A LETTER TO THE EUROPEANS from Victor Davis Hanson, and another one from Stephen Green. Plus, advice from Austin Bay.

They won’t be able to say they weren’t warned.

ALITO UPDATE: The New York Times editorial on Alito draws commentary from Ann Althouse and Keith Burgess-Jackson.

My position: I think that unlike Harriet Miers, Alito is clearly qualified. He’ll probably be a good justice, but he certainly isn’t my personal top choice. So if I’ve seemed unexcited here, it’s because I am. Not opposed, or anything. Just unexcited.

UPDATE: I don’t think that Senator Bernie Sanders will be much of a force in the confirmation hearings. If he is, it’ll be the first time something like that has happened since the Goldwater presidency . . . .

And Professor Bainbridge has much more on the NYT editorial.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Read this post from TigerHawk, too.

BLOGGING AND LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP: Interesting account of an AALS panel on the subject.

The risk of distraction is certainly real, though it’s perhaps overrated — at least, plenty of people are equally distracted by email lists, public-service activities, political activism, etc. I think you’re better focusing on outputs, making sure your scholarship and teaching are progressing. Then you can use your spare time for blogging or whatever. It’s the pickle-jar theory of time management, and it works. Start with the big things, and you’ve got room for the little ones. Try to do it in the reverse order and you’re screwed. At least that’s how it works for me.

As for junior faculty worrying that their blogging may cost them tenure, well, it might — but if you’re seriously worried about that, it’s probably a sign that your school has a major problem in the way of intellectual openness, and you should probably be thinking about going somewhere else.

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Christine Hurt weighs in on the women and blogging question.

MORE: Much more here and here. Both are must-reads, with links to lots of other posts.

JACK ABRAMOFF was a very busy man.

UPDATE: Read this post from Marc Cooper, too.

HELEN’S HEART T-SHIRT is mentioned in a story in the Chicago Tribune about the medical t-shirt company MedTees.com, run by Northwestern cardiologist Wes Fisher. Excerpt:

The MedTees T-shirts are the brainchild of Evanston Northwestern physician Wes Fisher and his wife, Diane. Fed up with a culture that they say resists the natural processes of aging and illness like leprosy, the Fishers’ idea allows patients and people with illnesses to poke fun at their ailments.

“It’s kind of a countercultural idea,” Wes Fisher said in the kitchen of his home. “People in Western culture really don’t think it’s OK to have an illness or be sick. We have a media image of the perfect body.”

The MedTees site has a number of different t-shirts, but they’re happy to get suggestions for new ones. And Fisher has a blog, too.

HOWARD DEAN AND SAM ALITO: A musical dialogue.

WORRYING ABOUT POLYGAMY: There’s been a lot of that on the right lately, much of it tied to questions of whether polygamy is being used to “normalize” gay marriage, or the reverse.

There’s a pretty good argument that polygamy is usually bad for the societies it appears in, producing a large surplus of sullen, unmarriageable young men. On the other hand, those are usually societies in which women, especially — but men, too — are mostly poor and uneducated. If polygamy were ever to become popular in the United States, which seems unlikely to me, I doubt it would look much like polygamy in, say, Mali.

I’m occasionally amused by the implication that there’s something unnatural about polygamy, though: It’s quite possibly the most common form of marriage in human society, and certainly far too common to dismiss as some sort of perversion. (Heck, read your Old Testament). But I think that most of the polygamy-talk now is just a symptom of the gay-marriage debate, rather than a genuine freestanding concern.

The solution to all of this, of course, is to separate marriage and state. There’s no reason why the government should be involved in this sort of thing (the origin of Tennessee’s statute requiring marriage licenses, it turns out, was a desire to ensure that county clerks got fees, not exactly an overwhelming justification) and there’s no reason why people’s private living arrangements should be part of public debate. That’s my take, anyway.

RON BAILEY: “Has science become politicized? A better question might be: When has it ever not been?”

THIS SOUNDS COOL: “The SkyScout is a revolutionary, one of a kind, patented handheld device that instantly identifies and/or locates any celestial object visible to the naked eye, providing educational and entertaining information, both in text and audio.” Thanks to reader Paul Music for the link.

JOEL SHEPHERD: Liberté Chérie.

THE WASHINGTON POST has done the grudging minimum by running a correction on its Bill Roggio coverage. But while the correction notes that the story by Doug Struck and Jonathan Finer got the facts wrong, it doesn’t make clear that those factual errors undermine the point of the story, which was an effort to paint Roggio as a stooge of the military/blogosphere complex.

Bill has more thoughts on the subject here.

A COURTHOUSE SUICIDE BOMBING in China. It’s not the first.

MAYBE THE ARMY is catching on to this whole blog thing after all.

LOTS OF BAD PRESS FOR MICROSOFT over its shutdown of a Chinese blogger.

AVIAN FLU UPDATE:

THE number of Turkish people thought to be infected with avian flu rose to more than 50 this weekend, prompting concern that the disease may be about to spread into Europe.

Yesterday a British laboratory confirmed that a Turkish brother and sister who died last week had the feared H5N1 strain of avian flu.

A third child from the same family in Dogubayazit, in eastern Turkey, has now died of avian flu and dozens more suspected cases have emerged.

“The laboratory in the UK said that they have detected H5N1 in samples of the two fatal cases,” said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organisation. They are the first fatalities outside East Asia.

Read the whole thing. There’s this, too: “Professor John Oxford, an expert on flu at Queen Mary’s medical school, London, said the most worrying aspect of the deaths in Turkey was the large number of human cases resulting from exposure to a small number of birds.”

JAMES LILEKS: “I do not worry about libertinism. I worry about libertines who think the greatest threat to the imminent Utopia is a Wal-Mart exec who refuses to stock a CD because the lyrics celebrate shooting cops in the head, or who think that uptight repressed Christers are six inches and five days away from replacing the Constitution with the plot of ‘A Handmaiden’s Tale.'”

This thinking betrays a certain lack of perspective.

UPDATE: Hey, look who else is worried about “extremist Christians” — like Hugh Hewitt!

ANN ALTHOUSE: “The question is: Are you concerned, in a politically neutral way, about national security?”

AUSTIN BAY has more thoughts on Stephen Hayes’ report about Saddam and terrorist training.

Meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein has thoughts on postmodernism and the media.

And this seems related, somehow.

UPDATE: Postmodernism is busting out all over.