IN THE MAIL: A new book on the Columbia crash, co-authored by my college newspaper editor Bill Harwood. It’s called Comm Check… : The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s likely to be good, given Harwood’s long experience reporting on space.

UPDATE: Here’s an excerpt.

MARTIN KETTLE IN THE GUARDIAN:

Having read the Hutton report and most of what has been written about it, I have reached the following, strictly non-judicial, conclusions: first, that the episode illuminates a wider crisis in British journalism than the turmoil at the BBC; second, that too many journalists are in denial about this wider crisis; third, that journalists need to be at the forefront of trying to rectify it; and, fourth, that this will almost certainly not happen.

Read the whole thing.

SAVE MARTHA STEWART! Okay, actually the title is Save Martha Stewart? The article, by my colleague Joan Heminway, is on “selectivity and bias in enforcement” of insider trading laws.

ANDREW SULLIVAN and James Taranto both refer to the Hajj-stampede phenomenon as an example of Islam as a “death cult.” I think this comparison is misplaced.

There’s no question that the more fanatical Islamofascist ideologues — and a huge number, perhaps a majority, of Palestinians — are in the grip of something that might reasonably be called a “death cult,” with its worship of suicide-bomb martyrdom as an end in itself. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here, and I think it’s a mistake to paint with too broad a brush.

What’s going on here seems to be classic Arab-regime ineptitude, glossed over with a convenient fatalism. Here’s what an American Muslim wrote recently:

In Mecca, I found the same mixture of confusion, oppression and apathy I thought I had left behind in Egypt. But as in Egypt, nothing worked, even at the blessed hajj, for we were visitors not to an Islamic state but to yet another cynical Arab kleptocracy which only pretended to adhere to the true ideals of Islam.

The Saudis couldn’t even organize the hajj safely. Each day, as I performed the rituals of the hajj, I was part of massed crowds of Muslims from all over the world: Turks and Pakistanis, Nigerians, Malaysians, Arabs. We would shamble forward without order or seeming direction, endangering lives as we knocked over women, the lame and the elderly in our hurry to get from one ritual to the next. Once, in a street so filled with pilgrims that I could not take one step forward, I was forced to jump into the back of a truck to avoid being killed in a stampede.

At night, I would wander through the pilgrim camps, disgusted by the sight of the mud-faced pilgrims who were only too happy to sleep on the filthy streets. In the morning, the streets would be clogged again, and veiled women who had trouble walking because they’d so rarely been let out of their homes would waddle slowly before me. At the stoning ritual, I watched little girls fall under the crowds of pilgrims: Turks shoving Arabs, Africans shoving Indians until each day a few more pilgrims were trampled to death. The next day I would read of the incident in the Saudi Times (FOURTEEN PILGRIMS KILLED IN STAMPEDE) which would quote a hajj official who never took any responsibility for the deaths. He would only say that since the pilgrims had died on hajj they would ‘surely enter Paradise’. There was never any promise to cut the number of hajjis or control the outsized crowds to prevent these needless deaths.

Disney could solve this problem in its sleep. That the Saudis aren’t up to Disney’s standards, and use lame fatalistic theology as an excuse, isn’t evidence of death-cultism so much as arrogance and ineptitude. Of course, the helpless rage that this behavior produces (or, perhaps, that the realization that Disney could solve this problem in its sleep produces) tends to feed the fanatics — but that’s still not the same as death-cultism.

RICIN in the Senate Mailroom? These early reports usually don’t pan out. But as noted below, Saddam did have ricin.

THE INSTA-CHICKEN RECIPE from a while back has gotten pretty good reviews from the folks who tried it. Here’s one from reader Rannva Weaving:

My husband and I tried your chicken recipe tonight for dinner. It was absolutely delicious! Just as simple and quick as you said it would be; in fact, preparation took the two of us only 12 minutes. We added some lemon juice to the sauce, and it seemed to be a nice touch. I am going to tell my mother in Finland about it, so “InstaChicken” will spread to the Nordic countries as well.

Simple and quick — the way we like things. Er, or at least the way we have to cook, most of the time, around here. You want fancier cuisine, drop in on Stephen Green around dinner time. (Actually, not a bad idea!)

I WASN’T GOING TO POST ANYTHING on the Janet Jackson Breast Incident, because, well, who cares? But then I saw that Darren Cahr has coined the term “boobenfreude” to describe the media reaction, and well, I couldn’t resist.

So here’s my take: Breasts — I like ’em. But if you look at this Drudge closeup (er, needless to say, it’s probably not work-safe, depending as always on where you work) well, you can decide for yourself, but my first thought was “what an entirely unappealing breast.” It’s obviously fake (fake’s OK; but obviously fake is, well, not so much) and then it’s got some kind of bizarre pointy metal thing attached to the nipple. It looks like some sort of Ninja throwing-star weapon. (And forget the boob, what’s going on with Janet Jackson’s face? Oh, wait, never mind — she’s a Jackson.) Sorry, I’m not impressed.

My theory is that this is a rather clever way to explode the widely held belief that no one watches halftime shows, thus boosting advertising revenues next year. (The Insta-Wife’s reaction: “It’s obviously fake. Big deal.” Not sure if she meant the incident, or the boob, or both.)

UPDATE: It’s not a Ninja star, it’s a — well, you’ll just have to read this shocking fact yourself. (The Drudge photo appears again.)

BRUSSELS BLOGGER MAARTEN SCHENCK has responded to an “I believe the BBC” campaign among Hutton-deniers with an amusing button of his own. I suspect that it will be popular.

