THANKS TO GLENN for inviting me to be one fourth of Instapundit again. I’ll be covering the Middle East, for the most part, as I usually do on my own blog. There is no shortage of material this week…

THANKS, GLENN. I’m heading out of town for the rest of the evening so this is probably my last post at Instapundit for now. Thanks, Glenn, for giving me, Megan, and Ann a big audience and the power of the Instalanche. Thanks, also, to everyone else for putting up with us.

BOO! If you want to know how to frighten people about a particular drug — and we’re talking about caffeine here, as well as crack — Colby Cosh compiled all the time-tested formulas just for you. (Hat tip: Matt Welch.)

BOB ARNE emails about a bloody crackdown in the Maldives that hardly anyone seems to be covering.

UPDATE: Robert Mayer has more over at Publius Pundit.

JOE KATZMAN is leaving Winds of Change. He’s also leaving Canada to become an American.

CALLIMACHUS compares the American propaganda of today with American propaganda during World War II.

SOME ADVICE to the West from Lebanon: “To stop a man who wants to oppress you is not a case of you oppressing him.”

AUSTIN BAY, filling in for Glenn over at GlennReynolds.com, builds on what Christopher Hitchens told Washington Prism in a recent interview.

THE CARNIVAL THING: We’ve been remiss in posting links to the various carnivals this week. Sorry about that. Here’s a link to the first year anniversary of the Carnival of the Recipes. I’ve been looking for a good recipe for steak au poive. (The French really do have the best food.) Anybody have one?

EAVESDROPPING ON IRAQIS: Friends of Democracy publishes essays from the Iraqi Arabic language blogosphere translated into English. Iraqis who blog in English are aware that their audience is primarily Western. Iraqis who blog in Arabic are talking to each other in their own language. Reading Friends of Democracy is your chance to eavesdrop. (Disclosure: I’m the site editor.)

Here are some recent posts you may find interesting: Shirko declares Syria an enemy state and demands regime-change in Damascus. Ali Taha Al-Nobani thinks financial aid to Arab dictators must cease. Samir Hassan argues with Islamists by throwing his own Koranic verses back at them. Saad al Omari notes that Middle Eastern leaders and clerics condemned the bombing in London on 7/7 while cheerleading similar bombings in Baghdad.

ACTOR CHRISTOPHER WALKEN is running for president in 2008.

UPDATE: Grassroots activists are already making posters for him.

HE KNOWS HIS SPINTOS AND HIS ARIOSOS: Timothy Noah in Slate reports that Tom DeLay is an opera buff. “I’m not making this up, I swear,” he says.

WHO NEEDS HOLLYWOOD DISTRIBUTORS? Kamal Aboukhater released his movie Blowing Smoke directly to the Internet on a blog. Check out the trailer at the link and, if it looks interesting, why not order a copy? Help him and other independent filmmakers stick it to Hollywood’s tired gatekeepers by proving we do not need them.

IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT US: My new Tech Central Station column is up:

Islamists have killed thousands of Westerners over the past couple of years — thousands in New York City alone. But they have killed far more of their own fellow Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, and too many other places to list. The Terror War, or whatever we ought to call it, is not about us. It’s a war waged by totalitarian Islamists against the rest of the world. We aren’t targets because of what we do or even because of who we are. We are targets because we are not them. They hate everybody and we’re part of “everybody.”

Read the rest…

THE PERSEID METEOR SHOWER may be exceptional this year. It is supposed to peak at 4:18 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (1:18 a.m. Pacific Time) Friday morning. That’s slightly more than three hours from the time I posted this entry.

OMAR BAKRI fled London for Lebanon after the authorities considered charging him with treason. Some people in Lebanon aren’t very happy about this and they are not going to put up with him.

UPDATE: That didn’t take long. He was arrested in Beirut.

WHOOPS: Today The Guardian published an opinion piece by a man linked to Al Qaeda.

THE MILITANT MIDDLE: Christopher Hitchens identifies the bipartisan militant middle in an interview with Washington Prism. He is asked “If there was a Democratic president on 9/11, would there have been a difference of opinion in the American left about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?”

Not from people like Michael Moore (the American film director and strong critic of President Bush), who makes a perfectly good brownshirt [fascist]. Or Noam Chomsky. No, it would not. To them it would have been further proof that the ruling class just has two faces and one party. But I think, in the mainstream of the democratic and Republican parties, you would have seen an exact switch. Richard Holbrooke’s position (Holbrooke was Clinton’s UN Ambassador and is a leading Democratic foreign policy thinker) would be Dick Cheney’s position. The ones in the middle would have just done a switch, finding arguments to support or criticize the war. In fact, I remember that people in the Clinton administration spoke of an inevitable confrontation coming with Saddam. They dropped this idea only because it was a Republican president. That is simply disgraceful. It is likewise disgraceful how many Republicans ran as isolationists against [former Vice-President] Al Gore in the 2000 elections. The only people who come out of this whole affair well are an odd fusion of the old left – the small pro regime change left – and some of the people known as neoconservatives who have a commitment to liberal democracy. Many of the neocons have Marxist backgrounds and believe in ideas and principles and have worked with both parties in power.

AL CAPONE REDUX: The Pinochet family is busted for tax fraud in Chile.

CHRIS MUIR NEEDS YOUR HELP. And, no, he’s not asking for money. Just read and click the cartoon.

