THE BELMONT CLUB has tough questions for the Associated Press.

KOFI, GENOCIDE AND INCOMPETENCE: Discussed over at GlennReynolds.com.

TIM BLAIR NOTES REVISIONIST HISTORY from Michael Moore. If you can imagine such a thing.

UPDATE: And, shockingly, Tom Maguire finds that Maureen Dowd is doing something similar.

THE NATIONAL NANOTECHNOLOGY INITIATIVE has released its strategic plan. Howard Lovy has more.

I STILL HAVE ALL OF LIVE AID ON VIDEOTAPE, and the tapes still worked fine the last time I played one, a few years ago. There’s now a Live Aid DVD out, too, and I imagine it’s pretty good since it’s the same stuff.

But Ed Driscoll notes that while the concerts were good, where the money went was another question, with a less satisfactory answer. (Via Lance Frizzell).

JEFF FOUST looks at the year in space and asks, “Is 2004 the breakout year for space entrepreneurship?”

SO, I ORDERED THIS IPOD because it would get here before January. And I guess it will, but it was supposed to come Friday. The package-tracking indicates, though, that it’s had something of a journey. Click “read more” to see it. Why it took the side trip to Doraville, Georgia is a mystery to me.

UPDATE: It’s here, and charging, now. So is the Laura Ashley dollhouse that inspired last week’s TCS column. Unfortunately, Roger Simon informs me that I am now crosswise with the Pope. Hey, at least I didn’t order the iBod!

(more…)

THIS KINDA MAKES ME FEEL SORRY for John Ashcroft:

When Attorney General John Ashcroft was lampooned for shrouding the bare-breasted statue at the Department of Justice, many expected he would reverse the eight-year decline in obscenity prosecutions under former President Bill Clinton.

But today, as Mr. Ashcroft prepares to vacate the highest law enforcement office in the land, anti-porn advocates are deeply disappointed with the Bush administration’s record — under Mr. Ashcroft’s guidance — for pursuing peddlers of smut.

That suggests to me that, in a time of war, he’s got his priorities straight. But boy, you just can’t please everyone, can you?

RED ENSIGN has posted another roundup of Canadian bloggers.

WELL PUT:

The United Nations is the pre-eminent trade association for people involved in the business of government power. Actually, it is more focused than that. The United Nations is the trade association for the world’s executive branches — the place where executive branches come together to promote their individual interests to one another, and to promote the expansion of executive authority in general. This point is often missed by UN critics who dismiss the organization as nothing more than the world’s greatest debating society. These critics confuse being voluntary with being powerless. Organizations like The American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, the International Tobacco Growers’ Association are all voluntary — but certainly not powerless.

Once it is understood that the United Nations is a trade association for the promotion of executive authority, its behavior becomes almost rational. The trade association extends professional courtesy to its members — its cardinal rule is not to step on the toes of another executive.

Indeed.

DARFUR UPDATE: “Sudan has said it is unconditionally suspending military operations in its Darfur region with immediate effect.” Fighting does not, however, appear to have actually stopped.

JEFF JARVIS AND HUGH HEWITT are debating religion in society.

HOWARD KURTZ INTERVIEWS Iraqi bloggers Omar and Mohammed.

LA SHAWN BARBER has an article in National Review Online noting a lot of unsung contributors to the blogosphere. She’s right.

ECONOBLOGARAMA: This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up.

DAVID HACKETT FISCHER UPDATE: Here’s Virginia Postrel’s review of the latest David Hackett Fischer book. And scroll down, or click here, for a lot of book recommendations.

MICKEY KAUS:

Michael Kinsley’s piece–on the speed with which he got useful reponses to his Social Security argument from the blogosphere–skirts an obvious point. It’s not just that Kinsley got more helpful criticism from the blogosphere (when Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall posted it on their sites) than he got from the bigshot economists he sent it to. Kinsley got more overall attention for his argument by making it in the blogosphere than it would have gotten if he’d printed it in the rather large conventional paper whose opinion pages he runs. And I’m not just talking “more attention” in the sense that the blogosphere is big–bigger than the conventional print-centric media elite. Kinsley’s thesis got more attention not just in the blogosphere but within the conventional print-centric media elite, even from those who pay little attention to blogs, because he got it posted on some blogs. … Crudely put, Tim Russert and Al Hunt and William Safire and Bob Shrum and Sen. Harry Reid are more likely to know about Kinsley’s idea because Kinsley bypassed his own LAT op-ed page.

Excellent point — and with implications that some people should find deeply worrisome.

MERLE HAGGARD: Poet Laureate? You can do worse. And we usually do.

SOME THOUGHTS ON CONGOLESE PROBLEMS, and U.N. peacekeeping in general, over at GlennReynolds.com.

A NICE BIT OF HISTORY.

LAW SCHOOL MEETS REAL LIFE, with a fact situation tailor-made for a Torts exam.

THE SPACE ELEVATOR WEBLOG has lots of cool stuff about space elevators.

And here’s an interesting article on space tourism from The Economist, though Rand Simberg notes an error or two.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF THE BLOGOSPHERE, from Joe Gandelman posting at Dean’s World. He’s right to stress the self-renewing nature of the blogosphere, and the way in which the blogosphere is much more important than any individual blog.

MORE ON THE IVORY COAST: But it’s nothing very pretty.

LARRY KUDLOW: “Bush has never before commented on Fed policy. Linking the Fed’s recent restraining move – which hopefully drains excess dollars as well as raising the target business rate – is therefore a significant Presidential statement. It hints that the period of floating exchange rate benign neglect is coming to an end.”