Today’s Salon has a very interesting article about the possible future of blogging by Steven Johnson.

Professor Volokh has a nice little piece in today’s Journal defending the Justice Department’s defense of the Second Amendment. I take issue with one of his points, however.

And the right, if firmly accepted by the courts, may actually facilitate the enactment of modest gun controls. Today, many proposals, such as gun registration, are opposed largely because of a quite reasonable fear that they’ll lead to D.C.-like gun prohibition.

While this may be true for “modest gun controls” in general, I don’t think that it will have much effect in terms of resistance to registration. Even with a formally-recognized right to own guns, many will still view registration as a potential prelude to a rapid and preemptive confiscation, because any government that contemplates consfiscating guns is likely to be indifferent to Constitutional concerns.

If one’s view of the right to bear arms is as a last line of defense against tyranny, then allowing the government to know who has all the guns and where they are weakens that defensive posture considerably.

For those who say that registering guns is no different than registering cars, there is no right to drive in the Constitution. A compromise might be a requirement to register guns that are going to be actually carried in day-to-day activities (just as a car that is going to be driven on the public highways has to carry a registration), but that necessarily doesn’t imply a requirement to register all guns that are purchased or owned. When owning unregistered guns is a crime, only criminals will have unregistered guns…

Our pet idiotarian “Eric Blair’s” posting has been extremely sparse recently. He hasn’t posted anything in a week, and he hasn’t posted anything entertaining in much longer than that. The Warblogger Watch group on Yahoo seems to be populated almost exclusively by “warbloggers.” I guess the trolls got bored. I’ve taken down his permalink. I might keep the quote at the top of the blog for a while, though. I still wear it as a badge of honor.

This is shameful.

The Chinese police in Shenyang apparently kidnapped the North Koreans seeking asylum in the Japanese embassy there. So who did the Japanese government criticize for this violation of its sovereign territory? Their embassy staff.

I’m still looking for criticism of the Chinese government from Tokyo, but I won’t hold my breath. And the poor souls are probably on their way to Pyongyang right now for torture and interrogation.

I just hope that our embassy officials there, who have some other North Koreans in their protection, will have some testicular fortitude.

Fox News is making their daily announcement that the church standoff is about to end.

The current chairman of the Senate committee that oversees NASA authorization made the following statement.

I want to recapture the vision of John F. Kennedy’s commitment to putting a man on the moon by 1970. Today, it is not enough to endlessly circle the Earth in low orbit. NASA should set the goal of putting a person on Mars and work with Congress to set a date to do it. But the aim must be to reach Mars both safely and cost-effectively, or not at all.

Of course, he did it in the context of an overall statement that NASA must get its finances and management house in order before such a thing can be seriously contemplated. And of course, he may not be the chairman next year…

And a rerun of Apollo would be daft. Apollo set us back decades–I’d hate to think of the effect of Apollo to Mars.

[Update at 2:44 PM PDT]

Mark Whittington has some further interesting thoughts on this.

Some folks are arguing whether or not there’s a Saddam connection to September 11.

WTF difference does it make, to anyone but a Eurohypocrite and their fellow travelers here? We don’t need such a connection to justify replacing him, any more than we would have needed proof of past crimes to take out Osama prior to September 11, if we had known what he was planning.

The “War on Terror” (quotes because it’s clear, in light of current Israeli/Palestinian policy, that it’s no longer that) isn’t about revenge–it’s about prophylaxis. A good offense, particularly with thugs like this, is not just the best, but probably the only defense.

My new Fox column is up. It’s basically a shortened version of this post from a few days back. I removed most of the stuff about man rating.

The other day, I posted about how the focus of the space budget tends to be about “jobs,” rather than wealth, or value to the taxpayers. Here’s a typical example in the Houston Chronicle.

Several who testified Wednesday urged the House Economic Development Committee to increase state support for efforts to recruit new military and commercial aerospace companies to Texas.

Nice goal, but more thought has to be given to this than just getting the Congress to pony up more bucks for NASA. Like markets, and investment…

Here’s my entry to Eugene Volokh’s contest–a sunset amendment.

“All laws passed by the Congress shall remain in effect for no more than ten calendar years from the date of passage, at or prior to which time they must be repassed, or expire. All federal laws in existence at the time of passage of this amendment shall have staggered expiration dates, as a function of their age on the books, according to the formula, time-to-expire = 35 x (year-of-amendment-passage – 1787)/(year-of-amendment-passage – year-of-law-passage) + 5. Repassage of all existing laws will also have a lifetime of ten years.”

I’ve put some (but not a tremendous amount of) thought into this. The idea is to make the whole mess go away eventually, but you wouldn’t want to have a single date of expiration for all existing law–it would simply overwhelm the system. What I’m hoping for here is something that whelms the system only slightly, but enough to keep them so busy renewing important laws that they won’t have time to renew antiquated or bad ones, or to cause new mischief.

The formula has the earliest phaseouts (of the most recent laws) occur in five years, while the oldest laws (some of which, given their age, might have actually been good ones), can hang on as long as forty. The last sentence may be redundant, because it’s implied by the first sentence, but I want to make it clear that once law existing prior to amendment passage has been reauthorized, it has no special status among laws passed later–it is simply treated as any other newly-passed law.

I also suggested repealing the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments.