THOSE MARYLAND FIRES MENTIONED EARLIER were apparently not ecoterrorism after all.

TVNEWSER REPORTS ON A Tucker Carlson move to MSNBC — which I think would be a good thing for MSNBC, and another sign of how CNN’s Crossfire has slipped.

THE IRAQ ELECTIONS BLOG is all about — you guessed it — the Iraq elections. (Via Charles Paul Freund — who also notes a child sex abuse scandal in Pakistani madrassas).

WAS THE ARMORED-HUMVEE STORY A HOAX? Power Line is calling it one, and has this: “At the time the question was asked, the planted question, the unit had 784 of its 804 vehicles armored.” Reading the followup, I think the number was more like 810 out of 830, but the ratio is still colossal, and it’s rather shocking that we’re just now hearing this.

UPDATE: Meanwhile Jason van Steenwyk is busting Dick Durbin for phony numbers. (“What’s the deal with the idiots on the pentagon beat? Why are they just taking the claim at face value?Why does it fall to me to dig this obvious crap out?”)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Donald Sensing has more, and observes:

My long-term readers may recall that I am no member of the Donald Rumsfeld fan club myself, but the calls for his head from US Senators over the phony armor shortage is absurd – especially from Republican Sen. John McCain; I increasingly wonder whether he knows he often seems to disconnect brain from tongue when making the talk shows. McCain’s Senate duties have included direct oversight of DOD expenditures since the years of the Clinton administration.

Yet the Tennessean reported,

The Pentagon is spending $4.1 billion over the next year to add armor to vehicles in Iraq. [Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey] Sorenson said 35,000 of them need armored protection, of which 29,000 have been funded by Congress.

Got that? The Army’s funding for armor is 6,000 vehicles short because John McCain won’t choke up the money.

All of which is to say that it’s business as usual on Capitol Hill: to seem rather than to be.

Indeed.

MORE: Greg Djerejian thinks I’m letting Rumsfeld off too easily. Well, possibly — though that’s because most of what I’ve seen aimed at Rumsfeld has looked like a cheap shot to me. McCain is guilty of flaming hypocrisy and obvious showboating, and I wanted to point that out. (And even bloggers who usually know better have launched some unfair attacks, like this from Andrew Sullivan: “Now that Powell has gone, Rummy will see it as a matter of cojones that he stay for a while, if only to prevent sufficient manpower being deployed to win the war in Iraq.” So Rumsfeld doesn’t want us to win? Puhleez. Rumsfeld might be wrong, of course, but the notion that he simply has an irrational aversion to having enough troops because he wants us to lose is absurd, and merely serves to diminish the credibility of those who make the claim.)

(more…)

IF A DRUG COMPANY DID THIS it would be a huge scandal. But it’s the government, so it’s okay!

UPDATE: Vik Rubenfeld says it really is okay, and that this story is deeply misleading: “Dr. Tramont’s actions got the drug to the people sooner and saved lives. But in less honorable hands the procedures he used could have been used for wrongful purposes. Do we sanction Dr. Tramont? Or do we give him credit but keep a more watchful eye out for such things in the future?”

WIRED lists some recommended books for holiday gift-giving.

And here are some InstaPundit recommendations:

For fiction, go here — and also check out John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, which I liked very much, and which is now shipping.

For nonfiction: James Webb’s Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. (My capsule review here.) I also recommend David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, from which Webb (as he freely admits) gets a lot of his stuff.

James Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge makes an interesting companion to the above. Follow the link to read a review by Lexington Green of the ChicagoBoyz, or read excerpts from the Times Literary Supplement review here.

George Dyson’s Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship, discussing the interesting work his father Freeman did. (My column on the book — with video of an Orion test — is here). Another cool space book is Bob Zubrin’s Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization.

Joe Trippi’s book, The Revolution will not be Televised. Still the best blogs-and-politics book to date — though I haven’t read Hugh Hewitt’s forthcoming book on the same topic, which will be out next month. Dan Gillmor’s We the Media is also a must-read in this department.

Derrick Story, Digital Photography Hacks. Also Scott Kelby, The Adobe Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers. (Though I took Kelby’s advice on recalibrating the auto-color-correction and regretted it until I restored the default settings. But the book’s otherwise good.)

