CLAYTON CRAMER NOTES ANOTHER DEFENSIVE HANDGUN USE, pointing out that “These don’t get much coverage nationally, but they happen frequently.”

IAIN MURRAY REPORTS on a poll suggesting that Brits are developing an astonishingly, well, American attitude toward crime.

SARS UPDATE: A friend in China sends a disquieting report, suggesting that things there are worse than I had realized:

Within the past week, it has finally become evident that the Chinese government’s failure to own up to the SARS problem when it began several months ago is coming back to haunt it, at the expense of many innocent people who had no idea that their government was (once again) lying to them. Although we have always known that we were visiting an authoritarian regime that lacks a free press, until this week, the police presence has been relatively low-key and the “news” in the China Daily has been a source of amusement to us. It is easy, in the capitalist mecca of Shanghai, to forget a key fact that the government here plainly wants you to forget but that is now quite clear: This is very much a police state. . . .

[Numerous anecdotes of coverups, “appearance-oriented” strategies, and so on follow. Example: a sick student showing up at a university clinic and being told “There is no SARS at the University. Do you want to be the first case?” after which he went home without treatment. Shanghai is reortedly quarantining anyone who enters the city from anywhere else.]

But for the facts that it is rapidly heading toward martial law and is infected with a contagious and potentially lethal disease, Shanghai is a fantastic city. . . . China is a growing world power with enormous political, military, and economic importance. But it will not be a full-fledged member of the world community until it meets its responsibilities to other countries and to its own people.

The report suggests that things are much worse elsewhere in China, particularly in Beijing and Guangzhou. I should note that my friend was until recently very optimistic about China, and very favorably disposed toward the direction that its government is taking. I suspect that the damage done to China’s reputation may, in some ways, do as much harm as the disease itself. China will have to work very hard to get out of this hole.

RACHEL BELTON WRITES THAT WE SHOULD KEEP THE UNITED NATIONS OUT OF IRAQ:

The United Nations and international allies promised to rebuild democracy in Bosnia. Seven years later, they have departed — only to hand over responsibility for the semi-state to the European Union. They failed again in Kosovo, where they are preventing a civil war but have brought little movement toward self-government in their four-year reign. In Afghanistan, international aid is coming too little and too late to support the fragile government.

The failure of these efforts to build autonomous, sovereign democracies lies in the very structure of international coalitions. Coalitions diffuse responsibility. When Bosnia failed to arrest war criminals, each coalition member could blame its compatriots. No one felt responsible for ensuring the legitimacy of the coalition — or the success of the country. Slow funding from a coalition is also inevitable, given the multiple money streams and organizations that must be coordinated. Yet lack of disposable funds causes pro-Western politicians to lose ground to more shady leaders, often funded by less-savory states and criminal organizations, who can deliver results to the citizenry more quickly.

Reconstruction efforts often become the battlefields for unconnected struggles between coalition members. To gain the upper hand, “internationals” dissipate their time and energy playing politics against one another.

This seems right to me.

“BUSINESS AS USUAL:”

Yes, conceded the defendant — a man named Yves Verwaerde — he had opened a $2 million Swiss bank account with the code name “Salad” in July 1991, when he was a Member of the European Parliament. It was his other employer at the time, the French oil company Elf, that asked him to open the account, he explained. The salad full of greenbacks was earmarked for Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader in Angola, where Elf was negotiating important contracts.

Listening intently in the wood-paneled courtroom of the Paris Tribunal last week, Judge Michel Desplan had some questions. If this $2 million was for Savimbi, how come Verwaerde had allegedly used about $300,000 of it to build a villa for himself on Ibiza? And why did his wife have power of attorney over the account? Verwaerde didn’t miss a beat. He claimed that Savimbi himself had said he could dip into the money. As for his wife, “she was usually the one who picked up the telephone when it rang, so she spoke to Savimbi several times when he called my home,” he replied. . . .

