BLOGGING WILL BE somewhere between intermittent and nonexistent for the rest of the weekend. Enjoy the many fine weblogs linked over there on the left. And scroll down for the NRA / Pink Pistols stuff.

CHARLES JOHNSON says that cracks are appearing in the Palestinian ranks, as they start to figure out that they're doing a lot of dying, and not getting anything for it except photo-ops for Arafat. This has been a theme of Fred Pruitt's for a while.

HULKISM: a multi-cultural approach.

UN INVESTIGATION BEGINS: Well, sort of. Mark Steyn writes:

Anyway, as Kofi's commission isn't going ahead, I'm pleased to announce my own fact-finding investigation into - drumroll, please - the UN. Ex-ambassadors, European Foreign Ministers and former presidents of humanitarian organisations are welcome to apply to join my commission, but, if they're too busy, we'll make do with jes' regular folks. Among the issues we'll be examining: UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia; the UN refugee extortion racket in Kenya; UN involvement in massive embezzlement in Kosovo; the UN's cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa involving aid workers demanding sexual favours from children as young as four; the UN-fuelled explosion of drugs, Aids and prostitution in Cambodia; the UN's complicity in massacres in pre-liberated Afghanistan; and, if we've any time left, the UN's collusion in terrorism in the Jenin refugee camp. As the organisation's own internal investigations usually put it, UN seen nothin' yet!

I think there's a lot of investigating that should go on here.

OSAMA'S PLANE FOUND: At the Jeddah airport.

GRAY DAVIS SCANDALS: Joanne Jacobs has links to several stories in one convenient location.

AIRPORT SECURITY: Still stupid.

FUKUYAMA PILE-ON LATE HITS: Brink Lindsey has good comments; so do Christopher Pellerito and Perry de Havilland over at Samizdata, while Eric Olsen (despite an atrocious attraction to awful alliteration) digs up some history. And over at Oxblog Anand Giridharadas discusses the difference between patriotism and statism, which appears to have eluded Fukuyama.

MORE FROM THE PINK PISTOLS on the NRA convention:

Hi Glenn, this is David Rostcheck from the Pink Pistols. Someone posted your instapundit discussion on the pinkpistols-politics@yahoogroups.com list. Here's some more info for you:

- The reporter, Steve Freiss, had actually contacted us before the convention to ask about whether any of us were going and what we thought about the NRA (the net net being generally that the NRA is generally quite welcoming, but, contrary to its rabid image, not nearly pro-gun-rights enough for many of us, which makes sense if you know more about the NRA). Few of us were. He was apparently looking to write some kind of article, the panel (stupidly) gave him he wrong kind.

- At that session, very late in the conf, Schlussel and some others apparently said some fairly anti-gay things that many NRA members (all of them straight so far) thought were very inappropriate. She went on Stern and spun it as a big smear campaign and downplayed her remarks. However, NRA members who were there report that she was quite out of line and that she's lying about the extent of her remarks. Check out the online discussion at The Firing Line. [Note -- interesting link; read the discussion]

Steve Freiss defended his article on the Pink Pistols list. He says he wrote what happened, and the attendees on The Firing Line back him up. I'm inclined not to shoot the messenger.

- That being said, the NRA and its members are, generally speaking, very welcoming to the Pink Pistols and to gay shooters in general. Now, there are 4.5mil NRA members and 50k+ at a convention, and there are all points of view and people from a wide generation range, so you have to have a reasonably thick skin and not expect everyone to agree w/ you or not offend you at those things, but I have no fear showing up at an NRA event w/ a Pink Pistols pin.

- I do think there is media bias on this issue, but it's not at the reporter level, it's at the editor level. More below from a post I made to pinkpistols-politics@yahoogroups.com about it.

- Schlussel doesn't necessarily speak for the NRA, but they should have more control over their message and if they were competent at handling them media (which, with the NRA, is not certain), they would just release a statement reiterating that regardless of who said what on what panel at their convention, they do not discriminate and have plenty of gay members and they don't see that as a core NRA issue. But we'll see if that happens...

That's it. More than you wanted to know!

Here's the message excerpt he mentions:

Let me say first that I think it's excellent to see a reporter willing to defend and discuss his story in an online forum. I love the internet for making media more of a two-way street...

Now, let me tell you what bothers me about media coverage of events like this. I don't think there's anything wrong with Steve holding Schlussel accountable for what she says; that's his job and he's doing what he should do. In the larger picture, I think articles that imply that the "NRA is bad on gays" (*) are, in the long run, bad for the GLBT cause and groups like the Pink Pistols are good for it, which I'll explain in more detail.

(*) Note, that's not what Steve wrote, his delination about speakers at the NRA event is very careful, but it's what a reading of headlines will imply, which is all about the editors.

I would say there is a consistent bias in the media, both gay and straight but particularly gay, in the way that gun owners and their views on GLBT people are represented. But I don't think it's so much a reporting bias as an editorial bias. Now Steve writes an article on the NRA convention. It says what happened, calls out a speaker who was inappropriate, and talks about the Pink Pistols, giving fair coverage to the point that most gun owners are not homophobic. Steve has done his job. But PlanetOut has never before covered the Pink Pistols in any other context. We've been the fastest growing gay sporting organization in the country, probably the fastest growing gay group, and we've had a pitched legislative battle with a lesbian senator whose most notable achievement was to amend gun-control legislation to allow arbitrary discrimination against anyone, including gay people, and particularly women and the poor (and who was subsequently endorsed by HRC). During that time, news media from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Blade covered the Pink Pistols, but PlanetOut was nowhere to be seen. Hmm.

Continuing along that line, I note that I never read an article in the gay media like "Gay gun owners say NRA members pretty friendly to them". We got positive coverage in Gun Week and Guns & Ammo. Does PlanetOut report that? "Gay gun group praised in Guns & Ammo" is just as important a headline as "At NRA gathering, speakers ridicule gays", isn't it? Everyone expects Schlussel to mouth off, so is that really bigger news than a gay-friendly gun group getting great coverage in gun media and being invited to speak at lots of pro-gun events, which many gay people claim is impossible?

I'm not blaming Steve for this. He's a freelance reporter and he writes what the editors will buy and he writes it carefully and fairly. But if Steve were to write "Pink Pistols Break Barriers", is PlanetOut going to buy it? [Steve: hey, I dare you to find out, it's a good story...]

Now, here are a few factual happenings in my experience over almost 2 years as a Civil Rights Activist with the Pink Pistols. We've dealt with all sorts of pro-gun activists and leaders, from conservative Christians to NRA leaders. Once in a while, we find someone who's not comfortable with us or is just a hardcore hater, but I honestly can't say that I come across them with any greater frequency than I would in overall society, and most gun owners are really happy to see us involved politically. Usually when some hater pops up, the other gun owners shut him or her down pretty quick. Overall, the pro-gun community is very accepting of the Pink Pistols.

Now prior to working with the Pink Pistols, I was the President of the Bisexual Resource Center, so I regularly worked with activists from NGLTF, GLAAD, and occasionally HRC. I attended Creating Change and was on many panel discussions. Then I started working with the Pink Pistols. All of my Creating Change workshop proposals were rejected and NGLTF then refused to refund my conference fee or answer calls anymore. Reporters from major media [Theresa Gubbins, Dallas Morning News, cough] told me that they couldn't cover me positively any more while I was working on gun rights. Hmm. Do many gay leaders have an anti-gun bias? Yes. Does the gay media often have an anti-gun bias? Yes. Now it's not monolithic - we did get good articles in the Washington/New York Blade, Bay Windows, In Newsweekly, etc. but we still don't see articles like "Pro-gun leaders say gay gun group is welcome", even though they often do say those things.

And that's very unfortunate, because the coverage pattern often implies that gun owners are generally homophobic, which totally isn't true and makes many gays unwilling to associate with pro-gun groups because of bias that's often not even there.

Moreover, the Pink Pistols have done more to advance equal treatment of GLBT people among gun owners and conservatives than a thousand PlanetOut articles ever will. There's no substitute for being able to walk up to the podium after a Schlussel and say "Hi, I'm from the Pink Pistols,a gay-friendly pro-gun-rights group, and before I get started I just want to say that I think Debbie is painting with a brush that may be too broad, if you know what I mean. I hope we all realize that for every Rosie O'Donnell, there are many more GLBT gun owners fighting to preserve our natural rights for all of us, gay and straight. Now let me tell you some of the things we're doing..."

The Pink Pistols win respect by actually doing the work to earn it and being worthy of it. And that sort of work does actually change people'sminds. We get some amazing emails from people who considered themselves anti-gay but have rethought their positions after seeing the Pink Pistols stand up for everyone's Second Amendment rights, including theirs. Those people would never change their mind because of a PlanetOut article or the snooty "Oh, the NRA" sneer that many GLBT leaders like to use. So who's really serious about working for social change, then?

