“DOLLYWOOD VALUES:” Heh.

UPDATE: Apparently, they’re spreading.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Watch out, Michael Moore. You’ve got competition.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Yes, it’s turnabout, to a degree.

HEH: “Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we’re not him.”

SOME VERY COOL AURORA BOREALIS PHOTOS, taken with a Nikon D70. (Via Colby Cosh.)

UPDATE: Reader Thomas Van Gilder emails: “I’m on the verge of getting the Nikon D70 and am wondering if you would recommend the ‘standard’ lens that is most often bundled with it. I scrolled through your D70 comments and couldn’t find anything but an oblique reference to the lens that came with your D70.”

Dang. That’s an omission. The “kit” lens (it’s an 18-70 ED) that comes with the D70 outfit is a very respectable piece of glass. The quality is excellent, and the focal range is quite versatile, though I often find myself wishing for a bit more reach at the telephoto end. I’ve also got the 28-200mm zoom that I wrote about here. I’d like the 12-24mm wide-zoom lens, too, but it’s a bit pricey. (I did buy this 50mm normal lens though — it was cheap, at under a hundred bucks, and it’s fast and sharp). Other questions answered here. If you wind up buying a D70 — or a Canon Digital Rebel, which is an excellent camera, too, despite my Nikon-preference — be aware that there are rebates out on both. More information on those at DPreview.com.

And, by the way, if you’re into making video you might be interested in this veterans’ living history project sponsored by the Library of Congress and currently being touted by my brother.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here, BTW, is a gallery of photos (mostly from Knoxville and its environs) by SKBubba, who also uses a D70. But here’s a photo of his favorite bird.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More northern lights pictures here, taken with a Digital Rebel. Very cool. Thanks to reader Jim Bass for the link.

MORE: Gigapixel images? I won’t be taking these any time soon.

And here, just because I ran across the URL, is my D70 review for Gizmodo from last year.

STILL MORE: Over at Entropy Manor we get this observation: “I need an inexpensive hobby which gets me away from the computer thank you.”

Heh. Indeed.

MORE STILL: Got this email on the kit lens:

Dennis here (of the ‘aurora borealis’ link you posted recently). I agree completely with your assessment of the 18-70mm kit lens being included with the D70. One additional note is how well-built, quiet, and fast the lens is. It’s a great all-purpose unit that is well worth purchasing, even for people who only have a D70 body.

Yes, I’m very happy with that lens.

And reader Mike Maas sends this link to a page of high-resolution images that I think I’ve mentioned before. But it’s still cool.

FIRSTHAND REPORTING FROM IRAQ, with photos, at The Mudville Gazette. Don’t miss it.

AXIS OF WEASELS is continuing to sell well. Congratulations, Scott!

RODNEY KING AND THE CIA: Fritz Schranck says there’s a parallel.

OBSERVATIONS FOR CULTURAL CONSERVATIVES:

Voting coalitions are ruled by the least committed members.

So the question to the cultural conservatives is: do you want 2004 to be the Republican high water mark or would you like to extend the string?

We’ll find out the answer to that question soon.

UPDATE: Jeff Rosen:

In the last 36 years, four Republican presidents have appointed all but two of the current nine justices.

But on the most contested social issues – abortion, affirmative action, school prayer and gay rights – the court has sided with liberals, while only modestly advancing the deregulatory agenda of the Republicans.

“If the goal of Republican presidents was to build a court that exercised its own power with greater restraint or adhered strictly to the original constitutional text, then they have clearly failed,” said Thomas Keck, a political science professor at Syracuse University and author of “The Most Activist Supreme Court in History.”

Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Of course, as I should have noted, this book is essential reading on the subject!

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES is up!

MORE DEBUNKING of election-fraud theories.

THE IDEA Of SETTING UP AN OIL TRUST to deliver oil revenues directly to the Iraqi people originally appeared here in March of 2003, was picked up by Michael Barone and some others, and then didn’t seem to go anywhere. But now it’s reappearing:

Ba’athist dead-enders are, in essence, fighting to regain the power to steal fellow Iraqis’ wealth — and kill anyone who objects. Their terrorist allies would also be hurt by the creation of the Freedom Trust. The commonsense justice of giving Iraqis a personal stake in their own oil wealth would undercut terrorists’ appeal to Iraqi youth. These “militants” would suddenly find themselves defined as fighting to steal young Iraqis’ future, while Iraq’s Army and National Guards would be fighting to defend that future. .

