BELLESILES UPDATE: The Emory Wheel is reporting that Bellesiles may have his prizes revoked — both the Bancroft Prize and another from the Organization of American Historians. But to me, the big story is at the end, where it is revealed that Garry Wills — who wrote an absurdly favorable review of Arming America for the New York Times, part of which is excerpted at the beginning of James Lindgren’s Yale Law Journal piece — has changed his tune publicly:

Garry Wills, a Northwestern University (Ill.) historian who wrote a favorable review of the book in The New York Times, wrote in an e-mail that much of Bellesiles’ work has been “discredited.”

In his book A Necessary Evil, Wills cites Bellesiles’ work to refute popular claims that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to bear arms.

In his e-mail, Wills wrote that he regrets having professionally associated himself with Bellesiles.

“I would not have included it if I had known what I now do, though my basic argument on the Second Amendment is not affected by it,” Wills wrote.

Knopf Press, which published Arming America and is said to have plans to print a second edition, did not respond to repeated e-mails and phone calls.

I’m glad to see that Wills has the decency to admit this now. (Though the claim that his argument is “not affected” is a bit much.) Knopf, though, isn’t showing much decency at all here. Coming soon: The Knopf guide to Piltdown Man!

MORE DEFIANCE OF THE MULLAHS IN IRAN:

More than 4,000 students came out to march today, the Iranian Student News Agency said, and student leaders said their demands went beyond Mr. Aghajari’s release. They said they would press for the release of all political prisoners and for a guarantee of freedom of speech.

“We demand unconditional release of Mr. Aghajari but demand freedom of speech and opinion for everyone and forever,” Abdullah Momeni, one of the speakers at the university today, said in a telephone interview afterward.

Mr. Momeni added that the students did not consider apostasy, the charge against Mr. Aghajari, a crime. He said the judiciary, which generally supports the hard-liners in the government, was acting like courts in the Middle Ages.

“Apostasy has no meaning in the world today, which favors freedom of speech and opinion,” he said.

Hurray.

OUR EUROPEAN FRIENDS demonstrate their superior sophistication.

DEROY MURDOCK, writing in the National Review Online, says the Army was crazy to discharge Arab linguists just because they were gay.

I DON’T THINK THINGS HAVE SETTLED DOWN IN IRAN:

The protest was held despite an order at the weekend by the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, that Mr Aghajari’s sentence should be reviewed.

Some students said that the intervention did not go far enough in satisfying their demands.

“Our problem is not only the revision of the death sentence on Hashem Aghajari, but freedom of speech and freedom in general,” student leader Abdollah Momeni told French news agency AFP.

Trouble is, the mullahs can’t satisfy those demands without cutting their own throats. Which is okay with me, but I doubt that they feel the same way.

EUGENE VOLOKH offers what might be the last word on the University of Tennessee blackface incident. Fellow Knoxville blogger SKBubba emailed me last night, suggesting that I was too hard on the University Administration. They’re trying to move the place up, he pointed out.

That’s true, and I’m happy to help. (Heck, I spent a lot of hours trying to help the last UT President with fundraising, etc., but that’s another story entirely). What bothered me about the initial reaction, though, was that it seemed to be instinctively punitive, when it should have been instinctively pedagogical. You don’t teach courtesy by enforcing political correctness at the point of a gun. You teach it by, well, teaching. And by example.

As it worked out, President Shumaker wound up denouncing the behavior but making clear that it’s protected by the First Amendment. That was the right thing to do. It just took them a little while to get there. But our Provost and President are new, and may not entirely have a feel for the place yet. One of the nice things about the University of Tennessee is that in the past it has managed to deal with these things without them blowing up into the kind of polarizing event that gets embarrassing national publicity.

MORE IRAQI-AMERICANS WHO SUPPORT WAR AGAINST SADDAM:

This was one of the few large gatherings in the Bay Area where you could find mass support for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. These are people who know a thing or two about Hussein’s branch of the axis of evil.

Indeed. (Via Stefan Sharkansky).