I say it's us.

Indeed. Well, that's probably more than anyone wants to know about this event, but if there's one thing a weblog is good for, it's relentless coverage of an issue that the blogger thinks needs to be covered. By the way, here's a link to David Rostcheck's webpage.

Now the only question is, why is he doing a better job of responding to this than the NRA, with its presumably big PR budget? The reason I stayed after this and didn't just join certain other bloggers in instant condemnation based on the PlanetOut article is that everything I've seen of gun rights folks indicates that they're very happy that the Pink Pistols exist, and very glad to welcome them as allies. Now I'm not a big gun-rights activist myself: the only time I go to those meetings is when somebody asks me to speak on the Second Amendment. But I thought that the story gave an impression so entirely at odds with my own experience that it was worth looking into. (Scroll down for more on this).

BILL QUICK HAS IDENTIFIED a program I can really get behind. Let's call it "Pork for Pundits!"

SOME THOUGHTS ON PRESS FREEDOM, from John Dunshee.

HATE MAIL OF THE WEEK: I think that this one is in relation to the posts on interracial marriage earlier in the week, since it comes from a reader named Lou Zurr who has sent me several emails on that topic. But here's the email in its entirety -- you figure it out:

I'm always amazed by whigged-out guys like you who think we can fill America up with Guatemalans and Chinese and various Islamotrash and still have a republic. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that overpaid academics have a lot of exciting new restaurants to go to even in Knoxville. But the first thing that will happen when white folks become a minority in the U.S. is that we will get a de facto dictator running things; and the second thing is that they'll start killing all the Jews...and when they run out of Jews they'll start in on constitutional-law professors, even if they find them savoring the tasty dishes in exotic restaurants....

It is, of course, definitionally impossible for me to be overpaid. But I think that people from anywhere can make good Americans if they buy into American ideals. And I think that people born here who don't buy into American ideals are just as much a threat as the foreign-born people who don't.

UPDATE & CORRECTION: It's Louis, not Lou. And he writes: "Technically, however, it wasn't hate mail. It was vexed and snarly mail."

ACTUAL REPORTING AT INSTAPUNDIT: Yeah, it happens now and then. I finally managed to speak with Tom Boyer of the San Francisco area Pink Pistols, who was at the NRA Convention, though he didn't actually attend the speeches reported in this PlanetOut article by Steve Friess. But, he said, "I think it [the article] was probably accurate." Boyer said that Friess was unfamiliar with the Rosie O'Donnell / Tom Selleck on-air confrontation over gun control, and probably just couldn't grasp the depth of hostility against O'Donnell among gun owners, which has more to do with her position on gun control than anything else. He also said that "in my own experience with the NRA I've had nothing but support," and that many NRA officials had offered to help the Pink Pistols in any way they can.

On the other hand, Boyer said that there were homophobic remarks made by individual members around Friess that Friess didn't report, because he didn't think it was fair to saddle the organization with the views of a few random members out of the 40,000 attending -- but that speeches are a different matter. He's right about this and -- subject to the fact that one of the speakers, Debbie Schlussel, has denied that she said anything anti-gay -- the remarks are a real problem for the organization.

As far as I'm concerned, no organization ought to have speakers making nasty anti-gay remarks at its annual meeting, and the NRA needs to get the word out to its speakers. Those who want to make such remarks should be invited to go elsewhere, and those who honestly don't realize that certain remarks are offensive need to learn a bit more. Boyer says that he thinks the NRA is responding to this pretty well, and is trying to address this sort of thing in the future. They'd better, because the NRA has a big enough image problem as it is, and a lot of gun-rights supporters are libertarian types who have no sympathy for anti-gay slurs -- or simply people with good manners who have no sympathy for slurs of that sort anyway. (On the other hand, though I'm okay with gay marriage and gay adoption, I think that opposing those isn't, in itself, a "slur" -- but it's not really part of the NRA's mission either, now is it?)

My conversation with Boyer, which ran over a half an hour, gave me a pretty nuanced view of an organization trying to deal with a real culture clash (or maybe mutual cultural ignorance would be a better description), with mixed results. It's a lot more nuanced view than I got from Friess's report, but of course he didn't have half an hour, he had something like 800 words. I hope that the NRA leadership will have a lot of similar conversations in the near future.

UPDATE: A reader says that Grover Norquist is big on getting gays involved in the Republican Party, and suggests that his remarks contrasting "Gay Pride" parades with the absence of "Gun Pride" parades were probably meant to hold the former up as a positive example to emulate.

EUGENE VOLOKH has posted an interesting piece on terrorism and the middle east by Robert Turner, of the center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia Law School.

MEDIA ETHICS: Oxymoron? Or just moron? Matt Welch reports -- you decide.

As with professional ethicists in most areas, media ethicists exist to pretend to do what competition would actually do if it were allowed to exist.

READER JEFF HUMMER WRITES:

I received my Instapundit hat in the mail yesterday, and boy do I look good
in it! I've already had to flee from a horde of beautiful women. Thanks for the style!

I just don't understand why he decided to "flee."

Coming soon: An all-new InstaPundit Store with a snazzy, James Lileks-designed InstaPundit Logo! Hold on to your, er, hats!

BELLESILES UPDATE: Military historian Kevin Hurst writes:

I am a historian employed by the Navy at the Naval Historical Center and I have been slavishly following the Bellesiles controversy for nearly two years. Bellesiles, and his defenders, are fond of pointing out that the probate records represent only a small fraction of Arming America. I guess I forgot the part in Grad school where they said it was OK to make things up as long as most of your footnotes are accurate. Regardless, Bellesiles' errors and misrepresentations extend into every area of his book where I feel qualified to pass judgement, particularly military history and weaponry. For instance, he strongly implies that bayonets were much more effective than muskets on the battlefield of the late 18th century, a ridiculous notion, and misleading[ly] refers to the Paoli Massacre as a battle to confuse ignorant readers on this point. (At Paoli, the British suprised Anthony Wayne's troops in the middle of the night and used bayonets to avoid alerting the Americans before they entered the camp) Given that he also sees bows as vastly superior to muskets, one is left to ponder why the musket and bayonet ever superceded archery and the pike? One could go on for quite some time with regard to Bellesiles' apparent ignorance of military history.

Unfortunately, few of the academic reviewers of the book were even minimally competent to discuss military history, so they accepted his version at face value. Most of the reviewers I read took Bellesiles to task for mistakes he committed in their respective areas of expertise. However, all seemed to think these mistakes isolated incidents in an otherwise persuasive book. I think Bellesiles correctly judged that academics loathe military and diplomatic history by and large and that he could get away with almost anything he said in that area ("In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king"). The probate records ended up tripping him up because they could not be spun as a "difference of interpretation" as Knopf is fond of saying about the controversy. In any case, no one can say that the book is solid if the probate records are ignored. Bellesiles brings the same level of mendacity to his discussions of military topics in the book.

SLATE has picked up on the Reason / Corner feud. Say, you don't think this whole thing was just a publicity stunt, do you? Naah, couldn't be.

H.D. MILLER says the Saudis are going nowhere. You can say that again! -- but that isn't what he means

READER RICHARD ROARK isn't persuaded by James Taranto's anti-cloning post today:

Maybe being raised on a literary diet of R. A. Heinlein results in different thought patterns, BUT I thought incest was taboo because of the heightened possibility of birthing defectives and Royal Families.

Also, the ranting that a clone would be a carbon copy discredits human intelligence, freewill and everything we've been led to believe about environmental influences on human development. Genetic copies would be unlikely to develop in exactly the same way. Or do we now believe in genetic predetermination? If so, maybe the eugenics crowd were right and society could use some pruning by not letting genes for (name your favorite pet peeve) be passed along. Oh ! I forgot we shouldn't do the research to identify those genes.

To counter the meeting of a man with his younger cloned wife may I suggest that James Taranto contact his local PBS station and get them to replay "The Cloning
of Joanna May".

ANOTHER FUKUYAMA RESPONSE, from Dan Hanson.

THE UNITED STATES: Secret colony of Australia, with help from Canadian fifth-columnists.

FUKUYAMA, YO MAMA! Well, James Taranto doesn't actually say that, but there's a response to "Libertarian Blogvillians" (a term I kind of like) in today's Best of the Web. I'm not, to put it mildly, persuaded by Taranto's cloning/incest equivalence, but like everything he writes it's thoughtful and well-written.

QUESTION: Why doesn't Reason just start a group blog of its own? (Charles Oliver's Brickbats gets them halfway there anyway). They've got plenty of interesting people, and interesting things to say.

SPIKED! The Stanford Law Review pulled articles giving the wrong side from a gay rights symposium issue, according to this report from Stanley Kurtz. I likely disagree with the spiked articles and agree with the ones they kept in -- I'm pretty pro-gay-rights, as InstaPundit readers know -- but that's no excuse. This is just plain tacky behavior, and has the effect of making what's left of the issue less credible.

