IS THE UNITED STATES THE GREATEST THREAT TO WORLD PEACE? That’s what this poll from Time Europe asks. It’s being stuffed by folks from Muslim websites. You might want to go vote yourself.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

They are obviously screwing around with the numbers. I’ve watched them climb, and fall, for the last 30 minutes.

I thought I’d screw with them, so I wrote a java program that flooded the site with votes. (For Iraq, of course! Anything to piss off the Islamakazis!) It looked like it was working, and then the Iraq numbers started dropping again.

But the votes for the U.S. just keep rolling in….

Nah. Nothing to see here. Keep moving along….

Heh. I wonder if CAIR is involved somehow.

OKAY, it’s not Nick-blogging. It’s Disney-blogging. Or Milne-blogging. Steven Den Beste compares Europe to Rabbit, and America to Tigger. Debouncing efforts have been spectacularly unsuccessful.

KARL ROVE PLAYS ‘EM LIKE A VIOLIN, AGAIN: Remember all the hoopla about how hard David Frum’s new book was on the Administration? How the White House was issuing dark warnings about Frum’s public statements deviating from the Administration line? How the press ate that up? Cracks in the formerly solid facade. . . dissonance in the well-tuned orchestra . . . at last, leaks!

Er, only now the book’s out, and according to Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, “Mr. Frum sides in this book with the hawks in the administration, repeatedly dissing Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, while pressing for a strong-armed reorientation of American foreign policy.”

Then we find out that:

Mr. Frum holds up a sunny vision of a post-Saddam Hussein future in which Iraq becomes “a reliable American ally,” Iranians are “emboldened to rise against the mullahs,” the Saudis and other Arab states modernize, and “new prosperity” is brought “to us all, by securing the world’s largest pool of oil.”

The horror! The White House must be shaking in its boots over that one. And there’s this bit of political dynamite:

Mr. Frum claims that President Bush and John F. Kennedy “owed their connections with the public above all to the power of their words.”

Can you say “setup?” I knew that you could.

EUGENE VOLOKH HAS MORE ON THE CRUSHING OF DISSENT in America. Does the First Amendment mean nothing anymore?

And while Volokh is no Michael Barone, now Michael Barone is showing up on Volokh’s page. The man’s on a march of conquest through the blogosphere!

I’M MOSTLY AGAINST PRE-EMPTIVE LAW ENFORCEMENT, but I might make an exception where these ought-to-be-illegal puns are concerned.

KRISPY KREME AND SOUTHERN NOSTALGIA: Some interesting reflections from an expatriate Southerner.

“EVERY CITY IS POMPEII” — Lileks on urban nostalgia.

SPEAKING OF THE POST BELOW, ABOUT ATTENTION, I keep meaning to post something on the latest Lomborg flap, but people keep emailing me information. It’s all great information, but most of it needs me to read, follow links, and digest it — and with classes starting today I just don’t have the time, or more accurately the mental energy needed to focus my attention on it right now. I’ll try to get something together later. In the meantime, Nick Schulz has a piece saying it’s bogus.

One key problem with the Bellesiles parallels that some people are trying to draw: Bellesiles’ critics made very clear statements charging Bellesiles with making up data and presented very clear evidence of what he had done wrong. Lomborg, on the other hand, has as far as I know been charged with nothing of the sort — no surprise, as he drew on data already published by the UN, etc. Instead, as I understand it, he’s charged with being “one-sided” in his analysis. Hardly the same thing. Indeed, comparing the Danish panel report on Lomborg with either of the two items linked above illustrates just how far apart the two cases are.

UPDATE: A reader suggests that I should add a link to Lomborg’s rebuttal of the critical article in Scientific American that seems to be the source of many of the panel’s complaints.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s The Economist’s take on it:

Why, in the first place, is a panel with a name such as this investigating complaints against a book which makes no claim to be a scientific treatise? “The Skeptical Environmentalist” is explicitly not concerned with conducting scientific research. Rather, it measures the “litany” of environmental alarm that is constantly fed to the public against a range of largely uncontested data about the state of the planet. The litany comes off very badly from the comparison. The environmental movement was right to find the book a severe embarrassment. But since the book was not conducting scientific research, what business is it of a panel concerned with scientific dishonesty?

