report compiled by the North Korean Refugees Assistance Fund (NKRAF), one refugee said: “Pieces of ‘special’ meat are displayed on straw mats for sale. People know where they came from, but they don’t talk about it.”

The NKRAF, an aid body set up in China five years ago which helps to smuggle food and medicines into parts of North Korea off-limits to WFP officials, interviewed 200 refugees for the report.

Oddly, however, the article speaks of starvation in North Korea as essentially a natural disaster, rather than a government-made one. But I’ll stand by one prediction I made a while back: When North Korea falls, and it will, and when the extent of the horrors there becomes widely known, many South Korean politicians will face a terrible reckoning as their complicity with evil becomes clear. Maybe they think the same thing — that would explain why they’re trying to keep things quiet, wouldn’t it?

UPDATE: Multiple perspectives via reader email: From Leo Strauss: “If all values are relative, then cannibalism is a matter of taste.”

From Amartya Sen:

One remarkable fact in the terrible history of famine is no substantial famine has ever occurred in a country with a democratic form government and a relatively free press. They have occurred in ancient kingdom and in contemporary authoritarian societies, in primitive tribal communities and in modern technocratic dictatorships, in colonial economies governed by imperialists and in newly independent countries run by despotic national leaders or by intolerant single parties. But famines have never afflicted any country that is independent, holds regular elections, has opposition parties and permits newspapers to question the wisdom of government policies.

From Samizdata:

From Tim Blair:

Cannibalism is increasing in North Korea following another poor harvest and a big cut in international food aid, according to refugees who have fled the stricken country.

The reporter is being polite. What he means to say is “Following years of communism.”

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dean Esmay offers some history. And here’s a book on cannibalism in China during Mao’s famines.

MORE HOMELAND SECURITY PROBLEMS:

As the war on terrorism spurs U.S. intelligence agencies to constantly expand aviation watch lists, many airline-reservation systems rely on name- searching software based on a 120-year-old indexing system that mistakes the similar spelling or sound of innocent passengers’ surnames for those of terrorists.

The result: Thousands of travelers have been flagged at airports for additional searches and police questioning — while critics say real terrorists could slip through undetected. . . .

The problem, critics say, is that the English-based name-search software used by airline-reservation databases is easily flummoxed by Arabic, Asian and other names that, when converted from their native script to the Roman alphabet, can have hundreds of legitimate different spellings.

Still a few bugs in the system.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile, Carl Hiaasen outlines more dumbness.