THE BBC — SLOW, BUT EDUCABLE:

According to what is described as the first truly representative survey of Iraqi opinion, people in Iraq believe that the best thing that happened in the past 12 months was the demise of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The thing they want most over the next year is peace and stability, and the preferred form of government is an Iraqi democracy.

Imagine.

“ME TOO” REPUBLICANISM: Pejman Yousefzadeh joins the many arguing that the Republican party is abandoning its small-government principles. Jim Pinkerton looks at the same phenomenon and isn’t especially happy, but observes:

I don’t agree with everything that Bush is doing, not by a mile. But personal preference aside, one must recognize that he is not only president, he’s also popular. The non-conservative worldview of South Park Republicanism, or Right-wingerism, is in the ascendancy.

Two interesting perspectives.

JEWISH WORLD REVIEW REPORTS that:

[P]rominent religious conservatives — Jews, Catholics and Evangelical Christians — are allied with a radical Islamic group to stop gay marriage.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but just as with antiwar people who align themselves with A.N.S.W.E.R., if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

FIRST IT WAS THE WHOLE MADONNA / WHORE THING, but that was banished as politically incorrect. So now we get the “Dad / Cad phenomenon” to take its place. And this is an improvement, how? . . .

CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL WRITES on the decline of France and the rise of the far-left / Islamist alliance. Belmont Club predicts that the far left will eventually be captured by Islam rather than allied with it.

FIRST IT WAS THE FAKE JULIUS CAESAR QUOTE about banging the drums of war. (More here). Now it’s a fake Lincoln quote:

“There’s no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There’s nothing good in war except its ending.” Attributed to Lincoln by anti-war protesters earlier this year, the statement actually was made by an actor portraying Lincoln in an episode of “Star Trek.”

Hey, close enough!

STEVEN DEN BESTE: “We don’t want to kill you, and we don’t want you to surrender to us. We just want you to stop your fellow Muslims from trying to kill us. Do that, and this war is over.”

UPDATE: Venkat Balasubramani disagrees.

IT’S BIZARRO-WORLD: Democrat Mickey Kaus responds to the defense of Hillary Clinton by conservatives Howard Owens and Bill Herbert:

Hillary’s criticism isn’t a real criticism or an honest criticism, it’s a strategic, partisan criticism, and it’s the sort of un-straight talk she should drop when she’s talking to the troops in a war zone.

I should add that until Hillary’s Iraq trip, I–like many Democrats surveying the current presidential candidates–had been feeling strange new respect for her. Now I remember why I used to loathe her.

Ouch.

PAUL KRUGMAN writes on problems with electronic voting.

All I can say is, indeed.

THE FBI AND LIBRARIES: Here’s an actual report of FBI agents at a library — though on closer inspection it doesn’t reveal that they were actually snooping on patrons. I’m all for people having privacy in what books they check out, though I think that the relationship between the Patriot Act and libraries is, as this columnist is honest enough to note, less direct than one might think. And that underscores a problem with the arguments over this topic.

I doubt, for example, that the American Library Association, or NPR, thinks that financial privacy is as important as the privacy of library circulation records, but I’d be interested to see them make the case that one is more closely connected to preserving freedom than the other.

As a longterm critic of the Patriot Act, I’d be fairly easy to persuade on the importance of both kinds of privacy. I’d just like to see people try a bit harder, instead of taking it for granted.

EUGENE VOLOKH is being harsh again — and, again, it’s richly deserved.

“SARANDONISTAS?” Actually, not a bad term.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING PROFILE of Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson.

DONALD SENSING has all sorts of interesting stuff. Just keep scrolling.

IRAQI BLOGGER OMAR writes that it wasn’t about the oil. Nope, it wasn’t. (Best line: “Some Iraqis say that Iraq is a wealthy country and that America came here to steal our fortune, and I ask them what f***ing fortune?”) It suits some people to pretend otherwise, but that was always obvious. If it had been about the oil, we would have cut a deal with Saddam for, you know, oil, instead of making it harder for him to sell it.

Interestingly, for the French, it is about the oil — though even there that probably takes a backseat to power-politics and the joys of anti-Americanism.

IS SELF-EMPLOYMENT BOOSTING THE RECOVERY? I guess I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if that turned out to be the case.

THIS STORY CONNECTING WESLEY CLARK WITH THE WACO DEBACLE is getting a fair amount of attention. Goodness knows that “debacle” is the kindest term for what happened at Waco, and that there’s blame to go around, but Clark’s role here seems to have been rather minimal, and unless there’s a lot more to this story than meets the eye — and I don’t think there is — efforts to tar him with responsibility for that disaster seem rather unfair to me.

The real question — as it seems to be again and again — is why the people who were responsible at the FBI and elsewhere weren’t fired.

UPDATE: This AP story on Fox News is calling Clark’s role “limited.” That seems right to me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an insider email on Clark’s role at Waco. Hit “more” to read it, as it’s a bit long.

(more…)

IT’S NOT JUST A.N.S.W.E.R., according to this report in The Guardian:

The peace movement could be destroyed by the takeover of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Stop the War coalition by Trotskyist groups and the Communist party, according to allegations circulated by a leading campaigner.

The claims have been made by Jimmy Barnes, the veteran leftwing secretary of the trade union CND movement. He has warned in a paper sent to the campaign’s national council and the trade union CND executive that “CND itself is now a small divided group with little future, unless there is a change”.

It has been well known that the anti-war groups have always been heavily influenced by the far left, but the internal divisions have reached a startling degree of animosity. . . .

