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BELLESILES UPDATE: Will Bellesiles' problems undermine the gun control movement? This article from the History News Network says the answer is yes -- noting that Bellesiles' work was part of a coordinated program of scholarship aimed at undermining recent pro-individual rights scholarship. Not only has Bellesiles lost credibility, but the other articles all cite him extensively, which doesn't do much for their credibility, either. This article draws together a lot of interesting threads in pro-gun-control scholarship, along with extensive links.

THE DANGERS OF HISTORY: Rick Perlstein writes on how Doris Kearns Goodwin came to resemble Lyndon Johnson.

ANDREW SULLIVAN worries about the problem posed by the overclass. His solution is philanthropy. I agree -- and wish to point out that while InstaPundit isn't actually a charity, it should be looked upon as one for giving purposes.

ROBERT MUELLER says that walk-in suicide bombers are coming to the United States, and that there's nothing we can do to prevent them.

Well, such bombing will have some psychological impact, but not much else. And the psychological impact is going to be as follows: (1) to increase Americans' tolerance for military action against Arab states that sponsor terrorism, especially Iraq and Saudi-controlled Arabia; and (2) to cause Americans to lose any real concern about civilian casualties in countries with which we are at war.

The last time someone made war largely against American civilians, the response was near-extermination. Is this a game the Islamists want to play? Because they're stupid, the answer to that question may be yes. Den Beste's piece on the Mongols and the Assassins is looking more relevant. (Den Beste usually is -- just read this one on the difference between warriors and soldiers.)

Think I'm wrong about these consequences? Just read this quote reproduced by Orrin Judd.

THE NEW REPUBLIC joins in the Fisk-Fisking fun. Sounds like they've been reading a lot of blogs.

CHINA IS PLANNING A MOONBASE, and wants to set up mining operations there. Take it away, Rand Simberg!

IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THIS ALREADY, Wired has a story on how Sony's latest CD copy-protection technology is readily defeated by magic markers. It may crash your computer, even when you're just trying to listen to a CD you've bought -- but it won't stop anyone trying to make copies, unless the RIAA succeeds in a new campaign to ban magic markers.

Jeez. Maximal inconvenience, minimal effectiveness: Sony must have hired the same corps of elite security specialists who are advising the airport security establishment.

ERIC OLSEN IS RATHER HARSH in a post about Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan should get his permalinks working, though.

I HAD A POST ABOUT A DUMB GEORGIE ANN GEYER COLUMN last week, but Blogger was undergoing one of its periodic epileptic fits, and by the time it was working again I forgot to post it. But Best of the Web has the definitive takedown.

EUGENE VOLOKH compares guns and abortion.

UPDATE: And now he's got a very interesting post on slippery slopes and gun control, also in response to Mary McGrory's anti-gun oped today.

TAPPED compares Bush's use of Air Force One on trips to campaign for Republicans to Hillary Clinton's use of government travel when she was campaigning for herself, and wants to know why this isn't hypocritical, given that some Republicans criticized Hillary. Um, isn't part of the difference that Bush is, you know, the President? And she wasn't? The Washington Post article that TAPPED links to puts it this way: "The accounting guidelines used by the White House were set in 1982, and Democrats benefited mightily from them during President Bill Clinton's marathon fundraising swings. Now it's the GOP's turn."

ANOTHER SUCCESS FOR THE SECOND AMENDMENT IN NASHVILLE:

A Forest Hills man shot two armed burglars at his home early yesterday morning and, police say, the burglars were lucky that Roy Luckett grabbed his wife's gun.

When the burglar alarm went off at 2 a.m. in Luckett's two-story home at 939 Tyne Blvd., it woke him and his wife, Patsy. Luckett had the choice of two guns in their bedroom — his .45-caliber handgun and his wife's less powerful, .38-caliber pistol, loaded with ''snake shot'' pellets. . . .

Metro police say the two wounded suspects stopped near the Harding Place/Humber Drive intersection and phoned for medical help.

The Lucketts were not injured. Metro police spokesman Don Aaron was quoted in a television report saying that the two suspects were fortunate Roy Luckett chose the gun he did.

Luckett said he does not know why the suspects stayed in the house after the alarm went off.

''They were lucky I didn't take the .45,'' he said.

Stuff like this happens every day. It gets very little attention outside local papers. News that reflects badly on gun ownership, on the other hand, tends to get national play.

