Check out the text of this lecture from Michael Crichton. It's more substantive than any of his novels:

Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?

I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now living, we have already had an example of dire predictions set aside by new technology. I refer to the green revolution. In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergoe famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn't ever going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure.

Read the whole thing. (Link via Tim Blair.)

Courtesy of Jayson Stark:

So what does it say about the bizarre pace of the baseball offseason that Saddam Hussein was acquired before Vladimir Guerrero?

Sorry for the lack of blogging, and as always, I do hope to resume soon.
I also might discuss why I haven't been blogging much lately, but I'm not ready for that yet. Maybe soon.

I think the upcoming trial of Saddam Hussein will probably lead to new tensions between the U.S. and Europe, with some potentially harmful spillover for the Democratic would-be-nominees.

It seems likely that if Saddam is tried by an Iraqi court, that court will have the authority to sentence him to death - an option unlikely to be discouraged by the US. And it also seems likely that even most death-penalty skeptics in the US - a smaller group to begin with than in most other countries - would, with respect to Saddam, adopt the position of Hank Hill from the TV show King of the Hill: "My position on capital punishment? As close as possible to the switch."
(This is to say nothing about the powerful practical reasons for Saddam to be put to death: Much was said about how the spectre of his possible return hovered over the Iraqi people and inhibited their cooperation with the Americans and their willingness to develop a free society; it's possible the same fears could return if Saddam is sitting in an Iraqi prison with many of his former loyalists still on the loose.)

By contrast, the consensus of the international war-crimes trial establishment (an awkward phrasing, but it aptly sums up the combination of NGOs, academics and journalists who have done great work on the subject, and European and other governments who are most active in advocating such trials) is, it's safe to say, that capital punishment should never be an option (and that only those barbaric Americans could feel otherwise). Things have changed since the Nuremberg trials, notwithstanding Saddam's efforts to live up to the example of those who were executed in 1947.

The difference between US and European attitudes (at least among their political elites) towards capital punishment has long been a source of transcontinental tension. I think that a potential death sentence for Saddam might present another opportunity for the usual suspects to preen about how they cannot possibly be involved with such a corrupted process, and that the aid that may be promised to Jim Baker will therefore be delayed or reduced. (Scroll down to the last two paragraphs in this item to see how these concerns might even affect England.)

Will the nations who had no problems aiding a country that featured the death penalty for untold thousands of innocent people, develop scruples about aiding that country for using the death penalty for the murderer of those innocents?

Put that way, the question almost answers itself. I hope I'm wrong.

Left to their own volition, the potential Democratic nominees should not be affected by any flare-up on this point; most Democrats who dream of higher office have made their peace with the death penalty when politically necessary (with respect to Kucinich, insert the classic P.J. O' Rourke abortion joke here).
Wesley Clark might not be so lucky. He has advocated the imprisonment of Osama bin Laden instead of execution. While that statement is unlikely to haunt him too much unless (hopefully soon!) bin Laden is in fact captured, a big part of Clark's platform has been to accomodate the concerns of our European allies. Will he be tarred with their anti-death penalty absolutism and be placed in the situation of defending Saddam? Not likely, but it might make for some uncomfortable moments.
(If Clark has made a statement with respect to Saddam similar to the bin Laden one linked above, or if he does so in the future, I expect it to be featured in GOP commercials if he makes it that far.)

I think everyone has heard about this by now:

The NYT has, among other features, a great account of how four current Iraqi leaders questioned their former tyrant.

I can't discuss this rationally:

We have two unpleasant choices: either the Yankees thought that a) Andy is on the verge of Tommy John surgery, which you don't wish on anyone, or b) letting him go made baseball sense - which, given when you look at the potential replacements, is a conclusion that could only have been drawn by the same person who thinks that Gary Sheffield is a better option than Vladimir Guerrero, or that Ken Phelps was a better option than Jay Buhner....

The treadmill just got a lot faster.

If Theo Epstein was old enough to drink, they'd be popping champagne in Boston right now.