One might expect to find the answer to this question in the arguments and data supporting the ruling—but there aren’t any. The material assembled by the panel consists almost entirely of a synopsis of four articles published by Scientific American last year. (We criticised those articles and the editorial that ran with them in our issue of February 2nd 2002.) The panel seems to regard these pieces as disinterested science, rather than counter-advocacy from committed environmentalists. Incredibly, the complaints of these self-interested parties are blandly accepted at face value. Mr Lomborg’s line-by-line replies to the criticisms (see www.lomborg.com) are not reported. On its own behalf, the panel offers not one instance of inaccuracy or distortion in Mr Lomborg’s book: not its job, it says. On this basis it finds Mr Lomborg guilty of dishonesty.

The Economist calls the panel’s report “incompetent and shameful.” Meanwhile Brian Erst notes this story and calls attention to the concluding paragraphs:

Most of the book’s contentions contradict the conclusions of a host of prominent scientists, who were astonished the book had even been published.

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told the daily Politiken he was considering an investigation of Lomborg’s institute, the Copenhagen-based European Environmental Agency.

Erst comments:

Apparently, anything that questions the beliefs of “prominent scientists” is now not just wrong-headed or misguided, but so beyond the pale that all mention of such dissenting viewpoints must be silenced. Write a book indicating that the September 11th attacks were an American/Israeli conspiracy and you’re at the top of the French bestsellers list and invited to speak all over the world. Write a book questioning the scope but not the fact of environmental degradation and you better go hide in a cave. I’m surprised the aggrieved scientists haven’t issued a fatwa…

Oh wait – who needs the fatwa? Rasmussen is already on the case.

There’s modern Europe for you. Write anti-American slander? Rake in the millions. Run a terrorist breeding ground like the Finsbury Park mosque? Walk free on the streets of London while planning the wholesale slaughter of thousands of Algerians. Hurt the feelings of some climatologists? Go to jail.

I rather doubt that Lomborg faces jail, but the point holds. As the Bellesiles case surely demonstrates, those who charge fraud should be expected to produce evidence, and lots of it. If the two cases taken together prove anything, it seems, it’s that the standards of proof are much higher when the target supports bien-pensant opinion than when otherwise.

READER YUVAL LEVIN emails about my TechCentralStation column from yesterday:

The concept of the scarcity of time is a very helpful way to explain some of the dynamics of the web. I write to suggest a very similar but possibly more precise way to put the matter.

Could it be that the way to frame the problem is not so much around the scarcity of time, but the scarcity of attention? We have always been short on time: the day is too short, the semester is too short, our lives are too short. But in a certain sense what is different about the web, as a medium of communication, is that it offers an enormous array of new voices clamoring for our attention. The trouble with these voices is that so many of them are so damned interesting and have such useful things to say that we feel compelled to listen, and so we must divide our (finite) attention among an ever-growing number of sources of ideas, which makes our attention very scarce (and, incidentally, therefore very valuable.)

This may be more helpful than speaking in terms of time, because individual units of time do not become less useful to us the more they are divided–a minute is still a minute, it’s just a question of whether we spend it doing something valuable or not, and that’s largely up to us. But attention can be “measured” not only in terms of quantity (like time) but also in terms of

intensity, and in both cases it begins to lose its value the more it is divided. If, in order to keep informed, even just on matters relating to my work, I have to check 15 web sites every morning, the amount and (importantly) the level of attention I can pay to each declines, and this makes my ability to benefit from each decline as well. In turn, this also affects our attention span, since we become accustomed to giving only small amounts of attention to each source, if only because there are so many. This is of course very closely related to the scarcity of time, but it might illuminate more of the character of the problem.

