JEEZ: “China has upped the ante on censorship, moving beyond the Great Firewall of China to mandate that all Internet video sites must be state-owned.” No Internet coverage of the next Tiananmen massacre if they can help it.

SOUNDS GOOD: “Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!”

UPDATE: Several readers think this is a hoax, or at least overstated, and one writes:

Nice dreams. but i find many issues with the story.

I use waste veggie right now in my Dodge. It clatters more than diesel, not less, the engine is less quiet than on diesel. You have to filter your wvo to less than 5 microns, and you can’t do that through a pair of jeans (it generally won’t flow through denim at less than 140 deg F), and it takes a pump to push it through a filter. If it were that easy,
more of us would do it. (trust me, I run 20K+ miles a year on veggie…..)

Biodiesel does require different materials in your fuel system (believe me, I *know* this from experience…The hard way). And biodiesel uses feedstock, just like ethanol does. His idea about electric (plug in) vehicles is good, and not far off the mark, but the devil is in the details. TO get good range, you need a LOT of batteries. You can’t “go next door to Ace Hardware and buy a DC electric motor” and just “bolt the electric motor onto the back of the
transfer case” and hook up the batteries. In the basics, that works. In reality, you need gearing to mate the DC motor to the rest of the drivetrain, and the weight of the batteries is prohibitive if you want any real range. (again, I know this from experience in DC driven farm carts and such). I’ve built 5 so far.

Hydrogen and Natural Gas are wonderful fuels, but they won’t cut mileage in half. At best, they are an alternative fuel. They will produce more power, but so will adding more gasoline or diesel to the current engine’s fuel mix. Hydrogen does help diesel burn cleaner, but it is cost prohibitive. The diesel guru’s have often used propane or Natural gas to increase HP in their engines. But it’s just putting another fuel into the engine. More miles per gallon of diesel, perhaps. Less fuel used per mile? No.

If adding hydrogen or propane or natural gas were economical, don’t you really think that the freight companies would use it? They’ll do anything to save a buck, but they haven’t. It really doesn’t save anything. More HP in the same size engine, but at a reduced lifetime.

Ethanol as you have posted previously, is at best a boondoggle for farmers via subsidies. It really doesn’t save any energy after all has been considered. If we had sugarcane, it might, but corn ethanol is a waste of good food.

He has some good ideas. But converting them to practical automobiles for people and cargo transportation? That’s the rub.

Yeah, over the years I’ve heard a lot of stuff that sounds good about homebrew MPG tinkering. Often you can make a vehicle that works pretty well if the driver is also the designer and mechanic; it’s a lot harder to make something you can sell to consumers. I’ve also heard a lot of hoaxes. Don’t know which this one is. There’s some skepticism in this DailyKos thread.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More discussion at Bill Quick’s place.

WHERE IS EUROPE’S RON PAUL?

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE REAL WORLD: As the Iowa hoopla dies down, some useful thoughts from William Shawcross about the big picture.

MARK LEVIN: Relax. Huckabee will not be the Republican Nominee.

FAT-BLOGGING: I guess it’s the time of year, but there’s always lots of interest when I put up a diet or fat-related post.

I will say that I tried the Shangri-La Diet as an experiment back when we did our podcast with Seth Roberts, and absolutely nothing happened. Of course, it’s supposed to work better the more overweight you are, and I’m not overweight — except on the lame BMI scale, which doesn’t really work for people who lift weights — so I suppose it’s possible that it lives up to the hype elsewhere.

In my experience, though, the only real weight-loss plan that works is eat less and exercise more. But nobody wants to do that . . . .

RICHARD FERNANDEZ on climate, corruption, and bureaucratic empowerment.

A REPORT FROM JOHN MCCAIN’S blog conference call.

WHY THE NETROOTS aren’t overjoyed about Obama’s victory.

CLAIM: A cold spell soon to replace global warming.

So, would that be good news, or bad?

FIREFLY RETURNS: as an online game.

IN THE MAIL: Eric Finkelstein & Laurie Zuckerman’s The Fattening of America: How The Economy Makes Us Fat, If It Matters, and What To Do About It.

MICHAEL YON: “The body armor controversy is heating up again. The military is being accused of malfeasance but I believe that certain manufacturers have been more successful at manufacturing controversy than body armor.” And on a related note, see Michael Totten’s comments on wearing heavy body armor: “One lieutenant forced me to wear Marine-issue body armor – which weighs almost 80 pounds – before he would let me go out on patrol with him. I felt like Godzilla lumbering around with all the extra bulk and weight, and I didn’t really feel safer. Running while carrying those extra pounds all of a sudden wasn’t much of an option. Sacrificing most of my speed and agility to make myself a little more bullet-proof might not be worth it.” That’s a trade-off that the press stories usually ignore.

UPDATE: Bill Ardolino emails:

“Marine issue” body armor weighs 80 lbs. only when it is accompanied by webbing and a full complement of ammunition and other gear. A standard issue interceptor or spartan vest with kevlar inserts and the heavy ceramic rifle plates is about 35 lbs., max 40 lbs. with kevlar bells and whistles like sleeves.