MORE DOMESTIC TERRORISM:

PORTLAND – Four forest activists charged with setting logging trucks on fire during last year’s protests of the Eagle Creek timber sale were captured after one of them told a girlfriend about the act, according to arrest papers.

The girlfriend’s father is a deputy state fire marshal. . . .

The government also has charged Sherman with the Easter 2001 firebombing of three cement trucks belonging to Portland’s Ross Island Sand & Gravel. The Earth Liberation Front, a well-known eco-terrorist group, later claimed responsibility for the crime.

I didn’t say they were smart domestic terrorists.

THERE’S AN ARTICLE ON WEBLOGS IN TODAY’S WALL STREET JOURNAL. It’s by Yochi Dreazen, but it’s only in paper or subscriber-only on the web. It’s part of their special Internet supplement. Regular blog readers won’t find much that’s new, but it’s meant as an introduction to the genre, and it’s a good one.

EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT MAC USERS SEEM TO LIKE ‘EM A BIT TOO MUCH. I’ve always found it a touch, well, creepy. But this is ridiculous.

ASK HIM HOW IT FEELS TO BE A VERB: Robert Fisk will reportedly be on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal tomorrow.

OKAY, I wasn’t going to link to this photo of “Marin Women Naked for Peace.” But then I got this reader comment:

Yeah. But the Taliban would’ve had ’em shot. And Saddam would’ve raped ’em.

True enough.

JIM BENNETT WRITES ABOUT SEPARATISM IN CANADA:

But it’s not Quebec we’re talking about here. It’s four provinces west to Alberta, where the top issue on the agenda is not Francophone nationalism, but Kyoto. Or “Ki-ota,” as it’s pronounced in Canada’s cowboy country. (As I said, they speak differently out that way.)

I have written previously about the curious post-colonial cringe that infects the intellectual and political classes of certain of Britain’s former colonies of settlement. This cringe leads to a rejection of the most obvious interpretation of the cultural identity of the nations they inhabit — that they are, for the most part, distinct nations, but ones that share a great deal in common with the cultures of other English-speaking nations.

One result of this peculiar political culture is a need to endorse the transnational progressive project of global governance through U.N. treaties. This has led Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to sign the Kyoto treaty on limitation of carbon monoxide production. Unlike many transnational progressive treaties, which merely erode the national cultures of signatories, Kyoto carries an immediate and significant price tag for Canadian industries, farms and, ultimately, consumers. Meanwhile, its benefits, if any, are problematic and widely debated.

Furthermore, the pain will be spread unevenly throughout Canada, and energy-producing Alberta with its wide-open Western pattern of population will suffer disproportionately. Normally, such a high-impact treaty would require substantial negotiation in Canada’s more consensus-oriented political system. However, Canada has also developed a particularly unchecked executive power.

We might take ’em in as states. Then again, we might not. But I think Quebec should become part of France regardless. Each deserves the other.

UPDATE: Colby Cosh says that Bennett is absolutely right:

Despite the lack of a serious instrument for the expression of separatist values, separatist sentiment is virtually universal amongst people born and raised in Alberta. The class of federal-government beneficiaries here is small. Most Albertans are vaguely aware that Confederation, for us, is a huge financial ripoff, with outgoing net government transfers amounting to thousands of dollars a head every year. It is a mystery to us exactly what we get for our federal taxes nowadays. Sit down and try to work it out sometime if you’re an Albertan, remembering that health, welfare, and education are provincially funded and administered. What, are they spending the money on our elite, powerfully equipped armed forces?

Asked outright “Stay or go?”, most Albertans (real Albertans, not people who came over from Montreal at age 16) will tell you “Go”, privately. It’s not just the rural loonies, either: as a rule, the more you know about trying to run a business, the more likely you are to answer “Go”. I have a lot of trouble making Easterners understand this. If any well-known leader decides to step up and give a voice to Alberta separatism, they will learn. And fast.

Hmm. I’ll take Alberta as a state, but only if Colby promises to come with it.