In cyberspace, almost everything is fantastically abundant, but human attention is terribly scarce. And in the age of the Internet and constant omnipresent communication in general, human attention is terribly scarce. One very significant result of this is that the value, and therefore the price, of attention goes up dramatically. This has serious consequences–consider for instance the fact that political campaign funds are spent almost entirely on purchasing human attention, through ads and the like. This seems to suggest that rather than bringing down the price of politics, and alleviating the “money problem” (a name I detest, since it isn’t really a problem) in politics, as some people have suggested, the information age is actually likely to make more expensive the commodity which all that money goes to buy, and therefore to make more money necessary.

I think this is right. One of the reasons people used to pay so much attention to politics was that it offered cheap entertainment at a time when entertainment was scarce. Now entertainment is plentiful, and much of it is more entertaining than politics.

TIM BLAIR: Poet Laureate.

THE NAME OF THIS GROUP SAYS IT ALL:

Fifteen people have been killed by suspected Islamic militants in various parts of Algeria.

One of the attacks took place in a mountainous area where the radical Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) is active.

The Algerian Government says the group has links with the Al-Qaeda network.

What’s really pathetic is, they’re not even especially good at preaching, or combat.

LAST NIGHT there was a Cosby show rerun on Nickelodeon. Theo defies his parents, and they leave him with nowhere to live in order to teach him that actions have consequences, and forgiveness isn’t to be taken for granted.

This morning Howard Kurtz is writing about the surprising degree of support, even among conservatives, for the idea of hanging South Korea out to dry. I wonder if there’s a parallel to be drawn here? [You just drew it! — Ed. Go away! That’s Kaus’s schtick. And Drezner’s!]

I haven’t written much on Korea, because I don’t know enough about what’s going on to have a very strong opinion about what ought to be done. On the one hand, North Korea is probably the worst place on the planet now. I suspect that the reason why some South Korean politicians want to prop it up is that when it comes out just how bad things have been there, which looks to be Pol-Pot-bad — and that they’ve known a lot more than they’ve let on while cozying up to and propping up the North — they’ll be seen as collaborators in horror. (And some, quite possibly, may turn out to be real collaborators, on the take from the North, and might be worried that that will come out).

On the other hand, North Korea is mostly inward-looking, and I don’t think it’s a big, direct threat. And, long-term, there’s a lot to be gained by reminding our triangulating allies that American love, and American forgiveness, are not to be taken for granted either. That’s a lesson we keep ramming home to the Germans. And the Koreans need to learn it too.

We live in a world where most of our allies are Theo Huxtables: self-centered, unrealistic, and overconfident in their assorted schemes because they know Heathcliff will always bail them out in the end. But this isn’t a situation comedy.

[You’re not going to start doing a lot of these Nickelodeon-themed posts, are you? — Ed. Coming next: why France is like Angelica, and the United States is like Tommy Pickles! (sigh) “Write what you know!” –Ed.]

MORE VIDEO: The Nashville Tennessean has a story and streaming patrol-car video of the Cookeville dog-killing incident. (Via Bill Hobbs).

INTERACTIVE VLOGGING: Justin Katz is raising the bar!

MICKEY KAUS is calling Weekly Standard editor Chris Caldwell a filthy communist. Well, kind of. Sort of. In a way.

OCCAM’S TOOTHBRUSH has moved off of blogspot. Reset your bookmarks!

I HAVEN’T WRITTEN ABOUT THIS WHOLE STORY because, well, it’s just too pathetic for words, and about all I have to say is “this is just too pathetic for words.” The Cookeville / Putnam County law enforcement apparatus has not enjoyed a good reputation, though they are largely notorious for speed traps.

For a biased and not guaranteed-to-be-accurate (but sure to be interesting) view from a website dedicated to that area’s politics and law enforcement, go to the Putnam Pit, a website so famous that I think Matt Welch nearly wrote a story about it for some big national publication.

A READER SUGGESTS THAT THIS BEARS WATCHING, and he’s right:

Soldiers from the Golani Brigade’s elite Egoz unit shot dead one armed infiltrator and captured another along the Syrian border in the southern Golan Heights Wednesday afternoon.

During the fight, Syrian troops shot at the soldiers the first such incident of its kind in nearly 20 years. There were no casualties and the soldiers did not return fire.

