THE MULLAHS ARE CRACKING DOWN IN IRAN: Bloggers and independent journalists seem to be major targets.

BIOTOXINS in the mail? I’m skeptical, as these early reports are almost always wrong.

UPDATE: Just got an email from someone who says CNN is reporting that the tests were false-positives.

AZIZ POONAWALLA mostly agrees with Steven Den Beste’s assessment of where France is going.

That’s bad news for France.

JIM DUNNIGAN WRITES ON SYRIA’S TENUOUS TERROR CONNECTION. Syria does have longstanding terror-group connections, but — unlike Iraq — it doesn’t seem to have been trying to run a proxy-war against the United States with them.

My sense is that Syria is a late-stage corrupt kleptocracy. Unlike Saddam’s Iraq, there’s more power in the oligarchy than in the dictator himself. As Dunnigan writes:

When Bashar took over at age 34, he initially talked of reform and cleaning up the endemic corruption and turgid economy. He soon changed his tune as he realized his father had surrounded himself with a bunch of thieves and cutthroats. These guys ran the police state, and expected to be paid. Or else. So Bashar is a dictator who can dictate a lot, but can’t touch any of the private empires his father’s cronies have set up. It’s all about money.

I’d still like to see the Ba’ath regime collapse, or be knocked down, and replaced by something better. But it’s not an immediate threat, and it’s likely that it will respond to pressure in a way that Saddam didn’t. In a way, it’s the difference between the Stalinist Soviet Union and the Krushchev- or Brezhnev-era Soviet Union.

REPORTS IN THE TELEGRAPH that British antiwar MP George Galloway was paid off by the Iraqis seem almost too thrilleresque to believe. On the other hand, The Telegraph must feel strongly about its case, given the obvious risk of a libel suit, which Galloway now says he’ll bring. Tim Blair has a roundup of links and observations.

Galloway, meanwhile, needs to ponder the old lawyer’s warning: “If you sue someone for libel, they’re liable to prove it.”

UPDATE: A reader emails: “On the other hand, Galloway might be able to prove that he didn’t have to be paid to be an apologist for Stalinist regimes.”

Yeah, that would improve his moral position. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Lionel Mandrake has some observations, and some links.

ONE OF MY BLOGCHILDREN is expecting, and is setting up a baby-blog. I think that the gene pool needs more bloggers to reproduce.

If you aren’t reading Day by Day, well, you should be.

HERE’S AN ARTICLE ON WAR HUMOR ON THE INTERNET. Blogosphere favorites Day by Day and ScrappleFace are mentioned.

I CONFESS that I haven’t followed the Josh Marshall vs. the Neocon Conspiracy story very closely. But Scott Wrightson has a pretty extensive set of links.

NOAH SHACHTMAN has more on Los Alamos security problems, a story that he’s following closely.

THIS PAST WEEKEND, Jim Bennett asked where all the European Fascists had gone. Apparently, they were standing in line to read this book, which argues that Franco wasn’t such a bad guy after all:

A controversial, revisionist history of the Spanish civil war which claims it was sparked by a leftwing revolution and that Winston Churchill was crueller than General Francisco Franco has proved a surprise publishing success.

The Myths of the Civil War, by the former communist guerrilla turned Franco apologist Pio Moa, has outraged the Spanish left and many mainstream historians with its attacks on the icons of the period.

But it has become the second most popular non-fiction book in Spain as it is snapped up by former Franco supporters and those curious to see a different interpretation of a civil war which most historians agree was started by a rightwing military uprising against a democratic government.

Humph. Wait until you read my soon-to-be-bestseller about how Marxism was actually a plot by British Intelligence to hobble Britain’s adversaries with a self-destructive ideology. Hey, weren’t you always a little suspicious of how a guy like Marx worked so freely in the bowels of the British Empire, with support from a wealthy industrialist?

A PACK, NOT A HERD? Hmm. Xeni Jardin reports in Wired News that people in Hong Kong are using text-messaging to avoid SARS:

Launched by Sunday Communications, the service allows subscribers with SMS-enabled phones to identify the “contaminated” buildings within a kilometer of their calling location. Subscribers can also learn which buildings visited recently by patients suspected of having SARS, or “atypical pneumonia,” as the disease is known throughout much of Asia.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I can see something like this working as a sort of “smart quarantine.” On the other, given that the data it’s based on are incomplete and likely often inaccurate, I wonder if it really does any good at all. Quality of information is the key here, it seems to me. Of course, given that rumors, etc., are already flying around the nets, this may represent at least a small improvement in that department. If you read the whole story, you’ll see that both good and bad information are playing a role here. And there’s an interesting bit of technological influence:

“Because SMS notes are terse anyway, disinformation seems to spread even faster because you don’t get the whole story.”

