PREPARING FOR BIOTERROR: I certainly hope we never need to be prepared, but I suspect that it’s a matter of when more than if. Plus, some of these preparations might be useful in the case of natural epidemics. This is certainly another of those areas where it would be nice if we could trust international organizations more.

JEFF JARVIS: “So I took my unsuspecting teenage son to see Woody Allen’s Scoop and here’s the funniest part: The entire audience was geriatric. There wasn’t a person in the theater — in a decent crowd, by the way — who wasn’t under 50 and most won’t see 60 again. . . . Woody Allen is the newspaper of film directors: His audience is dying off.”

The audience reaction seems lukewarm. The good news for Woody: At least people are living longer!

CARNIVAL-O-RAMA: This week’s Blawg Review is up, and it’s hosted by Jeremy Blachman, author of Anonymous Lawyer. There’s also this week’s Haveil Havalim, and Radiology Grand Rounds. Plus, the Carnival of Cordite, and, naturally, the Carnival of the Cats.

And, of course, don’t miss the Carnival of the Recipes!

Don’t miss all the carnivals collected at BlogCarnival.com.

I’M NOT COMFORTED BY THIS NEWS:

The first commercial flight in a decade departed Mogadishu’s newly reopened international airport Sunday, demonstrating how Islamic militants have pacified the once-anarchic capital and much of southern Somalia. . . . Now, Islamic militiamen are guarding the airport for commercial passengers, said Sheik Muqtar Robow, deputy defense chief for the Islamic group.

Somalia looks like a defeat for the good guys.

JOHN MCCAIN’S SON has joined the Marines.

SO IN THE MAIL the other day I got this book by Jacob Hacker, which looks like a testbed for 2008 Democratic domestic policy themes. The question is, would we be better off if the U.S. labor market looked more like, say, France’s? Less risk for employees, yes, but . . . .

I wonder what Gene Sperling would say.

CHESTER TRIES TO DECIDE WHETHER TO GO TO LAW SCHOOL: Much commentary ensues, including this item at the WSJ law blog.

My take: Now that a standard B.A. is worth about what a high school diploma used to be — an entry ticket, and no more — a law degree is probably the closest graduate analog to what a liberal arts B.A. used to be. It’s good for a lot of things besides law. But, like a liberal arts degree, it’s not for everyone. An M.B.A. does something similar, though perhaps a bit narrower, but does it in two years.

But be sure you scroll down to read the comments of Tucker Max, especially the part about student loan debt. I regularly see students who blithely take on a lot of debt in school, and are then surprised at how it limits their choices later. Student Loan debt isn’t always bad, but you should take it very seriously.

Finally, while I know some lawyers who are happy, most aren’t. It’s possible, of course, that they’re the kind of people who weren’t really happy before they became lawyers — not surprisingly, the field has an attraction to people who like to complain. But it’s also true that older lawyers seem to enjoy it more — and to have enjoyed it more when they were new at it — than today’s lawyers. I think the practice of law is substantially less enjoyable than it used to be, even if it’s sometimes more lucrative. That said, I actually liked practicing law when I worked for Dewey, Ballantine. But if I were still there today, I might not like it as much.

MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE WE’RE DRIVING FASTER?

American drivers are reporting fewer crashes to their insurance companies than ever before, and nobody knows precisely why.

Fewer claims mean record profits for auto insurers like Allstate Corp. and State Farm Insurance Cos. . . .

But behind the profit boon lies a mystery: Insurers can’t explain the drop in auto claims. And while theories abound, the lack of a clear, identifiable reason is unsettling in an industry that relies on sophisticated statistical modeling to predict its claim payouts. Those predictions are used to set premium rates, to decide whom to insure and to provide earnings guidance to Wall Street.

Or maybe people yapping on cellphones are worse drivers, but that’s offset by a reduced frequency of road rage because they’re too oblivious to get mad. . . .

(Via NewsAlert).

THIS IS INTERESTING: “College-age populations of the Midwest and Northeast are shrinking, while those in the South and West are rising.” Read the whole thing, and see the map. Upside: “North Dakota will give you a hell of a deal.”

PHIL BOWERMASTER has more thoughts on modern health and longevity.

AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY at the Los Angeles Times.

