ANTIWAR DEFLATION: A “study” by a group of “medical experts” reported in the New Scientist reports that an Iraq war could produce 500,000 casualties, mostly civilians.

This is progress. Before the Afghan war the usual suspects were claiming that millions would die. Now they’ve trimmed their hyperbole to a mere half-million. Another five or ten wars and maybe their estimates will start to approach reality.

I wonder, though. After reading a piece in The New Yorker (not on line) about German civilian casualties in World War Two, and then this post by Jim Henley on not going far enough in the Afghan war, it occurs to me that trying so hard to prevent civilian casualties might be a mistake. I’m all for minimizing civilian casualties to the extent possible, consistent with winning the war. But if people are beaten so bloodlessly that they don’t feel beaten, and have no real reason to dread a confrontation with the United States, is this really a good thing?

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear says I’m wrong. But my point isn’t that civilian casualties are inherently good, but that we shouldn’t let fear of civilian casualties cause us to lose the war. And I think that’s something we’re at risk for.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader writes:

As it stands right right now we are not out to defeat the Iraqi people, just their dictator. If, after he is removed, they elect another threat to the US then it will be necessary to defeat the Iraqi people. We don’t usually hold the people responsible for their tyrant’s behavior. If they start to become like the people of Palestine, supportive of terrorism, then they would definitely need to feel defeated.

Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say, more or less. Though we held the Germans responsible for Hitler, and wreaked far, far worse damage on them than anything the Iraqis are likely to experience.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Donald Sensing has a long and thoughtful post in response to my thoughts above.

P.C.U.: Lest my posts on the dumb University of Tennessee blackface incident (and the much, much dumber response of the University thereto) give the wrong impression, I should note that the car parked next to mine in the faculty parking lot yesterday bore a bumper sticker reading: “CHARLTON HESTON IS MY PRESIDENT.”

COULD MICHAEL MOORE BE DISHONEST? Jay Caruso reports that Canadian gun regulators think so. Apparently, he’s accused of using “sneaky editing” to make it look as if it’s easier to buy ammunition in Canada than it really is.

WILLIAM SAFIRE DOESN’T TRUST JOHN POINDEXTER or the proposed Department of Homeland Security.

Neither do I.

THOUGHT POLICE? “Hate crime police raid 150 homes.”

A few people were arrested for, you know, real crimes. But “most have been arrested on suspicion of making racist threats and of homophobic harassment.” Those could be crimes, of course, if they’re real threats, or real harassment. But the extent of political correctness in Britain makes me wonder.

The photo accompanying the BBC article shows police facing a stereotypically Muslim family; it doesn’t say whether they are victims or perpetrators. Adriana Cronin has more over at Samizdata.

ATTENTION, VICTIMS OF THE HARPERCOLLINS PR MACHINE: Michael Crichton’s next novel, which will be out on November 25, will be about “rogue nanotechnology.” (Here’s a link to the Amazon review page.) There’s a huge PR offensive about to unroll. Crichton’s even writing about nanotechnology for Parade!

I know next to nothing about the book — just what’s in the review linked above — and I have no idea about the quality of the information that HarperCollins is sending out. But if you want to write about nanotechnology, here are some sources you may want to check out:

1. The Foresight Institute website.

2. Nanodot, a Slashdot-style discussion board devoted to nanotechnology.

3. Small Times, a webzine about nanotechnology and related subjects.

4. Nanotechnology Magazine, which is pretty much what it sounds like.

5. Some stuff by me: Environmental Regulation of Nanotechnology: Some Preliminary Observations, in the Environmental Law Reporter. Do Not Be Afraid, Do Not Be Very Afraid: Nanotechnology Worries Are Overblown in TechCentralStation. Nanotechnology Research Must Be Supported on FoxNews. I also have a paper on nanotechnology coming out from the Pacific Research Institute, coincidentally right around 11/25.

6. The Foresight Guidelines for Molecular Nanotechnology, which are all about preventing “rogue nanobots,” and which, if followed, would have prevented the events in Crichton’s book. Which, of course, is why they weren’t!

Of course, I don’t blame Crichton for employing such a device. Everybody needs a plot driver, whether it’s realistic or not. As Daffy Duck said in the Loony Tunes version of Jack and the Beanstalk, “Well, I better start climbin’ this thing, or we won’t have much of a picture.”

TORA! TORA! TORA! UPDATE: The L.A. Examiner has more on what’s going on there, and why it’s so dumb.

THE BISHOPS HAVE A POSITION ON THE WAR. Ken Layne has a position on the bishops.

