TERRORISM IS HITTING HOME in Australia. And in Singapore.

SORRY POSTING HAS BEEN SO LIGHT. The DSL came back yesterday, but I’ve been busy with lots of real work. I’m an outside reviewer for quite a few people at other universities who are up for tenure or promotion and I’ve had to read a mountain of scholarly articles and write nuanced critiques of them.

I was in the office today, and — as usual — so were quite a few colleagues, including one who was back from serving on the Board of Inquiry in the California port strike. “When they saw my fierce visage,” he reported, “they ran for cover.” Well, not really.

It is astonishing how many people I see at the office on Sundays. Just another way in which my experience of law teaching fails to live up to the fantasies of my friends who practice law.

READER GREG BEATO sends this article from FrontPageMag saying that San Francisco is moving to the right. Could it be true?

UPDATE: Alex Frantz says the answer is no. But there’s more to his post than that one word.

INTERESTING ITEM on European views of America and international law, from Tacitus. No, not that Tacitus.

STEPHEN AMBROSE HAS DIED.

YEAH, I’VE LINKED A LOT OF TIM BLAIR’S STUFF TODAY. What can I say? He’s on a roll. Go to his page and scroll freely.

A DEFENSE OF PURE FISKING: Bill Herbert isn’t impressed with CalPundit’s “Fisking” of the Gettysburg Address. He points out that just because it’s possible to do a bad Fisking hardly discredits the form itself. (Any more, I might add, than Madonna’s latest cinematic effort discredits the entire art of film.) The same holds for a number of other allegedly-hilarious parodies that I’ve seen on other lefty blogs.

Herbert points to a recent effort of Tim Blair’s as an example of Fisking done right. I also like this one, where Blair unpacks a lot of dumb hidden assumptions and exposes some rather creative use of quotations, which perhaps explains why so many lefty journalists dislike the very idea of a Fisking. Er, and of Tim Blair, it sometimes seems.

UPDATE: I just got home and fired up the laptop after dinner. On rereading this post it seems a little mean to CalPundit Kevin Drum, which wasn’t what I intended at all. I think that Fisking is a very valuable blogging technique when done well. I also think that it’s fairly hard to do well — and that the harsher it is, the harder it is to do it well (i.e., in a fashion that will convince people who don’t already agree with the Fisker 100%). I don’t know whether Kevin meant for his post to be a critique of all Fisking, or just bad Fisking. I can agree with him on #2, though I read it as #1. What I will say is that Tim Blair can get away with things that I probably wouldn’t try, because, well, he’s Tim Blair and he’s a better writer than I am.

THE ECONOMIST ANSWERS TIM BLAIR’S CHALLENGE:

Australians abroad are obvious targets for Islamic terrorists in the region. The Australian government has staunchly supported President George Bush’s war on terrorism, and Australian troops were sent to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Americans. Furthermore, some Muslims are angry at the military role that Australia played in helping East Timor to obtain independence from Indonesia.

Me, I’m blaming John Pilger.

THE STRAIGHT DOPE ON THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS: Just ran across this post from Cecil Adams in 1995. Concise and accurate. Excerpt:

In almost every other aspect of law the Bill of Rights has been broadly construed to restrain the states as well as the federal government. Few today would argue that states can abrogate the right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. Yet many are prepared to let them gut the second, on the grounds that the framers did not foresee urban violence on the scale we face now. Maybe they didn’t, but so what? Civil-liberties advocates don’t accept urban violence as an excuse to curtail other constitutional rights, such as the protection against unlawful search and seizure.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Jim Henley has a long post on the Stephen Hunter / sniper column from the Washington Post that’s worth reading for the comments he interjects amid snatches of Hunter’s piece. It’s a sort of reverse-Fisking.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile, in Britain. . . .

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Clayton Cramer has more on Britain. Gun crime is the highest in a century, despite a ban so comprehensive that the British shooting team can’t practice in Britain. Law enforcement blames “easy availability of guns” to criminals. What — you mean criminals will break gun control laws, too?

