INSTAPUNDIT’S INCREASINGLY PEEVED PARIS CORRESPONDENT CLAIRE BERLINSKI REPORTS:

The goddamned helicopters are seriously disturbing my wa. It is now accompanied by the cacaphony of incessant police sirens. There are barricades on the street outside my apartment. I can’t hear myself think. My poor father had to walk miles today to get to an emergency medical appointment: no public transport, no taxis.

I am beginning to have a great deal of fresh sympathy for Marie Antoinette’s point of view.

Hmm. 50,000 crazed protesters vs. one angry Claire Berlinski. I feel sorry for those guys. . . .

BRAD DELONG’S BIGGEST FAN: So I got in the car to run errands, and as soon as it started the radio came on and to my amazement I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about the “blogosphere.” (Yes, he used that word, though his description was, ahem, not very clear.) And then he started quoting Brad De Long’s post on Hillary Clinton.

That’s the power of the Blogosphere, shaping the discussion in Big Media!

Meanwhile here’s a pretty good Business Week article on blogs, with a nice quote from Nick Denton:

“Blogs are Web media reborn,” declares Nick Denton, who authors his own, www.nickdenton.org and has launched two for-profit blogs — gizmodo.com, which is aimed at wealthy gadget lovers, and gawker.com, a salacious run-down on New York media. “After the boom, Web media got a bad name,” Denton notes. “So we gave it a new one.”

Blogosphere power, baby.

UPDATE: Here’s somebody else who heard the same broadcast.

ANARCHY AND VIOLENCE IN THE STREETS has caused the United States to shut down civilian operations in Paris.

Obviously, there aren’t enough troops to keep order in such an uncivilized place.

UPDATE: But don’t worry — the French are on the job in the Congo:

A European military planner who was issued a copy of the French document said: “This is the most cynical military briefing I’ve read in my entire life. Everybody is just laughing at it.”

Sheesh.

RON ROSENBAUM has a nice piece on the growing tide of European antisemitism.

There is a horrid but obvious dynamic going on here: At some deep level, Europeans, European politicians, European culture is aware that almost without exception every European nation was deeply complicit in Hitler’s genocide. Some manned the death camps, others stamped the orders for the transport of the Jews to the death camps, everyone knew what was going on—and yet the Nazis didn’t have to use much if any force to make them accomplices. For the most part, Europeans volunteered. That is why “European civilization” will always be a kind of oxymoron for anyone who looks too closely at things, beginning with the foolish and unnecessary slaughters of World War I, Holocaust-scale slaughter that paved the way for Hitler’s more focused effort.

And so, at some deep level, there is a need to blame someone else for the shame of “European civilization.” To blame the victim. To blame the Jews.

Yep. This piece first appeared last year, but it seems even more appropriate today, as this sort of behavior becomes steadily more obvious. But they’re not fooling anybody — except the willingly fooled, and those disappointed that things didn’t work out as Hitler planned, of whom there are still plenty in Europe and elsewhere. And as Rosenbaum notes:

Isn’t it interesting that you didn’t see any “European peace activists” volunteering to “put their bodies on the line” by announcing that they would place themselves in real danger—in the Tel Aviv cafés and pizza parlors, favorite targets of the suicide bombers. Why no “European peace activists” at the Seders of Netanya or the streets of Jerusalem? Instead, “European peace activists” do their best to protect the brave sponsors of the suicide bombers in Ramallah.

We know why. The Euros, meanwhile, might take a cautionary note from Ken MacLeod.

UPDATE: A reader who prefers to remain anonymous emails:

Glenn, I’ve been reading Instapundit for a long time — I’m a writer and editor based in London now (in fact, I can see the massive BBC towers from my back window).

Hitchens’s piece on the British obsession with Wolfowitz is right on the money: for some reason, his name always comes up first in the list of “neocons” who “control” the Bush administration. Half the time they either misidentify or fail to identify his position. Most frequently he “works in the Defense Department,” which has a nice shadowy sound to it — much more effective than “he works for Donald Rumsfeld,” because these Wolfowitzian neocons only “work” for their own kind, right? Naturally, when this is pointed out, they immediately go on the defensive, about how they’re against racism and could never be anti-semitic and not all criticism of Israel is anti-semitic (by the way, have you ever met or heard from anyone who said it was?).