Why would Elf make potentially illicit payments to French politicians? Le Floch-Prigent’s rationale had a touch of paranoia to it: “Elf is a French company up against the Anglo-Saxon world,” he told the court. “We are David against Goliath. Our politicians had to support us everywhere. In Africa, for example, if we got into a war between Socialists and Gaullists, we wouldn’t know where to go. A certain number of French politicians were capable of destabilizing Elf. We had to shut them up or make sure they were with us.”

Those damned Anglo-Saxons! We needed those villas to compete with them!

SLATE IS MAKING MONEY: Cool.

A BLAIR/CHIRAC SPLIT WIDENS:

Tony Blair has issued a direct challenge to France’s Jacques Chirac over the future of the transatlantic relationship by warning that the French president’s vision of Europe as a rival to the US is dangerously destabilising. . . .

Meanwhile a new MORI poll for the FT reveals that 55 per cent of Britons regard France as the UK’s least reliable ally, while 73 per cent view the US as the country’s most reliable.

Blair would like to heal the breach, but with Chirac’s ambitions — and, now, obvious efforts on behalf of a military enemy — it’s hard to see how that can happen.

PITCH CORRECTION IS THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET of pop music. Now R.S. Field, one of my favorite record producers (he produces Webb Wilder, John Mayall, and has worked with Steve Earle), is blowing things wide open with a sticker on the latest album he’s produced:

Pitch correction is actually one of many computer-based tools that producers use to make singers sound better. Using increasingly common studio software such as Pro Tools, flat notes can be fixed, off-key vocals can be spruced up and entire performances can be cut and pasted together from several different takes.

According to industry insiders, many successful mainstream artists in most genres of music — perhaps a majority of artists — are using pitch correction. Now some in the music industry think the focus on perfection has gone too far.

“Vocal tuning is contributing to the Milli Vanilli-fication of modern music,” says R.S. Field, who produced Moorer’s record. Putting the sticker on the record, he says, “was sort of our little freak flag.”

The software is, I have to say, very cool. You can program in the scale and it’ll force someone’s voice to it, or you can put it in automatic mode and it will just move the voice to the nearest “real” interval. I don’t use it (don’t believe me? Just listen to any record I ever produced!) but I’ve been tempted from time to time.

The problem is that — like quantization, which does the same thing, essentially, for beats — while a little bit of it may save an otherwise great take, more than a little tends to make everything sound the same: perfect, but lifeless. And the temptation is to overdo it. There’s a lot of that out there.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus is waiting for the blog application!

CHRIS REGAN HAS BEEN LOOKING AT DATES on the Iraqi documents that have been discovered. It makes him think less of Barbara Bodine.

MATT WELCH ACCUSES COLIN POWELL of being too close to Saudi Prince Bandar. His source: Colin Powell.

MORE FRENCH COLLUSION WITH IRAQ:

France colluded with the Iraqi secret service to undermine a Paris conference held by the prominent human rights group Indict, according to documents found in the foreign ministry in Baghdad.

Various documents state that the Iraqis believed the French were doing their utmost to prevent the meeting from going ahead.

Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP who chairs Indict, said last night that she would be demanding an apology from the French government for its behaviour, which she described as “atrocious”. . . .

Saddam supporters staged a protest outside before it started, she said, and at one point a bomb scare led to the hall having to be evacuated.

Victims of Saddam’s regime gave evidence at the conference and filming was strictly forbidden because they feared being identified.

But someone smuggled in a camera and started filming, Miss Clwyd said.

“The police were called. But they could not take the film from the man because he was an Iraqi accredited to the Moroccan embassy.”

The French foreign ministry denied collusion.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: And here’s more on George Galloway:

The appeal set up by George Galloway to treat a sick Iraqi child spent more than £800,000 on political campaigns and expenses, including a direct salary payment to his wife, the MP admitted yesterday.

Dr Amineh Abu Zayyad, Mr Galloway’s Palestinian wife, was paid around £18,000 by the appeal fund to “look after” Mariam Hamza, the girl who received treatment for leukaemia in Britain and America.

