MICKEY KAUS:

Michael Kinsley’s piece–on the speed with which he got useful reponses to his Social Security argument from the blogosphere–skirts an obvious point. It’s not just that Kinsley got more helpful criticism from the blogosphere (when Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall posted it on their sites) than he got from the bigshot economists he sent it to. Kinsley got more overall attention for his argument by making it in the blogosphere than it would have gotten if he’d printed it in the rather large conventional paper whose opinion pages he runs. And I’m not just talking “more attention” in the sense that the blogosphere is big–bigger than the conventional print-centric media elite. Kinsley’s thesis got more attention not just in the blogosphere but within the conventional print-centric media elite, even from those who pay little attention to blogs, because he got it posted on some blogs. … Crudely put, Tim Russert and Al Hunt and William Safire and Bob Shrum and Sen. Harry Reid are more likely to know about Kinsley’s idea because Kinsley bypassed his own LAT op-ed page.

Excellent point — and with implications that some people should find deeply worrisome.

MERLE HAGGARD: Poet Laureate? You can do worse. And we usually do.

SOME THOUGHTS ON CONGOLESE PROBLEMS, and U.N. peacekeeping in general, over at GlennReynolds.com.

A NICE BIT OF HISTORY.

LAW SCHOOL MEETS REAL LIFE, with a fact situation tailor-made for a Torts exam.

THE SPACE ELEVATOR WEBLOG has lots of cool stuff about space elevators.

And here’s an interesting article on space tourism from The Economist, though Rand Simberg notes an error or two.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF THE BLOGOSPHERE, from Joe Gandelman posting at Dean’s World. He’s right to stress the self-renewing nature of the blogosphere, and the way in which the blogosphere is much more important than any individual blog.

MORE ON THE IVORY COAST: But it’s nothing very pretty.

LARRY KUDLOW: “Bush has never before commented on Fed policy. Linking the Fed’s recent restraining move – which hopefully drains excess dollars as well as raising the target business rate – is therefore a significant Presidential statement. It hints that the period of floating exchange rate benign neglect is coming to an end.”

THOSE MARYLAND FIRES MENTIONED EARLIER were apparently not ecoterrorism after all.

TVNEWSER REPORTS ON A Tucker Carlson move to MSNBC — which I think would be a good thing for MSNBC, and another sign of how CNN’s Crossfire has slipped.

THE IRAQ ELECTIONS BLOG is all about — you guessed it — the Iraq elections. (Via Charles Paul Freund — who also notes a child sex abuse scandal in Pakistani madrassas).

WAS THE ARMORED-HUMVEE STORY A HOAX? Power Line is calling it one, and has this: “At the time the question was asked, the planted question, the unit had 784 of its 804 vehicles armored.” Reading the followup, I think the number was more like 810 out of 830, but the ratio is still colossal, and it’s rather shocking that we’re just now hearing this.

UPDATE: Meanwhile Jason van Steenwyk is busting Dick Durbin for phony numbers. (“What’s the deal with the idiots on the pentagon beat? Why are they just taking the claim at face value?Why does it fall to me to dig this obvious crap out?”)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Donald Sensing has more, and observes:

My long-term readers may recall that I am no member of the Donald Rumsfeld fan club myself, but the calls for his head from US Senators over the phony armor shortage is absurd – especially from Republican Sen. John McCain; I increasingly wonder whether he knows he often seems to disconnect brain from tongue when making the talk shows. McCain’s Senate duties have included direct oversight of DOD expenditures since the years of the Clinton administration.

Yet the Tennessean reported,

The Pentagon is spending $4.1 billion over the next year to add armor to vehicles in Iraq. [Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey] Sorenson said 35,000 of them need armored protection, of which 29,000 have been funded by Congress.

Got that? The Army’s funding for armor is 6,000 vehicles short because John McCain won’t choke up the money.

All of which is to say that it’s business as usual on Capitol Hill: to seem rather than to be.

Indeed.

