OUR MEETUP WITH ANN ALTHOUSE: If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then this is a New Yorker feature.

We’d never actually met before, but between the blog and the vlogs and the podcasts I felt like we were already old companions.

A LOOK AT YOUR RIGHTS IN the District of Columbia:

“Whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees,” wrote the District’s chief law enforcer, “it does not require the District to stand by while its citizens die.”

What an excellent example of unintended humor — the District’s government is a national leader in standing by while its citizens die. Our homicide rate hit a 20-year low in 2005 — just 29 victims per 100,000 residents. That is slightly better than New York City’s rate (30.7) under Mayor David Dinkins in 1990, when the Big Apple suffered 2,250 homicides. . . .

D.C. residents are strictly forbidden from owning handguns, even in the privacy of their homes. Any long guns must be registered and kept “unloaded and disassembled.” It is not even legal, strictly speaking, to assemble and load your gun when you hear an intruder downstairs. A lower court ruled the ban unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court will decide later this year whether to take up the case.

In the debate over the gun ban, there is a strong statistical case that an armed citizenry is safer than one disarmed by unconstitutional laws, but this argument is not even necessary. There is absolutely no valid case that the District’s gun ban makes me safer as a District resident. When Singer and Mayor Adrian Fenty (D., of course) penned a September 4 Washington Post op-ed stating that “The handgun ban has saved countless lives,” were they really suggesting that without the ban there might have been 1,000 murder victims in 1991, instead of just 482? The implication is that D.C. is so totally ungovernable that only a total deprivation of constitutional rights can make it barely livable.

Read the whole thing. Related post here.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON shares some final impressions from Iraq.

MORE PICS FROM THE BREAKTHROUGH CONFERENCE: It was like a grownup science fair. With an open bar and fancy snacks.

POLITICAL COVERAGE: Howard Kurtz says the problem is you.

MICKEY KAUS: “If Edwards sinks or disappears, does it benefit Hillary? You’d think no–she doesn’t want a clarified head-to-head race against Obama. But Obama is counting on Edwards to do the dirty work of taking Hillary on. … The ideal outcome for Obama would be if Edwards loses most of his support yet stays in the race long enough to go on the attack.”

THE NETROOTS DEMONSTRATE THEIR POWER AGAIN: Majority of Democrats will vote to fund war.

LAUGHING, CRYING, WHATEVER:

In a rare display of honesty, Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe has acknowledged that his “redistribution” of white-owned farms (which included giving land and equipment to thousands of people who hadn’t a clue how to farm) has been a disaster, and that it has turned his country into a “laughing stock.”

But it’s not his fault.

NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON: “Federal investigators are hinting that a fresh wave of campaign-related theft and corruption investigations of Members of Congress are moving through the pipeline, signaling that indictments may be on the horizon.” (Via The Influence Peddler, who has some thoughts).

Next is a panel with the modest title of How to Save American Science, with physicist Shawn Carlson, who won a MacArthur Fellowship for science education, and who founded the Society for Amateur Scientists; science educator David Connelly; Prof. Hod Lipson from Cornell who won a Breakthrough Award this year for developing universal fabrication technology, and student Breakthrough Award winner Kelydra Welcker, who came up with a way to remove ammonium perfluorooctanoate from drinking water.

BLOGS TARGET JIHADIS ONLINE. Blogger Rusty Shackelford appears: “Asked why he does it, ‘Mr. Shackleford’ said, ‘Because my wife won’t let me go shoot them.'”

MATT SULLIVAN JUST TOLD ME that they’ve got a big roundup, with video online, with background on a lot of the stuff I’m writing about, plus much more.

NOW IT’S A PANEL ON LOW-TECH SOLUTIONS FOR GLOBAL PROBLEMS: It’s Jock Brandis from the Full Belly Project, Shawn Frayne, who won a Breakthrough Award this year for generating a new, low-cost wind generator, Ashok Gadgil of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who got a Breakthrough Award for designing a high-efficiency cookstove for refugees in Darfur, and Peter Haas, who heads efforts on incubating for-profit enterprises targeting poor people who need clean water, sanitation, and energy.

