THE FUTURE isn’t what it used to be.

THIS PIECE in the Financial Times rains scorn on proposals for an EU defense policy:

The latest Franco-German proposals to further the EU’s defence ambitions highlight the follies of the project. In effect, Paris has acquiesced to Germany’s military ineffectiveness in return for Berlin’s acceptance of French institutional obsessions that would disconnect the EU from Nato. . .

Most important, whatever their pretensions to a greater military capacity, the Europeans will for the foreseeable future depend on US military assistance. Yet the Americans suspect that European defence ambitions are motivated by a desire for competition with the US, not co-operation. French demands for European autonomy in military planning do little to assuage US concerns.

The E.U. has committed itself, philosophically, politically and — most of all — economically to a strategy that ensures its military irrelevance. That makes this kind of discussion moot, I think.

AL GORE GETS IT (HALF) RIGHT: My TechCentralStation column is up.

UPDATE: Jim Pinkerton is a lot harder on Al than I was.

ANOTHER UPDATE: SpinSanity has a round-up on the whole Gore debate.

And here’s an interesting piece on Fox News as compared to The West Wing.

ANTISEMITISM IS, APPARENTLY, THE ANTISEMITISM OF THE INTELLECTUALS these days. St. Cloud University has settled a lawsuit alleging systematic bias against Jews.

I’m not sure I agree with the “establish a diversity training system” approach to settling lawsuits like this. I think big, whopping damages do a better job of training people not to discriminate, and without setting up campus bureaucracies that will never die.

I found this via Erin O’Connor, who also has an interesting report on the silencing of women at the University of Michigan.

THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF AMERICA-BASHING: Lee Harris has an essay on the subject. Excerpt:

This is an intellectual tragedy. The Marxist left, whatever else one might say about it, has traditionally offered a valuable perspective from which even the greatest conservative thinkers have learned — including Schumpeter and Thomas Sowell. But if it cannot rid itself of its current penchant for fantasy ideology of the worst type, not only will it be incapable of serving this purpose; it will become worse than useless. It will become a justification for a return to that state of barbarism mankind has spent millennia struggling to transcend — a struggle that no one felt more keenly than Marx himself.

It has been a long time, of course, since Marxism had much to do with Marx.

AL QAEDA VS. THE NETHERLANDS: Michiel Visser is reporting on an unfolding war there. And war’s the right word, though Al Qaeda appears to be losing there, too. The real question is why the British haven’t arrested Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who seems to be involved.

BLOG CHRISTMAS GIFTS: Jeff Jarvis has made a list, and I think he’s even checked it twice.

FREE PASS FOR THE SUPREME COURT: Just caught Falwell on Donahue, saying that (1) he thinks the Supreme Court will find sodomy laws unconstitutional; and (2) he thinks they should be kept in force for “symbolic reasons.”

When even Jerry Falwell thinks they’ll go down, and cares to defend them only on grounds of symbolism, well, it makes me think that the politics on this issue point the same way as the law. Or, if you’re one of those people who see the Court as a largely political animal, you might think that justices on the court who support other “right-wing” outcomes like ending affirmative action might think it useful to balance those by overturning Bowers. I don’t think the Court looks at cases that way, myself, but many people do and I suppose I could be wrong.

SCHROEDER IS LEADING GERMANY TO DISASTER, writes Rosemary Righter in The Times. Excerpt:

Revolt is in the air. The most, perhaps the only, popular people in Germany are its satirists; and German satire, when it gets going, is robust verging on nasty. The “shirt game” is gentler, but its message is unmistakable. In response to the 48 different tax increases, on everything from flowers to fuel oil, announced since September by a Chancellor who only last July declared that “tax rises make no economic sense” in a slump, the web designer Christian Stein suggested that people should solve Herr Schröder’s financial worries by sending him the “shirts off their backs”. The response has been such that he predicts that the Chancellor, compared in one of the less vitriolic epithets around to a bad case of athlete’s foot, will have 50,000 of them in his wardrobe come Christmas.

