JAMES LILEKS HAS SOME THOUGHTS about antisemitism in Minnesota, and elsewhere.

EUGENE ROSTOW, one of my old law professors, is dead. He was one of my “old” law professors even when I had him, and had to take off part of a semester for a heart attack. But he was an excellent teacher, and encouraged me to publish the paper I wrote for his class, thus starting me on an academic career even though I don’t think he agreed with the paper’s conclusions. And his 1945 article, The Japanese-American Cases: A Disaster, is a classic.

GOOD NEWS / BAD NEWS: Okay, I have to go teach Administrative Law, but I just ran into my old secretary who left here for a job with the county public health department. She’s carrying a pager that’s just for smallpox (or other bioterrorism, but smallpox is what they’re worried about). She gets her shot next week. They’ve already identified the locations where they’ll give emergency vaccinations, and they’ve made all the plans on who goes where with what so that all it takes to start the vaccination process is one mass pager message. They even have pre-arrangements for buses to take people to the innoculation centers.

I’m glad to hear that there’s so much planning and efficiency involved. But it indicates to me that someone is taking the threat rather more seriously than the general run of the media tends to suggest. And while the efficiency is comforting, what this says about the threat isn’t comforting at all.

SORRY for the light posting this morning. I’ve been kind of busy, and not feeling especially well, this week. But here’s a big Paul McCartney post from Blogcritics. I’ll try to have more later this afternoon.

JACK O’TOOLE’S POLITICALPROFESSIONAL.COM is back up and running, after an extended hiatus. Welcome back, Jack!

STEVEN DEN BESTE has some thoughts on permalinks and “coccooning” on the left.

UPDATE: Hesiod Theogeny replies. (And Wilde responds, though Hesiod seems to have changed his post since Wilde’s response).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Vegard Valberg says Den Beste is wrong.

ONE MORE: Eugene Volokh has some cogent thoughts.

OKAY THIS REALLY IS THE LAST ONE: Max Sawicky has weighed in. Meanwhile, Bill Peschel emails:

I’m still busy with the kids on my day off, so I haven’t blogged on this, but I just checked Rittenhouse’s site and see that two of them — Aint No Bad Dude and Into the Breach — are still linked to Charles Johnson’s site, five days after Rittenhouse threatened to purge his blogroll of lgf’s “fellow travelers.”

In fact, I don’t think they even know they’re “under the gun.”

All this floss flying about censorship and cocoons, and nothing has actually happened.

Is there a blogging version of “all hat and no cattle?”

Um, isn’t that what blogging is all about? . . . . And Stefan Sharkansky says he’s identified some hate speech.

A FINE ESSAY by the father of a Marine, in the Washington Post. Excerpts:

Before my son became a Marine, I never thought much about who was defending me. . . .

John’s enlisting was unexpected, so deeply unsettling. I did not relish the prospect of answering the question “So where is John going to college?” from the parents who were itching to tell me all about how their son or daughter was going to Harvard. At the private high school John attended, no other students were going into the military.

“But aren’t the Marines terribly Southern?” asked one perplexed mother while standing next to me at the brunch following graduation. “What a waste, he was such a good student,” said another parent. One parent (a professor at a nearby and rather famous university) spoke up at a school meeting and suggested that the school should “carefully evaluate what went wrong.” . . .

My son has connected me to my country in a way that I was too selfish and insular to experience before. I feel closer to the waitress at our local diner than to some of my oldest friends. She has two sons in the Corps. They are facing the same dangers as my boy. When the guy who fixes my car asks me how John is doing, I know he means it. His younger brother is in the Navy.

Read the whole thing. The author will be doing a live online discussion at WashingtonPost.Com at 1 p.m. Eastern today.

MOXIE OFFERS BIRTHDAY ADVICE FOR THE BUSH TWINS.

THE DMCA AS ANTITRUST VIOLATION? Using it to keep people from sharing sale prices seems like one to me. I hope that some state attorneys general investigate this.

UPDATE: Reader Howard Marvel says that there shouldn’t be an antitrust issue here unless there’s collusion involved. I don’t know, of course, but complaints from multiple people, with the same legal theory, addressed to the same fairly obscure website, suggest to me that there probably is. But that’s why I posed it as a question, not a conclusion, and suggested investigation.

