NOT A HATCHET JOB: Today’s Chicago Tribune has an InstaPundit profile. Here’s the key passage, though:

This is a point that Reynolds makes repeatedly: “I get more attention than I deserve. Some bloggers deserve more than they get. I’m happy to have it. Nobody becomes a law professor without a big ego. But, I encourage you to scroll down on my Web site and look at some of the other Weblogs.”

In addition, says Reynolds, the huge amount of e-mail he gets “tells you how many smart people there are out there and how many of them are in jobs that are not traditionally thought of as `intellectual’ jobs where smart people go. Truck drivers and insurance salesmen and mechanics. You know. People! They’re smart as hell.”

They are. And while I’m happy for the attention, there are a lot of interesting profiles of other bloggers waiting to be written. If you’re a journalist, and you want to write on blogs, check out the links. Or email me and I’ll give you some suggestions.

ASSIMILATED TO THE BLOGOSPHERE: Cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson has a blog.

(Via Electrolite — who, I’m happy to say, is blogging more these days.)

GYM BLOGGING: I’m off to a late start today because I’ve tried to return to my habit — which InstaPundit has interfered with — of going straight to the gym after dropping my daughter off at school.

That got me thinking about the dieting debate involving Megan McArdle and Jim Henley — as well as about John Ellis’s diet-blogging. Here are a few personal observations, which may or may not be worth anything.

First, the Body Mass Index seems worthless to me. Case in point: me. I’m 6′ 3″ tall. When I first started working out again over ten years ago, I weighed 194, which, according to the Body Mass Index calculator gave me a BMI of 24.2, which is healthy. Now, after many years of aerobic exercise and weight training, I weigh 210. That gives me an unhealthy BMI of 26.2 today. But when I started working out, my bodyfat was, if I recall correctly, 23.7%. Now it’s between 15 & 16%. My resting heart rate, always low, is lower than it was. My cholesterol is 150. I look better. And despite being at the computer a lot, I have fewer aches and pains than I had then. So am I really less healthy as the result of adding a good deal of muscle and losing a good deal of fat? I don’t think so.

Second, weight training is really important. Diet is important — you really can’t get in shape without paying attention to what you eat. But for me there’s nothing like muscle-building exercise to bring down body fat. Old-fashioned free squats are the single best thing: if I do them regularly, I get in better shape overall, and in particular the computer-related low-back pain disappears. If I stop for a while I can really tell the difference, in bodyfat and in how I feel. I don’t use a lot of weight — never more than bodyweight, and usually a good deal less. They even seem to help my knees feel better (as long as I’m careful to observe strict form). Other big compound exercises (curls, clean-and-press, etc.) have similar effects — old-fashioned, but effective. Aerobic/cardio work is important too (if I slack on that, I can see my cholesterol go up, and in particular my “good” HDL go down), but people seem naturally to pay more attention to aerobic exercise for some reason. Don’t neglect the weight training, too. This goes double for women, who need the bone strength it builds, and some of whom seem to worry about building too much muscle. Don’t worry — you won’t. And muscles on women are sexy, anyway.

I’ve long been an Atkins skeptic, and I’ve never done the Atkins diet. I do notice, though, that the more carbs I eat the hungrier I get. Protein and fat seem to satisfy me on fewer calories. Fortunately, I’d rather eat them anyway, and I’d rather have a small serving of protein than a big one of carbs. (My wife, like most women, feels differently.)

Anyway, for me it all goes back to a series of Bloom County cartoons in which Opus kept looking for gimmicks, oblivious to Milo’s advice of “eat less and exercise more.” “That can’t be it!” exclaimed Opus. It can, and it is. At least in my experience.

PRANK CALLS TO DICTATORS, via Henry Hanks. Back in my law school days, we drunkenly placed a collect call to the Kremlin from “Raoul Wallenberg.” They didn’t accept the charges.

This is much better.

BLOGGING THE POLITICAL CONVENTIONS: Ken Layne did it in 2000! I guess that’s why we worship him. Well, that and the spiffily-groomed beard.

HERE’S A LIST OF CONTACT INFORMATION FOR D.C. MEDIA FOLKS, courtesy of a lefty outfit called “take back the media.” I haven’t checked it, but I assume it’s accurate. I’d save the page, or print it out, not just bookmark it, just in case the folks at the Washington Black Book raise a fuss. . . .

FOXHOLE CONVERSION IN THE DRUG WAR: Reason interviews three drug warriors who now think the war on drugs is a mistake. Vietnam comparisons are made — and rightly so. Excerpt:

Reason: From the perspective of the working police officer, how has the War on Drugs changed over the years?

McNamara: It has become the priority of police agencies. It’s bizarre. We make 700,000 arrests for marijuana a year. The public is not terrified of marijuana. People are terrified of molesters, school shootings, and people stalking women and children. The police are not putting the resources into those crimes where they could be effective if they gave them top priority.

You don’t get to seize and forfeit a Ferrari when you bust someone who rapes little old ladies. Read the whole thing.

(Via TalkLeft).