Up until recently in Anbar, this rig, while cumbersome and problematic for middle-of-the-night and Special Ops stuff, was fairly useful in stopping armor piercing and other high caliber sniper rounds, as well as protecting against lesser threats like shrapnel and 7.62 rounds.

Regarding the ostensibly superior dragon skin armor: as a journalist embed without the ammunition, I would find the extra weight prohibitive. If I were a soldier or Marine with an extra 40 lbs. of ammunition and gear, I would find it REALLY prohibitive.

More info on body armor here.

It probably feels like 80 lbs. soon enough.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More on body armor at The Captain’s Journal.

MORE: Still more on the armor faux-controversy here.

STILL MORE: A reader emails:

Right after my son got to Iraq, they weighed his basic rig. That was armor(with side and shoulder plates), camelback with water, basic ammo load, first-aid kit, all the stuff you ALWAYS take. It was right at 90 pounds. Add in helmet, rifle, extra ammo, etc., and that’s a lot to carry around.

Yeah. If you know you’re gonna get shot, you’d like to be wearing the heaviest armor possible. But if you know you’re going to duck, you’d like to be wearing the lightest armor possible. It’s a bit like sports cars vs. SUVs, I suppose: You see a wreck, and you’d like to be in a big heavy SUV. But you don’t see the wreck that didn’t happen because the guy in the sports car managed to swerve out of the way.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: “With oil prices soaring, a U.S. distracted by war in Iraq and the rise of populist anti-American leaders in Latin America, it’s amazing that free trade isn’t better understood as a way the U.S. can boost its influence in its own hemisphere.” Yeah, even among the supposed devotees of “soft power” it gets short shrift.

A CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW PREVIEW. I’ll be there with the Popular Mechanics folks starting on Sunday.

MICKEY KAUS says Iowans are smarter than he thought — but he also finds journalists admitting they’re afraid to write negative things about Obama.

GOOD NEWS — VINDICATION. Bad news — 26 years behind bars for an innocent man:

Three times during his nearly 27 years in prison, Charles Chatman went before a parole board and refused to acknowledge he was a rapist. His steadfastness was vindicated yesterday, when a judge released him because of new DNA evidence showing he indeed wasn’t. The release of Mr. Chatman, 47, added to Dallas County’s nationally unmatched number of wrongfully convicted inmates.

I think he ought to get a millon bucks per year served. At a minimum.

FREE SPEECH? WHAT’S THAT? British blogger to be arrested for inciting racial hatred. What, are they channeling the Saudis in Britain? If you’re interested in supporting free speech rights, the British Embassy’s contact page is here. As with the Saudi case I don’t know much about the blogger, but I don’t need to — people shouldn’t be arrested merely for blogging things that the powers-that-be don’t like.

But since the British government disagrees, they should be forced to live with their position, and the one-sided nature of it should be brought out. As with the Steyn-persecuting Canadian government, British citizens who value free speech should be flooding the authorities with complaints about hate speech aimed at Jews, Christians and, for fun, even Americans, and then documenting the action, or lack thereof, that results.

UPDATE: Brian Micklethwait comments: “If Lionheart’s claim that he faces arrest just for blogging his mind are correct, then of course it is everything-and-the-kitchen-sink time. Let battle be joined. But for now, I would like just a little more reconnaissance.” Well, if it turns out he knocked over a bank or something, then yes. But the notion of people being arrested in Britain just for saying politically incorrect things is hardly shocking these days. That said, I’d be happy if this turned out to be something else, for obvious reasons. As one of Micklethwait’s commenters observes: “Surely the bigger issue here isn’t whether or not he actually goes to chokey, it’s the fact that we now live in a society in which he credibly could.” And that’s pretty clearly the case in Britain, which is also trying to export its laws to the United States via libel tourism and the like.

STEPHEN GREEN TO IOWA REPUBLICANS: “What the f*** is wrong with you people?”

BIG — AND DEVASTATING — NEWS ON THAT LANCET STUDY claiming massive civilian deaths in Iraq. A National Journal cover story by Neil Munro suggests the possibility of outright scientific fraud. Munro notes serious problems with the study, and a failure on the part of The Lancet’s staff to determine if the data on which it was based — data which the authors will not share — were even true. In addition, there are problems with conflicts of interest and political bias. This is a big deal story; it’ll be interesting to see if it gets the attention it deserves.

UPDATE: Some background here. (Bumped).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Much more here. “This should be a lesson to Old Media that a little digging is in order when something so out of line with previous reports shows up. But it’s one that probably won’t be learned — at least when outlier studies like Lancet’s fit their advocacy template.”

ON TO THE Wyoming caucus!

SEEING A GHOST in New Hampshire.

RON RADOSH REVIEWS Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. Our podcast interview with Goldberg is here.

UPDATE: Another review, by Fred Siegel, in the Wall Street Journal. Jonah comments here.

MORE JOURNALISTIC SCANDAL: The latest on Scott Horton and Harper’s.

THEY’RE NOT AN ENDANGERED SPECIES IN ACADEMIA YET, THOUGH: Where have all the Marxists gone?