DARFUR UPDATE: The International Community — a guarantor of inaction:

Some non-military options may otherwise be proposed. Travel bans may be imposed on military and civilian leaders, while assets held by Sudanese leaders overseas may be frozen. Most effective might be measures to target Sudan’s oil revenues, which provide the government with most of its cash. Sales of equipment to maintain the country’s oil infrastructure could be limited, for instance. And in extremis Port Sudan could be blockaded, thus choking off all of Sudan’s oil exports at one stroke.

But most of would depend on getting an international consensus. China, Malaysia, India and Russia are all deeply involved in Sudan’s booming oil industry. These are unlikely to support any sanctions that would hurt their own considerable interests. China, which imports about 5% of its oil from Sudan, has been a staunch supporter of Khartoum. Western countries might try unilateral action, but this is rarely effective. America has maintained comprehensive economic sanctions against Sudan since the mid-1990s, yet the economy is booming.

Nor, even if outsiders could agree on rhetoric for a plan B, is there any guarantee that action would follow. Too often, foreign (and in particular Western) countries have talked tough on Darfur but done nothing. In the past the West has bullied the Sudanese government into making commitments, such as to disarm the janjaweed, but when Khartoum failed to do so there was no follow-up. One reason for Khartoum’s assertiveness against the UN in Darfur is that it has learnt that the West, bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, seems to be full of empty threats on this issue. If that perception does not change, nothing else will move fast.

The real problem is that nobody cares enough to do anything.

JAMIL HUSSEIN UPDATE: Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston are going to Iraq. As far as I know, Kathleen Carroll of AP isn’t.

UPDATE: Read this post, too.

SOME LOVELY PHOTOS, from Kenneth Parker.

ANOTHER BLOGGER FIRED FOR BLOGGING: “Joseph Huffman of Moscow, Idaho, alleges in a lawsuit filed in Benton County Superior Court that his supervisor at the federal lab in Richland spent hours examining Huffman’s personal Web site about gun rights issues in the weeks before the firing in June 2005.”

I’ve written about this phenomenon before.

LARRY LESSIG at the Berlin Hackers’ Conference. (Via Cory Doctorow).

UPDATE: Lessig’s pretty hard on the Democrats and Howard Berman over intellectual property, which makes me wonder — yet again — why the Republican Congress never took the opportunity to expand fair use rights, gut the DMCA, and generally stick it to the entertainment industries, which are a crucial source of funding for the Democratic Party and the left generally. It’s not like this tactic wasn’t obvious. (I wrote in 2002: “Will Republicans take advantage of this opportunity? That depends on whether they want to be a majority party – or history.” Well. . . .) Plus, it was the right thing to do.

And read this, too. And for some further thinking on the general subject from an original-intent perspective — rejected, alas, by the Supreme court — see this article that Rob Merges and I wrote.

THE CONCOURSE OF HYPOCRISY: This is why I drive a hybrid. And avoid dumb bumperstickers!

Personally, though, this would have been my pick for first place.

KOFI’S GONE, BUT HIS SCANDALS REMAIN: “The UN said today that it would launch an investigation after the Daily Telegraph reported allegations that UN personnel have abused children in southern Sudan. Members of the United Nations peacekeeping forces in southern Sudan are facing allegations of raping and abusing children as young as 12, The Daily Telegraph reported today. . . . This paper has learnt of more than 20 victims’ accounts claiming that some peacekeeping and civilian staff based in the town are regularly picking up young children in their UN vehicles and forcing them to have sex. It is thought that hundreds of children may have been abused.”

If these were U.S. troops, it would be proof that Bush is Hitler, and America is evil. Since we’re talking about the U.N., though, it’s just one of those regrettable incidents that can’t be helped, really.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: Hanging with Hezbollah.

The first time I met Hussein Naboulsi, Hezbollah’s media relations liaison, he was perfectly friendly. But he later threatened me with physical violence because I cracked a joke about Hezbollah on my blog. On another occasion I was detained for two hours by Hezbollah because they suspected one of my photojournalist colleagues was a Jew. A reporter friend (and I’ll keep his name out of this) was harassed because of an entirely innocuous article he wrote about them for a mainstream left-wing American magazine. Chris Allbritton, who works on occasion for Time magazine, wrote the following on his blog during the July War: “Hizbullah is launching Katyushas, but I’m loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist’s passport, and they’ve already hassled a number of us and threatened one.”

This is how Hezbollah treats Western journalists. I’d say I’m surprised more journalists don’t mention this sort of thing in their articles. But most journalists don’t write first-person narratives. Industry rules generally don’t allow them to describe these kinds of incidents.

Actually, I’m pretty sure that if the Israelis were acting similarly, industry rules would require them to describe these kinds of incidents. But read the whole thing to find out why hassling bloggers is different.