DOMESTIC TERRORISM UPDATE: James Morrow has the scoop.

AN AMERICAN EMPIRE? Not hardly:

Still, despite the endorsement the notion of an American empire has received from writers across the political spectrum, something is missing from the analysis. There is more to having an empire than simply the possession of great power. Empire presupposes the existence of a military establishment that is charged with the task of insuring, through the threat and use of force, that local and regional conflicts are settled by the application of imperial power. Understood that way, the imperial model does not match American foreign policy as it has actually developed since the end of the Cold War: Indeed, we fear empire rather than welcome it. . . .

For conservative defense intellectuals to achieve their imperial ambitions, their first order of business would have to be preparing the American public, and their own Republican base, for increased public expenditure. Alas for them, the president for whom they work has done exactly the opposite. No serious empire-builder would ever cut taxes as recklessly as President Bush has. Because of the enormous tax cut, the Bush administration has had little choice but to disappoint its allies in the Pentagon by reneging on its promise to throw open the government’s checkbook.

I think this is largely right. Americans don’t want an empire. We want to be left alone by those — like the Wahabbist fanatics of Al Qaeda — who are trying to build their own empires.

HOW TO LIVE FOREVER: Ray Kurzweil offers some advice in this Wired news interview. Hey, it’s working for him so far!

TECHNOLOGY AND THE ATTACK ON IRAQ: This article from Technology Review says it won’t look much like Desert Storm. Or even Afghanistan. Is warfare on Internet time, now?

Maybe not if this story by Noah Shachtman on the military’s scientific brain-drain turns out to be right. As dependent as we are on technology, problems like this need attention.

“SAN FRANCISCO DEMOCRAT:” Gayblog Agenda Bender thinks Josh Marshall is silly to try to claim that’s gay-baiting.

AMIR TAHERI writes on the French philosophy for dealing with Arab nations. What it lacks in effectiveness, it makes up in amorality. And it seems a bit, well, racist:

The French way is based on what is known in Paris as “France’s Arab policy” (La politique Arabe de la France).

Devised by the late General De Gaulle in the early 1960s , this is based on three assumptions.

The first is that it is natural for Arabs to be ruled by a “strongman.”

The second is that the Arab “strongman” has no particular principles apart from a keen desire to stay alive and in power.

The third is that, if handled intelligently, the Arab “strongman” could be useful to the West.

Kind of puts those criticisms of U.S. policy into perspective, doesn’t it?

UPDATE: Reader Mostafa Sabet writes:

I for one welcome this, maybe it’s a historical bias that I was born with (though my views on Israel prove to myself that I’m not blinded by this), but I have always felt that following the French leads to nothing but trouble. We should have learned this after Algeria and Vietnam. As far as I am concerned, one would be hard-pressed to find a more xenophobic, racist and cowardly state that deserves being marginalized more than the French. One of the unfortunate consequences of the Cold War is that the French have weapons of mass destruction. I have this bizzare, gut-feeling that our next “Great War” (in the pejorative sense) will involve the French as the enemy. . . .

I feel if we must disarm a regime, like Iraq, the only army or group that should use American armaments should be Americans and our close democratic allies, rather than internal dissenters. More often than not, these groups are just as thuggish as the regimes we seek to overthrow and given time we will need to remove them at a later date.

War with France? [Insert obligatory surrender joke of your choice here.] I rather doubt it, but you never know.

ARTHUR SILBER HAS MOVED HIS “LIGHT OF REASON” BLOG off of Blogspot. Check out the new site, especially the very cool photo that sits on top.

RADLEY BALKO is still mad at John J. Miller’s New York Times oped from last week on how libertarians should stop costing Republicans elections and just vote for the GOP. Excerpt:

Oh my. Lemme see. Tom Davis, who chairs the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, ran so fast from Social Security privatization last election, he nearly pulled a hammy. Oops. Did I say “privatization?” Damn. I forgot. Tom Davis told us not to use that word any more. And now we learn that our fearless President has decided he won’t even address Social Security until at least 2004. Mr. Miller, which party controls two Houses of Congress and the White House at the moment? Yes. I thought so. And so which party should we libertarians blame when Social Security is ignored in the 108th Congress?