It’s always the money with these tribunes of the people. As Tim Blair notes:

The charity spent £860,000 on anti-sanctions campaigns, expenses and administration, and only £100,000 on the kid. She was effectively used as a front for a propaganda operation.

He thinks things are looking bad for George.

BILL WHITTLE hopes the Iraqis kick our ass. No, really, he does.

THE CONSPIRACY IS UNRAVELLING. Whatever shall I do?

MICHAEL MOORE CRITIC DAVID HARDY is scheduled to appear on FoxNews’s Fox & Friends tomorrow morning around 8:45 a.m. It’ll probably be a boost for the Revoke the Oscar campaign.

JEFF JARVIS has observations on democracy in Iraq, Iran,and China. Just keep scrolling.

HOWARD OWENS WRITES that we shouldn’t worry about charges of imperialism:

It’s a charge leveled by people who want the power for themselves and their kind. In Athens, it was the oligarchy, displaced by the democrats who trumped up the imperialism charge, then conspired with Sparta to war against Athens. Today, it’s a wide swath of liberals and a few conservatives (mostly paleos like Pat Buchanan) who blame western liberalism for all the evils of the world. Such people are uncomfortable with the uncertainty an open society engenders, and either consciously or unconsciously they seek more order and centralized control.

The charge of imperialism has nothing to do with any actual fault of the United States, and more to do with a fear that America’s model, the open society, will take hold in more regions of the world.

Interesting.

UPDATE: Don Williams sent me a lengthy comment on Howard Owens’ history, which he says is wrong, but it was too long to post here. He’s posted it with Howard’s essay — it’s comment #21, just scroll down.

JESSE WALKER NICELY CORRECTS an error from his USA Today piece on Iran. That’s one of the nice things about a blog: fast’n’easy error corrections. God knows when, if ever, he’ll be able to get USA Today to run the correction. And it’s another good reason to have your Big Media pieces link to your blog!

I didn’t even catch the error when I read the piece, because — seeing what I expected instead of what was there — I read it as saying that Iran isn’t as oppressive as Saddam was, which is true, rather than as saying what it actually said. So for me, at least, it was harmless error.

MORE SUPPORT for Mickey Kaus’s theory on why Cuba is so popular with politicians and celebrities: “It’s the ‘ho’s!”

HOORAY FOR JEFF BEZOS:

Now he has a $1.7 billion fortune to try to convert that dream into reality. NEWSWEEK has learned that Bezos created Blue Origin, also known as Blue Operations LLC, to pursue his fervent dream of establishing an enduring human presence in space. He has surreptitiously recruited a stable of rocketeers: physicists, ex-NASA scientists, veterans of failed space start-ups and even sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson (“Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon”), who has a lifelong interest in rocketry. People familiar with the firm say Bezos spends part of a day each week at Blue, and is in frequent touch through e-mail, pinging his staff with technical questions. These sources say Blue Origin is actually building a spacecraft whose mission will be closely related to some of the first voyages that brought astronauts to the very edge of space. Confident that people want to travel beyond the Earth’s atmosphere—even after a second shuttle disaster—Bezos and his engineers are in the process of working on rocket designs. They’re adding staff and aiming toward launching a reusable space vehicle into suborbital space, with seven tourists onboard, in the next few years.

I wonder if he’s a Star Trek fan?

UPDATE: Reader Demian McLean emails that Bezos is indeed a Star Trek Fan:

I worked at Amazon for four years. Bezos named his dog “Kamala,” after a minor character on The Next Generation. Kamala was the metamorph in the episode titled “The Perfect Mate.”

I knew it!

I WONDER IF THIS MADE AL JAZEERA?

(04-27) 10:40 PDT CAMP BUCCA, Iraq (AP) —

Chanting “Saddam no, Bush yes,” some 200 Iraqi prisoners of war were let go Sunday at the coalition’s main internment camp in the desert near the southern port of Umm Qasr.

The men, many of them barefooted, shook hands with the American soldiers guarding the camp before boarding buses and trucks to be driven to nearby Basra, southern Iraq’s largest city. . . .

