Now that Henry Kissinger has resigned as co-chair of the "independent" investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it appears that some other elder statesman with a gravelly voice will have to be found to deliver the stunning news: that pretty much everyone in the country was unprepared for what happened, and that the very few people who suspected something along those lines might be in the offing were, in retrospect, much, much more right than anyone realized at the time. (Eugene and Sasha Volokh's father suggests Tom Clancy as chair, but I expect the latter is more adept at writing spectacular fiction than pedestrian truth.)

Independent commissions of inquiry have many purposes, a few of them even legitimate. Probably their most respectable role is to act as official codifier and publicizer of some already-well-established set of facts being challenged by conspiracy theorists or generic wackos. (The Warren Commission was the prototype; it may not have been as successful as it had hoped to be, but think how wild and, uh, imaginative the Kennedy assassination conspiracy industry could have been without its careful establishment of a basic set of facts and evidence on the event.)

Finger-pointing commissions, on the other hand, are much less effective; it's much easier to believe that an august panel of dignitaries has misplaced the blame for some fiasco than that they've deliberately fabricated or covered up hard evidence. If it's politically or emotionally expedient for some people to reject the 9/11 commission's conclusion that it was, say, all Larry King's fault for failing to book Steven Emerson often enough, then they will.

Besides, how on earth can "blame" for failure to anticipate 9/11 possibly be calculated? When an event is unanticipated, that means that most people have adopted a worldview that rates such an event as highly unlikely. Now that the event has happened, of course, it's possible that their calculation of the likelihood of such a threat was grossly--even negligently--mistaken. It's also possible, though, that their calculation was completely correct. For all we know, the September 11th attack was a wildly improbable "success" that depended on numerous strokes of unbelievable luck on the terrorists' part (say, multiple near-compromises of the plot that somehow were just barely avoided). It's also possible, for all we know, that an attack viewed at the time as far more likely (say, a missile launch by a "rogue state") happened to have been derailed around the same time by some remarkable fluke of good fortune.

Indeed, even if an al Qaida attack was the most likely threat at the time, it's still possible that no reasonable information collection and analysis strategy (that is, one that did not recognize a priori the nature of the al Qaida threat) would have identified it as such. As Slate's William Saletan pointed out a few months ago, a "pattern" of evidence comparable to the one since observed regarding the September 11th attack could also have been constructed to support a prediction of any number of other disasters that, as it turned out, never came to pass. Expecting the unexpected is a very difficult business; there's just so much out there not to expect.

That doesn't mean that the government shouldn't be hard at work seeking out, studying, investigating and evaluating threats to the country, of course. What it does mean, however, is that a thorough examination of the process that missed the last threat is not likely to be particularly fruitful. (It could, for instance, spawn a "terrorist threats first" approach that will miss the next, non-terrorist danger.) A more productive exercise would be a simple best-effort threat assessment, based on the best information currently available, then an enumeration of possible countermeasures, and identification of the most cost-effective of these (in terms of estimated threat reduction potential) for implementation. I see no reason to think an "independent commission of inquiry" headed by Henry Kissinger or any other grandiose luminary would be nearly as effective as, say, a Pentagon "skunkworks" team (or perhaps several, working independently) at performing this function.

Readers of the Volokh Conspiracy weblog may be puzzled by the references there to a substance called "chopped liver". I will try to explain the origins of this bizarre material.

The liver is an organ present in all higher animals; its primary function is to secrete a malodorous green substance called bile, essentially a detergent that helps dissolve fats to aid in their digestion. It also produces a cascade of other chemicals designed to neutralize various toxins; some of these toxins are also stored in the liver to protect the rest of the body from them. In some animals, the liver is actually toxic in its own right; polar bear livers, for instance, contain hazardous quantities of vitamin A. In other animals, the organ is (barely) edible, albeit with an extremely foul flavor.

