JONATHAN RAUCH: A new politics? Or a new pandering?

GAY CRACKPOTS JOIN WAR ON SEX. Well, once you’ve lined up all the non-gay crackpots, you have to expand your recruiting, I guess . . .

And Amy Alkon piles on.

UPDATE: Further thoughts at Gay Patriot.

THOUGHTS ON THOSE CANADIAN TAR SANDS:

At a time when saying anything good about fossil fuels is like declaring war on the environment, it may seem like wishful thinking to press for an expansion of U.S. oil refining capacity.

Yet it is precisely this sort of thinking that is necessary if we are to make use of a vast, secure and reliable supply of fuel from Canada’s oil sands.

The tar sands hold an estimated 174 billion barrels of crude oil, making Canada’s oil-sands deposits second only to Saudi Arabia in global reserves. The U.S. currently obtains 1 million barrels a day from Canada’s tar sands, but with planned investments the daily supply could exceed 3 million barrels by 2015.

Seems like we should be making those. Then there are reports — which I still regard as iffy, though much of the blogosphere seems excited about them — regarding a potentially just-as-big discovery in the Bakken oil formation of North Dakota. I certainly hope they’re true, and we’ll see. There’s also lots of oil shale in Colorado.

IN THE AGE OF THE PHARAOHS, life basically sucked:

Studies on the remains of ordinary ancient Egyptians in a cemetery in Tell el-Amarna showed that many of them suffered from anemia, fractured bones, stunted growth and high juvenile mortality rates, according to professors Barry Kemp and Gerome Rose, who led the research. . . . The study showed that anemia ran at 74 percent among children and teenagers, and at 44 percent among adults, Rose said. The average height of men was 159 cm (5 feet 2 inches) and 153 cm among women.

“Adult heights are used as a proxy for overall standard of living,” he said. “Short statures reflect a diet deficient in protein. … People were not growing to their full potential.”

As Robert Fogel has noted, we take for granted today conditions that are a huge departure from basically all of human history.

WHY BLOG? Reason No. 92: Book Deal! As I can attest, those can be sweet.

MORE THOUGHTS on the problem of PC-induced starvation.

ANOTHER FREE ONLINE PHOTO EDITOR: Earlier, I mentioned Photoshop Express, but a reader recommended Picnik.com and I gave it a try. It’s quick, free online basic photo editing package. Not a lot of fancy features, but not bad at all and easy to use. And free!

ROBOSEXUALITY: Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Not everything’s perfect, though: “I’m limited to what games I can play because I have Vista.”

THE WAR MOVIE THAT NOBODY’S MAKING: But actually, I just got the latest installment of J.D. Johannes’ Outside the Wire project, and, well, somebody is making it.

And here are some thoughts from J.D. Johannes on what Hollywood has done wrong. And what you can do to help show them.

YOU GET SOME AMUSING JUXTAPOSITIONS ON TECHNORATI, SOMETIMES.

MAKING PROFESSORS PAY for late grades:

Florida State is what she believes to be the only institution in the country that fines its professors when they turn grades in late at semester’s end. The tab: $10 per grade.

“We charge for every grade for every student that is not turned in by our deadline,” Barber said, adding, slowly for emphasis: “I’ll say that again: Every grade for every student that is not turned in by our deadline.”

Here at UT, fear of the registrar’s wrath provides sufficient discipline.

THE JOY OF DESPAIR: I had a column on this phenomenon a while back.

OKAY, IF IT WEREN’T FOR GLORIA ALLRED, this Hugo Chavez pic would be the picture of the day.

FORCING OBAMA TO take a stand on affirmative action.

MORE ON THE IRAQI ARMY VS. THE MAHDI MILITIA from Bill Roggio. Just got a voice mail from Michael Yon, too — hoping to get a report from him soon.

UPDATE: Further thoughts here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: “One thing to keep in mind is Muqtada al Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army, is pressing for an end to the fighting. If Sadr’s Mahdi Army was doing so well, why would he call for an end to the fighting?”

