AMITY SHLAES looks at “girlfriend salaries” at the World Bank. Apparently there are rather a lot of them. “In any case, the old corporate rule holds yet again: When salaries seem odd, something is out of balance — just not always in the way you think.”

RIDE BLOG TO THE SOUND OF THE GUNS: OMAR FADHIL reports from Baghdad.

JOHN TAMMES ON preparing for the worst.

TODAY’S FRED THOMPSON RALLY IN COOKEVILLE: I thought about going, but we’ve been a bit under the weather. But reader Jim Brown emails this YouTube video: “It was filmed and edited by my fifteen year old Grandson, Matthew Matheson. I was late in picking him up so he missed the first part of the rally. He makes and designs web sites and has all the latest technology and software to work with. He is young, but very good. Who knows? He might start making political commercials for the candidates.”

I think he already has.

UPDATE: Dan Riehl doubts the Thompson campaign would approve. Er, well, if there were a Thompson campaign, anyway . . . .

He’s probably right. But in YouTube politics, that’s not the point, is it? You’re going to get campaign videos by 15-year-olds about what they think is important, not about what the campaign thinks is important. And anyone who wants to go anywhere will have to learn to live with that, and work with it. It’s all part of the growth of free agent media.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Matt Matheson asked me to embed a newer edit that he likes better, so I did. But for archival purposes, the original can be found here.

FREE CARBON OFFSETS! Sadly, these may be just as good as a lot of the others. . . .

VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES: surprisingly good news from Iraq. Especially surprising since it’s via the New York Times. “Anbar Province, long the lawless heartland of the tenacious Sunni Arab resistance, is undergoing a surprising transformation. Violence is ebbing in many areas, shops and schools are reopening, police forces are growing and the insurgency appears to be in retreat.”

(Via Tom Maguire, who has some thoughts on what it might mean).

UPDATE: Plus this New York Times report about Afghanistan: “Infant mortality has dropped by 18 percent in Afghanistan, one of the first real signs of recovery for the country five years after the fall of the Taliban regime, health officials said Thursday. . . . 40,000 to 50,000 fewer infants are dying now than in the Taliban era, Dr. Fatimi said.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ace has an amusing take.

MORE: A look at what the Times left out. Surge? What surge?

Another reader cynically suggests that we’ll see more good news in the near future — having achieved their goal of persuading Americans to pull out, the press will loudly report some good news in order to protect themselves against postwar charges of bias. I think that’s overly cynical.

STILL MORE: NYT: Late to the party.

MORE STILL: Criticizing the Times on the surge mention may be unfair. A Marine officer with knowledge in the area who asks that I not use his name emails:

I know a good bit more about things there than I can let on, but one thing I did want to email and make clear: There has been no surge of extra troops to Anbar yet. What has been accomplished thus far has been with the same force structure that has been more or less in place there for the past three years. I might even go so far as to say that the new strategy for the entire country — begun in January — had its genesis with the actions of one particular Marine battalion working in the far west in the fall of 2005.

It was so successful that its methods – which I won’t go into – were adopted in some manner throughout Anbar and now we are seeing their fruits.

Worth noting. And this underscores a point made here before — that the ‘surge” isn’t so much about more troops as it is about different tactics.

HILLARY CLINTON GETS strange new respect.

“TOTALLY MEAN AND IRRATIONAL:” I think the war between the Democratic establishment and the Netroots is heating up.

FROM ONE OF MY COLLEAGUES AT U.T., A LOOK AT NON-CORN-BASED ETHANOL:

Biomass can also be derived from residue left behind after forest products have been harvested or from the elements of corn left in the field to rot after the grain has been harvested. Cellulosic ethanol comes from the part of the corn plant not used for food.

So, in addition to corn grain-based ethanol, Tennessee has an array of potential new energy sources from biomass – cellulosic ethanol. This expands ethanol’s potential availability well beyond corn grain, which greatly expands our alternative fuel options – and in no way competes with any utilization of corn.

A unit of corn ethanol, made from grain, yields about 40 percent more energy than it takes to produce that unit, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

A unit of cellulosic ethanol yields more than 500 percent of the energy that goes into producing it. In contrast, gasoline made from petroleum returns 20 percent less energy than it takes to produce it.

That’s why cellulosic ethanol is the future of energy.

Since cellulosic ethanol can already be made in the lab, the next challenge is to make it at the commercial scale.

The only political downside is that this isn’t likely to win the kind of enthusiastic support from corn farmers that corn-based ethanol enjoys. But it seems to me that ethanol from waste biomass is a lot better than ethanol that’s made from . . . food.

UPDATE: The prospect of making fuel from waste biomass inspires reader Brian Cubbison to utter a single magic word: “Kudzu.”

Watch out, Saudis!

CROSS-CULTURAL TOILET COMPARISONS.

JOHN WIXTED: “Awareness of al Qaeda is slowly growing in the minds of mainstream media reporters who have been hamstrung by the civil war schema that they simply cannot get out of their heads. Even so, there is not the slightest mention of the fact that al Qaeda was probably behind yesterday’s bombing. . . . Just because you don’t want to reinforce Bush’s claim that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror is no reason to be deliberately misleading when presenting the news from Iraq.”

But, he says, Reuters got it right. No, really.