But this leads to a point about anti-Semitism that many — particularly those among my fellow lefties — fail to understand: Nazism does not define anti-Semitism. That is: one can hold anti-Semitic attitudes, and one can even hold them un- or semi-consciously, without believing that all Jews should be gassed. Not being a Nazi doesn’t mean one cannot under any circumstances be an anti-Semite. For some reason, this distinction is perfectly clear to anti-war lefties when talking about racism — witness how frequently they accused Republicans or even war supporters of unconscious or institutional racism — but when it comes to examining the anti-Semitic content of their own beliefs, it just doesn’t get through.

Not much does. BTW, here’s the Hitchens post. I added this update here because of the Nazi point. I think that we’re seeing two different, but related things: (1) a rebirth of the old (and non-genocidal) species of Continental antisemitism, which was suppressed by anti-Nazi talk for a while; and (2) a desire, as Rosenbaum describes above, to overcome the Nazi-era guilt, and also the constraints imposed by that guilt. This is also driven, I think, by foreign policy concerns. It’s much harder to posture morally, suck up to the Arabs, and oppose Israel when confronting the facts that (1) Europeans did largely support the Holocaust; and (2) Arabs largely still do. So the impulse is to explain it away by saying (1) the Holocaust wasn’t that bad; (2) Israel is just as bad; and (3) see, Europeans aren’t any worse than anyone else. (This is much the way Stalin-era Soviets responded to comments on genocide by saying “what about you Americans and your Red Indians?”) As with the Stalinists, it’s a dodge in defense of the indefensible.

MAKING A FEDERAL CASE OUT OF EVERYTHING? Gene Healy has a nice piece on the federalization of crime, using the Jayson Blair case as a jumping-off point. Excerpt:

James Comey, Orrin Hatch, and other officials pushing the expansion of federal jurisdiction ought to reacquaint themselves with the Founding documents. Staying out of local affairs isn’t only their legal responsibility as servants of the people sworn to uphold the Constitution. It could also be a matter of life and death. As Nobel economist Milton Friedman has pointed out, when government begins to do what it should not, it ceases to do what it should. That’s a lesson we should have learned after September 11th.

As was widely reported, the Phoenix FBI office knew about Al Qaeda activity at U.S. flight schools prior to September 11 but could not get the Bureau’s main office in Washington, D.C., to take action. In fact, Kenneth Williams, the FBI agent who recommended canvassing flight schools for Islamist radicals prior to 9/11, couldn’t concentrate on terrorism full-time because he was ordered to head up an arson investigation. Williams’ memo about Bin Laden-ist pilots-in-training disappeared down a bureaucratic black hole. Meanwhile, according to the Los Angeles Times and other sources, the FBI was engaged in an 18-month-long sting operation at a brothel in New Orleans that netted 12 prostitutes. While Al Qaeda was preparing for 9/11, federal law enforcement was down in the French Quarter acting like the local vice squad.

There are limited resources available to law enforcement and defense. Spend time and money pursuing prostitutes, arsonists, and dishonest reporters, and there are fewer resources available for the fight against Al Qaeda. It’s well past time for the federal government to get its priorities straight.

(Emphasis added). He’s absolutely right on this, and it seems clear that priorities are still askew. It’s hard to cut the Justice Department the slack it wants for the overwhelmingly important war on terror when the Justice Department itself doesn’t seem to treat the war on terror as overwhelmingly important.

UPDATE: Here, by the way, is a link to an excellent ABA report on the federalization of crime, a subject that brings together folks as different as me, Gene Healy, Jeralyn Merritt, and Chief Justice Rehnquist.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Clayton Cramer has posts on this topic here and here.

I’VE BEEN MEANING TO MENTION how happy I am that BILL QUICK has done away with his popups, which used to take forever to load. (Maybe because I often have 30+ browser windows open at a time? Nah, couldn’t be. . . .) He says his traffic has gone down since then, but I rather suspect that’s the end of the war, the coming of summer, etc. But if popups have been keeping you away, be advised that his site is now popup free!

ANDREW SULLIVAN RAISED ABOUT TEN GRAND YESTERDAY, as part of his pledge week. Well, he is trying to turn himself into a self-sustaining media empire, and doing a pretty good job of it.

Donations around here, while much appreciated, were, er, rather a lot less. And that’s okay, since I’m not trying to create a self-sustaining media empire. But thanks to those who gave. I’m using the money for a series of sessions with a trainer who specializes in stretching exercises that remedy the problems caused by excessive computer use, something from which I definitely suffer.