“I gave orders to my five men not to fight and we surrendered,” he said, his eyes red from the sand. “Americans were coming for our own good. … What has Saddam done for us? I’m 30 and I haven’t enjoyed life — no justice, no piece of land, no car.” . . .

The men gave thumbs-up signs and peppered journalists with questions: “No more Saddam statues?” “No more military service?” “No more executions?”

Hussam Abbas, from Basra, said all he had known in his 25 years were prisons and military service. “I gave myself in so that I would have a chance to be evacuated and not to come back to Iraq,” he said. “But now, I am happy. We got rid of Saddam who oppressed us.”

Hanging out a bus window, Mussalam Hassan, 22, shouted happily: “We did not fire a single shot!” He said he was taken prisoner in Rumeila on March 21, the second day of the war.

I sure hope so.

ACCORDING TO THIS ARTICLE, Saddam was bribing a lot of journalists and politicians.

Is it ethical not to expose these people, if we find out who they are?

UPDATE: Meanwhile, these thoughts on George Galloway:

Leaving aside unproved accusations of personal gain, there are other explanations that might cover George’s sudden blindness on the road to Baghdad. And the most obvious is that sin of the committed, the belief that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Or, in the context of the modern world, any anti-American will do. When Iraq stopped being a friend of the West it became a friend of George’s.

This is linked to a characteristic of much of the Left, which is a strangely cavalier attitude towards freedom and democracy. What, for example, should we make of this question from Tam Dalyell, asked in Parliament in 1998: ‘Is an alternative to Saddam Hussein,’ queried the man who has condemned Tony Blair as a war criminal, ‘really preferable? How can we be sure that post-Saddam Iraq will not descend into civil war along religious and tribal lines – like the north of Iraq?’

True, the same people will often shield themselves with one half sentence about Saddam’s ‘appaling human rights record’. But this is a phrase invoked as a defence against the reality of that record.

Indeed.

JIM LINDGREN WRITES IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE ABOUT IRAQ AND EXPECTATIONS:

A few days ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld referred to the continuing confusion and death in Iraq as “untidiness”–a euphemism for something far more serious. Yet community upheavals can be deadly–even in the absence of war, cruise missiles, and attack helicopters.

Just last year, more than 200 people died in riots in Nigeria over newspaper comments about the Miss World contest. In the three days of burning and looting in the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, 52 people died and 1,200 businesses were destroyed. Looting was also a big part of the 1990 Detroit Pistons riots, which killed 7 people. In the 1993 Chicago Bulls riots, our fellow Chicagoans killed 3, shot 20 more people, looted 197 businesses, and damaged more police cars than the chase scenes in “The Blues Brothers” movie–139 cruisers in all.

These numbers, of course, are mere shadows of what can happen when a people are freed from colonial rule and millions are forced to relocate, as happened in 1947 with the partition of India and Pakistan. In a recent issue of the scholarly journal Asian Ethnicity, professor Ishtiag Ahmed offers estimates that 2 million people were killed and 750,000 women raped in the violence accompanying the partition. . . .

The French were so angry after only four brutal years of Nazi occupation that more than 9,000 collaborators were summarily killed at the end of the war, according to standard academic accounts. And these vigilantes were the oh-so-civilized French.

The evolving process of reform after World War II was slow. Britain’s wartime rationing continued until 1954–and, remember, Britain was bombed but not invaded, and it won that war. Sometimes I wonder whether the English might still be under wartime rationing if they hadn’t kicked out the Labor government for a few years in the 1950s and brought Winston Churchill back in.

Read the whole thing.

YES, I know that NRO has been hacked. I emailed them earlier this morning, just in case nobody had noticed, though I imagine they’ve gotten plenty of emails.

UPDATE: Joshua Claybourn reports that the hacker is French.

MICKEY KAUS is all over Rupert Murdoch and Robert Reich.

SGTSTRYKER.COM and a bunch of other blogs are having problems. This is because CornerHost has problems, which seem to have been precipitated by an outfit called ServerBeach. Got that? Updates are on CornerHost’s offsite status blog here.