FREE SPEECH AT MICHIGAN: Catharine MacKinnon recently lectured on free speech and academic freedom. At least one student is rather unhappy.

UPDATE: I wonder what MacKinnon would say about this?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Alex Bensky writes:

Professor MacKinnon does serve one, albeit, minor constructive purpose. Some years ago, in a week moment, the University of Michigan law school gave me a degree. Every so often they ask me for money and if I’m ever tempted to give them any I remember that MacKinnon is on the faculty.

This is nothing new. The day of the faculty-sponsored picnic for graduating students in 1973 a number of female medical students showed their displeasure with a supposedly offensive textbook by burning a number of copies. I was upset about this and was stunned that evening when almost everyone else seemed to see this as not noteworthy.

A professor went to China one summer and then lectured to an avid and approving audience about how the Chinese system was based on real justice, aimed at rehabilitation only, was gentle and considerate of the human rights of all. This was during the cultural revolution. I recall disapproving looks from everyone when during question time I suggested that perhaps this wasn’t all there was to the justice system in the Some People’s Republic.

And so on. In the spring of 1972 I could only rarely walk down the street, minding my own business and wearing a “Humphrey for President” button, without drawing catcalls and insults.

A frequent theme in the law school’s fundraising letters is the need to maintain the high prestige that the law school enjoys. I am sorry to say that I have never been able to take quite the pride in my Michigan J.D. I wish I could.

Well, a university is a big place, and it’s not fair to judge it by the actions of a few. But it’s certainly true that Professor MacKinnon adds no lustre to Michigan’s stature in the free-speech department. Meanwhile Halley’s Comment offers a perspective on 21st-century feminism that MacKinnon is unlikely to favor.

A SCIENTIST-READER EMAILS ABOUT MICHAEL CRICHTON’S PREY:

OK, I just finished reading Prey.

Yow. A thin veneer of science, with frequent references to genetic algorithms, nanotechnology, molecular this and that, genetic engineering, etc. is used to gussy up a plot that merges the juicy bits from various B sci-fi movies of the past, including “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” tracking down nests of loathsome insects, the small group of desperate people being picked off, one-by-one, by the loathsome enemy (with a traitor in their midst) and various and sundry other random things. Then it throws in the afternoon soaps, and some other stuff.

Conclusion: “A good story, nothing to do with nanotechnology.”

My copy should arrive today. I’ll let you know what I think when I’m done.

SAY, WHAT IF ALL THE TALK ABOUT IRAQ has just been misdirection?

DENISE HOWELL has blogged the Pavlovich case. This is going to make it hard for Big Entertainment companies to sue people in a friendly California court.

IT’S HARD TO BE A MODERATE MUSLIM IN EGYPT. And a lot of other places, apparently.

JOHN RAWLS HAS DIED.

UPDATE: Jacob T. Levy has a remembrance.

VIA JERRY POURNELLE I found this cool satellite image of fog in Central California.

He also points to this excellent essay on copyright, which I had meant to link last week but didn’t. Check ’em both out. Here’s an excerpt from the essay:

The Founding Fathers wanted that term to be 14 years, with an additional 14 years if the author were still alive. After 28 years, they figured you’d had your chance to exploit your creation, and now it belonged to the nation at large. That way we would never end up with a system of hereditary privilege, similar to the printers guilds of Renaissance England, who tied up rights to dead authors and tightly controlled what could or could not be printed and who could or could not use literary material.

In America, land of free ideas as well as free people, this would never happen, they said.

Well, it’s happened. It’s happened because for years now Congress has allowed it to happen. We now have an exact replica of the medieval Stationers’ Company, which controlled the English copyrights, only its names today are Disney, Bertelsmann, and AOL Time Warner. The big media companies, holding the copyrights of dead authors, have said, in effect, that Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton were wrong and that we should go back to the aristocratic system of hereditary ownership, granting copyrights in perpetuity. To effect this result, they’ve liberally greased the palms of Congressmen in the form of campaign contributions — and it’s worked.

Yep.

HERE’S SOME GOOD NEWS:

The US will on Tuesday unveil a bold proposal to eliminate tariffs on manufactured goods, calling for countries in the World Trade Organisation to sweep away all duties no later than 2015. . . .

