AIMEE DEEP is soliciting artists for Madster’s new FairPlay music-distribution system. In the interests of full disclosure, I may participate, once the details — which are still unclear — are settled. But since giving music away has been my philosophy from day one, I’m receptive.

CHRETIEN UPDATE: Apparently he’s not having much success at dining out on his anti-American reputation.

(Via Shiloh Bucher).

“REGULATE GUNS” = “BAN HANDGUNS NOW:” Eugene Volokh has been looking further into the website I mentioned the other day. (And here’s an earlier post of his on the same topic.)

Hmm. If advocacy groups were held to the same truth-in-advertising standards as businesses, I think a lot of them would be in trouble.

UPDATE: Now Volokh has even more, with a quote from the VPC’s Tom Diaz that makes clear that “regulating” handguns really does mean banning handguns to the VPC. I guess those “paranoid” gun-rights activists aren’t so out of touch with reality after all.

DANIEL PIPES CONTRASTS Concordia University and Colorado College, and their respective speakers’ reception. Excerpt:

These two parallel yet contrasting episodes point to several conclusions:

* Both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict are seeking to shift the terms of the debate. The pro-Israel side wants to delegitimize speakers who effectively call for the destruction of the Jewish state. The anti-Israel side wants to block speakers sympathetic to Israel.

* Both incidents point to profound problems in the university, and why Abigail Thernstrom calls it “an island of repression in a sea of freedom.” In Colorado, the administration made the morally idiotic choice of honoring an apologist for terrorism. At Concordia, a weak-kneed response let thugs inhibit free speech.

* The incidents also point to the differing faces of pro- and anti-Israel activism, with the former acceptably political and the latter crudely violent. The first resembles the restrained actions of the Israeli armed forces. The second represents a North American face of the suicide bombings.

Or, in the most elemental terms, we see here the contrast between the civilized nature of Israel and its friends versus the raw barbarism of Israel’s enemies.

Indeed. We’ve seen the same thing demonstrated at San Francisco State University. Where, it appears, a victim is being made a scapegoat.

BERKELEY HAS ENDORSED Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-Mars) “Space Preservation Act” — which among other things bans space-based “mind control” devices. Just put tinfoil in your hats, folks. That’ll block the beams. Soon you’ll be thinking more clearly. . . . yeah, more clearly than ever before. . . .

(Via Red Square Albany).

CHRETIEN UPDATE: Tom Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College writes:

To be sure, Americans are used to hearing this kind of bloviation from European intellectuals, but Canada was once a country that could boast common sense among its many virtues. In fairness, Chretien’s foolishness has drawn fire from some Canadian politicians on the right, including former prime minister Brian Mulroney, who called his successor’s comments “false, shocking and morally specious,” and “dangerous intellectual nonsense.” Canada’s National Post was even more blunt, asking: “did Jean Chretien have to choose the subject of Sept. 11 as an opportunity to make a Royal Canadian ass of himself?” Still, too many Canadians are drawn to Chretien’s attempts at neo-appeasement, indulging in a reflexive anti-Americanism that takes as an article of faith that the downtrodden of the world hate the United States because they have every reason to. . . .

Given Chretien’s inane comments prior to the meeting, Bush can hardly be faulted for not trying to lay out a case to his Canadian colleague. Indeed, given the lack of substance in their meeting and the clear Canadian aversion to shouldering the burden of the fight against terror — an aversion, by the way, that does not seem to be shared by the brave and able men and women of the Canadian armed forces — September 2002 might well be the date affixed by future historians to Canada’s last days as a world power.

Yes, it’s hard to take statements like Chretien’s — or the government that issues them — seriously.

MICKEY KAUS says the blogosphere rules when it comes to coverage of the Bob Greene, er, affair. But even the Blogosphere isn’t perfect:

Still there’s one last level of artifice, even in the blogosphere: Why do men — like Scalzi here, or Warren Beatty in Shampoo (or whoever wrote Warren Beatty’s lines in Shampoo) — have to explain their desire to have sex with attractive women in terms of a struggle against mortality (“middle-age-death-denying” in Scalzi’s words)? You mean they wouldn’t have sex with young girls if they were in good shape and knew they were going to live to be 300? They didn’t want to have sex with young girls when they were young themselves? It’s sex! Millions of years of evolution have designed men to want it and enjoy it.. It’s stupid to try to explain this urge in some highfalutin’ literary or spiritual way — and revealing that even relatively no-BS men like Scalzi (or Nick Hornby in High Fidelity, to name another) feel that they have to.