However, humankind's long history of daring ingenuity and perennial food shortages has prompted many societies to attempt to exploit all manner of noxious resources--insects, worms, dirt--for nourishment. It was thus inevitable that some intrepid cultures would attempt to convert the liver from waste by-product of livestock slaughter into dietary component. And, as with so many other examples, liver originally consumed out of desperation evolved in some locales into a "delicacy", as palates trained to tolerate this revolting ingredient eventually learned to crave it. The French, for example--notorious converters of detritus into cuisine--have taken to subjecting geese to obscene tortures in the belief that these can actually render the birds' livers tasty (in fact, the forced-feeding regimen they impose only dilutes the organ's flavor somewhat, making it marginally less disgusting to eat).

Another European tradition asserts (mistakenly) that cooking the liver, mashing it, then mixing it with fat, onions and spices, can mask its nauseating flavor; hence Volokh's strangely enthusiastic references to this dish. And remember: if anyone ever asks you whether they're "chopped liver", it's only polite to assure them, in no uncertain terms, that they are not.

(Next week: "Steak and Kidney Pie -- The British Sense of Humor Strikes Again")

Thomas Friedman, my favorite international affairs columnist, is now arguing that NATO should take control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the way they did Kosovo. In fact, he claims to have suggested the idea a year ago. Of course, the analogy was absurd even back then; Kosovars weren't attempting to conquer and resettle all of Serbia, nor were they sending suicide bombers all the way to Belgrade to murder innocent civilians in support of their ambitions. But at least at that time the necessity of suppressing the "terrorist infrastructure" in the Palestinian Authority's domain with harsh military force, while obvious to many of us, hadn't yet been empirically proven. This past March, however, the Israelis moved in, and what has happened since? "Ariel Sharon has adopted a policy of hot pursuit and it has resulted in the Palestinian Authority's being destroyed and more Israelis being killed and feeling insecure than ever," writes Friedman. Does he really believe that more Israelis are being killed and feeling insecure than before Operation Defensive Shield? Does he even read his own newspaper?

Unless NATO is prepared to act as vigorously against terrorism as the Israeli army has, the bombings and killings emanating (currently at a much-reduced but still disturbing rate) from the PA's former stomping grounds would only increase under NATO rule. And the minuscule likelihood that, say, Norwegian troops would be willing to conduct dangerous and aggressive military operations against Palestinian terrorist organizations to capture "militants" and destroy munitions factories does not exactly inspire optimistic hopes for Friedman's plan. But widely celebrated international affairs pundits don't like messy, ugly situations with no elegant solutions; they're paid to be creative, and they'll propose grand, imaginative schemes, dammit, even if they have to ignore reality to do it.

You've got to hand it to Michael Kinsley; few writers can make a spectacularly flawed argument sound so spotlessly logical. His current critique, in Slate, of the practice of plea-bargaining is apparently derived from a 1978 article in the magazine Public Interest by one John Langbein, entitled, "Torture and Plea Bargaining". To quote Kinsley:

Langbein compared the modern American system of plea bargaining to the system of extracting confessions by torture in medieval Europe. In both cases, the controversial practice arose not because standards of justice were too low, but because they were too high. In medieval Europe, a conviction for murder required either two eyewitnesses or a confession by the perpetrator. This made it almost impossible to punish the crime of murder, which was an intolerable situation. So, torture developed as a way to extract the necessary confessions.

Plea bargaining evolved the same way, Langbein explained. As our official system of justice became larded with more and more protections for the accused, actually going through the process of catching, prosecuting, and convicting a criminal the official way became impossibly burdensome. So, the government offered the accused a deal: You get a lighter sentence if you save us the trouble of a trial. Or, to put it in a more sinister way: You get a heavier sentence if you insist on asserting your constitutional rights to a trial, to confront your accusers, to privacy from searches without probable cause, to avoid incriminating yourself, etc.

