THOUGHTS ON summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. From the Knoxville News-Sentinel’s new military blogger, Fred Brown.

AMY ALKON LOOKS AT who’s exploiting the poor.

I’VE SAID THAT HOT AIR DESERVES A NETWORK DEAL, and now it’s got one!

A GERMAN BRAIN DRAIN: ” For a nation that invented the term ‘guest worker’ for its immigrant labourers, Germany is facing the sobering fact that record numbers of its own often highly-qualified citizens are fleeing the country to work abroad in the biggest mass exodus for 60 years. Figures released by Germany’s Federal Statistics Office showed that the number of Germans emigrating rose to 155,290 last year – the highest number since the country’s reunification in 1990 – which equalled levels last experienced in the 1940s during the chaotic aftermath of the Second World War. . . . Fed up with comparatively poor job prospects at home – where unemployment is as high as 17 per cent in some regions – as well as high taxes and bureaucracy, thousands of Germans have upped sticks for Austria and Switzerland, or emigrated to the United States.” Seems like the more socialist the country, the more its talented citizens tend to go elsewhere.

THE FABLE OF THE BEES: Joel Garreau looks at the disappearing honeybee story and notes various efforts by various people to put their favored spin on it. I’m particularly amused at how disappointed some people are that the cellphone explanation turned out to be bogus.

I’m inclined to agree with Bill Joy: Complex systems behave unpredictably. But I think his suggestion that this sort of thing is new is iffy — it’s just that in the old days it either wouldn’t have been noticed, or would have been attributed to supernatural causes. And I think that environmentalists should actually be happy!

“From an ecological standpoint, it is opening up the possibility for local pollinators like the mason bee to come back.” Honeybees, after all, are an introduced species. They were brought here by European explorers and settlers. The Indians called them “white men’s flies.”

Forward, into the past!

WELL, THIS IS A SWITCH: “Ahmadinejad’s spiritual advisor, Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, was shouted down by angry Iranian and Afghan protesters a minute into his talk at a liberal college in Canada this week.”

I guess they figure silence is complicity.

IN THE MAIL: Daniel Gross’s Pop!: Why Bubbles Are Great For The Economy. Irrational exuberance is good for you!

BILL QUICK: “In the vein of LBJ and Walter Cronkite, I think it is fair to say that if George W. Bush has lost Peggy Noonan, then he has lost the Republican Party.”

Hey, Rush Limbaugh savaged me when I said it last fall before the election, but it’s like there’s some bizarre Republican death wish. (But Limbaugh seems to have caught on to my point more recently.) I’d disagree with Noonan, though, in that I think the GOP Congress was just as bad as the White House is now. In both cases, it’s an attitude of entitlement that seems to be endemic among our political class, and certainly one that the Democratic Congress is already displaying in full measure.

And, despite Bush’s many flaws, not everything is Bush’s fault — though it would surely be convenient for lots of people if it were.

UPDATE: And read this report and this one about Republican problems with grassroots support. All I can say is, “I told you so.” Repeatedly. In fact, all you have to do is listen to this podcast interview with Ken Mehlman, then RNC chair, to realize that these problems were obvious over a year ago, but that the GOP establishment was either oblivious, or unwilling to address them. Can’t anyone here play this game?

ANOTHER JOHN EDWARDS CAMPAIGN MISSTEP:

John Edwards told a Google “town hall” yesterday that he had read the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the summary of the evidence that led to war in Iraq. . . . His assertion that he read the NIE seems to contradict what his campaign told me last week, when Edwards spokesman Mark Kornblau said his boss hadn’t read the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. That put him in the same position as all the other senators from the time running for president, save Joe Biden.

However, Kornblau said today that Edwards had “misunderstood” the question yesterday, and that he was referring to having read the declassified version of the NIE, and other intelligence documents.

For some reason, the Edwards campaign seems to have had a series of these unforced errors.

EVERY TIME I POST ABOUT THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS, I get loads more email, which makes me think that there’s a genuine cultural moment going on here. That makes me wonder if one of the various political candidates won’t try to capitalize on it somehow, but it’s not clear to me just what they could do. Any thoughts?

UPDATE: Reader Don Spoon emails:

While growing up in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I ran across a used book from one of my uncles called “The Boy’s Book”, which became my bible until I joined the Boy Scouts. I am EXTREMELY glad to see a replacement for it! My grandson will benefit from it just like I did. I am saddened that my sons didn’t have a reference like this!

You see similar sentiments in the reader reviews, too. Check out the one that quotes G.K. Chesterton.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In a related vein, reader Charles Vinod emails regarding my earlier post about hands-on toys:

I bought the Radio Shack Electronics kit 101 for my six year old son this week on the occasion of his kindergarten “graduation”. Needless to say, he loved it and has not asked to watch TV or play video games since receiving the kit. Most interesting of all, even at this age, he just doesn’t want to build the circuits; he wants to know the reason “why” each one works differently. This point especially makes his scientist dad proud.

And rightly so! So why don’t schools use things like this?

SPEAKING OF TIPJARS: James Lileks makes a discovery:

Augh. Brilliant! I put up a tip jar, and it doesn’t work. Turns out that a picture of an Amazon tip jar does not actually link to an Amazon tip jar. Tomorrow, your host learns that clicking on a picture of a telephone does not generate a dial tone.

Live and learn! Plus, thoughts on sex and free will.

STUMBLING INTO SUCCESS: J.D. Johannes posts another report from Iraq. Read it and then ask: Why are we only getting this kind of reporting from people like him and Michael Yon?

