DAVID WARREN offers some thoughts on Bush and the Europeans:

The problem at this juncture is indeed one of political sophistication. The U.S. understands where the Europeans are coming from, but not vice versa. Yet while there are genuine splits within European opinion, there are no real splits on the U.S. side. (Lapses in etiquette are accumulating everywhere.) . . .

In Rome, Mr. Bush will attend a summit that will mark the formal inclusion of Russia within the NATO decision-making structure. (The poor Europeans: they used to look to the U.S. to save them from the Russians, and now the Americans and Russians are getting along.) He will also have an audience with Pope John Paul II at which neither will mention recent sex abuse scandals involving Roman priests.

But before that, on Monday, the U.S. Memorial Day, President Bush will visit the beaches in Normandy, where so many U.S. soldiers fell, in a noble battle to free Europe from the original Fascist menace, two generations ago. It is the U.S. that is now under attack, and the Europeans being asked to return the favour.

He has some interesting observations about how the Saudis and Egyptians are beginning to catch on to the real game, too.

RAND SIMBERG has a FoxNews column about the newly-ambitious Chinese space program. He’s skeptical, and offers some lessons from history that the Chinese, above all, should pay attention to.

CRANKY PROFESSOR MICHAEL TINKLER reveals the dirty little secret of public — and private — school: Most of the time there is wasted. You spend about 30 minutes a day actually learning stuff, and the rest “engaged in learning activities — which means “not learning stuff.”

The best teacher I ever had was Mrs. Priscilla Dunn, who taught me second grade at the Louis Agassiz Elementary School in Cambridge. She let me spend most of a month reading through the whole set of Childcraft encyclopedias, instead of doing busywork at my desk. A few of the more officious second-grade girls were offended, but it was time well spent.

UPDATE: In a weird example of synchronicity, anonyblogger Godless Capitalist points out that the Cambridge school board just voted yesterday to change the name of Agassiz elementary to the Maria Baldwin School, after the first African-American to head it. Stephen Jay Gould’s characterization of Agassiz as racist was repeatedly invoked.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jason Strauss sends this link to a Harvard Crimson story. My favorite quote: “‘I don’t think we were taking someone else’s name off so much as changing the name,’ said Cambridge Mayor Michael A. Sullivan.”

SORRY for the relatively few entries this morning. I’m computing grades (ugh) and staying home with a sick kid. My daughter got out of school yesterday, and promptly developed a stomach bug today — or else it’s bad pad thai from last night, as my wife suspects. She’s (my daughter, not my wife) reading Junie B. Jones books and entertaining herself pretty well, but it’s not like a normal day.

The site updates are continuing, so don’t be alarmed if you see changes. The comments seem to work, and to register at a legible text size now.

More later.

A SCARY THOUGHT FOR THE DAY, courtesy of NakedWritings. What’s scariest is that it’s coming from a guy who says he’s a liberal.

I think there are a lot of liberals feeling this way lately, though — at least to judge from my email. That’s what happens in a war.

UPDATE: The dreaded Blogger Archive Bug strikes again. Go here. It’s currently the top post.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Melissa Seckora already scooped everyone with this story about the NEH and Bellesiles over on The Corner the other day, but now it’s hit the general media.

MATTHEW YGLESIAS REPORTS that a Hamas fundraiser will be speaking at Harvard commencement. There’s lots more information on his site.

THE INSTAPUNDIT.COM URL IS WORKING FOR ME NOW, and seems to be working for most everyone else.

WORRISOME INDO/PAK NUKEWAR UPDATE: A reader who works at a nuclear-weapons lab informs me that you can cobalt-jacket ordinary atomic bombs, not just thermonuclear ones. Oh, happy day. He doubts that either the Indians or Pakistanis would do that, though. Hope he’s right. He says that fallout downrange won’t be radiation-sickness bad, but it’ll produce increased cancer risks, and advises having some iodine pills handy, since having plenty of normal iodine in your body cuts down on the uptake of radioactive iodine. That’s true, but it doesn’t do anything for the strontium and cesium.

For those who wrote about my comment on smallpox/plague-bearing missiles — I thought it was obvious, but I meant instead of atomic warheads, not in addition to atomic warheads. Indeed, for that matter, if you’ve got more missiles than nukes, a chemical warhead aimed at a city can be pretty destructive. It won’t kill as many people, but it’ll kill a lot, and it’ll spread devastating panic.

Just a few thoughts to brighten your morning.

THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY: Now Chris Matthews has a blog. I wonder if this, together with Alterman’s effort, represents MSNBC trying to get ahead of the curve with celebrity-journalist blogs. The question is, will they be able to keep ’em interesting? And will we see a parade of bigfoot journalists with ghostwritten blogs put together by staffers? I believe that Chris Matthews can copy a URL. But somehow, I doubt that Dan “Necklace” Rather will be writing his own stuff if he gets a blog.

