THE ASSAULT ON THE RED MOSQUE HAS BEGUN.

A GALLERY OF REGRETTABLE LILEKS PHOTOS: Photoshoppery at its finest!

A LOOK AT “ZERO ENERGY” HOME PLANS, from Matt Edens. Excerpt:

Starting in 2002, ORNL’s Building Technology Center teamed up with Habitat for Humanity to build four demonstration homes outside Lenoir City. Built for less than $100,000 each, those homes’ daily energy costs averaged out to a mere 82 cents a day compared to the $4-$5 of an average Lenoir City home. They weren’t entirely “off the grid,” but at times, their meters more or less ran backwards. Credit for excess electricity contributed back to the power grid trimmed an average of almost $300 off each home’s annual utility bill.

Read the whole thing.

OUCH:

Continuing to strike fear into the hearts of, well, everyone, Taser has released an electrified round that works with any 12-gauge shotgun. The Wireless eXtended Range Electronic Projectile, or XREP, is a fin-stabilized, self-contained round with no wires leading back to the gun and a maximum range of 100 ft. . . .

The XREP punctures the target with multiple probes, and then unspools to dangle from the unfortunate belligerent’s body, all the while applying Taser’s infamous rapid-fire electrical pulses. As an added bonus, any helpful passerby trying to yank the XREP out of the target before the 20-second discharge cycle is finished will also get zapped, thanks to a “hand-trap wire” that’s nestled
in among the other hanging cables.

Impressive — but it’ll be pretty important to be sure that your 12-gauge is really loaded with Taser rounds when you think it is, and not, say, slugs. Or vice versa. I’m not sure that mixing nonlethal and lethal capabilities in the same weapon is a good idea, accident-wise. Never mind the laughing-gas bullets.

STILL MORE ON ROBERT HEINLEIN, from Brian Doherty, in Reason. Excerpt:

Heinlein was, then, his own kind of libertarian, one who exemplified the libertarian strains in both the Goldwater right and the bohemian left, and maintained eager fan bases in both camps. A gang of others who managed the same straddle, many of them Heinlein fans, split in 1969 from the leading conservative youth group, Young American for Freedom, in what some mark as the beginnings of a self-conscious libertarian activist movement. In a perfectly Heinleinian touch, the main sticking point between the libertarian and conservative factions was one of Heinlein’s bêtes noires: resistance to the draft, which he hated as much as he loved the bravery of the volunteer who would fight for his culture’s freedom or survival. . . .

That iconoclastic vision is at the heart of Heinlein, science fiction, libertarianism, and America. Heinlein imagined how everything about the human world, from our sexual mores to our religion to our automobiles to our government to our plans for cultural survival, might be flawed, even fatally so.

It isn’t a quality amenable to pigeonholing, or to creating a movement around “What would Heinlein do?” As Heinlein himself said of his work, it was “an invitation to think-not to be-lieve.” He created a body of writing, and helped forge a modern world, that is fascinating to live in because of, not in spite of, its wide scope and enduring contradictions.

Read the whole thing.

ED MORRISSEY INTERVIEWS Ambassador Said T. Jawad of Afghanistan.

MAGGOTS.

EASY ON THE EYES, BUT HARD ON THE HEART: Padma Lakshmi dumps Salman Rushdie. Not even a knighthood was enough, I guess. Or maybe he got too old and fatwa-ed.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: “Democrats Can’t Wait Around for GOP Defectors to End the War.”

Well, they can vote to end it themselves. But they’ll be responsible for what comes next. And they don’t want that — in fact, one of the things they most want is to take the issue off the table before fall of 2008 so they don’t have to offer a policy.

