ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST: EPA Deputy Administrator candidate withdraws.

YOU KNOW, I BOUGHT A SUBSCRIPTION TO THE FINANCIAL TIMES, but unimpressive reporting like this from Sheila McNulty and Dan Dombey makes me wonder if my money is being well-spent. The story talks about soaring U.S. gun sales, but fails to mention fears of an Obama gun/ammunition control initiative (spurred by Eric Holder’s remarks) and then repeats the Mexican gun canard. Plus, policy quotes are all from regulators or gun-control groups. Honestly, I can get this kind of lazy and misleading stuff anywhere for free — no need to actually pay for it. In fact, the L.A. Times did a much better job on this story days ago, making clear that most of the weapons people are talking about don’t come from America, and particularly not from civilian gun shops, but from illicit military channels.

UPDATE: Reader Ben Wells writes:

I read the same story and had the same thoughts as you.

I find that the FT is very good on, well, finance.

Other subjects, not so much.

So it appears.

THE MEDIA’S QUEST to right the Good Ship Obama.

AS SEEN ON TV: Testing Shamwow vs. Zorbeez.

SLATE: Of all the reasons to plant a garden, free food may be the worst.

MICKEY KAUS: ONE IN FIFTY CHILDREN HOMELESS? “This is one of those statistical assertions that you know is BS before you even set out to show it’s BS. If you just live here and go around with your eyes open you know it’s BS. Sure enough, it’s BS!”

“JUST THE BEGINNING:” But will they like the ending?

NOW, THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN a suitable gift for Gordon Brown, if you had to give a bunch of DVDs. And it would have subtly underscored the importance of Anglo-American defense and intelligence cooperation. But watch out for the region code!

GOING JOHN GALT EDWARD ABBEY? Attacking parking meters in Chicago:

Mike says the people who are writing to him have a sense of “anger, frustration, rage in some cases.” To the point where some, it appears, are vandalizing the meters. Pictures on Mike’s website show meters deliberately smashed, taken apart, spray-painted, or deliberately jammed. “People suggest taking a quarter, putting some super glue on it, and putting it in the coin slot,” Mike said.

That jams the meter and everyone parks for free. Or not at all. . . . “Some people write me and say, ‘this is the last straw, my condo is for sale, sales tax, red light cameras.’ It’s just too much for some people,'” Mike said.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Various readers say it’s more like going “Cool Hand Luke.” Heh.

GEITHNER Open to Chinese Dollar-Replacement Plan?

Geithner, at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the U.S. is “open” to a headline-grabbing proposal by the governor of the China’s central bank, which was widely reported as being a call for a new global currency to replace the dollar, but which Geithner described as more modest and “evolutionary.”

Well, that’s a relief. But Geithner needs to learn to be more careful in his statements:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sent the dollar tumbling with comments about China’s ideas for overhauling the global monetary system, only to drive it back up by affirming that it should remain the world’s reserve currency.

The affirmation came only in response to Roger Altman’s last-minute save in the form of a request for “clarification.” This kind of thing just adds to the sense of a team that’s not ready for prime time.

Also: Geithner Misses Lifeline, Sinks Dollar.

And, as the image below from Memeorandum earlier today demonstrates, Geithner also deepsixed some of the JournoList crowd who had launched a premature defense on the China dollar-replacement issue. Heckuva job, Timmy!

UPDATE: “No he can’t.”

JONAH GOLDBERG: Paranoid Style for Thee But Not For Me. “I just have a hard time listening to liberals grow suddenly high-brow and Ivy League serious about the paranoid style of the American Right. Where were these people for the last eight years when abject paranoid hysteria consumed the left flank of liberalism and threatened to capsize the entire enterprise?”

Meanwhile, here’s a Jerry Pournelle quote from a while ago: “We have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It’s worse now, because capture of government is so much more important than it once was. There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time — not during most of your lifetimes, and for much of mine — and it will probably never be true again.” I may be wrong, but I doubt there was as much of a paranoid strain in American politics 100 years ago.

HMM: Most Electronic Voting Isn’t Secure, CIA Says. Luckily, there’s an amazing technology for addressing this problem.

SAFE WATER with the Steripen.

REDSTATE WANTS YOU TO phone Congress about the budget. They’ve got some specific targets.

THE 100 GREATEST Indie-Rock Albums of All Time. Bah — they left out Copper’s The Fragile Fall. And Heart Break and Duct Tape.

NOAH SHACHTMAN: Pentagon Plan to Regrow Limbs: Phase One, Complete.

UH OH: Stocks slide after lackluster demand for US debt stirs worries about economic recovery plans. If we can’t borrow a lot of new money, how are we going to pay off the people we already owe?

SILICON GRAFFITI: “2009: A Book Banning Odyssey”.

REHABILITATING Eliot Spitzer?

CRIMINALS in medical school.

CYBERTERRORISM: How Vulnerable is U.S. Infrastructure to a Major Cyber Attack?

GIVING GORDON BROWN a much-deserved hard time.

UPDATE: At his blog, some thoughts from Daniel Hannan on bypassing the media filter:

The internet has changed politics – changed it utterly and forever. Twenty-four hours ago, I made a three-minute speech in the European Parliament, aimed at Gordon Brown. I tipped off the BBC and some of the newspaper correspondents but, unsurprisingly, they ignored me: I am, after all, simply a backbench MEP. When I woke up this morning, my phone was clogged with texts, my email inbox with messages. Overnight, the YouTube clip of my remarks had attracted over 36,000 hits. By today, it was the most watched video in Britain.

How did it happen, in the absence of any media coverage? The answer is that political reporters no longer get to decide what’s news.

Read the whole thing. (Via Randy Barnett, who notes: “FWIW Hannan initially favored Obama over McCain in January ’08 before becoming undecided in September.” I note, however, that Hannan is willing to give Obama more time before turning against him, despite the seeming similarity between Brown’s economic policies and Obama’s.)

SPACE STORMS AND POWER OUTAGES:

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences. The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. ‘We’re moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster,’ says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report. . . .

There are two problems to face. The first is the modern electricity grid, which is designed to operate at ever higher voltages over ever larger areas. Though this provides a more efficient way to run the electricity networks, minimising power losses and wastage through overproduction, it has made them much more vulnerable to space weather. The high-power grids act as particularly efficient antennas, channelling enormous direct currents into the power transformers.

The second problem is the grid’s interdependence with the systems that support our lives: water and sewage treatment, supermarket delivery infrastructures, power station controls, financial markets and many others all rely on electricity. Put the two together, and it is clear that a repeat of the Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. . . .”If a Carrington event happened now, it would be like a hurricane Katrina, but 10 times worse,” says Paul Kintner, a plasma physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

In reality, it would be much worse than that. Hurricane Katrina’s societal and economic impact has been measured at $81 billion to $125 billion. According to the NAS report, the impact of what it terms a “severe geomagnetic storm scenario” could be as high as $2 trillion. And that’s just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back. “I don’t think the NAS report is scaremongering,” says Mike Hapgood, who chairs the European Space Agency’s space weather team.

As I’ve noted before, we need to be hardening our infrastructure. This is just another reason why these things need to be tougher and more fault-tolerant. It’s also an argument for more distributed power-generation sources, like wind and solar — and, to a degree, for sources less dependent on frequent resupply, like nuclear.

PHYLLIS CHESLER: A Universal Doctrine of Women’s Rights.

BRIAN WANG: Emerging technological Black Swans.