DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY — HIGH: Trojan Horseshoes is Fisking a church bulletin, and doing a good job.

Somebody should send a copy to the IRS.

I COULD BE WRONG, but I wonder if Kuwait’s closing of its Al Jazeera office isn’t a sign of impending war.

AZIZ POONAWALLA RAINS on the wrap-them-in-pigskin parade:

The reason that these murderers are not going to heaven is because they killed innocent men, women and children. They were engaged in harabah, not jihad.

Wrapping them in pigskin to “prevent” them from entering Heaven implicitly gives credence to the idea that these murderers were engaging in jihad, and had performed an act worthy of admittance to Paradise.

This is probably right, though it assumes a degree of rationality not in evidence.

UPDATE: Vegard Valberg is cool to the idea, too.

THE IMMORALITY of the anti-war position, via Salman Rushdie.

INCRIMINATING PHOTOS from Global Conspiracy HQ. Er, well, one of them is pretty incriminating, anyway.

HMM. Here’s a study suggesting that the economic future for blogging might turn out to be quite bright. Of course, I don’t tend to believe this sort of forecast. . . .

WHY WE NEED NANOTECHNOLOGY:

Diplomacy has failed – meaning that only a revolutionary advanced technology will save the Earth from relentless global warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions, scientists warned yesterday.

Avoiding a catastrophic effect on climate from the burning of fossil fuels would require political will, international cooperation and huge resources, said the team from a group of American universities. But “no amount of regulation” could solve the problem, they said.

Well, yeah. Of course.

UPDATE: This story from Time says that nanotechnology is making money. And, not surprisingly, there’s investor interest.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More nanotechnology links at FuturePundit.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: And here’s a linkfest from Robert Prather.

SAUD DELENDA EST!

ON BEING A PROFESSOR: I’m in the office, as usual on Sunday except when I take the laptop to my “other office” at Borders. I’ve finished my TCS column, replied to a couple of hundred emails on my office account that I can’t access from home for some reason, and gone through a stack of mail that includes a lot of junk, offers for textbooks in areas where I don’t teach, invitations to conferences that take place in three days (what’s the point of mailing those things?) and so on.

I got my annual review from the Dean (we get those even when we’re tenured full professors, like me) and discovered that I “exceed expectations” in all categories. InstaPundit even gets a favorable mention. I got a “conflict of interest” form that doesn’t seem to apply to me, but I emailed the Dean to make sure. (The joy of being a Dean is that you get lots of email like that. . . .) I accepted an invitation to speak at a panel on “Communitarian Approaches to Cyberspace.” I threw away a bunch of accumulated paper left over from doing tenure reviews — where other schools send you the scholarship of people up for tenure or promotion for comments, thus requiring you to read hundreds of pages and write a letter about them. Sometimes they pay you an honorarium of $100, which works out to burger-flipping wages or less. Other times they don’t even do that. The library wants back its copy of David Brin’s “The Transparent Society.” And the mailing list software for the list that I run for my National Security Law seminar keeps kicking one of the students out for some reason. I think that’s fixed now.

People sometimes write to wonder how I spend my time, so here you are! And, despite the way the above sounds, I love my job. It’s just amazing how much underbrush I have to clear just to get to the point where I can actually do the stuff that’s actually supposed to be my job. Next week I’ll get rough draft papers back from my seminar — I don’t grade those, but I do comment on them. And the students in my Administrative Law class will turn in their comments. I pick proposed regulations from the Federal Register each year and have them draft comments, which are actually filed with the agency and become part of its rulemaking docket. This is a great exercise, except, of course, that it means I have to read and grade them all. The class is reasonably sized this year, so it’ll only be about 300-400 pages, plus perhaps half again that many in seminar rough drafts, for me to read this week.

Will blogging be lighter as a result? Could be.

HURRAY! PunditWatch is back!

Big scoop — Gary Hart is thinking of running in 2004! Well, I guess it’s a big scoop for those TV shows, but it was predicted here over a year ago! Well, sort of.

ANOTHER BUMMER. Charles Sheffield died yesterday.

ONLY LAURENCE SIMON WOULD FISK AN APPLIANCE. But he has.

UPDATE: Here’s an earlier, somewhat more conventional treatment of the subject.

BACKLASH? A poll conducted by Minnesota Public Radio and the St. Paul Pioneer Press says that Mondale is now trailing Norm Coleman by six percent. I don’t know how much stock to put in these last-minute polls, but given who’s conducting it, this can’t be written off as wishful thinking by Coleman partisans.

If Mondale loses, I think that the Wellstone rally will be the reason. And I imagine it will cost Terry McAuliffe his job.

UPDATE: Hmm. I guess Terry McAuliffe is worried about the same thing, which is why he’s blaming the Wellstone family.

That’s how you can be sure the whole thing was a bad idea — people are casting blame, not taking credit.

