THEY LET THE 9/11 HIJACKERS IN, but they’re denying Dmitry Sklyarov a visa. Seems the State Department is better at protecting media interests than American citizens.

Well, I guess that’s not exactly news.

JOE KATZMAN HAS SOME THOUGHTS ON NORTH KOREA, and why the Administration isn’t seeming too worried. And scroll up for his “moral obligation to blog” post.

UPDATE: Stephen Gordon has managed to bring Jack Nicholson in.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Daniel Drezner responds to people who say the Bush Administration is being hypocritical by treating North Korea differently by saying, basically, “so what?” And there’s a similar observation over at Sgt. Stryker’s.

AN INTELLIGENT PIECE IN THE ARAB NEWS:

We moan the passing of what we look fondly back on as an “Islamic Golden Age” and indeed we should regret its end and study the reasons for its decline. Though we may not be able to recreate it, we could certainly emulate it in various ways. An important one would be to strive for that age’s tolerance, intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness when it comes to education and learning. Those early Muslims were quick to absorb what other cultures and civilizations had to offer and at the same time, neither their language nor their culture suffered. Are we so very different? Knowledge, after all, is power and it is only the intolerant and bigoted who refuse to understand this.

If there were more Saudi Arabs who felt this way, maybe they would actually be our allies.

KILLER APPS: Reader Erik D’Amato has these observations based on my TechCentralStation column on weblogs and Big Media:

But re Big Media’s big chance to again be dominant in reporting and spot news, there are three other words that need to be remembered: cheap streaming video. Being fans of the written word, bloggers and blogger-types always make the mistake of equating news with words. But we are not the majority… to say the least. For most people, news is primarily about sights and sounds: 9/11, men walking on the moon, the white Bronco inching down the freeway, the white van circling DC. And in the background, a bit of yakking, a lot of it unscripted.

Why should we think Big Video Media will be able to compete with cheap video over the wire any better than Big Print Media have have been able to keep up with cheap written oped over the wire? Put it this way: If they actually find the White Van and properly Dillinger the sniper, what are the odds it will be caught on tape by CNN or Action News 5, as opposed to some guy with a Canon SUX-6000 (or whatever)? At this point, I’d give Mr. Canon the odds. Meanwhile, BVM, unlike the videoblogland of the future, will be expected to pay for the Van video or not show it without getting the rights first, and then might not be able to show it at all, because of griping from the standards or legal depts. Add in the liklihood that the resulting news conference (supplying all the necessary quotes and details) will be open to all comers, and its hard to see what BVM adds, besides sports and the weather. Oh, but they lost that, too.

Hmm. Interesting.

BELLESILES UPDATE: An article by Jon Weiner in The Nation portrays Michael Bellesiles as the victim of a gun-lobby witch hunt, concluding:

But the campaign against Bellesiles has demonstrated one indisputable fact: Historians whose work challenges powerful political interests like the NRA better make sure all their footnotes are correct before they go to press.

Unfortunately, the article also serves to illustrate that those who challenge politically powerful anti-gun interests will get slimed even if their footnotes are correct. The article is quite nasty to NWU legal historian James Lindgren, though it doesn’t seem to identify a single inaccuracy in his Yale Law Journal article on the problems with Bellesiles’ Arming America.

This is itself a problem, as I’ve written elsewhere:

When fraud is discovered, it is usually by another researcher whose skepticism is aroused. Yet uncovering fraud usually isn’t considered as valuable to an academic career as original research is; worse yet, some scholars who expose their colleagues as frauds face resentment from those who dislike seeing their field’s dirty laundry aired. But the absence of consequences for fraud can only make the problem worse. If we want to discourage fraud, we need to ensure that the people who discover it are recognized for their contributions – which, after all, spare other members of the field years or even decades of wasted effort based on fraudulent work – and properly rewarded. And, of course, we need to ensure that those who commit fraud are properly punished.

Those who complain that academics don’t do enough about fraud in their midst need to recognize that attack pieces like this one are one reason why that is so.

Some of the statements about Lindgren in this piece ring false to me. I’m going to see if I can get an email from him. If so, I’ll post what he sends. In the meantime, I invite readers to follow the link to the Yale Law Journal piece and to compare it with The Nation’s article and decide for themselves.

Meanwhile, there’s no word yet on what Emory plans to do about Bellesiles.