Yeah, text-messaging isn’t good at nuance.

WEIRDLY, THIS ALMOST MAKES SENSE:

Well, u– um, can we come up and have a look?

What Monty Python Character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hmm. Nice but not too bright, doesn’t like the French. . . .

UPDATE: I’m not surprised to see how Daniel Drezner’s score came out.

THE QUOTE THAT WON’T DIE: Back in August of 2001, Dave Kopel and I wrote
this column about a National Academy of Sciences study panel on guns that seemed rather biased to us. We noted that the study was funded by the anti-gun Joyce Foundation, the anti-gun Packard Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control, noted for anti-gun junk science. We also noted that the panel appeared stacked, with no obvious pro-gun scholars, with anti-gun non-scholar Benjamin Civiletti and others. And we noted that one panel member, Steven Levitt, had been described to us by another scholar as “rabidly anti-gun.”

Levitt emailed me to say that he wasn’t anti-gun, and I posted that here the very same day. Levitt seemed happy with that, and I’ve never heard from him since. A few days later I noted a report by Sam MacDonald of Reason who attended the first meeting of the panel and who thought it seemed reasonably fair.

Over a year later, Brad De Long and Mark Kleiman noted the original piece but didn’t notice that it was a year old. I posted on that here.

Now John Lott’s new book apparently recycles the quote about Steven Levitt without mentioning my followup post. (I haven’t actually read the book, but this has been the subject of considerable discussion on an email list that I belong to.). Lott shouldn’t have done that, since he should have been familiar with the whole Levitt flap (he was reading InstaPundit at the time, I believe, since he emailed me a link to an oped he had on the same subject), and to mention the NRO article, but not Levitt’s response, is rather disingenuous. Perennial Lott critic Tim Lambert has been spamming me trying to get me to say whether or not Lott is the source of the Levitt quote, but of course I can neither confirm nor deny that, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has ever played “Twenty Questions.” Accidentally outing someone who asked for anonymity is, as Henry Copeland notes, a serious breach.

Kopel has already sent NRO — over a week ago — an update to the original piece making clear that he has great admiration for Levitt’s non-gun scholarship, something that repeats an email that he sent Levitt at the time, and responding to the rest. I don’t know why it’s taking so long, but NRO still hasn’t made the update, so I’m going ahead and posting this now.

Personally, I think it’s entirely proper to look into the makeup of important policy panels of this sort, and I still think that — entirely aside from Levitt, who was hardly the subject of the article to begin with — there is reason for concern where this panel is involved. The equivalent would be a panel on, say, purported links between abortion and breast cancer, funded by the Catholic Church, the National Right to Life Committee, and a government agency that had been consistently and openly anti-abortion, with a membership that seemed unbalanced and about which some people were voicing suspicions. Wouldn’t that be relevant? I certainly think so. Kopel talked to the panel head, who admitted that such concerns were reasonable, but promised a fair study. I certainly hope so.

UPDATE: Kopel has more over at The Corner.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dr. Brendan Dooher, a reader and engineer, emails:

I worked with the study director at the National Academy of Sciences (he is actually in the National Academy of Engineering) when I was a Fellow there last year. I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the study is heavily biased. I made myself persona non grata there over my year because of my conservative (but always scientifically based) views. The committee’s first meeting had multiple speakers from Hand Gun [Control] Inc and other anti-gun types giving testimony – but no one to speak of the positives. I asked him if he would have Professor John Lott speak and the reply was a sneer. [Unrelated remark removed later at Dooher’s request.]

Interesting. I don’t know Dooher, but I checked him on Google and found this, which would seem to establish his bona fides.

We shouldn’t let the Levitt side-issue distract us from the real question, which is whether the study is an honest one.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Now Dr. Dooher sends this email:

It has been pointed out, correctly, that an NRA spokesman and Dr. Lott did
indeed speak to the committee. I cannot apologize enough (and am somewhat
embarrassed) for not checking the web site. I am often the first one to
tell my friends to look at snopes.com to make sure that what is being
stated on the web is accurate. I should have done so with my own
memory. My comments to the responsible staff member were upon seeing the
first (and draft) meeting agenda. At the time, there were none from the
NRA. I asked at the time why there were no speakers from the NRA and also
asked why Dr. Lott was not invited (initial meetings at the NAS often set
the tone for the later meetings and the final product). His response was
non-committal. I didn’t follow up on it, as I had my own program on energy
systems to work on. I still believe that the study had a bias at its
creation. I apologize for misleading anyone, and for perhaps placing Dr.
Reynolds in a bad light.

