EXPLAINING THE LAW at The Belmont Club:

As currently interpreted the Geneva Conventions only apply to individuals bent on destroying America. Individuals who blow up elementary schools, kidnap children, attack churches and mosques, kill invalids in wheelchairs, plan attacks on skyscrapers in New York, behead journalists, detonate car bombs with children to camouflage their crime, or board jetliners with explosive shoes — all while wearing mufti or even women’s clothing — these are all considered “freedom fighters” of the most principled kind. They and they alone enjoy the protections of the Geneva Convention. As to Americans like Tucker and Menchaca or Israeli Gilad Shalit — or these fifteen British sailors for that matter, it is a case of “what Geneva Convention?”

This does seem to be the reaction of the “international community” — and, of course, of the press. You might almost think they preferred the one side over another.

Read this, too.

AN IMPORTANT BICENTENNIAL: “On March 25, 1807, two hundred years ago today, Parliament passed An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.”

ANOTHER REASON WHY REPUBLICANS should cheer the music industry’s troubles, and perhaps help them along by repealing the DMCA or something. As I’ve suggested in the past, though, I think their reflexive tendency to side with big business has gotten in the way of smart politics.

A LOOK AT IRAN’S ambitions.

COMBAT FATIGUE from women soldiers who were never in combat. Only at The New York Times! More here.

IS THE BLOGOSPHERE JUST one big bitch fest?

GLOBAL WARMING: A QUESTION OF MORALITY, or a question of science? I’m going with “science.”

WHY I DON’T HAVE COMMENTS ON MY BLOG: In part, because if I did, dishonest reporters would attribute to me things said by the commenters. In this case, comments on an entirely different blog . . . .

Jeez.

UPDATE: As if. What’s to discuss?

IN RESPONSE TO MY EARLIER DARFUR POST, a reader emails: “How is it that the war we aren’t involved in ended up fulfilling all the quagmire predictions of the one we did get into? Makes Iraq look like a rather professional, and practically downright humanitarian, gesture.”

WHERE THE MEN ARE AVERAGE, and the women are shy: “I only wish she had broken that down with a bit more detail – is it Matt Yglesias who speaks for the blue-collar worker with a high school degree? Does Ezra Klein speak for the young black males of the Dem party? Or are they all just average guys speaking for the average guy? Gosh, I feel like buying them all a beer or something while we talk college hoops.”

SOME MCCAIN-FEINGOLD BLOWBACK for John McCain’s campaign?

ASSESSING FRED THOMPSON’S CHANCES: “My prediction: The first reliable national polls after Thompson announces his candidacy will have Thompson roughly tied with Giuliani, and both of them at least 10 points ahead of McCain and Romney.”

DEAN BARNETT: “I’ve reached some conclusions about comment boards and the effect they’re having on our politics at large.”

THERE WAS ENOUGH INTEREST in my post on the Saturn Aura that I went back and shot a short video of the interior, and an exterior walkaround. Plus a bit of commentary. Really, though, the video doesn’t fully capture the surprising sense of quality that I felt, something that’s been sadly missing from a lot of GM vehicles in recent years., This was first rate.

And it turns out that Robert Scoble has an Aura, and likes it: “I even choose to drive it over Maryam’s new BMW quite a bit, which is a testament to how good a car it is (it’s a better freeway car than the BMW and the back seat has a LOT more room).”

THANKS TO THE MIRACLE OF “SCHEDULED POSTING” ON MOVABLE TYPE, it probably hasn’t been obvious, but I’ve been travelling with the Insta-Wife and Insta-Daughter this weekend. Among other things, that gave me the opportunity to test out this Netgear Travel Router that I got as free swag when I was at the Consumer Electronics Show. It’s the size of a pack of playing cards, and it worked perfectly as soon as I plugged it in.

That’s more than I can say for the “iBahn internet service” at the J.W. Marriott, though. It’s bad enough that they charge you $12.95 when much cheaper hotels like the Hampton Inn give away wireless Internet access. But even though we’d registered and paid the fee, when I hooked up the Netgear router the sign-on screens reappeared. I assume it’s some kind of scheme to block people from doing what I was doing, which seems rather lame, especially as they offer a 2-foot ethernet cable that ties you to the desk otherwise. My suspicion is that hotels, like the J.W. Marriott, that cater to a mostly business crowd charge for Internet access because they know it will just get passed on to the company, while hotels that don’t, like the Hampton Inn, give it away because they know that people who are paying out of their own pockets will resist paying half as much for a day of Internet access as they pay for a month at home. Well, okay — the kine that tread the grain, and so forth. But if you’re going to charge, shouldn’t you make the exorbitantly priced product at least as convenient as the free version?