UPDATE: A several readers write to say that it's the Stanford Law & Policy Review, not the Stanford Law Review that's involved. That's a different journal. Reader Marty Lederman adds: "Don't know whether the behavior was "tacky" or not -- what if the anti-gay articles were miserably bad and/or horrifyingly hostile and bigoted? (Not saying they were -- I haven't read them; but if they were, what would be wrong with spiking them?)." Well, nothing. Though presumably they were solicited by the review in question (which is how symposium issues work) meaning that such is rather unlikely. And how likely is it that all such articles would just happen to be miserably bad or horrifyingly bigoted?

CHRIS SUELLENTROP offers a surprisingly positive assessment of Crown Prince Abdullah in Slate.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Here's an interesting discussion thread on H-Net, a historians' email list. Bellesiles, consistent with his agenda of showing that only the government, and professional soldiers, were possessed of, and competent in the use of guns, frequently dismisses the Revolutionary militias as ineffective. In this post Bellesiles is taken to task at great length for misrepresenting the Battle of Cowpens, where revolutionary militias defeated the British. (Note the British letter quoted at the very end). Another post by the same author suggests that Bellesiles misrepresents the effectiveness of the militia more generally.

A Bellesiles defender responds here to the effect that Bellesiles' views on the militia may be biased but are consistent with other sources, but this reply indicates that those "other sources" are rather old and have been discredited by more recent work that Bellesiles (and his defender) ignore.

Particularly interesting in the last item are links to the US Army Command and General Staff College and the U.S. Army's Center for Military History, whose studies support the effectiveness of the militia. (This is all the more impressive because for over a century professional military men had a policy of deriding the effectiveness of the militia, and of citizen-soldiers generally). Academic historians -- like academics specializing in international law -- often forget that they do not have a monopoly on the field, and that an awful lot of expertise resides elsewhere. I suspect that there are more accomplished scholars of military history, and working lawyers in the field of international law, than there are academic experts at the top 50 research universities. I've met some of these people, and they're pretty damned smart.

Most university people are smart, but most smart people aren't at universities.

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Andrew Sullivan has something nice to say about John Derbyshire!

I'VE ALWAYS BEEN PROUD OF OUR ARMED FORCES, but this article shows their superlative performance in a whole new light.

MORE BAD NEWS FROM ALGERIA:

"From boxes to boxes" is the chilling slogan of a fundamentalist Algerian underground organization known as the Armed Islamic Group that has stepped up its attacks against civilians recently to discourage people from voting in the May 30 general elections.

Their graphically conveyed message is: Anyone who is tempted to drop a vote in the electoral boxes is likely to end up in another kind of box -- a coffin.

GOD HAS A MIDDLE EAST PEACE PLAN of his own.

OKAY, nobody from the Pink Pistols who was at the NRA conference has answered my call. I'm still trying to scare someone up and get their version, since the PlanetOut piece I referenced earlier seemed to be trying pretty hard to gin up a scandal. I did get this email, though, from a reader who asks to remain anonymous but who I know and regard as entirely credible:

A few months ago I founded a chapter of Pink Pistols in San Francisco, of all places. This led to an appearance on the BBC tv show "That Gay Show" (we taught their spokesguy how to shoot - and here's a direct quote when he fired my Taurus PT145 for the first time [into the ten ring, I might add]: "Cut! (stop cameras) Holy...fucking...shit!!!" I think we made a convert...) as well as a meeting with Carol Migden, the local (lesbian) state rep for SF district, and other interesting conflations - including a *lot* of interaction with the local NRA chapter.

I must confess to initial trepidation. I mean, the NRA? But I was wrong. What a great bunch of people. They were far, *far* more interested in how people felt about RKBA than what they did with each other in bed. Several of the local officers told me how glad they were to see PP get started, because they'd been trying gay outreach for years with no luck.

Even the (extremely) straight guys who own and run our only local urban shooting range not only were tolerant, they were positively welcoming, and even offered us a place to hold our meeting before our monthly shoots, rent free.

As things stand now, I'd quicker turn to the NRA for help in a pinch than I would to the local gay establishment here. Yes, I imagine there are troglodytes here and there in the NRA (as anywhere) but I can't stand Rosie either, the fat freakazoid. So does that make me anti-gay too?

I think after decades in the wilderness, the NRA people may have more sympathy for "outsiders" than most people realize. Their issue is guns -- and that is going to have more to do with how they view people than almost anything else. Or so it seems to me.

Well, that doesn't specifically answer the question of what Debbie Schlussel, etc., said at the NRA Convention, but I suspect that it's at least as representative.

THE MIDDLE EAST: More like Monty Python every day.

REASON HAS POSTED THIS "PARODY" OF THE CORNER by Tim Cavanaugh. I don't think it's funny -- just kind of mean and lame. It's not Mad Magazine-level parody, which is what it's shooting for. I don't think it's even Cracked-level parody. Cavanaugh wrote a pretty good piece on "message" pictures in this month's Reason, but I find that his efforts to be humorous just come across as , well, mean and lame. I'm kind of surprised that Reason went with this.

UPDATE: But The American Prospect's "Tapped" likes it.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY -- AND YOUR ALLY: Reader Gloria Chase writes:

This is a page of pictures from the lame UC Berkeley pro-Palestine rally. If you go down to the bottom you'll see a group called QUIT: Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism. Then check below in the comments area. A fellow named Sallah has written: "As a Palestinian, I must protest the inclusion of a homosexual group in this afternoon's rally. Gay people have no place in society, whether in Palestine or in the US."

The Left sure is mixed up these days.

Isn't it, though? Salah's response to some critical comments is this: "We are fighting for self-determination. That means that we wish to live according to our own societal values, not your Western ones. You are a cultural imperialist. I appreciate your concern for our struggle, but WE will decide for ourselves." That reminds me of this quote, from some French Communist or other (this is from memory): "When you are in power, you give me freedom because that is according to your principles. When I am in power, I will take away your freedom, because that is according to my principles."

CLONING, DRUGS, LIBERTARIANS, AND FOXY BROWN: All on Stephen Green's page this morning.

TO MY MIND, this is a bigger disgrace than the arrest of Father Shanley. And harder for the Church to disassociate itself from -- not that it appears to want to. As reader Eric Timmons, who sent the link, says: "This photograph says something about the French and the Vatican. You didn't see Colin Powell doing this with Arafat, nor will you, I imagine. I also doubt you will see the good Cardinal doing this with Sharon."

UPDATE: Reader Michael Gaddis writes:

I have a suggested caption for the picture you just posted of Arafat arm-in-arm with the Vatican cardinal:

"But is he a 'NOTORIOUS' terrorist?"

RICHARD BROOKHISER says we're all Jews to the islamists.

CARTERPALOOZA is what Jay Nordlinger calls his festival of negative commentary on Jimmy Carter. Nordlinger's thesis is that Carter's wildly overrated even as an ex-President.

I still think my headline of "Fukuyama-a-rama" is better, though.

TOUR O' THE BLOGS continues with a profile of Bill Quick. Quick rules, and the Tour o' the blogs feature, which I was a bit skeptical of at first, is actually pretty cool.

SOME FACULTY at Harvard and MIT are calling for divestment from Israel. Naturally, Noam Chomsky is among them.

If I were a student, or a faculty member, at these institutions, I'd be calling for Chomsky's resignation. Maybe someone should start a petition drive.

MORE ON EUGENICS & GENETIC ENGINEERING: A reader sends this gem:

To tie two recent Instapundit threads together, I don't see much difference
between anti-cloning and anti-genetic engineering laws on one hand and the old anti-miscegenation laws on the other. In both cases the Law declares that certain types of families and certain types of offspring are Officially Undesirable.

An anti-genetic engineering law is itself a eugenics measure, as much if not more so than as the old anti-miscegenation were. It's a eugenic measure of the old style, where the State decides what genes and genetic combinations are "good" or "bad" and imposes its decisions with the force of law. An anti-genetic engineering law and an anti-miscegenation law differ only in that the later declares "genetic purity" to be "good" (socially desirable and required by law), while the former declares "genetic naturalness" to be "good."

This bears repeating: Anti-genetic engineering laws would be no different, in style or motivation, from the eugenics laws of the '30s. All that would change is the definition of "socially desirable" genetic combinations - "pure" genes in the case of the old laws, and "natural" (or "wild type") genes in the case of the new ones.

MICKEY KAUS has some sage advice for anti-Le Pen demonstrators.

WEST BANK WAR CRIME: Ralph Peters writes:

A TERRIBLE war crime has been committed in the West Bank. It will have far-reaching and heartbreaking consequences. But it has nothing to do with lies about an imaginary massacre in Jenin. The war crime - committed brazenly before a global audience - is the occupation of the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, by Palestinian terrorists.

