BY THE WAY, I think I was channeling Ken Layne in the post below. I felt his spirit enter my body there for a minute as I typed. If I start writing about bats, send help.

SOME CANADIAN GUY is denouncing America again, with the usual form letter: blah blah oil, blah blah militarism, blah blah Enron, blah blah guns.

Here’s the part he gets right: “Does this bother you? Not in the least.”

UPDATE: James Lileks suggests that this is a brilliant government plan to discredit the opposition to the war — made more brilliant by the fact that it contains nothing with which the opposition disagrees! Lileks resurrects the term “idiotarian” here, and though I think that term’s moment has passed, I’ll grant that this specimen is unusually worthy.

ANOTHER UPDATE: For some reason, the Lileks link above isn’t working. (One reader said that’s okay, because Lileks has the world’s coolest 404 page. I wish I were as cool as James Lileks.) Anyway, here’s the main link; just scroll.

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Canadian reader Alan Cameron is buying Lileks’ theory:

I’m from Canada and yet haven’t had the good luck to meet Mr. McDougall. Seriously, don’t you wish you could meet him? He’s fascinating. So very stupid, so ill-informed, so vile, so hate-filled. Truly an uncommonly high concentration of all these characteristics to be found in just one fool. There isn’t a conspiracy theory he doesn’t believe. Where, or in what, does he live? How does he get by on the pittance that is welfare subsistence? Can he tie his own shoes? Where does he vacation? What colour was the sky in his kindergarten drawings? I would love to learn more about the man. Thanks for this one.

Lileks’ theory is great, and it seems the most plausible explanation for the letter.

Yes, the disinformation theory would explain a lot about the antiwar movement. And I keep trying to remind myself that just because yahoos like this guy oppose the war does not, by itself, make it a good idea. It just seems that way.

STEVEN DEN BESTE may have found a Homeland Security success story. No, really.

IT’S A FAMILY FEUD, on PunditWatch!

WHAT JOURNALISM SCHOOLS CAN LEARN FROM LAW SCHOOLS. Interesting.

OLIVER WILLIS HAS ADVICE FOR LOUIS FARRAKHAN ON REPARATIONS: “Louis, you owe America more money than you can count for having to endure your sorry shuck and jive for all these years.” He’s also ticked off about media coverage of the subject, and of black people generally.

Except at The American Times, of course.

SKBUBBA SHINES THE LIGHT OF THE BLOGOSPHERE on TVA air pollution. Burning coal is one of the nastiest ways there is to generate electricity. We do a lot of it around here. Wish we had more nice, clean nukes. . . .

MUGABE IS STARVING THE OPPOSITION, according to this report in the Christian Science Monitor. You’d think that after the fuss that Noam Chomsky made about starvation that never happened in Afghanistan, he’d make an even bigger fuss about this since it’s, you know, actually happening. Well, you’d think that if you didn’t know Chomsky.

DEFINING TERRORISM DOWN: Charles Johnson is unhappy with this article by Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson in the Washington Post.

What causes Charles to label this article “appalling” is its cold-bloodedly neutral assessment of suicide bombers’ attacks on innocent civilians as purely a question of military effectiveness. If Israel or the United States chose to attack primarily Arab schools and shopping centers, would the Post take the same tone?

Of course not. And like all those who hold Arabs to a lower moral standard, the Post is being discriminatory — some would say “racist,” though Arabs are caucasian — in doing so. But it’s certainly condescending. “What can you expect from the wogs?” is the implicit assumption behind such treatment.

UPDATE: Sasha Volokh disagrees, sort of. He says he loves dispassionate military analysis, though he agrees that the Post probably wouldn’t be so dispassionate about U.S. or Israeli actions deliberately targeting civilians for the sake of inspiring terror. Which was my point.

MORE ABOUT BLOGS, in Newsweek.

BRUCE ACKERMAN raises legal arguments against the Bush Administration’s doctrine of “strong preemption.” They’re related to, but not the same as, those raised by William Van Alstyne earlier. Had Ackerman’s earlier comments on the war not been so embarrassingly partisan and uninformed, this piece — which has some actual substance — would carry more weight.