UPDATE: Lindgren sends the following via email:

As anyone familiar with the Bellesiles matter can plainly see, the Nation article has a large number of errors. Since the Nation was unable to find any factual errors in my scholarship, it instead attempted some rather crude ad hominems. Among them, it says that I urged people to retract their reviews of Arming America. If I had done so, that would indeed have been unusual, though not improper. But what I did was urge two authors to correct or retract one statement in their reviews merely by an online post to H-Net lists, which eventually they both did, because the particular statements were indeed factually wrong. I never said the words that one of those authors, Matthew Warshauer, attributes to me in the Nation article.

Referring to me, the Nation also says, “He accuses Bellesiles of bias . . . .” I have never accused Professor Bellesiles of bias (nor of prejudice). To the contrary, I have repeatedly argued that such claims of bias are incoherent in this matter.

In addition, Clayton Cramer has blogged some comments. (Eugene Volokh calls it “a very good response to The Nation’s rather weak defense of Bellesiles.”) I should note, too, that the Nation piece fails to mention that the big explosion in publicity over Bellesiles’ work came after the Boston Globe — hardly an NRA mouthpiece — published an investigative piece on Bellesiles’ work. And how come it links to Bellesiles’ website, but not to the Lindgren article — freely available on the Web in several places — or to any of the other criticisms on Bellesiles?

As Volokh says, rather weak. Even for The Nation. As that other NRA mouthpiece, The New York Times noted:

Without doubt, Mr. Bellesiles’s research would not have received such careful scrutiny if he had not stepped into the politically and ideologically charged struggle over guns. Yet the scholars who have documented serious errors in Mr. Bellesiles’s book — many of them gun-control advocates — do not appear to have any sort of political agenda.

They were struck by his claim to have studied more than 11,000 probate records in 40 counties around the country. He found that between 1765 and 1790, only 14 percent of estate inventories listed guns, and “over half (53 percent) of these guns were listed as broken or otherwise defective.” Those claims are featured prominently in the book and were cited in many positive reviews as the core of its argument.

But those who tried to examine the research soon found that they could not, because most of Mr. Bellesiles’s records, he said, had been destroyed in a flood. The records they could check showed an astonishing number of serious errors, almost all of them seemingly intended to support his thesis. In some cases his numbers were off by a factor of two, three or more, said Randolph Roth, a history professor at Ohio State University.

To use one example: in his book, Mr. Bellesiles writes that of 186 probate inventories from Providence, R.I., recorded between 1680 and 1730, “all for property-owning adult males,” only 90 mention some form of gun, and more than half the guns were “evaluated as old and of poor quality.”

At least three scholars have independently examined the same archive and found that 17 of the estates in question were owned by women; that some estates lacked inventories, and that of those that had them, a much higher percentage than Mr. Bellesiles reported contained guns; and that only 9 percent of the guns were evaluated as old and of poor quality.

“The number and scope of the errors in Bellesiles’s work are extraordinary,” Mr. Roth said. They go well beyond the probate record data, he added, affecting Mr. Bellesiles’s interpretation of militia returns, literary documents and many other sources. . . .

Those who have pressed him hardest for details say they have been led on a bizarre scholarly car chase, with Mr. Bellesiles offering new memories about where he got his records as soon as the old ones were discredited. (Emphasis added).

What, the folks at The Nation don’t read The New York Times?

UPDATE: Arthur Silber has a long post on Jon Wiener’s article, which segues into a lengthy discussion of bias on both left and right. But here’s an on-topic excerpt:

I hope you will read both Wiener’s Nation article and the Lindgren Yale Law Journal piece — and I think the difference in tone and approach will strike you as forcefully as it did me. (I also point out that the Lindgren piece contains an Appendix which discusses over 200 documents which Bellesiles misread or misinterpreted in basic ways in the first edition of his book.) But with regard to the Nation article, I will note two aspects of it: first, approximately the first third of the article is devoted to a personal reminiscence concerning a lecture by Bellesiles that Wiener attended — and he takes every opportunity to describe the pro-gun individuals who also attended (and who challenged Bellesiles’ findings) as “unusually large men” — in other words, and in Wiener’s view, pro-gun, NRA-type thugs. And this is apparently seriously offered as some sort of legitimate argument which, by implication and for “right-thinking” kinds of people, ought to make us question the legitimacy of a scholar such as Lindgren. Second, the entire article is remarkably, and inappropriately, “personal” in tone. It is, as Reynolds also notes, quite nasty to Lindgren — although, very significantly, Wiener does not offer even one substantive argument challenging even one of Lindgren’s conclusions.

Indeed. And he’s right that you should read the two pieces and compare their tone.

