DANG, AND I MISSED IT: Neal Boortz walked off Phil Donahue’s show last night. Of course, since it was Donahue’s show, I imagine a lot of people missed it. . . .

SOME PRETTY STRONG EVIDENCE has emerged vindicating John Lott: Someone who was interviewed for his 1997 survey. Julian Sanchez has more.

I should say, by the way, that I’ve seen the email Sanchez excerpts, and other discussion about it, on an email list to which I subscribe. I don’t blog directly from that list, because of list etiquette, but I can vouch for Sanchez’s post.

UPDATE: Steve Verdon has some further comments on a Lott-related issue. And I should note that Lott has shared his income tax forms for 1997 (which show money paid for research) and the data from his forthcoming study replicating the 1997 study (which produces a result consistent with his claims for the earlier study) with other scholars, including Jim Lindgren.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more from Clayton Cramer, Megan McArdle, and Tim Lambert.

FURTHER PROOF THAT WE WON THE COLD WAR:

Drag racers make tracks around Kremlin

I love it.

THE RULE OF LAW: Some reporting from Bjorn Staerk. And scroll down for a link to his weekly Internet radio show.

I PUT RALPH WIGGUM ON THE PHONE for this interview. Next time, my cat.

IS ALEX BEAM working for Ha’aretz now? I guess I missed the memo. . . .

ARMS FOUND IN MOSQUE TERROR RAID: And, surprise, a lot of Algerians are involved:

One of the three was said to be a “hugely significant figure” in the ricin poison plot uncovered two weeks ago. His arrest is said to be one of the most important made since police began tracking down members of the ricin network.

Police also removed computer equipment. M15 is reported to have asked the GCHQ listening station at Cheltenham to intercept thousands of coded e-mails sent and received by the mosque.

The raid, codenamed Operation Mermant, was mounted after police analysed material seized during a series of arrests following the discovery of the makeshift laboratory in North London. Senior officers now suspect that they have uncovered a major supply base for Islamic terrorists.

The mosque has been a focal point for Islamic fundamentalism for more than six years under the influence of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the one-armed, one-eyed Egyptian-born cleric.

A lot of people have wondered why the Brits haven’t shut Hamza down. I suspect it’s because they wanted to see who he was associating with.

UPDATE: Charles Murtaugh emails that this headline is misleading, since the arms found were pretty puny (by American standards, anyway), and the big find was lots of forged documents, etc. He’s right — but that’s the Times’ headline, not mine. Guess I should have used my own, which would have been “Another Algerian Connection,” or some such.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Miller has more on the subject.

I’M NOT SURE THAT THIS NEWS lowers my confidence in Scott Ritter any more, but, well, it does make me wonder about some things.

PENISES have enormously high bandwidth. Well, yeah.

ON THE ROAD: A new vlog by Justin Katz.

LAW PROFESSOR ERIC MULLER has been assimilated into the blogosphere. Buwahahaha!

WELL HERE’S SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T READ INSTAPUNDIT MUCH or he’d realize how dumb this “challenge” is:

But as I condemn ANSWER will you of the Right condemn people like Falwell and others of his religious extremist ilk who say that the United States’ immorality made us deserve 9/11?

Especially I challenge Tacitus and Instapundit to do this. Will you condemn them as loudly as I do those in ANSWER? Will you do what ever you can to minimize their power in your political party, as I try to minimize those from ANSWER in my own?

If you do not, and if you don’t do it as loudly as I do, you are no better than those from ANSWER and the Radical Religious Right.

Heh. It’s already answered in his comments, but I should note that the original post of mine leading to the term idiotarian specifically mentioned Falwell and Robertson.

Next time, read the blog first. Or at least use Google. Jeez.

Coming soon: “Professor Reynolds, I challenge you to abandon your teetotaling and drink a nice glass of Chilean Merlot!”

I think I’ll go ahead and accept that challenge right now, just to be safe.

UPDATE: Here’s a reverse-Falwell point though. Or something like that.

BEN FISCHER reports that the number of North Korean refugees appears to be climbing dramatically.

If true, that’s probably a sign that the regime is near collapse.

“GLENN YOU *SS,” Andrea See emailed. Apparently, the traffic from my last link killed her site. She’s now moved to a new, and presumably more robust, hosting setup. The old address will work once the DNS change kicks in but for the moment she’s here.

And despite the frustration, she hasn’t started smoking again. Bravo.

DECLAN MCCULLAGH has posted a photo gallery from Saturday’s march and emails:

There were certainly tens of thousands of people there and just as certainly not hundreds of thousands. I cover marches in DC pretty frequently, and I’d say Saturday’s march was perhaps 50,000 to 70,000 people. That is, it was a little larger — though not that much larger — than the October 2002 protests in DC.

That seems about right.

TRENT TELENKO says the trap is sprung.

KEN SMITH sent a long report from the Portland protest. I’ve posted it over at InstaPundit EXTRA! because of the length, but don’t let that stop you from reading it. It’s only a mouse-click away!