HMM. THIS IS INTERESTING. Someone from the New York Times is looking for people to say bad things about me. I guess I’ve been picking on Howell Raines too much!

But there are no secrets in the blogosphere. Heh.

UPDATE: Reader Tom Larsen writes: “How’s this sound?: ‘Critics say that Mr. Reynolds has been …'”

We’ll see.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Just got off the phone with the reporter. I’ve agreed not to blog about the story for now, but he’s promised that it’s not a hatchet job. I think I trust him, and the last New York Times guy to promise that was a man of his word.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Yes, I know, it’s not as good a picture as the one of Lil Kim below. I wasn’t hired for my looks, which shouldn’t come as any surprise.

THE LAST UPDATE TO THIS POST: But I can’t resist linking to this parody by Ken Layne. What’s great is that — as the comments indicate — it was realistic enough to fool people!

VLOGGING TAKES ANOTHER STEP: This one can only be called Vlog Noir. Frightening, and all too true.

It’s by Don McArthur.

INSTAPUNDIT’S PARIS CORRESPONDENT NELSON ASCHER HAS SOME INTERESTING BOYCOTT-RELATED NEWS:

I was driving home at close to 6 PM from the Rue Des Ecoles to the Island of St Louis, when I was caught in a traffic jam due basically to police cars and vans and lots of policemen running around in riot gear. There had just been a protest in front of the nearby campus of Sorbonne 6, where immediately before Christmas, with half of its 60 or so counsellors absent, a resolution was voted that, in short, called for the EU to boycott Israeli academic institutions.It seems that though this protest wasn’t violent (I couldn’t reach it) there was another, somewhat angrier, taking place near it, organized by the Palestinians and their friends. All I know, is that half an hour later I went to the neighbourhood’s pharmacy and there I found two young Arabs, a short one and a tall one, the second with a bleeding brow being taken care of by the pharmacist: if I understood him correctly, he was obviously “just passing by”, though when he said this the pharmacist seemed to be kind of smiling…

It is important to note the conditions in which that Sorbonne resolution was voted, once it was the kind of administrative coup that people unsure of their backing use to perpetrate. A small but growing group of intellectuals, not all of them Jewish, began, as soon as they found it out, to articulate a reaction, and one of the first public results has been precisely today’s protest. What’s interesting however is that they (those against the boycott) managed to reach high ranking people in the government and their position was quickly endorsed by them. It seems those in the government were privately furious at what the guys in the Sorbonne had done, considering it moronic (une connerie). Their indignation is easy to understand: France wants to play a major role in world politics and, for the time being, its main arm is its diplomacy. In order to have any influence in the Middle East it has to prove it is an honest broker, a friend that understands both sides, have open channels with them and so on. If they accuse the US of not being sufficiently balanced, of taking sides, and then their universities (which, unlike the American ones, are under control of their strongly centralized government) begin boycotting Israel, then all pretense at neutrality vanishes, and instead of being a judge, France becomes a party to the conflict and, actually, the Arabs’ hostage. It is no surprise, thus, that exactly today Le Monde published an editorial against the boycott. After seeing what Israel has just done to Tony Blair, they know they’re not dealing with amateurs.

What did Sharon do to Blair? Well, he wouldn’t receive Netanyahu, because he’s just a Foreign Minister, but would be receiving Avraham Mitzna, the Labour candidate? Isn’t he witholding spare parts for the Israeli airplanes? Well, then Blair can bid the conference he was preparing about the Middle East goodbye, because unfortunately the Palestinian participants won’t be able to attend.

Blackmail can be a two-way street, right? What’s really interesting, however, is that both in the US and in Europe the big story is not that there have been people trying to boycott Israel, but how this is simply not working and how strong, immediate and principled have usually been the reactions to it. As far as I can tell, everywhere, even in the UK, for every person who’s backing the boycott there’s a silent majority ten times larger that’s against it. Now, that’s amazing and should be front page news.

Best

Nelson Ascher

Paris

Yes, it should be. And it is, here at InstaPundit! Oh, and “Paris Correspondent?” Well, he’s in Paris, and he corresponds. . . .

UPDATE: Claire Berlinski emails, “I thought I was your Paris correspondent, Glenn!”

It’s a big bureau over there.

JEEZ, MAYBE WE SHOULD JUST SKIP THE 2004 ELECTION. That’s positively the most frightening, and likely to be accurate, prediction I’ve seen yet.

ALL I CAN SAY IS Buwahahahaha!

GOOD GRIEF: People seem to be paying more attention to my traffic than I am. I guess I should follow it more closely since each hit brings me big bucks.

What? Oh, never mind then.

PATRICK RUFFINI wants bloggers to cover the 2004 G.O.P. convention. I’m all for it.

THERE’S LOTS OF GOOD STUFF over at The Volokh Conspiracy today. But you knew that. . . .

DEFENSETECH is a new blog by Wired News reporter Noah Shachtman, focusing on — you guessed it — defense and technology. Check it out.

PBS’S MEDIA MATTERS has a video clip of their “Trip to the Blogosphere” program online. Check it out.