According to security sources, the gunman and his accomplice apparently came from Syrian territory, ruling out the possibility they had infiltrated from Jordan.

Following interrogation of the captured infiltrator, it transpired that they were Syrian soldiers dressed in civilian clothes. It is still not clear what they were doing, although it is thought they might have been on a reconnaissance mission and were surprised by the IDF presence. Syria charged that Israel had violated cease-fire terms.

“Hey, no fair! You shot our armed infiltrators!” How sadly typical. But you have to wonder why Syria might try something like this just now. And you also have to wonder if part of the reason for the delay in invading Iraq is that the operation may wind up as a twofer.

HERE’S A BLOG THAT’S BEING USED TO PROMOTE AN INDEPENDENT FILM that’s shooting here in Tennessee. There’s even a copy of the script in PDF.

BERKELEY SPEECH-SUPPRESSION UPDATE: The Mayor has entered a guilty plea to charges of stealing massive quantities of the Daily Californian:

Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates pleaded guilty today to a petty theft infraction and was fined $100 for trashing 1,000 copies of the University of California, Berkeley campus newspaper that endorsed his opponent. . . .

Wednesday’s plea ends an embarrassing episode for the newly elected mayor. Bates, a former Alameda County supervisor who served 20 years in the state Assembly, became enraged when the Daily Californian endorsed former Berkeley Mayor Shirley Dean. So he threw away copies of the free newspapers in the trash.

It’s ended. But not forgotten.

CLAIRE BERLINSKI HAS A QUESTION:

I’m just writing an article about this boycott issue and a question occurred to me; maybe you’d know the answer or you’d know someone who does: The scientific cooperation accords in question were established by treaties between the EU and Israel shortly after the signing of the Oslo Accords. Would unilaterally abrogating these treaties not constitute some kind of breach of international law? How big a deal is it, legally speaking, to tear up an international scientific cooperation agreement? I mean, a treaty is a treaty, right?

I don’t know the legal status of those agreements — though I feel sure that the United States would be criticized for “unilateralism” and “contempt for international law” if we broke them somehow. I do know, though, that UNESCO is criticizing this effort, which surely puts it beyond the pale.

YESTERDAY, I POSTED ABOUT THE TITLE of a Washington Monthly article: “License to Kill: How the GOP helped John Allen Muhammad Get a Sniper Rifle.” I pointed out that the Bushmaster in question is what is more commonly called an assault weapon and appears to have morphed into a “sniper rifle” in response to the political needs of gun-control groups, and noted that blaming the GOP seemed rather over the top.

In response (at least, their email implied it was in response) the Washington Monthly has now made the entire text available online, so you can read it and make up your own mind. There’s nothing in there addressing the “sniper rifle” question, and the article certainly seems to blame the gun — and the Republicans — more than it blames, say, the actual shooter. This overwrought paragraph should illustrate what I mean:

One such gun was a .223-caliber semiautomatic Bushmaster XM15 rifle, which Bull’s Eye received from the manufacturer on July 2 of last year. On Sept. 21, a bullet from that gun blew through the back of a liquor store manager in Montgomery, Ala. (she died in the emergency room soon after). Two days later, another bullet burrowed through the head of a beauty store manager in Baton Rouge, La., who died instantly. Between Oct. 2-3, bullets from the gun ripped through the bodies of six people in Montgomery County, Md., killing all of them. Over the next three weeks, the gun claimed seven more victims–including a bus driver, a female FBI analyst, and a 13-year-old schoolboy–killing four of them. Finally, on Oct. 24, law enforcement authorities found the Bushmaster in the back seat of a blue Chevy Caprice occupied by John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo.

Note that the gun and bullets are apparently responsible for the deaths, not Muhammad and Malvo, who in this report merely occupied a Chevrolet Caprice — an offense against automotive taste, perhaps, but no more.

The gist of the complaint is that, because of politics, the ATF lacks enforcement power. I don’t know if this is true — that’s more Dave Kopel’s department, and I’m no Dave Kopel. (Nor, as we’ve established, am I Michael Barone). I only know a couple of gun dealers, but my impression is that they take the ATF and its regulations seriously. That’s hardly a statistically valid sample, though.