HERE’S SOMETHING MORE ON MUHAMMAD AND MALVO:

Federal authorities are investigating whether accused snipers John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo had ties to a growing sect of militant American Muslims committed to waging holy war against the United States.

Law-enforcement authorities yesterday said investigators want to know whether the suspects — now awaiting separate murder trials in Virginia — were involved with Jamaat al-Fuqra, a militant Muslim group with documented ties to international terrorism that has been linked to 13 slayings and 17 firebombings in the United States and Canada.

The al-Fuqra network, through an offshoot group known as the Muslims of America, has established a patchwork of more than two dozen communes from New York to California, including a sizable retreat in Red House, Va., 30 miles south of Lynchburg, where as many as 200 people live in trailers in a guarded community.

Michelle Malkin emailed me about this on October 24. Advantage: Malkin!

UPDATE: Justin Katz was fingering al-Fuqra on October 5! Advantage: Katz!

WOW. IT LOOKS AS IF MSNBC IS SPARING NO EFFORT to get the best people.

It’s bound to be better than Donahue.

THE LIBERAL CASE FOR WAR AGAINST IRAQ — in The American Prospect of all places. Excerpt:

We now find ourselves about to go to war with Iraq, and most liberals have lined up against such an invasion. Their main argument rests on the thesis that Saddam Hussein can be deterred. This argument is bad for liberalism for three reasons: because its veracity is highly suspect, because it is woefully inadequate as a statement of policy and because it is not, in fact, a “liberal” argument at all.

There’s more. Does Kuttner know about this?

IBERIAN NOTES, by John and Antonio, has moved. Update your bookmarks and blogrolls with the new URL.

At least they’ll have permalinks now.

A WHILE BACK, I WROTE ABOUT this law enforcement disaster in Houston, in which police went after drag racers and then, not finding them, proceeded to arrest everyone in a K-mart parking lot, for a total of 278 bogus arrests. (I seem to recall that the Houston police chief wound up losing his job over this, but I’m not sure.)

At any rate, it looks like something similar is going on in Wisconsin, where police raided a fundraiser and charged 445 people even though only three were found to have drugs. (Three people with drugs on them out of nearly 450? I doubt you’d get that low a percentage if you frisked the House of Representatives.) I spoke with one of the organizers, an artist who spends his spare time doing historical renovations named Gary Thomson. He said that in his mind they were definitely “profiled and targeted because we were playing electronic music.”

I’ve written about this sort of idiocy before, but I’m sorry to say that too many members of law enforcement don’t seem to have gotten the message. But here it is: You’re idiots. How can I trust you to chase terrorists — or even burglars — when you show such an appalling degree of arrogance and bad judgment?

I’m sure there will be a lawsuit. The question is, will the public officials behind this disaster lose their jobs? They should.

UPDATE: Here’s more on the Houston case, where the police chief wound up under indictment for aggravated perjury. And here’s the website for the haunted house party. And here’s what one letter to the editor said: “If the Racine City Council was running Green Bay, 63,284 people would have been ticketed at the Monday night Packer game because of 70-some people getting drunk, rowdy and urinating in the men’s room sinks.”

Do they play electronic music at those games?

UPDATE: Sean Hackbarth has more on this.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more on the Houston case, where lawsuits are proliferating like, well, lawsuits after a dumb mass-arrest. And The Comedian has this update.

THE KIRSTEIN AFFAIR IS COVERED OVER AT HISTORY NEWS NETWORK.

There’s also a piece by Joyce Appleby on the Bush Administration’s “radical bellicosity.” The reader who sent the link says that it’s “ripe for a Fisking,” and a quick perusal suggests that he’s right. Unfortunately, I’m headed for a faculty meeting and don’t have time right now. (“I have a Fisking for that, but it is too long to include in the margin. . .”) So I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader — though I can’t help noting that people who think the Administration’s policy has been radically bellicose have little appreciation of what a response based on actual radical bellicosity would look like. Contrast, say, what Curtis LeMay would have done, with the Bush Administration’s approach to get some idea of what I’m talking about.

UPDATE: Hmm. There seems to be some pretty good Fisking going on in the comments section at the bottom of Appleby’s piece. Here are a couple of my favorite excerpts:

I find it odd that Prof. Appleby, who I am sure thinks of herself as progressive, would use John Randolph of Roanoke to support her position.

—

I wish you were right. I would very much prefer a world in which America could simply turn inward and “set an example.” But choosing this option in the face of attacks already completed against us is choosing to submit to the will of our self-declared opponent.

Is Bush acting in a “radically bellicose” manner? Given our true capacity for mayhem, I’d say that he has acted with great restraint.

