ANTI-IMMIGRANT SENTIMENT in Switzerland. I’m afraid we’ll see more of this sort of thing in the future. Well, it’s not like people weren’t warned.

CONGRATULATIONS TO PATRICK NIELSEN HAYDEN, who won a Hugo award for best science fiction editor. It’s well-deserved, I think.

Also, Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End won for best novel. You can hear our podcast interview with Vinge here.

Another winner was Naomi Novik, whom I’ve praised here before. She won the John W. Campbell Award, which also recently went to InstaPundit fave John Scalzi. (Bumped).

IN THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, Dan Morain asks: “How did Democratic presidential front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign fail to see the red flags in Hsu’s contributions?”

LARRY CRAIG VS. NORMAN HSU: Loyalty counts. “I think the Republicans could learn a thing or two about loyalty from Ed Rendell. . . . Sorry to sound so exasperated, but whatever happened to the South Park Republicans? Is it just my imagination, or are the Jimmy Carter Republicans taking over?”

MR. RODGERS GOES TO DARTMOUTH: “Now the college’s establishment is working to ensure that the likes of T.J. Rodgers never again intrude where they’re not welcome. What follows is a cautionary tale about what happens when the business world crosses over into the alternative academic one.”

Actually, it’s about the point I made earlier — on academic institutions not having the kind of open and responsible governance we find in for-profit corporations. Instead, it’s an insiders’ game all around.

VIDEO FROM THE MINNESOTA STATE FAIR: James Lileks catches Ronald McDonald delivering a vicious clown-beating to a defenseless boy. Quick, call Dateline!

CASUALTIES IN IRAQ: John Wixted looks at the numbers. And at how they’re being spun.

MORE ON THE GOOSE CREEK ARRESTS INDICTMENTS, from Andrew McCarthy.

DANIEL ROTHCHILD SAYS THAT CONTRARY TO REPORTING, there’s no shortage of post-Katrina leadership on the Gulf Coast:

The tendency of journalists to look first to political leaders-who, to say the least, usually have other motives for pushing a narrative-and big names explains why so much of the media has gotten post-Katrina New Orleans so wrong. Turning first to the great and the good to get the story is an easy mistake to make in a society where everything from the foods we eat to the way we garden is subject to the whims of the ruling class.

But leadership isn’t something you are elected into. There have been plenty of leaders on the Gulf Coast over the last two years. It’s just that their names don’t roll off the tongues of magazine editors, or appear in newspapers or campaign ads.

If there’s any good news to come out of the recovery effort it’s that people in the hurricane zone have learned to become less reliant on political saviors and more reliant on themselves.

Read the whole thing.

SARKOZY CHARTS a new foreign policy course. “In the traditional opening address to the French diplomatic corps, Nicolas Sarkozy presented a precise, coherent, logical outline of his foreign policy positions. One need not agree with all or any of Sarkozy’s ideas to appreciate the contrast with the vainglorious platitudes of his predecessor, Jacques Chirac.”

ALL MY SONS. Well, except for that one.

UPDATE: Tom Smith has had it with Arthur Miller.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

THE FASTEST FINAL EXAM ON EARTH:

I’m at the Formula SAE, a highly regimented competition organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers, the institution that sets most auto-industry standards in the U.S. The contest, held in Romeo, Michigan, a semi-rural exurb about 40 miles north of Detroit, pits student-built 610-cubic-centimeter racecars against one another, testing acceleration, braking, endurance and the time-honored rules of car design and prototyping.

Hands-on is cool.

MORE DMCA CHICANERY: Worse than Vogon poetry: bogus DMCA takedowns stun sci-fi lovers. More robo-lawyering:

Because DMCA takedown notices require a sworn statement from the sender that the works in question are actually infringing (and that the sender has the right to handle copyright issues related to those works), the SFWA could actually find itself in the legal equivalent of a Vogon airlock over the notices.

