If a tree falls in the woods... does it make a sound? What if it lands on your car?

AlterNet: "Now retired after a 26-year career with the New Jersey State Police, Cole is leading a new group of current and former law-enforcement officials who are similarly disillusioned with the war on drugs. Called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, this nationwide organization takes as its premise that the war on drugs is, as Cole puts it, 'a total and abject failure.'"

Al Qaida claims responsibility for blackout: "Al Qaida's Abu Hafs Brigades has claimed responsibility for the blackout last week in the Northeast and Midwest United States. A communiqué by the Abu Hafs Brigades made reference to Operation Quick Lightning in the Land of the Tyrant of this Generation."

Potent Stem Cells Found in Baby Teeth: "Your seven-year-old's baby tooth may be worth a lot more than the quarter the tooth fairy left under the pillow. Scientists have discovered that the pulp inside deciduous teeth is a treasure trove of fast-growing stem cells. Naturally-shed choppers could thus provide an easily accessible new source of these sought-after cells for clinical studies of stem-cell transplantation and tissue engineering."

Rethinking the Articles of Confederation: "Thus do we see how the period of the Articles of Confederation was not characterized by chaos and increasingly bad economic times, as historians tend to assume. Rather, the Articles proved themselves to be a perfectly viable structure for a free society, encouraging trade and prosperity and adherence to the highest ideals of 1776. The driving forces for the creation of the central government with the Constitution involved economic imbalances and debts leftover from the war with Britain. The federalists, ideologically attached to protectionist and nationalist theories, exploited both real and false fears in the hope of resolving these imbalances, but they ended up by recreating what the founding generation had struggled so hard to overthrow ten years earlier."

Stripping the Skin: "Ksenia Vidyaykina performs as a 1920's era strip tease dancer who takes off her cloths, and then her skin in a portion of 'Trapped,' during this year's New York International Fringe Festival."

GeorgeWBush.com Launches: "Bush-Cheney '04 today unveiled its complete campaign Web site at www.GeorgeWBush.com. The site invites grassroots supporters to join the President's team and spread his positive message. Issue-specific action centers enable supporters to easily write news editors, call talk radio shows, and email friends and family about the issues that are important to them. They can also register to vote, order an absentee ballot, and contribute to the President's campaign." It finally looks like the Republicans are starting to understood the internet. Ugh.

Beware of VICTORY Act, Privacy Group Warns: "For example, the group says, one section of the bill gives the Attorney General the power to issue 'administrative subpoenas' in investigations stemming from an extremely broad definition of 'terrorism.' (According to NCC, an 'administrative subpoena' is like a search warrant automatically issued by the clerk of court, except there's no need to have a judge sign off on it.) 'Section 504 specifically mentions subpoenaing consumer records from telecommunication companies, Internet service providers, and financial service firms such as banks,' the group said in a press release." VICTORY stands for Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003.

I was in the New Jersey suburbs during the blackouts. No one was panicing. No one was rioting, or looting. Everyone was more civil than they'd been through the rest of my trip.

"The most salient feature of the event here was how calm New York City was. People were wandering the streets of my neighborhood well after dark (and no, not in order to mug other people). Spontaneous street parties arose in a number of places. Everyone was talking to everyone else. Strangers would gather around someone on her stoop with a transistor radio or sitting in his car listening to the news. In Brooklyn, even traffic flowed smoothly. At busy intersections cars pulled to a stop on their own. One driver would wave the other through. People stopped for pedestrians at crosswalks without a traffic light or the threat of a ticket to make them do so. I heard of two minor incidents of looting, both in the worst neighborhood in the borough. One person in the city died as a result of the blackout from a heart attack. Civil society, given a chance, works far better on its own than statists can conceive. The government sits atop it like a parasite, and is most often a major threat to its smooth functioning."

Good morning from the airport. Purely as a function of usability, airport security measures have decreased the ease of air travel by at 500%.