It is deeply disappointing that the Bush Administration, which is advancing the virtues of an “ownership society” in America has not advanced any creative ideas for using Iraq’s oil to benefit its people directly. Nor has the Allawi government laid out any path away from the regional tradition of state-centered oil paternalism and public clientelism. Yet it is difficult to conceive a policy action that could better clarify what it means to “liberate” Iraq, empower its people, and create real common ground for a national rebirth. Reform in the distribution of oil revenue is as critical to “winning the peace” in Iraq as land reform was to fostering democracy in post-war Japan.

By sharing some of Iraq’s vast oil wealth with its people, a new Iraqi government could foster the rise of a broad-based, democratic middle class. It could turn black gold into liquid freedom, the fuel for democracy and the engine of development. The Freedom Trust would give the Iraqi people, and their new police and Army, a future to believe in — and fight for. This single move would do more than any other initiative to help secure a lasting peace, grounded in justice. And such a peace may be the only outcome that could, in some small measure, redeem the sacrifices that Americans and Iraqis are now enduring.

While some people have raised reasonable-sounding objections to this approach, so far I haven’t seen anything that should be a deal-killer, and the failure to go forward with this idea has probably been the Administration’s biggest mistake in Iraq. After the transfer of sovereignty, of course, this is for the Iraqi government to do. But it seems like an idea that it ought to consider, and that we ought to encourage it to consider.

UPDATE: Reader Roy Mumaw notices that StrategyPage has picked this idea up.

And read this article from Slate on how Norway handles things.

W.H.O. WILL APPROVE EXPERIMENTS WITH GENETICALLY-ALTERED SMALLPOX — which suggests to me that someone is worried that such smallpox is already a threat, from somewhere.

I GUESS I’M A COLUMN-A KIND OF GUY, REALLY — but with more column-B characteristics than most.

HEH. Yes, there are a few parallels in their platforms.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE:

The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded $4 million in grants to study the health and environmental risks posed by manufactured nanomaterials — the new and invisibly tiny materials that are revolutionizing many industries but whose effects on living things remain largely unknown.

The grants to a dozen universities mark the first significant federal effort to assess the biological and medical implications of nanotechnology, a burgeoning field of science that is expected to become a trillion-dollar industry within the next decade.

I’m not surprised, and I think this is a good thing. You can read my account of the EPA Science Advisory Board meeting where this was discussed here.

SCOTT PETERSON IS GUILTY OF FIRST DEGREE MURDER: Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft is doing a LiveChat discussion on the Washington Post site at this very moment. No doubt there will be more stuff on her blog as well. And she’ll be on Hannity and Colmes tonight with more discussion.

My main feeling is disappointment that it’s over: For many, many months I’ve been able to look up at TVs in bars, restaurants, the gym, etc. — and when the Peterson trial was on, I knew right away that there was no actual news to report. Now I’ve lost that valuable tool.

HERE’S ANOTHER DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY SITE, in addition to the ones I mention below.

UPDATE: Another reader likes this site, which he describes as opinionated and “Nikon-centric.” But sensible, as this essay, which I liked very much, demonstrates.

And here’s a gallery of action photos from the National Wakeboarding championship.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader J.D. Metcalf likes this site.

And I should note that I’ve been very happy with my photo-hosting service, ExposureManager.com. You can see my photo galleries here. I’ve also ordered prints from them with excellent results, including one 20×30 print that was tack-sharp and dirt-cheap.

BLOGS AND POLITICS: This article echoes something that I’ve said before — if Kerry had hired Joe Trippi, he’d probably be President-elect now.

Of course, the notion of using blogs to make a rapid response to the Swift Boat Vets’ allegations might have stumbled on the Kerry campaign’s big problem, which is that it didn’t have a very good response. But more active use of blogs would at least have kept them from being taken by surprise.

WELL, DANG: It looks as if the Times Literary Supplement review of Jim Bennett’s new book isn’t going to be available online to nonsubscribers, at least not today. But North Sea Diaries has a bit of it. And I’ve got a bit more below — click “read more” to read it.

(more…)

THOUGHTS ON RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY, over at The Belmont Club.

“Wild Crowds, Gunfire Force Hasty Arafat Burial:” If the Palestinian “authorities” can’t even organize a funeral, how are they going to run a country? The answer, judging from past experience, is “miserably, violently and with massive corruption.”