UPDATE: Reaction so far: (1) Megan McArdle is, indeed, a “babe” and they should have shown more of her (sorry — guess you’ll just have to watch the show); and (2) I look a bit like Max Headroom. T-t-t-thanks! I think.

EURO-ISLAMOTERRORISM UPDATE:

PARIS – Vandals set fire Monday to the car of a Paris rabbi who was stabbed outside his synagogue over the weekend, news reports said, partially destroying the vehicle.

A neighbor alerted authorities after walking by the parking lot of Rabbi Gabriel Farhi’s home and seeing his car set ablaze. . . .

Anti-Jewish violence increased in France after Israeli-Palestinian fighting broke out in September 2000 and has continued to mount since the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States.

France has both large Jewish and Muslim communities.

Yes, but the Jewish community has been largely peaceful. To his credit, Chirac has condemned the attacks. I hope his response will go beyond condemnation.

UPDATE: Maybe he should look into where the money from sales of “Mecca Cola” is going.

NEWMAN WAS RIGHT: THE MAIL NEVER STOPS. Returning to my office, the mailbox was full past bursting (er, well, to overflow, anyway). Various promotional materials for conferences I would never attend, which are happening next week — mailed, presumably, just so I’ll know that they happened. A bar-examiner request for a recommendation on a student. A bunch of books: Arianna Huffington’s Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America (autographed!), Walter Olson’s The Rule of Lawyers: How the New Litigation Elite Threatens America’s Rule of Law (autographed, too!) (I wonder how the “litigation elite” and the forces of “corporate greed and political corruption” decide which parts of America each will ruin — oh, wait, that’s called the “two party system,” isn’t it?); Tom Donelson’s Economics 101 and a report from the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights on how civil liberties have ceased to exist since September 11. Oh, and the latest edition of “Constitutional Law in a Nutshell” from West — a student study aid, but they send them to professors for some reason. Also two checks from appreciative Insta-readers who wanted to donate but who eschew PayPal and Amazon — hey, thanks! And several memoranda from the law school administration. . . uh, thanks for those, too. . . . And a Christmas card from a former student who is now a partner at Coudert Brothers, a big international law firm.

The semester’s just starting, and my desk is already getting cluttered. Oh, wait — that’s a good thing!

GEITNER SIMMONS OBSERVES that “We’re merely living in a lull between the future terrorist earthquakes.” This is probably right. He goes on to analyze Angelo Codevilla’s “we’re not doing enough” critique of the Bush Administration.

And scroll down for Geitner’s take on a bizarre outbreak of neo-confederatism.

I don’t get this. Oh, anyone who reads Confederates in the Attic (and everyone should) can grasp the way in which the Civil War can capture people’s imagination. But wishing the South had won? Ridiculous. Anyone who wishes that should read Harry Turtledove’s all-too-plausible alternate history novels (here’s the first in the series) in which the South did win the Civil War, leaving the United States looking, well, like Europe. Ugh.

IAIN MURRAY WRITES THAT THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT IS BACK. I think he’s right.

What convinced me was a really stupid commercial from MADD last year about alcohol and date rape. “Excuse me?” I thought. “What does date rape have to do with drunk driving?”

The answer is nothing — but it’s ironclad proof, if any is needed, that MADD has morphed from an anti-drunk-driving organization to an anti-alcohol organization. The pitch has gradually shifted from “don’t drive drunk,” (utterly correct and reasonable), to “don’t drink and drive” (not really the same as “don’t drive drunk,” but perhaps within the zone of reason) to, essentially, “don’t drink” — which is fluorescent idiocy. I hope that more people will start pointing this out, particularly as the evidence — long suppressed — of the health benefits provided by alcohol gets more attention.

What’s more, as Murray points out, most of the anti-alcohol claims being peddled in the media are, to put it bluntly, lies. Journalists need to start checking these claims, rather than mindlessly repeating them. The fact that claims come from a group that styles itself “non profit” doesn’t make them trustworthy.

“WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION” was voted word of the year (word? isn’t that a phrase?)

But “Blog” was voted “most likely to succeed.”

Ya sure, ya betcha.

AIMEE DEEP, now out from under the injunction, is back to blogging!

MUSLIM SPOKESGROUPS ARE DEEPLY OFFENDED by this photo of Lil Kim. Boo hoo.

UPDATE: Aziz Poonawalla emails: “the link you mentioned is from a pretty small organization. Most of those I’ve talked to think that the lil Kim photo is simply awesome.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a link to the full-length version of the photo — even more awesome!

Meanwhile, reader Daniel Kotler writes:

I love the Lil Kim cover of Oneworld that you posted. Far from mocking Muslim women, the cover reminds me of the non-Jewish Danish King putting on the yellow star under Nazi occupation. The King wasn’t mocking the Jews but expressing his solidarity with their plight. Likewise, this Lil Kim cover seems not so much a mockery of Muslim culture as an expression of solidarity with the women who are repressed in large parts of the Muslim world.

Yes, I’m sure that’s what Aziz meant by “awesome.”

EXPLOITING THE PALESTINIANS: Max Boot writes that everybody’s doing it.

But the Palestinians keep falling for it.