Read it and make up your own mind.

UPDATE: I’m not Dave Kopel — but Dave Kopel is, and he emails as follows:

The important thing that the Wash. Monthly leaves out from its description of why Congress limited BATF’s enforcement powers was BATF’s egregious abuse of civil liberties under FOPA. Some of the details are in “No More Wacos,” and also in my Oklahoma City Law Review article, which is available at www.davekopel.org

The short version is that a Congressional investigation officially concluded that seventy-five percent(!!) of BATF prosecutions were constitutionally improper. Agencies like IRS have had their powers curtailed for an abuse rate far below that. It’s true that DEA has a lot of powers that BATF doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean that the DEA model is right. There’s been plenty of abuse by DEA, too, but DEA doesn’t have a powerful watchdog.

The figure about a high percentage of crime guns traced to about 1% of FFLs is less impressive than it sounds. There are a lot of FFLs which are very low volume dealers, selling a few dozen guns a year, as an adjunct to a small business, or as a weekend activity. In major metro areas, the small number of major gun stores will account for a very large percentage of guns sold. Those large stores which sell to customers who live in poor neighborhoods are going to show up in traces quite frequently, no matter how scrupulously the dealers obey the law; some of the customers of that dealer are going to have their guns stolen, and those guns will turn into crime guns. That happens a lot more to a dealer in central Detroit than to a dealer on the Upper Peninsula, but it doesn’t prove that BATF needs new powers to use against the Detroit store.

The claim that dishonest gun dealers are immune from inspections 364 days a year is nonsense. The one-per-year limit applies only to random investigations involving no probable cause or suspicion. There is no limit on the number of audits which may be conducted pursuant to a genuine criminal investigation.

The fundamental thing wrong with the article is that he complains that the sniper shootings were caused by the Republicans/NRA because BATF didn’t shut down Bulls Eye. (Of course there’s the absurd presumption that the killers would not have been able to obtain a gun from another store, or from somewhere else.) But if Bulls Eye is in fact guilty of everything that the author charges, then BATF had full power to have Bulls Eye’s FFL revoked. Once again, we have a case where the existing law wasn’t enforced, and the gun prohibition groups then turn around and claim that more laws are needed.

Hypothesizing that BATF failed in this case, perhaps the solution isn’t to demand more powers for a failed (supposedly) agency which egregiously abused greater powers when it had them. Instead, we need to begin thinking about whether a federal agency should be the main licensing agency for retail businesses. States are competent to license doctors and liquor stores — why can’t they be the ones to license firearms dealers? Federal licensing is a relic of a 1938 federal law, and like a lot of economic regulation from that era, is obsolete, and never worked very well to begin with. How about retaining existing restrictions on interstate gun sales, turning the licensing of firearms dealers over to the states (some states license dealers already, which is duplicative), and sending the BATF out to conduct criminal investigations of terrorists attempting to obtain guns. Of course these criminal investigations could legimately include investigations of stores suspected of selling to criminals.

So there you are. I like this business where I mention people and a few hours later have email from them answering my questions. I wonder if Britney Spears is really — no, never mind. Let’s not go there.

UPDATE: Reader David Lonborg (not Britney Spears) writes:

OK, I read the WM piece. And you’re right, it’s pretty horrendous. Maybe Mr. Kendall ought to consider the possibility that an awful lot of us find the idea of more “felony record-keeping charges” a lot scarier than the occasional armed nut.

Indeed.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Kendall replies:

I appreciate the interest you and Mr. Kopel have taken in the story I wrote in The Washington Monthly. Let me address your main criticisms.

First, while aficionados may object to using the term “sniper rifle,” the Bushmaster was mounted with a scope and a bipod, and was capable (as we’ve seen) of murdering people from several hundred yards away. It has been referred to as a sniper rifle by the nation’s leading newspapers, wire services, and television stations.

