Links and Minifeatures 03 05 Sunday

Carnival of Insanities Recommended: American Thinker

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Strata Sphere has an excellent article on cracking down on those who leak classified information to the press.



I don't care who is in power, leaking of information that can get people killed needs to stop.



Captain's Quarters notes the hypocrisy when the leftist members of the press are hoist by their own petard. It was one thing demanding an investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame which might catch Administration thugs, quite another when it would involve putting reporters in front of grand juries (as the Plame investigation ended up doing). You want to wield power, you are subject to investigation. The president, who was elected, faces far more scrutiny than the publisher of the New York Times, who was not.



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Samizdata has the details of thoughtcrime in the UK.



On a related subject, Coyote Blog mourns the unjust execution of Arthur Anderson.



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I am not a reporter and do not pretend to be, but I believe if more reporters followed Countercolumn's suggestions, we'd be much better off.



HT to Chapomatic



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Camp Katrina has morphed into MilTracker. My understanding is that all new content will go there.



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Blackfive has some self-interested rationality on the results of the negotiations with Iran.



He's absolutely right in that in order for negotiations to be successful, both goals must be simultaneously achievable. He misses the corollary that in order to achieve anything by negotiations at all, you cannot be seen as unwilling to do something about the intransigence of the other side. The EUropeans were known by all parties to be unwilling to actually do anything, and so they accomplished nothing beyond providing a smokescreen for Iranian nuclear ambitions for two years. In other words, worse than useless.



At a minimum, the regimes in Syria, Iran, and North Korea, are going to have to get dealt with if the next generation of humans is not to grow up mutated survivors of atomic warfare. Yes, we've got to be careful. Damned careful. We're going to have to get inventive. Neither one of those words means anything like the opposite of firm or determined, which are also components of any possible solution that's actually desirable. It most emphatically doesn't excuse us from having to do it.



Mind you, all of this is about as surprising as gravity.



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Q and O has a great essay about fetishizing democracy. No, not as in expanding electoral democracies. As in expanding lowest-common-denominator responses. Money quote:

(Some libertarians, of course, raise the distrust of democracy in to a matter of high principle, by refusing to vote at all. "Voting," they say, "is merely giving consent to a system that takes away my rights! I'll never compromise my principles by participating is such a charade!" Well, maybe so, but it also ensures the election of people who are prone to take away your rights, rather than people that will defend them. This is the very name "self-defeating".



These same people often say that they'd fight to defend their rights. Huh. Let's see if I get this straight: You won't try and defend your rights by voting once every two years, but when jackbooted government thugs drop by with submachine guns, you're gonna pull out a rifle and make a courageous final stand. Go on, pull the other one.

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Remember I said it appears as if there's more perception of an Iraqi Civil War in the US than there is the actuality over there? The New York Post debunks that other New York paper.



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Asymmetrical Information notes a Times Magazine Article by Jon Gertner that says most of the same things I said in my article on The Economics of Housing Development back on December 26th, even if it does mostly wait until page six to start with the meat of the article. He also hypothesizes:

Glaeser speculates that there may be a viral phenomenon whereby once housing prices reach a certain level, residents become aware of high home values and agitate for restrictions; another possibility is that judges have become much more sympathetic to blocking development for environmental reasons. Still another thought: that homeowners, utilizing skills learned during the civil rights movement and political protests of the 1960's and 1970's, became much more adept at organizing against developers. (There appears to be a reasonable correlation between liberal enclaves, zoning regulations and high housing prices.) In any event, Glaeser says, he doesn't know the answer yet, and it may take years to find out.

I just don't care about which side of the political divide is causing the problem, I just want it dealt with in a rational manner.



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Armies of Liberation notes that US News has a good article on Yemen due out tomorrow. I look forward to it.



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Via LGF, Publish or Perish, the lessons of the Cartoon Jihad.



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Via Volokh, Housing Bubble reports that not only are builder cancellations up, but that the builders are keeping the deposits and in some cases coming after the depositors for the difference between what the house sold for and their contracted sale price. You want something guaranteed to chill the market long term? When your potential customers are worried about becoming your insurance company by insuring that you'll get that price.



Foot. Bullet. Hydrostatic shock.



I can imagine the company spokesman: "We're just doing our part to make a bad situation worse."



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Full Disclosure and Mea Culpa: A few days ago I wrote about how the children of those who drew the Islamic Cartoons have been threatened. Via Michelle Malkin, I find a report that it's not true.



I can't read the Danish either, and Babel Fish doesn't do Danish to English, but I thought I'd post it in the interests of disclosure. here is a Danish onliner's translation.



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Austin Bay has a cute little couple paragraphs on information isolation and overcoming it.