I agree with Mickey Kaus:

The New York Times is for withdrawal of U.S. troops from most of Iraq, except maybe the Kurdish north. Even the promising Anbar-type initiatives–which seem to require an aggressive U.S. military presence–are apparently to be abandoned. The Times admits the result of the withdrawal will “most likely” be chaos, including “further ethnic cleansing, even genocide.” But it still prefers withdrawal. Jules Crittenden finds this morally curious, and so do I. … I could be convinced that withdrawal is justified because the ensuing burst of sectarian killing will be short, followed by relative stability–preferable, in the long run, to continued occupation. I could be convinced we should abandon the goal of a unitary Iraqi state and focus on some sort of engineered partition. I hope I couldn’t be convinced that we should abandon Iraqis to “genocide” just because the resulting deaths can be blamed on Bush. Does that mean they don’t count?

Not to me, but perhaps the folks at the Times feel differently. But I think they’re crazy to think — as I believe they do — that such a result would help the Democrats. Won’t they at least listen to the BBC?

Meanwhile, it seems clear to me that (1) Bush can pretty much run out the clock on the surge, with at least 6 or 8 months before Congress can make him do much; and (2) Whoever’s President in 2009 will do what looks right at the time, regardless of what he or she says in 2007. (This is why I kind of like Richardson, despite what he’s saying about Iraq.) It’s also clear that at the moment nobody has much of a strategy for 2009 if the issue’s still on the table. Realistically, even if we’re making steady progress, the American public is way past the “three year rule” on overseas combat and by 2009 they’ll be more than double that amount. Heck, I’m not hearing much in the way of useful ideas on what to do about Iran, either. So I guess whoever the next President is will pretty much wind up improvising, regardless of what’s said now. So who in the current field looks like a good improviser?

UPDATE: I agree with Hugh Hewitt that Republican Senators are kidding themselves if they think that going wobbly on Iraq is going to help them. But it’s of a piece with the kind of self-defeating strategy that Byron York points up. Can you say “Republican Death Wish?”

Related thoughts here and here.

And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. isn’t afraid to call people traitors when they don’t appreciate the nature of the threat confronting us . . . . “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.” Hey, I thought it was wrong to question people’s patriotism!

Meanwhile, Dan Riehl offers some historical perspective. Yeah, our losses are lighter, and our military is better, but our politicians are worse.

THOUGHTS ON CONSERVATIVE JUDICIAL ACTIVISM.

HACKING THE VIRTUAL FENCE: At least you need a hacksaw to hack a real fence . . . .

SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY sued over speech codes by the Alliance Defense Fund.

“INCREASINGLY EFFECTIVE IRAQI TROOPS:” Andrew Sullivan says that’s the line I’m pushing, but as seems to be his wont when describing me lately he doesn’t link to an actual post of mine, and I can’t find that phrase on my blog, though Andrew presents it with quotation marks twice. It is true, though, that we’re hearing from people actually in Iraq, like Michael Yon and J.D. Johannes, that the Iraq troops are generally getting better, though Yon says Iraqi commanders and logistics are still subpar. Still, if Andrew’s going to present something as a direct quote, he might want to point to where I’ve actually, you know, said it. With a link. This is a trivial matter, of course, except for the likelihood that Glenn Greenwald or somebody will start linking to this post of Andrew’s while attributing things to me in a misleading way, kind of like they’ve done with “more rubble, less trouble.”

UPDATE: Reader Gregg Reynolds (no relation) writes:

Because it’s been a few weeks since I’ve visited Sullivan’s site, I was intrigued by your reference to Sullivan today and wanted to get to the bottom of it.

The “increasingly effective” quote comes evidently from a recent Jules Crittenden column: http://www.julescrittenden.com/2007/07/08/genocide-prefered/

Here is Sullivan’s post on it: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/07/continuing-the-.html

Now Sullivan labels you and anyone you cite “approvingly” on still trying to win in Iraq with the moniker “the ‘stab-in-the-back’ right” or some similar construction. I’m still confused about where that label comes from. I’m guessing it’s pejorative, though.

I hope this reduces confusion.