RUSTY SHACKLEFORD says everyone is wrong about the drug war.

THEY CAN HEAR YOU NOW: When I was in Beirut in April one of the leaders of the Cedar Revolution, Nabil Abou-Charaf, told me that Syrian intelligence agents used cell phones to “spy” on people.

“You mean they monitor your phone conversations,” I said.

“No,” he said. “They can listen to us all the time even when we’re not using the phone.” He could tell I didn’t believe him. “We know as a fact they can do this.”

The Middle East is notoriously paranoid. When your country is infested with secret police that will happen. Nabil had good reasons himself to be paranoid. He told me he had already been arrested and beaten for standing up to the Syrian puppet regime. Just a week before I met him someone ran his car off the road and left a message on his answering machine and said that was just the beginning.

Still, I didn’t believe what he said about spies using his cell phone as a bug. If the cell phone is off or just sitting there it isn’t transmitting a signal.

Looks like I was wrong. Julian Sanchez at Hit and Run points out this chilling excerpt from a story in last week’s Guardian.

The main means of tracking terrorist suspects down has been the monitoring of mobile phone conversations. Not only can operators pinpoint users to within yards of their location by “triangulating” the signals from three base stations, but – according to a report in the Financial Times – the operators (under instructions from the authorities) can remotely install software onto a handset to activate the microphone even when the user is not making a call.

I’m sure the police love this feature. Police states apparently love it, as well.

SITZKRIEG’S END: Marcus Cicero remembers the Cold War and wonders if, somewhat counter-intuitively, we’re in more danger now than we were then.

It turns out the Cold War amounted to an entire half century of having it all, creating nominal safety. The nothing part of M.A.D. — Armageddon — never came to pass. And so we did indeed create a playground of prosperity: Shopping malls, freeways, cheap global travel, and the Internet; the plethora of things, rock-n-roll, the rise of socialism and multiculturalism; baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet. We got very used to that. Three generations grew up in the soil of transparent global war.

M.A.D. conditioned us to have our cake and eat it too. But today’s WMD perils are unlike the days of M.A.D. In the Cold War, we could depend on the rationality of our adversaries, the Soviets. We could mutually agree on something, heinous as it was. M.A.D. created a sense of certainty out of nucler parity. That certainty was: if it happens, everyone dies. That’s it. No debate necessary. If you were alive, it meant everything was normal. If you were dead, well…

Weapons of mass destruction in the 9/11 era no longer represent the end of everything. The threshold to this brave new terror-nuke world is far lower than the threshold to M.A.D. Parity is no longer apparent. That makes catastrophe with a small ‘c’ far more likely to happen.

Read the whole thing.

YOU’RE EITHER WITH US OR YOU’RE AGAINST US: James Wolcott is beating up on liberal hawks (he singles out Roger L. Simon in particular) for making common cause with conservatives by supporting the Terror War:

The fact is that by subscribing to Bush’s War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq with every corpuscle of your tired body you’ve made common cause with Republican conservatives, neoconservatives, and Christian fundamentalists who are dedicated to destroying those parcels of liberalism on which you stake your tiny claims of pride…Do you really think that conservative supremacy in the executive, congressional, and judicial branches of government means that gay rights and abortion rights will somehow be spared?

I can’t speak for Roger, but I didn’t vote for “conservative supremacy in the executive, congressional and judicial branches of government.” I voted for a Republican White House and a Democratic Congress. That’s the sort of thing liberal hawks and other centrist types do. I made “common cause” with the Religious Right, which as a social-liberal/left-libertarian isn’t much fun. At the same time I made “common cause” with Dennis Kucinich, which as a foreign policy hawk isn’t much fun.

Politics isn’t binary, James. It’s not a war between the white hats and the black hats — or the blue hats and the red hats for that matter. Tens of millions of Americans answer with “neither” when asked if they consider themselves liberal or conservative. Some of us vote for third parties. Some of us vote for both of the two major parties at the same time. It’s about tough choices and lesser evilism. If you’re a liberal I suppose the choice is an easy one. Some of us non-liberals see nuance and shades of gray. Maybe you’ve heard of those things.

UPDATE: On a related note, Harry Hatchett says many on today’s anti-war left strikingly resemble right-wing nationalists and isolationists. It begs the question then. Who, really, are the new conservatives? I couldn’t care less, personally, about being tainted with conservative cooties. But those who fear and loathe the idea might want to read Harry’s essay.

BAD NEWS FROM IRAQ: A municipal coup d’etat.

Armed men entered Baghdad’s municipal building during a blinding dust storm on Monday, deposed the city’s mayor and installed a member of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite militia.

The deposed mayor, Alaa al-Tamimi, who was not in his offices at the time, recounted the events in a telephone interview on Tuesday and called the move a municipal coup d’état. He added that he had gone into hiding for fear of his life.

“This is the new Iraq,” said Mr. Tamimi, a secular engineer with no party affiliation. “They use force to achieve their goal.”

The militia that overthrew the mayor is an Iranian proxy.

I’d say this needs to be reversed, that he should be put back in office so this sort of thing isn’t rewarded and therefore encouraged. But he already tried to resign in June and it looks like he doesn’t even want to stay in Iraq.

If Tamini can’t be restored, the new mayor Hussein al-Tahaan must in turn be replaced. As quickly as possible.