SISSY WILLIS has a lengthy post on Darwin and ‘Intelligent Design.’

LT SMASH and submariner-blogs Ultraquiet No More and Bubblehead are covering the Russian submarine rescue. And so is Gateway Pundit. All have lots of pics, links, and interesting information.

A WOMEN’S RIGHTS PROTEST in Iraq.

ARE WE MORE DEPENDENT ON SAUDI ARABIA for oil? These charts suggest not as much as this story from the New York Times indicates.

UPDATE: More thoughts from Jonathan Gewirtz.

KAMAL ABOUKHATER has made a film called Blowing Smoke, and you can now order the DVD via the Blowing Smoke blog. Cool.

KNOXVILLE WANTS TO INSTALL RED-LIGHT CAMERAS, but it’s decided to keep the details of the contract secret:

City administration officials released a revised policy Friday for withholding information related to the selection of a company to install and operate cameras to catch red-light-running drivers. A city evaluation committee has selected Reflex Traffic Systems for exclusive negotiations, and the Knoxville Police Department expects to present a contract for City Council members’ consideration at their Aug. 16 meeting.

Hmm. I’m suspicious. Is this one of those deals where the cameras are operated by the contractor, and the contractor gets a cut of ticket proceeds? That provides an incentive to cheat, as has happened elsewhere. (Via Michael Silence).

UPDATE: Reader Allen Cogbill emails:

As you likely know, there is a distinct incentive to cheat, both for the company operating the system and the city, the latter due to “revenue enhancement”. Often in such situations, the orange-light period is shortened, increasing the likelihood that someone will run the red light. This is particularly bad, as it is fairly well-known that longer orange-light intervals (up to a point, of course) decrease accidents.

Yes, and that’s happened in quite a few places. This is all about revenues, of course, and not about safety.

ELIOT SPITZER is investigating Air America donor the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club over the dubious-loan scandal. (Via Michelle Malkin, who unlike me has been on this story for a while).

TERRY HEATON notes that blogs are not mass media. No, they’re not. And they won’t be, except perhaps in a collective sense.

Meanwhile, Jay Fitzgerald notes some convergence, and here are some thoughts on how bloggers build traffic.

And Froggy Ruminations is, er, ruminating on what it all means — though for the really vital questions you have to go to Doug Berman!

I MEANT TO MENTION THIS BEFORE, but Eric S. Raymond is blogging again.

ARE BIG MEDIA pushing back against the blogosphere?

U.S. SPEAKS OUT, as Azerbaijan cracks down on pro-democracy activists.

CLAUDIA ROSETT:

It’s rich that the former head of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, Benon Sevan, is now protesting the secrecy surrounding U.N. records that he himself set up as confidential. . . .

But it would have worked out far better for the U.N., and the rest of us, had Sevan achieved this appreciation of transparency and access back in the years when he was running Oil-for-Food, from 1997-2003. Today, Sevan remains on the U.N. payroll as a $1-per-year “adviser,” retained by the secretary-general with no apparent duties but to “assist” in the U.N.-authorized Oil-for-Food inquiry — which Lewis, Sevan’s lawyer, is now denouncing on Sevan’s behalf as a cover-up in search of “cartoon villains, not the truth.”

It would be more helpful still, were Sevan’s boss, Kofi Annan, to conceive even at this late date a similar urge for open and honest U.N. dealings and public access to U.N. records. Such priorities have so far eluded the secretary-general, perhaps because — as Sevan’s lawyer correctly points out — the Volcker inquiry has applied a double standard. Sevan aside, the committee’s findings have imposed spit-shine discipline on a few obscure U.N. officials, while dismissing as merely “inadequate” Annan’s failure to inquire competently into conflicts of interest involving six-figure payments to his own son — and excusing Annan’s growing list of memory lapses along the way.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Austin Bay has more thoughts on the unfolding UNSCAM scandal.

GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS about avian flu.

JOE GANDELMAN writes that Robert Novak is now damaged goods.

I was never a fan, myself.

AUSTIN BAY offers advice to soldiers deploying to Iraq, based on his own experience there.

VIRGINIA POSTREL will be on Penn & Teller’s show-with-the-name-you-can’t-say-on-CNN tonight at 10 Eastern, on Showtime, where the name is permitted.

GATEWAY PUNDIT has a roundup on the stranded Russian mini-sub in the Pacific. The Russians have asked for U.S. help.

ANKLE-BITING PUNDITS says that AP is presenting a bogus poll.

UPDATE: More on the poll from The New Editor.

My sense is that polls this far from an election aren’t worth much. And polls close to an election . . . aren’t worth much either, judging from recent experience!

STEPHEN PRESSER AND RICHARD EPSTEIN are debating the Supreme Court over at Point of Law.

STEPHEN GREEN BREAKS THE RULES.

STRATEGYPAGE: How Europe encourages Islamic terrorism.

HERE’S A LINK to Ray Kurzweil’s appearance on Charlie Rose.

(Via FightAging.)

ROGER ABRAMSON HAS A COVER STORY in The Nashville Scene: “Why prosecuting victimless crimes is a colossal waste of time.”

A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WONDERING whether Valerie Plame was mentioned in Joe Wilson’s Who’s Who entry. Kevin Aylward took the unprecedented step of actually looking it up (okay, actually he had a librarian do it for him) and reports: “via Who’s Who, the name ‘Valerie Plame’ has been associated publicly with Joe Wilson since the Clinton era.”

UPDATE: What’s the meaning of this? I dunno. It’s not consistent with the idea of Valerie Plame being deep cover. On the other hand, it may make Novak’s position worse, since he didn’t use her name but identified her as an agency operative, with the Who’s Who making it easy for people to connect the dots. But, of course, that only matters if she was under cover to begin with. That’s why I leave this stuff to Tom Maguire.

CAMPAIGN-FINANCE HYPOCRISY from John McCain?