MARK IN MEXICO is doing more reporting on events in Oaxaca.

HERE ARE SOME THOUGHTS ON ROADSIDE SURVIVAL KITS, from SayUncle. And there’s a lengthy discussion thread on the topic at Knoxviews. I carry something similar to what SayUncle lists — and I highly recommend including tampons or kotex, good for treating wounds as well as the obvious, and a roll of toilet paper, good for, well, the obvious. We keep some “Mainstay Emergency Ration bars” and water in the car too — advantage being that they are so unappetizing that we’ll never eat them unless it’s a real emergency.

At the very least you should carry something like this or this in your car. None of that will prepare you for a James Kim kind of situation, though,

But it’s worth noting that your car itself has a lot of things you can work with, including gas in the tank, lines, and carbueretor (if it has a carbueretor). That should let you build a big attention-getting fire. I’ve heard of people freezing to death on a broken snowmobile with a nearly full tank of gas — that kind of thing shouldn’t happen, and it when it does happen it’s usually because people, under stress, don’t think clearly. That’s where mental preparation is as important as buying supplies. (This is a good place to start.) More on the subject can be found here.

UPDATE: “What it means to be a father: More on James Kim. Plus, some outdoor survival advice from Popular Mechanics.

THE TRUTH ABOUT TRANS-FAT:

I simply do not believe that the so-called health side is really composed of people who are solicitous about everyone else’s health. I can’t prove it, but my intuition is that all the strength on the “health” side of this war comes not from people who really care whether other people are healthy, but from people who don’t like having to see fat people. They are concerned about their own aesthetic pleasures, and they think fat is ugly.

Plus, in a world where feeling superior is politically incorrect, it’s important to have someone to feel superior to. That said, I do think there’s something to the Nina Planck approach, but the legislative approach is idiotic.

STANDING UP FOR free speech in Turkey.

BIG DAMN HEROES: The Firefly convention was cancelled, but nonetheless: “Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Mark Sheppard, Jonathan Woodward, Christina Hendricks and Adam Baldwin have all turned up and are partying with fans at the hotel bar into the night at the cancelled convention Flanvention. These actors? I don’t have the words.”

More here.

BLACKBERRY ORPHANS: “As hand-held email devices proliferate, they are having an unexpected impact on family dynamics: Parents and their children are swapping roles. Like a bunch of teenagers, some parents are routinely lying to their kids, sneaking around the house to covertly check their emails and disobeying house rules established to minimize compulsive typing. The refusal of parents to follow a few simple rules is pushing some children to the brink. They are fearful that parents will be distracted by emails while driving, concerned about Mom and Dad’s shortening attention spans and exasperated by their parents’ obsession with their gadgets.”

They don’t call it the “CrackBerry” for nothing. On the other hand, here’s an argument that the Blackberry is really pro-family. Like all technology, it depends on how you use it. . . .

EBENEZER SCROOGE: Pioneer environmentalist!

JUST SAW MY FIRST EPISODE of NUMB3RS, and I liked it a lot. Any show that boosts math is cool, and this one also has Navi Rawat, who’s likely to do more to make math look cool than anything since, well, ever.

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs emails that Season one and Season Two are both out on DVD already. That’s fast! I guess the TV folks have caught on to the Sarah Pullman trend: “has anyone else observed the phenomenon of non-TV watchers who will spend hours watching shows on DVD and think that it’s somehow morally superior, since you avoid the commercials?” Heh. It’s just another marketing niche. Of course, for perfect Sarah Pullman synergy you need to be watching this, I guess.

HEDGE FUND OPERATORS trading on political information. (Via Bainbridge).

HEATH SHULER GOES TO WASHINGTON: Mike Gibson reports.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: “The Department of Homeland Security recently warned stock traders and bankers that their online systems may be vulnerable to an al-Qaida cyberattack. DHS should heed its own warning. Remarkably, one of the nation’s most vulnerable networks is run by DHS headquarters, thanks to rapid turnover of cyberchiefs at the young agency. Last October, the inspector general’s office reported that computer systems at the Customs and Border Protection bureau and the Secret Service are vulnerable to unauthorized penetration. Among other things, the DHS-controlled agencies failed to install software that can patch security holes.” That’s comforting.

SEGOLENE ROYAL, the next President of France?

HOLE. SHOVEL. DIGGING. A.P. vs. the bloggers, again.

Plus, Mark Steyn piles on.

UPDATE: More thoughts here: “The AP won’t produce its star source, Jamil Hussein, the policeman that neither the Iraqi Ministry of Interior nor CENTCOM can find record of, any of the immolated bodies or their names, the names and credentials of the local Iraqis the AP used as reporters of the incident and the AP’s follow-up, the purported conveniently located afterward anonymous witnesses, nor any Sunni leaders who are aware of the claimed incident.” Plus, a Nixon comparison.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Mark Tapscott reports:

That amendment requiring the Pentagon to publish an annual report grading anonymous earmarks inserted by Members of Congress into defense spending bills was defeated in the House this afternoon on a 330-70 vote.

The vote is among the last official acts of the Republican majority in the House and ends an effort in the departing Congress to force Members to put their names on earmarks they sponsor.