And, though it’s pre-digital, Photography, by Phil Davis, is still an excellent text.

And, finally, for the HGTV crowd there’s James Lileks’ must-read Interior Desecrations — full of stuff that will no doubt be back in style in the near future.

Happy reading! And if reading’s not your bag — er, then what are you doing here? — but there’s always this complete Star Trek video collection. Woohoo!

UPDATE: Reader Douglas Williams emails: “If you liked Albion’s Seed, you’re going to love Washington’s Crossing. I envy you not having read it.” No envy needed — here’s my post. And Hackett Fischer fans may also like his most recent book, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas, which I haven’t reviewed — but here’s a post from ChicagoBoyz. Meanwhile, post-surgical reader Jim Martin responds to my “what are you doing here?” question:

I would love to read the books on your list, but, unfortunately I can not.

I have had glaucoma for 25 years and, Thursday, I had laser surgery on my right eye for the second time in 23 years in an effort to save what vision is left, about 20%. I also have double vision which makes print reading almost impossible.

Two hours following the laser surgery I could not watch televison due to the anesthesia and a gel they put on the eye so a lens isn’t painful. The surgery is somewhat painful even with anesthesia, seventy shots around the optic nerve.

What I could do was read your blog with no discomfort at all. The font is large and easy to see and the subjects far more interesting than TV anyhow.

I wish books could be posted on Web pages, not just the classics.

Well, you can read the stuff at the Baen Free Library on the web for free, and it includes some of the fiction works I’ve recommended. And I’m glad that InstaPundit is reader-friendly for people with eye problems, which was part of the design philosophy (including the text-size menu). But it makes me feel guilty for not posting more often!

MICHAEL KINSLEY ON THE BLOGOSPHERE:

Some of my best friends are bloggers. Still, it’s different when you purposely drop an idea into this bubbling cauldron and watch the reaction. What floored me was not just the volume and speed of the feedback but its seriousness and sophistication. Sure, there were some simpletons and some name-calling nasties echoing rote-learned propa- ganda. But we get those in letters to the editor. What we don’t get, nearly as much, is smart and sincere intellectual engagement — mostly from people who are not intellectuals by profes- sion — with obscure and tedious, but important, issues.

Indeed. (Via Robert Prather).

TIME NAMES BUSH “MAN OF THE YEAR,” and Power Line blog of the year. Sounds about right to me!

UPDATE: Here’s an excerpt from the Power Line story:

The story of how three amateur journalists working in a homegrown online medium challenged a network news legend and won has many, many game-changing angles to it. One of the strangest and most radical is that the key information in “The 61st Minute” came from Power Line’s readers, not its ostensible writers. The Power Liners are quick, even eager, to point this out. “What this story shows more than anything is the power of the medium,” Hinderaker says. “The world is full of smart people who have information about every imaginable topic, and until the Internet came along, there wasn’t any practical way to put it together.”

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Thanks, guys, but I’ve had my Time article already.

FAKE FAT FOR YUSHCHENKO?

Perhaps Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko should try an “Olestra diet” to rid his body of dioxin.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the “fake fat” product was used as an emergency agent to flush out dioxin, one of a group of chlorinated hydrocarbons that are toxic, lipophilic (attracted to fat) – and persistent in the environment and animal tissues. About five years ago, two Austrian women suffering from dioxin poisoning were given olestra snacks, which resulted in removal of dioxin at 10 times the normal rate, according to some reports.

In an as-yet-unpublished study, researchers at the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine, along with Trevor Redgrave at the University of Western Australia, treated a patient with PCB toxicity over a two-year period with olestra in the form of fat-free Pringles. The patient’s chloracne disappeared and the PCB level in fat tissue dropped dramatically.

Somebody airlift a pallet-load of Dorito’s Wow chips!

REALIST SCHOLAR DENOUNCES IDEALIST PRESIDENT: Which one will history vindicate?

HERE’S A MEMORANDUM from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, concluding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to arms.

UPDATE: A couple of articles by yours truly on this subject here and here. And read this, too.

SLASHDOT looks at comment spam and Movable Type.

THREE CHEERS FOR SPRINT, which has donated 2500 prepaid phone cards to wounded troops at Walter Reed.