“SLAM DUNK:” “This country faces important tasks, like completing the liberation and stabilization of Iraq and stopping Iran’s Islamofascist regime in Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. Why, with a global war on terror to win, are we wasting time worrying about a years-old quip?”

Because Tenet, who should have been fired shortly after 9/11, is still trying to justify himself. As are a lot of press, pundits, and politicians who supported the war in 2002 and 2003, and who often went on about Saddam’s threat as far back as the 1990s, but are trying to execute a pivot in time for 2008. But read the whole thing. And don’t miss the video here.

Oh, hell, I’ll just embed it below:

FANS AND CRITICS for Nancy Pelosi: The Washington Post is surprisingly critical.

ANOTHER ANTI-ISLAMIST PROTEST in Turkey.

PRIVATE GROUPS MONOPOLIZING PUBLIC LANDS: “This finding should not be particularly surprising. ‘Public’ lands are political lands. Management and access rules are ultimately driven by political considerations, and this gives concentrated interest groups and well-heeled organizations a leg up.”

ANOTHER SPACE VENTURE TAKES OFF:

The cremated remains of Star Trek actor James Doohan and Apollo 7 astronaut Gordon Cooper soared into suborbital space today aboard a rocket launched in the New Mexico desert.

The launch was the first success at a commercial spaceport being developed in the southern part of the state.

The rocket was fired by Suzan Cooper and Wende Doohan, who sent the missile carrying small amounts of their husbands’ ashes into the sky at 8:56 a.m.

The rocket soon plummeted back to Earth as planned at the White Sands Missile Range.

About 200 other families paid $495 each to have their loved ones’ ashes sent into space aboard the Spaceloft X-L rocket.

Bill Richardson deserves a spot of credit, too, as he’s been good about pushing the New Mexico spaceport.

UPDATE: More here.

TROUBLING THOUGHTS ON IRAQ, from Rick Moran. Sadly, I agree that our domestic political situation will make constructive action difficult. As I’ve said before, it was obvious in the 1990s that we had a dysfunctional political class, but it’s become much more obvious in the current decade. (Via TMV). And yes, time’s the enemy now. Pentagon planners talk about the “three year rule” for domestic support in a war, and it’s been four — five if you count Afghanistan.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

FIRE MELTS STEEL: Somebody tell Rosie O’Donnell.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: “Will someone explain to me why I have to hurry and beat the After Church Rush to get a seat in the smoking section of a bar?”

UNREST IN IRAN: May it strengthen and spread.

MAYBE THERE’S HOPE: The Dangerous Book for Boys, a politically incorrect work indeed, has topped the sales charts in the UK and it’s now shipping in the United States. More on that book, and its writers’ views about the overly safe PC culture that surrounds kids today, here.

UPDATE: Great line from the comments: “I rode myself two miles to baseball practice and back all summer. The proportion of child molesters was probably the same as today, but there was no 24-hour news cycle, so we were free.”

ACROSS THE COUNTRY IN A “SMART CAR” AT 48 MILES PER GALLON: This is interesting, but I’m not all that impressed. My mother just traded in her 12-year-old Saturn SL, which routinely got over 40 mpg on the highway. It was a bit sluggish, but it had four doors. The compromises made here to get a bit more don’t seem worth it.

She replaced the Saturn — she loved it, but at 165K+ miles it was time — with a Honda Civic. She likes it, and she’s getting 36 mpg in mixed driving, so I imagine that with her legendarily frugal driving style she could get around 40 on the highway. Is it worth chopping off the back half of the car to get 48?

UPDATE: Alex del Castillo emails: “Have we unlearned something? I remember my boss’s zippy little CRX getting 50 real world MPG in New Orleans back in 86. One would think that 20 years later we could do better than the Smart Car. I am not prone to conspiracy theory, but it almost seems as if they are sandbagging…”

I don’t think it’s that. Extra safety requirements added weight, and consumers quit caring about mileage.

IN TODAY’S NYT: CARBON-NEUTRAL IS HIP, BUT IS IT GREEN?

On this, environmentalists aren’t neutral, and they don’t agree. Some believe it helps build support, but others argue that these purchases don’t accomplish anything meaningful — other than giving someone a slightly better feeling (or greener reputation) after buying a 6,000-square-foot house or passing the million-mile mark in a frequent-flier program. In fact, to many environmentalists, the carbon-neutral campaign is a sign of the times — easy on the sacrifice and big on the consumerism.

As long as the use of fossil fuels keeps climbing — which is happening relentlessly around the world — the emission of greenhouse gases will keep rising. The average American, by several estimates, generates more than 20 tons of carbon dioxide or related gases a year; the average resident of the planet about 4.5 tons.

At this rate, environmentalists say, buying someone else’s squelched emissions is all but insignificant.

“The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”

“This whole game is badly in need of a modern Martin Luther,” Mr. Hayes added.

Read the whole thing.

JAMES TABOR lists five books he likes on the theme of man vs. nature. It’s not quite the same thing, but to that list I’d add David Baron’s excellent book, The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator’s Deadly Return to Suburban America. In fact, there’s probably a deep sociological point in the contrast between this book, and the books that Tabor discusses.

GLOBAL WARMING, GLOBAL COOLING, and a Blue Oyster Cult reference, all in one post.