HMM. NOT SURE WHAT I THINK OF THIS: “President Bush’s $15 billion anti-AIDS program will begin investing significant money in making circumcision available to African men seeking to protect themselves from HIV, top U.S. health officials said Sunday.” There’s certainly some research supporting this, but is it really worth the resources?

GERARD VAN DER LEUN photoblogs from Hempfest Seattle.

JAMES FALLOWS: HOW TO PROTECT YOUR KIDS from lead-covered Chinese toys.

ARE THE DRUG WARRIORS helping the enemy in Afghanistan?

MY COLLEAGUE PENNY WHITE gets spotlighted by the CrimProf blog.

DAN COLLINS: “There is something self-deconstructing about this post by David Neiwert. Can you spot it?”

UPDATE: Jules Crittenden weighs in.

IN THE BOSTON GLOBE, a look at the cyberwar against the United States.

GAIL HERIOT: Abuse of power in Missouri? Hey, if you don’t like the referendum, change the language to make it less appealing.

IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE, but a bad day for Jamaica. Scroll down on this page for more.

UPDATE: Grand Cayman quiet before curfew.

A SELF-HELP cornucopia.

RON PAUL WINS THE Alabama straw poll.

ZIMBABWE: It’s much easier to destroy a nation than to build one. And more profitable, for some.

Plus, a culture of dictatorship?

IT’S AS IF THEY REFLEXIVELY SIDE WITH THE ENEMIES OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: “The BBC is in trouble today for once again allowing ugly antisemitic and anti-Christian slurs to remain posted at the BBC 5 message boards, while instantly deleting any criticism of Islam.”

A LOOK AT THE POLICY COMMUNITY, and the fear of being provably wrong.

KOUCHNER IN BAGHDAD: France’s Foreign Minister visits Iraq and observes: “Now we have to face the reality, including the American view.” Think how much better things would be if the previous French administration had taken that view.

UPDATE: How the French media are responding.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here:

One of the key promises that Nicolas Sarkozy had made during his presidential election campaign last spring was to “correct” foreign policy “mistakes” made by his predecessor Jacques Chirac.

Chief among these was Chirac’s desperate efforts to prevent the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussain’s regime of terror. Chirac failed to save his friend’s regime but managed to do serious damage to relations with the US, Great Britain and more than 40 other nations that joined the coalition of the willing to liberate Iraq in 2003. . . . Kouchner’s visit, full of symbolism, shatters one of the key points in Al Qaida’s analysis: that the Western powers will never find enough unity to develop a common strategy against terror.

At one point, when Chirac invited German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian President Vladimir Putin to a gathering to forge an anti-American triple alliance, Al Qaida’s analysis appeared to have some basis in reality.

Now, however, both Chancellor Angela Merkel and Sarkozy understand the stark fact that the perception of Western disunity may be one of the factors that prolongs the conflict in Iraq.

Saddam thought that his bought-and-paid-for support from Chirac et al. would forestall his overthrow. He was wrong, but the whole invasion might have been avoided had the French been pushing him to come clean, instead of helping him cover things up and giving him hope that he could get away with it.

WE LIKE ELECTRICITY: Indeed.

WELL, GREEN IS THEIR COLOR: “Climate Change Protestors” attack Jews, hoist Palestinian flag.

UPDATE: Heh: “Lefties would make much more progress with the bourgeoisie if they promoted only one revolution at any given rally. We prefer to pick and choose our causes, rather than having them bundled together like pre-loaded software we do not want.”

I like this: Leftism as Microsoft Vista — promises a lot but doesn’t deliver, and is kind of bossy. Meanwhile are rightie politics like Linux? You know, fairly efficient, but requiring more work than most people are willing to put in?

DEAN UPDATE: Curfew declared, soldiers patrol streets as Hurricane Dean nears Jamaica.

UPDATE: Dean’s northern eyewall punishing Jamaica. Expected to pass slightly south of the Cayman Islands.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More on Jamaica here. And Mexico is evacuating oil rigs.