THE U.S. AMBASSADOR apparently warned Indonesia a month before the Bali attacks.

READER KEN BARNES, who edits the talk.politics.guns mailing list, writes:

I’ve seen it twice so far on the Sunday talk shows, so it must be in the official talking points for today: “ballistic fingerprinting” has been put forward as a new law that would help catch the D.C.-area sniper. I hope you have an opportunity to debunk this idea. It’s first of all a back door means of gun registration, and secondly, the comment made on NBC’s Meet Tim Russert that it is a proven forensic technique “like DNA for guns” is just not true. The ballistic characteristics of a gun barrel change over time, and they can be altered, unlike a person’s DNA.

Yes, I just this minute heard George Stephanopoulos raise the issue, and I’ll bet it’s featured in faxes from the VPC and the Brady Campaign. I’ve always wondered how this would work — it seems to me that anyone with a file could get around this, and I heard Parris Glendening talking about identifying shell casings which seems dubious to me — what are you going to do, put a barcode on them?

Anyway, I’ll leave the technical issues to someone else, but here’s what I’ve noticed from the anti-gun crowd:

“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

I think I’m starting to see a pattern here.

THE STANDARD RAP ON THE INTERNET is that it’s the home of paranoid ranting. Like many raps on the Internet, this turns out to be dubious at best, as it appears that the Internet is favored by people who tend to trust others.

TIM BLAIR THROWS DOWN THE GAUNTLET to the Australian press. I expect someone will pick it up.

VARIOUS READERS have sent this link to a speech by Teddy Roosevelt about the Nobel Peace Prize:

We must ever bear in mind that the great end in view is righteousness, justice as between man and man, nation and nation, the chance to lead our lives on a somewhat higher level, with a broader spirit of brotherly goodwill one for another. Peace is generally good in itself, but it is never the highest good unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness; and it becomes a very evil thing if it serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument to further the ends of despotism or anarchy. We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong. No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft, effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality.

Moreover, and above all, let us remember that words count only when they give expression to deeds, or are to be translated into them. The leaders of the Red Terror prattled of peace while they steeped their hands in the blood of the innocent; and many a tyrant has called it peace when he has scourged honest protest into silence. Our words must be judged by our deeds; and in striving for a lofty ideal we must use practical methods; and if we cannot attain all at one leap, we must advance towards it step by step, reasonably content so long as we do actually make some progress in the right direction.

It’s styled as an “Acceptance Speech,” but Roosevelt actually got the prize in 1906, and didn’t accept in person. It’s good, though I don’t agree with the way some “national greatness” conservatives make use of TR. I’m all for national greatness, but I don’t believe that the greatness of a nation is determined by government programs and jobs for political apparatchiks administering and flacking for them. But TR is right that peace is only one virtue among others, and right to note that neglecting certain virtues, which until recently had become unstylish, is likely to have bad consequences.

UPDATE: Et tu, Teddy? A couple of readers saw the term “Red Terror” and wondered if this was another phony quote like the Julius Caesar passage that ensnared Barbra Streisand. No. At least, it’s also on the official Nobel site and — unlike the phony Caesar quote — is in character. A footnote there says — as I assumed without even thinking — that the “Red Terror” TR is referring to is the French Revolution, not the later Red Terrors that succeeded it.

CLAYTON CRAMER has a SpinSanity-like analysis of how the D.C. sniper is being used by pro- and anti-gun partisans, and why those uses are largely beside the point. Interesting reading.

WHY AM I AWAKE SO EARLY ON A SUNDAY? Beats the hell out of me. Woke up at 6:30 wide awake. Maybe it was the nap I took yesterday afternoon.

DEDICATED FOLLOWERS OF FASHION: David Carr suggests that the Helsinki bombing may be an example of the world’s nutcases converging on a model pioneered by Palestinians, for reasons of style more than substance.

CHRIS SEAMANS, of The Unilateral Commission, writes about Afghanistan: “While many Americans wouldn’t trust the United Nations to watch their worst enemy’s dog, that’s exactly who we’ve turned the difficult and important task of rebuilding the country over to. Is this wise?” That’s from this post on nation-building. Also read this earlier one on the same topic.

