SARAH BOXER UPDATE: JEFF JARVIS DELIVERS A WITHERING RESPONSE to Daniel Okrent over the Times’ publication of unfounded and potentially life-threatening speculation about Iraqi bloggers.

JON HENKE WONDERS where Howard Kurtz is getting his numbers. I hope he’s not getting them from New York Times editorials!

YESTERDAY, I recommended this book as a partial cure for journalistic ignorance concerning matters military so as to avoid embarrassing mistakes like calling an armored personnel carrier a “tank.” But this correction from The New York Times suggests that the problem is worse than I realized. Note especially the last sentence:

An editorial on Monday about the new jumbo Airbus misstated the weight of the airplane. Its takeoff weight, fully loaded with passengers, freight and fuel, is hundreds of thousands of pounds heavier than the Boeing 747, depending on the configurations, not 30,000 tons heavier. It’s an aircraft, not an aircraft carrier.

Ouch! And the truly colossal weight-error (30,000 tons is 60 million pounds) makes me wonder how much I can trust their numbers on Social Security. (Thanks to reader David Gerstman for the pointer).

UPDATE: Reader Brad Spencer recommends this book by John Paulos, instead: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences.

INTERESTING ARTICLE on progress in nanomedicine, in The Washington Post.

THE SILENCE OF THE NAYSAYERS:

Skeptics of President Bush’s attempt to bring democracy to Iraq have been largely silent since Iraqis enthusiastically turned out for Sunday’s elections.

Billionaire Bush-basher George Soros and left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore were among critics of the administration’s Iraq policy who had no comment after millions of Iraqis went to the polls in their nation’s first free elections in decades.

Heh. (Via the Democracy Project).

UPDATE: On the other hand, here’s news from Fallujah.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ouch. Now that’s gotta hurt.

DARFUR UPDATE: This editorial cartoon from the new D.C. Examiner says it all, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, the folks at iAbolish.com are telling the U.N. “don’t hide from genocide.”

A TECHCENTRALSTATION EXCLUSIVE: G.I. Joe’s P.O.W. diary!

UPDATE: At the risk of blowing my own horn, I have to note that InstaPundit has featured actionfigureblogging for a long time, going all the way back to October of 2001. And why not? This war will be won on the rec-room floors of suburbia!

I PICKED ON HOMELAND SECURITY A LOT for a while, then I just kind of gave up. But Homeland Security is still a joke, and the Bush Administration needs to do something about it. If there’s a major attack, all this stuff will be out there, and they won’t have the excuse that it never happened before.

I realize that organizing all those bureaucratic functions into a new department is hard — which is why I thought it was a lousy idea to begin with — but having decided to go that route, the Administration has to devote the effort to making it work. And Congress, which overwhelmingly supported the move, needs to help, too.

UPDATE: An example of Congressional failure, here.

JIM GERAGHTY: “Is my sense of what is newsworthy off, or did the insurgent’s bold ‘capturing G.I. Joe plan’ deserve a little more play than two sentences on page A18 of the Washington Post?”

I don’t think it’s Jim’s news-sense that’s off, here.

THIS MORNING, I BLOGGED AN ELEPHANT IN MY PAJAMAS: Tanzanian reader Nic Steenekamp sends this elephant picture, taken with a Sony.

HONOR THY FATHER — OR ELSE! Europe needs to pay more attention to this kind of thing. Sadly, the paralysis seems to continue.

AUSTIN BAY on the Iraqi elections:

I spent the summer of 2004 on military duty in Iraq, and the January elections were a constant subject of discussion. Iraqis told me the election was their “big chance,” the opportunity to escape the legacy of dictatorship. One Shia I met in Baghdad told me to beware of “your American view of us.” He insisted that “you divide us in ways we do not divide ourselves.”

He attacked the “American” view that Iraq’s Shia, Sunni and Kurd would inevitably clash along ethnic and religious lines. “We are more nationalistic than you think,” he warned me. “You will see that in the election.”

Another Iraqi (a well-heeled Sunni) told me he agreed with that assessment. He said Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his terrorists would fail to ignite a Shia-Sunni war. “We have a more secular tradition than other Arab countries,” he said. Neither man thought elections were magic — they were an opportunity, not a guarantee.

Read the whole thing. Austin has further thoughts on his blog.

SHOT DOWN OVER TIKRIT: Major Matt Mason.

UPDATE: Tim Blair: “We were warned that Bush would turn Iraq into a puppet regime, but none of us suspected that he’d use actual puppets.”

HAVING KEPT HIS MOUTH SHUT on things he knew were true, it would behoove Eason Jordan not to blather about things that he doesn’t know are true. Really.

BEST TAKE on Howard Dean’s candidacy for DNC chairman, from The New York Times:

“I think it’s a scream,” Mr. Bond said.

Heh.