MORE: Greg Djerejian thinks I’m letting Rumsfeld off too easily. Well, possibly — though that’s because most of what I’ve seen aimed at Rumsfeld has looked like a cheap shot to me. McCain is guilty of flaming hypocrisy and obvious showboating, and I wanted to point that out. (And even bloggers who usually know better have launched some unfair attacks, like this from Andrew Sullivan: “Now that Powell has gone, Rummy will see it as a matter of cojones that he stay for a while, if only to prevent sufficient manpower being deployed to win the war in Iraq.” So Rumsfeld doesn’t want us to win? Puhleez. Rumsfeld might be wrong, of course, but the notion that he simply has an irrational aversion to having enough troops because he wants us to lose is absurd, and merely serves to diminish the credibility of those who make the claim.)

(more…)

IF A DRUG COMPANY DID THIS it would be a huge scandal. But it’s the government, so it’s okay!

UPDATE: Vik Rubenfeld says it really is okay, and that this story is deeply misleading: “Dr. Tramont’s actions got the drug to the people sooner and saved lives. But in less honorable hands the procedures he used could have been used for wrongful purposes. Do we sanction Dr. Tramont? Or do we give him credit but keep a more watchful eye out for such things in the future?”

WIRED lists some recommended books for holiday gift-giving.

And here are some InstaPundit recommendations:

For fiction, go here — and also check out John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, which I liked very much, and which is now shipping.

For nonfiction: James Webb’s Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. (My capsule review here.) I also recommend David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, from which Webb (as he freely admits) gets a lot of his stuff.

James Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge makes an interesting companion to the above. Follow the link to read a review by Lexington Green of the ChicagoBoyz, or read excerpts from the Times Literary Supplement review here.

George Dyson’s Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship, discussing the interesting work his father Freeman did. (My column on the book — with video of an Orion test — is here). Another cool space book is Bob Zubrin’s Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization.

Joe Trippi’s book, The Revolution will not be Televised. Still the best blogs-and-politics book to date — though I haven’t read Hugh Hewitt’s forthcoming book on the same topic, which will be out next month. Dan Gillmor’s We the Media is also a must-read in this department.

Derrick Story, Digital Photography Hacks. Also Scott Kelby, The Adobe Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers. (Though I took Kelby’s advice on recalibrating the auto-color-correction and regretted it until I restored the default settings. But the book’s otherwise good.)

And, though it’s pre-digital, Photography, by Phil Davis, is still an excellent text.

And, finally, for the HGTV crowd there’s James Lileks’ must-read Interior Desecrations — full of stuff that will no doubt be back in style in the near future.

Happy reading! And if reading’s not your bag — er, then what are you doing here? — but there’s always this complete Star Trek video collection. Woohoo!

UPDATE: Reader Douglas Williams emails: “If you liked Albion’s Seed, you’re going to love Washington’s Crossing. I envy you not having read it.” No envy needed — here’s my post. And Hackett Fischer fans may also like his most recent book, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas, which I haven’t reviewed — but here’s a post from ChicagoBoyz. Meanwhile, post-surgical reader Jim Martin responds to my “what are you doing here?” question:

I would love to read the books on your list, but, unfortunately I can not.

I have had glaucoma for 25 years and, Thursday, I had laser surgery on my right eye for the second time in 23 years in an effort to save what vision is left, about 20%. I also have double vision which makes print reading almost impossible.

Two hours following the laser surgery I could not watch televison due to the anesthesia and a gel they put on the eye so a lens isn’t painful. The surgery is somewhat painful even with anesthesia, seventy shots around the optic nerve.

What I could do was read your blog with no discomfort at all. The font is large and easy to see and the subjects far more interesting than TV anyhow.

I wish books could be posted on Web pages, not just the classics.

Well, you can read the stuff at the Baen Free Library on the web for free, and it includes some of the fiction works I’ve recommended. And I’m glad that InstaPundit is reader-friendly for people with eye problems, which was part of the design philosophy (including the text-size menu). But it makes me feel guilty for not posting more often!