MORE ON THE SEATTLE SHOOTINGS:

The man suspected in a fatal shooting rampage hid behind a potted plant in a Jewish charity’s foyer and forced his way through a security door by holding a gun to a 13-year-old girl’s head, the police chief said Saturday. . . .

Haq, a Muslim, told authorities he was angered by the war in Iraq and U.S. military cooperation with Israel.

“He pointedly blamed the Jewish people for all of these problems,” Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said at a news conference Saturday.

According to a statement of probable cause, Haq told a 911 dispatcher: “These are Jews and I’m tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East.”

Muhammad Ullah, a close family friend and a senior member of a mosque founded in part by Haq’s father, described Haq as a quiet loner with few friends.

In a statement, the Islamic Center of the Tri-Cities offered condolences to the shooting victims and said “we disassociate this act from our Islamic teachings and beliefs.”

As they should, of course. I notice some blogs complaining about the fact that area police are now guarding mosques as well as synagogues. That seems to me to be a wise, though likely unnecessary, precaution. The chance that someone will shoot up a mosque in retaliation here is low, but if it happened it would make things much worse. It seems smart to try to ensure that it doesn’t.

KEVIN DRUM: “The fight against Islamic jihadism is essentially a vast, global counterinsurgency, something that the United States is lousy at. But we’d better get good at it fast, and the first step is to discard the fatuous notion that more violence is the obvious answer when the current amount of violence isn’t doing the job. History suggests very strongly that the truth is exactly the opposite.”

Well, it’s not so much a question of more or less violence as it is a question of applying the proper amount of violence to the proper people. And if, as Kevin argues, the current amount of violence isn’t doing the job, that actually isn’t evidence that either more or less would be better.

While I think that Drum’s comparison with U.S. and Israeli strategy today with Soviet strategy in Afghanistan — if that’s what he means, which isn’t quite clear to me — is wrong, I think that his reference to “casual genocide” as the preferred strategy of pro-war people is pretty clear, and pretty absurd. Yeah, you see that kind of thing in blog comments sometime, but I think most people support current U.S. military efforts because they fear that ignoring the problem is likely to produce more death and violence over the long term, not less. (Hence the frequent invocations of 1936 and 1938). That’s certainly my view.

In the 1990s, we followed the “ignore it and maybe it’ll go away” strategy. As I’ve noted before, I can’t blame people for that — it was the strategy that I favored, too, based on what I knew at the time, as I thought that if we waited Islamic Jihadism would collapse under the weight of its own idiocy. But it clearly didn’t work. I don’t know whether the current strategy is correct or not, though it seems to me that so long as we give Syria and Iran (and for that matter, Saudi Arabia) a pass, we’re never going to get much of a handle on this problem. But Drum’s post is notable for what it lacks — a specific proposal beyond saying that we’d better get better at this stuff fast. I agree, of course, but . . . .

Neither Kevin or I is a military expert, but I do know that counterinsurgencies, even the most successful ones, are long, drawn-out, messy, and often lacking in obvious signposts of success for most of their duration. So if this is a global counterinsurgency against terror, and it looks long, drawn-out, messy, etc., well then that’s hardly a surprise.

Still, so as not to fail at making positive proposals myself I’ll make one suggestion: The real problem in the war on terror, I think, is a relatively small number of terror-backers in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Why aren’t we waging unconventional warfare against them? They undoubtedly have toes we can step on in the form of business interests, overseas accounts, vacation homes, etc. Would we make more progress by targeting those sorts of things, rather than fighting their cannon fodder in the field? If I recall correctly, a shift to that strategy was what ended the Philippine insurgency a century ago.

But I’m no military expert, so there may be good reasons why we’re not doing this. Or we may, in fact, be doing it and it just may be under the radar, though I kind of doubt that.

UPDATE: I think that Hugh Hewitt is too hard on Kevin. I don’t think that Drum was ascribing ineptitude to U.S. troops, but rather disapproving of the overall strategy. But I could be wrong.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kevin responds.