This analogy looks reasonable on the surface, but it is in fact wildly self-contradictory. If the modern system of justice is as "larded with....protections for the accused" as the medieval one, then how can plea-bargaining threaten to impose a "heavier sentence" on someone who is nearly guaranteed an acquittal? What is the incentive for the accused not simply to demand a trial, and obtain an exoneration?

In fact, the medieval torture analogy fits one aspect of the modern criminal justice system perfectly--just not the part that involves plea-bargaining. Plea bargains almost always involve cases in which the defendant faces a very high chance of conviction, because the evidence for guilt is overwhelming. In such cases, the defendant has a strong incentive to accept the certainty of a lighter sentence in exchange for the near-certainty of a heavier one. This is a perfectly reasonable transaction for both sides, and not even Kinsley is able to come up with a serious argument against it.

The trouble starts when the authorities have somebody whom they "know" is guilty, but whose prospects for an acquittal are large--either because the evidence is genuinely weak, or because the elaborate labyrinth of "protections for the accused" prevents the damning evidence from being used. In such cases, modern equivalents of medieval justice--from ruthless interrogation techniques to falsification of evidence to "testilying"--become extremely tempting "correctives" to the system. And once used to convict the unmistakably, horribly guilty who would otherwise go free, they become equally tempting tools for winning convictions in cases where the evidence is less clear-cut--including some where the accused later turns out to have been innocent after all.

Now, all of this fits Kinsley's/Langbein's analogy perfectly. It even explains the ostensible topic of Kinsley's column ("Why Innocent People Confess") much better than all of his grumbling about plea bargains. But the clear lesson of this analysis--that doing away with absurd Constitutional barriers to convicting the obviously guilty might actually afford the innocent greater protection, by reducing society's incentives to quietly allow convictions to be obtained by corrupt means--is terribly unappealing to someone of Kinsley's ideological pedigree. So he must instead twist a perfectly good analogy in perverse directions, extracting a lesson--plea-bargaining is bad--that makes no sense, and that benefits nobody except a lot of criminals, their defense attorneys, and their political sympathizers.

Then again, given the incoherence and perniciousness of his claim, Kinsley certainly argues it well.

The blogosphere (and now the real world, too) is up in arms over Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's fond reminiscences about Strom Thurman's days as a rabidly pro-segregationist "Dixiecrat". Some commentators have expressed surprise and even alarm at the slowness with which the public outcry has arisen. Sunny optimist that I am, I view this delay as a positive sign; in effect, it demonstrates that Lott's expressed sentiment is now so far beyond the pale that everyone simply assumed he'd gotten his tongue in a knot, so to speak, and ended up blurting out something whose plain meaning he couldn't possibly have intended.

Of course (he said, returning to cynical mode), none of this has any bearing on whether Lott actually gets to keep his job or not. As I've often pointed out, a political scandal rarely has much to do with the actual offense ostensibly at the center of it; rather, it's an occasion for the protagonist's allies and opponents to do political battle, with the offender emerging unscathed, alive but bloodied, or completely destroyed, depending upon the relative strengths of the forces engaged in the melee. I have no idea how strong Lott's support is in, say, the Republican Senatorial caucus, but if it's strong enough, he could tout Osama bin Laden for president and get away with it, whereas if it's sufficiently weak, his crummy hairpiece alone is enough to sink him.

That having been said (he adds, returning to sunny idealism), the outcry among conservatives at Lott's remarks (and the initial relative restraint among liberals) extends a building (and most welcome) trend against racial polarization in American politics. (The defeat of several polarizing candidates in 2002 also provided consipcuous evidence of this tendency.) I haven't seen it mentioned, but I suspect that one of its biggest accelerators was the WTC attack; nothing promotes national unity better than an external enemy, and racial animus post-9/11 now seems not only quaintly outdated, but arguably downright unpatriotic. Somehow, I suspect that improved racial harmony in America is not the effect the September 11th hijackers had in mind....