It’s sexism, Mickey — they’re afraid of the Sisterhood and its patriarch/rake dichotomy where male sexuality is concerned.

UPDATE: TAPPED is unashamedly defending Greene’s sexuality. Oh, and Eugene Volokh, who’s on a roll today, has some observations too.

CATHY YOUNG WRITES about post-9/11 feminism:

Maybe the real gender-related message to be gleaned from Sept. 11 is this: However much we would like to see women’s liberation as a natural right, it is the achievement of a complex, advanced civilization. Recent events remind us that this civilization is fragile and that its enemies are hostile to freedom for anyone—but especially women. Feminists, perhaps more than anyone else, should realize that the West is worth defending. Perhaps if they did realize it, they wouldn’t be so irrelevant.

Indeed.

AGAINST ANONYMITY: Declan McCullagh has news on the White House’s cybersecurity plan.

THE END TIMES ARE AT HAND: Margo Kingston is linking to Tim Blair.

SPECIALTY BLOGGING: Paul Mansour writes that he has a weblog “for the express

purpose of regular, weekly fiskings of New York Times architectural critic Herbert Mushchamp. I was disappointed that Muschamp’s Think Big article in Sept 8th’s Sunday New York Times Mag did not get much attention in the blogosphere — so I took matters into my own hands.”

Well, that’s the spirit of the Blogosphere.

200 MISSING NUKES? That’s what Pravda reports.

UPDATE: ABC News is on top of this one.

AN A.P. REPORTER has been sacked for apparently quoting nonexistent experts in stories over a period of years.

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer weighs in with the inevitable comparison to Emory’s dithering over Michael Bellesiles.

THERE’S GOING TO BE A TEACH-IN TONIGHT at George Washington University regarding the war. Er, except that it’s sponsored by “Americans for Victory Over Terrorism,” and the guests are distinctly non-Chomskian.

WHO’S THE BIGGER ENEMY OF CIVIL LIBERTIES? John Ashcroft? Or Nick Kristof? Well, Stephen Green has his own opinion, which for the moment he’s allowed to express:

“Congress shall make no law…” except, of course, to suit the tastes of Nicholas Kristof.

Nick Kristof holds a powerful position at one of the world’s most powerful newspapers. His voice will never be silenced. But yours might be someday, if Kristof gets his wish.

Given the fuss people made regarding Ari Fleischer’s innocuous remark about people needing to watch what they say in time of war, no doubt this out-and-out call for censorship will be widely denounced by civil libertarians and the mainstream media. Right?

Or will this exercise of “Jackboot Liberalism” get a pass?

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Is Kristof unaware of the books on munitions handling and operation, security infiltration techniques, and silent killing methods that have been available for decades from any Army surplus store? I wonder if he would like to shut down the presses that educate our own military…

I also know from firsthand experience that the semi-underground ‘cookbooks’ he is so worried about are, and always have been:

a) easily available

b) DANGEROUS (primarily to the user)

My guess is that the majority of malefactors who follow such guides will end up killing only themselves. That such an op-ed would pop up now is nothing short of ignorant hysteria (or less charitably, a calculated power ploy). Enemies of the United States have always been around. So have how-to guides for aspiring criminals. But the only thing that ever blew up was my mother’s kitchen.

The fact that he equates his ability to purchase these poorly written books with his ability to make the substances they claim displays a deep ignorance of applied science at even the Chem 101 level. Which is, admittedly, not his area of expertise. But for a publisher, his apparent belief that the information today wasn’t availble less than a decade ago (for Aum Shinrikyo) is remarkably naive.

Indeed. Kristof seems a bit on the gullible side. I wonder who’s been feeding him this stuff.

BLOGOSPHERE UPDATE: Eric Alterman has finished his Ph.D. (history, Stanford) as of Friday. The dissertation: “Two Lies: The Consequences of Presidential Deception.” (The lies are Yalta and the Cuban Missile Crisis.) Apparently he’s going to add two more lies — Tonkin and Iran/Contra — and turn it into a book. (Will the publisher put a blurb on the cover: “Improved — now with more lies!”? Er, maybe not, but that has a suitably Kausian sound to it.)

