OUTLAWING BLASPHEMY? I blame John Ashcroft!

More here.

SANTA IN THE SKY, WITH DIAMONDS: Or something like that.

HEY, THE S&P500 SEEMS TO BE GOING LIKE GANGBUSTERS when you value it in Euros, judging from this chart. I’m not sure what that means.

TIM BLAIR IS CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS.

LIVEBLOGGING THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA at Chapomatic. You can support the Blogger Challenge here.

THE ENGINEERS WHO SAVED CHRISTMAS: My TechCentralStation column is up.

And for those who asked, I wound up buying this one.

MICHAEL TOTTEN sums up the election, and the left’s problems:

Juan Cole would rather align himself with anti-American Iraqis like the blogger Riverbend. Okay, whatever. But I have no idea why he expects conservatives and centrists to do any such thing. Most people in this world don’t reflexively side with those who hate them. One reason he is in the political wilderness and I’m not is because he does and I don’t. . . . It’s not the right’s fault that it has come to this.

Indeed. Jeff Jarvis has further disagreements with Cole, and expresses them in his usual forthright fashion.

GOTCHER HEALTH CARE BLOGGING RIGHT HERE: This week’s Grand Rounds is up.

JAMES BOND DIED FOR OUR SINS: Jim Dunnigan looks at why the intelligence agencies shied away from human intelligence, and why they’re trying to move back into the field now.

You can, however, count on hostile media whenever anything goes wrong.

RON BAILEY WILL BE COVERING the global warming negotiations. And don’t miss his review of Michael Crichton’s new book, State of Fear.

GOOGLE MEETS THE HARVARD LIBRARY: This is cool.

MEDPUNDIT RESPONDS to the CodeBlue claim that Yushchenko wasn’t poisoned. “Here’s a description of acute dioxin poisoning which fits Yushchenko’s symtpoms to a tee . . . As for the possibilty [of] Yurshchenko having acne rosacea, it’s unlikely. Acne rosacea usually has a much slower progression.”

UPDATE: Photos here. And even more here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Sean Doherty emails:

George Soros has a long history of manipulating elections in eastern europe (as he tried to do here in the US).

Soros loves Yushchenko.

The media is duping you, Reynolds, and you’re falling hook, line and sinker. Don’t fall for it.

Well, I certainly disagreed with Soros on the U.S. election. But it’s not as if I disagree with him on everything — we both favor drug legalization, for example. But if Soros is fooling me, he’s fooling a rather diverse group of people.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Treacher emails with the bottom line: “I don’t think you’re getting duped about Yushchenko. There’s no way a guy goes from George Clooney to Joe Don Baker overnight without some shenanigans.” (Upsetting photo here.)

IT’S NOT SELF-PARODY: It’s being comfortable with your inner geek! Er, and the outer one, too.

MORE MPAA LAWSUITS PLANNED, this time against BitTorrent and eDonkey.

PATTERICO HAS EXTRACTED A FAKE-TURKEY CORRECTION from the Los Angeles Times:

Joel Stein — Stein’s Dec. 5 column said a photo showed President Bush holding a fake Thanksgiving turkey during his 2003 visit to U.S. troops in Iraq. The turkey he was holding was real.

It was? Who knew? (Well, Tim Blair knew. But where are the permalinks on his new blog?)

MICKEY KAUS:

Even if the latest allegations about Marc Rich–that he helped broker Saddam’s oil-for-food deals–prove accurate, that won’t be the main reason Clinton’s pardon of the fugitive financier was scandalous. Saddam could presumably always get someone to broker his lucrative schemes–if not Rich, then another high-level operater. The Marc Rich pardon was scandalous mainly because it taught a generation of young Americans that you could buy your way out of punishment. … But buy with what? …

What, indeed? Or whom?

GEORGE W. BUSH AND U2: A surprising connection.

UPDATE: Yeah, I guess I have to link to this, too.

BLACKFIVE SPENT THE DAY with Iraqi bloggers Mohammed and Omar.

I DON’T CARE, BUT YOU MIGHT: There’ll be a Peterson verdict in a few minutes.

UPDATE: Death penalty. Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft is unhappy.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Randy Barnett:

I have not been following the Peterson trial very closely, if for no other reason than that I lack all confidence in the competence of California prosecutors to competently handle high-publicity murder trials. But listening to comments of the three jurors now being interviewed live by the networks, my faith in the jury trial system for criminal cases is reinforced. They are intelligent, careful, clear, conscientious and emotionally moved by their experience.

That’s an encouraging note.

MORE: Ann Althouse’s feelings are mixed:

At some point I was overcome with admiration for these people, who had devoted so much time and energy to the trial and were so thoughtful and sensible and human. . . . I admire the jurors and think they did their job properly. Their outrage at the defendant is justified. Nevertheless, quite without meaning to, I found myself reaffirmed in opposition to the death penalty.

Read the whole thing.

SO FAR, the falling dollar doesn’t seem to be hurting too much. At least, Jim Herd sends this link noting that Nikon is slashing the price of their D2H camera, and another link demonstrating that it’s showing up already at retail. Still a bit pricey for me.

By the way, if you missed ’em this weekend, lots of stuff on digital photography here and here.

FOR THE LAST HOUR OR SO I’ve been blogging from the tire place. Found a flat tire on the Passat, pumped it up with a hand pump (no small job) and drove it over to get it fixed. There’s no wifi here, but the Verizon wireless card has worked great, letting me post to the blog and do research for a law review article I’m finishing up.

UPDATE: It was a big, nasty screw that was responsible for the flat. On the hand-pump angle, some readers wrote that I need to buy one of these. Actually, I own one, but I wanted the exercise since I’ve spent the rest of the day at a computer writing. It was, however, plenty of exercise as it takes a lot of pumping on a bicycle pump to inflate a big automobile tire.

Meanwhile, one reader emails to say “The reason we like Instapundit – besides the fact that you make even the dumbest sh** interesting – is that you are crazy like the rest of us, blogging from the tire shop and suchlike places. Keep it up. You’ll really grab our attention if you manage to blog from the middle of a U2 concert this spring.” Hmm. . . .

ROGER SIMON WRITES on meeting Iraqi bloggers Omar and Mohammed:

One thing I would like to say at the outset is that they were terrific people and I was instantly comfortable with them in the way you are with old friends. This is one of the miracles of the blogosphere. We all know each other to an extraordinary degree before we meet. . . .

Omar and Mohammed, who are Sunnis themselves, said that many would, that the impression we get of the Sunni Triangle is skewed by reporting. I hope they’re right. These people are incredibly courageous. When you meet them it’s hard to understand why some of us could be rooting against them, but the not-so-sub subtext of many of the war’s opponents is just that. You see, they keep saying, look how bad it is-it’s our fault. I wish they could talk to Mohammed and Omar. I think even the Michael Moores of the world would have trouble saying it to them face-to-face. These men are the hope of democracy. I hope some day to meet their brother Ali… in Baghdad.

Indeed. But, sadly, some people are rooting against them.

UPDATE: A response to the rooters, from Iraqi blogger Ali.

PLAGIARISM IN THE ACADEMY: Here’s an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here’s an earlier post on the subject. I’ve written about the subject (along with Peter Morgan) at more length in The Appearance of Impropriety, in a chapter that you can read for free online in slightly different form here. My sense is that people are often quick to claim plagiarism on fairly spurious grounds, but that there’s also a lot of real plagiarism out there.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH has thoughts on natural law.

ECONOBLOGGING TO THE STARS: This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up.