Meanwhile Andrew Sullivan is having the expected good fun fact-checking (and spell-checking) Alterman’s blog.

Via Ken Layne.

CORNEL WEST UPDATE: His star may be setting, but he can still score a fawning, one-sided feature in the Star Tribune. Note how it manages to give the impression that Larry Summers called West a “lazy negro,” though in fact those are West’s words, not Summers’s.

And note this line about Summers: “It’s that assumption — that decency is something that has to be proven — that’s racist in many ways.”

Hmm. I thought that to be a University Professor at Harvard you had to be more than just decent. I thought you had to be, well, really good.

UH-OH. Stephen Green has this worrisome observation about India and Pakistan. He says he’s a lot more worried than he was last night.

What would the impact of a nuclear war in India / Pakistan — call it 50-100 nuclear explosions in the 20-kiloton range — be on the United States? Probably fairly minimal. Nobody there has thermonukes, do they? Or extra-dirty atomics? If I recall, you need an h-bomb for nasty tricks like cobalt-jacketing.

Er, and there isn’t, like, smallpox or plague in any of those warheads. Right?

I think I’ll go back to my previous optimistic state. It’s less warranted than it was, but much more comfortable.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE NEXT TERROR TARGET: Nothing that won’t have occurred to you, probably, but sobering nonetheless. Everybody is (at least subconsciously) trying to forget about these threats, and get back to “normal,” so it’s probably worth reminding people what it’s really like.

OKAY, as I read this story, and this story, and somehow, especially, this story, my nuclear-war optimism began to wane.

I still find it hard to believe that anyone could be stupid enough, or crazy enough, to risk a nuclear war, especially when neither country is in such great shape that it can afford even a medium-sized conventional war, really. Such a conventional war would be a disaster. A nuclear war would be a calamity more-or-less unprecedented in history.

The good thing about the U.S. / Soviet rivalry was that neither side really wanted a full-scale war. The U.S. didn’t because we never do unless we’re attacked, and the Russians didn’t because they’d already been through the wringer in World War Two.

I hope that there’s a lot of U.S. contingency planning so that we won’t be caught flatfooted if it happens. In particular, the NSC needs to be thinking up what (if anything) Bush could do to stop such a war if it started. And I hope we’re doing what we can to stop it before it starts. I’m not entirely comforted that Jack Straw (see first link) has been dispatched to the scene.

JAMES MORROW notes that CAIR is seeking a new webmaster and wonders if it had anything to do with their recent poll flap.

HERE’S A SUGGESTION I LIKE: Rename the Defense Department the Department of War at least for the duration.

THE ISRAELI EMBASSY IN PARIS IS ON FIRE, according to a usually reliable emailer. I don’t know any more than that, and can’t find anything on Reuters, BBC or Agence France-Presse.

UPDATE: A number of readers sent this link, which doesn’t tell you much more.

TRANSPARENCY: If you go to the bottom of the page and click on the icon, you can see my open Extreme Counter. It tracks unique visitors, which my old Bravenet counter didn’t, and it’s open. The downside is it only tracks the main page. Links to individual posts go to an archive page and don’t show up there, so it probably understates traffic, and overstates the proportion of refreshes.

Nonetheless, it seems that InstaPundit gets more unique visitors than I had thought (Just under 19,000 so far today). (Click on incl/excl reloads for the dope). Maybe it’s just my regular email correspondents who hit refresh 10 times a day.

UPDATE: For some ccomparative figures you can click here — but they’re monthly unique visitor figures, and comparing monthly and daily uniques is probably an apples/oranges thing. However, I understand from TAP that they’re getting about 30,000 uniques a day.

BIZARRO WORLD, CONT’D: It’s not just TAPPED praising Jonah Goldberg, it’s the Columbia Journalism Review, too. What next? Bill Moyers funding the G-File?

GERMAN PROTESTS: I’m listening to NPR talking about German protests, and I’m wondering: when has the United States done anything worthwhile in the last 20 years that didn’t produce thousands of Germans protesting?

I’m hearing a lot of German talk about the United States’ power not being “counterbalanced.” I can understand German diplomatic concerns along those lines. I just can’t understand why we should share them.

STEVEN DEN BESTE crafts a “nightmare scenario” for an India/Pakistan nuclear war. I hope he’s wrong.

The real questions, of course, are (1) can the U.S. do anything to stop it? and (2) what should the U.S. response be if it happens anyway?

If nothing else, a nuclear war will create a lot of confusion that we can expect bad guys to take advantage of.

PEOPLE ARE INTERPRETING this Peter Beinart column as saying that the public is softening on gun control because of the reduction in fear of crime. But if that’s true, then why are the Democrats fleeing the issue as the 2002 elections loom?

