IF YOU OPPOSE LEGISLATION CRIMINALIZING CLONING RESEARCH, you should go sign this petition. There’s more background from Virginia Postrel over at her site; the petition is her project. I’ve signed, and so has Milton Friedman.

MEDPUNDIT SYDNEY SMITH reports on The New York Times’ firing of one of its corporate physicians for refusal to violate employee privacy. Here’s the story medpundit links to. Remember this the next time The Times gets on its moral high horse:

While working as The New York Times’ corporate physician, Dr. Horn said, company executives asked her to let them see patients’ medical records even though she didn’t have patient permission to share the confidential information.

She also claims, in court documents, that the vice president for human resources told her to “misinform employees regarding whether injuries or illnesses they were suffering were work-related so as to curtail the number of workers’ compensation claims filed against The Times.”

When she didn’t comply, Dr. Horn said, she was fired.

Perhaps Howell Raines or Gail Collins will resign in protest.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN EUROPE:

But now, German chancellor Gerhard Schroder has called on the European Union to ‘quell the far right’, by paying ‘urgent attention to the issue of law and order’ (why is that always their solution? More law’n’order clampdowns?). It will hardly be surprising if mainstream politicians try to make mileage out of standing up to the far right – just as Chirac did against Le Pen in France and as local politicians did against the British National Party in Britain. After all, these mainstream politicians don’t have any decent policies or ideas of their own worth voting for – but at least they aren’t fascist scum, eh?

Mick Hume of spiked made sense of the reaction to Fortuyn’s death, arguing: ‘The way that one politically meaningless shooting in the Netherlands has shaken the Continent reveals the strength of the culture of fear today…. Whatever the reasons behind Fortuyn’s death, we can be certain that, driven by the culture of fear, the response to it will pose a far more urgent threat to democracy than the far right or a crackpot vegan assassin. It will strengthen the view that a united front against the spectre of “extremism” is more important than political debate, and that certain views cannot safely be expressed. It will reinforce the “safety first” attitude about protecting politicians from the public, and protecting the public from themselves.

The sad thing is, I think that this may turn out to be an optimistic assessment.

MICKEY KAUS takes on Andrew Sullivan’s banishment from The New York Times Magazine.

UPDATE: Eric Olsen weighs in, too.

JUAN GATO has been tracking the similarities among newspaper editorials on the Second Amendment. Start with this post and scroll down for more.

MARK STEYN does it again in a hilarious piece on “march of fascism” alarmism in Europe:

“Gotcha,” I said. “So this guy, Pim, is another charismatic, hateful Right-winger like Le Pen, who believes in.” I reached under the desk and pulled out the BBC’s handy How to Spot a Right-Wing Madman chart. “So, like Le Pen, he believes in Right-wing policies like economic protectionism, minimum wage, massive subsidies to inefficient industries. He’s opposed to globalisation, fiercely anti-American.”

“No, no,” said Ron. “Pim doesn’t believe any of that conventional Right-wing stuff. He’s the other kind of Right-winger.”

“What other kind?”

“The kind that’s a sociology professor who believes in promiscuous gay sex and recreational drugs. We’ve got a call in to Norman Tebbit and Baroness Young asking if they’d like to pay tribute to him from one of their favourite gay bathhouses.” . . .

“Got it,” I said. “So I’ll start with a little scene-setting colour stuff – not since the 1930s have we witnessed the disturbing spectre of so many gay professors on the march across Europe in their screamingly camp jackboots, blah blah, and then we’ll go to Jean-Marie for a quick comment on how he and his fellow Zionist homosexuals are taking the news.”

And it just gets better from there.

HALF OF ALL ARGENTINES are living below the poverty line now. Jeez, that’s just awful. Unfortunately, unless the political situation is solved, it’s going to be hard to solve the economic problems. And with economic problems like these, the political situation is likely to stay dreadful.

