THIS SUCKS:

FALLUJAH, Iraq – U.S. soldiers mistakenly opened fire Friday on Iraqi police officers chasing highway bandits near an American checkpoint in a small town west of Fallujah, witnesses said. The U.S. military in Baghdad said it had no information on the incident.

No doubt we’ll hear more about this as the situation develops.

UPDATE: James Rummel has more on how this happened — lack of insignia seems to be a problem. Ship over some police cars!

I’M NOT GOING TO POST ANY MORE TONIGHT: But if you haven’t seen this 9/11 memorial you might want to check it out. See you tomorrow.

I WON’T BE POSTING MUCH TODAY: Last year on September 11, I commemorated the day by posting nonstop. Today, I think I will take the opposite approach. But I’ll leave you this passage from Lee Harris’s forthcoming book, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History:

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct.

And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.

A lot of people haven’t learned that yet. But that’s what 9/11 is all about. Stephen Green understands. (And read this, too. And this.) Back later. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis is blogging from the World Trade Center via Starbucks and wi-fi.

UPDATE: Oh, and go read Lileks’ piece — now.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Check out this memorial on SKBubba’s page, which will only be there for a few more hours. And Bill Whittle has an essay up, too.

THIS RUMSFELD INTERVIEW IS INTERESTING, but here’s the bit that popped out to me, where he’s talking about terrorists in Iraq:

JIM LEHRER: And they’ve come to cause trouble and to kill people.

DONALD RUMSFELD: Sure. We’ve scooped them up and arrested them and killed them. There’s something in excess of 100 just from one or two countries. And we’ve got that many that have been captured and killed. And some of them have in their… they have money that they’ve been given to do this. They’ve got leaflets that recruited them.

I wonder which “one or two” countries we’re talking about. Well, I don’t wonder much. This is good, too:

DONALD RUMSFELD: I think so. I think we’ve had to face the vulnerabilities that are there for the 21st century. And they weren’t there in that way for us. With these two big oceans and friends North and South, we’ve had a rather protected, safe environment. With terrorists being able to get access to jet airplanes and laptops and wire transfers and all kinds of electronics, with the proliferation of technologies that relate to a chemical and biological and radiation weapons and you look forward and you think, that’s going to be a quite different world, there are two or three terrorist states that are potentially going to be nuclear powers in the next three or four, five, eight, ten, twelve years. That creates a different environment that we’re going to be living in.

JIM LEHRER: How about here?

DONALD RUMSFELD: I think that people have registered that. They’re concerned for their safety. We are free people. We don’t want to live in fear. We don’t want to be terrorized. We know there’s no way to defend against it. The only way to deal with it is to go after the terrorists where they are. We’re killing, capturing terrorists in Iraq which is a… Baghdad today which is a whale of a lot better than Boise.

Yes, it is.

IF YOU’RE A LAWYER, you’d better be reading Howard Bashman’s blog. Because a judge might ask you why, if you don’t.

THIS STATE’S ATTORNEY made an honest mistake and tried to board an airplane with a gun he forgot he was carrying.

I hope that people who aren’t associated with law enforcement also receive the kind of courteous treatment that he apparently got. But I have some doubts.

In a possibly unrelated development, Alphecca’s weekly chart of media gun bias is up.

RON BAILEY REPORTS FROM CANCUN on the damage done to the world’s poor by protectionism.

WHAT? WHY DIDN’T WE THINK OF THIS BEFORE?

This morning on the Belgian radio news: Fientje Moerman, minister of economic affairs, lamenting about the woes the Kyoto protocol is causing. Either it means very heavy investments in even further (minimal) polution reduction (which causes companies to run away and jobs to be lost) or it means sending large amounts of cash abroad for no good reason (‘buying clean air elsewhere’). And some people in the government even want to put a cap on the amount of ‘clean air’ that can be bought elsewhere, thus forcing the loss of jobs.

Oh, and since there is policy to ‘get out of nuclear energy’ in Belgium, the pollution reduction forced on the industry has to be more severe than it already was when the protocol was signed: Nuclear plants don’t emit greenhouse gasses, but their future replacements surely will.

Freya Van Den Bossche, the minister for the environment, refused to comment.

International diplomacy has consequences? Go figure.

SHEILA O’MALLEY DIDN’T LIKE THE RIC BURNS DOCUMENTARY on PBS either:

But the special made me ANGRY. ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY. (Here’s the transcript)

You could play a drinking game watching it. Actually, that would make the whole thing more watchable. Here’s what you do: Take a drink every time you hear the word “hubris”. You would be SMASHED before the first hour was out.

The implication was that those buildings were asking for it. They were asking for it even before they were built. We were asking for it. You know what happens to people who have hubris! The Greeks taught us that! Hubris is punished!

It’s an odd mindset that sees hubris everywhere, but that cannot recognize evil.

UPDATE: Analog Mouse calls it the “she was asking for it” approach.

