IF I HAD TO BET, I’d say that this was another Nancy Oden case (i.e., bogus) but if this report is true, it’s time for more shakeups at DHS. I find it doubtful, however, that the DHS is spending much time looking for signs of incipient Maoism. (Via Brian’s Study Breaks).

SO I SHOULD HAVE BEEN grading Administrative Law exams last night, but I made the mistake of starting John Scalzi’s new book Ghost Brigades yesterday afternoon, got totally sucked in, and read until I finished it about midnight last night.

As that might suggest, it’s really good. It’s only sort of a sequel to Old Man’s War, though it takes place in the same world and with some of the same characters. Perhaps for that reason, it doesn’t suffer from the slowed pace and inconclusive action that many second-of-series books do: It’s a self-contained story, and you could read it and enjoy it even if you hadn’t read Old Man’s War, though you’d miss out on some of the background. At any rate, I liked it very much, and I think that anyone who enjoyed the first book will like this one just as much.

Various people have asked for other science-fiction recommendations, but I don’t have time to post that now. I’ll try to do something up later.

POPULAR MECHANICS has been doing an in-depth investigation of the Katrina disaster, and posting reports to its blog in advance of a big forthcoming article. Here’s one:

To understand the full impact of Katrina, you have to make a distinction between New Orleans and the rest of the region. New Orleans suffered devastating inundation due to the various levee breaks, but wind damage was moderate. When you fly over the city, you see a patchwork of blue FEMA-supplied tarps on roofs. But the real damage came from below as floodwaters from failed levees rose and quietly soaked homes through and through. Only in areas where the levee failures were particularly sudden and intense—like the Industrial Canal and the 17th Street Levee—were houses physically demolished.

Outside the city you see a different story. We drove east out of the city on I-10, crossing over the famous twin-span bridge across Lake Ponchartrain. (Today it is a crowded single span as crews install temporary roadways across the destroyed portions of the northern span.) For the next eight hours we drove in a big loop through Slidell, Biloxi, Gulfport and Pass Christian. In all that time we never left a zone of hurricane destruction that ranged from moderate damage to total annihilation. And this is after three months of clean-up operations. . . .

Biloxi ought to be Exhibit A in any discussion of whether current coastal development regulations make sense. The beachfront properties were devastated, but only a few hundred yards inland, damage was moderate. Maybe there’s a lesson there for developers? Apparently not. Compared to New Orleans, where whole neighborhoods remain deserted, Biloxi is crawling with construction teams. Most of them are busy rebuilding hotels right at the water’s edge.

Read the whole thing, and scroll down the blog for other reports.

UPDATE: Reader Barry Dauphin emails:

I take some issue with the portrait painted by Popular Mechanics. I don’t dispute what they saw in Biloxi, etc. But they are under reporting the wind damage. There are lots of blue tarps all over the greater New Orleans area. Damaged roofs are not caused by flood waters. There is no question that the levee breaches were the cause of the most substantial damage and the reason the city is a semi-ghost town. But having been in New Orleans at Thanksgiving, I think Popular Mechanics is minimizing the damage from the storm other than flooding (I have pictures). The rest of what is written seems accurate.

And Mississippi reader Jane Meynardie emails:

I agree that floating casinos are stupid. But as for the notion that Biloxi ought to be Exhibit “A” for how not to develop a beachfront, I must protest. Many of the homes that were destroyed on Biloxi’s beach (and in Pass Christian, Gulfport and Bay St. Louis) were over 150 years old. (One in Bay St. Louis was over 200 years old and was built with axe-hewn wood prior to our first sawmill.) They took everything nature threw at them better and for longer than most of the crap that builders are putting up today under current codes (including our brand new $50+ million federal courthouse well off the beach). Many were built of cypress designed to withstand the water if it got wet. Beauvoir (the retirement home of Jefferson Davis, given to him by my great-aunt’s sister-in-law) survived this storm, although it took a battering, and still commands the beachfront. There was NOTHING wrong with those homes and nothing stupid about their location. Some acts of nature are simply too ferocious and too freakish for anything short of concrete pilings to withstand, and God help us if we turn that beautiful beachfront that He has given us into a wall of concrete condos. Biloxians and Biloxi’s architecture could teach the rest of the world a good bit about how to survive these things. We’ve been doing it for generations.

So noted.

DARFUR UPDATE: As usual, alas, it’s bad news:

Darfur has fallen into anarchy, with army troops, pro-government tribal militias, bandits, anti-government rebels and AU peacekeepers all fighting one another. It’s a low key war, with the main objective being to rob, rape and kill civilians, or loot UN relief operations, or trying to stop the all the lawlessness. There are only about 7,000 AU peacekeepers, and, technically, they are only supposed to be observing, not protecting. Such is the chaos, that few countries are willing to offer more peacekeepers. Historically, this sort of widespread tribal warfare is nothing new. But in the past, news of the atrocities took a lot longer to get out to the rest of the world. Getting the news faster has not made it any easier to stop the violence. Since Arab Sudanese run Sudan, they have the rest of the Arab world to protect them in the UN, and make it difficult for sanctions or war crimes investigations to get anywhere. Officially, the Arab world denies that there are any Moslem-on-Moslem atrocities being committed by Sudanese Arabs.

