NON CAMPOS MENTIS: Heh. Anybody who can bring Jeff Goldstein out of retirement with a gleam in his eye is okay by me, however silly his writings.

THIS MAY BE A TREND: Videoblog TVJersey.com bills itself as The television station New Jersey doesn’t have.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll likes it.

MICHAEL TOTTEN INTERVIEWS A CLERIC Hezbollah doesn’t like:

In the dahiyeh, the suburb, of Haret Hreik south of Beirut, where Hezbollah built its command and control center and the “capital” of its illegal state-within-a-state, lives Sayyed Mohammad Ali El Husseini, a moderate Shia cleric with a doctorate in religion from Qom in Iran, who steadfastly and publicly opposes Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s doctrine of war and jihad. He uses the Koran and the Islamic religion as the basis for an alternative vision of peace, independence, and democracy for the people of Lebanon.

My translator Henry informed me that Lebanese journalists are no longer allowed to publish or interview Sayyed Husseini. Dissent from the likes of this man is intolerable and has to be smashed. Hezbollah issued its threats. After the two-year spree of car-bombs against journalists, threats from Nasrallah pack weight.

Read the whole thing.

THE NATIONAL REVIEW FOLKS are having a big summit on the future of conservatism, featuring a lot of big-name speakers. I won’t be able to attend — and I don’t think that actual conservatives care much about where I think conservatism ought to go anyway — but it looks very interesting.

NEAL STEPHENSON’S The Diamond Age is going to become a Sci-Fi Channel miniseries, with George Clooney as Executive Producer. I’m not sure what I think of that, though I’m pretty sure I’d prefer, say, Tim Minear. And speaking of Minear, Nathan Fillion of Firefly will reportedly be appearing in Minear’s new show “Drive.”

BTW, my interview of Stephenson is here, and our podcast interview of Tim Minear is here.

STEPHEN SPRUIELL TAKES A LOOK AT PORKBUSTERS and comments:

Perhaps the biggest success of the Porkbusters movement has been its ability to incorporate the efforts of both left- and right-leaning bloggers, transcending the partisan bickering which characterizes so much of the political blogosphere. “The real split on this stuff is not conservatives vs. liberals or Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s insiders vs. outsiders,” Reynolds says.

And it’s not just the Porkbusters who are bipartisan. Just ask Trent Lott and Harry Reid. As they’re likely to attest, you can find the Porkbusted on both sides of the aisle.

May it remain so. Given its modest resources, PorkBusters has done pretty well. But there’s a long, long way to go. And I want to stress the importance of lefty outfits like TPM Muckraker and — as Spruiell notes elsewhere — The New York Times in helping to bring this along. It’s truly a nonpartisan issue, as I say above.

MAYOR BAILS OUT of Bloomberg’s anti-gun mayors’ group.

CONGRESS CHANGES HANDS: Or does it?

WILL A LARGER MILITARY mean lower standards?

MORE KIDNEY-BLOGGING from Virginia Postrel. (“In a system that is terribly difficult to reform, fixing that law should be relatively simple–if only the beneficiaries weren’t too sick and weak to campaign for reform.”) Podcast interview on this topic with Virginia here. Plus, has the romance gone out of travel?

JAMES MCCORMICK: “America will get the MSM it wants when America takes its national security as seriously as its football.”

MICHAEL YON REPORTS: “Iraq is very winnable.”

IT’S IN TOMORROW’S NEW YORK TIMES, but as an InstaPundit Premium Subscriber^TM — which is, well, everybody — you get access to it tonight! It’s my oped on municipal gun-ownership ordinances and why they’re a good idea. Read it, enjoy it, email it to your friends, whatever. And it’s absolutely free — just like everything else on InstaPundit. [What about the plans for “InstaPundit Select”? — Ed. On hold for the foreseeable future.]

UPDATE: Some people are surprised to see a piece like this in the New York Times. It certainly runs counter to their own editorial stance, but I should note that they solicited the piece based on a couple of blog posts I had; it hadn’t even occurred to me to write an oped on the topic.

And, interestingly, Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing is on the same page. Maybe it’s an experiment to see if opeds by bloggers bring more pageviews!

UPDATE: Cafe Hayek: “While I oppose statutes that mandate gun ownership, these statutes do strike me as being more consistent with the ‘public-goods’ rationale for state action than is most of what government does — and certainly more consistent with this rationale than are statutes that prevent peaceful people from owning guns.”