Yeah, I know, it’s a Red Queen’s Race, using money from blogging to pay to remedy the problems caused by blogging. But whaddyagonnado?

Michele, meanwhile, says that she can offer things that Andrew, fortunately, can’t. I’ll bet her spine is more flexible than mine, too.

LOOTING UPDATE: The Guardian’s David Aronovitch takes the press to the woodshed over the bogus looting reports:

So, there’s the picture: 100,000-plus priceless items looted either under the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves. And the only problem with it is that it’s nonsense. It isn’t true. It’s made up. It’s bollocks.

Not all of it, of course. There was some looting and damage to a small number of galleries and storerooms, and that is grievous enough. But over the past six weeks it has gradually become clear that most of the objects which had been on display in the museum galleries were removed before the war. Some of the most valuable went into bank vaults, where they were discovered last week. Eight thousand more have been found in 179 boxes hidden “in a secret vault”. And several of the larger and most remarked items seem to have been spirited away long before the Americans arrived in Baghdad. . . .

This indictment of world journalism has caused some surprise to those who listened to George and others speak at the British Museum meeting. One art historian, Dr Tom Flynn, now speaks of his “great bewilderment”. “Donny George himself had ample opportunity to clarify to the best of [his] knowledge the extent of the looting and the likely number of missing objects,” says Flynn. “Is it not a little strange that quite so many journalists went away with the wrong impression, while Mr George made little or not attempt to clarify the context of the figure of 170,000 which he repeated with such regularity and gusto before, during, and after that meeting.” To Flynn it is also odd that George didn’t seem to know that pieces had been taken into hiding or evacuated. “There is a queasy subtext here if you bother to seek it out,” he suggests. . . .

Furious, I conclude two things from all this. The first is the credulousness of many western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional might have been an apparatchiks of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that – these days – you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed.

Yes. But the Yanks are understandably less and less interested in paying attention to the credulous and the dishonest folks who seem to make up the bulk of the critics. (Via Zach Barbera).

“PEOPLE ARE DYING. THE AMERICANS MUST COME. WE WANT PEACE.” But don’t worry — the French are on hand:

But unlike in Sierra Leone in 2000, when British troops remained in large numbers on the ground for months, the French commanders ordered their men to leave Liberia as soon as the foreign passport holders had been rounded up.

“For the moment we don’t foresee leaving our troops here,” a French army spokesman said.

“Our sole mission is to proceed with the evacuation of Europeans and other foreigners upon the demand of the French government.”

Typical colonialist response: get the white folks out, and let the natives go hang. Literally, I’m afraid, in this case.

MAX POWER SAYS I’M WRONG about the Justice Department’s position in the Unocal Burma case. (The original post, in which Paul Stephan of the University of Virginia Law School also says I’m wrong, is here.) Hmm. Maybe I am wrong.

GOOD SENSE IS BREAKING OUT ALL OVER:

Russia is Iran’s top nuclear business partner and the builder of a controversial $1 billion reactor at Bushehr. But after years of defending Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful, Russia appears to be undergoing an change in official thinking . . . .

“Russian officials have made a huge evolution in understanding the threat from Iran” and are making “progress toward the US position,” says Anton Khlopkov, an Iran expert at the PIR Center in Moscow, a military-research institute that predicts a “worst-case scenario” of Iran building a nuclear weapon by 2006, in a report soon to be released.

“Not only US but Russian experts were really surprised by the information about these two sites and these two plants,” Mr. Khlopkov says of the enrichment facilities. “Russia and the US should engage with European experts to find the source of such technologies … maybe in North Korea or Pakistan.”

Why the Russians would want a not-terribly-friendly-or-stable nuclear-armed power on their southern border has never made sense to me. I guess they’ve just been unable to resist the lure of those big contracts. The last paragraph above also indicates just how hard it is to know what’s going on in these programs from the outside. It sounds as if the Iranians have managed to keep the Russians in the dark about the extent of their program even while buying a lot of expertise and materiel from them.

IRAQI EXECUTION TAPES FOR SALE:

Videotapes showing people being tortured and executed by Saddam Hussein’s regime are being bought on the streets of Baghdad by Iraqis anxious to trace missing relatives.

Most of the tapes date from the Shia Muslim insurgency that erupted after the first President George Bush urged Iraqis to overthrow the former Iraqi leader in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War.

Many of the executions took place in Najaf and Karbala.

Some of the tapes show a man who appears to be Lieutenant General Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam Hussein, better known as “Chemical Ali”, killing people.