Second, the article clearly does not argue that Republicans and the NRA “caused” the killings, as Mr. Kopel says; I argue that restrictions on ATF’s ability to crack down on wayward gun dealers made it far easier for the snipers to get their weapon. Mr. Kopel states that ATF had full power to revoke the license of the store in question, Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply. While that’s technically true, and I say in the piece that ATF should have done more, Kopel is dodging the central point: that the best way to enforce better compliance from stores like Bull’s Eye is with penalties short of shutting them down–fines, temporary suspensions, etc. These more modest penalties are precisely the ones that the NRA and GOP made sure that ATF didn’t have. This paralyzes ATF by putting them in the position of either putting a store owner out of business

completely, a rather draconian move, or doing nothing at all.

Kopel argues that there were ATF abuses before the 1986 restrictions were added, but the way to solve abuses is by disciplining the abusers, not robbing an agency of the tools it needs to do its job. If some police officers misuse their firearms, we don’t respond by stripping the police force of its weapons.

Kopel says our statement that ATF can only audit a dealer once a year is nonsense, arguing that there is no limit on the number of audits than can be conducted in a criminal investigation. But we’re talking about civil audits, not criminal ones. And ATF can only conduct a civil audit on a dealer once a year. If ATF had more flexibility in its ability to audit stores, the bureau could do more to prevent guns from hitting the streets, instead of having to wait until they’ve been used in crimes.

Kopel also takes issue with the data that show a high percentage of crime guns are traced to about 1 percent of FFLs, arguing that many FFLs in the remaining 99 percent are low volume dealers and located in more rural areas. So what? The point of the article is that ATF is restricted in its ability to discipline stores within that 1 percent, regardless of their volume or where they’re located. Of course stores near high crime areas will have more crime guns traced back to them.

Some of those stores are doing nothing wrong. Others, through sloppy procedures, or out-and-out law breaking, are creating a menace to their communities. The gun store where the sniper suspects got their gun may be one of them. Our argument is that ATF is hamstrung in its ability to pursue precisely these bad actors.

This is more in answer to Kopel’s point than to mine — and in particular doesn’t really answer my point about the blame-the-gun character of the language that I excerpted, which pervades the article. Nor — given the generally ignorant and biased treatment of firearms in the mass media — does the fact that newspapers called it a “sniper rifle” make it correct. Monthly magazines of ideas, like the Washington Monthly, are supposed to take the time to get things like that right in a way that daily papers can’t.

What’s disturbing about the efforts to call the Bushmaster a “sniper rifle” is that they dovetail so neatly with the latest campaign by advocacy groups. When journalists use the latest buzzphrase from anti-gun groups under circumstances where it really doesn’t fit, it suggests that they’re in the tank with those groups, or that they are sufficiently ignorant about the subject matter that they swallow the groups’ points whole. And here, as near as I can tell, is their strategy:

“Saturday Night Specials” (cheap handguns) = Bad, must be banned

“Military Style Handguns” (expensive handguns) = Bad, must be banned

“Assault Weapons” (inaccurate, short-range rifles) = Bad, must be banned

“Sniper Rifles” (accurate, long-range rifles) = Bad, must be banned

As I said in my original post pointing this out, I think I’m starting to see a pattern here. And when an article seems to fit too neatly with that pattern, then I do tend to find it less credible.

FINAL UPDATE: Kopel replies to Kendall:

1. Mark Twain is reported to have said, “If a hundred people call a cow a dog, it’s still a cow.” The Bushmaster isn’t a “sniper rifle,” and no-one who knows anything about firearms would say that it is. There are thousands of guns which use scopes and bipods and which can kill from hundreds of yards. Only a small fraction of these guns are “sniper rifles.” A cow has four legs and two eyes, and lives in multi-animal social groups, but the fact that a cow and a dog share some attributes which are also shared by many other animals doesn’t mean that you can call a cow a dog. Even if the Associated Press calls a cow a dog, the fact that daily news outlets make a mistake doesn’t justify the mistake being copied by a monthly magazine article that is supposed to be based on in-depth research.

2. BATF’s abuse rate of 75% — according to the findings of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution — wasn’t the result of a few bad agents. Such an abuse rate can only be the result of a pervasively flawed institutional culture. I don’t think it&#