MILTON FRIEDMAN: “After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas; we have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course. We are still far from bringing practice into conformity with opinion. That is the overriding non-defence task for the second Bush term.”

UPDATE: Arnold Kling responds: “I do not think that we have have won the battle of ideas. The Left has not conceded defeat; it has merely become passive-aggressive. Simply by holding on to public provision of schooling, Medicare, and Social Security, those who distrust markets can ensure that government will play an ever-larger role in our lives.”

SO I OPEN UP this Harry Turtledove book to take a break from the blogosphere, and the dedication is to . . . Patrick Nielsen Hayden, for being the best editor imaginable.

Undoubtedly true, but also proof that there’s no escaping the blogosphere, these days.

HUGH HEWITT:

My point is that the talking heads of cable land know as much about the drug approval process as I do about monster trucks. And I don’t know anything about monster trucks except what Ed Morrisey has told me (and I still think it is pretty odd that Ed owns one of those eight-foot tire jobs.) The last thing we need is a witch hunt that shutters the drug development process.

Media hysteria is probably killing as many people as bad pharmaceuticals. My wife has had a problem with patients — scared by stuff they’ve heard on TV about anti-depressants causing suicide — stopping their antidepressants and becoming . . . suicidally depressed.

Will Lou Dobbs take the rap for those deaths?

EMBARRASSING REVELATIONS:

The American Civil Liberties Union is using sophisticated technology to collect a wide variety of information about its members and donors in a fund-raising effort that has ignited a bitter debate over its leaders’ commitment to privacy rights.

Some board members say the extensive data collection makes a mockery of the organization’s frequent criticism of banks, corporations and government agencies for their practice of accumulating data on people for marketing and other purposes. . . .

The group’s new data collection practices were implemented without the board’s approval or knowledge, and were in violation of the A.C.L.U.’s privacy policy at the time, said Michael Meyers, vice president of the organization and a frequent and strident internal critic. Mr. Meyers said he learned about the new research by accident Nov. 7 in a meeting of the committee that is organizing the group’s Biennial Conference in July.

He objected to the practices, and the next day, the privacy policy on the group’s Web site was changed. “They took out all the language that would show that they were violating their own policy,” he said. “In doing so, they sanctified their procedure while still keeping it secret.”

With nonprofits, just as with for-profits, it’s usually about the benjamins.

DANIEL HENNINGER:

We see where a curator at France’s Pompidou Center says his museum is opening a branch in Hong Kong, because “U.S. culture is too strong” there, and “we need to have a presence in Asia to counterbalance the American influence.” With the Pompidou Center?

“American influence” is the great white whale of the 21st century, and Jacques Chirac is the Ahab chasing her with a three-masted schooner. Along for the ride is a crew that includes Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, Kofi Annan, the Saudi royal family, Robert Mugabe, the state committee of Communist China and various others who have ordained themselves leaders for life. At night, seated around the rum keg, they talk about how they have to stop American political power, the Marines or Hollywood.

The world is lucky these despots and demagogues are breaking their harpoons on this hopeless quest. Because all around them their own populations are grabbing the one American export no one can stop: raw technology. Communications technologies, most of them developed in American laboratories (often by engineers who voted for John Kerry), have finally begun to effect an historic shift in the relationship between governments and the governed. The governed are starting to win.

Not that long ago, in 1989, the world watched demonstrators sit passively in Tiananmen Square and fight the authorities with little more than a papier-mâché Statue of Liberty. Poland’s Solidarity movement had to print protest material with homemade ink made from oil because the Communist government confiscated all the printers’ ink.

In 2004, in Ukraine’s Independence Square, they had cell phones.

Read the whole thing.

OVER AT ASYMMETRICAL INFORMATION, I’m accused of Nikon-centrism, and Mindles H. Dreck writes about the joys of the Canon EOS 20D digital camera.

Actually, I have blogged on that before.

JAMES LILEKS:

Maybe it’s just me. Perhaps I’m overly sensitive. But when I wish a store clerk “Merry Christmas!” they often appear stunned and flummoxed for a moment, as if I’ve just blabbed the plans for the underground’s sabotage of the train tracks in front of the secret police. I’ve said something highly inappropriate for the public square, and I almost expect a security guard to take me aside on the way out. . . .