Where is the outcry? International law forbids the parties to armed conflict from using churches, as well as hospitals, museums and monuments, for military activities. The Laws of Land Warfare are even stricter.

The United Nations, which is ever quick to condemn Israel, has been silent about this violation, even though the Palestinian actions violate the UN's own rules. The church is even under UNESCO designation as a protected site.

Yes, Ralph, but don't you understand? Only Jews and Americans can commit war crimes nowadays. For everyone else, such acts are merely signs of understandable frustration.

ROBERT MUSIL is rather critical of Will Hutton's book on Europe's economic superiority vis a vis the United States. So is Howard Owens.

JONATHAN ADLER, writing in The Corner, makes a point about the difference between eugenics and reproductive technologies that's somewhat different from the one that I make below, but still significant:

Webster's Collegiate defines eugenics as "a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed." I think that last phrase is key. Eugenics may not require control of human mating, but it seems to me that the term -- and the revulsion it rightly engenders -- does require broader racial ambitions (and, I should note, does not require government control). This is not to say that genetic engineering of children by their parents is a good thing -- I am not sure whether I accept Bailey's arguments -- only that making decision about one's own children is fundamentally different from trying to engineer an entire race.

I would agree that eugenics may not necessarily require government control in the abstract -- but it always has in the concrete, unless you want to include such things as genetic counseling for Tay-Sachs carriers under the label eugenics, in which case calling something "eugenics" is a long way from proving that it's evil.

READER GREG DECKER WRITES:

How is genetically engineering humans to be smarter/stronger/prettier different from eugenics?

There's the obvious difference, in that we're fabricating humans instead of breeding them, but what's the moral/socio-political difference? Is eugenics bad simply because fascists used it the last time?

And, if there is none, then please outline your argument defending eugenics, for if genetic engineering and eugenics are equivalent, and you approve of genetic engineering, then you must also approve of eugenics.

Uh, no. Eugenics wasn't bad because it involved improving the species (though the genetic theories -- and applications -- of eugenicists were lame enough that it probably wouldn't have done that anyway). Nor was eugenics bad "because fascists used it the last time." (At any rate, the fascists got their own ideas from American eugenicists, vigorously supported by Oliver Wendell Holmes).

What was bad about eugenics was that it involved overriding people's reproductive choices, typically by sterilizing them so that they wouldn't pass on genes deemed defective. Conflating forced sterilization with voluntary use of reproductive technologies -- a common move among opponents of genetic science -- is either ignorant, or dishonest.

THE NRA CONVENTION AND GAYS: A kind reader sends the link to this piece from PlanetOut.Com on anti-gay remarks at the NRA convention. That's the piece I remembered, and now I remember why I waited to post -- it wasn't that compelling and I wanted to see what else came out.

Calling Rosie O'Donnell a "freak" -- given gun owners' general antipathy toward her hysterical antigun views -- hardly counts as an anti-lesbian slur, and most of the other reports are equally vague and suspicious. Anyone got anything else on this?

My own experience has been that gun-rights folks, even hardened good-ole-boys types, are tickled, er, pink at groups like the Pink Pistols. And I've heard far more race-and-gender-and-sexual preferences from liberal academics than I've heard from gun folks.

UPDATE: Reader Eddie Brown writes:

Schlussel addressed this on Howard Stern's radio show Tuesday.

Schlussel said she called O'Donnell a "freak" not because O'Donnell is gay, but because O'Donnell does "weird" things. Such as telling Diane Sawyer that she has e-mail conversations with people's multiple personalities, or attacking Tom Selleck for his NRA membership on her show, or stating that gay adoption is advantageous to black children, while she herself adopts white children.

I consider Schlussel to be a very intelligent columnist and at this point am willing to take her at her word. Also, like you, I found the ambiguity of the PlantOut article to be suspect. However, Schlussel has often struck me as someone who makes "edgy", politically incorrect statements simply for the sake of being politically incorrect. (Even as she was defending herself on Stern's show, she referred to O'Donnell as a "fat ugly blob" for no reason.)

I think the situation needs either a more objective witness from the convention, or a tape or transcript of the panel Schlussel appeared on, to fully clarify matters.

If you want to hear her interview on Stern, you can play or download an MP3 of it from here...

I agree that I'd like to here more. I'd really like to hear someone from the Pink Pistols who was there address it.

FUKUYAMA-A-RAMA: Now it's Virginia Postrel raking him over the coals.

BRIAN LINSE WANTS TO KNOW WHEN I'll criticize Wayne LaPierre for comparing gun-controllers to Osama bin Laden. Right now.

Comparing gun controllers to bin Laden is just silly. He wants to blow Jews up, not disarm them. Here's a more apt comparison, from Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

I meant to post a more serious criticism of some anti-gay comments made by some people attending the NRA conference, but now I can't find the story I read yesterday, and there's nothing about it on the Pink Pistols website as far as I can tell, even though I know they had representatives there.

IT'S A FUKUYAMA FEEDING-FRENZY! Take that, Jonah! Josh Chafetz at OxBlog says this:

On foreign policy, he says that September 11 "was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports." Well, yes. But most libertarians recognize the need for limited government, which includes things like police and the military. Virginia Postrel and Brink Lindsey -- two libertarian luminaries -- have been relentless in their attacks on anti-war libertarians. And the problem with airport security was not that the screeners weren't government officials, but rather that federal guidelines about what was okay to take aboard flights didn't prohibit box cutters. No one ever thought that box cutters would be used to hijack a plane. So government screeners wouldn't have made a bit of difference.

But what Fukuyama is really interested in is cloning. He's not even interested in talking about therapeutic cloning. No, he goes right for the big one: reproductive cloning. He tries to present a non-theological argument against reproductive cloning. Here it is: "Children do not ask to be born, of course, but it is a stretch to assume the informed consent of a child to be born deaf, or a clone, or genetically redesigned in a risky experiment." This is a cheap rhetorical trick: he sandwiches being born "a clone" in between being born deaf and having risky procedures carried out on you. Let's put aside the risk involved in reproductive cloning because Fukuyama's argument isn't that cloning is too risky right now -- it's that it should never be allowed, ever, regardless of any advances in medical technology. In other words, for Fukuyama, being born a healthy clone is the equivalent of being born deaf or forcibly undergoing a risky experiment.

What? Why on earth would this possibly be? Because you'd know that there was someone else wandering around out there with the same DNA as you? Does Fukuyama think that identical twins suffer from a disability akin to deafness?

It gets even better.

EUGENE VOLOKH has a reply to Fukuyama's piece, too. It's characteristically polite, and destructive.

EURO-ANTISEMITISM UPDATE: George Will has a good column on the subject today. Also check out this piece in The Times, which warns Europeans that they really don't grasp just how bad they look to Americans.

FUKUYAMA PILE-ON: Brink Lindsey calls Fukuyama's oped a "smear," dissects its bogus logic, and concludes:

So if opposition to the cloning ban is a libertarian-left plot, how does Fukuyama explain Orrin Hatch and Arlen Specter? Furthermore, Fukuyama sneakily conflates the cloning controversy and the broader issue of genetic engineering. But on that broader issue, the political alignment is totally different from what Fukuyama suggests. The fact is that most conservatives oppose cloning strictly on pro-life grounds; they have none of Fukuyama's general hostility to medical progress.

In reality, it's Fukuyama -- not libertarian opponents of the proposed cloning ban -- who is in the grips of a "radical dogma." Fukuyama, having proclaimed the end of history, wants to keep history under arrest by throttling scientific and medical progress. He speaks for an emerging coalition of neocon and Luddite left intellectuals – but are such views really in line with the broad currents of conservative or liberal opinion? I don't think so. I was speaking recently with someone very prominent in conservative circles, and I asked him if he would oppose genetic engineering to improve intelligence, looks, etc. if it didn't involve destroying embryos any more than current in vitro fertilization techniques. "Of course not," he replied. "The essence of human nature is the desire to improve your condition. You can't oppose that." But Fukuyama does -- in the name of defending an imaginary, static "human nature," he sets himself against the essential dynamism that defines our humanity.

Yes.

JONAH GOLDBERG wants to know why libertarian bloggers are ignoring Frank Fukuyama's piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Well, I can't speak for others, some of whom have taken on Fukuyama (see below). But I guess the reason I didn't respond is that I've never taken Fukuyama all that seriously. His most famous book, The End of History, seesawed between being embarrassingly obvious and obviously wrong, his Trust was just embarrassingly obvious, and his latest comments on biotechnology have seemed both naive and ill-informed.

But since Jonah asked: The Journal item is of a piece with his other comments, except that it's also intellectually dishonest. Even Bob Shrum has given up arguing that September 11 brought back an uncritical faith in Big Government: the Democrats tried that, it polled badly, and they quit. Now some of the big-government rightists are taking sloppy seconds on this bogus issue, and it looks even stupider.

