Michael Kinsley, first editor of the online magazine Slate, also writes a column for the Washington Post. He's not declaring where he himself stands on the issue, but he does raise the possibility, in connection with the infamous Valerie Plame-as-CIA-agent leak, that journalists shouldn't protect what he calls bad-faith leakers.

I linked to a Michael Crichton speech on environmentalism as a religion the other day. Here's another one that suggests extraterrestrials are linked to global warming. Don't think it's a joke, he's deadly serious, and makes a hell of a case for the connection. It's too meticulously woven to sum up in a paragraph, but he's as withering as ever on the subject of bad science. Sample:

"I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. "

A Boeing 727 vanished from an airfield in Angola last year, raising fears that terrorists might have intended to use it for another 9-11 attack. Despite an intense hunt, it was never found. Now, there is some suggestion that the Lebanon-bound aircraft that crashed off Benin at Christmas, killing 130 of the 161 aboard, might have been the missing aircraft.

More than 50 years after they were deported to a gulag in the Arctic, hundreds of now-free inmates are still prisoners of their poverty.

Another African tragedy seems to have had its opening act in Botswana, where the government is forcibly moving Bushmen off the land on which they have survived by hunting and gathering for more than 30,000 years. Reserves of diamonds have been detected in the area, and Botswana, which already produces 80 per cent of the world's quality jewel gems, wants to be able to get at them easily.

A new exhibition of Brancusi's work, called The Essence of Things, opens at the Tate Modern in London on January 29. Jonathan Jones of the Guardian says the Romanian sculptor was like Rousseau, a wild and un-bourgeois peasant.

"Brancusi was a legendary lover," says Jones. "His bearded intensity and violin playing attracted, apparently, artists, collectors, princesses. He is often spoken of as a spiritual artist, but the shock of his art lay in its combination of metal, stone and sexuality. Just like Duchamp, he seemed to be saying that the new century was engendering a new humanity, with smooth, metallic desires. The work that really scandalised Americans in 1913 was Mademoiselle Pogany, an abstract portrait of one of his lovers, the Hungarian-Romanian painter Margit Pogany. Today, surviving versions of this face, with its vast almond eyes, make you think of an alien - a bug-eyed, sexy alien."

Lafcadio Hearn was a strange, wandering journalist, among other things a crime reporter covering lurid murder cases in Cincinnati, Ohio, who fetched up in Japan when he was 40, and stayed there for the rest of his life.

He and Japan entered into a remarkable kind of partnership. Japan revealed itself to Hearn. For his part, he did more than any other human to explain and interpret Japanese culture to the West. His articles in The Atlantic between 1890 and 1896 are nothing short of a treasure, to many of which the Atlantic Monthly is giving access in this article. It's a generous end-of-the-year gift from one of the world's best magazines. Don't miss it.

A tiny sample of the Hearn touch: "But while it remains impossible for the man of the West to discern the true color of Japanese life, either intellectual or emotional (since the one is woven into the other), it is equally impossible for him to escape the conviction that, com- pared with his own, it is very small. It is dainty; it holds delicate potentialities of rarest interest and value; but it is otherwise so small that Western life, by contrast with it, seems almost supernatural. For we must judge visible and measurable manifestations. So judging, what a contrast between the emotional and intellectual worlds of West and East! Far less striking that between the frail wooden streets of the Japanese capital and the tremendous solidity of a thoroughfare in Paris or London. When one compares the utterances which West and East have given to their dreams, their aspirations, their sensations, a Gothic cathedral with a Shinto temple, an opera by Verdi or a trilogy by Wagner with a performance of geisha, a European epic with a Japanese poem, how incalculable the difference in emotional volume, in imaginative power, in artistic synthesis! True, our music is an essentially modern art; but in looking back through all our past the difference in creative force is scarcely less marked, — not surely in the period of Roman magnificence, of marble amphitheatres and of aqueducts spanning provinces, nor in the Greek period of the divine in sculpture and of the supreme in literary art."

The Cato Institute's probably right - there is little science to justify the panic over eating beef. But sometimes being correct simply isn't enough.

Top ten recipes of 2003, in the opinion of the Los Angeles Times. Honey-brandy ice cream with fig jam sounds like a pretty unanswerable argument to me.

This week's Los Angeles Times investigative report on Syrian collaboration with Saddam Hussein has spread ripples of understanding like the frog of that haiku, jumping into a still pond. Caroline Glick in Jerusalem thinks the new understanding of Syria's actions is a good thing for Israel. I think she's right.