Biggest take-away point so far: “Simple technology” doesn’t mean “dumbed-down.” It’s not really even “low tech.” It often takes a tremendous amount of intellectual input to create a simple, rugged, inexpensive device that cleans water, makes electricity, etc. And while it may seem that the opportunity for small-scale invention has passed, it turns out that there are lots of places where individual inventors can accomplish huge things — they’re just mostly in the poorer parts of the planet.

UPDATE: Best line, from Ashok Gadgil: “The fun of doing this kind of stuff is amazing!”

Second best, from Shawn Frayne: “You can actually make a living at this.”

And from Peter Haas: “There’s a renaissance in tinkering going on.”

Biggest problems in third world countries: Corruption, government bureaucracy, and lack of legal infrastructure.

FAKE HATE SPEECH at George Washington University. The administration was fooled.

UPDATE: Reader Randy Bean emails: “Actually, it was real ‘hate’ speech. The posters were intended to paint the YAF as racist for sponsoring an event discussing the issue of radical Islam. FWIW.”

I’M AT THE POPULAR MECHANICS BREAKTHROUGH CONFERENCE, and Amory Lovins is talking about how the whales were saved by technological innovators and profit-maximizing capitalists. He also says — and I agree — that it doesn’t matter whether you believe “peak oil” catastrophe scenarios because you ought to be doing the same thing anyway. Likewise the global warming debate, which I also agree with. “The debate about energy conservation is about costs, but it’s not about costs — everybody who saves energy makes money on it.”

That’s Lovins on the right, and Popular Mechanics editor Jim Meigs on the left Some nice thoughts on non-hairshirt environmentalism, something I’ve mentioned before.

UPDATE: Below, Lovins talks afterward about how we’re nowhere near the feasible limits of improving efficiency in, well, nearly everything we do.

IN THE MAIL: Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger’s Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.

Plus, Paul Aligica’s Prophecies of Doom and Scenarios of Progress: Herman Kahn, Julian Simon and the Prospective Imagination. Kahn and Simon’s predictions have certainly been borne out to a much greater extent than those of their contemporary doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich.

WRAP YOURSELF IN NANOFABRICS.

MORE THOUGHTS ON TAXES AND PROGRESSIVITY, from James Joyner. “It’s not what it was before the Kennedy and Reagan tax cuts, by any stretch, but it’s hard to argue that those who earn 21.2% of the nation’s income should pay 39.4% of all federal income taxes when taken in isolation. Second, while FICA is undeniably a tax, it’s of a different sort than income taxes. Social Security is, in theory anyway, a pension system rather than a means of collecting general revenue. The reason the very rich pay a smaller percentage of their income into Social Security is that the payout is capped and therefore so is the collection threshold.”

MORE THOUGHTS ON TAXES AND PROGRESSIVITY, from James Joyner. “It’s not what it was before the Kennedy and Reagan tax cuts, by any stretch, but it’s hard to argue that those who earn 21.2% of the nation’s income should pay 39.4% of all federal income taxes when taken in isolation. Second, while FICA is undeniably a tax, it’s of a different sort than income taxes. Social Security is, in theory anyway, a pension system rather than a means of collecting general revenue. The reason the very rich pay a smaller percentage of their income into Social Security is that the payout is capped and therefore so is the collection threshold.”

DRAINING THE SWAMP by “declaring it a wetland and moving on.”

THE DUTCH HAVE no use for heroes. Heroism makes people who behave unheroically feel uncomfortable.

FINDING MARIA BARTIROMO depressing.

MICKEY KAUS: “Mickey’s Assignment Desk–Baracktrackers: 2,000 words on Dem policy bigshots who went with Obama when he looked like the coming thing–and are now desperately trying to somehow get back in Hillary’s good graces. Foreign policy types are usually the most obvious about this sort of thing.”

MEGAN MCARDLE on S-CHIP: “I have to ask conservatives and libertarians: is this really the hill you think we should die on? I do understand your objections to the program, but an informal survey of swing voters, in their current incarnation as my mother, indicates that this is killing you with the moderates. Save it for national health care next year, is what I’m saying. This debate is framing the issue in a way that is going to make things harder, not easier, when Hilarycare is on the table again.”

Of course, not debating would have the same effect, wouldn’t it?

THOUGHTS ON CARBON TAXES, from Megan McArdle.