ARABS ARE PROTESTING THE OCCUPATION FORCES that have stood astride their quasi-nation for too long.

DAVID GELERNTER WRITES:

After September 11, many American liberals pointed out that, no matter how enraged you felt, it was an especially good time for Americans to underline their unshakable belief in religious toleration and their acceptance of Muslim Americans. The liberals were right; many Americans duly sounded off. The unsolved D.C.-area murder spree is another fine opportunity for principled people to put themselves on record.

Anyone who has read John Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime”–a cool, calm, collected, unanswerable proof that widespread gun ownership leads to lower crime rates–please stand up. Owning a gun is no help whatsoever in fending off a hidden sniper. It is plenty of help if a criminal breaks into your bedroom, and in certain other unpleasant situations.

Last January, a lone gunman on a killing spree at a Virginia law school was stopped by three brave students–two of whom had run for their cars, grabbed their guns and rushed back to point their weapons at the killer. (Mr. Lott himself points out that of the 280 news stories he had turned up on this law school shootings, all but four had somehow forgot to mention that the heroic students had been armed with guns.)

All you rational, honorable, facts-not-emotions Americans who spoke up for Islam last September–and more power to you!–how about a big rousing cheer for gun ownership right now?

Well, I was one of those Americans. (Here’s an example). But I note the hypocrisy that Gelernter points out, and I doubt that many of the people he refers to will answer this particular call. As Peter McWilliams said in his fine book Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do, it seems that after a shooting spree they want to pass laws punishing everyone but the actual shooter. If liberals would begin displaying some of that vaunted “tolerance” toward gun owners, perhaps gun owners would quit being so “paranoid.” After all, it’s not paranoia when people really do want to get rid of guns through means fair or foul.

WHY HAVE COFFEE PRICES FALLEN to the point that coffee growers are suffering, while the latte you buy remains hideously overpriced? This piece explains it. I found it via William Sjostrom who tartly observes: “This is the sort of writing Paul Krugman used to be able to do well, before he started to do non-stop ‘I hate Bush’ tantrums.”

ANDREW SULLIVAN has a long list of people who should be eating crow over North Korea’s admission that it has a nuclear weapons program. “Should be” being the operative phrase, apparently.

JIM HENLEY reflects on the old it’s-a-bug/it’s-a-feature conundrum in the context of, well, a lot of stuff that involves Iraq.

SO THE “NOT IN OUR NAME PROTEST” WAS LED BY THE REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST PARTY, according to this on Max Sawicky’s weblog. Hmm. If there were pro-war rallies led by the Nazis, that would get more attention, I think. Er, except that the Nazis are anti-war, too. Seems like the antiwar movement has a way to go if it’s going to be taken seriously. No wonder Todd Gitlin is unhappy.

I DISAGREE with the assumption behind the campaign to restore felons’ right to vote. I think the real problem is that there are too many felonies. Felonies used to be serious crimes, involving a likelihood of capital punishment. Now pretty much any crime is likely to be a felony. I’m inclined to think that there ought to be sharp limits on making victimless crimes like simple drug possession felonies. We’ve experienced inflation in the criminal-law area, and the currency — including the moral currency — of the criminal law has been debased thereby.

SEVERAL PEOPLE EMAILED to ask why my FoxNews.com column today didn’t mention the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt. The answer is that it was going to, but it was already too long (it came in at well over 1200 words as is). But here’s a link to a piece that Dave Kopel and I wrote on that subject last year. Consider it incorporated by reference.

UPDATE: Nick Denton calls the piece “superficially shocking but ultimately compelling.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader writes:

I am writing in response to your article on Foxnews.com. I couldn’t agree with you more. As a former Special Forces officer, I have traveled to a few troubled parts of the world where various thugs, hoodlums and other paramilitary pseudo-governmental “bad guys” were generally shaking down an unarmed, defenseless civilian population. In every case I couldn’t help thinking “What if all of these people had guns?” Many of my colleagues who saw a lot more action than I did made similar observations.

Invariably, there are never enough police, peacekeepers, or soldiers to protect everyone. When you deny criminals a pool of victims, you deny them their ability to commit crime. I believe this is true of robbery, murder, terrorism and especially genocide. I do feel professionally obligated to point out that when arming civilians you must ensure that the people who get the guns are also trained to properly use them. This includes not just basic marksmanship but discipline and civic responsibility. Recently armed, untrained people can be a great danger to themselves and others. However, with the proper training and support, democracy can often flourish among a population that is trained and equipped to defend itself.