ORRIN JUDD HAS NOTICED an interesting confluence of bin Laden stories. He thinks the war on Al Qaeda is going better than we realize.

ANDREA SEE SAYS THAT LOOKS MATTER. Of course not smoking matters, too.

WHAT THE FBI IS DOING INSTEAD OF STOPPING TERRORISTS: Latest in an apparently endless series. Does this suggest that they’ve got their priorities right?

WELL, THIS SUCKS: I just got an email saying that Terry Hill died Friday night. Terry was one of the great unknown figures of underground punk and new wave in the late 70s and early 80s. He was very ill and awaiting a liver transplant; last year I remastered some of his stuff and put it up on the web for him. (You can hear it here.) I don’t know anything about funeral plans yet, but I’ll make the information available when I do.

UPDATE: There will be a small memorial service for friends, followed by what Hector Qirko describes as a “more musical and fitting memorial” at a later date.

WHERE HAVE THE YOUNG PACIFISTS GONE? Not to join antiwar protests, apparently:

Across the country, college professors spearhead anti-war protests as America prepares for a possible attack on Iraq.

They organize forums and lectures critical of war.

And they sign petitions calling an attack on Iraq morally unjustified.

Meanwhile, their students seem to care less. Few organize marches or rallies. Even when asked, only a smattering write letters to their campus newspapers. Many worry more about tomorrow’s literature quiz than the burgeoning international crisis over Iraq’s potential to build weapons of mass destruction.

It’s the 1960s revisited, only this time the professors — not the students — wear their conscience on their sleeves.

Read the whole thing, which is fascinating. Perhaps it’s the intense advocacy by professors that explains why students aren’t so motivated: It’s not rebellion when the professors are leading the way.

UPDATE: Of course, the problem could be, as David Corn argues, with the antiwar movement itself.

SPEAKING OF EXPLODING ROUSSEAUVIAN MYTHS, Derek Lowe points out that life wasn’t so great in pre-Columbian America:

The study found a long-term decline in health as the populations grew in different areas, which is interesting. But any surprise people have at the general results surprises me. When my brother and I were small children, we accompanied our parents to achaeological digs back in Arkansas. My father was a dentist, and he was there for some forensic work on the teeth of the Indian remains. What he told me back then has stayed with me: these folks had lousy teeth. They had cavities, they had abcesses, impactions, the lot. (The weakened condition of their gums due to lack of Vitamin C probably had a lot to do with it.)

So, growing up, I knew that the Hollywood depiction of Indian life was rather idealized. For one thing, all the movie actors had great teeth. And the young braves weren’t like those 24-year-old actors – they were maybe 14. And the ancient medicine man, he wasn’t 80 years old at all. He was in his 40s; he just looked 80. You never saw extra tribesmen in the background, hobbling around because of poorly set broken bones or clutching their jaws in pain. No skin problems, no infections, not even so much as a bad allergy – no doubt about it, the tribe to belong to was MGM.

You can imagine how I feel about the rest of the cheap thinking that goes along these lines. Oh, the way preindustrial cultures loved the land, lived in harmony with it while everyone ate the wholesome diet of natural purity and stayed true to those simple values that we’ve lost touch with. . .spare me. I’m with Hobbes: the life of man in the natural state was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And let’s not forget it.

Sadly, too many people have a vested interest in presenting bogus arcadian images to keep this clearly in mind.

CHARLES MURTAUGH says that Stephen Pinker is getting a bum rap from critics of his new book. I haven’t read the book, but I saw Pinker on CSPAN2 last night, lecturing at the National Academy of Science. It was an excellent presentation, and seemed quite well-received.

ANOTHER MICHAEL MOORE FISKING — soon we’ll have to call them “Mooreings.”

UH OH. Jay Zilber wonders if we living in a bearded-Spock world. Well, it would explain a lot. . . .

UPDATE: James Rummel has a plan, though in all honesty he’d probably favor the plan regardless of what universe he lived in.

AL GORE WILL BE guest hosting Saturday Night Live in December. There’s no musical guest for that show yet. Any suggestions for who it ought to be?

UPDATE: Oh, silly me. It should have been obvious!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Brian Erst notes in the comments, below:

I know this one is probably TOO freakin’ obvious, but I’m sure they’ve already played SNL and would be welcomed back…

Bush.

If you had Gore doing some sort of call-and-response with Gavin Rossdale, it could even be Bush v. Gore…

Heh.

READER MICHAEL GERSH was appalled to discover that the “Jeff Cooper” link on my blogroll leads to the law professor Jeff Cooper, rather than this Jeff Cooper.

APPARENTLY, voting machine manufacturers are upset about this website claiming conflicts-of-interest and other problems in their business. I don’t know anything about this story beyond what’s on these pages, but I’m thinking of writing a piece on the inherent superiority of paper ballots, so this caught my eye. Make of it what you will.

UPDATE: Here’s another page devoted to election mistakes.