There’s much, much more.

GERHARD SCHRODER IS NOT PROSPERING:

NEVER in modern German history has a newly elected government got off to such a wretched start. With Germany now teetering on the brink of its second recession in just over a year, there is an increasing sense of helpless floundering at the top. Forget the “steady hand” on the tiller that Gerhard Schröder promised when the economic going first began to get rough last year. This is now rudderless drift. And with a mutinous crew to boot. Small wonder many of the passengers are already wondering whether they chose the right captain on September 22nd. . . .

Many Germans feel cheated and betrayed. Support for Mr Schröder’s Social Democrats has plummeted. Less than two months after scraping back into power, they now trail the opposition Christian Democrats by 14 percentage points. Opposition leaders accuse the government of carrying out “the biggest electoral fraud in German history”. Two Germans in three do not believe that the government’s cobbled-together austerity package will bring the promised boost to growth and jobs. Indeed many, including most economists and business leaders, expect it to have just the opposite effect. Tens of thousands of workers took to the Berlin streets this week to vent their anger, frustration and fears.

And it looks like Bush will be snubbing Schroder again in Prague this week, underscoring that Schroder’s administration is doing just as badly in the field of foreign affairs.

DOCTORS WHO LIE FOR “PEACE:” Howard Feinberg points out the one-sided dishonesty of the Medact report:

The real problem lies not in the presented data, but in what is missing from them. Sanctions and war, hardship and heartache are all catalogued as if they were acts of nature or the effects of freakish chance. However, all of Medact’s detailed situations, casualty figures, grisly war scenarios, and environmental and health impact estimates result from one cause, which does not get mentioned more than once or twice in the whole report.

Hint: Its name is Saddam.

INFORMATION WAR: Jim Dunnigan writes about what we’re doing to unnerve the Iraqi leadership.

SO THE HOMELAND SECURITY BILL HAS BALLOONED FROM 35 TO 484 PAGES: And the addition appears to be largely pork. That’s no real surprise, I guess, but while it may not be a surprise it is an illustration.

I’m happy that the Democrats are making an issue of this, even though I’m sure that their main objection is that it isn’t their pork. That they chose to make their stand earlier on protecting public-employee unions rather than civil liberties shows where they stand, too. But the beauty of politics is that people often do the right thing for the wrong reason. (Perhaps more often than for the right reason). I hope this stinker dies in the lame-duck session, though that’s probably too much to expect.

As I’ve written before, I think there has been too little accountability for the failures of homeland security pre- and post-9/11, and I’m not at all convinced that this bill will fix those problems. (How can it, when so little effort has gone into figuring out what the problems were?) The airline industry is strangling under security curbs, and passenger resistance to hassles (though it’s doing its best to chase passengers away on its own). Law enforcement still seems fundamentally unserious about the problem. The whole thing seems to be more about the security of bureaucrats than of the nation. As proof, you need only look at the assignment of officials involved in prior law-enforcement scandals and coverups to homeland security duties. And there’s not much evidence that the proposed DHS will do anything to promote the kind of citizen involvement that might actually do some good, despite the obvious need for a distributed approach to antiterrorism.

But here’s one suggestion for any members of Congress who might read this. (Yes, that means you, Bob Barr). Since the Department of Homeland Security is so important that we’re supposed to surrender various privacy rights, etc., to its extraordinary existence, how about some extraordinary discipline, too. Put in an amendment waiving sovereign immunity where the Department of Homeland Security is concerned. And not some grudging, half-hearted, no-jury-trial waiver as with the Federal Tort Claims Act. An absolute, no-holds-barred, you-can-sue-us-as-if-we-were-Exxon waiver of sovereign immunity. With the Trial Lawyers watching like hawks, the DHS won’t be able to get away with much in the way of misconduct.

And I’ll bet you can get some Democratic votes for that one, too.