The key elements of the US proposal, according to industry and congressional officials briefed on the plan, are: A rapid reduction in high tariffs on non-agricultural products, so that by 2010 there would be no tariffs above 8 per cent. All tariffs would then be reduced progressively to zero by 2015. The elimination, no later than 2010, of all duties that are currently below 5 per cent. A parallel initiative calling for faster elimination of tariffs in many industrial sectors such as chemicals, paper, wood and construction equipment.

Wonder how it’ll fly in Europe?

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST. In Algeria, this time.

ANTISEMITISM IN EUROPE? No way!

DEREK LOWE isn’t impressed with Craig Venter’s plans to create a new “artificial” form of life:

The whole project could be explained in terms of cars and trucks: what we have here is an attempt to disassemble a small car down to the most primitive conveyance possible, by removing parts one by one until nothing extraneous remains. This stripped-down go-cart will indeed be a new vehicle, one that’s so simple that it could be built from things lying around the house, stuff that you wouldn’t normally associate with cars at all. People that think that you need a huge factory to build a car will be amazed. But this thing won’t stand a chance on the open road, and will probably barely make it around your back yard on a warm day.

The Neal Stephenson quote is good, too.

MICHAEL MOORE’S ONE-MAN SHOW GETS A BAD REVIEW FROM CLIVE DAVIS:

The show is certainly worth seeing, but not quite for the reasons that Mr. Moore imagines. If you want to know why much of the left has lost its moral compass, if you want to know why Christopher Hitchens no longer feels able to write for the Nation, the reasons are writ large in Mr. Moore’s staggeringly crude mixture of agitprop and stand-up comedy.

He works from a simple premise. America is the evil empire, one vast, continental gulag with McDonald’s golden arches towering above the barbed wire fence. Corporations grind the workers into the ground and devote endless ingenuity to finding new ways of polluting the atmosphere. Black people are little more than slaves, and all those intelligent people who did not vote for George W. Bush two years ago are busy digging an escape tunnel to Canada.

I exaggerate, of course. But not by much.

Davis loves OxBlog, though! No, really:

Few members of his British fan club bother to acquaint themselves with the basic facts about the American political system, so they fall easy prey to his fictions. The point was put forcefully to me by David Adesnik, one of the three American post-grad students who run Oxblog, a new web log devoted to foreign policy musings. As Mr. Adesnik observed when I met him and his two colleagues Joshua Chafetz and Dan Urman last week, it is amazing how much familiarity with McDonald’s, Arnold Schwarzenegger and MTV substitute for knowledge of real American culture.

Yeah, I’ve noticed that too.

ONCE AGAIN, I find out what’s going on at my own campus via Eugene Volokh’s weblog. Here’s the story:

None of the six Kappa Sigma fraternity members at the University of Tennessee will face disciplinary action by UT for allegedly painting their faces black for a party.

Although UT-Knoxville’s Kappa Sigma chapter was suspended by the fraternity’s national headquarters due to the incident, both the fraternity and individual members are protected from official school sanctions by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, according to an “overview” of the Oct. 22 incident released by UT.

“Controversy and debate are a normal part of life at a university, and (UT) is firmly committed to protecting the constiutional rights of freedom of speech and expression – even when some find it to be insensitve and offensive,” said the UT report.

It took them a while to come around, but they did come around. Good for them.

ANOTHER LETTER FROM OSAMA has been discovered on yet another rabble-rousing website.

UPDATE: This is pretty good, too.

STILL MORE ON THE CUNY/BROOKLYN COLLEGE TENURE CASE, over at The Volokh Conspiracy. One of the College’s early defenders has now changed his mind and decided that Professor Johnson is being unfairly punished for his political views.

I JUST HEARD NPR reporting on the FBI hate-crime story that Iain Murray has already debunked. Excerpt:

The hate crimes figures are a joke. Alabama regularly reports no hate crimes. The total number that the FBI reports is normally lower than absolute number of murders. Because no-one can agree on what a hate crime is, agencies vary in how they record and report them. The base number of anti-muslim incidents from 2000 was tiny — 28 — and so any increase is going to be large in percentage terms. There are still, however, only half as many anti-muslim incidents as there are anti-jewish ones. If there were more incidents this year than last overall, this was at least partly because a lot more police agencies are contributing figures this year. This makes trend comparisons impossible, and the AP was very naughty to say they increased by 17 percent.

But you’ve got to say there’s a trend or there’s no story. Scroll down for more debunking, this time directed at MADD’s latest report.