DISAPPEARING BEES FOUND: Well, some, anyway:

Danny Peters is a hobby bee keeper and told the family they had a potential disaster on their hands.

“He told me within a matter of weeks they could create 500 pounds of honey up there. It could sour and drip into the house,” says Erickson.

Peters says that’s exactly what the bees were doing.

“They’ve probably been there since early spring. There are probably 50,000 bees,” says Peters. “There’s a couple quarts of honey in there now.”

They’re moving them out safely.

A LOOK AT NARCISSISM AND THE SUMMER OF LOVE: I was 6. I remember things somewhat differently than those who were a decade or two older.

JOHN HINDERAKER: “I think it’s fair to say that the bureaucracy’s war against the Bush administration is more or less over, and the bureaucracy won.” It was a pretty one-sided war.

A “DATA STORM” shut down a nuclear power plant. It may have originated outside the plant.

UPDATE: Skepticism about this report.

A CONTRACTOR COMPARES Iraq and Afghanistan. (Via The American Thinker).

Meanwhile, relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan are ruffled.

MICKEY KAUS:

On the heels of his triumphant announcement of a breakthrough “comprehensive” immigration deal, President Bush’s support has … “fallen to the lowest level ever recorded”! Pollster Scott Rassmussen notes:

The president’s ratings have tumbled each time immigration reform dominates the news.

Using advanced, high-tech tools, Karl Rove has found the last pocket of support for Bush and destroyed it with laser-like efficiency.

Remember what I was saying about a Republican “death wish?”

THIS SOUNDS KIND OF INTERESTING:

Many respected engineers have been trying for years to bring a compressed air car to market, believing strongly that compressed air can power a viable “zero pollution” car. Now the first commercial compressed air car is on the verge of production and beginning to attract a lot of attention, and with a recently signed partnership with Tata, India’s largest automotive manufacturer, the prospects of very cost-effective mass production are now a distinct possibility. The MiniC.A.T is a simple, light urban car, with a tubular chassis that is glued not welded and a body of fibreglass. . . .

Most importantly, it is incredibly cost-efficient to run – according to the designers, it costs less than one Euro per 100Km (about a tenth that of a petrol car). Its mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car (200 to 300 km or 10 hours of driving), a factor which makes a perfect choice in cities where the 80% of motorists drive at less than 60Km. The car has a top speed of 68 mph.

Refilling the car will, once the market develops, take place at adapted petrol stations to administer compressed air. In two or three minutes, and at a cost of approximately 1.5 Euros, the car will be ready to go another 200-300 kilometres.

As a viable alternative, the car carries a small compressor which can be connected to the mains (220V or 380V) and refill the tank in 3-4 hours.

Due to the absence of combustion and, consequently, of residues, changing the oil (1 litre of vegetable oil) is necessary only every 50,000 Km.

The temperature of the clean air expelled by the exhaust pipe is between 0 – 15 degrees below zero, which makes it suitable for use by the internal air conditioning system with no need for gases or loss of power.

Adiabatic air conditioning. Cool! Er, literally . . .

If this catches on first in India and China, that’s okay — that’s where the growth of auto sales is likely to be fastest in the coming decades. I wouldn’t mind having one for commuting, though.

AUSTIN BAY LOOKS AT NICHOLAS SARKOZY and likes what he sees so far.

DOUG WEINSTEIN is mad about gas prices.

Tim Haab is mad about gas price legislation.

CRYING WOLFOWITZ.

BARACK OBAMA’S advice to graduates.

A LOOK AT European energy politics.

UPDATE: Further thoughts from T.M. Lutas, who looks at the Caspian route:

Russia has an interest in making the safest, most moral route for that energy westward to be through Russia’s pipeline network. Russia has an interest in instability and odious governments arising in Georgia (or separatist region’s thereof) and Azerbaijan. It has an interest in Turkey’s romance with the EU ending in failure. Most intriguing of all, it has an interest in keeping the mullah regime staggering along in Iran.