IS THE TIMES TRYING TO MAKE BLOGS LOOK BAD? Yesterday I linked to a Wall Street Journal piece asking:

Is it just me, or does the whole mainstream-media-generated controversy over blogs savor of an attempt to score a hit against blogs out of pique and envy? . . . Would it be unrealistic to see the gleeful reporting on the fallibility of the blogs as a feeble and rather clueless attempt to dent their credibility — in effect, to say, you’d better leave it to the pros next time? Of course, virtually all the mainstream media (MSM) cheerfully jumped on the supposed Kerry victory bandwagon, leading, as blogger Mickey Kaus put it, to the “Seven-Hour Presidency of JFK.” But then the MSM have never been too good at self-analysis.

Now some people are suggesting that this NYT article, which is admittedly a bit hard on Kos and others, is an example of that phenomenon. I’d have to give it mixed marks though. First, to its credit, it debunks the election-fraud conspiracy theories. (“‘We know this was an emotional election, and the losing side is very upset,’ said Daniel Hoffheimer, the lead lawyer for the Kerry campaign in Ohio. But, he said, ‘I have not seen anything to indicate intentional fraud or tampering.'”) Second, it makes this point:

But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong – though many were still reluctant to let them go.

It’s Mickey Kaus’s asymptotic approach to the truth. (On the other hand, though the article doesn’t mention it, semi-mainstream guys, like Keith Olbermann, have been in many ways no more skeptical than the blogosphere.)

Of course, it would have been fairer to the blogosphere had the Times noted that some blogs — like, ahem, this one — were appropriately skeptical of both the early exit polls and the post-election fraud/conspiracy theories.

UPDATE: Bryan Preston is less charitable, and thinks that the Times is trying to use lefty blogs to discredit the entire blogosphere: “The legacy media empire, burned by a couple of years of legitimate blogger triumphalism over catching the media in various forms of bias and hackery, will use the election conspiracy theories and the exit poll fiasco to strike back at the rebels. . . . Watch for more of this bloggers-can’t-be-trusted reporting.”

UPDATE: Reader John MacDonald thinks that Preston is right here, and adds: “CBS will go on the offensive, instead of answering questions: Wait for them to do hard hitting analysis of the blogosphere in order to diminish its credibility. . . . Riding out the storm isn’t going to cut it because their integrity is shot to hell by doing nothing.” I think it’s pretty well shot regardless.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

On Hardball tonight it was transparently obvious Chris Matthews has picked up on the meme to put bloggers down by criticizing the behaviour of left-wing bloggers solely (re conspiracy theories regarding the election) without mentioning it is left-wing bloggers’ behaviour they are talking about. Susan Molinari also chimed in strongly on the same theme, though in her case she just seems ignorant of blogs and bloggers altogether.

I predict that this strategy will work as well as their ceaseless flacking for Kerry did.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More — including lots of links — here.

SANDY BERGER UPDATE: Er, or non-update. My RatherGate followup post, below, led a couple of readers to ask what’s going on with the Sandy Berger “pantsgate” story. Beats me, and I couldn’t find anything recent on Google News.

THE RIGHT TO ARMS AND CONCEALED CARRY: Dave Kopel has posted a draft of his forthcoming law review article, for those who are interested.

ROGER SIMON WONDERS who to believe:

The Syrian Defense Minister called Arafat “the son of sixty thousand whores,” but Jimmy Carter called him “a powerful human symbol and forceful advocate” for a Palestinian homeland.

I know what I think.

“I HATE ILLINOIS NAZIS.” That line, referenced below, is from the Blues Brothers movie.

The fancy car stunts in that movie were coordinated by George Koopman, who was a founder of an early commercial-space company, The American Rocket Company. Amroc was a pioneer in solid/liquid hybrid rocket engines of the sort used in SpaceShipOne to win the X-Prize.

Another founder of the American Rocket Company was Jim Bennett, now best known for his UPI columns and his new book, The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century. (Bennett’s book gets a nice review in this weekend’s Times Literary Supplement — I’ll post a link when it’s available online). Other space-movement bloggers include Rand Simberg and Dale Amon of Samizdata. Just a bit of background for those playing six-degrees-of-separation and wondering “how do these people know each other?”

UPDATE: Another blogger with a Burt Rutan connection. To which I should add that I was on the National Space Society Board of Directors with Buzz Aldrin, who’s a business partner of Rutan’s.