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?