UPDATE: Stuart Buck writes that Ackerman is on the wrong side of an ongoing “constitutional moment.”

NEAL STEPHENSON UPDATE: Well, only sort of. My earlier post invoking Cryptonomicon generated a lot of email. One noticeable strand involved the character of America Shaftoe, who many readers saw as unrealistic, and who was referred to by one reader as a “geek fantasy chick.”

I disagree. In fact, my brother’s long-term girlfriend makes America Shaftoe seem tame. She’s gorgeous enough to be a swimsuit model, is in grad school in robotics, and is a crack shot. (And for extra exoticism points, is Nigerian). She even has her own software company selling network billing and management software to Internet cafes in the third world.

Plus, when they were here last weekend, she re-installed my wireless network. The replacement hardware was, of course, an upgrade from what I’d had before, and the installation was totally different. I had looked at it, groaned, and put it off until I had a full afternoon, and plenty of patience, to screw with it. She did it in a couple of hours. And, most impressively, was visibly having a great time while she did.

Let’s see Neal top that!

GO-ANYWHERE BLOGGING? This looks pretty cool. It’s an ISDN-speed (up to 144 kbps) always-on go-anywhere wireless connection via a PCMCIA card. The pricing seems a bit steep, though: it’s based on bandwidth, and I think I’d blast through my monthly allotment in a day or so.

UPDATE: Reader Rob Wald has some firsthand experience to report:

About the Novatel/Sprint card. First of all, Sprint is pure evil. I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with them, but in a world of wireless carriers which are all bad, they are by far the worst.

But as long as you are mentioning the service, Verizon has the same service called CDMA 1xRTT) priced at $99/month for unlimited usage (Mb pricing also available). I don’t know why sprint is getting all of the press because Verizon is a better company with more coverage and better pricing. All cell companies may be evil, but Verizon is not Satanic.

Anyway, I’m currently testing the service. Happy with some of it, but for my admin duties, the latency is very bad which makes telnet/ssh somewhat unpleasant to use. Not sure if it is good enough. Is fine for email and surfing, but one doesn’t spend $100/mth of other people’s money for surfing.

Nice slogan: “Evil, sure, but not Satanic!” Sounds interesting. $99/month unlimited bandwidth isn’t bad. A bit too steep for me, especially since my home and work environments have wireless networks that are much cheaper, since they’re free. But it wouldn’t have to come down a whole lot to be worth my while.

THE POLITBURO is reporting on the reparations rally on the mall, with a big wrapup promised for a bit later. Highlight so far: Brooklyn councilman Charles Barron’s expressed desire to slap a white person just for his mental health. There are audio excerpts from the speeches.

UPDATE: The Corner has discovered this too, and has some observations.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Susanna Cornett has a transcript of a radio interview in which Barron tries to explain the remark away as “black hyperbole,” and claims that if a white person said that sort of thing it would be different. Cornett’s verdict:

Barron was being flagrantly racist in his comments, and the fact that he was applauded by blacks and whites alike only says that his kind of racism is acceptable in some circles, not that it wasn’t racism. I hope the mainstream media pick up Barron’s explanation from Malzberg’s show, because it makes his racism very clear.

I’m with Oliver Willis on this stuff.

JURY — AND GRAND JURY — NULLIFICATION: Howard Bashman points to an interesting Ninth Circuit case on grand jury instructions, and goes from there into a general discussion of jury nullification: the power of juries to refuse to convict (or, where grand juries are involved, to indict) even where the evidence is sufficient, if they feel that such a refusal is necessary to serve justice.

Howard sees jury nullification as an inevitable bug in the system: “Jury nullification is something our system endures because there’s no other alternative, but it’s not something to be encouraged.” I think this is wrong: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Jury nullification gets a bad rap, being associated in the public mind with the O.J. trial and with the failure of various juries to convict racist killers in the South in some famous cases during the 1940s and 1950s. Such discretion, the conventional wisdom says, is at odds with justice.