SCIENTISTS TO CELEBRITIES: Keep your mouths shut about science unless you actually know what you’re talking about. “Sense About Science has urged stars not to dip their toes into tricky scientific issues without checking their facts first. Here are some examples put forward by the charity of dubious science uttered by celebrities – together with the views of its experts.” Follow the link for some celebrity-embarrassing moments.

MORE COMPETITION FOR GOOGLE: As I’ve noted before, the barriers to entry are low.

I’m not sure I buy the Coca-Cola analogy to Google presented here. Store shelf space is actually very expensive, so barriers to entry are much higher in the soft drink world. And Coke’s taste is pretty consistent — Google, by acting in ways that dilute its trustworthiness, is tampering with its own brand integrity in ways that Coke never did, except perhaps in the case of the “New Coke” fiasco.

REAL HEROISM in New York.

TOP FIVE ROBOTS YOU CAN BUY RIGHT NOW: By Daniel Wilson, author of the indispensable How to Survive a Robot Uprising, and the forthcoming Where’s my Jetpack? I’ve been asking that question for years.

SYMPATHY FOR Monica Lewinsky.

Plus, fighting the matriarchy.

THOUGHTS ON bloggers, newspapers, and accountability.

HOWARD KURTZ ON GERALD FORD REVISIONISM: “Another way of putting that is that many journalists, three decades later, are admitting that they misjudged Ford and were wrong about the Nixon pardon.”
They said nice things about Reagan after he died, too, despite hating him in office, and they’re already gearing up to do the same thing with George H.W. Bush, who was treated quite unfairly during his term. (See, e.g., the supermarket scanner story). It’s as if the only good Republican President is a dead Republican President.

UPDATE: Jim Bennett emails:

The reason for the media praising dead republican presidents is to make the current Republican president look bad in comparison. This is a twofer — you show that you’re not prejudiced against republicans, and you paint the current president out to be a traitor to the better traditions of his party, even if those better traditions are only recognized posthumously.

Indeed.

A POLITICAL SCANDAL IN BOSTON!

Romney has allowed potentially unqualified people to hobnob! I wonder if the Globe is planning on publishing a special edition to publicize its latest reporting coup.

I smell a Pulitzer! Er, or something. As Dean Barnett comments: “It’s not exactly stealing turkeys from the needy.”

JULES CRITTENDEN NOTES TERRIBLE NEWS: “It means there may actually be reason for hope in Iraq!”

AT POLLSTER.COM, Mark Blumenthal tries to unravel the conflicting Iowa poll data. My explanation: People just don’t care that much about the 2008 elections yet.

EMBEDDED BLOGGER BILL ARDOLINO: “I just got back from a first mounted patrol/IED hunt in and around Fallujah.”

Read the whole thing. And if you like his reporting, consider making a donation, since that’s what’s supporting his work.

A NOT-SO-FOND FAREWELL to Eliot Spitzer: “Spitzer did some good but also a lot of harm to Wall Street and beyond. Competing financial centres, possibly including the rapidly-growing hub of Dubai, will rush in to fill the gap as capital becomes ever more fluid in this information age.”

A SENSE OF PROPORTION, at Reuters.

LIVING LONGER BY STAYING IN SCHOOL:

The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income.

Year after year, in study after study, says Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, education “keeps coming up.”

And, health economists say, those factors that are popularly believed to be crucial — money and health insurance, for example, pale in comparison.

Dr. Smith explains: “Giving people more Social Security income, or less for that matter, will not really affect people’s health. It is a good thing to do for other reasons but not for health.”

Health insurance, too, he says, “is vastly overrated in the policy debate.”

Instead, Dr. Smith and others say, what may make the biggest difference is keeping young people in school. A few extra years of school is associated with extra years of life and vastly improved health decades later, in old age. . . . “If you were to ask me what affects health and longevity,” says Michael Grossman, a health economist at the City University of New York, “I would put education at the top of my list.”

I’m not sure that the causal relationship is there. It may just be that idiots are more likely to drop out of school, and also to die young as a consequence of idiotic behavior. As John Wayne said, life is tough, and it’s tougher when you’re stupid.

MORE THOUGHTS ON STATELESS WAR-FIGHTING, from Josh Manchester. His reference to the Pablo Escobar approach is interesting.

SPECIAL TREATMENT for Suzanne Magaziner on a DUI charge?

SPIDERMAN AND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION: If you think that this story line parallels what’s happening in America today, then you’re definitely in comic-book territory.

UPDATE: Frank J. emails: “It should be noted that Rumsfeld is apparently opposed to the meta-human registration act because here he is pictured with Spider-man and Captain America who are leaders against the regulation (not a photoshop… sadly).”

Isn’t that whole plotline a shameless ripoff of The Incredibles anyway?