EXPELLED SAUDI DIPLOMATS: More here — and Kevin Maguire thinks I missed the most important passage from the article I mentioned earlier:

The agency said Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar Bin Sultan has refused to take responsibility for the Saudi embassy in Washington. The agency cited a source as saying he hasn’t entered the embassy in years.

Hmm. What’s going on there that Bandar doesn’t want to “take responsibility” for?

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “We’re really looking hard at female replacements,” Martin said. “If only because they can masturbate and hide it so well.”

I’m pretty sure this is a spoof, although nowadays, who can tell?

BBC REPORTER ANDREW GILLIGAN has resigned in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry’s finding that he “sexed up” reports on British intelligence and WMDs.

RANDY BARNETT IS THE CONSTITUTIONAL-LAW EQUIVALENT OF A ROCK STAR, and now he’s going on a nationwide tour to promote his new book, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. Coming next: Groupies?

PORPHYROGENITUS looks at the fallout from the WMD issue in Britain and notes that, despite Tony Blair’s triumph over the BBC, the news is not all good.

BRIAN MARTIN IS RANTING SENSIBLY about something that has been bugging me — useless “security responses” from antivirus systems that catch viral email spoofing my address. Whenever one of these email-spoofing viruses is spreading, my inbox fills up with messages reading “Norton AntiVirus has spotted a virus in an email from your address.” Except, of course, that it never came from me.

Email spoofing has been around for years. This “feature” in antivirus programs should have been off the table for nearly as long.

SONIA ARRISON looks at tech’s future, and what they’re worrying about in Silicon Valley.

ORKUT appears to be inspiring hatred despite its meaning “orgasm” in Finnish. (Via Joi Ito).

THANKS to the folks who donated via Amazon or PayPal this month! Thank-you emails will be forthcoming shortly.

THIS SEEMS PROMISING:

The United States has ordered the expulsion of dozens of Saudi diplomats suspected of helping promulgate Al Qaida ideology, diplomatic sources said. The State Dept. has refused to either confirm or deny the action..

The State Department revoked the diplomatic credentials of the Saudi diplomats in Washington over the last month in an effort to crack down on Saudi efforts to promote Al Qaida interests in the United States.

The diplomatic sources said about 70 diplomats and embassy staffers were expelled in late 2003 and dozens of others were ordered to leave the United States by mid-February. Many of those expelled were said to have worked in the office of the Saudi defense attache.

Remember — Iraq was just one phase of the war.

SCORE ANOTHER ONE for sophisticated European diplomacy.

BRUCE SCHNEIER writes that we’re slouching toward Big Brother.

I’m not as gloomy as he is, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read his piece. I could be wrong, you know! I do think, though, that the most important thing in preserving civil liberties is to maintain a firewall between the treatment of noncitizens and citizens. Mistreatment or surveillance of noncitizens may be bad, but it doesn’t offer the temptation toward political abuse that such conduct offers where citizens are concerned.

A NEW BLOGOSPHERE SPORT: Googling the reported recipients of Saddam’s oil-bribe money! Stephen Green has gotten started. Salon’s Wagner James Au emailed with this suggestion, too, and thinks it’ll be interesting to see whether their public statements prior to Saddam’s fall indicate any special solicitousness toward Saddam’s interests.

MICKEY KAUS: “Next: Kerry claims to have secretly ghostwritten Joe Klein’s novels!”

Meanwhile David Adesnik says the debate’s real loser was Tom Brokaw.

UPDATE: But Wonkette pronounces Brokaw the winner — though on grounds Adesnik may not share.

WHY DOES PRINCE CHARLES WANT TO HURT POOR PEOPLE?

A report published today on the Institute of Physics website Nanotechweb.org will say that Prince Charles’ claims about nanotechnology could widen the chasm between have and have-not countries and damage the emerging nanotechnology industry in the developing world. This new analysis comes from a leading bioethics think-tank, the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics and is the first-ever survey of nanotechnology research in developing countries.

Dr Peter Singer, Director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics and Dr Erin Court, the lead author of this report, argue that concerns over the legitimate risks of nanotechnology should be addressed through a new international process and not by resorting to a moratorium on research that promises vast improvement in the lives of five billion people in developing countries.

Dr Singer said: “Opposition from Prince Charles and pressure groups around the world should not be permitted to diminish the health, environmental and economic opportunities of the poor in Africa, Latin America and Asia.”

This report outlines for the first time the health, environmental and economic benefits for developing countries of nanotechnology (NT).

The report is here. Note that this is not the animal-rights Peter Singer. It’s the one who cares about human beings. . . .