Well, maybe — but if so, the jury is the least of the problem. Everybody else in the system, from the cop on the beat, to the prosecutor, to (realistically) the judge, has discretion to let an offender off if they think conviction would be unjust. But oddly enough, it’s only the excercise of this power by juries that gets a horrified reaction from the justice system. A cynic might conclude that this is because juries don’t have union cards, and aren’t as readily controlled by the other players in the justice system.

The cynic would have a stronger case for this position than Howard’s post suggests. In a recent book entitled Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine, Clay S. Conrad looks at the conventional wisdom and the history of jury nullification and finds some mismatches, concluding that juries were meant to have this power, and that the justice system’s opposition to it comes mostly from institutional self-interest. He also draws support from legal scholars such as Leonard Levy and Akhil Amar.

For a summary of Conrad’s argument, and some suggestions of my own, you can read this review of Conrad’s book that I wrote for the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. The opening sentence, with all due modestly, is among the catchier ones in legal scholarship.

UPDATE: Howard calls my remarks “especially thoughtful,” which coming from him is quite a compliment. Though I notice he doesn’t say whether he agrees. . . .

DANIEL TAYLOR is still in the ICU, though doing a bit better. There are daily reports on his blog from his wife, Oreta. Leave a get-well message in the comments if you like — she’s reading them to him in the hospital.

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY UPDATE: Reader Martin Grace lives in Atlanta, and has this report about Robert Redford campaigning for Cynthia McKinney:

My wife just got a phone call from Mr. Redford (one of those prerecorded campaign phone calls) plugging Ms. McKinney for next week’s primary election here in De Kalb County. Louis Farrakhan and Robert Redford. Who’d of thunk it?

Well, I’ve never seen them photographed together. . . .

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus has an observation on Marxism and the Gore campaign.

IT’S A LESSIG-O-RAMA over at Brad De Long’s page, with links and info on copyright from Larry Lessig.

TALKLEFT has a new URL. Set your bookmarks accordingly.

THE DEMOCRATS ARE GOING TO ATTACK BUSH for going too easy on Saudi Arabia, predicts Silflay Hraka, whose case looks pretty strong in light of today’s Frank Rich column, Rich being a near-infallible conventional-wisdom weathervane where the Democratic establishment is concerned.

If so, well, Bush was warned. Repeatedly.

HOLY SH*T! As of 7:32 this morning, 6837 people had downloaded the Lindgren piece on Bellesiles.

And I thought the 1600 or so who downloaded the two articles of mine that I put up earlier was a lot. The Web seems to be an underappreciated tool for the dissemination of legal scholarship.

WE HAD AN ANTIWAR PROTEST IN KNOXVILLE YESTERDAY, right across from the law school. It was one rather overweight and unkempt guy with a handwritten sign that said “U.S. OUT OF” followed by an illegible list of scrawled country names. There was also a “honk for peace” sign. I didn’t hear anybody honk, and I didn’t see anyone give him the finger, either. It was like he wasn’t even there.

The law school, I should note, has been displaying an enormous American flag since September 11.

MY DAUGHTER IS WATCHING CINDERELLA II on video as I write this. Like most of the Disney remakes, it’s not a patch on the original. But the theme is relevant to the times: Cinderella is now the Princess, scandalizing the very European-accented aristocrats (Cinderella, of course, sounds quite American) with her egalitarian approach to the commoners, her choice of banjo-and-fiddle music in place of waltzes, etc., etc. The aristocrats huff and puff about how crass this is, and how such things aren’t done, but their huffing and puffing is, of course, impotent, and they are left to fume on the sidelines.

Sounds familiar.

MUGABE UPDATE: His financial mismanagement (er, and corruption) has reached the point that he’s deeded over his embassy in London to Qaddafi to cover bad oil debts. The good news is, Libya’s own state oil enterprise is close to bankruptcy, in part from covering for Mugabe’s profligacy. I also learned something I didn’t know: the land seized from white farmers has been deeded over to Tripoli to cover bad debts. New slogan for Zimbabwe: “No land for oil!”

THE MORAL BANKRUPTCY OF SUBURBAN MAHATMAS: That’s the subject line in an email directing me to this post about those who want moral superiority on the cheap.