A BBC correspondent who has seen some of the recordings says they are evidence of the atrocities of the former regime.

Some of my lefty correspondents seem to think they’re scoring points by noting that Saddam killed a lot of people because George H.W. Bush didn’t remove him in 1991. But I agree. Saddam was left in power because Bush and Powell feared (wrongly) a backlash from Americans after the “highway of death” footage of killed Republican Guards aired on TV. In addition there was — misplaced — concern that toppling Saddam would have been wrong, somehow, in light of the U.N. resolutions. I felt at the time that it was a big mistake to leave Saddam in power, and I still do. I don’t quite understand, though, how people can say that we should have toppled him in 1991, but that it was wrong to do so in 2003.

BOY, FINDING THOSE WMD FACTORIES SURE IS HARD, even in the United States:

FREDERICK, Md. (AP) – The FBI began draining a pond Monday in a search for evidence that the person who carried out the deadly anthrax-by-mail attacks in 2001 filled the envelopes with the deadly spores under water for his own protection.

The draining of the one-acre pond in the Frederick Municipal Forest is expected to take three to four weeks. The pond is 4 to 5 feet deep.

The work drew FBI agents, other law enforcement officials and contractors, who operated dump trucks and backhoes at the site several miles northwest of the city. A generator and a pump were brought in, and a hose ran into the pond.

Hey — maybe those anthrax attacks never really happened!

THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLFOWITZ: Christopher Hitchens points out something noted here a while back, that the BBC seems to be making a . . . special effort to make Paul Wolfowitz sound extra-Jewish:

“Yes that’s all very well,” said the chap from the BBC World Service, “but what about this man Vulfervitz who seems to run the whole show from behind the scenes?” For the fifth time in as many days, and for the umpteenth time this year, I corrected a British interviewer’s pronunciation. You see the name in print, you hear it uttered quite a lot in American discussions, you then give a highly inflected rendition of your own. … What is this? In my young day, the BBC had a special department for the pronunciation of foreign names for the guidance of those commenting on Thailand, say, or Mongolia. But this particular name is pronounced as it is spelled. “Very well,” said the BBC chap, with a hint of bad grace. “This man Wolfervitz …”

We know why, don’t we?

UNRELIABLE SOURCES: On the one hand, you’ve got this:

An Iranian government official with ties to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says Tehran sides with the Americans on one big issue — Saddam Hussein’s weapons.

“Yes, we agree with the Americans. Our intelligence indicated that Iraq did possess weapons of mass destruction and was hiding them from the U.N.,” the official said.

On the other hand, there’s this:

Two of the highest-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in American custody have told the C.I.A. in separate interrogations that the terrorist organization did not work jointly with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, according to several intelligence officials.

The former, of course, supports an Administration claim; the latter contradicts one. Is either reliable? Who knows?

THE PROSECUTION IS CALLING FOR “EXEMPLARY SENTENCES” in the Elf Aquitaine scandal.

EUGENE VOLOKH WONDERS if antiglobalization folks are seriously in favor of slavery.

L.T. SMASH HAS advice for non-Americans who don’t understand Americans.

I think it would be interesting to have Jim Treacher do his own version. . . .

In the meantime, there’s always William Burton’s statement to the world, which lives on even though his blog is now defunct.

THERE’S AN ALL NEW L.A. EXAMINER SITE! That’s the blog, not the forthcoming newspaper of the same name.

“U.N. ENVOY FAILS ON SUU KYI’S RELEASE:” No surprise there, but it’s a reminder that Burma is more likely to be freed at gunpoint than via diplomacy.

I’VE PUBLISHED QUITE A FEW CONSTRUCTIVE RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES: Now Donald Luskin has some, too.

UPDATE: Now Tom Maguire is fact-checking Luskin.

SIR ARMY SUIT: HERE’S AN INTERESTING PIECE ON MILITARY NANOTECHNOLOGY from tomorrow’s Christian Science Monitor.

Collaboration between the military and Boston’s mega-watt academic minds is nothing new. Researchers at MIT perfected radar for military use during World War II.

But nano-technology is a whole new world. It’s the science of objects far smaller than the width of a human hair.

For instance, when Ms. Frick and Mr. Bruet use scanning-electron microscopes or atomic-force microscopes to look at the seashells, they see what looks like a wall of bricks. The “bricks” are five microns long and one micron tall. (A human hair is 80 microns wide.)