Mark Kleiman is tussling with a few folks who resent his (and others') calling Elliott Abrams a "felon". Now, I agree completely with his point that while "innocent until proven guilty" is a perfectly appropriate standard in a criminal court, public discussions of public figures are free to use less rigorous standards of proof when judging criminality. Hence, describing Abrams as a "felon", despite his having plea-bargained his way to a couple of misdemeanors and an eventual pardon, is not unreasonable by the standards of casual (e.g., blog) conversation.

But, significantly, Kleiman also felt compelled to throw in an offhand-seeming remark that "Abrams wasn't deceiving the Congress about his sex life". In other words, it's not true that to him, a felon is a felon is a felon; allowances can be made for, say, people forced under oath to choose between mendacity and political suicide, and opting for the former, in the course of a political witch hunt decried by Jeffrey Toobin in a book as a scandalous misuse of prosecutorial power for political ends. Well, under that criterion, Abrams, too, would get the benefit of the doubt.

(Of course, Kleiman may well feel that the matters about which Abrams misled Congress were more the investigator's business than those about which a certain former president misled a certain plaintiff's lawyers. And personally, I'm inclined to agree. But then, that president didn't have to sign into law the statute that made the topic about which he was later pressured to dissemble a permissible line of investigation for sexual harassment plaintiffs. That he did suggests that by his own standards, the investigators who later caught him perjuring himself were acting legitimately.)

Hence, in the end, while I won't quibble with Kleiman for referring to Abrams as a felon, he shouldn't pretend that he's doing so merely because Abrams is, in the casual sense, a felon. More likely, it's because he objects strenuously to Abrams' past political acts and views (and quite possibly his present ones, as well). Wouldn't it be more appropriate, then, for discussions of the man to concentrate on his merits or demerits as a political figure, rather than legal hairsplitting? Isn't that what we both would wish for, after all, in our conversations about that former president with the embarrassingly similar problem?

The New York Times may not allow columnists to disagree with its editorial page, but it apparently does allow op-ed pieces to conflict with columnists. For example, Chinese dissident Gao Zhan's critique of the Chinese education system directly contradicts Nick Kristof's glowing praise for it a few weeks ago. Who's right?

Actually, the two columns agree on quite a bit; Kristof asserts that academically speaking, "Chinese parents demand a great deal" of their children, that "Chinese students may not have a lot of fun", but that they "are driven by a work ethic and thirst for education" that leads them to study many hours a day, seven days a week. Gao writes that "[t]he competition in big city schools is intense", that "[s]tudying 15 hours or more a day is commonplace", and that "[l]est you think the pressure is only on the children, parents are not exempt." They disagree on the breadth of students' education; Kristof writes that "the brightest kids are not automatons; many are serious enthusiasts of art, music, poetry or, these days, the basketball plays of Yao Ming", while Gao complains that "the system discourages intellectual inquiry, especially in the humanities".

But mostly, they disagree over whether all this drive for educational achievement is really a good thing in the first place. Kristof lauds the country's "educational success", attributing it to the attitude that "good students do well because they work harder", and the fact that "parents set very high benchmarks". Gao is principally concerned that the Chinese educational system is "hopelessly politicized, a vehicle of propaganda". But she also frets that "[t]he pressure on children can be cruel" and that students are "poisoned by cutthroat contests for academic success". In other words, this isn't primarily a difference about methods, or even the results of methods; it's about the very goals of the educational system. Kristof admires China's schools for producing outstanding academic achievers; Gao considers their successes irrelevant at best, and instead criticizes them for being "inhumane", producing "hotheaded nationalists and submissive cogs"--albeit scholarly ones.

And her extra-academic priorities are shared by plenty of non-Chinese educational critics. In a Washington Post commentary, writer Christine Woodside expresses unusual concern for a little-noticed (and not-usually-deplored) development on the American educational scene: the decline of recess. Although she raises the argument that a break in the daily schedule might actually improve classroom learning (a tough sell, empirically speaking, given China's experience), most of her claims focus on her concern that American schools might be (believe it or not) "forbidding fun".