How bad has the culture of denial gotten among BBC true-believers? This bad: “The most inventive theory I have heard this week is that Lord Hutton is an Ulsterman and that Gilligan is a republican-sounding kind of Irish name, and that this is all a subtext of the age-old struggle between Orange and Green.”

CIVIL WAR IN IRAN? Here’s a roundup of developments. And here’s a report from the Christian Science Monitor.

INTERESTING PIECES BY BOTH CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS and David Warren on Saddam and WMD. Hitchens:

So Saddam Hussein finally got his reward for all the unpunished times. Well, history doesn’t move in a straight line, and irony is a dialectical hairpin. But if he really didn’t have any stores of unlawful WMD, it was very dumb of him to act as if he still did or perhaps even to believe that he still did. And it seems perfectly idiotic of anybody to complain that we have now found this out (always assuming that we have, and that there’s no more disclosure to come). This highly pertinent and useful discovery could only be made by way of regime change. And the knowledge that Iraq can be finally and fully certified as disarmed, and that it won’t be able to rearm under a Caligula regime, is surely a piece of knowledge worth having in its own right and for its own sake.

Warren:

Unnoticed to the gliberal media in North America, Mr. Kay’s reports have cleared the Bush administration of the charge of “sexing up” threat assessments in the same way Lord Hutton’s inquiry into the suicide of David Kelly have cleared Tony Blair. It is clear as day after both inquiries, that the respective governments acted sincerely upon intelligence assessments that were as disturbing as they were wrong. Moreover, they could only be proved wrong because of the invasion of Iraq. Had that not taken place, Mr. Kay’s massive search for the truth, under every discoverable desk and rock, would have been impossible.

Though some people are prone to have a laugh at Bush’s, or the CIA’s, expense, when you couple this with the intelligence agencies’ inability to spot the Pakistani nuclear program in advance, and with the surprisingly advanced state of Libya’s program, the real lesson is a grim one: In an age of easily concealable weapons of mass destruction, the only way to be safe is to invade first, and answer questions later.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Melanie Phillips:

For the fact that Saddam was actively engaged in WMD programmes, large-scale or not, shows he was indeed in breach of the UN resolutions, and was indeed the threat he had been assumed to be from his record, temperament, regional ambitions and links to terrorism.

How much ricin, after all, do you need to kill thousands of people? To listen to anti-war critics, it would seem that modest amounts of biological agent somehow don’t count as WMD, or a re-started nuclear programme is no threat because it is only rudimentary.

To Dr Kay, the war was absolutely necessary because Saddam had become “even more dangerous” than had been realised, and, he said last week, “it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat”. Yet virtually no one has reported these remarks. Instead, Dr Kay is being quoted out of context to sustain the charge of Government duplicity by the anti-war brigade.

Read the whole thing.

STUART TAYLOR ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION:

Why not require publicly funded universities to disclose detailed data about all of their preferential-admissions programs? This would shed light on who benefits and who does not, on the nature and magnitude of the preferences, and on how much they compromise academic standards.

Sounds reasonable to me. Read the whole thing.

I MENTIONED A STORY ON THIS A WHILE BACK, but here’s more on the phenomenon of senior citizens arming themselves. Hey, maybe Kerry’s Second Amendment stance is a shrewd bid for the senior vote!

Or maybe he was going for the women’s vote.

ANOTHER POLL shows Kerry beating Bush. These early polls don’t mean a lot, but they certainly indicate that Bush can lose this election.

A JOHN KERRY SECOND AMENDMENT LITMUS TEST? I certainly agree with Kerry that “The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the right of each law-abiding United States citizen to own a firearm for any legitimate purpose, including self-defense or recreation.” And I’d be happy if he took that into consideration in appointing judges.

Pardon me, however, if I doubt this will come to pass.

WYETHWIRE REPORTS that the South Carolina loyalty oath has been abandoned.

UPDATE: Jesse at Pandagon says that there never was a loyalty oath, though I don’t really get that. At any rate, if the only purpose is to keep people from voting in more than one primary, an oath seems like a poor method. Around here, the voting machines only let you vote in one or the other, and it is, of course, illegal to vote more than once — as, I assume, it is in South Carolina.

Jesse is clearly and indefensibly wrong, however, in his statement that “Knibb High Football RULES.” Everyone with any sense knows that Maryville High football rules.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More on the loyalty oath issue here.

THIS WAS NOTED HERE A WHILE BACK, but Spinsanity notes a phony “imminent threat” quote that has been circulating: “This tall tale, first created by the liberal Center for American Progress, has been repeated several times by journalists who failed to check their facts.”

GEORGE W. BUSH AND TONY BLAIR — nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION: Ouch.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS is up — loads of blog posts relating to business and economics.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: This interview with three Silicon Valley nanotechnology experts is very interesting, offering a mixture of caution and visionary planning. Best quote: “The only thing you can safely say (about predicting nanotech’s potential) is the farther out you look, the tougher it gets, and the more bold and the more futuristic the prediction. If it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it’s almost certainly false.”

To the best of my knowledge, the speaker — venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson — does not reside in his mother’s basement. . .

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR has an editorial on French political corruption.

HERE’S A FASCINATING DISCUSSION THREAD on German and American culture, from MedienKritik.

HOWARD BASHMAN has a lengthy interview with Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit. I agree with Reinhardt on two significant points: Hans v. Louisiana was wrongly decided, and federal judges’ salaries are too low.

I should note that Howard has opened his own law firm, a “boutique” firm specializing in appellate litigation, effective today.

CHUCK SIMMINS has thoughts on outsourcing and lawyers.

LOYALTY OATHS in South Carolina? I blame John Ashcroft.

What’s next? Literacy tests?

UPDATE: More here.