I wonder if he’ll be posting more than once a day now that the dissertation is done. I haven’t asked, but I’ll bet the real barrier is MSNBC’s set-up. It seems that Big Media websites don’t allow posting with the convenience of programs like MT or Blogger, with the exception of NRO, which has just incorporated Blogger into its setup. I wonder why more places don’t do something like that.

OUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE: I haven’t read the book in question, but this review makes Timothy Ferris’s Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space, and Guarding Earth from Interplanetary Peril sound pretty cool. And it’s certainly true that amateur astronomers (whose operations are in some ways as sophisticated as the professionals’) are the ones most likely to spot some dangers, such as an asteroid or comet aimed at Earth.

If Ferris makes one point, he makes it again and again: Don’t overlook “the backyard stargazer who searches with a telescope for previously undiscovered asteroids and comets.”

These thought adventurers gazing up at the night sky from backyards all over the world are “simultaneously engaged in two missions — a study of our origins and a reconnaissance that just might bear on our survival.”

There have even been some efforts to harness these amateurs in a more organized fashion, via prizes for discovering earth-crossing asteroids. As individuals get richer, and as technology extends their capabilities, informal groups of interested amateurs are likely to become the main means of addressing some important problems. In fact, as this example makes clear, they already have.

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Rachel Lucas can’t find anything to rant about. What has this person done with the real Rachel Lucas?

FLIGHT 93 CONSPIRACY THEORIES — which involve the idea that the plane was shot down, but that it’s being covered up — make a lot of the timing discrepancy between the seismic record of the crash and when the voice recorder data end. But the seismic data are also inconsistent with the shoot-down theory according to this item in Discover magazine:

Based on the amount of seismic energy, Wallace could estimate how the plane came down: “The UA flight produced a significant signal, consistent with a fully-loaded jet that was intact, or nearly intact, on impact.” That finding disputes rumors that the hijacked jet was shot down, he says, because a missile or other explosion would have broken the craft into smaller pieces that would have caused less seismic disturbance. The Pan Am crash over Lockerbie, Scotland, which blew apart in midair, produced only a faint signal, even though the crash occurred close to an array of ground-motion sensors. David McCormack, a seismologist at Natural Resources Canada who studied the Lockerbie crash, agrees with Wallace’s interpretation. “To detect a signal even marginally, the aircraft would have to be intact,” he says.

I’ve found the shoot-down / coverup theory rather flimsy anyway. I don’t see how to put the pieces together in a way that makes sense. Why would the government lie about shooting down the plane? They were getting flak, readers may recall, for not shooting down the others.

JASON RYLANDER SAYS THE DEMOCRATS ARE ABDICATING RESPONSIBILITY ON THE WAR:

I’m embarassed for my party right now, and nothing I see in the Democratic response to Iraq gives me hope for a Democratic political renaissance. As I see it, the Democrats have two choices: Start making some principled arguments to the American people showing why Bush is wrong on Iraq, or start convincing us liberals why, in this case, our usual skepticism about military action is wrong. That is the choice Messrs. Daschle, Gephardt, Kerry, Kerrey, Clinton, Biden, Dean, Edwards, and other prominent Democrats face.

This sounds a lot like what Indepundit Scott Koenig is saying in his Daschle Dawdle Watch, and I agree with both of them. There’s a case to be made against war — maybe even an intelligent one as opposed to the of-course-America-is-wrong line we’re getting from the usual Chomskian suspects. And we’d be better off if someone were making it clearly and responsibly. (Robert Wright has been doing a much better job than Daschle, et al.) But making that case requires taking a position that someone might hold against you later, as opposed to carping from the sidelines and hoping to capitalize if it all goes wrong. Those who lack the backbone to take a position at a time like this aren’t qualified to hold office.

UPDATE: Athena Runner has a similar take. Oh, and I should link this editorial from The New Republic:

The Democrats’ evasions come in several forms. The first, and most naked, is the contention that the Iraq debate should wait until after the November elections. This is what Senator Ted Kennedy meant when he argued last week that “we can’t let it [Iraq] replace the domestic agenda,” and it is what Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe meant when he declared hopefully that “people are going to vote on the kitchen-table issues we’ve talked about for eighteen months.” But if the Democrats succeed, if they make this fall’s election a referendum on prescription drugs and pension reform, they will have done the voters a disservice. Elections should be about the most urgent issues facing the country; and compared with war with Iraq, the Democrats’ litany of poll-tested standbys is frankly trivial.