Of the more than two million Zimbabwean refugees who have sought refuge in South Africa over the last nine years, only 11 have been granted asylum. One thinks immediately of Thabo Mbeki's peculiar attempt to hold the AIDS crisis at arm's length a couple of years ago by denying there was a connection between AIDS and HIV, and refusing proper treatment to HIV sufferers. Is he, Canute-like, trying to hold back another unstoppable tide? To be fair, the refugee problem predates the start of his presidency by five or six years. But still...

Recent archaeological discoveries in the Siberian Arctic push the date of the first human occupation of that region back by 16,000 years. There are suggestions that these people might have travelled a little further on and, in so doing, become the very first North Americans.

Do you suppose that's why the Guardian's science editor suggests in his lead that these first humans "colonised" the Siberian Arctic? The process of colonisation involves the subjugation of a native people. In this case there wasn't such a thing. Would a professional writer...an editor...use such a word as carelessly as this use implies? I don't think so.

This is a puzzling story - the Pope is said to have called during the World Day of Peace for a new international order to replace the one that emerged from the Second World War, and the Guardian is interpreting this as a call to replace the UN in the light of its failure to stop the US invading Iraq. Other media seem not so sure, or perhaps are simply avoiding comment on something that is not clear to them.

Earlier this month, John Paul issued a formal document preparatory to the World Day of Peace, which is held on January 1, in which he called for a reform of the UN and international law to deal with the evolving threat of terrorism, so it may be the Guardian is right. If it is, then the Pope is making an extraordinarily significant proposal in the last days of his life, about which we will undoubtedly hear more in the days to come.

British botanists, worried by the failure of many plants to flower any more in the face of habitat destruction, climate change or changes in land use, are creating a seed bank, so that threatened plants get a crack at avoiding extinction.

"When Italian Prime Minister took over at the EU helm on 1 July, Europe was still suffering from the rifts caused by the Iraq war and was hoping to broker a deal on an EU Constitution; it needed a strong but discreet politician to pave the way.

"Instead, it got Mr Berlusconi, teller of poor jokes, prone to extraordinary gaffes and archenemy of fellow Italian Romano Prodi, head of the European Commission."

Europeans are so ready to proclaim their dislike for the now ex-head of the Commission that one wonders where dislike of him ends and a kind of self-indulgent witch hunt against the things they think he represents begins. It's an ugly, overdone phenomenon that reflects as badly on them as on Mr Berlusconi.

Another list! This one the ten most popular stories published in the New Scientist.com during 2003. It demonstrates something truly appalling - even the learned and sensible side of one's nature is helpless to resist the siren call of crassness and trivialiality.

Denis Boyles, who writes a column for National Review Online, reviews some of the best and the worst of 2003. It's worth taking time with this, and reading some of the linked source articles. Hell of a good New Year's Day read.

Even the bedrock left-wing bible The Nation seems to think Fidel Castro's past it. But this account by the playwright and author Arthur Miller of meeting a surprisingly convivial and gregarious Fidel during a visit to Cuba in March, 2000, is interesting and rewarding despite Miller's reservations about the aging dictator's ability to do good for his country. Miller is such a good writer it's hard to pick some paragraphs as more succinct than others, but these ought to whet your appetite:

"Watching him at lunch--he ate two leaves of lettuce - one saw a lonely old man hungry for some fresh human contact, which could only get more and more rare as he ages. He might very well live actively for ten years, perhaps even longer as his parents reportedly had done, and I found myself wondering what could possibly be keeping him from a graceful exit that might even earn him his countrymen's gratitude?

"The quasi-sexual enchantment of power? Perhaps. More likely, given his history, was his commitment to the poetic image of world revolution, the uprising of the wretched of the earth with himself at its head. And in plain fact, as the chief of a mere island, he had managed to elevate himself to that transcendent state in millions of minds. The more so now, after all other contestants had fallen away and conditions in Latin America and Africa gone from bad to worse, the possibility needed only its right time to erupt again. After all, he had thrown Cuban forces into action in many countries around the world despite his country's poverty and the obstinate resistance of his main sponsor, the now-abominated Soviet leadership.