ALTERNET HAS A PIECE ENTITLED “THE IMPORTANCE OF LOSING THE WAR,” which says about all you need to know regarding the state of the “peace” movement. But then, that was visible before the war, with those who cheered Chrissie Hynde for hoping for defeat then: “she hopes the United States loses if it goes to war with Iraq (‘Bring it on! Give us what we deserve!’).”

Resurrection song is unimpressed. So am I. What kind of American regards an American victory as the worst of outcomes? Jonathan Schell, who told us that the Cold War was unwinnable. And who, one suspects, regrets that it was won.

UPDATE: Reader Scott Helgeson notes that this piece on Alternet faulted the Bush Administration for not doing enough in Afghanistan, just as the one above faults it for doing too much in Iraq. There’s no pleasing some people. Helgeson writes: “One thing I’ve noticed about this ‘pull out of Iraq, quick’ talk is that it is the exact opposite of what they were saying re:Afghanistan. Doesn’t ‘poverty cause terrorism’? Patty Murray is supporting W.’s road-building efforts in Iraq, right?”

And don’t forget the day-care centers!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Chris Stacy emails:

I almost threw this away as simply another example of leftist self-loathing, until I caught this whopper.

“But the United States, precisely because it is a single foreign state, which like all states has a highly self-interested agenda of its own, is incapable of providing Iraq with a government that serves its own people. The United States therefore must, to begin with, surrender control of the operation to an international force. ”

These two sentences, buried 2/3 of the way into the piece, form the entirety of Schell’s actual argument… And yet it is absolutely, completely and 100% conclusory. No evidence, not even any internal logic supports why this is so.

No surprise there.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Ralph Peters writes:

DESPAIR is the preferred narcotic of the intellectual classes. The rest of us must stand up for what we know in our hearts and souls to be right and true. Our cause is just. Our efforts in this great, global war have been admirably successful. Our soldiers have kept us safe and made us proud. We owe them unity, not divisiveness.

No power on this earth can defeat us, unless we defeat ourselves.

Schell’s doing his best. . . . And proving that Andrew Sullivan was entirely right when he wrote that a “fifth column” would emerge from within the ranks of the (self-labeled) intelligentsia.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some readers think that I’m being too hard on Schell, and that his piece is mere defeatism, rather than actual rooting for an American defeat. I suppose that, title aside, that’s a conceivable reading of the piece, but it’s not how I read it.

TIM LAMBERT HAS MORE on the seemingly interminable John Lott coding error question.

I’m inclined to agree with Mark Kleiman that the “con” is always in econometrics, and I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable to opine on the statistical questions. But perhaps Lott will respond on his site.

UPDATE: Lambert has more on Lott today. I am, as I’ve said before, not competent to assess the accuracy of Lott’s work, though at this point I’d be quite reluctant to rely on it. He’s wrong, however, to suggest that Lott’s accuracy bears on the constitutional right to bear arms, though it may bear on the policy question of whether concealed weapons reduce the crime rate or not.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kleiman emails to clarify a fuzzy memory of mine regarding something he had said earlier: “That why it’s so hard to take the ‘con’ out of econometrics: there are always sample definition, coding, and model-specification decisions to be made, and more often than not they’re big enough to matter. That’s why judging econometric work, except for the occasional finding of an intra-ocular correlation (i.e., one that hits you right between the eyes), depends so much on knowledge of the character of the person doing it.”

I thought I had remembered this post, but I wasn’t able to find it until he sent me the link. Sorry.

TWO YEARS ON, a weary nation takes stock. I’d say this piece gets it just about right.

JOHN SCALZI WEIGHS IN on the whole “cottage industry” topic, and notes:

Glenn speculates on some of the consequence of home workers (safer neighborhoods because burglars would never know when people were home, for example), but glosses over one of the primarily sociological aspects of self-employment, which is that those of us who are self-employed tend to become prickly DIYers who largely want to be left alone to do their own thing — i.e., vaguely libertarian. It’s like we all turn into New Hampshire Yankees or something. I don’t know if will translate into something perceptible, politically (Glenn leaves the politics aspect for a future column), but I sure know my capacity for BS in its myriad forms has lessened since I started working for myself, and that definitely informs how I vote.

Yes, I think that will be another column.

HANK WILLIAMS, SR. HAS A NEW ALBUM, Elvis is putting out a single — and Osama has a new release, too.

UPDATE: And Robert Heinlein is publishing a new novel!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Nelson Ascher emails that the difference is that Osama’s release is “just a remix.” Heh. Indeed.

BEST OF THE WEB IS DEFENDING HOWARD DEAN from a “smear” by Juan Williams, which it calls “shameful.”

UPDATE: Reader Mark Miller emails:

I think Best of the Web is going a little overboard. Obviously, Juan Williams did not phrase the question perfectly. But it was obvious to me what he meant, and in fact Taranto rephrased what he said in exactly the way Williams meant it. As Taranto points out in the same edition of best of the web, people do not always speak in perfectly formed sentences (in the piece on Jacob Weisberg’s Bushisms of the Day column).