CROWD SIZES: Several people have sent emails like this one:

I’m always bothered how we don’t know how many people really go to these

protests. What about satellite photos?

Those would be interesting. In fact, I contacted someone I know at SpaceImaging to see if they’d done that. Mostly they only take pictures in response to orders from cash customers (it’s cheaper than it used to be, but still expensive) but they sometimes shoot stuff like that and make it available on their site. Not this time, alas.

Even then, it’s hard. You either have to count a few samples and extrapolate (which is iffy, since crowds aren’t uniformly dense, though that’s addressable to some degree) or count everyone, which requires, well, counting everyone.

Heck, even counting website traffic gives people fits.

I WAS JUST ON LOCAL TV in response to this piece of mine criticizing the media for not reporting the background of A.N.S.W.E.R. It wasn’t bad, though I stressed that my beef was with A.N.S.W.E.R., not with people protesting and that only sort of came through in the coverage — the sound bite they chose might have given the impression that I thought the local protesters supported Saddam and Kim Jong Il, when I was really talking about A.N.S.W.E.R. Oh, well. I think the TV folks tried not to muddy my message, but it’s hard in a three minute piece. That’s the trouble with talking to the media. They didn’t use my best soundbite, which really sums up my take on the issue: “You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”

One interesting thing is that they ran video supplied by the local protesters, who took a camera with them. This whole guerrilla media thing is really taking off.

EUGENE VOLOKH writes on Martin Luther King’s birthday:

The message of July 4 is “What a great country!” The message of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday is at least in large part “What great crimes our country has committed, but what a great thing it is that we have largely overcome them.”

I think that it’s not bad for the nation to have at least few holidays that are occasion for self-criticism or even self-doubt, mixed with confidence in a better future. Self-congratulations are important, too, but they should be mixed with some official and repeated acknowledgements of past wrongs. But it’s important to recognize that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday is a different sort of holiday, which is supposed to create a different mood and contribute something different to the national psyche than other holidays do.

True enough. Both messages are important ones.

IT’S A BLOGOSPHERE PILE-ON! Even Eric Alterman is denouncing A.N.S.W.E.R. and the protests:

But radical rhetoric denouncing America and everything it stands for — which is what I heard from the A.N.S.W.E.R.-chosen speakers in D.C. over the weekend — does more harm than good. They harden the other side’s resolve and turn away “normal” non-political people from a cause they might otherwise support. . . .

In other words, by allowing A.N.S.W.E.R. to take over the peace movement, protesters are focusing America on their worst features, and almost daring them to side with Bush and company. It’s a tough quandary because the left needs bodies and these Stalinist types are the best demonstration organizers — just as they were in the sixties. And the Left has never solved it.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. And I think that when you’re getting slagged by Alterman and me, you’re not launching a viable mass movement.

UPDATE: Michelle Dulak has this comment on Megan McArdle’s post:

I think the most pathetic aspect of this is that the supposedly vast grassroots anti-war movement hadn’t the means even to organize its own protest. How hard would it have been for a large, legitimate left-of-center organization to put something of its own together? That reasonable opponents of war consented to sign on with the ANSWER lot because they they were such good organizers is shameful. (Slightly stronger statement deleted as I thought I’d better not pollute this blog.)

I think there hasn’t been enough attention given to how the notice of the protest spread from ANSWER to the non-Stalinist groups who must presumably have done most of the serious work of getting the word out and persuading ordinary citizens to show up. ANSWER must have sent press releases to other antiwar groups, leftist organizations, leftist media, &c. I don’t think an ordinary citizen who has never heard of ANSWER is at fault for attending an ANSWER-sponsored rally, but the more mainstream organizations that must have first gotten the word out to their members damn well had a duty to know who ANSWER is (or, if they didn’t, to find out, which would take about a minute online) and I think they bear a good deal of the responsibility here.

I’m guessing that Karl Rove is ordering up footage for the ’04 Presidential race.

UPDATE: Alterman emails to clarify that he was referring to the speakers at the protests: “Speakers, please, not protests. We don’t know what the protesters thought and it’s my belief/hope that the speakers did not represent them.” Fair enough.

DAVID HOGBERG points out that A.N.S.W.E.R. is now claiming a half million protesters in Washington yesterday. A German reader emails that the German media are uncritically repeating this claim.

Do these photos show a protest with a half-million people?

The photo on A.N.S.W.E.R.’s website is suspiciously tight in its framing. (In fact, all their crowd shots are). Note the absence of a panoramic view, and note that reports from the scene yesterday noted that a block from the mall you couldn’t tell anything was going on. Of course, they’re not exaggerating their crowd size any more than they’ll exaggerate Iraqi civilian casualties in the event of war. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: More on crowd sizes: maybe bigger in San Francisco than the official estimates, but nothing like a half million in DC. Some interesting photographs of other marches are included.

JONATHAN ADLER has an interesting report of a San Francisco anti-Chavez demonstration.