ANTI-SECOND-AMENDMENT EDITORIALS: Reader Brian Hoffman sends these observations:

You oughtn’t be surprised about the LA Times Second Amendment editorial. A only slightly-differently worded editorial was in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune yesterday, with the same lack of discussion of the history or scholarship of the Second Amendment, the same talk about the position of the government since the 1930s (without mentioning Miller by name), and the same accusation of Ashcroft’s personal prejudices.

I know exactly where this came from, since it’s merely an expansion of what Volokh mentioned (in one sentence) as the talking points of the Violence Policy Center:

This, a lawyer representing the antigun Violence Policy Center opined, is a departure from what was “the government’s position for more than 60 years”–and an illegitimate one, because “people who happen to be in office temporarily shouldn’t use the office to promote their personal views.”

The LA Times and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune ought to be published in critical and synoptic editions, in order to show how lazy and biased they really are (I doubt Matt Welch will simply run press releases).

Yes, the extent to which both papers — and a lot of others — simply regurgitate press releases of groups they agree with is a disgrace, and someone ought to point it out on a regular basis. The Star Tribune editorial, by the way, flat-out misrepresents what the U.S. Supreme Court has said on the subject. For more background, see this piece.

BERKELEY HATEWATCH UPDATE: The Angry Clam finds the double standard.

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES EMBARRASSES ITSELF with this dumb and hysterical editorial on the Justice Department and the Second Amendment. The title is a giveaway (“Ashcroft’s gunslinger style”) and the whole thing simply piles one cliche on top of another. The editorialist can’t decide whether to savage Ashcroft simply for being Ashcroft, or to argue with his Second Amendment position, so the piece is an incoherent mixture of unsupported ranting on both subjects. You’d never know from reading the Times editorial that Ashcroft’s view is shared by lots of leading constitutional scholars, that the Supreme Court has repeatedly treated the Second Amendment as an individual right, or that the Framers thought individual gun ownership was important. The L.. A. Times editorial board should read Eugene Volokh’s oped from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. And they should note that Volokh provides footnotes, while all the Times provides is sputtering vituperation.

ERIC OLSEN has a long post on the economics of blogging. I want to be clear, though: I don’t think that money is necessarily corrupting. But I’m keenly aware of what Mark Twain said in Tom Sawyer — that work consists of what a body is obliged to do. If I became “obliged” to produce a couple of dozen (or more) interesting posts a day, I’d probably enjoy it a lot less. That’s my concern, and it’s why I like a donation model: people can donate money if they appreciate it, but there’s no long-term obligation.

EUGENE VOLOKH replies to Rand Simberg’s response to Volokh’s oped in the Wall Street Journal on the Second Amendment. All within about 12 hours. Cool.

HERE’S A BLOG-INFLUENCED PIECE ON THE CLONING DEBATE, from The Economist.

MORE COURTS, LESS JUSTICE: Dahlia Lithwick says international law is oversold. Yep.

STANLEY KURTZ says that liberals should read conservative magazines since conservatives read liberal publications:

Last year, liberal political theorist Cass Sunstein put out a ridiculous little book about the dangers of the Internet called Republic.com. His argument was that the web is allowing people to isolate themselves from contrary opinions. The places Sunstein held up as dangerous examples were all conservative sites like townhall.com and Free Republic. If Professor Sunstein had actually read the conservative web, he’d have seen that conservative sites are preoccupied — even obsessed — with the liberal media, a media they know intimately.

He’s right. Of course, Sunstein was ignorant of the blogosphere, which answers all of Sunstein’s concerns without requiring the government coercion that Sunstein advocated.

STEVEN DEN BESTE says that the National Training Center at Fort Irwin is more important than a turtle. I agree.

SELF-ORGANIZED NETWORKS: This is kind of interesting.

HERE’S AN EXCELLENT PIECE ON BLOGS by Scott Rosenberg. Here’s a key sentence that proves he actually knows what he’s writing about: “The editorial process of the blogs takes place between and among bloggers, in public, in real time, with fully annotated cross-links.” Absolutely. A blog is always a work in progress, subject to revision in light of criticism or reflection. It’s as if you got to read a newspaper story through all the drafts.