I’m sure you will get a lot of very negative responses to your position. I’m also sure that very few of those who attack you will have ever been in a country virtually consuming itself under the boots of tyrants. Thank you for having the courage to propose a practical idea that is not politically correct.

Actually, I’ve gotten less abuse so far than I expected, even though predictably enough this piece has generated a lot of email. Maybe this is an idea whose time has come. And no one has tried to argue that the current approach works.

Heck, Neal Stephenson had something along these lines as a plot device in Cryptonomicon.

NORTH KOREA: One of the interesting questions is why North Korea chose to come clean. Here’s a thought: North Korea, whatever its other faults, has both an excellent intelligence service and close ties to Iraq. Maybe they have some idea what’s going to happen, and don’t want to be associated with Iraq when it does.

UPDATE: Tacitus has a response.

MAJOR BOMBING IN THE PHILLIPINES, which looks to be more of the same terrorist stuff.

It seems to me that the fact that this stuff is accelerating as we get closer to an attack on Saddam suggests that there’s a connection between him and Al Qaeda nowadays.

WHO’S TO BLAME for the Bali bombing? James Lileks rounds up the usual suspects in his Newhouse column — which is nice since he’s been Bleating so little this week.

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE KING. But Emily Bazelon writes that it’s nearly as good to be Sandra Day O’Connor. I think that Bazelon’s take on federalism is rather superficial, though: “If we care about fighting the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which men and women are treated differently in the workplace, it seems more important to set a uniform standard than to worry about insulting the states.”

“Insulting the states?” Federalism isn’t a dignitary right of the states. It’s a structural feature of the Constitution that’s supposed to protect individual freedom — and that the Framers thought was more significant in that role than the Bill of Rights.

ED LAZARUS IS DEEPLY CONFUSED according to this post at the Volokh Conspiracy. In fact, it is reported, he has the import of Nobel Economist Vernon Smith’s work exactly backwards.

DON’T MISS THIS PIECE BY FRANKLIN FOER IN THE NEW REPUBLIC ON how Iraq manipulates the Western media.

When journalists are accused of being unpatriotic for reporting from enemy countries, their excuse is that they’re delivering the truth. But they’re not, as Foer makes clear. So what’s the excuse for delivering untruths from an enemy country in wartime?

The same media-ethics types who get their panties in a wad over journalists accepting free t-shirts from corporations seem much less exercised over this far more serious question. Excerpt:

It’s not because American reporters have an ideological sympathy for Saddam Hussein; broadcasting his propaganda is simply the only way they can continue to work in Iraq. “There’s a quid pro quo for being there,” says Peter Arnett, who worked the Iraq beat for CNN for a decade. “You go in and they control what you do. … So you have no option other than to report the opinion of the government of Iraq.” In other words, the Western media’s presence in the Ministry of Information describes more than just a physical reality.

If you’d rather report propaganda than not report at all, is what you’re doing journalism? And people say weblogs aren’t objective?

UPDATE: This piece says that American journalists are just as bad where Iran is concerned: “So often, we hear self-described Iran experts on CNN and reporters in America’s leading newspapers explain away the dictatorship under which we suffer. We hear them talk about how young people and women still support President Khatami! No. We do not!”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader David Gillies writes from Costa Rica:

Franklin Foer’s piece in TNR was an eye-opener. It of course raises the possibility that the surreal coverage of the recent Iraqi ‘referendum’ in the

mainstream press is simply a reaction to the whip hand Saddam’s regime has over the foreign news corps. It might explain the tenor of the coverage; it certainly does not justify it.

No, it doesn’t.

MORE THOUGHTS ON “BALLISTIC FINGERPRINTING,” from Tabula Rasa. Doug Turnbull, meanwhile, starts out more positive, but then sees some issues, while openly admitting that maybe it’ll lead to gun registration, but he’s all in favor of gun registration anyway. This is more honest than the Mercury News, — which, as Tabula Rasa points out, claims that ballistic fingerprinting won’t lead to gun registration but notes that gun registration is a fine thing and “long overdue.”

However, Turnbull’s reference to “paranoid fantasies of imminent tyranny starting with national gun seizures,” and his claim that “a national gun registry will be no more of an invasion of privacy than registering your car, which is already required,” are out of place. In fact, gun registration has consistently led to confiscation; car registration has not. It’s not “paranoid” to fear real dangers.