THE JUNIOR VARSITY: There's a funny Sylvester cartoon (actually, they did this theme at least twice) in which Sylvester gobbles gasoline, high explosives, gunpowder, dynamite, etc., and then strikes a match, vanishing in a huge explosion. "Wow, that's a great trick!" exclaims an onlooker. "Yeah," says a now-ghostly Sylvester, rising into the sky clutching the inevitable harp. "But there's just one problem: I can only do it once."

This news story sent by reader Mark Draughn suggests that the Palestinians may be running into the same difficulty, and are now stuck with the B-Team:

A Palestinian militant detonated explosives at a busy intersection Monday as he was approached by police — killing himself, but causing no other injuries in the second suicide bombing in northern Israel in two days.

The supply of guys smart enough to be successful suicide bombers, but dumb enough to be willing to do it is finite. If they're not running out now, they will be.

HERE'S A DIFFERENT KIND OF PIECE FROM THE GUARDIAN on Euro-criticism of the United States:

Diplomatically and militarily, Europe is still a pygmy. We can't solve stuff - old stuff, middle-sized stuff - within our own borders. Why on earth should we presume to lecture the rest of the world on conflict resolution? And what, in honesty, do we have to say, as Europeans, to the White House which should engage their attention?

The Chirac lecture on probity in government? The Berlusconi lecture on trans-media ownership? The Schröder lecture on economic dynamism? Even the Blair lecture on incisive leadership (once I've squared Gordon)?

Humility isn't merely in order, but inescapable - and humility doesn't begin at Calais. For all the resonance of commandos blowing up empty caves in the Hindu Kush, our own wait-and-see game of hint, smirk and scowl over referendums is just one more reason for the Americans to shrug us away. Speedy on the motes, as Colin Powell might observe, but dead slow on the beams. What use is fixing Sierra Leone if you can't fix No 11?

Interesting. Perhaps we're beginning to see the conventional wisdom fray.

IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM. . . . After being savaged throughout the Blogosphere, The Guardian now has a blog of its own. Well, kind of. I mean, it's no TAPPED, but then they're new at this.

UPDATE: No they're not -- I'm just an idiot. It's been around a while. Of course, that means they have no excuse for not being as good as TAPPED.

JIM BENNETT'S UPI COLUMN is a response to Chris Patten's unity-through-opposition-to-American-tariffs article from The Spectator.

SOME THOUGHTS ON INTELLIGENCE FAILURES: Andrew Hofer agrees that the real problem was a systemic breakdown --as he puts it, the inability of agencies with part of the picture to share information laterally so that the whole picture could be put together. Meanwhile, David Rothkopf writes in Foreign Policy that the business community has the expertise to solve these, and similar, problems in the war on terrorism if allowed.

As best I can tell, the evidence indicates that people had figured out that something was going to happen, and the rather slow and kludgey national security apparatus was starting to move toward doing something about it -- but the terrorists were inside our decision curve, and thus able to strike before we were able to act even though we had access (somewhere in the system) to all the information that would have been needed to anticipate the attacks.

In this, as I've said before, the learning curve, and the ability to learn and act faster than the enemy, is the key. American civilians, using civilian technology and their own inherent ability to self-organize, were able to neutralize the terrorist plan in 109 minutes, as Flight 93 demonstrates. The national security bureaucracy, on the other hand, still hasn't fully gotten its act together. This is what we ought to be asking tough questions about. Unfortunately, that threatens the whole feedlot, meaning that very few people in Washington -- in either party -- have any incentive to ask the right questions.

MORE HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES IN SYRIA. Where's Mary Robinson on this? Oh, right.

CHIRAC WANTS TO CUT TAXES, despite heavy opposition from the EU. See, I told you there was hope for France.

GRAY DAVIS SCANDAL UPDATE: This article from the Christian Science Monitor surveys Davis's many fundraising scandals, and says it's hurting him in the polls. He may wish he had the $10 million that he spent on anti-Riordan ads back now. . . .

A "DESPERATE" PAKISTAN IS READY TO NUKE INDIA, according to this article in The Times of India. This seems dubious to me, as (1) Pakistan's nukes and delivery systems probably won't work that well; and (2) India will annihilate Pakistan in such an event.