UPDATE: Reader Chuck Cilek emails:

When you sign up for this service, they register the MAC address of the card connecting to their service, not the room number. From your description, it sounds like you

1) connected the laptop and signed up
2) disconnected the laptop
3) connected the router, then connected the laptop to the router.

From the IBahn’s DHCP server’s point of view, it sees the router MAC which is not registered. It does not see your laptop’s MAC, because the router sends its own MAC and never sends your MAC.

I believe that if you had hooked up the router first, then connected your laptop and signed in/registered, the router would have been registered and your intended setup would have worked.

Several other readers said the same thing, and yes, that’s how I signed up. That makes sense, I guess, so I shouldn’t blame Marriott too much. On the other hand, another reader emails:

I don’t do much traveling but have ended up on the road in a fancy hotel on occasion. Once, reluctant to charge my employer for the exorbitant Internet connx charges, I decided to try the phone dataport and use my old (since discontinued) dialup AOL account. No go. It would not let you access the AOL modem pool – as soon as the modem tones were detected, the line went dead. So do these expensive hotels have you by the short hairs in all ways? Why yes. Yes, they do.

I echo your sentiments re: Interstate highway motels, which offer free (often wireless) access in their guest rooms. One summer, we even used IM between our rooms, instead of calling, to coordinate schedules during a large family reunion – thanks to the free WiFi.

Only when you are paying at least three times as much for the room, do you have to pay additional for access, I have found. Oh, unless of course you want to get dressed and go to the lobby, where the WiFi doesn’t cost. Although, on a trip not too long ago, I discovered even the lobby location is becoming a for-pay T-mobile spot. I wonder how these hotels’ decisions to make access pretty darned expensive (with no value added) will influence cities’ decisions to make downtowns into WiFi hotspots. Won’t the Hiltons and the Radissons fight tooth and nail to keep their for-pay islands, even if the heart of the city is free WiFi?

This seems like overreaching to me. And a couple of readers asked why I care, when I have EVDO. The reason is that my wife and daughter want Internet access too, and don’t want to share computers. Yes, we’re that geeky.

VOTERS VOTE YES, county says no anyway:

On the Web site Grupthink.com, an online symposium founded by John Masterson, who is also chairman of the oversight committee, a post exclaims “I have lost all faith in Missoula County government.”

“Is there even a point to voting any more if the will of the people can so easily be subverted by two people?” the post inquires.

Much of the criticism, online and off, has alluded to County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg’s position that a “gut feeling” led him to conclude Missoula’s electorate misinterpreted the ballot language. The tone of Wednesday’s public hearing, which was teeming with 20-something adults, went from inquisitive to indignant when Van Valkenburg used the phrase “gut feeling,” which many called insulting.

“Your ‘gut feeling’ does not supersede the democratic process,” according to one post.

This is sadly familiar to me. (Via Slashdot).

A ROMNEY SCANDAL, reported by the L.A. Times: Abortion rights and gay rights activists are unhappy that Romney pretended to be more liberal on those issues than he really was. Or something like that.

LOTS OF STUFF ON THE L.A. TIMES SCANDALS, over at Patterico’s. Just keep scrolling.

Meanwhile, Kaus says it’s Civil War, and pours it on.

HMM: “American forces in Iraq now hold some 300 prisoners tied to Iran’s intelligence agencies, Pajamas Media learned from both diplomatic and military sources.”

KIM DU TOIT endorses Fred Thompson.

IN COOKING, cheap wine works fine — in fact, just as well as expensive wine:

Over all, wines that I would have poured down the drain rather than sip from a glass were improved by the cooking process, revealing qualities that were neutral at worst and delightful at best. On the other hand, wines of complexity and finesse were flattened by cooking — or, worse, concentrated by it, taking on big, cartoonish qualities that made them less than appetizing.

It wasn’t that the finished dishes were identical — in fact, they did have surprisingly distinct flavors — but the wonderful wines and the awful ones produced equally tasty food, especially if the wine was cooked for more than a few minutes.

So save the expensive stuff for drinking!

WE NO LONGER QUESTION THEIR PATRIOTISM: “Perhaps the most disturbing scene of the afternoon, however, involved the man who pulled down his pants in front of women and children and defecated on a burning U.S. flag.”

Even more shockingly, he apparently failed to purchase carbon offsets to cover the burning flag’s greenhouse emissions. . . .

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll says it’s an attempt at peace through superior bodily functions.

“RAMPANT SLUT CULTURE:” Coming? Or going?

If the slut culture goes away, the terrorists will have won!

WHERE’S THE LOVE?

FROM CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION to “conspicuous virtue.” In both cases, of course, people are often tempted to overspend.