AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE: A report from Lima.

SO YOUR COMPUTER IS hostage to Microsoft’s “Genuine Advantage” servers? Which don’t always work. That’s a selling point.

IS IT THE PRESIDENT’S JOB TO BE role-modeling what good families look like?

IRAQIS PROTEST TERROR in a rally at the Saudi Embassy. Good for them.

THE ULTIMATE ALL-IN-ONE BREWING MACHINE: It’s quite an achievement, but I can’t help but feel that at the end of the day, it makes homebrewing so easy that it’s almost like buying your beer at the store . . . .

CALLING FOR A MILITARY COUP at The Huffington Post. Ed Morrissey is appalled. I think it’s a new high point for Bush Derangement Syndrome. Which is saying something, especially at the HuffPo.

UPDATE: Perhaps it’s all part of the new urgency on the left that Tom Smith notes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bill Quick is unimpressed.

HITTING SPAMMERS WHERE THEY’RE VULNERABLE:

Between July 1 and the end of the year, spam jumped to nearly 60 percent of all e-mail traffic monitored by Symantec, and many administrators say it makes up an even greater percentage of e-mail now.

Spam filtering is not the answer, said Garth Bruen, who runs a volunteer project focused on taking down the Web sites run by spammers. Bruen tracks down the ISPs and domain name registrars used by spammers and arranges to have their sites shut down.

“This problem is not going to go away if you ignore it. Blocking and filtering is just a jacked-up technological form of ignoring,” he said. “What you want to do is report it and make it difficult for these people to exist on the Net and do their transactions.”

Earlier this month, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, endorsed Bruen’s position, saying that anti-spam fighters could really hurt the spammers’ bottom lines by targeting their Web sites.

This seems plausible to me.

RALPH PETERS ON JOHN WARNER: Peters, writing from Fallujah, isn’t impressed:

Although this trend has been reported, our battlefield leaders here agree that the magnitude of the shift hasn’t registered back home: Al Qaeda is on the verge of a humiliating, devastating strategic defeat – rejected by their fellow Sunni Muslims.

If we don’t quit, this will not only be a huge practical win – it’ll be the information victory we’ve been aching for.

No matter what the Middle Eastern media might say, everyone in the Arab and greater Sunni Muslim world will know that al Qaeda was driven out of Iraq by a combination of Muslims and Americans.

Think that would help al Qaeda’s recruitment efforts? Even now, the terrorists have to resort to lies about their prospective missions to gain recruits.

With the sixth anniversary of 9/11 approaching, how dare we throw away so great a potential victory over those who attacked our country?

Forget the anti-war nonsense you hear. The truth is that our troops want to continue this struggle. I know. I’m here. And I’m listening to what they have to say. They’re confident as never before that we’re on the right path.

Should we rob them of their victory now and enhance al Qaeda by giving them a free win? How can we even contemplate quitting now?

I’ve been sitting down with Iraqis, too – including former enemies. They don’t want us to leave. They finally cracked the code. They need us. And although they’ve got a range of their own goals (not all of them tending toward Jeffersonian democracy), they’re unified in their hatred of al Qaeda.

I’m not either, but for a different , or at least additional, reason. First, Warner’s been saying similar stuff for quite a while, and it’s funny that the press is making a big deal of it — perhaps to overshadow the more significant about-face by Democratic Rep. Brian Baird. And Petraeus has talked about a troop pulldown already too. This looks like Warner trying to take credit for something that will probably happen anyway. In other words, Washington as usual. Warner, it’s true, doesn’t come off that well.

Meanwhile, notice that pretty much all the reporting from Iraq is more positive than the talk in Washington? As Damien Cave of the New York Times observed:

I talked to a commander the other day who said that the political debate at home is bizarro-land and something that he doesn’t connect with at all. . . . it’s funny, one of the things that comes up a lot here among commanders and among the press corps is the way that the debate at home seems to be mainly focused on the impact on Washington or among constituents.

Well, that’s how they look at everything, I suppose. But you expect better when a war is involved.

ATTACK OF THE fake bloggers.

PLAYING VIRTUAL ARMY EXPERIENCE:

I didn’t play it — no, that’s not a picture of me — but the gamers playing it didn’t seem too impressed, coming out. The “controller,” if you will, was pretty awesome, but the game itself wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as even the Xbox version of America’s Army outside. They complained of low accuracy. Then again, maybe it’s just a really accurate simulator of how hard it is to fire a giant metal rifle in the back of a military vehicle?

I wonder how the Army is doing, with their “recruit gamer nerds” strategy.

You can probably track that by looking at military purchases of Jolt! cola. . . .

DON SURBER ROUNDS UP the week that was.

BILL MAHER IS DISAPPOINTED, but I’m not surprised. I’ve known Damien Cave since long before the InstaPundit days, and he’s an honest reporter.

IN THE MAIL: Hanna Rosin’s new book on Patrick Henry College, God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America. There’s already a good deal of discussion going on in the book forums.

HIGHWAY ROBBERY: “Should people who carry large sums of cash just assume that there’s a small chance the government will simply steal it from them at gunpoint?”

JEFF EMANUEL REPORTS FROM IRAQ: Southeast of Baghdad, the Surge is working.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

ILYA SOMIN on dating across ideological lines.

MICKEY KAUS MATH-CHECKS THE NEW YORK TIMES: Shockingly, when 2700 dealers sell a car at about half the rate of 440 dealers, the 2700 dealers still sell more cars! Go figure!

No, really — go do the figures next time. Because apparently those layers of editors and fact-checkers don’t do math either.

‘HANDS OFF MY ANALOGY!”

THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, CONT’D: Jackass is now a video game. “Fans of Jackass and people who always wanted to plummet from a skyscraper but never got up the nerve will love the game.”

MIDWIFE TRAINING saving lives in Afghanistan. “Afghan women die more often in childbirth than women anywhere but Sierra Leone — one in nine will die during or after being pregnant. But the rapid training of midwives and spread of essential health information suppressed during Taliban years is beginning, perhaps, to change this.” More at the link.

A LOOK AT THE GUNS OF BRITAIN:

Following the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, in which seventeen people were killed by a man armed with two 9mm pistols, Britain passed a law outlawing the ownership of most handguns, despite researchers finding “no link between high levels of gun crime and areas where there were still high levels of lawful gun possession.” It’s a law so severe that the Britain’s Olympic shooting team is forced to train abroad, lest one of its members try to shoot up a grammar school. So how effective has the law been? A doubling in gun-related crimes since the ban, naturally.

Read the whole thing.

BOB KERREY VS. CHUCK HAGEL: I’m okay with that.

UPDATE: Reader John Tuttle emails: “Chuck Hagel vs Bob Kerrey ain’t gonna happen … Hagel won’t make it thru the primary.” He does have opposition.

BUT HIS BROTHER HAD A GREAT BAND: “Attorney Geoffrey Fieger and one of his law partners have been indicted by the U.S. government, which accused the pair of making $127,000 in illegal campaign contributions to the 2004 presidential campaign of John Edwards.”

MONEY: Not evil, after all.

POLITICIZING TERROR.