Nature, they explain, has taken relatively weak materials and created a structure – the brick wall – that is impressively tough. Using nano-construction techniques, the ISN will eventually try to mimic that structure with super-strong materials, thus creating a lightweight – and bulletproof – substance.

As I say, interesting.

UPDATE: Noah Shachtman wasn’t as impressed as the CSM reporter.

JOE KATZMAN IS SAVAGING JOHN ASHCROFT for defending — well, indirectly — the use of forced labor in Burma. A commenter to Joe’s post asks for “non-commentary sources” describing the subject. Here’s an article from the Boston Globe on the subject. Excerpt:

For the past 23 years, federal courts have allowed victims of torture and other abuse to file claims under an obscure 1789 statute for violations of human rights norms, commonly known as the Alien Torts Claims Act.

Since a 1980 civil suit against a former Paraguayan police chief accused of torturing and killing a teenage boy, lawsuits have been filed against Ferdinand Marcos, former Philippine president; Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic; Al Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden; and banks and other companies alleged to have profited from Nazi war crimes.

But the Justice Department, reflecting an emerging view among conservative legal scholars, argues in a 30-page brief that such lawsuits frequently have no connection to the United States and may complicate foreign policy objectives by targeting allies, including nations helping to fight terrorism. . . .

The government brief was filed in the San Francisco-based US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in a case involving a gas pipeline in Burma. It said the law ”has been commandeered and transformed into a font of causes of action permitting aliens to bring human rights claims in United States courts, even when the disputes are wholly between foreign nationals and when the alleged injuries were incurred in a foreign country, often with no connection whatsoever with the United States.”

The filing has prompted an outcry from human rights groups and some lawyers within the State Department, who say that such lawsuits should be encouraged. American University law professor Diane Orentlicher said the brief amounted to ”a profound reversal” on the part of the US government, which has previously been supportive or remained neutral in many alien torts cases.

”There are legitimate questions to be raised about some of the interpretations by some of the courts,” Orentlicher said. ”But what they’ve done with this brief is like treating a mosquito bite by cutting off your arm.”

I think Ashcroft’s position on this is wrong, and that it shouldn’t be that hard to distinguish between bogus and real suits. On the other hand, the willingness of “international human rights” activists who are really anti-American to abuse human rights claims has become pretty apparent, with efforts to prosecute Tommy Franks, Tony Blair, etc. in Belgium. And the story makes clear that the Bush Administration has become hostile to this sort of thing because it fears “activists” using it as a tool to harass the United States’ anti-terrorism efforts.

So while I think that Ashcroft is wrong, I have to note that when a currency is debased, it becomes worth less. The currency of international human rights has been debased. And as a result, it’s worth less. Back when I took International Human Rights Law I remember the professor warning about pushing things too far — the case in question, Filartiga, was pretty new then — and this is why.

UPDATE: Prof. Paul Stephan, who teaches this stuff at the University of Virginia Law School, emails:

With all respect, Glenn, what the Justice Department is saying is that the position of the Second and Ninth Circuits, which the D.C. Circuit has opposed and the Seventh has doubted, rests on an implausible act of judicial lawmaking unhinged from an relevant act of Congresss. The so-called Alien Tort Claims Act is a product of judicial imagination; the 1789 statute from which it is claimed to be derived did something completely different. The Unocal case illustrates the shortcomings of this litigation strategy, apart from its lawlessness: The Burmese government is not being sued because it has sovereign immunity, and otal SA, the big oil company in bed with the Burmese government, is out of the suit because it has no contacts with California. So Unocal, which has a minority interest in a joint venture and no active management role, is subjected to millions of dollars of litigation costs and potential liability. No other country in the world authorizes such litigation. The U.S. civil justice system is wonderful, but more is not necessarily better.

Fair enough. Meanwhile reader John Allison emails:

Geez, I’m with the justice dept on this one with the caveat that I think they could have made the point in the filing that the brand spanking new ICC in Brussells would be much better suited to this sort of suit. That is what they claim to be there for, right? RIGHT?!
[cricketchirp=1]

Uh, right. Right after they allow a suit against TotalFina ELF.

SET THE GIZMODO WAYBACK MACHINE FOR 1983, Mr. Peabody!

HERE’S MORE ON THE BAGHDAD LOOTING THAT WASN’T. Apologies for the slur are not forthcoming, however.

UPDATE: Roger Simon suspects the Museum staff of not being entirely forthcoming.