The Germans also want their deutschmark back. It turns out — as became known when C&A, in an inspired bit of marketing, invited Germans to spend their “useless” marks in all its branches this week — that they hated surrendering the currency so much that they still have €8.8 billion stashed under their mattresses. The euro — and, by extension, “Europe” — is becoming equated with national disaster.

There is a queasiness about that goes beyond the dyspepsia induced by this particular winter’s discontents. That could be a good thing if it means that a truth evident to others for some time is finally sinking in. This is that the postwar German system, in which this most systematic of nations has placed its trust, is not just in need of a tonic but is fatally diseased. Not only that, but the quack medicines being administered will make its eventual demise a messy, expensive, and needlessly, humiliatingly, miserable business. . . .

The breakdown is not just economic, but political. The election turned not on hard facts about the economy, but on Herr Schröder’s crude manipulation of anti-Americanism. Germans have turned on their own man for now, but the less able they are to face facts, the more tempting it will be to hunt scapegoats outside Germany. That would be the most alarming development of all.

Can things really be that bad in Germany? And since when did Steven Den Beste start writing for The Times under a pseudonym?

GWEILO DIARIES SAYS that some other bloggers need to be careful about who they call felons, lest they face a libel suit. The actual likelihood of such a suit seems low to me, but it is bad form to call people felons when they’re not, and it appears that Gweilo is right. But a quick google search shows that quite a few others have made the same mistake, and I suspect that they may have gotten the idea from this article in Insight magazine, dated today.

TWO TOWERS UPDATE: Reader Michael Drout emails:

Saw the Two Towers today and thought you’d be interested to know that if there’s a central “message” that comes out of the movie, it is that the only responsible thing to do for one’s people is to ride out and engage the attacking evil rather than retreat into a fortress. Very interesting that Jackson made this movie before September 11, since there are a lot of images (“suicide bomber” orcs; terrified children; Saruman deliberately targeting women and children because they are weaker), none of which are specifically found in the books, but which fit the current zietgeist quite well.

I think people who liked Fellowship will find Two Towers consistent: magnificent setting, good battles, cool creatures (the cgi of Gollum is amazingly effective; the revised dialogue less so), flawless costumes, etc., but also gratuitous plot changes, oversimplifications and changes that are, to me, flat out unexplainable. Definitely worth your $10 and 3 hours.

And as a coincidence, a new book by Tolkien, which I edited, just came out oday. It’s a scholarly book about Beowulf that Tolkien wrote in the 1930s but will be of interest to at least some Middle-earth fans. There is some interesting discussion about war, civilization and one’s duty to protect it (applied to Beowulf, of course, but generally relevant, as all great literature is). Here’s a link to my home page where there’s a more developed blurb: Link

Interesting.

THE BRAIN DRAIN: Steven Den Beste looks at it here, and with a lot of interesting reader mail, here.

If Europe causes us too much trouble, we should just open up immigration. That would be a brutal blow.

JERALYN MERRITT IS GUEST-BLOGGING FOR ERIC ALTERMAN — and she’s posting it from Shanghai en route back to the states. Her guest-blogging is excellent: reportage on China’s changed stance relating to AIDS, and some nice comments about the left/right connection where civil liberties are concerned — but if she can guest-blog from Shanghai, what’s got Alterman so busy that he can’t show up?

I’m guessing it’s either a root canal, or a chance to spend the day with Bruce.

UPDATE: Closer to the former than the latter, apparently: Alterman emails that he’s sick as a dog but sparing us the gross details. I appreciate that. Whenever Lileks writes about having the flu, I don’t feel right myself for the next hour or so.

MORE BACKING AND FILLING FROM THE MULLAHS in Iran.

IS IT THE END OF THE AMERICAN ERA? Not hardly, writes Eric Olsen.

WELL, all that work I’ve put into my blogroll is paying off in, er, unexpected ways.

(Link courtesy of the obviously too-well-read Jeff Jarvis.)

I RATHER LIKE THIS OATH OF ALLEGIANCE.

JOHN TABIN has been cruising Iranian student websites, and has found something interesting.