DAVID AARONOVITCH: “Now it’s time for the war critics to move on.”

HEH: “9 names the UN would PREFER we give to the ‘not genocide’ in Darfur.”

PATRICK RUFFINI and W.C. Varones are unhappy with a couple of my blogads.

UPDATE: Reader Patrick Songsanand emails: “As a regular reader of your blog, I must say i agree with your critics about accepting blogads from the UN or its related agencies.” Well, they’re not criticizing me for taking the ads, they’re criticizing the ads.

But I have a very broad ad-acceptance policy, for two reasons. (1) The money does more good in my hands than in the U.N. Foundation’s or George Soros’s; and (2) If I only took ads from people I agreed with, soon critics would say that my opinions were following the ads, rather than the other way around.

The Spirit of America ad, though, is a freebie.

HOW TO SAVE YOUR OWN LIFE: Donald Sensing offers some useful advice.

MY “CULT OF THE IPOD” OBSERVATION is being echoed by USA Today:

With its high-tech decor and clubby feel, Apple’s flagship store here doesn’t look like a creepy cult headquarters. But there’s some kind of mind-noodling going on: Everyone exiting its glass doors is ready to spout the gospel of iPod. . . .

“With the iPod, the Buddha is in the details. The finish and feel are such that you want to caress it.

“And when you do, wonderful things happen.”

Well, yeah. What I’ve noticed — echoing an observation made in the article — is that when I listen in public places women often come up and ask what I’m listening to. I guess if I were single that would be a big selling point. But then, people often join a cult to meet women, right?

NEWSWEEK: Months behind The Belmont Club!

Which is why I’m more inclined to rely on The Belmont Club, despite the occasional complaint that I’m not paying enough attention to Newsweek. Especially as The Belmont Club also explains what Newsweek missed.

COMING UP NEXT: “Islamic Hostage Barbie.” But will the media fall for it again?

Good thing they have editors and fact-checkers and stuff.

UPDATE: Photographic evidence of Osama bin Laden’s capture!

And there’s this exclusive report: “Zarqawi quits al Qaeda, joins C.O.B.R.A.”

Heh.

Reader Steve Smallshaw emails: “Is it just me, or does everyone find it both comical and reassuring that the terrorists have been reduced to ‘kidnapping’ action figures and pawning them off as the real thing?”

Yes. And I find it comical — but not reassuring — that so many big media organizations fell for it.

Unfortunately, as Power Line informs us, it’s worse than we thought!

I blame Evil Bert!

MORE: A big-media report on the hoax.

STILL MORE: Cool, Charles-Johnson-style animated graphic overlay here. [LATER: Jordan Golson emails that the image is originally from here.]

Heh. More press coverage here.

And reader Mark Dunn asks: “Any bets on whether Poynter picks it up?”

But Cody will be avenged. The action-figure-American community sticks together.

LAST UPDATE TO THIS POST: Behind the curve, The Guardian is sucked in, repeating the bogus story with a dateline of 2/2.

TO CELEBRATE HIS BLOGGIVERSARY, Bill Ardolino offers the year in pictures.

AN INTERESTING PHOTOBLOG from Jim Landry.

MY EARLIER POST on Confederate nostalgia and neo-secessionist movements generated a lot of email. Several emailers noted that secessionist sentiment isn’t limited to neo-Confederates, sending links to articles like this one from the L.A. Weekly:

Count me among those who woke up on November 3 and thought: secession!

My turn toward the idea that California should secede from the Union was based on some bedrock logic that my father used to admonish me with as he suspiciously eyed my derelict teenage friends: You can tell a lot about a person by the company he keeps. That Wednesday morning, I looked at the sea of red in between the coasts and in the South, and I listened to the hypocritical crowing by misogynists and homophobes about values and strength and “the real America” and thought: If these were my friends, I’d try to get new ones. . . . When I was arguing the merits of seceding recently, a friend finally said, “But, but, we live in America.” I thought — we do? I live in California.

Sigh. Robert E. Lee couldn’t have said it better. Another vein was that things like the Confederate flag aren’t necessarily a sign of neo-secessionist sympathies: many people in the South see the flag as an emblem of regional pride, rather than as an endorsement of Confederate ideology. That’s certainly true, and after getting that email I noticed the bumpersticker pictured at right, which certainly doesn’t seem to embody much in the way of nostalgia for the Old South.

That said, I’m not a big fan — though no one who displays Communist paraphernalia, however allegedly ironic the display, has any room to criticize the badges of an obsolete and murderous regime — and it’s not the sort of thing I’d endorse. But the point of my post was the absurdity, and worse, of neo-secessionist thinking, and the oddity that some of the more lunatic fringes of allegedly libertarian thought are so enamored of the Confederacy. Whatever you say about the Confederate States of America, it was no libertarian paradise.

UPDATE: Another reader notes that it would be just part of California seceding . . . .