Something to think about. In a way, of course, the most important thing about Afghanistan is that bin Laden’s supporters (or maybe it was his tools) aren’t in power there any more, as this is the lesson most likely to be taken home by our target audience. On the other hand, there are real benefits to seeing our enemies transformed into friends, or at least not-enemies, over the long term.

I think it’s premature to call the Afghanistan efforts a failure. People forget that the Marshall Plan wasn’t applied to liberated territories while World War Two was still on — in fact, it wasn’t applied until some time after World War Two was over. This war is still on, and what’s happening in Afghanistan is, at the moment, less important than what’s about to happen in Iraq.

UPDATE: This New York Times article by Eric Schmitt is worth reading too, though the item on civilian casualties notes that “estimates” “range from several hundred to a few thousand.” The “few thousand” is, apparently, an oblique reference to the discredited Marc Herold study from last year. To read more about the problems with Herold’s numbers, read this summary by Bill Herbert, and this piece on Herold by the Statistical Assessment Service.

He’s no doubt sharpening his pencils to inflate Iraqi civilian casualties from the coming invasion, too. Heck, he may already have started adding up numbers, and you can be sure that his inflated estimates will be used by opponents of the war, who have already shown a blithe disregard for the truth in such matters. But as Chris Bertram noted:

Who said that only the “bad guys” would get killed? Who believed them if they did? I can’t recall anyone who said or believed any such thing. Those of us who thought (and think) that the Afghan war was just did so in the full knowledge that in any war innocents get killed.

Yes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: David Warren has some thoughts, too.

THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE doesn’t seem to be enhancing Norway’s reputation the way it once did.

UPDATE: This editorial from the Sunday Telegraph underscores the point.

STEFAN SHARKANSKY ISN’T PLEASED with Helen Caldicott’s latest.

HERE’S A WEBLOG ACCCOUNT OF THE MICHIGAN DIVESTMENT CONFERENCE by an Israeli who attended. Needless to say, he wasn’t impressed.

UPDATE: Here’s a story from the Washington Post, and here’s a story from yesterday’s Michigan Daily.

MAX POWER responds to charges that a U.S. occupation government in Iraq would be “colonialism:”

What’s wrong with a little colonialism? Are people saying that the brown peoples of Iraq aren’t worthy of Western-style democracy and freedoms?

And I would love to see any of these so-called opponents to colonialism speak out against Wahhabist colonialism in Europe or Afghanistan (or the repeated Arab desire to colonize Israel by force and commit genocide in the process). The failure to do so shows that the objection is not to colonialism but to the West and to democracy. It’s frankly appalling and close to racist to see people complaining that a repressive and murderous dictatorship might get replaced by a democracy because the people leading the transition aren’t the same skin color as the victims of the totalitarian regime.

Indeed.

PSYCHOLOGIST HARVEY GOLDSTEIN WRITES that press and politicians are encouraging the D.C. sniper. Excerpt:

The frequent news conferences themselves seem to be a big part of the problem, mostly because they impart so little actual news. At some of these events, politicians seem to dominate. They thank the police, they thank each other and they praise the spirit of teamwork and cooperation. Are they really doing anything constructive? We are treating the sniper to a political rally on his behalf.

The news media contribute to the situation simply by paying it too much attention. Ever since the O.J. Simpson trial, competition among media outlets has created an obsession with finding “experts” to theorize about every facet of a crime. This current crisis features not attorneys but an endless stream of criminal profilers jockeying for attention, further gratifying the killer. Those experts appearing on TV and radio during the crisis, speculating on every aspect of the criminal’s life and behavior patterns, need to ask themselves whether there is any utility in bolstering his arrogance.

Indeed.

JIM BENNETT’S COLUMBUS DAY COLUMN argues that we’re celebrating the wrong Italian.

SOMEONE IS SERIOUSLY UPSET WITH CHARLES JOHNSON, but they’re not up to the task of crossing swords with him.