Well, read what Beinart actually said: “The biggest reason is America’s decade-long decline in crime, which on issue after issue–from gun control to mandatory sentencing–has tipped public opinion away from the early 1990s obsession with law and order toward a greater concern for civil liberties and individual rights.” Now I’m not sure if this is what Beinart meant, but one way of reading this is that people think of gun ownership as one of those “civil liberties and individual rights,” and that without fear of crime the Democrats can’t persuade them to part with it.

In which case there’s no contradiction at all.

THE HOROWITZ / ROBERT MUELLER ITEM generated a lot of comments. Eugene Volokh says that Mueller’s lines are akin to Vince Lombardi saying: “Boys, this is a tough team and they’re going to score on us; but you can’t let their occasional successes break your spriit.” Several others wrote to echo this point.

Most correspondents weren’t so kind. Richard Bennett emails these suggestions: If Mueller was Patrick Henry, he would have said: “give me liberty or give me slavery, it doesn’t really matter.”

If he were in Boston during Paul Revere’s ride, he would have said: “One if by land, or one if by sea, or one if out of the air, or one if tomorrow. Whatever, dude.”

Okay, that’s a little harsh, but that’s Richard. Blogosphere favorite Claire Berlinski surfaces long enough to send this correction to Horowitz: Re: ‘If Mueller had delivered the statement to the troops on the eve of D-Day instead of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Men, no matter how well we plan this thing, half of you are gonna die anyway. I wish there was something else I could do. Good luck.”‘

I only point this out because Patton’s speech is so marvellous that it really deserves the credit. I wish he were still running the show. Check it out. Yes, I’d like to see a bit more Patton from quite a few of our leaders at the moment. (Berlinski reports, by the way, that she’s finishing up her book, Loose Lips, and that bloggers will love it).

Reader Scott Hegelson sent this, along with several others: Mueller as Yoda: “Try not. Do not. There is no point. Too big is the starship for you.”

There were many others — too many to post here (sorry about the comments, there’s still a Java problem; I’ll activate ’em here in case we can get it fixed later this evening). But perhaps the most cogent point came from reader PJ VanBloem:

Must say I don’t understand what Mueller is doing. Horowitz overstates the case, as I don’t think he’s throwing in the towel, but apart from simple ass-covering, I don’t know what Mueller is trying to accomplish.

The Eisenhower pseudo-quote strikes me as pretty accurate. The Farragut one would be better as: “Look at all the torpedoes! We are bound to lose some ships.” Mueller does _not_ say “I’m out of here” or “Let’s turn back”, but neither does he say “Full speed ahead!”

Mueller should have at least added, “We’re doing the best we can, and the likelihood of more attacks only means we need to continue our War on Terrorism.”

I think we’re all well aware that you don’t win a war (or a game) with defense, and the FBI is on defense.

Yes. I don’t mind Mueller saying “We’re the goalie, and the goalie can’t stop every shot.” But his statement did have a rather negative resonance to me, and obviously I’m not the only one who read it that way. If his goal was to lower expectations, well, he certainly succeeded.

MATTHEW HOY IS backpedaling (his own word) from charges that Kathleen Parker stole a column from the Blogosphere. I think he’s right to do so, and honorable to admit it.

Charges of plagiarism — or even idea theft, which isn’t quite the same — are serious stuff, not to be made lightly. Playfully pointing out parallels is one thing. But don’t let the thrill of “catching” someone cause you to create a crime where none exists.

FUKUYAMA UPDATE: Charles Paul Freund notes the multiple Fukuyama-Fiskings in the Blogosphere, and then adds one of his own. Excerpt:

Fukuyama’s continuing argument with libertarians is a rhetorical disaster because it springs from ignorance and invites contempt. Compare this current argument, for example, to the one he marshaled in defending his major intellectual achievement, the famous 1989 essay, “The End of History.” What made the earlier work so impressive was that he built his argument — which was about the resolution of a major chapter in the history of ideas, not about whether anything would ever happen again — entirely within the worldview he was critiquing. What infuriated his opponents on the left was that he effectively used their own ideas to demonstrate the intellectual obsolescence of their position. It was one of the great displays of rhetorical gymnastics in recent years, and Fukuyama deserved the fame that resulted.

Now he wants to argue that libertarians too are obsolete, and he seems to think he is using their own ideas against them. But arguing that support for biotech research is retrograde, and that individual sovereignty is a defense of slavery, doesn’t demonstrate that libertarians are passe; it reveals that Fukuyama is embarrassingly ignorant about the ideas he is dismissing. This time his opponents are not seething in frustrated anger; they are staring in cold contempt, a contempt that Fukuyama has invited and is richly earning with each public volley.

That sounds about right.