MATTHEW MILLER says Bush is pulling a rope-a-dope on Gray Davis.

RAND SIMBERG responds to Eugene Volokh’s oped on the Second Amendment.

WELCH DISSES ALTERMAN by proxy. It’s pretty good, too.

HOW DUMB IS AL QAEDA? As my post below suggests, I think that they’re more competent than I’d like, but not especially bright. Reader Michael Marion is more worried:

“Al Qaeda has shown some degree of operational skill, and gets a lot of points for persistence, and for being willing to learn from its mistakes. What it lacks completely is political judgment. But then, what do you expect?”

Personally, I don’t know what to expect. That Al Qaeda will be defeated eventually, and that technological, secular, free market, republican modes of existence will survive, seems so much more likely than the opposite. Allowing for the unimaginable, which is always a wild card, what we have on our side is superior to what they have.

We have firepower, money, amazingly broad competence, a high degree of solidarity and purpose (in the USA, at least), a deep sense of justice and civilization in our mission to destroy Jihad, and (more or less) good political leadership.

What they have is a global, religious/ideological solidarity honed to the highest degree of commitment, a willingness to die, an understanding of the technology available to them and the patience to carefully implement missions based on the biggest technological bang for the buck.

In this game, they rationally see themselves as David confronting our Goliath. The question is whether their Islamic slingshots can defeat our Western (dare I say, Judeo-Christian?) predators and daisy cutters.

You say they have no political judgment, and you may be asolutely correct. I hope you are. I think you are. But the question does not seem foreclosed. It seems apparent from 9-11 that death to kafir is not the sole nor even the primary purpose of the current Jihad, as heart-warming as the death of infidels may be. Destruction of the western (meaning American) economy is the chief interim goal.

The ultimate goal is a completely Islamic world. The penultimate goal is to bring the non-Islamic world down to the subsistence level of the Islamic world. That makes the fight more even, a world where the sword of Islam is mightier than the pen of freedom and commerce.

Whether Al Qaeda is politically astute or not, depends on several confused or unknowable considerations.

First, where does the world of Islam stand? AQ depends on money, comfort, expertise and spiritual sustenance from the billion and more Moslems on Earth. The Moslem world is the water in which AQ swims.

It does not seem clear where the official or unofficial Moslem world will go. AQ is betting that they can provoke the West into actions so severe, that the Moslem world will have no religious choice but to engage in a planetary Jihad so overwhelming the West will be destroyed.

In this respect, the millions of hostile, unassimilated Moslems in America and Europe would seem to play a part.

Second, what weapons does AQ have? This unknown factor is paramount. If they have smallpox, anthrax, sarin, nuclear or other WMD, they are very powerful indeed. 9-11 makes no sense whatsoever, unless AQ had WMD. If 9-11 occurred without a present capability to inflict free-form mass destruction, then AQ is stupid indeed, politically and in every other way. Again, “mass destruction” being defined not merely as numbers killed, but primarily as a means of destroying the economy by instilling widespread fear, and by hyper-elevating the level of risk and uncertainty to discourage economic activity.

In this respect, a special note must be taken of suicide bombers. A dozen such bombers in a dozen NYC subway stations during rush hour, would be more massive in economic effect than the purely spiteful and banal enormity of bombing a bar mitzvah. Nonetheless, it probably would not quite reach the magnitude of a dirty bomb, for instance.

Third, how clueless is the West? In order for AQ to succeed in fomenting a planetary Jihad which surpasses every other human concern, they depend on the absurd qualms of much of the West’s political elite, an elite which already disdains America and Western values. AQ looks at the Moslem world with its simple resolve, and compares it with a world which is uncertain of the question whether force should be used to defend yourself.

In this respect, the advantages of the West seem utterly devalued.