"It would have been too much to expect that after half a century in power he would not become to some important degree an anachronism, a handsome old clock that no longer tells the time correctly and bongs haphazardly in the middle of the night, disturbing the house. Notwithstanding all his efforts, the only semblance of a revolt of the poor is the antimodern Islamic tide, which from the Marxist point of view floats in a medieval dream. With us he seemed pathetically hungry for some kind of human contact. Brilliant as he is, spirited and resourceful as his people are, his endless rule seemed like some powerful vine wrapping its roots around the country and while defending it from the elements choking its natural growth. And his own as well. Ideology aside, he apparently maintains the illusions that structured his political successes even if they never had very much truth in them; to this day, as one example, he speaks of Gorbachev's dissolution of the Soviet Union as unnecessary, 'a mistake'.

"In short, there was no fatal contradiction inherent in the Soviet system that brought it down, and so there is nothing in the Castro system or in his take on reality that is creating the painful poverty of the island. The US embargo created this island's poverty out of hand, along with the Russians by their deserting him. It is Don Quixote tilting at windmills which, worse yet, have collapsed into dust."

Camille Pecastaing, Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins, reviews in Foreign Affairs a book written by an Algerian journalist who infiltrated a French al Qaeda cell.

"The ideological chatter exchanged in Sifaoui's meetings with his 'brothers' consists of little more than gossip about Osama bin Laden and sound bites from Ibn Taymiyya and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, radical Muslim theologians from ages past. The militants care less about doctrinal depth than they do about Islamist symbolism - a jihadist pop of sorts. They are obsessed with matters of style: the beard, a distinctive slang, open disdain for women, wearing one's watch on the right wrist rather than the left, an aversion to all jewelry, and an irritation with Sifaoui's beret (which they think makes him look Jewish)."

It's not the rich seam of information that it might be, though, because Mohamed Sifaoui's own statements and intentions may be suspect, Pecastaing believes.

The seizure of a cargo of components for producing nuclear weapons in early October might have derailed secret talks with Libya. Instead, it seemed to strengthen Moammar Gaddafi's determination to cooperate.

Shmuley Boteach, was a rabbi at Oxford University for 11 years, and was voted one of the top 100 radio hosts in the US in 2003 by Talkers Magazine. The Church of England, he says, was on its way to becoming a rotting corpse during the years he lived in England.

"How sad and tragic," he says, "that in addition to passionlessness, amorality has now become a central staple of a once great Church."

There was last year, and no doubt will be this year, as ever, no accounting for taste. Jack, which the Guardian describes as a solid, old-fashioned name, was the choice of parents for males children in Britain in 2003. Chloe was the most popular for girls.

This man, president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association, pumps his argument up a bit more than he really ought, but he nonetheless makes some good points about the importance of scientific knowledge:

"We all need to know about science. Without this knowledge we are powerless, forced to live in a fog about how things work. Without it, we are utterly dependent on others to form our opinion. Without it, we cannot properly participate in society as informed, critical and responsibly opinioned citizens. Moreover, in today's hi-tech information age world, democracy cannot work without a scientifically literate society."

Buoyed by the success of its first-ever manned space flight, China says it plans to launch an unmanned lunar landing in 2004, with a lunar satellite sent up by 2007.

Khieu Samphan is one of the few surviving senior leaders of the communist Khmer Rouge. In a recent interview, he admits that his regime committed genocide. He personally never ordered any killings, he says, and only learned the full extent of the killings only two months ago from a documentary. Sure.

Perhaps I should have included this yesterday in my post about the Los Angeles Times' story on Syria's involvement in the provision of arms to Iraq. But better late than never. It's a fascinating account of some of the entries in the day planner of a director of the Iraqi state-owned Armos Trading Company, who left it behind on his desk when he fled Baghdad. The entries reveal how Siham Addin Khairi searched the globe for illicit weapons until the brink of war to satisfy his client, Saddam Hussein's Military Industrialization Commission.

The media was full of stories yesterday and today about Michael Jackson having asked the Black Muslims to...well, quite what was a matter of speculation. Provide security? Manage his affairs? Britain's Independent, spinning off the hysterical attitude many of the media have on that side of the Atlantic about what the Nation of Islam is and what they do, say they're holding him captive and brainwashing him.

The Nation of Islam says there is no official relationship at all.

If there is another human being on the planet who needs a little discipline in his life as much as Michael Jackson does, I don't know who that might be. The Nation of Islam may not be good at everything it does, but it is good at discipline. If Michael Jackson wants help, why shouldn't he get it from them?

Here's a New Year's Eve grab bag of lists and predictions. This one is the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland making reckless predictions.