I don’t think that the Second Amendment bars registration. But only an idiot would fail to notice this pattern, and I think that “ballistic fingerprinting” is, in fact, being pushed as a backdoor way of getting gun registration, by people who would favor confiscation if they thought they had the votes. I recommend this article for some concrete examples.

UPDATE: Suman Palit is already worried by what the FBI is doing in Maryland.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more, from Juan Gato.

ONE MORE: Tabula Rasa responds to my Second Amendment comments above.

LOTS OF UPDATES ON VENEZUELA, which is getting less attention than it should, over at El Sur.

DANIEL POLSBY (a law professor at George Mason University, in the Virginia suburbs) writes in response to my “panic in DC” post:

I haven’t seen anybody walking zigzag patterns, for what that’s worth.

I’m right in the middle of these incidents and have actually patronized both the Manassas Sunoco station where one murder and the Falls Church Home Depot where the latest murder occurred. What is the level of fear around here? People talk a lot about the sniper, but I haven’t seen much of anything beyond that. There has been a jump, apparently, in carry concealed applications, or so the Fairfax County court clerk told my wife. The cops are working longer shifts, more surveillance and less traffic enforcement (a lot of which has nothing to do with public safety). On net, though the world may feel less safe, it is probably

safer.

I believe the “market research” hypothesis, not the “lone nut” hypothesis. I suspect a crew, not a soloist.

What to do? There is no defense from a long gun fired from ambush; you have to get on offense and stay there. There is a spider web, that is mostly just “out there,” but that plainly couldn’t exist without anchor points in a number of conventional nation-states. If you want to get rid of the spiders you need to tear the anchor points up. This, and not that Saddam is a mean guy, is the real argument for the war against Iraq. The reason it is difficult for the government to lean too heavily on this justification is that other nation-states are anchor points also, and well known to be. Nurturing international acceptance for the use of arms, we don’t necessarily want to make a public commitment to dealing

with Syria — a member of the Security Council for God’s sake! — after dealing with Iraq.

If we do the Iraq thing right, though, a lot of those other anchor points will just sort themselves out.

Indeed.

A CONSPIRACY SO VAST: Lots of good stuff over at The Volokh Conspiracy. Erik Jaffe writes:

First, why do we fetishize life and death to the point of virtually excluding — or grossly minimizing — all other values? Given that everybody dies eventually, what is really at stake is longevity, and we routinely sacrifice potential longevity for other interests. (Easy examples include driving small cars or motorcycles, drinking, smoking, skydiving, mountain climbing, and volunteering for the armed services.) But in many public policy debates I am noticing a tendency to treat the loss or shortening of life as an overarching value that trumps virtually all others, especially liberty. Once upon a time “Live Free or Die” might have seemed a perfectly natural motto for a state. Today it is hard to imagine any government seriously espousing that view. Rather, any slight threat to health or safety is routinely touted as a reason for government compel, command, restrict, or tax in order to combat the threat.

Scroll down, and see an interesting post by Eugene on yet another campus free speech issue, this time at UNLV.

DAN SAVAGE ON WAR:

Liberals Against Liberation

“No to War! No to Oppression!”

The above anti-war message was delivered to me via a sad-looking pink poster. I pulled the poster off a light pole and hung it in my office over my desk. I look at the poster every day when I sit down to work, and every day I wonder how and when the American left lost its moral compass.

You see, lefties, there are times when saying “no” to war means saying “yes” to oppression. Don’t believe me? Go ask a Czech or a European Jew about the British and French saying “no” to war with Germany in 1938. War may be bad for children and other living things, but there are times when peace is worse for children and other living things, and this is one of those times. . . .

After 9/11, the left argued that our support for brutal dictatorships in the Middle East helped create anti-American hatred. Apparently the Bush administration now agrees–so why isn’t the American left claiming this victory?

Because claiming this victory means backing this war, and the American left refuses to back this or any war–which makes the left completely irrelevant in any conversation about the advisability or necessity of a particular war. (Pacifism is faith, not politics.) What’s worse, the left argues that our past support for regimes like Saddam’s prevents us from doing anything about Saddam now. We supported (and in some cases installed) tyrants, who in turn created despair, which in turn created terrorists, who came over here and blew shit up… so now what do we do? According to the left, we do nothing. It’s all our fault, so we’re just going to have to sit back and wait for New York City or D.C. or a big port city (like, say, Seattle or Portland) to disappear.

Read the whole thing. He’s right about the Saudis, too.

MUSLIM CONDEMNATION OF TERROR: Samizdata has links and excerpts.