And remember, like Michael Yon he’s supported by his readers. So if you like what you’re reading, hit the tipjar.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: “Just how vulnerable is the U.S. economy to troubles in China?”

AMITY SHLAES HAS A NEW BOOK OUT, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. Arnold Kling has read it, and has some observations, including this one:

The struggle over economic policy in the 1930’s was really an episode in the long, historical conflict between business participants in the market and anti-business academics. Roosevelt gave free rein to the professors, until the start of the Second World War led him to realize that he would need the tycoons to help mobilize to defeat Hitler. I suspect that one reason that Roosevelt and the New Deal come off so well in the conventional wisdom is that history books are written by professors, not by entrepreneurs.

Read the whole thing, which is quite interesting.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Sen. Jon Kyl is behind the latest effort to block transparency:

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-AZ, has conceded that he is the senator behind the secret hold on the proposed Open Government Reform Act of 2007, which would provide much-needed improvements in the federal Freedom of Information Act.

AP reports that Kyl explains his decision to place the secret hold on the bill as a result of “uncharacteristically strong” objections from the Justice Department. Kyl will maintain his hold until supporters of the FOIA reform bill, which includes its primary architect, Sen. John Cornyn, R-TX, and opponents can work out their differences.

Memo to Sen. Kyl: Some differences are irreconciliable, such as the difference between those like Cornyn who believe transparency in government is the first essential for democratic accountability, and those in government like the career attorneys at the Justice Department who ALWAYS find a reason to oppose increased transparency. . . .

What is really aggravating here, Sen. Kyl, is that you profess to be a conservative, a believer in limited government and individual liberty, but here you are taking up the cause of Big Government’s first line of defense.

Of all people in Congress who ought to be first to proclaim that the public has an inherent right to see how the public’s business is being conducted, one would think it would be a conservative from a western state where people remember Barry Goldwater.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S BETTER THAN TIM RUSSERT ON A GOOD DAY! The latest Corn & Miniter Show is up!

I’M ON THE COVER OF THIS MONTH’S BLOGGER & PODCASTER MAGAZINE: Together with Seth Godin and Michael Geoghegan. We did a panel interview on . . . blogging and podcasting!

A RATHER EMBARRASSING EXERCISE by The Economist Intelligence Unit. I’ve always looked at the ads for their expensive services and wondered what I was missing. Not much, if this is any guide.

A “REACTIONARY TURN IN THE INTELLECTUAL WORLD,” in the reception of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Full story (registration required) here. And here’s an excerpt:

About Hirsi Ali we do not have to wonder: where does she stand on the question of stoning women to death? Or on the obligation for husbands to beat their wives? Read one page by her and you will know the answer; and if you read two pages, you might begin to suspect that, on the television screens of France, the man who defended the oppressed of the oppressed in the poorest neighborhoods of Europe was Nicolas Sarkozy. But that has got to be the problem from a perspective like Buruma’s. This talk of women’s rights–doesn’t it point ultimately in directions that ought to be regarded as (here is the mystery of our present moment) conservative? Better the seventh century than Nicolas Sarkozy. . . .

But this means only that Hirsi Ali’s critics have lost the ability to distinguish between a fanatical murderer and a rational debater. Here is “the racism of the anti-racists,” in Bruckner’s phrase. It is the racism that, while pretending to stand up for the oppressed, would deny to someone from Africa the right to make use of the same Enlightenment tools of analysis that Europeans are welcome to use. Bruckner took note of the nasty personal tone with which Hirsi Ali had been discussed–the masculine condescension, to mention one aspect, which scarcely anybody could have missed in Garton Ash’s New York Review essay, where he suggested that Hirsi Ali’s literary success must be owed significantly to her looks. . . .Salman Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class, a subset of the European intelligentsia–its Muslim wing especially–who survive only because of their bodyguards and their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe during the last sixty years. And yet if someone like Pascal Bruckner mumbles a few words about the need for courage under these circumstances, the sneers begin.

The progressives aren’t looking particularly progressive these days.

A LOOK AT THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS:

Right now there’s a dispute at Romanesko over whether Google is to blame for newspapers’ problems – why, they link to things they don’t pay for. One writer confronted the future square on, and came up with two forward-thinking responses: a class-action suit, and union pressure.

That’ll do it. I can see the headline: Newspapers win $1.6 billion verdict against Google, use the money to start a youth-oriented tabloid giveaway paper that competes with YouTube. If you flip the corners of the pages really fast, the pictures appear to move!

It’s a winner.

QUESTIONS ABOUT eavesdropping on phone calls and the Clinton campaign.

IN UNDERSTANDING SUPREME COURT JUSTICES, it pays to read their opinions rather than simply relying on political stereotyping.

IF YOU CAN’T WIN THE GAME, change the rules!

Dartmouth blog Dartlog reports: “Petition candidate Stephen Smith ’88’s recent accession to Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees has inspired the unhappy Alumni Council and the Board of Trustees to change the rules by which trustees are elected. As outlined in two speeches given during the Alumni Council’s annual Green Key meeting in Hanover this year, the Board may take drastic measures during their June 10th meeting to revamp the current election system for alumni trustees.” Insiders seldom yield power to outsiders without a fight.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Joe Malchow.

DON SURBER ON TORTURE, SILENCE, AND COMPLICITY.

IMPORTANT THOUGHTS ON HOLODECK SEX from Professor Bainbridge. And Naomi Wolf should be pleased that her old article is still spurring discussion in the blogosphere.

(Link was bad earlier. Fixed now. Sorry!)