Now, few such educational "reformers" openly express indifference as to whether children actually learn anything in school. But nobody could advocate making, say, driving school or medical school less rigorous, with fewer tests and more stress-free activities so that students won't feel so much pressure, without the obvious inference being drawn that the complainer cares little about the quality of the nation's drivers or doctors. And Gao's and Woodside's assertions that a less intense educational program would in fact be a more intellectually successful one are about as plausible as, say, the claim that children have more fun in a highly competitive school than in a slack one. There may be a tiny grain of truth to both statements, but anyone who makes them without massive caveats should be considered most likely completely disingenuous.

One can perhaps understand how a woman raised in an oppressive, totalitarian society could come to oppose highly disciplined education systems in general, associating them in her own mind with propaganda and perpetuation of state power. (That's not to say that the association is empirically valid; after all, Chinese students have been more involved in dissident activity, on average, than most segments of that society.) But what explains the popularity, here in the free world, of the notion that education--by far society's most powerful agent for personal, social, economic and technological advancement--is less important than adding to the modern Western child's copious quantities of leisure time?

James Taranto of "Best of the Web" notes a MEMRI report of a Saudi translation of a Kuwaiti newspaper's interview with Saudi Interior Minister Prince Naif Ibn Abdul Aziz. "I cannot still believe that 19 youths, including 15 Saudis, carried out the September 11 attacks with the support of bin Laden and his al-Qa'ida organization," avers the Prince. "It's impossible."

I guess they don't call him "Prince Naif" for nothing.....

Jacob Levy has posted a thoughtful response to my comments on "free speech" on campus. (He is also one of three bloggers recently added to my highly exclusive--though possibly not coveted, depending on what one thinks of my tastes--"blogs better than their exposure" roll.) We may not disagree as much as it seems; I will try here to sort out some of the intertwined issues.

First, we apparently agree fully that "time, place and manner" restrictions on speech--"no shouting outside dorms"-type stuff--can be quite legitimate. Levy also accepts that "[i]n-class speech that fails to advance an argument or to contribute to the academic enterprise is, of course, discouraged." (How vigorously it can be discouraged, Levy doesn't say.) Speech that is "merely offensive", however, is a different matter; according to the policy he wrote for the University of Chicago, it is not generally appropriate for "the University [to] intervene to enforce social standards of civility."

These last two positions form a striking contrast--with themselves, and also with traditional notions of academic freedom. In effect, they turn the usual form-content distinction on its head: we may forbid you to utter arguments in class that we consider invalid, but you are of course entitled to spew as many four-letter words as you please! That can't be what Levy has in mind--and it appears that indeed, it is not: " To single out a student for abuse," he writes, "to throw racial epithets at a particular person, to threaten with violence--these are over the line. They're violations of professional ethics and may well warrant university intervention." Now, to me, that sounds a lot like "enforc[ing] social standards of civility", and Levy seems quite comfortable with it.

What he is not comfortable with, as his examples show, is actually something very specific: restricting the expression of a specific set of ideas, on the grounds that a particular person or group finds it "offensive". Now, I happen to share this discomfort myself, but--and this is the crux of the issue, I think--I do not consider the principle at issue here to be the protection of free speech. There are, as our previous examples have shown, so many completely legitimate reasons for restricting free speech in an academic setting that standing on the principle in this class of instances invites charges of massive inconsistency.

No, the reason for not restricting speech based on perceived "offensiveness" is that this particular rationale for doing so is a terrible one. Left as is--"thou shalt not say things that are offensive to a particular person or group"--it is meaningless: who determines whether a given statement is "offensive" to a particular person or group? Defined more precisely--"thou shalt not say things that a particular person or group says it finds offensive"--it easily becomes grotesque: should any particular person or group be entitled to call down punishment on an arbitrary individual for the crime of having given offense? Even if such a rule were never used to stifle debate-worthy political or intellectual opinions (and there is every reason to suspect that it might), it would still be wide open to abuses of all kinds--blackmail, prosecution of personal or social vendettas, and so on. Why treat it as a free speech issue?