There’s more.

UPDATE: Geitner Simmons has discovered an Appleby / Bellesiles connection. Well, it’s not really so surprising.

AMERICAN DIPLOMATS SOURING ON EUROPE?

Well, the Europeans may still be able to count on the sympathies and cultural deference of many East Coast journalists, but something has shifted among the diplomats, the think tanks and even many of the academics. At a think-tank meeting last week, when a European diplomat asked rather patronizingly what all these American weapons were actually for, a renowned liberal academic simply quoted Kipling’s line about “Making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep.” And then he turned on his heel and walked away.

When liberal academics start quoting Kipling, the world has changed. And the Europeans, as usual, are the last to figure it out.

POLICE HAVE SHUT DOWN TRAFFIC in downtown Washington, D.C. to investigate a suspicious truck.

MARGARET ATWOOD UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus has found that Martha Burk, currently busy trying to achieve gender integration at Augusta National, has made some fertility-control proposals of her own. Call it A Handmaid’s Tale in reverse.

UPDATE: Here, via The Corner, is the article in question. Excerpt:

So how do we control men’s fertility? Mandatory contraception beginning at puberty, with the rule relaxed only for procreation under the right circumstances (he can afford it and has a willing partner) and for the right reasons (determined by a panel of experts, and with the permission of his designated female partner). This could be easily accomplished with a masculine version of the contraceptive implants some judges are now trying to force on some women by court order.

Controlling men’s fertility would not be a hard restriction to enforce. The fertility authorities could use a combination of punishments for men who failed to get the implants and for doctors who removed them without proper authorization. The men could be required to adopt one orphan per infraction and rear her or him until adulthood. The doctors, could lose their licences or, in extreme cases, go to prison.

Sounds pretty creepy to me. In the Corner post linked above, Kathryn Jean Lopez says that this is exaggeration for effect. Perhaps. But I can only imagine the response in, say, Ms. if some conservative male engaged in similar exaggeration where women’s reproductive rights were concerned.

UPDATE: A bunch of people have emailed me this CNN transcript with this portion highlighted:

SCHLUSSEL: You wrote in Ms. Magazine where you believe in forced sterilization of men. And not only that, but you think that men should have to go before a committee before they have kids. That’s worse than China.

CARLSON: Actually, Martha Burk, it’s interesting…

BEGALA: Let her defend herself.

CARLSON: No, but I want to put it on the screen. We actually have the piece you talk about, how your moral code is offended by discrimination against women. You don’t say — you don’t seem to be upset about women’s colleges and the Girl Scouts.

I want to show you your article. It’s entitled “Sperm Stops Here”…

BURK: In “Ms. Magazine.”

CARLSON: … in Ms. Magazine. “How do we control men’s fertility?” Mandatory contraception beginning at puberty with the rule relaxed only for procreation under the right circumstances and for the right reasons, et cetera, et cetera.”

Pretty authoritarian even by the standards of feminism.

BURK: Hey, if they’re going to restrict abortion, buddy, we’ve got to do it this way.

However, if you scroll down, you do find her saying that it’s a “spoof.” No doubt, though with the likes of Burk it’s hard to be sure sometimes. But I repeat my point above — non-lefty white males aren’t allowed such spoofs, which probably wouldn’t even be printed in a mass-circulation magazine, and which would certainly produce an outpouring of indignation after the fact. It all goes back to Dale Amon’s point that political sensitivity varies more with the speaker than with what’s spoken.

WHILE I WAS AT THE GYM I saw Daniel Pipes on Fox. The caption was “PROFESSORS OF HATE,” and Noam Chomsky appeared on the screen briefly. I don’t know what was said (the captioning was off, and I didn’t have my headphones) but I imagine it was along the lines of this oped.

I heard an NPR piece on antiwar protests a couple of weeks ago that suggested, rather hopefully, that college campuses would be the seedbed of a new anti-war movement. I don’t think so. The reason is that American universities don’t have the moral capital they had a generation ago. Back then they were seen as the responsible abode of the future elites, with many private schools still holding some lingering moral authority in the minds of many from their historically religious character. Deans and University Presidents were seen as responsible, thoughtful and patriotic: pillars of society in an entirely non-ironic sense. So campus opposition to the war meant something.

Now, however, the situation is different. We’ve seen universities squander their moral capital on decades of silly stuff, from free-Mumia causes celebre to P.C. idiocy and thuggishness, to open anti-Americanism, to — as we’ve seen recently — barely and reluctantly addressed instances of outright academic fraud.. What’s more, a much greater percentage of America has actually been to college, experiencing these kinds of things firsthand. America’s academic class is on the defensive, nowadays, and to a large degree it deserves to be.