September 11 brought back faith in Big Government? Like the INS -- which was issuing Mohammed Atta a visa extension months after September 11? Like the FAA, which recently turned around a U.S. Air flight full of suspicious Arab men who bought one-way tickets an hour after the plane took off? Like the cowardly Great Washington Bugout that took place in October's anthrax incidents?

I'd say the opposite. The reason polls show a majority of Americans supporting armed airline pilots is that they don't trust Big Government to protect them.

And as for Fukuyama's effort to tie this nonexistent trend to an enthusiasm for anti-cloning regulation and the like, well, that's a pathetic non sequitur. Back in Sixth Grade, my class used Layman Allen's Wff'n'Proof logic games, including one module called "The Propaganda Game." A non sequitur exactly like Fukuyama's was one of the standard moves there; we all learned to spot it pretty quickly. So I guess in ignoring his piece I was assuming that most people function at better than a sixth-grade level. Fukuyama, by writing his piece, apparently feels differently, which probably tells you all you need to know about his faith in individuals' ability to make their own choices. But enough of what I think about Fukuyama's work. Here's what blogger Stephen Green wrote about Fukuyama last night at 12:05 a.m. (I'm a parent, with Daddy hours, so he usually takes the first swing at this stuff when it appears at midnight):

Somehow, Fukuyama’s fear that parents might want to engineer their children to be smarter and better looking, has morphed into a fear of us breeding a race of Gamma sub-humans to work for sub-minimum wages in the DNA-polluted soap mines of West New Dakota.

If we do someday have the power to breed “lesser” people for backbreaking labor (today we call them “illegal immigrants’), only the government can deprive them of their liberty. The Constitution is pretty clear that everyone breathing here gets his USRDA of the Bill of Rights, no matter what his wife says. If Alpha Individuals or Evil Corporations, or, hell, Senator Palpatine attempted to enslave their clone armies, they’d face the biggest stack of criminal and civil charges since OJ and Baretta killed their transgender hooker boyfriends in a suicide-pact bombing plot to start a race war in LA.

Then the rest of us would have to put up with thousands of tiny, griping, clone ex-soap miners, all suffering from bubblelung, sitting on piles of punitive damages and trying to get their 15 minutes on O’Reilly. Without government intervention, there can be no loss of rights, no evil profits, and no motive to breed mutant Gamma workers to iron my shorts. Damn.

So lighten up, Francis.

And blogger John Tabin writes:

He plays so fast and loose with his rhetoric, setting up straw men and resorting to the always unconvincing slippery-slope argument, that it's hard to know exactly how he does it, but he seems to roll research with embyros, research with cloned embryos, reproductive cloning, genetic engineering, and Hitlerian eugenics into one big ball. Apparantly, we shouldn't attempt to cure cancer, because someone might some time in the future change his child's eye color.

Follow these links -- each post is longer than this one.

Fukuyama is not a serious person. But I suppose that's no reason to ignore him. After all, bloggers do pay attention to Cornel West and Noam Chomsky -- whom Fukuyama, with his intellectual sloppiness and rash pronouncements, is coming to resemble.

CATHOLIC SEX SCANDAL: Who says those guys can't enforce the rules? The book has been thrown in this case. Of course, it's not a pedophile priest abusing kids. It's two adult college students having sex. Can this be true? It's on the Notre Dame Observer's website, and it appears genuine. I called the Observer's office and they verified it.

So how does the Church justify covering for child abusers while punishing adult consensual sex?

UPDATE: Some people think this post is unfair to Notre Dame. Rich Cook writes:

Your unspoken statement was that the University should
lay(!) off two adults having consentual sex. I know the situation reeks of hypocrisy but the students were wrong and they know it.....and the Church knows it is
wrong.

Well, what I was complaining about was the covering-for-pedophiles thing, really.

NEW RESOURCE: Check out the Copyfight page from Corante, which features lots of info on IP disputes.

INTERNET HOAX ALERT: Several people suggested that my post on The Bachelor was based on a hoax, but Alex Rubalcava, who sent me the emails, said they were genuine. Well, both were right: Apparently the emails were genuine in origin, but altered by someone who passed them on. Read about it here. You can go to Alex Rubalcava's site -- which is what I linked to originally -- and scroll down from here to find out more.

JONAH GOLDBERG REPORTS that NRO got 10 million pageviews last month. By way of contrast, in the past month InstaPundit has had 1,175,429. This isn't as big as it sounds, since a lot of those were people hitting "refresh" to see if there was something new (of course, people do that at NRO to see if the G-File has appeared yet, too . . .) And NRO had one million unique visitors. I don't track those, but I'm pretty sure that I didn't have a proportional 100,000 unique visitors last month.

Still, when you consider the big bucks they're spending over there -- Slim Jims for the underpaid Goldberg, fancy ocean cruises for the overpaid Lowry, and so on -- I feel pretty good about InstaPundit's performance. And I don't have annoying popup ads asking you to subscribe. Just a little, tiny tip jar over there on the left. . .

DAHLIA LITHWICK HAS IT EXACTLY WRONG. She says that the Moussaoui trial is a no-win proposition for the United States. Actually, it's a no-lose proposition. She writes:

If we really do believe in the freedoms and rights that represent the warp and woof of this democracy, it's absurd to argue that they stop at U.S. borders or that we can just put them on pause during wartime. If we really believe in the free marketplace of ideas, we'll have to allow Mr. Moussaoui to put his own asinine convictions on the block. Be warned: It will be ugly. Be warned: Our enemies will hoot with joy. But what's the alternative? If 200 years of constitutional ideals can't withstand the taunts of one angry little lunatic, we shouldn't be fighting a war to defend them. Moussaoui can go ahead and trash this trial, trash U.S. morale, giggle with his terrorist buddies, and embarrass the court.

It won't be "ugly," it'll be beautiful. By doing that, he'll be playing into our hands. We should be encouraging him to rave, and we should put it on TV. His "terrorist buddies" can't be persuaded, only killed. But everyone else will realize what we're dealing with -- which will build support for harsher measures against terrorists and the nations (*cough* Saudi-controlled Arabia! *cough*) that fund them and provide them with ideological, logistical, and diplomatic support.

And it will embarrass the French. Win/win!

IF YOU'RE IN NEW YORK, I'm supposed to have a piece in The Sun today, on intellectual property and Big Media. Naturally, you should buy every available copy.

WAR CRIMES IN JENIN? Well, yes. By the Palestinians, who as Chas Rich notes, brag about having used civilians as shields and decoys -- which is, by the way, a war crime.

GOT A PROBLEM? Stan Lee has the solution! After last night's West Wing episode, even liberals are starting to sound like this.

MARK STEYN WRITES ON UGLY EUROPEANS:

Well, sure enough, the crude, xenophobic rednecks did assert themselves. But not in America — in Europe. Muslims kill thousands of Americans in America, and there’s a big anti-Muslim backlash ...in France! Oh, and also Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal and those other provinces of the land of sophistication where explicitly Islamophobic parties are now a significant part of the political calculus. What d’you reckon Le Pen’ll get this weekend? Just his 17 per cent base? Maybe 20? And how many voters will stay home? France’s domestic intelligence agency has apparently advised the government that Le Pen will pull at least 30 per cent. That seems rather high for a chap BBC announcers, demonstrating their famous impartiality, describe as ‘virulent’. There can’t, surely, be that many French electors willing to vote for M. Le Virulent, can there? I mean, this isn’t Mississippi, is it?

For the Europhiles in the US media, the events of recent weeks are bewildering. It’s barely two months since they were reporting approvingly every snotty crack by Chris Patten and Hubert Vedrine and regretting that Washington was so out of step with Europe. But then the synagogue attacks became too frequent to ignore, and M. Le Pen whupped Jospin’s sorry ass, and frankly, if you can pick only one place to be out of step with, Europe’s an excellent choice. Like the man almost said, I do smell destabilising violence in the wings. In fear, the Continent, to my mind, has always proved mean-spirited and violent.

It certainly has. And, frankly, it's been pretty mean-spirited even without the fear.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Now it's the Feds investigating him:

The National Endowment for the Humanities has taken the unusual step of demanding a review of a federally funded fellowship awarded to Emory University history Professor Michael Bellesiles.

"The NEH request is unprecedented," said James Grossman, vice president for research and education at the Newberry Library in Chicago, which gave Bellesiles $30,000 for a project to research American gun laws. "They're asking questions that they're entitled to ask, and we're answering them as best we can." . . .

In its 37-year history, the National Endowment for the Humanities has revoked its backing of a project only once, Turner said.

I'd be interested in knowing what that other occasion was, but the story doesn't say.

LILEKS RULES AGAIN!

It was so in the Cold War, when I was always admonished to see things from the Soviet perspective. Why, they’d lost so many in WW2! How this gave them license to put Czech dissidents in psychiatric hospitals and give them turpentine injections was never made clear, and eyes rolled when I brought that up.