I don’t get it. There’s this peculiar fear of Christmas that seems to get stronger every year, as if it’s the season that dare not speak its name. Check out the U.S. Postal Service Web site: two different stamps for Kwanzaa. One for Eid, two for Hanukkah. Two for non-sectarian “Holiday,” with pictures of Santa, reindeer, ornaments, that sort of thing. One for the Chinese New Year. One for those religiously inclined — it features a Madonna and Child. But the Web site calls it “Holiday Traditional.” The word “Christmas” doesn’t appear on the site’s description of the stamps. Eid, yes. Hanukkah, yes. Kwanzaa, yes. Christmas? No. It’s Holiday Traditional.

I’ve noticed the same thing.

JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS: There’s no better stocking stuffer for that special someone anywhere!

ANOTHER RESPONSE TO MICHAEL KINSLEY: They’re everywhere!

THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS:

Surgeons have used stem cells from fat to help repair skull damage in a 7-year-old girl in Germany, in what’s apparently the first time such fat-derived cells have been exploited to grow bone in a human. . . .

Roy C. Ogle of the University of Virginia, an expert in skull reconstructive surgery who has been studying bone regeneration from fat-derived cells, said he considered the new report to be the first indicating that any kind of stem cell had been used to grow bone in a human.

“It is a very big deal,” said Ogle, who called the study a landmark.

These are “adult,” not embryonic, stem cells.

NASA READER ROGER MITCHELL EMAILS:

Since you write often digital cameras, I just thought I’d throw a bit more information out for you.

Last week, I had the Fuji Government representative down here at JSC to look at our photo lab (yes, that’s where I work) and he also brought with him the new FinePix S3 PRO camera.

At the demonstration later that afternoon, I must say that I was impressed! This camera has such a wide dynamic range that it really does rival film. It does this by using two pixels in tandem, one for highlight detail and one for shadow. Comparing images side by side shot at the same ISO, aperture and shutter using a D2H, D100 and the S3 you can definitly see the difference. More highlight and shadow detail in the image. Also, they had a 30×40 enlargement (inkjet) that was fairly outstanding coming from a digital (we print digital camera files that large all of the time, but you can see some artifacts of the digital image when you look close – of course, most are from the Kodak DCS760 we still use onboard the station).

It’s advertised as a 12MP camera, but this is because it counts all of the pixels, although it can output a full 12MB image (uses both pixels to fill in the dynamic range for each other). Also, for those of us out here with a big investment in Nikon glass, it uses all Nikon lenses and flash units (alas, no iTTL support – yet). At a street price about $2K, it is more pricey than a D100 or D70, but it does pack some pretty nice picture taking capability.

Still too pricey for me — it shows at $2,499 at Amazon, and that’s allegedly an 11% discount. But it does sound cool — and the nice thing is that cameras this good will be a lot cheaper, soon. And when you compare it to $2000 for a Nikon D2H, I guess the price isn’t bad. This just illustrates what I’ve said before about the quality of digital cameras going up, even as prices drop or stay stable. And as I’ve also noted, that’s actually a reason for a working pro with a lot of film cameras to hold off on buying digital.

MICHAEL MALONE has some interesting thoughts on the future of the blogosphere, but I think he gets this bit wrong:

You see, the real problem of the blogosphere is not its content, but its structure. That is, it has yet to develop a viable business model. It is essentially a vast global movement of volunteers, most of whom are hoping for some kind of eventual payoff for their noble labors.

By “payoff” he means financial payoff. I don’t think most bloggers are blogging away in the expectation of getting rich. Some will, and some larger (but still small) number will be comfortably well off, or at least make enough money to pay the hosting fees. But people blog so that they can express themselves — to be producers, not consumers — and we see this impulse across the world of new and alternative media. But it’s not really new. Lots of musicians play music in spite of the fact that most of them won’t get rich. (Most won’t even do as well as my touring rock-musician brother, and believe me, he isn’t rich). They do it because they like to play, and they want their music heard. I think the same kind of thing drives most bloggers, too. It’s certainly what’s driven me. And while some people will drop out after a while (heck, most people will drop out after a while) the blogosphere will remain.