COMCAST: You’ve overused your “unlimited” service! But we won’t tell you what the limits are. . . .

This is miserably, pathetically, lame.

DENIAL ISN’T A RIVER IN EGYPT: It’s a walkout in London.

AMIR TAHERI WRITES that Iraq is becoming a normal society. Let’s hope.

HERE’S A SOUTH CAROLINA DEBATE ROUNDUP from Jeff Quinton.

I DON’T FEEL SORRY FOR JOE TRIPPI ANYMORE: Taegan Goddard finds a report that Trippi got up to a 15% commission on Dean’s ad buys. Can this be right? I’m in the wrong business — I could lose two states, spend $40 million, and walk away a millionaire as well as anybody else! Sheesh.

UPDATE: Steve Verdon has a trenchant observation on Dean’s web-based donation program.

ANOTHER UPDATE: D’oh! It’s not Steve, above. It’s Dave. The SteveVerdon.com address always lulls me into forgetting that it’s a group blog now.

SPELLBOUND, OUTBOUND, AND SCHOOLBOUND: As I promised yesterday, today’s GlennReynolds.com post ties together the movie Spellbound with the question of outsourcing.

UPDATE: More on outsourcing here and here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Virginia Postrel continues to call me “coy” on the outsourcing issue. I’m still confused as to why. Here’s what I wrote in the original column on this topic, which I’ve linked in most of my posts since:

With all sympathy to Mr. Paris, people usually conclude that foreign competition has “gone too far” when it threatens their job. (And if we could import foreign politicians to compete with domestic ones, you’d see tariffs and protectionism that would make Napoleon’s Continental System look like free trade.) Nonetheless, this sort of competition can certainly cause dislocations, both political and economic. (For more, here’s a report that outsourcing to India increased by 25% last year, and a somewhat sunnier view of the situation from the Hindustan Times.)

But it also causes moral dislocations, and in various parts of the political spectrum. Bray’s story reports on an “alliance of liberal activist groups and labor unions” that is opposing the outsourcing of jobs. And while it’s easy to see why labor unions might oppose this sort of thing, it’s hard for me to see it as a liberal issue, really. After all, aren’t liberals supposed to be for the redistribution of wealth from the better-off to the less-well-off? These jobs don’t disappear, after all: they go overseas, to people who probably need them more. Isn’t that a good thing? Or, at least, to me it’s not obviously worse than, say, taxing corporations in a way that causes them to cut jobs, and then using the money to pay for foreign aid.

I wrote something similar over at GlennReynolds.com, but it vanished in the MSNBC non-archive black hole. But it should be obvious: I’m against bans on outsourcing, and I think that the moral case for them is as weak as the economic one.

But — and maybe this is what Virginia is picking up on — I do have a certain degree of ambivalence. Arthur Leff, in a review of Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law, famously worried about how many lives would be lashed to ribbons as the supply and demand curves flailed around, “desperately seeking equilibrium.” On policy grounds, it probably is better to be coldhearted where this sort of thing is concerned. But I see how hard this has hit parts of the IT sector, and I think that in many cases it’s more of a management fad than it is a source of real economic efficiency. If Virginia thinks that I’m the one ginning up controversy in this area, then she’s very much out of touch with what tech people are talking about, because the subject has been all over Slashdot (look here and here, for example, and note the number of comments) and the various tech publications for a while — and you hear a lot of it from IT people whose interest in the subject didn’t come from InstaPundit. I’m just passing it along.

TOM MAGUIRE has a good observation on why we should be suspicious of the Saddam oil-bribe reports. The documents may be genuine, but the people who created them may have been lying to Saddam and pocketing the proceeds. As I said before, we should wait to see if this pans out. Just because it’s plausible doesn’t mean it’s true.

UPDATE: Maguire has updated, and ABC has picked up the story now, too. And the Chirac connection may be closer than I indicated below. Still to early to say for sure, but it’s certainly interesting. Stay tuned.

MY FRIEND AND SOMETIME COAUTHOR ROB MERGES has a new paper on compulsory licensing and digital media out. I’m somewhat more friendly to the notion of compulsory licensing than Rob is, but since he’s smarter than me, you should probably listen to him. However, I will note that — as I wrote here a while back — the “hassle factor” involved in non-compulsory schemes, and the burden on creative endeavors that it represents, shouldn’t be underestimated.

JAM YESTERDAY AND JAM TOMORROW: Joe Katzman notices that for some people, the time is never right.

UPDATE: Reader Richard Andrews emails:

Obviously, professor, our policy should be JDAM’d if you do, JDAM’d if you don’t…

Indeed. Justin Katz has some further thoughts on this subject that are worth reading.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: This time at Illinois State.