It’s the southern route that is most threatening to Russia because unlike the Caucuses, Iran is not historically “bandit country” where grievances are relatively easy to stir up and profound instability is just a few strategic tribal/clan murders away. Iran is historically its own creature, a regional and sometimes world class power that is difficult to disrupt. It’s also the swiftest route for Caspian energy to hit the sea at which point it can go all over the world, including the EU. Russia’s strategy of political impunity through energy dominance of Europe is history if a stable post-mullah regime emerges in Iran.

Read the whole thing.

MAU-MAUING THE MULTICULTURALISTS: Roger Simon reviews the New Criterion’s anthology, Counterpoints.

MCCAIN’S TOUGH TALK, not okay with Beldar.

WAITING FOR IT TO HAPPEN, in Spain.

LOTS OF ATTENTION FOR FRED THOMPSON in tomorrow’s Washington Post. “Thompson also tends to catch some slack because, at 6 feet 6 inches and with a charm and sense of humor that can crack even the most tightly clenched among us, he’s someone men want to be and women want to be with. He’s the John Wayne to Gore’s professor. Gore was the prep-school son of a U.S. senator from Carthage, Tenn., spending most of his formative years not in the green hills of the Volunteer State but in the monument-dotted confines of Washington. Thompson was the son of a used-car salesman from Lawrenceburg, Tenn., who, like Thompson’s mother, never graduated from high school.”

HAPPY ARMED FORCES DAY!

MICHAEL YON SENDS ANOTHER EMAIL FROM ANBAR:

Am still in Anbar and just went another day without hearing a single shot fired. Am out with a small group of Marines who live with a much larger group of Iraqis. I enjoy the Iraqi food more than the food at the dining facilities. Some of the Marines out here live in shipping containers. Their “toilet” is WAG bag. (Waste Alleviation and Gelling.) It’s every bit as exciting as it sounds. Basically it’s a little ziplock baggie — one-time use only.

I was told that a chemical munition (artillery shell) was found within the last few days.

Today, went on a patrol with Iraqis and a couple of Marines and we talked with Iraqi villagers for a couple of hours. I got to talk with a man who was about 81. His hearing was not good, so I had to sit close. He said he worked for the British RAF here in about 1945-46. I asked him if the British treated him well and he said they treated him very well. Said he made the equivalent of about 25 cents per day but that was good money back then. There is, in fact, a British-Polish-Indian-Aussie-Kiwi cemetery nearby. (I visited and photographed many of the headstones some days ago.)

All the villagers we got to talk with were very friendly. Kids wanted their photos taken, that sort of thing. They were not asking for candy and that was nice. There was a train track nearby (looked to be in very good condition), and a locomotive turned over on its side, derailed. I asked a man what happened, and he said that about four years ago, during the war, an “Ali Baba” (thief) tried to steal the train but ran head-on into another train! He said the police caught the Ali Baba and he has no idea what happened after that.

Marines are getting along well with the locals. They wave a lot, and stop to talk. If the rest of Iraq looked like this, we could all come home!

Let’s hope this continues to spread.

A CYBER-ASSAULT ON ESTONIA:

This small Baltic country, one of the most wired societies in Europe, has been subject in recent weeks to massive and coordinated cyber attacks on Web sites of the government, banks, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers and news organizations, according to Estonian and foreign officials here.

Computer security specialists here call it an unprecedented assault on the public and private electronic infrastructure of a state. They say it is originating in Russia, which is angry over Estonia’s recent relocation of a Soviet war memorial. Russian officials deny any government involvement. . . .

“These attacks were massive, well targeted and well organized,” Jaak Aaviksoo, Estonia’s minister of defense, said in an interview. They can’t be viewed, he said, “as the spontaneous response of public discontent worldwide with the actions of the Estonian authorities” concerning the memorial. “Rather, we have to speak of organized attacks on basic modern infrastructures.”