Well, a bit. I followed a link to Andrew’s post and didn’t spend enough time poking around, obviously. The “stab in the back” label basically involves calling me a Nazi, which is of a piece with his behavior lately. But I’ve never rejected Sullivan.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Han Meng emails:

Sullivan’s “‘stab-in-the-back’ right” apparently refers to Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth, which Sullivan seems to think everyone’s familiar with, but makes little sense if one isn’t. And I don’t think it applies to you:

“Given this state of permanent culture war, it is not surprising that the Bush White House trotted out the stab-in-the-back myth when its Iraq project began to run out of steam early last summer. It was first given a spin, as usual, by the right’s media shock troops, and directed at both Democratic and renegade Republican lawmakers who had dared to criticize either the strategic conduct of the war or our treatment of detainees….Critics of the war were not simply questioning its strategy or its necessity, or upholding the best of American traditions by raising concerns over how enemy prisoners were being treated. Instead, they were aiding the enemy, and actively endangering our fighting men and women. They were traitors and “revolutionaries,” individuals who were “conducting guerrilla warfare on American troops,” and “excrement” who could now be safely incarcerated “immediately” or even “eliminated.””

Hmm. I hadn’t read that piece, but I don’t think it applies to me, either: I certainly haven’t called for eliminating or incarcerating war critics. Meanwhile, more on the Nazi angle from Hub Blog

MICHAEL MOORE PULLS A ROSIE O’DONNELL: Okay, it’s not “ching chong ching chong,” but he’s mocking Sanjay Gupta for having an Indian name. A real class act.

MASS ARRESTS IN ZIMBABWE over price controls and inflation.

GOOD THING IT SEEMS TO BE A SLOW SEASON: “Hurricane Center director replaced in wake of staff rebellion.”

UPDATE: Brendan Loy says I’m wrong, and that it’s not a slow season. I cheerfully bow to his superior expertise, but that doesn’t make me happier about this fiasco.

PARSING Hillary Clinton and Matt Drudge.

AIRBRUSHING AND BACKTRACKING at The Los Angeles Times?

IF THE GENDERS WERE REVERSED, WOULDN’T THIS BE A FIRING OFFENSE?

“I sort of slapped him around,” Couric admits to the magazine. “I got mad at him and said, ‘You can’t do this to me. You have to tell me when you’re going to use a word like that.'”

Just imagine if Brian Williams “sort of slapped around” a female producer.

IF THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO KICK OFF A GORE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDACY, I’d say it failed:

NBC’s three-hour primetime “Live Earth” special, which included highlights from Saturday’s global concerts, failed to generate much enthusiasm in the ratings.

The estimated 2.7 million viewers was slightly under the 3 million viewers NBC has averaged on Saturday nights in the summer with repeats and the Stanley Cup hockey playoffs on what is already the least-popular night of television.

As a reader Bob Houk notes, a guy who can’t outdraw hockey won’t make much of a candidate.

NEWS FROM THAILAND:

The security forces have finally forced the Islamic terrorists to the surface. This was done by identifying religious schools and villages where the terrorists were hanging out, and then making arrests. Large quantities of weapons and bomb making material have been found, and over a hundred people have been arrested in the last week alone. Religious schools are being shut if they are found to harbor terrorists. Last month, 160 arrests were made, and that total will double or triple this month. All this is the result of months of intensive intelligence work and sorting through thousands of incidents and individual records.

Sounds like profiling to me.

FLOATING WINDMILLS for the North Sea.

Maybe we should try it in Nantucket Sound. Ted Kennedy won’t mind . . . .

RODNEY DANGERFIELD MEETS GLOBAL WARMING.

WHEN IS FISH BAD FOR YOU? When it’s pork.

I FINISHED RICHARD MORGAN’S THIRTEEN, and it was quite good. Part of the backdrop for the story is a U.S. that has divided along the “Greater Canada” / “Jesusland” lines in that post-election cartoon. Morgan doesn’t do much with that — he’s not an American, and he treats the flyover states as one big Mississippi, which would be irritating if it played more of a role in the story. Even Mississippi isn’t really one big Mississippi in that fashion. One thing that he gets right, though, is that everybody’s worse off from the change.

A post-secession America would be a better topic for a novelist with a lot of multi-culturalist chops like Tobias Buckell, somebody with enough understanding of America to pull it off in a way that Morgan was smart enough not to attempt.