Nowadays I am admonished to look at things from the Arab perspective. Well, I do. I read their papers as much as I can, as well nuggets gleaned from the MEMRI site. I see a legitimate cause long lost to a collective spasm of romantic insanity. I see a pathological hatred of the Jews that seems both delusional and self-destructive. The problems of the Arab states are the fault of the Arab states, but this cannot be discussed, so all anger must be directed at the Jews. It’s interesting to note after the 50s, the American culture never objectified and demonized Russians - on the contrary, we indulged ourselves with notions of the curmudgeonly Bear who, in the end, could be brought around with some good clear likker. If there is one remarkable and unnoticed aspect of the Cold War, it is the way in which the Americans eventually wanted to love the Russian people. Screw the Kremlin, fine, but we had no beef with Rooskie workin’ stiffs. You got your system, we got ours, but hell, it ain’t worth blowing up the planet over.

If Saudi Arabia had a Star Trek, do you think they’d put a Jewish Chekov at the helm?

Indeed. Of course the phrase "If Saudi Arabia had a Star Trek," captures much of the problem all by itself, doesn't it?

HERE'S A GOOD COLUMN on the new newspaper that Matt Welch, Ken Layne, and some guy named Riordan are starting in Los Angeles.

WILLIAM SAFIRE savages Bush on privacy policies, saying that he's surrendered to the "intrusion lobby."

BERKELEY HATEWATCH UPDATE: Go here, and look at the pictures.

SOME MAYDAY CHEER from Stephen Green:

Actually, May Day never really caught on in the US. Know why? We're too busy getting rich to bother.

Marx was right about one thing, though -- the State did, indeed, wither away. Too bad it was the Marxist states that all withered away, so that people might enjoy enough freedom to make a little money and enjoy themselves a bit.

Yep. Was it Eugene O'Neill who said the American working class was the only one working to become so rich that it didn't have to work?

SEVERAL READERS doubted the veracity of the Emory Wheel story about Michael Bellesiles' bartending career that I link to below, noting that the only source is Bellesiles. Well, yeah, that's not exactly ironclad sourcing these days, I guess, though it's not as if I actually care about the underlying truth. I just thought it was amusing in light of my earlier remark that violence studies types should be tending bar.

Reader Andres Magnusson, writing from Iceland, however, does care:

Am I the only one finding the veracity of Bellesiles statements on his bartending suspect? Or should we just believe he singlehandedly saved England from the barbarous habits of quaffing mead and barring women from public houses?

"There, he introduced the English to a more international style of bartending -- the traditional English pub culture centers around ale and beer, so bartenders have little knowledge of mixed drinks such as piña colada. Bellesiles also was one of the first managers to hire waitresses, prohibited by pub tradition until 1973."

While it is true that most pubs lack that cosmopolitan touch, the drinking classes are by no means confined to ale and beer. Or pubs for that matter. And never have been.

Perhaps Bellesiles was the first to call his female staff waitresses, but barmaids have been there forever, not forgetting the landladies. . . . [Chaucer quote omitted] There is an unbroken chain of literary evidence -- from Elizabethan taverns, through Victorian ginhouses, to the clubs of the 60s -- of person of the female persuasion plying the drinks. Plus ça change...

Well, there you have it -- though to be fair, my own experience suggests that it would be unfair to blame anyone interviewed by a student newspaper too much for what comes out of the process. I've been the subject of some real howlers.

SOME THOUGHTS on what exactly all those French people are protesting.

EVERYBODY IS DISSING THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS over on Romenesko's letters page for its asinine effort to ban deep-linking.

And well they should. It's legally bogus, technically stupid, economically insane, and utterly offensive. But then, they are owned by the people who gave us the CueCat, so I guess that's par for the course.

IT'S AN INTELLIGENCE-A-THON over at Gary Farber's site: What the CIA is doing, what Senators had for lunch, and the Chinese Communist Party's message problems -- plus a lengthy essay on why Ashcroft's priorites are misplaced, and a report on Freemasons conspiring in Cuba. (Well, I made up the "conspiring" part, actually).

"THE SURVEILLANCE VALUE OF FREE SPEECH" -- I've been vaguely uncomfortable with James Taranto's campaign, over at Best of the Web, to drive hate groups off the Yahoo and MSN discussion services. Now Justin Adams explains why: It's better to have these groups out in the open than hiding underground where we don't know what they're talking about.

HERE'S A LINK to Dan Gillmor's column on the Foresight Conference this past weekend. Domestic issues kept me from going, and now I regret it. But family's first when the chips are down.

JONAH GOLDBERG wonders why OxBlog looks like InstaPundit. The short answer is that they're using the same template (designed by Alex-Beam-bamboozler Bjorn Staerk) that I do. I've thought of changing mine, since a lot of people are using Bjorn's template now, but I like it.

PALESTINIANS ARE UPSET OVER THE JENIN "MASSACRE," according to this report, because not enough Palestinians were killed. But they're trying to increase the body count. . . .

ARMED BUS DRIVERS: In response to my post about arming pilots, below, reader Mark Draughn writes:

So Tom Ridge says, "Where do you stop? If pilots carry guns [then] railroad engineers and bus drivers could ask to do the same." He makes it sound like that would be a bad thing.

My alma mater, the Illinois Institute of Technology, operated a shuttle bus between the main campus and the downtown rail hub. The bus drivers were usually campus cops, who were real cops with real guns. Even when the bus broke down in a bad neighborhood, I never felt safer.

So there, Tom.

Of course, you start arming pilots, and bus drivers, and such, and pretty soon ordinary Americans might wonder why they can't be armed. And we couldn't have that.

UPDATE: No sooner did I post this than I saw Craig Schamp's take on the subject.

HUMAN RIGHTS AT THE U.N. turn out to have a rather specialized definition.

THE CLONING BATTLE MAY ALREADY BE OVER, says this MSNBC story, with the pro-therapeutic cloning forces having won. I think that's rather optimistic, at least from my standpoint.

By the way, in a response to an earlier post of mine Christian blogger Phillip Winn takes issue with the idea that Christian bloggers are necessarily anti-cloning. "I am on that list myself, and I certainly don't support any government-imposed limits on cloning, therapeutic, reproductive, or otherwise."

Well, yes. The notion that Christian bloggers must be anti-cloning wasn't mine, but Minute Particulars' -- I certainly don't think that Christianity necessitates opposition to cloning. Orrin Judd on the other hand, disagrees -- and thinks that Christianity should trump Constitutional principles where the President is concerned. (At least I believe that's what he's saying.) Such a belief isn't exactly unreasonable, of course, but it doesn't seem all that different from the claims of anti-Christians who say that you can't appoint or elect a Christian conservative (which is how Judd characterizes Bush) to high office because they'll ignore the Constitution in favor of their Biblical interpretations. Judd seems to think that's their moral duty, which is fine -- but if you think that way, then you can hardly call it anti-Christian bigotry when those who don't share those interpretations feel that being a "Christian conservative" makes you untrustworthy where the Constitution is concerned. You've already admitted it. In fact, based on Judd's post, he's not just admitting it, but celebrating it.

PINK FLOYD'S THE WALL: Paean to libertarian individualism? That's what Aaron Page says.

DAMIAN PENNY IS Fox's guest weblog today. He leads off with a discussion of a new world trend, which I think should be named "PanIdiotarianism" -- in which all the world's dumb beliefs, from antisemitism to anticapitalism, are merging into one colossal black hole of stupidity. Or as Penny puts it: "the individual idiocies of the world are morphing into a collective force."

He's got evidence.

BELLESILES UPDATE: I said a while back that the "public health" folks who are studying violence instead of anthrax should either change their focus or start doing something productive, like tending bar.

Lo and behold, a reader sends me this article from the 1997 Emory Wheel that informs us that Michael Bellesiles, founder of Emory's Violence Studies program, used to tend bar.

Okay, that's not exactly the same as having some CDC folks move from studying whether guns are related to shootings to learning how to tap a keg, but it's close.

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS deep-linking fiasco is thoroughly examined on Slashdot. Conclusions in brief: (1) It's easy to set up a website so as to prevent deep linking if you want to; and (2) If you do that, you're a complete blithering idiot, since you destroy most of its appeal.

Sounds about right to me. So apparently the Dallas Morning News folks are technically incompetent idiots, rather than greedy, selfish assholes. Whatever.

DO SHORT LINKS DRIVE MORE TRAFFIC?

THE SARGE looks at old training photos and sees the future: his own. Dilbert isn't just in the corporate world.