This is Mark Steyn with some of his predictions from the Jerusalem Post. I particularly liked his last paragraph:

"The real story of this last year is not Saddam, but something deeper, symbolized by the bizarre persistence of the 'antiwar' movement even after the war was over. For a significant chunk of the British establishment and for most of the governing class on the Continent, if it's a choice between an America-led West or no West at all they'll take the latter. That's the trend to watch in the year ahead."

And this is the New York's Post's list of the silliest quotes of 2003 - award-winners all.

French journalist Alain Hertoghe wrote a book accusing the French press of not being objective in its coverage of the war in Iraq. In response, his newspaper sacked him. Surprise, surprise.

Scientists have begun looking at old sailing ships' logbooks for information about climate in the recent past. They say they want to find out more about the weather over the world's oceans before industrialisation could have had any significant impact on it.

It's Debka, so you have to remember it's fairly raw intelligence, as opposed to the proven truth. But if this piece is true, that little gangster Arafat has been at the Palestinian Authority's funds again. Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia is accusing Arafat of exploiting the attention focused on fruitless discussions about a truce for an underhand move to help himself to the PA's funds and whisk its financial system out of the hands of the pro-American Palestinian finance minister, Salem Fayed. Now the Palestinians can't meet their January 1 payroll.

This is good news, if Saddam's telling the truth. When was the last time he did that?

Meantime, the Los Angeles Times has an extraordinary story on its front page this morning about the flow of banned armaments into Iraq before the invasion. If you think that US accusation that Syria provided night-vision glasses to the Iraqis was exaggerated, think again.

Caramba! Somewhere, a Cuban with a wild sense of humour and a king-sized hangover is wishing he were small enough to stow away on the first sparrow heading north. But this is a story that isn't going to have a nice ending, I think.

Stuart Jeffries of the Guardian can be as funny as Mark Steyn when he's on a roll, and he is in this story.

Try this for size: "With the failure of the Beagle 2, one might argue, normal service has been resumed. Britain is back where it likes to be, failing and meticulously analysing that failure. Whole British industries are devoted to this analysis. One of the great postwar British industries is the sitcom, and that industry's greatest products are failures. Basil Fawlty, Del Boy Trotter, Harold (and possibly Albert) Steptoe, Rab C Nesbitt, Frank Spencer, the characters of Dad's Army and Are You Being Served, David Brent and Alan Partridge are all ground-down anti-heroes whose role is to remind the British, reassuringly, of themselves, to confirm what we all know - that we suffer from a British Leyland of the soul."

And speaking of the British Leyland of the soul, a brace of British Bishops was busy setting a blistering pace for nitwits everywhere yesterday. What gets me is the appeal to the ne plus ultra of political correctness achieved by somehow managing to drag Brixton (a predominantly black area of London, for those who don't know) into the war on Iraq. Spectacularly pathetic stuff.

The BBC admits that heads are going to start rolling when the Hutton Report is released in a couple of weeks. Greg Dyke's trying to play it down, but that's understandable, since his is about the most rollable of the bunch.

Another top ten list - no apologies. These are the top ten weather stories in Canada in 2003. Makes pretty bizarre reading.

If it seemed to you that there was something slightly false about Muammer Gadaffi's decision to give up his nuclear programme, this might explain why.

The Financial Times says Libya is trying to get $30bn-worth of investment from international oil companies. It hopes to increase oil production from 1.3m barrels a day to 3m by 2010. However, even that target is short of the 3.5m barrels a day it produced in 1970. Since oil export revenues account for 95% of Libya's hard currency earnings...well, you get the picture.

LA Weekly has announced its Fatty Arbuckle Memorial Awards for 2003. It's a must-read list.

Space is a busy place these days. In Britain, they're still looking for the Beagle, missing on Mars. NASA's got a couple of its own Mars explorers on the way, and a deep-space explorer , launched in 1999, is zipping through space on its way to try to catch a comet by the tail. It will rendezvous with the comet, Wild-2, on January 2, which is Friday. Two years later, with a little luck, it will bring a little of the stardust it hopes to grab back to earth.

If you're thinking about making some kind of New Year's resolution to lose weight, maybe you might gain a little perspective from this article in the Los Angeles Times, and this one, which accompanies it. I think you'll agree that William the Conqueror's style is much to be admired...

British Health Secretary John Reid has been accused in just about all political quarters in Britain of trying to grab headlines in the quiet period between Christmas and the New Year, by announcing a plan to stop "health tourists" - people who travel to Britain for the purpose of getting free medical treatment from the national health system. That seems fair enough - why should the British tax-payer be ripped off in that way? But whether it was a cheap headline-grabbing exercise or not, it has demonstrated the sort of foolish political reaction that makes Britian the target of choice for immigrants from all over the world. Making tourists pay for their health care, according to the Liberal Democratic spokesman, is "immoral" and panders to racist attitudes. Such a policy "ushers in an American style of healthcare I thought a Labour government had set its face against," according to Paul Burstow.