The result is that I don’t think the American academy is in a position to offer much moral leadership nowadays, on the war or anything else. And I don’t think that what leadership it tries to offer is likely to be accepted. That’s too bad, in a way, but when institutions persist in acting irresponsibly, people tend to view them with less respect.

CHILD EXPLOITATION IN BERKELEY? Hell, at least we’re not seeing this there. Yet.

A PACK NOT A HERD: My TechCentralStation column is up. It has more on a citizen-based antiterrorism campaign.

The piece was written week before last, but got put back so that my paper-ballot column could run on election day. Otherwise I would have put in a reference to this post by Jim Henley, which elaborates on the “pack not a herd” theme that Jim coined, and which has some suggestions for TV producers, too.

UPDATE: Tough Times says Henley is wrong.

YESTERDAY I MENTIONED MICHELE NEWTON. Now I notice that her song “Broken Pavement” has risen to Number One on the Adult Alternative charts at MP3.com. Not bad.

A couple of people have emailed to ask me the about the history on this project, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. I’m solo-parenting at the moment while my wife’s away, and I’m beat.

UPDATE: A reader emails that he wasn’t crazy about the tune, and that he then listened to another, randomly selected, band and didn’t like it either. His conclusion: “Thus, MP3.com sucks.”

Puhleez. If you randomly pull CDs out of the bins at Tower you won’t like most of what you hear either. And with MP3.com (and similar sites), you get to hear the music for free. And even download it for free. So you won’t ever do what I did recently with Groove Armada’s latest, which is pay twenty bucks for something you only listen to once. Now that sucks.

ANOTHER VICTORY FOR THE COMMERCE CLAUSE: A New York law banning interstate wine sales has been struck down as a burden on interstate commerce. The so called “dormant commerce clause” has also recently been employed to strike down New York laws on tobacco and porn. Here’s some general background.

UPDATE: Professor Brannon Denning writes to correct me, as I omitted the 21st amendment:

Though I like cheap liquor and wine as much as the next person, the NY decision and those like it (e.g., from TX and VA) are wrong, wrong, wrong. The 21st Amendment was intended, in large part, to remove the strictures of the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine from state regulation of liquor imported into their borders. Not only did “drys” want to make sure that Congress didn’t repeal the Webb-Kenyon Act, but “wets,” too, wanted to make sure that fundamentalists didn’t get control of Congress and use the Commerce Clause to re-impose Prohibition.

If your readers are interested in the reasons why, steer them to my “Smokey and the Bandit in Cyberspace” article, still hanging fire at Constitutional Commentary.

I am proud that I have found one issue in which my strongly (and I mean *really* strongly held) personal beliefs point one way, and my research another. So proud, in fact, that I’m going to have another drink before I go to bed.

Brannon’s right about the 21st Amendment — though the governing caselaw is, by his lights, wrong, I believe.

IS BIN LADEN ALIVE? Maybe.

UPDATE: And then there’s this to worry about.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Nelson Ascher suggests that even if he’s alive, the preference for audio tapes might tell us something:

Is Osama alive? We don’t know, obviously, but the goal of releasing a tape is to use it as proof that yes, he is. The main argument that has been used against this kind of vocal proof is to say that were he among the living, he could as easily have sent videos instead of audiotapes. But, what if he has been badly wounded, having had for instance his face desfigured or some limbs amputated? Then he surely wouldn’t want us to see that some kind of punishment has already reached him, not at least before his own revenge, right? Well, maybe this could explain the lack of images.

Yeah. Personally, I’m quite skeptical of these tapes. As a sound engineer, I could put together a genuine-sounding tape pretty easily if I had access to a lot of genuine old tapes.

BRIAN LINSE just had his one-year blogiversary. A sometimes-obstreperous child, but cute as a bug’s ear nonetheless.

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED, TO READ THIS:

When he brought these incidents to the attention of police, they requested–and he granted–permission to tap his home phone. UCLA installed a red panic button next to his desk, ensuring that campus cops could respond within minutes to any crisis in his office. The FBI even assigned an agent to track down his tormenters. (To date, they have not been found.) All of this might sound like the prelude to a textbook hate crime, but the Abou El Fadl case has a twist: The callers weren’t angry white men accusing him of terrorist sympathies; they were fellow Muslim Americans accusing him of selling out the faith.

If you can’t safely espouse a liberal Islam in the United States, where, exactly, can we expect it to catch on?