MICHAEL KINSLEY ON THE BLOGOSPHERE:

Some of my best friends are bloggers. Still, it’s different when you purposely drop an idea into this bubbling cauldron and watch the reaction. What floored me was not just the volume and speed of the feedback but its seriousness and sophistication. Sure, there were some simpletons and some name-calling nasties echoing rote-learned propa- ganda. But we get those in letters to the editor. What we don’t get, nearly as much, is smart and sincere intellectual engagement — mostly from people who are not intellectuals by profes- sion — with obscure and tedious, but important, issues.

Indeed. (Via Robert Prather).

TIME NAMES BUSH “MAN OF THE YEAR,” and Power Line blog of the year. Sounds about right to me!

UPDATE: Here’s an excerpt from the Power Line story:

The story of how three amateur journalists working in a homegrown online medium challenged a network news legend and won has many, many game-changing angles to it. One of the strangest and most radical is that the key information in “The 61st Minute” came from Power Line’s readers, not its ostensible writers. The Power Liners are quick, even eager, to point this out. “What this story shows more than anything is the power of the medium,” Hinderaker says. “The world is full of smart people who have information about every imaginable topic, and until the Internet came along, there wasn’t any practical way to put it together.”

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Thanks, guys, but I’ve had my Time article already.

FAKE FAT FOR YUSHCHENKO?

Perhaps Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko should try an “Olestra diet” to rid his body of dioxin.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the “fake fat” product was used as an emergency agent to flush out dioxin, one of a group of chlorinated hydrocarbons that are toxic, lipophilic (attracted to fat) – and persistent in the environment and animal tissues. About five years ago, two Austrian women suffering from dioxin poisoning were given olestra snacks, which resulted in removal of dioxin at 10 times the normal rate, according to some reports.

In an as-yet-unpublished study, researchers at the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine, along with Trevor Redgrave at the University of Western Australia, treated a patient with PCB toxicity over a two-year period with olestra in the form of fat-free Pringles. The patient’s chloracne disappeared and the PCB level in fat tissue dropped dramatically.

Somebody airlift a pallet-load of Dorito’s Wow chips!

REALIST SCHOLAR DENOUNCES IDEALIST PRESIDENT: Which one will history vindicate?

HERE’S A MEMORANDUM from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, concluding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to arms.

UPDATE: A couple of articles by yours truly on this subject here and here. And read this, too.

SLASHDOT looks at comment spam and Movable Type.

THREE CHEERS FOR SPRINT, which has donated 2500 prepaid phone cards to wounded troops at Walter Reed.

MILTON FRIEDMAN: “After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas; we have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course. We are still far from bringing practice into conformity with opinion. That is the overriding non-defence task for the second Bush term.”

UPDATE: Arnold Kling responds: “I do not think that we have have won the battle of ideas. The Left has not conceded defeat; it has merely become passive-aggressive. Simply by holding on to public provision of schooling, Medicare, and Social Security, those who distrust markets can ensure that government will play an ever-larger role in our lives.”

SO I OPEN UP this Harry Turtledove book to take a break from the blogosphere, and the dedication is to . . . Patrick Nielsen Hayden, for being the best editor imaginable.

Undoubtedly true, but also proof that there’s no escaping the blogosphere, these days.

HUGH HEWITT:

My point is that the talking heads of cable land know as much about the drug approval process as I do about monster trucks. And I don’t know anything about monster trucks except what Ed Morrisey has told me (and I still think it is pretty odd that Ed owns one of those eight-foot tire jobs.) The last thing we need is a witch hunt that shutters the drug development process.

Media hysteria is probably killing as many people as bad pharmaceuticals. My wife has had a problem with patients — scared by stuff they’ve heard on TV about anti-depressants causing suicide — stopping their antidepressants and becoming . . . suicidally depressed.

Will Lou Dobbs take the rap for those deaths?