STATE CONSTITUTIONS AND ABORTION: Jacob T. Levy says that Slate is full of it.

One reason, I think, why state court decisions on abortion rights (except perhaps for the funding decisions, which are less common) — and, for that matter, state decisions striking down sodomy laws — have generated less flak than federal decisions is that they’re cast in more negative terms. Rather than announcing, with Reihnardtian glee, “look at this cool new right I’ve found!” they instead invoke long-standing limitations on government power.

When courts brag about creating new rights, they are, in a very real sense, bragging about excercising a new government power, though one lodged in the judiciary. But when they strike down laws based on general limitations on the legitimate exercise of government power, they’re not creating a new government power, but rather respecting limitations on government power.

If you look at decisions which might have been controversial but weren’t — for example, Tennessee’s decision striking down the state’s sodomy law — they seem generally to be written in a very originalist, Borkian mode: “The government was never held to have the power to interfere in purely private behavior that didn’t hurt anyone else; this is purely private behavior that doesn’t hurt anyone else; therefore the government may not interfere.” That’s what Tennessee’s court said in Campbell v. Sundquist, that’s what the Kentucky Supreme Court said in Commonwealth v. Wasson, that’s what the Georgia Supreme Court said in State v. Powell, and in none of those cases was there much of an uproar. (You can read more about these here).

There may be a lesson there for the U.S. Supreme Court.

JACK WELCH-LIKE PERKS at The New York Times? Well, they’re certainly beyond InstaPundit’s operating budget.

GEITNER SIMMONS FLAGS AN INTERESTING PIECE from a DLC bigwig on European versus American attitudes on war. Excerpt:

In Berlin, I often asked Germans how they would feel about Iraq if the president were named Clinton or Gore, and had supported Kyoto and the ICC, but still had the same Iraq policy as Bush. Almost all said: “Oh, that would be different.” They’ve confused the messenger with the message; their problem is Bush, when it should be Saddam Hussein.

This is likely to prove an expensive mistake on their part.

UPDATE: Here’s more on the subject.

DIANE E. responds to comments about Western “hypocrisy” on human rights from Baghdad blogger Salam.

I think this illustrates the harm that the hypocrisy of groups like Amnesty can do.

TOM HOLSINGER WRITES THAT A LOT OF CRITICS OF THE WAR JUST DON’T GET IT. Holsinger is a big proponent of Walter Russell Mead’s “Jacksonian” analysis of America at war.

SADDAM’S USEFUL IDIOTS: Michael Gove writes in the Times about Amnesty International:

When Mr Sabri and Mr Aziz do the Iraqi dictator’s bidding we know they speak with his gun at their back. But what is Irene Khan’s excuse?

Ms Khan is the Secretary-General of Amnesty International and, as of yesterday, number one pin-up girl in Baghdad’s presidential palaces. For her reaction to the publication of the British Government’s dossier on Saddam’s human rights abuses was not satisfaction that one of the world’s most evil men was facing the scrutiny he deserved, but anger that something might be done about him.

“This selective attention to human rights,” Ms Khan pronounced, “is nothing but a cold and calculated manipulation of the work of human rights activists.” Why is Ms Khan’s reaction to this dossier condemnation for the British Government rather than the Iraqi? You would have thought that if Amnesty International were objecting to anyone’s cold and calculated manipulation, it would be the Iraqi regime’s wrenching of innocent civilians’ arms out of their sockets.

Having taken part in a Channel 4 debate with Ms Khan, in which she appeared for those arguing against the War on Terror, I know where she is coming from — that unhappy section of the British Left whose antipathy to Western policy makes them Saddam’s useful idiots.

Amnesty International, which I once respected, has lost its credibility entirely over the past year. This is just icing on the cake.

UPDATE: It appears that the quote from Khan actually predates the report that Gove is talking about. More here.

PEOPLE ARE ASKING WHY I haven’t written about the sexual harassment case that has led to the resignation of the dean at Berkeley’s law school. The reason is that I don’t know much, and I don’t have any very strong thoughts.

Erin O’Connor, on the other hand, has been following it closely and thinks she knows what’s really going on.