Now, it might be said that my distinction is a niggling, angels-on-pinheads affair; what does it matter whether a bad rule is shunned on free-speech grounds or on its own demerits? But as I explained in my previous posting, the "free speech" argument has been used to defend a lot of scurrilous behavior on campus, including acts that are profoundly damaging to the academic endeavor. These acts are not, pace Levy, a "red herring"; they are an excellent argument for avoiding overuse of the "free speech" shibboleth--especially when far more compelling arguments apply.

(Correction: Jacob Levy did not write the University of Chicago policy from which he quotes; I misread his reference to it as suggesting that. My apologies.)

Paul Krugman's undignified descent from distinguished economist to respectable economics-popularizer to partisan hack is already well-documented (by me and others), but even so, his most recent column must be read to be believed. In it, he states that (I'm not making this up) "[f]or most of the last 50 years, public policy took it for granted that media bias was a potential problem"; that "[t]he answer was a combination of regulation and informal guidelines"; and that because "much of that system has been dismantled", today "we have a situation rife with conflicts of interest", in which a "handful of organizations that supply most people with their news have major commercial interests that inevitably tempt them to slant their coverage, and more generally to be deferential to the ruling party".

Memo to Krugman: If you're going to accuse "major news outlets" of being "inevitably....deferential to the ruling party", it would help (1) not to do so in prompt, slavish imitation of recent remarks by Democratic party leaders Tom Daschle and Al Gore; (2) not to cite as your "most important example" a network (Fox News) whose nightly viewership is less than the daily circulation of the newspaper that carries your own twice-weekly, virulently anti-Republican column (to say nothing of all the other newspapers that publish your screeds as New York Times News Service features); and (3) not to propose government regulation as a solution at a time when the ruling party you so passionately rail against has just won complete control of the elected branches of the federal government (and hence, presumably, of any regulatory process that might be established).

Just a suggestion.....

Pharmaceuticals heiress Ruth Lilly has donated $100 million to Poetry Magazine, but Meghan O'Rourke, in Slate, and Eric Gibson, in the Wall Street Journal, both express their doubts about the gift's potential to rejuvenate the muse, described by poet Dana Gioia (whom Gibson quotes) as "the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group". It should come as no surprise, though, that both articles, in bemoaning the obscurity and unpopularity of poetry, somehow failed to mention the one word that would have given the lie to their effete lugubriousness. That word, of course, is "rap"; and compared to its multibillion-dollar market, Ms. Lilly's paltry nine-figure bequest is a tiny irrelevancy in the world of poetry.

Now, I don't mean to claim that the major hiphop artists of our day are all creating poetic masterpieces. But then, neither were the greats of English-language poetry all living in a pristine world, blissfully free of the plague of mediocre doggerel. On the contrary, their work stood out precisely because it existed in the context of a living, even popular art form whose typical examples were, in retrospect, unmemorable or worse. Many of the giants achieved acclaim in their own day; some toiled in obscurity, only to be appreciated much later. But until Matthew Arnold popularized the idea of art as something that an audience needed to be taught to appreciate--setting the stage for the devastating schism between popular and "high" art that has left forms like poetry in such a sorry state today--none of the greats would have shied away from comparisons of their work with that of their most fashionable, most popular (and, they would confidently have asserted, self-evidently inferior) contemporaries.

But today's poets don't want to face such comparisons; rather, they consider themselves to be doing something entirely different from their pop counterparts--even as they reject any restrictions or boundaries on the form or content of their own work. They hide behind their illustrious claimed predecessors because they are naked. They tartly note the cavernous gap in artistic mastery that separates P. Shelley from P. Diddy--glossing over their own conspicuous inability to bridge that gap themselves. They may not be as popular as rap performers, they sniff, but, more importantly, they are appreciated by--who? The 12,000-odd readers of Poetry Magazine?