When this last sentence was quoted to Tom Daschle on This Week he replied by pretending to misunderstand — disingenuously, I think — and saying that he agreed with The New Republic that important issues like prescription drugs were suffering because of too much focus on the war. That’s not the point of the piece, Tom.

MOIRA BREEN is looking for a primer on nation-building.

LAST MONTH I mentioned the claim by Carl Bogus that Joyce Malcolm’s historical research on guns was “discredited.” I suggested that Bogus was, ahem, engaging in wishful thinking. Now Dave Kopel says that rather more strongly.

CHRETIEN UPDATE: Mark Steyn is dissing him and the horse he rode in on:

M. Chrétien, whatever his efficacy as a small-time largesse-dispensing ward-heeler, has never troubled himself to form anything approaching a political philosophy. So, ask him what’s to blame for September 11th, and he falls back on that old standby — “global poverty,” the growing “inequality” between rich and poor.

Let’s spell it out: There’s no such thing. The story of the last 30 years is the emergence of “a new world middle class,” as Professor Xavier Sala-i-Martin calls them in his study The World Distribution Of Income. This class is made up of some 2.5 billion people in the developing world, whose standards of living now approach those of the West. That’s to say, roughly half the people in the developing world are doing pretty well economically. As Virginia Postrel wrote in The New York Times recently, taking the world’s population as a whole, in 1998 “the largest number of people earned about $8,000 — a standard of living equivalent to Portugal’s.”

Why hasn’t the Middle East shared in this economic growth? Because they’re failed states run by kleptocrats who govern by clan and corruption and whose starting point is to exclude half the population — the women — from the economic life of the country. If M. Chrétien wants to give Paul Wells’s salary to President Mubarak, that’s up to him but it will have zero effect on either poverty or terrorism. . . .

The Islamists have no rational demands, and no conceivable changes to U.S. policy will deflect them. M. Chrétien says he formulated his theory –American arrogance plus Osama’s poverty equals global terrorism — on the evening of September 11th. And what’s heartening is that in the last 12 months nothing in the torrent of evidence has stirred our grand buffoon from his complacency.

There’s more.

WORTH READING IN FULL:

For leftists like me who had long considered Chomsky as our own beacon of moral clarity, it is hard to say which development is more catastrophic: the fact that Chomsky-bashing has become a major political pastime, or the fact that Chomsky has become so very difficult to defend. Chomsky’s response to the war in Afghanistan offered a repellent mix of hysteria and hauteur. . . .

The antiwar left once knew well that its anti-imperialism was in fact a form of patriotism – until it lost its bearings in Kosovo and Kabul, insisting beyond all reason that those military campaigns were imperialist wars for oil or regional power. And why does that matter? Because in the agora of public opinion, the antiwar left never claimed to speak to pragmatic concerns or political contingencies: for the antiwar left, the moral ground was the only ground there was. So when the antiwar left finds itself on shaky moral ground, it simply collapses.

I wonder what happened to the left such that it became capable of horror at the thought of removing a (quite literally) fascist dictator.

UPDATE: Alex Bensky writes:

Thanks; I’m still unimpressed.

Berube reminds me of the leftists and outright commies who decided after the Czech invasion of 1968 that maybe the Soviets weren’t leading the way to the radiant future. All I could think of then was, “Where the hell have they

been?”

This is the Noam Chomsky who defended the Cambodian massacres, wrote a forward to a holocaust denier’s book, and has readily and vigorously defended some of the worst assaults on human rights imaginable. He’s been doing this at least since American Power and the New Mandarins (which was taken apart in Robert James Maddox’s curiously ignored The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War). Five minutes on the internet would lay out a sorry litany of Chomsky’s nastiness.

And now Michael Berube decides that maybe Chomsky isn’t the best the left has

to offer? Where the hell has he been?

In a parallel universe, the same one where people argue, as they do, that Chomsky’s defense of the Khmer Rouge is “misinterpreted.” But maybe it’s because I’m a teacher that I feel hope when I see the light begin to dawn in anyone, however benighted.

THE REAL REASON why Hussein is inviting arms inspectors in:

“Frankly, I just want to know if these bombs are going to work,” said Hussein. “Our scientists don’t have enough experience and Iraqis don’t exactly have a reputation for craftsmanship. Who better to judge whether these armaments are functional than the best weapons inspectors in the world?”

This almost makes sense.