Mr Barnes claims the Communist party and Socialist Action sought control of CND in order to use the campaign as a base from which to exert influence over the Stop the War coalition, the loose body which organised the massive protests against the war in Iraq. Mr Barnes asserts the coalition is increasingly dominated by another Trotskyist group, the Socialist Workers party.

Referring to the last CND conference, he claimed “the antagonism we saw at the conference is derivative of the aggressive and sectarian behaviour of those involved in the Stop the War coalition who strove hard to control and dominate the anti-war protest movement”.

The communists always seem to have money from somewhere, and they’re good organizers, which tempts people to hold their nose and ally with them. But if you let the communists in, they’ll either take over, or wreck things. It’s the history of the left in the 20th century.

MONTY PYTHON BECOMES REAL LIFE at the University of Virginia. You know, this kind of thing is doing an amazing amount of damage to the reputation of higher education out in the greater world, and most academics don’t appreciate the extent of the harm.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE COCOA:

GAGNOA, Ivory Coast (Reuters) – Three more tribesmen were killed in clashes at the weekend in a major cocoa-growing area of Ivory Coast, bringing the death toll in three days of violence to at least nine, a local official said on Monday.

Local Bete tribesmen have been in conflict with farm workers from outside the area and immigrants around cocoa plantations in the Gagnoa area since Thursday.

The clashes are part of a wider cycle of violence over plantations in the world’s top cocoa grower, where a civil war erupted last year and inflamed ethnic tensions.

The French certainly seem to be having a bad time of it in the Ivory Coast:

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) – French soldiers fired tear gas and blanks to expel a rock-throwing mob of government supporters Monday that attacked the main French military base in Ivory Coast’s commercial capital. . . .

On Sunday, Ivory Coast soldiers briefly seized control of state television headquarters, broadcasting demands that French and West African peacekeepers leave so armed forces can resume attacks on insurgents.

I wish for things to go well, not badly, in the Ivory Coast, which was quite a nice place by West African standards until recently.

BUSH AND HILLARY IN IRAQ: I’ve got a roundup of blogosphere reactions over at GlennReynolds.com.

CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS has a big nanotechnology point-counterpoint on the feasibility of molecular assemblers. This is a big deal.

“Nanotechnology” as a term encompasses all sorts of things, but when people talk about its more sophisticated applications, they generally mean what Eric Drexler (one of the discussants) calls “molecular manufacturing,” using molecular assemblers. Whether the more exciting and spooky applications of nanotechnology are possible thus depends largely on whether molecular assemblers are possible.

Initial doubts about their feasibility were resolved some years ago, but more recently people have been raising skeptical claims again. I’m somewhat skeptical of the skeptical claims, in part because of Clarke’s First Law (“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”) and in part because the nanotechnology business community seems to have decided that the best way to deal with people who fear nanotechnology (as a result of things like Michael Crichton’s novel Prey — debunked here by Freeman Dyson in a piece that goes well beyond Crichton to raise lots of interesting points about nano- and bio-technology) is to loudly proclaim that the really scary stuff is impossible. I think that’s shortsighted, and more than a touch dishonest, but you can follow the link and see what you think yourself.

And ultimately, of course, this stuff will all be settled in the lab. I know which way I’m betting.

For more background, see my TechCentralStation column on the new nanotechnology bill from last week, and follow the many links it contains. You might also read this post by Howard Lovy. (I’ve also got video interviews with some of the players here — just scroll to the bottom).

UPDATE: Here’s Ray Kurzweil’s commentary on the debate, which has a lot of interesting and useful background on nanotechnology, and the technical and political disagreements around it, that will be especially welcome to those who haven’t followed this subject in the past. Kurzweil also includes lots of links and references. Phil Bowermaster has comments, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Foresight Institute has a press release and a list of FAQS and comments on its website.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S PENCHANT FOR SECRECY has apparently found an unlikely admirer:

As investigative reporters and “oppo” researchers flock to Vermont to dig into Howard Dean’s past, they have run into a roadblock. A large chunk of Dean’s records as governor are locked in a remote state warehouse—the result of an aggressive legal strategy designed in part to protect Dean from political attacks.

DEAN—WHO HAS BLASTED the Bush administration for excessive secrecy—candidly acknowledged that politics was a major reason for locking up his own files when he left office last January. He told Vermont Public Radio he was putting a 10-year seal on many of his official papers—four years longer than previous Vermont governors—because of “future political considerations… We didn’t want anything embarrassing appearing in the papers at a critical time.”

Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and all that.

ANOTHER CHINESE BLOGGER has been banned, though this is a somewhat different case:

Mu Zimei is both reviled and admired, but she is not ignored. The country’s most popular Internet site, Sina.com, credits her with attracting 10 million daily visitors. Another site, Sohu.com, says Mu Zimei is the name most often typed into its Internet search engine, surpassing one occasional runner-up, Mao Zedong.

Her celebrity — which exploded when she posted an explicit online account of her tryst with a Chinese rock star — first seemed to baffle government censors but now has drawn a familiar response. Her forthcoming book was banned this week. She has quit her magazine columnist job and halted her blog, or online diary.

Yet at a time when “Sex and the City” episodes are among the most popular DVD’s in China, the Mu Zimei phenomenon is another example of the government’s struggle to keep a grip on social change in China. Her writings have prompted a raging debate about sex and women on the Internet, where more people are writing blogs or arguing anonymously about a host of subjects in chat rooms and discussion pages.

I often hear that the Western belief in sex as some sort of liberating force is silly and superficial.

So why are tyrants always so afraid of it? (Thanks to Hylton Joliffe for pointing out this story, which I had missed).

GOOD NEWS: Bush is repealing the steel tariffs.