Looking at means and goals, it is tempting to compare Jihad to the Internationale. From the perspective of Western Man, global communism looked a lot like Jihad in practical consequence … the determined ideological destruction of the values held dear by those who see liberty as the greatest political good. Disruption and terror, violence and brute force, lying and oppression … mere tools for the greater good.

But Jihad is not communism in meaningful respects. Communism had states to protect, Jihad does not. Jihad has ummah, which communism never had. True, Moslem masses are oppressed by Islam, but Islam was not imposed on the present generations of Moslems, it was transmitted.

Communism, because it ruled from the top down, had an interest in stability, if only to avoid mass retaliation. Today, Jihad dangles the Islamic states, not the other way around. For the temporary and short-sighted motive of self-preservation, the Islamic rulers contribute to the chaos Jihad seeks.

If politics is defined as arranging circumstances to achieve your goals, it is not so clear AQ is politically inept. AQ benefits with every act of violence, it seems. A day without violence, is a day which did not add to the psychological mosaic of destabilization of the world detested by Jihad.

What it all comes down to, is an audacious risk by AQ. They are gambling Islam on their ability to bully and intimidate the West into economic chaos and eventual poverty. They think the West is psychologically incapable of understanding and effectively responding to Jihad.

To the extent Western politics, in the surrealism of leftist thinking, and in the sheer ignorance often generated by self-satisfied, material well-being, refuses to acknowledge the death threat explicitly being made by Jihad, AQ might not be so lacking in political judgment whenever it does something which seems lacking in political judgment.

Maybe AQ has figured us out, better than we have figured out them. Maybe not. Your point, which is that AQ is helping the formerly ignorant or indifferent to figure things out, may be true. Let us hope it is not too late to have figured things out.

This seems excessively pessimistic. The Ummah is mostly a fiction. If it becomes a genuine threat to the West, it will be history. Al Qaeda’s weakness lies in not understanding just how bloody and brutal the West is capable of being if it feels seriously threatened. I suspect that Israel alone, with 400 atomic weapons, is capable of wiping out much of the Muslim world, and that’s peanuts compared to what the United States would do if faced with a unified Muslim world bent on its destruction. (And biowar cuts both ways: imagine what would happen if smallpox got loose in Mecca at the right time of the year. I hope that any Al Qaeda types bent on biowar think about this long and hard.).

At any rate, most Muslims — even most Arab Muslims — don’t want to bring down the West in an orgy of gotterdammerung-style destruction, and aren’t likely to get behind anyone who does. But if through some miracle Al Qaeda were to unite them in that goal, it would simply mean the end of Islam as a world force. The big danger to us all (but especially to them) is that the Arab world’s penchant for substituting fantasy for reality makes them less responsible in this regard than the stakes suggest they ought to be and — and here you’re right — than the Communists were. But then the Soviets had the experience of World War Two. The Arab world has yet to experience such a sobering encounter with mass bloodshed. That, however, will change if they push too hard.

UPDATE: Will Allen writes:

Glenn, Marion’s post is very well argued, but I think you are correct. If the United States suffers an attack from a weapon of mass destruction, or even a near miss, it had better be entirely, completely, fatal, if one is viewing the conflict from Al Qaeda’s perspective. If it is not, the population of the United States will sweep away any hesitant elites like so many dust motes, and an absolute maelstorm of titanically massive violence will ensue, the likes of which the world has never seen, and it will be very one-sided. WWII will look like a medium-sized, drawn-out skirmish. There is nothing as dangerous as a large, technologically advanced, totally enraged democracy. I hope to never see it.-Will Allen

I hope never to see it too — because I hope that such a response won’t be necessary.

ORRIN JUDD uses a recent piece in The American Prospect as a jumping-off point for his argument that Bush’s critics in the media don’t understand him because they don’t understand business, or the management culture of business.

MORE ON PIM FORTUYN’S ASSASSINATION, in TechCentralStation.

THE RISHAWN BIDDLE / ERIC ALTERMAN FEUD continues apace. Rishawn also has an interesting piece on hotel management squabbling in Forbes.Com but you have to be a subscriber to read it.