MORE: Jamaica video from Jim Edds. (Via Newsbeat1).

Meanwhile, reader Alain Gadoury emails: “Are you trying to outdo Drudge? All hurricane, all the time!”

Actually, I think I have outdone Drudge. The Cayman connection got me following this more closely than I usually follow hurricane news. Plus, with Brendan Loy living in Knoxville now, I guess the hurricane-blogging thing is just contagious!

STILL MORE: The latest Cayman outlook isn’t too bad: “Hurricane Dean is now moving in a direction between west and west northwest and is expected to continue this motion over the next 24 hours. If the current forecast holds, the maximum sustained winds that will be felt in the Cayman Islands will be between 60 and 70 mph.”

DISASTER PREPAREDNESS UPDATE: I mentioned this earlier, but with hurricane season underway people always start thinking about disaster preparedness again — even when they live out of hurricane zones. Anyway, the Popular Mechanics guide to disaster preparedness is now online for your perusal.

Meanwhile, you can find some previous InstaPundit posts on the topic here, here, here, here, and here. And here’s a column I wrote on the subject last year. And a huge disaster preparedness list. And here’s a guide to emergency preparedness from Consumer Reports.

Also, here’s an item from Wired on the topic. One piece of advice: People tend to focus on buying stuff, stockpiling food, etc. That’s good — you won’t be able to run down to Wal-Mart when you really need emergency supplies — but you should also focus on having a plan, and acquiring some skills, for when things go wrong. A full pantry and some radios and flashlights (and guns, and cash, and bottled water) is very important, but it’s what we lawyers call a necessary but not sufficient element of disaster planning. More on that here.

UPDATE: A lot of the stuff on the big list above is out of stock. Try this hurricane preparedness list or this emergency survival kit gear list. Plus, some basic disaster survival items. And Col. Douglas Mortimer emails that no home should be without one of these. Well, duh.

A BLOG-REPORT FROM JAMAICA: “We are currently being affected by the outer bands of Dean,and we’ve been having moderate rain and slight breezes since 8:00 p.m. last night. . . . Electricity which was supposed to have been shut down at 10:00 a.m this morning will be shut down later and the water supply will be shut down, soon after that. (This is to spare the equipment from damage.) Also, in the case of Jamaica Public Service (JPS): electricity, is also being shut down to prevent electricity from being in lines that will be downed by the hurricane – that could cause injury and loss of life.”

UPDATE: Streaming radio from Jamaica.

ANONYMOUS ALLEGATIONS OF NONEXISTENT THREATS.

From a guy named “BinkyBoy.” There’s a New Republic diarist piece in this, somewhere . . . .

NO ROOM AT THE INN:

The Dionne quintuplets were born on May 28, 1934, to a humble, French-speaking couple in a farmhouse outside of Callander, Ontario, Canada. They were identical sisters and for the first 10 years of their lives, the five girls were the No. 1 tourism attraction in Canada.

Then came free health care for all Canadians. Which is why the four identical Jepp sisters were born in Great Falls, Mont., instead of Calgary this weekend. The Canadian parents flew 325 miles to get to an American hospital. . . . I’m sure most Canadians like their health system. Just remember, though, that Canada’s backup system is in Montana. Americans spend 15% of their income on health care. That’s why Great Falls has enough neo-natal units to handle quadruple births — and a “universal health” nation doesn’t. After all, they didn’t fly Mrs. Jepp to Cuba, did they?

Ouch.

SOME THOUGHTS ON TEACHING HISTORY: “The wrong things are being taught. Kids are interested in the history of how things work, not stories about Indians. And they should be!”

I FORGOT ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC DEBATE, but Stephen Green liveblogged it, in his own inimitable fashion. “Everybody on this stage is running against George W. Bush. I’ve asked it before and I’ll ask it again: Where were these people in 2004?”

IN THE MAIL: ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, by Vijay Vaitheeswaran and Iain Carson. They’re not that big on mass transit: “Oil is the problem. Cars are the solution.”