OUCH: “According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950. ”

UPDATE: Reader Johann Erickson emails: “Last time I put a ‘help wanted’ ad in my local paper, it cost me about $500. I got 6 faxes, 5 were unqualified for the job. I put an ad on Craigslist for free and got about 40 resumes. About 10 qualified for the job. Why would I ever use a newspaper again? Classified ads were the biggest drop, 16.5% or so. Just another dinosaur dying.” As I said, ouch.

MORE: Jeff Jarvis: “The situation is desperate.”

Plus, a recovery plan: “Hire more lefties to report anti-American stories, and whenever possible, betray national security secrets. . . . Avoid at all costs running columns by Mark Steyn and others with dedicated followings.” That’ll work!

KERRY HOWLEY: How Fear of Life-Saving Technology Swept Through Africa.

In May 2002, in the midst of a severe food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa, the government of Zimbabwe turned away 10,000 tons of corn from the World Food Program (WFP). The WFP then diverted the food to other countries, including Zambia, where 2.5 million people were in need. The Zambian government locked away the corn, banned its distribution, and stopped another shipment on its way to the country. “Simply because my people are hungry,” President Levy Mwanawasa later said, “is no justification to give them poison.”

The corn came from farms in the United States, where most corn produced—and consumed—comes from seeds that have been engineered to resist some pests, and thus qualifies as genetically modified.

Death before political incorrectness.

DEADLINE CONFUSION.

MORE thuggish behavior from Duke University.

LESSON: If you don’t like a film, threaten violence. Then people will take it down. Is this really the message folks like LiveLeak want to send? Because it’s the message they’re sending, over and over again. “Share and enjoy.”

UPDATE: Now the Poligazette link above is down — “Account Suspended.” Don’t know why. But you can still see Fitna on Google Video.

Meanwhile, here’s more on the film:

Speaking to various media about this today, it’s interesting that the first sense of shock is that the footage which Wilders includes is so bloody. Of course Wilders didn’t create this footage – the jihadis did. But it raises an interesting question about the mainstream media. In the last seven years the MSM has gone out of its way to spare the public from seeing the most barbarous acts of our enemies. As we discovered when the BBC infamously pixellated the cartoons two years ago, even Danish drawings have been deemed too upsetting to broadcast of late. The footage in Wilders’ film of the victims of jihad is therefore especially sobering. It isn’t pleasant viewing, but then jihad isn’t pleasant viewing, and if this is what it takes to alert people to the savagery of the threat we all face, Muslims included, then there it is.

I hope as many non-Islamists as possible see the film and consider its implications. But I also hope that the Islamists themselves are not so stupid as to fall into the oldest idiocy of theirs: that is the one which says “Say my religion is peaceful or I will kill you.”

Oops. Too late. And in LiveLeak’s defense, I guess their pulling the film just proves Wilders’ point.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Allah:

Don’t worry, the film’s still around. Google Video has it for the moment and I hear that it’s up and down on YouTube too. When all else fails, just search for “fitna” and “torrent” and all should be well. They don’t call it “viral video” for nothing: Once it’s released into the population, you can never quite stamp it out. LiveLeak did its job for as long as it needed to.

I’d like to see the threateners more scared than LiveLeak, though.

MORE: Pat Dollard has posted Fitna and says he won’t be taking it down in response to threats.

And here’s a YouTube link that’s working at the moment.

FINALLY: Poligazette is back online. They were down for 3 hours, and don’t know why their hosting service suspended them. And more thoughts and discussion here.

CAN OBAMA DISOWN WRIGHT? Yes he can!

VIDEO: A trailer for the forthcoming new version of Grand Theft Auto.

CLARITY AND GUESSING: More on the Texas Democratic Caucus confusion.

STANLEY KURTZ: “After listening to these autobiographical excerpts from Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, read out loud by Obama himself, I’m left with the conviction that, in the 2008 election we are facing the mother of all cultural battles.” Oh, goody.