I must've re-watched that particular module 3 or 4 times, trying to catch everyone else I knew. It was amazing to see these guys when they were fresh-faced youngsters just out of high school. You could see actual hints of happiness in their eyes coupled with the intense look of determination in their sharp, toned faces. I was being given a rare gift: The chance to see my supervisors before too much beer and bullshit took their toll on them. The young men in the pictures weren't the scared, dreary and doughy men that I knew and worked for. I could relate to the men in the pictures, but not the guys I saw everyday that had been broken down by the system.

What I didn't realize at the time was that I was also being given a glimpse of my own future. I was too busy making fun of the old pictures to realize that my future was staring me right in the face when I looked at them in the flesh 12 years later. The happiness and life in their eyes was replaced with resignation and defeat. They were eyes that had seen too much shit and just didn't give a damn anymore. There was no hope, no zeal. Just a look of wanting to get shit done with a minimal amount of BS so they could go home, spend time with their families and look forward to retirement. It's a face I'm all too familiar with nowadays. I see it every day in the mirror.

On the other hand, I remember once when I was a pretty new professor, asking another guy about some of our nearly-retired "deadwood" colleagues. "Do you think they expected to end up that way?" I asked. "Are you kidding?" was the response. "They planned to end up that way."

JOHN WEIDNER weighs in in favor of space colonization. That's going to be the topic (well, sort of) of my next FoxNews column, too.

"ARE YOU AN AMERICAN, OR A JOURNALIST?" That's the question asked by journalists and examined over at Media Minded.

HERE'S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE ON BIOTERRORISM, focusing on deterrence, not just amelioration.

AIRLINE PILOTS WANT PILOTS ARMED. The public wants pilots armed. Norm Mineta doesn't want pilots armed. The Wall Street Journal asks why not:

The objections expressed by the Administration are weak. "I don't feel we should have lethal weapons in the cockpit," says Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who also insists that grandmothers be screened at airports with the same intensity as suspicious-looking young men. Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge adds, "Where do you stop? If pilots carry guns [then] railroad engineers and bus drivers could ask to do the same."

The response seems obvious: Control of a cockpit can turn an airliner into a lethal weapon. Hijacked trains and buses can't be flown into the Pentagon or a nuclear plant.

I trust airline pilots -- and for that matter airline passengers -- to protect me far more than I do underperformin' Norman Mineta, or Tom Ridge.

Politically, of course, this is a very risky move for Mineta. If another airplane is hijacked -- or even if there's an attempt in which passengers or crew are killed before the meticulously-disarmed passengers are able to subdue the hijackers -- Mineta and Ridge will be crucified on this. At least figuratively -- and there'll be some folks who'll want to make the figurative literal.

RON BAILEY reports from this past weekend's Foresight Institute conference on nanotechnology. I agree with Ray Kurzweil in terms of hopes, but with Leon Fuerth in terms of fears.

JONAH GOLDBERG has some unkind words for the European Street:

Indeed, Europe's problems with Israel and America can be boiled down to these two attributes: guilt and arrogance.

The Europeans, as we all know, are now the backseat drivers of history. They had their hands on the wheel for a very long time, and the world is better off for it — an assertion which is, sadly, politically incorrect on both sides of the Atlantic, but no less obviously true for being so. Were it not for European civilization leading the way for much of the last thousand years, humanity would be in a ditch. To suggest otherwise is to dabble in fantasy.

But, around the middle of the last century, the Europeans got lost and America had to get into the driver's seat. This was very embarrassing for the Euros because, after all, they'd driven us around for years, treating us like we were a little brother they'd gotten stuck chauffeuring to Little League games. (The fact that the driver traditionally gets to decide which radio stations everyone listens to and which drive-thrus to stop at particularly rankles with Europeans who hate American culture.)

Read the whole thing. It's excellent.

JOURNALISTS WITHOUT A CLUE: An apparently endlessly continuing series. The Dallas Morning News is threatening to sue a site called Barkingdogs.org unless it quits linking to individual articles and starts linking only to the paper's front page.

First, this sort of linking has been upheld repeatedly, and it's key to the operation of the web.

Second, have you seen the lame, hard-to-navigate front page of the Dallas Morning News site? What do they think they'd be accomplishing -- except to turn people off -- by forcing everyone to go there first and then hunt for the story? Do they think that most readers will read the headline story "Plant Fire Near Houston Forces Evacuations" when they've actually come to the site to read "Church Takes the Lead in Head Start Projects"?

Next they'll want to force you to read all the ads in section one before you're allowed to turn to the sports page.

UPDATE: Reader D.F. Hawbaker writes from Dallas:

As a Dallas resident, you are so right about the DMN's website. As with everything else in this city, they think they are God's gift to journalism, the web, the world! It's made worse by being the only newspaper in town. DMN has always had one of the lamest websites, but their egos refuse to get out of the way of improvement.

Write 'em and tell 'em. Personally, I think the commenter on Alice's page is right: this hurts them more than it hurts us, since it costs them pageviews.

THE NEW YORK SUN GETS A MIXED REVIEW from Joe Bob Briggs, forwarded by reader Eric Akawie. Since when did Briggs leave his double-wide outside Dallas and move to Manhattan?

KASS COUNCIL KAPUT? My TechCentralStation column is up.

RABBIS ARE CALLING FOR A BOYCOTT OF THE NEW YORK TIMES because of its biased Israel coverage. Hmm. What a convenient time for a new New York daily paper to appear on the scene.

Say, the L.A. Times is facing similar complaints, and there's a new Los Angeles daily paper in the works, too, with heavy involvement by anti-Idiotarians Matt Welch, Ken Layne, and Tim Blair.

DRIVE FARMERS OFF THEIR LAND and hand it over to your inept, corrupt political cronies. What do you get? Food shortages, growing into famine. Perhaps Kofi Annan should turn his attention to actual human rights abuses.

UPDATE: Amartya Sen wrote that famines don't occur when you have a free press. Uh oh.

MINUTE PARTICULARS calls me magnanimous for linking to a list of Christian bloggers even though most of them disagree with me on cloning. I'll take the praise, I guess, but it's not like you have to agree with me to get a link.

I link to anything I find interesting. The growth of Christian blogging is interesting to me. So there.

NADER MATH: Dan Lewis responds to some figures by Ralph Nader in Slate's "Breakfast Table" feature.

MICKEY KAUS wonders why everyone is still getting McCain/Feingold wrong.

CLONING UPDATE: Virginia Postrel has much more debunking material on the Kristol/Shrum ad campaign, and the subject of stem cell research and cloning in general. She also has a rare Camille Paglia sighting!

LAMAR ALEXANDER'S POLITICAL CAREER may be in trouble now that someone has pointed out his resemblance to Pat Boone.

THE GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH-- a cultural universal?

HERE'S A HOMESCHOOL BLOG with an, er, insider's view of the process.

DAVID NIEPORENT points out that Eugene Volokh has yet another accurate Supreme Court prediction to add to his record. Advantage: Volokh! And Nieropent, for pointing this out.

"VELVET CONSERVATISM" -- An article on New York Sun and New Republic owner Roger Hertog from The American Prospect. I don't know how accurate it is, since I know nothing about the guy, but it certainly seems fair.

The best quote in the piece, though, is from Sun Editor-in-Chief Seth Lipsky:

"The right wing of the Democratic Party," Lipsky told me recently, "is a depressed stock."

That's certainly true, and God knows I hear it from Tennessee Democrats all the time.

WAS THE BACHELOR RIGGED? Alex Rubalcava says it was, and it looks like he's got the goods.

THAT'S MISTER YUPPIE SCUM, TO YOU: According to this article, gentrification may be good for neighborhoods, and even for the poor people who live in them. The reduction in crime and improvement in amenities have something to do with it:

"Low-income households actually seem less likely to move from gentrifying neighborhoods than from other communities," said a recent report by the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a New York nonprofit organization that analyzed demographic shifts in the city over the last few years.

If low-income residents remain in gentrifying areas, then they can enjoy the community improvement that gentrification generally brings. . . . "I really didn't find any evidence that it did push poor people out," Vigdor says of his study of demographic changes in gentrifying neighborhoods in Boston. "In fact I found a good amount of evidence that they're more likely to stick around."

Even though rents go up in gentrifying neighborhoods, Vigdor found long-term residents wanted to stay to enjoy the better environment for children, the increased local services, and the possibility of new jobs in the area.

"Basically you've got two factors," says Braconi. "You've got rents maybe increasing — that makes it harder for poor people to stay — by the same token gentrification brings with it a lot of community improvement."

Wow. Who'd've thought that poor people might actually benefit when their neighborhoods get better?

A WORD FOR OUR TIMES.

THIS POST BY RAMESH PONNURU over at The Corner is, as far as I know, the first use of the term "Idiotarian" by a professional journalist.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Hankamer writes: "Now if only there was an Idiotarian Party. I can see it now: 'Vote Idiotarian - It's Easier Than Thinking.'"

Actually, Mike, sometimes I think we have two of those.

CLONING UPDATE: Reader James Taranto sends a link to this Slate article on Hatch, LDS theology, and stem cells.