Not having seen the debate, I have no idea of the context.

CELLULAR JAMMERS IN IRAQ: Darren Kaplan has an interesting report.

AIRBRUSHING AT THE ASSOCIATED PRESS? OxBlog has a report.

SUPPORTING THE TROOPS — It’s a small gesture, but a nice one:

NORFOLK, Va. — The Germans didn’t back the U.S. war in Iraq, but a German brewery is treating American sailors and soldiers to beer.

Munich-based Spaten, one of the world’s oldest breweries, is donating 600 cases of lager to each branch of the U.S. military for personnel who fought in the war.

Thanks, Spaten! Plus, they demonstrate one area of clear German cultural superiority:

However, there is one small problem that Louis Sieb, president of Spaten North America, did not consider when he came up with the idea. The average sailor is 20. Legal drinking age is 21.

“They give up everything, right? They put their lives on the line, right? And they can’t drink beer?”

Nope. Thank Nancy Reagan and Liddy Dole for that one.

AUSTIN BAY’S BOOK, The Wrong Side of Brightness, gets an excellent review from The Weekly Standard. Excerpt: “Austin Bay’s plot is alarmingly plausible in the vicious landscape of the past dozen years. His cast varies from the military to investment banking. These characters and their international settings are terrifically convincing. This is a gritty tale with an ethical core, neatly executed.”

I read the book a while back, and I liked it very much. (My only complaint was that it was too short).

YOU CAN HEAR SALAM PAX INTERVIEWED ON THE BBC HERE. He’s pretty positive, overall, especially by contrast to where the BBC interviewer keeps trying to take him. The subsequent webchat is here. And Randy Barnett summarizes a new poll of Iraqi attitudes, which also seem reasonably positive.

BY A VOTE OF 19-2 THE CALIFORNIA SENATE HAS DEMANDED THAT GRAY DAVIS APOLOGIZE for his crack about Arnold’s accent.

I’m glad to see them take a stand against Davis’s immigrant-bashing. (Via Volokh).

UPDATE: But the fight against racial prejudice at the highest levels of the Democratic Party in California is not without its setbacks, as Cruz Bustamante is still refusing to renounce MEChA. Well, we didn’t end Jim Crow overnight, either.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And it’s not just California, alas. Mark Kleiman writes:

Sharpton is easily the most despicable major figure in either of the two major parties, and yes I do include Trent Lott and Tom DeLay. The fact that no Democrat can run for President without appearing in the same room as Sharpton is the only good reason I can think of for voting Republican. It’s not a good enough reason, but it’s not chopped liver either.

He takes Slate to task for not being sufficiently critical of Sharpton. On the other hand (scroll up), I think he’s probably wrong about a racial angle to the anti-tax sentiments in Alabama. At least, the Tennessee anti-tax movement is all about not trusting the legislature — or our previous, Republican Governor, Don Sundquist — to spend the money wisely, or to keep promises about what would happen to tax rates. Tennessee’s not Alabama, of course, and I don’t follow Alabama state politics, so the extent to which this analogy holds is unclear, but that’s my experience.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails that Davis has apologized, but didn’t send a link. I couldn’t find a story on it, but while looking I found this Letterman joke:

David Letterman: “It’s getting ugly out there. The governor, the recall Governor, Gray Davis, was making fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s accent. He said if you want to be governor of California, you have to be able to pronounce it. And so, this upset Arnold, and Arnold said to be governor of California, you should be able to govern it.”

Ouch.

MORE: Bryan Preston isn’t impressed with Bustamante’s defenders (!) efforts to root the offending MEChA slogan in Cuban communism rather than simple racism.

STILL MORE: Pro-tax Mobile, Alabama reader Jennifer Jones sends a lengthy response to Kleiman’s suppositions regarding race and taxes — click “more” to read it.

EVEN MORE YET: Reader Lucian Truscott thinks that I’m equating MEChA with Jim Crow above. Huh? (Jim Crow was a set of laws; MEChA is an organization). My point was that it’s hard to change entrenched racist attitudes in a political leadership — as it was with Jim Crow. In this case what’s hard to change isn’t support for racial separatism by the majority, it’s the notion that racial separatism is okay when it’s by minority groups. Just in case anyone else was similarly confused, though it seems hard to believe that they could be. But heck, after the Ashcroft business, anything’s possible. (And believe it or not, I’ve gotten irate mail from Ashcroft-defenders since that happened. Sheesh.)

(more…)

HARRY POTTER: Feared by wacky fundamentalists of all stripes. Heh.

AN IRANIAN GIRL ASKED A.N.S.W.E.R. FOR HELP: Spot On reports that the response was, er, disappointing.

GO VOLS!

NICK GILLESPIE WRITES that last night’s Democratic debate is proof of Fox’s right-wing bias. Meanwhile, Polipundit has examined the transcript and found the scoop that everyone else missed

UPDATE: Nitin Gopal Julka writes that Howard Dean is losing him with his two-faced Israel policy.