And who, exactly, is this desperate? Not Musharraf, who has nothing to gain from this. Perhaps some Ladenites in the Pakistani high command might desire this outcome for apocalyptic-dumb Ladenite reasons -- but if Pakistan still has that many Ladenites in its high command, I'd be very surprised.

MEDPUNDIT HAS A lengthy discussion of smallpox vaccination, and more-or-less joins the call for mass vaccination on the grounds that the CDC's "ring vaccination" approach won't work in a biowar setting.

UPDATE: The dreaded Blogger Archive Bug has appeared. Just go to the main Medpundit location. Scroll down if necessary.

MICHAEL RUBINS SAYS that Mary Robinson should be investigated as a war criminal. He's got the goods.

UPDATE: Reader William Sjostrom writes from Ireland with this observation:

In a decade in this country, I have endured countless smug lectures from Irish intellectuals on how much more reasonable their political system is than America's. So, it gives me huge, immature, and vindictive pleasure to note that Sinn Fein, the closest thing Ireland has to a Nazi party (virulently nationalist, racist, although they deny that part, and anti-foreign, dedicated to the wildest dreams of socialism, and very big on using baseball bats on their opponents) got 6.5% of the first-preference votes, and 5 out of the 166 seats in the Irish parliament, in the Irish general election on Friday.

Perhaps someone can explain why the Wall Street Journal describes Sinn Fein as left-wing, whereas LePen is right wing.

I wait for Mary Robinson to denounce extremism in her own country.

Wait all you want, but don't hold your breath while you do.

HMM. I TAKE BACK ALL MY CRITICISM of the Bush Administration's foreign policy. New evidence has appeared to suggest that they're clearly on the right track.

MICKEY KAUS JUMPS ON a blogger-inspired antiterrorist scheme.

ACCORDING TO THIS REPORT, Syria is pressing Hamas to step up suicide attacks. Hmm. Put them on the list for "regime change." Oh, wait -- they're already there! Guess they're not really our friends, huh?

THE HOLLINGS BILL gets criticized even by self-described copyright protectionist Roger Parloff:

I have frequently sided with the protectionists in the digital copyright showdowns to date. I thought Napster was illegal, for instance, and think the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which prohibits disseminating software designed to strip copy-protection off the files of copyrighted works) is sensible and constitutional. But certain lines must not be crossed in the quest to secure creators' digitized intellectual property. Sen. Hollings' bill transgresses those lines by a country mile.

Though my guess is that creators can adequately protect their digital wares without legislation of this sort, if events should prove me wrong, the Hollings legislation should still be defeated. If controlling digital property requires government intervention on this scale, then there should be no such control. Digital technology will have rebuffed the legal system's attempts to tame it, anti-protectionists will have won the war, and it will be time for protectionists like me to raise the white flag. We can't imperil everyone's freedom and prosperity in a quixotic quest. The game has to end somewhere.

Indeed. (Via Overlawyered.Com).

THE ROBERT MUSIL / TED BARLOW FEUD continues apace. Here's a link to the latest installment, which links back to the one before, and so on.

JUDGING BY HOW MANY OF THEM ARE SHOWING UP IN MY EMAIL, the Klez worm is still spreading. I get a couple of copies every time I check my email now, it seems. Norton catches it with no problem -- though the new version won't let me set it to autodelete this stuff, so I have to click on a button every time, which kind of sucks.

I'VE USED THE ANALOGY between blogs and 18th century coffeehouses when talking to reporters on several occasions, but none of them has seemed very interested in it. Doug Turnbull, however, has an excellent post on the subject.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT OVER THE WEEKEND, I had a link to a post by "Cranky Professor" Michael Tinkler that sheds some interesting light on the likelihoood that Michael Bellesiles' claims are true.

JOSHUA CLAYBOURN has some interesting thoughts on why you should want SNL to stay as unfunny as possible.

SYLVIA HEWLETT'S BOOK "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children" has gotten publicity all over the place, but it's still not selling. Publicity is useful for selling books, in that it's hard to sell them without it, but it's what we lawyers call a "necessary but not sufficient condition."

Why isn't it selling? Apparently, women find it depressing.

UPDATE: Reader R.Z. German writes:

Maybe women aren't reading it because they disagree with the data, the analysis and the conclusions.