JAMES LILEKS writes that things are looking up:

One of the few virtues of growing up in the 70s is the constant realization that everything is better. I mean, everything. Food. Architecture. Shampoo. Politics. Coffee. Music. Magazines. Television. Cars. Industrial design. Consumer electronics. Video games. (When I was a kid our version of a deathmatch was Pong; tonight I hooked up the Xbox to the large TV and played Jedi Knight in widescreen mode.) Beer is better.

Beer is better. I started to make a classic, self-deprecating American-beer joke in an email to a Canadian friend and then stopped: it’s not true anymore that all American beer tastes like water. And he’s enough younger that he might not even remember a time when it was true. Who would have predicted that, twenty years ago?

A BAY AREA READER who for professional reasons wishes to remain anonymous says that the pictures that I show below aren’t fully representative of the San Francisco protests, and sends the following links to IndyMedia photos (though to me they don’t seem to make the protests look better, as he seems to think they do):

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Also, in response to a photo posted below, he sends this cautionary observation:

A little comment on the “U.S. out of Middle East and San Francisco” photo you posted: it’s more representative than you might think. There’s a definite feeling of alienation in the S.F. Bay Area. The folks on the right like to attack the region’s patriotism, intelligence, morals, politics and anything else that comes up. “Californian” is an epithet in the rest of the country, or so we’re led to believe by Conservatives. (It’s true in my experience.) In the meantime we know (it’s a legal fact) that the energy crunch was a conspiracy of the Veep’s buddies and the Whitehouse refused to help. It will be common sense that the Dept of the Interior is turning off the water on L.A. for political reasons (when it goes into effect). We know we aren’t part of the “Red Country” that won the last election and we believe we’re being victimized because we voted Blue.

Let’s see: 1/8th to 1/6th of the country lives in a geographically contigious territory. The population feels alientated and hated by the rest of the country (and gets slandered daily). Said region is one of the largest economies in the world (between 5th and 8th) and has numerous secessionist movements within it (e.g. in LA and Jefferson). And you’re encouraging a psychological divide. That’s just fucking great. Consider whether national unity should really be assumed. Then don’t try so hard to divide the house against itself. k?

Now, there’s something to be said for this point — though I can’t help but note that I was issuing similar warnings about much larger parts of the United States during the Clinton years, when things like gun control were inspiring similar alienation there, without it having much resonance. And trust me — the secession thing has been tried. It’s a bad idea.

But it’s easy to overdo regional bashing. Southerners know this, of course, because we’ve been on the receiving end for a long time, but that doesn’t make it right.

Then again, perhaps the folks in California should take this opportunity to examine how their arrogance may have engendered resentments elsewhere, and to ask themselves “why do they hate us?” Or at least make fun.

UPDATE: Reader David Nishimura responds:

It is absolutely true to form that those in the SF Bay Area who feel alienated from the rest of the country should blame the rest of the country and not themselves. I grew up in the Bay Area, and I can think of no other part of this country where outsiders were regarded with such open scorn. Anyone living more than an hour or two from the Pacific was considered a redneck; Southerners were considered racist trash by definition, and even the most PC were happy to mock a Deep South accent.

When I moved to New York City for graduate school, I was repeatedly asked, by everyone from my college friends to the telephone company clerk, “Why are you leaving?” It was simply unfathomable to a broad cross-section of Californians that anyone would actually choose to live somewhere else for any reason. Interestingly enough, when driving cross-country then, and again a few years later, I talked to people wherever I stopped who would ask where I was from. When I responded “New York” or “Manhattan”, the non-Californians were uniformly polite and understanding, even if they had no desire to live anywhere else themselves. Typical was a roadside rock-shop employee in New Mexico, who explained he could never give up the wide open spaces, but that he’d like to visit New York, since there was so much there to see.

Your Bay Area correspondent also suffers from another characteristic regional myopia, in being unable to see that his California is not monolithically left-liberal. And I really shouldn’t even bothert rying to address his paranoid rants about water policy in the Southland and energy policy statewide (though I’ll note that environmentalists have been calling for a stricter water policy for

decades, and that while Enron & friends did take advantage of California’s energy problems, it was only possible thanks to the state’s own fundamentally flawed skin-of-the-teeth energy policy).

Reader Scott Breffle has a similar response:

I’ve lived in San Francisco for 5 years, but grew up in Southern California (Orange County), and have spent several years living on the East Coast. My point is basically that the Bay Area lives in a political and cultural bubble, and it is on strong need of some fresh air. Your reader proves the point himself when he translates the “alienation” of the Bay Area into the whole state. Has this reader been to Orange Country or San Diego recently?

Or how about the burgeoning Central Valley? Even parts of LA?! There are great swaths of California that are decidedly more conservative that the Bay Area. As someone who travels south often, I don’t sense this great “alienation”, except for here in San Francisco. I’m all for thinking outside the box, but the Bay Area’s supposedly progressive bent, by not incorporating anything that changed in the world since perhaps 1978, seems increasingly stale and unreflective.

I received quite a lot of email along these lines, interestingly all from Californians.