Well, there you have it. Perhaps Dooher’s comments actually changed things, which would suggest a degree of open-mindedness that I, for one, would welcome.

At least blogs make updating this stuff easy, which — with this story in particular — seems to be an especially useful thing.

IN AN EFFORT TO PROMOTE CONFIDENCE, Beijing has a new spokesman for issues relating to SARS.

UPDATE: I think that this is where that image originated.

HERE ARE SOME INTERESTING THOUGHTS on the redistribution of honor in 21st century America.

JEFF JARVIS HAS A LOT MORE INFORMATION about imprisoned Iranian weblogger Sina Motallebi, and the interesting role that weblogs are playing in support of a liberalized Iran.

It’s enough to worry the mullahs, apparently.

A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE UPSET about this quote from Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA):

“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything,” Santorum, R-Pa., said in the interview, published Monday.

Perhaps this is all simply a misunderstanding, and Santorum was just staking out a strongly libertarian position in advance of the Supreme Court’s ruling. . . .

UPDATE: Bill Quick’s views on Santorum’s statement are, um, a bit more pungent.

H.D. MILLER DOES THE MATH, and concludes that the war killed fewer Iraqis in a month than the peace did:

Saddam was killing hundreds of his own people every day. Even Iraqi Body Count, using the most biased methodology possible, can only come up with 2,325 civilian deaths in Iraq over the past month. Compare this astonishingly low number with one supplied by John Burns of The New York Times who estimates that during Saddam’s reign “figures of a million dead Iraqis, in war and through terror, may not be far from the mark.”

Now do the math: One million Iraqis killed over the past 23 years comes out to something around 3600 deaths per month, or 50% more per month than were killed during the most intensive bombing campaign conducted since World War II. And the result is that the Iraqi people are less oppressed, less terrorized than they’ve been in decades.

I’m not so sure about this calculation. I’m pretty sure that the million-deaths number includes Iraqi soldiers killed in various wars. The 2,325 number is “civilian deaths,” though given the source I suspect that it is quite highly inflated. I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone knows, how many Iraqi soldiers were killed, but I suspect that it was more than enough to drive the total number of dead over 3,600.

It wouldn’t surprise me, though, to find out that (using non-Heroldized numbers) fewer Iraqi civilians died in the past month than died in a typical month under Saddam. And, of course, the war is pretty much over, while Saddam’s terror was an ongoing phenomenon.

A CONSPIRACY SO VAST: This neoconservative cabal behind the liberation of Iraq looks to be huge — according to this report, it even includes Bill Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

No wonder the anti-war movement couldn’t get any traction. Does Josh Marshall know about this?

BLOGCRITICS has a new design. It’s a little bit like the new design for The Command Post.

FRENCH WISHFUL THINKING: This is hilarious. Soon to be a collector’s item.

PIZZA HUT AND BURGER KING ARE OPERATING IN BASRA, which is sure to upset, well, the people you’d expect.

Prediction: Soon the complaints will shift from “Iraqis are starving because of American actions,” to “Iraqis are getting fat because of American actions.” There will be no intermediate, “just right” phase, either.

Yeah, I know — this is just on bases now. But for how long?

BRUTAL KNUCKLEHEADS: H.D. Miller writes on Saddam’s thugs, who combined ineptitude with savagery.

MORE NEWS FROM ZIMBABWE:

A member of Zimbabwe’s opposition has died as a result of police torture, according to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Tonderai Machiridza, 32, died after six days in police custody, according to the MDC, which issued photographs of the unconscious Machiridza being carried to hospital.

Armed police took him from his home in Chitungwiza, on April 13.

But Mugabe’s pals with Jacques Chirac:

22 February 2003 Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, and his wife, Grace, left their five-star Paris hotel last night at the end of the France-Africa summit, praising French hospitality and President Jacques Chirac’s role in “uniting the world.

“We’ve had tremendous hospitality, we felt at home,” said Mr Mugabe, who woke up yesterday, his 79th birthday, in the palatial Plaza Athénée hotel. “We leave with very good impressions about France.”

Mr Mugabe spoke of himself in the third person to Radio France Internationale: “Chirac was insistent that we attend because some members of the European Union did not want Mugabe to attend.”

Sheesh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Then there’s this.