Earmarks direct executive departments and agencies to spend tax dollars on projects without competitive bidding or other normal processes designed to prevent waste, fraud and corruption.

Now-former Rep. Randy Cunningham, R-CA, pled guilty earlier this year to multiple counts of accepting bribes from a defense contractor in return for earmarks in military spending bills.

A reason to miss the GOP majority just a bit less — though opposition to reform here is, as usual, distressingly bipartisan. Nancy Pelosi, along with many, many Democrats, voted against the bill.

COFFEE WITH RICHARD PERLE: “The day Baghdad fell we should have handed political authority to Iraqis.”

MORE COOKWARE! Bill Quick has posted his weekend cooking thread, and it’s a guide to all kinds of kitchen stuff.

Between that post and this one you should be covered, though people are still emailing me about cookware.

DONALD RUMSFELD SAYS GOODBYE:

In a question-and-answer session, he was asked about his best day and his worst day as defense secretary.

“Clearly, the worst day was Abu Ghraib, seeing what went on there and feeling so deeply sorry that that happened,” he said without hesitation, referring to the scandal in the spring of 2004 that triggered worldwide condemnation and prompted him to twice offer his resignation to President Bush at that time. Bush rejected those offers.

“I guess my best day, I don’t know, may be a week from Monday,” he said with a big grin, referring to the fact that his successor, Robert Gates, is scheduled to take over at the Pentagon on December 18.

In prepared remarks to his audience, Rumsfeld predicted that the period since he took office in January 2001 would eventually be seen as one of “enormous challenge and historic consequence.”

Asked how he wants history to remember him, he said simply, “Better than the local press.”

I think that’s likely. More information, and video, here.

BILL ROGGIO POSTS a blog report from Fallujah.

MAKING SPACE LAW at the Space Law Probe blog.

A SECOND AMENDMENT ARGUMENT IN D.C.:

At issue in the case before a federal appeals court is whether the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms” applies to all people or only to “a well regulated militia.” The Bush administration has endorsed individual gun-ownership rights but the Supreme Court has never settled the issue.

If the dispute makes it to the high court, it would be the first case in nearly 70 years to address the amendment’s scope. The court disappointed gun owner groups in 2003 when it refused to take up a challenge to California’s ban on assault weapons.

In the Washington, D.C., case, a lower-court judge told six city residents in 2004 that they did not have a constitutional right to own handguns. The plaintiffs include residents of high-crime neighborhoods who want guns for protection.

Congress has also repeatedly said that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to arms. (Via Cato@Liberty, which has links to more information.) Some articles of mine on the Second Amendment can be found here and here. And this piece is specifically on the militia issue. Many more law review articles on the subject can be found here. There’s also this recent podcast interview with Dave Kopel.

THIS WEEK’S Blog Week in Review podcast is up, featuring me, Austin Bay, and Tammy Bruce.

A LOOK AT “the not-so-infallible AP.” “Unfortunately, and repeatedly of late, this behemoth has not only been getting it wrong – but increasingly refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing. Instead, acting more like a politician or the mega-corporation that it is, the AP crew spins, obfuscates and attacks. Now they’re at it again in Iraq.”

JIMMY CARTER CHARGED WITH PLAGIARISM:

Ambassador Dennis Ross, a former Mideast envoy and FOX News foreign affairs analyst, claims maps commissioned and published by him were improperly republished in Carter’s book.

“I think there should be a correction and an attribution,” Ross said. “These were maps that never existed, I created them.”

After Ross saw the maps in Carter’s book, he told his publisher he wanted a correction.

When asked if the former president ripped him off, Ross replied: “it sure looks that way.”

Er, if stealing maps counts as plagiarism, anyway. More here. (Via Gateway Pundit).

SHINY: “Like Capt. Mal Reynolds stumbling in after a bar fight, the short-lived but much beloved sci-fi series Firefly will soon make an unexpected return, not as a TV show, but as a massively multiplayer online game.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

Suffice to say that when the Democrats allege incompetence because we are not yet victorious, they forget we have lost 50 soldiers a month since September 11, not 8,000 as was true of every month during World War II. And it is much easier to carpet bomb Tokyo, as horrendously difficult as that was, than to go into Fallujah and sort out the terrorists from the “innocent” under the glare of a hostile globalized media, and a disunited American public, some of whom believe that Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore should be consulted for their superior wisdom.

I haven’t engaged much in the parlor game of identifying mistakes in the occupation, because none of them (and there were many) reached a magnitude of those in World War II (e.g., daylight bombing without fighter escort in 1942-3, intelligence failures about the hedgerows, surprise at the Bulge, etc) or Korea (surprise at the Yalu). Nor were any fatal to our cause, despite the ‘disbanding’ of the army, Abu Ghraib, etc. If there were any serious blunders, they concerned the sense of hesitation that gave our enemies confidence—the sudden departure of Gen. Franks, the pullback from first Fallujah, the reprieve given Sadr, etc. In other words, once we were in a war, whatever public downside there was to using too much force was far outweighed by losing our sense of control and power, and ceding momentum to the terrorists. So we can learn from that, and begin again cracking down hard on the insurgents before calling for more troops.

Read the whole thing.