THE MULLAHS' GRIP IS LOOSENING in Iran, in this very interesting story from ABC. (Via Clueless). Keep those Britney Spears videos on the air -- they're obviously weakening:

The 15-year-old girl trying out her new in-line skates in central Tehran also was making a bold fashion statement: jeans, a bulky sweater rolled up to her elbows and a bright orange head scarf barely hanging on to her hair.

Yet her outfit drew no special attention part of a quiet, but potentially momentous, test under way in Iran.

Almost daily, new boundaries are being defined for the "hijab," the Muslim dress code for women enforced since the Islamic revolution 23 years ago.

Coming soon: a Barbie airdrop!

STEVE at HappyFunPundit has the email address for the PR firm behind the Saudis' TV ads. He's suggesting that people express their sentiments about making pro-Saudi advertisements.

READER ALEX BENSKY writes about the epidemic of "public health" studies relating to guns:

Why wouldn't medical people have special insight into gun control, given that misuse of guns leads to health problems?

As a baseball fan, therefore, I have special insight into nuclear weapons programs, because an all-out nuclear attack on the U.S. might lead to an interruption in the American League schedule. As a matter of fact, I have direct insight, because I've got tickets to a Red Sox game in June.

And my friend the realtor has special insight into nuclear warfare because nuclear war would, after all, destroy real estate and reduce the value of what's left. Maybe he could form a group called Realtors for Social Responsibility.

Why the hell not?

EMILY JONES is unimpressed by peace protesters.

STEPHEN GREEN says he doesn't trust Bill Kristol.

MARTIN ROTH now has a more comprehensive list of Christian blogs.

LOS ANGELES IS THE ROME OF THE 21ST CENTURY, according to Ken Layne. So what's the Athens?

Knoxville, of course, is the Sybaris of the 21st century.

ANOTHER major public-health study will be released tomorrow.

MORE ON CLONING: I've said it before, but it's worth pointing out again that Congress's enumerated powers don't extend to a ban on cloning anyway. Such matters don't concern big-government conservatives (if that's a meaningful term) like Kristol, but this ought to give pause to more principled conservatives who believe that the Constitution actually means something.

CLONING UPDATE: Orrin Hatch is supporting cloning. Well, therapeutic cloning -- he wants to outlaw human cloning. Still, that puts him on the opposite side of this legislative from Kristol, who supports the Brownback/Landrieu bill that would ban therapeutic cloning, too. I didn't notice it at the time, but Gerald Ford took the same position last week.

CHARLES JOHNSON comments on David Tell's article about the U.N.'s obsession with Israel. Johnson hits the nail on the head: "In a sane world, the United Nations itself would be investigated."

JUST HEARD A REALLY TERRIFIC STORY on space tourism on NPR. It was first-rate, with interviews from people in the space community who really get it, and who did a good job of explaining why it's important.

BILL KRISTOL'S ANTI-CLONING GANG has its own commercial in response to the Harry and Louise pro-cloning ads. Too bad it's basically full of lies.

Too harsh? Well, it says that the anti-cloning bill won't ban life-saving research. But it will.

It says "some biotech companies will do anything to make a buck" -- a faux-populism worthy of John Edwards and the Trial Lawyers.

It portrays real, human clones as walking around now because of cloning research (they're not) -- and suggests that if they existed they'd be patented, and hence owned, by big pharmaceutical companies, presumably leading to armies of subhuman cloned slaves. That's not true.

This is Shrum-like in its dishonesty.

UPDATE: Reader Dave Murray writes:

Of course, the deeper hypocrisy of the Kristol ad is its explicit claim that those rascally corporations need to be reined in, or God only knows what they'll do in their mad pursuit of profit, coming as it does from a right wing that has for years preached free market economics. I guess this means that I should expect to see Kristol at the next anti-globo rally, carrying a disfigured papier-mache puppet and condemning corporate greed, huh?

Well, that's where they're headed, based on this commercial. Though Kristol has never been much of a fan of free market economics. He likes big government -- he just wants it to be his kind of big government.

HEY, THE CAIR WEBSITE IS DOWN. The reader who calls my attention to it asks: Could it have anything to do with this story on FoxNews?

Probably not. But stay tuned.

UPDATE: It's back. Hey, it's not like my site ever goes down. . . .

HEY, I ALMOST FORGOT: InstaPundit is site of the month over at Enter Stage Right, though they correctly report that I am not a conservative, but a Whig.

Does that count as right-wing? Who knows, anymore?

UPDATE: Reader Tyler Boswell writes: "The Whig party, huh? So that explains your hair in the pic." Ouch. No, for better or worse, that's all mine.

MICKEY KAUS is ahead of the curve on the John-Edward-backlash front. ("Who?" you may ask. "I am asking!" And well you may.) Kaus has the skinny in a piece long enough that I'm surprised it didn't run in Slate. Maybe Jacob Weisberg's a closet Edwards fan?

TAPPED, the American Prospect's in-house blog, now has a stable URL so that you don't have to go hunting around for it. Check it out -- and scroll down to note TAPPED's response to the Max Power porn-star incident.

SALON SEXWATCH -- SPECIAL NOSTALGIA EDITION: Okay, I quit doing this feature a few months back because (1) I got sick of reading the lame Salon sex-advice column in search of actual sex; and (2) everyone knew about Rachael Klein's column anyway, and I figured interested parties could go there on their own.

But a reader wrote to say that there's actual sex in today's Salon column. Well, kinda: there's some advice how to kiss a woman, anyway, and later on some advice on how to avoid losing your erection. For the Salon column, that's big progress. But it doesn't really hold an, er, candle to Rachael Klein's column on how to bring a woman to orgasm. Advantage: Klein. Some things never change.

CHRIS BERTRAM suggests that it's kind of hard to be an anti-globalization, anti-bourgeois Marxist. If, that is, you've actually read Marx.

The problem isn't that the far right is adopting leftist themes, but that the left, still as hostile to capitalism as ever but lacking a clearly articulated modernist alternative of its own since the failure of the Soviet experience and the Hayekian critique of central planning, has been drawn into adopting traditionally reactionary and conservative positions and a celebration of the very "idiocy of rural life" that Marx condemned. That doesn't mean that we should be passive in the face of environmental destruction, but it does mean that we should think harder about how to combine a modern urban and diverse civilisation with greater social justice.

Yeah. But "thinking harder" isn't a hallmark of the antiglobalization movement, is it?

MORE ON BELLESILES: There was actually another letter in the Emory Wheel today defending Bellesiles, also from a psychology professor who is affiliated with the Violence Studies program that Bellesiles founded. (Here's a link to the Violence Studies faculty page). Unlike the letter from Patricia Brennan, mentioned below, this letter is entirely sensible: it doesn't compare Bellesiles to an anti-lynching activist from 1902, and it doesn't attempt to defend his work; it merely says that Bellesiles is entitled to keep his job until the University has investigated and come to a conclusion about whether he's guilty of fraud.

JUST A THOUGHT: Maybe Israel should send some investigators to Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone to investigate claims of rape and child abuse by U.N. empoyees.

BELLESILES UPDATE: A letter in the Emory Wheel from Emory psychology professor Patricia Brennan suggests that Michael Bellesiles is the victim of a political witchhunt (she actually compares Bellesiles to an anti-lynching campaigner in the Old South), and says that Emory should be supporting him. Brennan asks some questions: "Exactly how many errors were found in Bellesiles' work? Is this a large number of errors in light of the number of data points that he has provided? How many other books and research projects would fare better than Bellesiles' when met with the same level of scrutiny? Where, and from whom, did this campaign against Bellesiles originate? Could this attack have been politically motivated?"

A response from Clayton Cramer (scroll down and click on the link) answers these questions: (1) Hundreds and hundreds; (2) Yes; (3) Nearly all of them; (4) from Clayton Cramer. The best part of Cramer's response is this:

If this isn't fraud, then it is presents an interesting opportunity for the psychology department to examine Professor Bellesiles, and explain about how someone with such a severe reading disability managed to earn a Ph.D. in History from University of California, Irvine, then become a full professor at Emory, without this serious reading disability being noticed.

Another reader, Don Williams, writes:

If Brennan is looking for a covert agent of the NRA, she might look at Bellesiles --he has made fools of our country's gun control intelligentsia. The NRA could never have accomplished so much.

And he's got a point. Note that Cramer and Williams both provide numerous links to support their positions -- Cramer even links to a page showing actual copies of the original documents that Bellesiles misrepresents. Bellesiles' defender Brennan does not provide any similar support, but merely spins conspiracy theories. Typical, I'm afraid.

UPDATE: Judging by this webpage, Prof. Brennan appears to be affiliated with the Violence Studies program that Bellesiles founded with the help of anti-gun scholar Arthur Kellerman. Her call for support is thus not exactly selfless.