The Health Secretary says "We will do what we have to do morally and under international law. But we are not mugs. We will not allow people in this country to be taken for a ride." Wrong, I'm afraid. They are and they will.

Here in Bermuda, and I imagine elsewhere as well, it is the civil service that sets the pace in the country's policies on retirement. Making retirement mandatory at a certain age is a policy that is important, because it dispenses with what would otherwise be a tortuous and expensive process if decisions had to be made in each and every employee's case. So I doubt if those who want to dispense with it entirely will win their case. But there is something to be said for raising the age ceiling in the light of the longer life expectancies of the age - perhaps from 65 to 70. The fight will be over what that does to the minimum retirement age, which employees and unions will no doubt want to keep as low as possible.

A few days ago, I posted a little item about a ghostly image that had been caught on CCTV at Hampton Court in London. Hampton Court, history buffs will remember, was the home of Henry VIII, and has long had a reputation for being haunted.

JohnB let me know yesterday that he's put up a blog site dealing with nothing but those images. I've had a look, and if you're interested in the story, it's a must-visit site. The pictures really are amazing.

NASA says that one contributor to global warming is soot, much of it from diesel engines, settling onto ice and snow covering the earth's higher latitudes. "Soot in the higher latitudes of the Earth, where ice is more common, absorbs more of the sun's energy and warmth than an icy, white background. Dark-colored black carbon, or soot, absorbs sunlight, while lighter colored ice reflects sunlight," NASA says.

NASA's graphic brings the effect dramatically to life.

Thanks to Owen for the tip.

Well now, here are a couple of little-known facts about Christmas. The first is that it was being celebrated 300 years before the birth of Christ.

And the second is that for 22 years, celebrating Christmas was a crime in Massachusetts, where observers of the holiday were subjected to fines and "mince smellers," individuals who were paid to patrol streets to sniff out those who might be baking traditional mincemeat pies around December 25.

Cullen Murphy, who is the Atlantic's managing editor has written a whimsical, witty and wise little piece about standards. She proposes ten to which we might all be able to agree to adhere. I'm in.

The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, seems sometimes to be more interested in converting people to his political views than to being a good leader for the Anglican Church. The Telegraph calls him out on it.

"Dr Williams has become adept," the Telegraph says, "at using the media to his own ends. Yet he does so not to offer spiritual guidance but to advance a soft-Left political agenda. A full page of the Daily Mail last week was devoted to a piece by Dr Williams proffering family financial advice. 'The credit explosion has made life a lot easier in all sorts of good ways,' he wrote. 'But it is in danger of slipping out of control unless we have some better regulation and some new attitudes.'

"The Archbishop would more likely find himself being taken seriously were he to render unto the Government the business of financial regulation and concentrate a little more on spiritual leadership."

Might also help if he shaved that scrofulous damned beard off.

Christopher Paolini is now 20. His first novel is outselling the Harry Potter books. The story of how he managed that seems as much a fantasy as his book, Eragon.

Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman's official history of the Falklands War is about to be published in Britain. Among other things, it is likely to exonerate former Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher of charges of needlessly ordering the sinking of the Argentinian Navy ship Belgrano, and of subsequently misleading the House of Commons about the action.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair commissioned Professor Freedman, director of war studies at King's College London, to write the official account in July, 1997. Publication of his work has been repeatedly delayed by disagreement over what could be included. Intelligence chiefs have apparently now relented on the question of whether orders transmitted to the Belgrano just before it was sunk, and intercepted by British intelligence, should be made public.

British poet Lavinia Greenlaw had to try writing a libretto to understand what opera is all about.

"An opera is like an unpacked poem - the words here, the music there and the action all over. All three are realised for you and so, rather than travel inwards and imagine, you can sit back and feel. I wanted to pursue opera as sensation, and began to understand how this is achieved through theatre, where we are not watching a performance but entering a world."

What a shame about Beagle! But as Britain's Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees says in the Observer today, just getting the thing to Mars was a victory of sorts.

"By maintaining a focus on unmanned programmes - a policy which the UK has always endorsed," Sir Martin says, "Europe has become fully competitive with the US in scientific spacecraft, as well as having an effective commercial programme."