One point that hit me & my 40-ish friends: Hewlett is still painting women as passive victims of society & corporate America. Absurd. The choices we all face are tough, and books that either serve to inspire guilt over choices we made or anxiety over choices to be made may not be what women (and men) want to read. My thoughtful friends recognize that decisions about career, family etc, were hard to make the, and are hard to change 20 years later, but that there is fulfillment, happiness, etc, in either path
(or a hybrid betwixt the two).

Yeah, there's a whiff of 1987 about the whole enterprise, it's true.

A NERD'S TALE OF REVENGE, as told by Josh Trevino.

THE SECRET BRINK LINDSEY / ADAM WEST CONNECTION has gone public at last.

PUNDITWATCH is up!

EUGENE VOLOKH HAS an oped on the Second Amendment and on the Bush Administration's position thereon. He also has this accompanying timeline of Second Amendment analysis that suggests that the Bush/Ashcroft position represents the norm, and the prior position a departure from the norm, as against the previous two centuries or so.

BY THE WAY, I'm in the process of moving to a new server. My hosting difficulties seem to be solved. The InstaPundit.Com URL will take you there once everything's up and running, but I'll post further notices.

THAT'S IT FOR A WHILE. I'm continuing the new policy of limited blogging on weekends.

THE BLAME GAME: Eric Olsen has a pretty long post on Al Qaeda activities through the 1990s, and how they were ignored. He concludes: "There is plenty of blame to go around. Let's learn from our mistakes and not repeat them."

CBS UPDATE: Pejman Yousefzadeh has preserved a screenshot of the original story for posterity's sake.

NADERISM OF THE WEEK: "Fast food restaurants are weapons of mass destruction," according to Nader speaking in France. (Via Matt Welch).

READER HAMISH CAMPBELL also opposes a boycott of France:

Like many Scotsmen, I find myself rather conflicted with regard to France. The ties of 'Auld Alliance' go back to 1295 and strange as it might sound to some, that actually does count for something even now to people like me. Yet contrary to what others might think, England too is not an enemy... a rival at times yes, but in the final analysis, our customs are more akin to our brothers in London and our even cousins in New York than our mistress in Paris.

I see the Franco-German dominated EU as not just harmful and misguided an endeavour, but indicative of how the truth of the matter is that what I hear called the Anglosphere more and more in various blogs really does exist and France is not in any real way a part of that. Our old liberties, hard won yet hanging in the balance this very day across BOTH the United Kingdom and the United States, can be better secured by cutting the ties of government to socialist Brussels for Britain and a closer association between both the United Kingdom and the United States. Not union, mind you, for whilst the USA has much to admire, it has other things to abominate, such as its over-mighty taxation 'service' which makes our Inland Revenue seem like kittens, a legal system seemingly designed to maximize the revenues of the legal profession and the fact un-enumerated rights are in reality in the USA second class rights compared to those in the written constitution.

Yet regardless of gibes about 'cheese eating surrender monkeys' so beloved of many blogs, the French, rather than the corrupt French Republic, have much to commend them. To dismiss a people such as they as all hopelessly anti-Semitic and mindlessly anti-American is, as the good folks on Libertarian Samizdata have pointed out, to paint a people with a grotesque broad brush. A French reader wrote to Instapundit telling Glenn Reynolds he would be happy to see France become the next US state! Obviously this will never happen...hell, I am usually said to be an Atlanticist and I would not actually want to see the UK actually join the USA... but it does show that
there are French people who do not take the racist Le Pen or 'little France' Chirac world view.

Boycotting France to 'punish' the French people for the views of some would be rather like boycotting the USA because of the existence of the KKK, the Aryan nation and Susan Sontag. It will be ineffective at best and harmful at worst to the very causes the boycott seeks to further. I shall continue to take my holidays in the Loire valley, I shall continue to argue for British withdrawal from the EU and I shall continue to argue for the tolerant 'small c' conservative values that I belive underpins any civilised
society and allow it to resist the siren call of irrational racist or ethnic hatreds.

Boycotts have their time and place but I cannot see the value of trying to boycott all of France other than allowing some loud mouthed pressure groups to try and gain some attention for themselves.

Hmm. That "mistress in Paris" sounded pretty good until I figured out what Campbell meant. I still think that the French will come around. They have perhaps the worst political class in Europe (which is saying something -- and it's not like I think the American political class is any great prize) but Campbell is right that the real problem is there, not among the populace, for the most part.

PERRY DE HAVILLAND weighs in against the "boycott France" movement.