What appears to have happened is that the group ran a Scribd search for certain author names and then issued takedown notices for all the results—Doctorow’s book makes a reference to Isaac Asimov, for instance, and Senger’s reading list is populated with the names of great sci-fi authors. This, it hardly needs to be said, is a less than foolproof way to police copyrights.

Perhaps it’s time for the SFWA’s legal team to guide the ship to a starbase for some needed repairs.

People who execute false affidavits should be prosecuted, and the fact that those affidavits are the result of sloppy, unchecked searches hardly constitutes a defense. Here’s a column that I wrote on the topic a while back.

UPDATE: Jerry Pournelle gives the other side of the story, though it doesn’t excuse the errors.

HEH: “Sen. John Warner, R-VA, today said the failure of politicians to make reforms and the lack of progress on ‘almost any benchmark you can name’ have led him to conclude that the only way forward is to pull out of the U.S. Senate, therefore he will not seek reelection at the end of his current term.”

THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT has opened an investigation into Norman Hsu’s political activities.

JAMES FALLOWS POINTS TO A BOOK ON THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, which tells a story that hasn’t gotten a lot of traction in the West:

Fewer and fewer people can actually remember the 1930s or 1940s, but we all feel we have a sense of what the Nazi era was like in Europe. There are so many novels, so many movies, so many memoirs, so many museums, so much accumulated lore, apart from the histories and analyses themselves. Life under Stalin is not quite as amply rendered for a world audience, but thanks to legions of Russian writers everyone has some idea.

For obvious reasons, there are far fewer public representations and reminders of daily life in China during the Cultural Revolution. Main reason: the current Chinese government is still uneasy about backwards looks at that era. Such documents as do exist, in Chinese, are less accessible to the rest of the world than are the German, French, English, Russian, etc memoirs of Word War II.

He calls Confessions “a brilliant addition to the existing evidence.” The reader reviews are quite positive, too.

MICKEY KAUS WONDERS IF I’M AGAINST CAMPAIGN FINANCE “REFORM:”

Reaction–even from Instapundit–focused on the fine being “too late and too small” to have any effect at deterring future ACTs. I’d say the controversy is whether ACT should be fined at all.

Well, yes. But that wasn’t my point here — rather, my point was that campaign finance law as it exists is a sham (I also used the word “crock”) because although it limits free speech it’s unwilling to actually police the big-kahuna political players involved. Like a lot of Washington regulations of its ilk, it seems more focused on producing the appearance of regulating the big players than the actuality thereof.

IT’S A HSU-NAMI! Best scandal name in a while.

HARRY REID SOFTENS ON IRAQ: “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has backed down from demands for a withdrawal of our troops in Iraq by next spring. Selling voters on cut and run was always tough, but now a new UPI/Zogby Poll finds that 54% of Americans believe the Iraq war is not lost.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: “I’m probably going to end up voting for Obama just because I like his senior economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee . . . and then regretting it as soon as he actually starts doing things.” Plus, thoughts on Ron Paul.

OVER AT CONCURRING OPINIONS, Kaimipono Wenger wonders when the New York Times will correct its constitutional error.

NEW YORK TIMES: Degeneres/Clinton ’08?

TRAFFIC’S UP TO A 12-MONTH RECORD, which is odd for August. I don’t know where it’s all coming from, but thanks for coming by!

STAND BY THE MISSION: A petition to support the surge.

NORMAN HSU UPDATE: “A top Democratic fundraiser wanted as a fugitive in California turned himself in Friday to face a grand theft charge. San Mateo County Superior Court Judge H. James Ellis ordered Norman Hsu handcuffed and held on $2 million bond. A bail hearing was scheduled for Sept. 5, at which the judge will consider reducing his bail to $1 million. . . . On Friday, Hsu, who has an apparel business in New York, also resigned from the board of trustees of The New School and from the board of governors of The New School’s Eugene Lang College. The college received a federal appropriation secured by Clinton last year, but a spokesman for the school said Hsu was not involved in seeking money for the school.”