The Estonian government stops short of accusing the Russian government of orchestrating the assaults, but alleges that authorities in Moscow have shown no interest in helping to end them or investigating evidence that Russian state employees have taken part. One Estonian citizen has been arrested, and officials here say they also have identified Russians involved in the attacks.

“They won’t even pick up the phone,” Rein Lang, Estonia’s minister of justice, said in an interview.

If Russia doesn’t watch out, they’re going to find people quarantining them, electronically and otherwise.

SAXBY CHAMBLISS was booed at a GOP convention over the immigration bill. The big problem for the GOP leadership is that they’ve lost their credibility. And they still don’t understand it. This was clear a year ago when we talked to then-GOP chair Ken Mehlman, and it’s much, much truer now. As a reader emails: “No credibility to fall back on. No reserve of good will to fall back on. No record to fall back on. No successes to fall back on.”

And as Dan Riehl said earlier this week, Republicans were given a wakeup call with the 2006 elections, and they opted to hit snooze.

I still don’t know enough to know if the bill is good or bad. But if the bill is actually a good bill that the GOP base would accept if they read it . . . then that’s an even bigger indictment of the GOP leadership for failing to sell it. At this point, they’ve either mis-sold a good bill, or produced a bad one.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt is reading the bill.

A READER SUGGESTS that this is an effort to lock up the crucial InstaPundit podcast endorsement: “We need to note that Mrs. Fred Thompson does not drive a Bentley or a Bentley look-alike, contrary to our previous report of a sighting. . . . Mrs. Fred Thompson in fact, drives a Volvo.”

STRATEGYPAGE looks at Muslim terrorism in the south of Thailand:

The violence in the south is increasingly directed more at Moslems, as the terrorists try to eliminate government informers, and non-Moslems increasingly organize death squads to carry out reprisal attacks. Most of the Moslem population wants all the violence to stop, as this sort of thing has happened before. Since the Moslem Sultanate was taken over by Thailand a century ago, there have been uprisings every few generations. In the past, these rebellions were put down with much violence by the Thai government. It’s not for nothing that Thailand is one of the few nations in the region to never be colonized. The Thais are tough, determined, and vicious if provoked. However, times have changed, and “vicious” doesn’t play as well as it used to. So the Thai government is telling the southerners to cool it, and is sending money and other economic aid as peace offerings. In times past, this might have worked. But this time around, it’s not just ethnic (the southerners are Malays) and religious (some 95 percent of Thais are Buddhists) differences, but the presence of Islamic radicals who want to convert all Thais to Islam, and establish an Islamic religious dictatorship throughout the region.

This will never work, and if the Islamic militants are able to keep it up long enough, the Thais will toss political correctness and go old school on the Moslem minority. That may help the world-wide Islamic radical movement (by providing lots of “martyrs”), but it will be a disaster for the Moslems in southern Thailand. And it will probably work. Islamic terrorists have been stamped out several times in the last twenty years, using similar methods. Most Moslems are caught in the middle. If they oppose the Islamic militants, they are attacked for disloyalty. If the Moslems support the terrorists, they are subject to attack by death squads or security forces.

The Islamists bring joy wherever they appear, don’t they?

SCOTTY HAS BEEN FOUND.

IS IT JUST ME, OR DOES THIS SOUND TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE? The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.

Other than a few tenured faculty members near retirement, I don’t know anyone who’s actually pulled this off. But maybe I’m missing something . . . .

UPDATE: Summary in this blog post, and lots of discussion pro- and con in the comments, including a response by the author. A somewhat more critical take can be found here. (Thanks to Bill Peschel for the links.)

BILL QUICK IS DEPRESSED at this evidence of Congressional out-of-touchness:

Hannity was telling some caller to his talker today that his contacts in Washington were “astounded” and “shocked” by the firestorm backlash they’re getting over the supposedly “done deal” immigration bill.

Just as with Harriet Miers and the Dubai Ports deal, the backlash was entirely predictable to anyone who read blogs. Or in this case, even listened to talk radio. Don’t these people pay any attention?