Here’s a big Darfur roundup from AllThings2All.

BLOGGER-TURNED-WAR-CORRESPONDENT BILL ROGGIO has an article on the Iraqi elections in the new Weekly Standard. Read the whole thing. He’s also got a followup post on his blog. And here’s a Flash presentation of photos he took.

ROBERT NOVAK is leaving CNN for FoxNews: I think he’ll be happier there.

JOHN SCALZI says we need more entry-level science fiction:

And this is the point: Fantasy literature has numerous open doors for the casual reader. How many does SF literature have? More importantly, how many is SF perceived to have? Any honest follower of the genre has to admit the answers are “few” and “even fewer than that,” respectively. The most accessible SF we have today is stuff that was written decades ago by people who are now dead. You all know I love me that Robert Heinlein as much as anyone, but why does my local bookstore still have more of his books than anyone else’s in the genre? The most effective modern “open doors” to SF are media tie-ins, which have their own set of problems: They’re fenced in grazing areas that don’t encourage hopping into the larger SF universe, and also, no one but unreconstituted geeks want to be seen on the subway with a Star Wars or Star Trek book in tow.

Good point. And, by the way, I finished Ghost Brigades (late) last night. I’ll post a review later today.

MIKE KREMPASKY says there’s good news at the FEC.

TYPEPAD IS BACK UP: It’s to their credit that an outage like this is rare enough to be big news.

UPDATE: Slashdot reports that this is a symptom of how the growth of the blogosphere is straining data centers.

HUGH HEWITT thinks the non-reauthorization of the Patriot Act is a big disaster. I’m not so sure.

UPDATE: There’s some unhappiness at The Corner, too. And there’s also a sense that Bush has lost a lot of legislative battles lately: Harriet Miers, the McCain Amendment, the Patriot Act renewal, etc.

Well, he has. The Miers nomination was a mistake from day one. The McCain Amendment and Patriot Act renewal defeats — which I’m not convinced are bad things in and of themselves — are defeats for Bush, but even if you think they’re bad on the merits, they’re certainly proof that despite claims of impending fascism we actually live in a country where checks and balances work. The Administration (which won far too easily on the Patriot Act the first time around, in my opinion) can’t be charged with running roughshod over its opponents, and only an idiot can claim that we live under the iron rule of the Bushitler regime. The system may or may not be producing the right answers, and that’s often hard to tell until later anyway, but it’s working as designed. Meanwhile, in light of these losses the White House might want to look to its legislative operation, and ask if it needs revamping. I think the answer is yes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Kathryn Diamond emails:

I think President Bush recognizes he has weak support among the Republicans in the Senate.

One specific, concrete example is John Bolton’s nomination. The conduct of the Republicans in the Senate ranged from feckless to disgraceful.

And, now that Bolton is proving to be a very effective UN ambassador, we need to worry about the Senate Republicans’ judgment.

I believe the Senate Republicans fear the media more than their local constituents. Or fear the national media might make them look foolish in front of their local constituents.

Good point.

STEM CELL UPDATE: This report says that “If South Korean cloning hero Hwang Woo-suk falls from grace in what could turn out to be one of the biggest scientific frauds in years, he might take U.S. stem cell researcher Gerald Schatten with him.” On the other hand, this report says that Hwang is standing by his research: “South Korea’s best known scientist said Friday he stands by his breakthrough stem cell research despite a barrage of fraud allegations, and vowed to prove the findings within days.”

Meanwhile, here’s an article from Slate by Daniel Engber on the investigation of scientific fraud. And here’s a piece I wrote a while back that looks at some past experience in the area.

ANDREW SULLIVAN says he never called being wrapped in the Israeli flag “torture.” But in this post he listed it under the heading of “Anti-Islamic Torture,” along with a variety of nasty behaviors with nothing to suggest it’s not of the same order. And see this post, too. He says he doesn’t think fake menstrual blood is torture, but he sure has paid a lot of attention to the subject in that context for someone who doesn’t.

Sullivan’s heart has been in the right place on the issue, most of the time, at least, but his head has been sorely absent. Nor do I understand why he’s thought it useful to pick at me regularly, as opposed to, say, the bloggers who actually support torture.

Perhaps he’ll improve. As others have noted, “Tomorrow is always another day at andrewsullivan.com.”

UPDATE: James Taranto emails: “I wonder where Sullivan gets the idea that I ‘concede’ he never said ‘fake menstrual blood’–i.e., red ink–is torture. I did use the phrase ‘”torture” and “abuse,”‘ but I certainly didn’t indicate that I thought he made the distinction, and indeed my impression is that he uses the terms more or less interchangeably. Oh well, go figure.” Or not.

A DELL BATTERY RECALL: Happily, my Inspiron 700m isn’t affected, but a lot of models are. Applel and HP notebook computers have recalls, too.