The mandatory nature of these statutes, as I note, is pretty notional — but in fact, the government clearly has the constitutional power to mandate gun ownership, and in fact did so in the past.

MORE: “Another sign of the apocalypse?” Heh.

AND WITHOUT MY LAME BIRD THEME: The Carnival of the Recipes is up! And so is the Carnival of the Capitalists.

STEVEN POSTREL on economists and physics envy.

HMM: History Repeats Itself: How The RIAA Is Like 17th Century French Button-Makers. Actually, it’s a pretty compelling comparison.

BIRD-O-RAMA: Megan McArdle cooks chicken, then has thoughts on hawks and doves:

Now, of course, I supported the war, so I can be expected to say something like what I am about to say. My only excuse is that I have been thinking hard about this, trying to pick out what went wrong, and I think that I am willing to admit where I was wrong. I was wrong to impute too much confidence to my ability to interpret Saddam Hussein’s actions; I was wrong to not foresee how humiliating Iraqis would find being liberated by the westerners who have been tramping around their country, breaking things for their own reasons and with little regard for the Iraqi people, for several hundred years. I was wrong to impute excessive competence to the government–and not just the Bush administration, but to any government occupation.

However.

This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky? In some way, they got it just as wrong as I did: nothing that they predicted came to pass. It’s just that independently, things they didn’t predict made the invasion not work. If I say we shouldn’t go to dinner downtown because we’re going to be robbed, and we don’t get robbed but we do get food poisoning, was I “right”? Only in some trivial sense. Food poisoning and robbery are completely unrelated, so my belief that we would regret going to dinner was validated only by random chance. Yet, the incident will probably increase my confidence in my prediction abilities, even though my prediction was 100% wrong.

Read the whole thing(s). And here’s my favorite chicken recipe.

UPDATE: Okay, it’s not a bird, but here’s my recipe for lamb and Guinness stew. And no, I’m not sure that this experiment in “theme” blogging really works. But hey, it’s an experimental medium!

“CHERRY PICKING,” redefined.

THE MOST FUN YOU CAN HAVE, without being tasered.

HUGE MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY ROUNDUP here.

MORE ON THE ANTI-GUN JOYCE FOUNDATION’S funding of anti-gun research. Again, this isn’t necessarily wrong, but if the NRA were doing this, it would be considered a huge national scandal of bought-and-paid-for science. But the Joyce Foundation is at least as political and doctinaire as the NRA. So why does this get so little attention?

IN LIGHT OF THE MANY, MANY COOKWARE DISCUSSIONS HERE, I suppose I might mention that there’s a big post-Christmas cookware sale at Amazon.

BLAME AMERICA FIRST: Check out this bogus Associated Press story. Key bit:

The United States is no longer bound by Kyoto, which the Bush administration rejected after taking office in 2001.

Er, no. The truth is as close as this entry from the not especially Bush-friendly Wikipedia:

On July 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was finalized (although it had been fully negotiated, and a penultimate draft was finished), the U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95–0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98),[40] which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or “would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States”. On November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Both Gore and Senator Joseph Lieberman indicated that the protocol would not be acted upon in the Senate until there was participation by the developing nations.[41] The Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol to the Senate for ratification.

Hmm. No Bush Administration rejection there. There is this bit, later on:

The current President, George W. Bush, has indicated that he does not intend to submit the treaty for ratification, not because he does not support the Kyoto principles, but because of the exemption granted to China (the world’s second largest emitter of carbon dioxide[42]). . . . Despite its refusal to submit the protocol to Congress for ratification, the Bush Administration has taken some actions towards mitigation of climate change.

Read the whole thing, and note: The United States was never bound by Kyoto, and it was not “rejected” by the Bush Administration. Once again, a webpage by unpaid amateurs is more accurate and nuanced than an effort by the Associated Press. Anyone can make a mistake, but the AP’s seem to lean heavily in an anti-Bush direction. (Thanks to reader Ronald Vogt for the AP story link.)

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll emails: “No wonder AP is trying to tie Kyoto in with Bush—because then the circle would be complete.”

MORE: Greg Barto emails: “This is another example of why the AP can’t keep relying on environmentalist stringers!” It was vouched for by Asst. Secretary of State Jamil Hussein . . . .

TALL TALES from Megan McArdle.

A COMPLETE RUNDOWN on the Detroit Auto Show and the Consumer Electronics Show in the latest Popular Mechanics podcast.