MORE: Related thoughts from Bill Quick. And a column on the general subject from Mark Steyn. “In Iraq, the leviathan has somehow managed to give the impression that what previous mid-rank powers would have regarded as a little light colonial policing has left it stretched dangerously thin and bogged down in an almighty quagmire. Even if it were only lamebrain leftist media spin, the fact that it’s accepted by large numbers of Americans and huge majorities of Europeans is a reminder that in free societies a military of unprecedented dominance is not the only source of power. More importantly, significant proportions of this nation’s enemies also believe the spin. In April 2003 was Baby Assad nervous that he’d be next? You bet. Is he nervous now?”

I REMEMBER BUMPER STICKERS IN THE 1980S saying that “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.” Now people are saying that Iraq is Vietnam. Jim Hoft looks at some statistics and sees a pretty big difference.

TIGERHAWK HAS THOUGHTS ON PARENTING. They overlap with the podcast we did with James Lileks and Cathy Seipp (available here with nifty new easier-to-use player) and with some things I wrote here.

And here (via The Corner) is a depressing article from Psychology Today.

JAMES JOYNER looks at blogger burnout.

“PHOTOS THAT DAMN HEZBOLLAH:”

THIS is the picture that damns Hezbollah. It is one of several, smuggled from behind Lebanon’s battle lines, showing that Hezbollah is waging war amid suburbia.

The images, obtained exclusively by the Sunday Herald Sun, show Hezbollah using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy-calibre weapons.

Dressed in civilian clothing so they can quickly disappear, the militants carrying automatic assault rifles and ride in on trucks mounted with cannon.

The photographs, from the Christian area of Wadi Chahrour in the east of Beirut, were taken by a visiting journalist and smuggled out by a friend. . . . The Melbourne man who smuggled the shots out of Beirut and did not wish to be named said he was less than 400m from the block when it was obliterated.

“Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets,” he said.

“Until the Hezbollah fighters arrived, it had not been touched by the Israelis. Then it was totally devastated.”

I guess that’s the kind of thing that explains why we’re not neutral in this conflict. (Via The Volokh Conspiracy). Meanwhile, I’m expecting an outcry any year now about Hezbollah’s violations of the laws of war. So far, though, there’s this: “The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it had not received agreement so far to its request to visit two Israeli soldiers abducted by Hezbollah guerrillas.”

UPDATE: Josh Trevino writes: “In a sane world, we would give thanks for Hezbollah’s failure to murder, regret what has happened in Qana, and reaffirm the justice of the Israeli war. But this is not a sane world: in place of right and wrong, too many appear to operate in a universe of strong and weak (or, one suspects, Jew and non-Jew) — and their sympathy goes to the weak, even if the weak is a shell of a polity married to a genocide-minded Muslim murder-front.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: “The strangest aspect of all this, of course, is that no one doubts that Israel killed the civilians in Qana accidentally while targeting terrorists, whereas, on the other hand, Hezbollah has launched hundreds of rockets into Israel for the sole and express purpose of killing civilians. Yet where is the outrage against Hezbollah? Why is it that Kofi Annan swings into action only to denounce Israel and to promote the course that Hezbollah wants, namely a time-out so that it can rebuild its terrorist infrastructure?”

Yeah, it’s almost like he’s on Hezbollah’s side, or something.

STILL MORE: Questioning the timing, and a shockingly professional and prompt Condi banner.

MORE STILL: Qana photos turn out to be staged. This is common in photojournalism from the region, I’m afraid, but Western press agencies eat it up.

JEREMY LOTT is defending Patrick Hynes.

CURSE and effect.

A GRAND JURY PROBES NEWS LEAKS at the NSA.

ARMED LIBERAL OFFERS ADVICE to “the people who are reading the news and thinking of heading to the gun store.”

BILL BRADLEY REPORTS that Arnold Schwarzenegger has weathered a perfect energy storm in California.

HEZBOLLAH AS AN ARMY OF DAVIDS: A troubling thought, to say the least.

The Cold War demonstrated that guerrillas can be beaten with difficulty on their own turf, but that they dry up pretty quickly when their outside sponsorship is gone. I suspect that that remains true.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Andy Roth reports big progress on his 435 districts, 435 blogs anti-pork initiative

We’re up to 78 blogs writing about 168 politicians.

That’s good news (you can see what still needs to be done by following the link), and you should feel free to get involved. Adopt a member of Congress — they’ll be glad you did! Or not.

RAND SIMBERG says the Bush Administration’s war on terror rhetoric doesn’t match the reality.