JOHN HINDERAKER IS QUESTIONING THE TIMING of the New York Times’ story on NSA surveillance — and calling for an investigation of the leaks, and prosecution of the leakers. “Under the Plame precedent, this case is a no-brainer. The intelligence officials who leaked to the Times should be identified, criminally prosecuted, and sent to prison.”

UPDATE: Peter Schramm: “There will be more on this, you can count on it. ‘

OP-EDS FOR PROFIT: A disappointing story about Doug Bandow and the ubiquitous Jack Abramoff. I’ve had PR people offer me considerable sums to write op-eds, going back before InstaPundit, but I’ve always declined. That fact, and the fact that the topics in question weren’t political in an obviously partisan sense, makes me think that there’s a lot more of this going on out there.

UPDATE: Jonathan Adler reports similar experiences.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Ronald Stack emails:

I used to work at a PR/public affairs agency. Soliciting op-eds, letters to the editor, etc. in support of the client’s position was SOP. We only solicited people who we determined actually to support our side, because (a) they could withstand follow-ups from reporters and (b) they didn’t ask for money.

Note that in many cases the authors were public officials or others who could not legally accept payment. Note also that the agency would often draft the articles that were to be submitted under the supporter’s byline. The client paid us for those, but we did not pay the supporter.

Despite “PR ethics” being a classic oxymoron, my recollection is that we saw a difference between renting someone’s expertise (and paying them as we would any freelancer) and renting their prominence or reputation.

Indeed. I’ve written about that phenomenon here. And Rand Simberg has questions.

THE ROLL CALL VOTE will be useful in 2006:

For the second time in as many months, the House rejected calls for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq with a vote Friday that Democrats said was politically driven and designed by Republicans to limit debate on the war.

In a 279-109 vote, the GOP-controlled House approved a resolution saying the chamber is committed “to achieving victory in Iraq” and that setting an “artificial timetable” would be “fundamentally inconsistent with achieving victory.”

Democrats voted against the resolution by a roughly two-to-one margin, underlining splits within the party over alternatives to President Bush’s Iraq war policies.

Stay tuned for the political ads. Is this starting to feel like a setup?

MORE FAKE NEWS? Well, sort of.

ATRIOS, OF COURSE, has been warning people about this for years. But no one listened, and now it’s too late.

TYPEPAD UPDATE: Anil Dash emails:

I saw your post on TypePad’s downtime, and since I work with the team, I just wanted to send you a quick update. We’re verifying all the data before we restore it, and just put up the older pages in the interim while that happens.

Once we’re sure we can turn everything back on, we should have the application running by 1pm PST. If any recent posts don’t show up on the blog pages then, people can republish their blogs and they’ll be current.

Thanks for saying you’ll assume we’ll have it fixed — that’s not always the default assumption people in the blogosphere make. :)

Yeah, I know, everybody’s a critic. . . .

THE PATRIOT ACT REAUTHORIZATION HAS FAILED:

The 52-47 roll call by which the Senate voted to reject reauthorization of several provisions of the USA Patriot Act. Sixty votes were needed to overcome a filibuster of the bill.

Voting “yes” were 2 Democrats and 50 Republicans.

Voting “no” were 41 Democrats, 5 Republicans and one independent.

Follow the link to see how people voted. I think this is a good decision. While my earlier fears about the Patriot Act haven’t really been borne out, my earlier instinct that this was a bureaucratic wish-list masquerading as antiterrorism seems to have been well-founded. Are these things necessary? I don’t know, but the proponents of the bill haven’t met their burden of proof.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Orin Kerr:

For those of us who think of the Patriot Act as actual legislation rather than a symbol of the Bush Administration, this is rather puzzling stuff. The dirty little secret about the Patriot Act is that only about 3% of the Act is controversial, and only about a third of that 3% is going to expire on December 31st. Further, much of the reauthorization actually puts new limits on a number of the controversial non-sunsetting provisions, and some of the sunsetting provisions increased privacy protections. As a result, it’s not immediately obvious to me whether we’ll have greater civil liberties on January 1, 2006 if the Patriot Act is reauthorized or if it is allowed to expire.

The Patriot Act’s supporters, and its detractors, could both do a better job of arguing their cases. But the burden of proof is on its supporters and, as I say, they haven’t met it. Of course, I didn’t think they had met it the first time around, when it passed with almost unanimous bipartisan support.

TYPEPAD IS CURRENTLY BELLY-UP, which is why you’re not able to reach your favorite TypePad blogs. I assume they’ll have it fixed as soon as they can.

THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR: The Insta-Daughter got one of these gadgets for her birthday and it’s surprisingly smart. This would have been an amazing example of artificial intelligence a few years ago. Now it’s a kid’s toy.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

HOW TO SAVE MONEY: Over at Asymmetrical Information, Winterspeak and Megan McArdle offer a bunch of cheap and easy things to cook.

SOME POST-ELECTION THOUGHTS from Iraq, at Iraq the Model.

JIM BENNETT on the Sydney riots: “Democracy, immigration, multiculturalism. Pick any two.”