Perhaps what poetry needs is an equivalent to jazz music: a popular form that intellectuals can respect, that shows up classical music's supposed descendants, the practitioners of "modern serious music", for the masturbatory noisemakers they are, and that isn't afraid to interact with, influence and be influenced by a mass audience and its cacophony of overlapping mass tastes. Rap may be empty drivel, after all, but the next Tennyson is far more likely to arise from its crowd-pleasing dynamism than from a few insular scribblers publishing obscurantist verses for tiny audiences and pathetically imagining themselves to be writing for the ages.

Federal Reserve Governor Ben S. Bernanke made an interesting speech last week, asserting the Fed's imperative to fight deflation by any means necessary. He also pointed out what is generally considered a basic economic fact:

[T]he U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.

Now, this would appear to be simple, inarguable common economic sense. But there are a couple of seeming exceptions that might give one pause. First there's Japan: after years of budget-busting Keynesian fiscal stimulus, the country is still mired in a deflationary slump, and the government--printing press and all--appears helpless to do anything about it. Many Japan commentators claim that it's bureaucratic incompetence, not lack of available means, that's hamstringing the government and preventing the necessary economic repairs, but the measures these pundits typically advocate--such as reforming the banking system, and allowing large but hopelessly debt-ridden concerns and banks with humongous portfolios of nominally-performing-but-effectively-deadbeat loans to go under--sound like they have nothing to do with simply running the presses and printing away deflation. Why, then, aren't they (apart from Paul Krugman, who has been pushing the inflation solution to Japan's ills for years now) all just advocating the obvious?

Well, perhaps Japan is an exceptional case--its savings rate is astronomical, the economy lacks transparency, the culture is inscrutable, etc. etc. etc. But there's another puzzling exception that hasn't been mentioned much in this context. It's a bit like Sherlock Holmes' famous "incident of the dog in the night" that didn't bark, and hence passed unnoticed despite its oddity. I refer to the case of the US over the last five years.

From October 1997 to October 2002, broad money supply (M2) in the US rose more than 44 percent; the broadest measure, M3, rose 55 percent. These are rates not seen since the early eighties, when inflation was much higher. The printing presses seem to have been running full tilt, but inflation has still been low enough to prompt worries of impending deflation. Where has all the money gone?

It turns out that more money does not always create more spending. As Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley points out, "[newly generated] money must go somewhere, but initially it might be channeled into balance sheet repair, paying down debt, or a restoration of saving before it ends up in the real economy or the price structure. There are no guarantees of instant policy traction near a zero rate of inflation." This is particularly true of post-bubble economies like the current American one, where indebtedness is high, savings are low (and hence have much room to rise), and an investment-minded culture pumped full of cash may be perfectly happy to pour the surplus funds into yet another asset bubble (some suggest that urban real estate may already be playing that role, now that high-tech stocks have lost their luster). It would be comforting to think that Japan's malady is sui generis, and can be easily cured should it occur elsewhere. I just wish I were convinced....

The academic blogosphere--including Eugene Volokh, Jacob Levy, and Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds--is up in arms over threats to freedom of speech on college campuses. "[T]he regulation of merely offensive speech in classroom settings is an utterly noxious idea," writes Levy, and the rest resoundingly agree. I admit to being a trifle confused; my understanding was that the whole point of universities is that a student whose speech--in classroom presentations, on exam papers, in course assignments--is not even offensive but merely insufficiently scholarly can face penalties as severe as expulsion. Have things changed that much since I went to school?

Actually, not that much; on-campus ranting about free speech was popular back in my day, as well (although in Canada, where I studied, the rhetoric was always much more muted and less indignant). Now, I recognize the important role that free speech plays in a healthy democracy, as well as the dangers inherent in limiting free expression in society as a whole. But universities are not society as a whole, nor are they even democracies. They are institutions (ostensibly) dedicated to education and research, whose members voluntarily forgo all sorts of freedoms (such as the freedom to neglect one's education and the freedom to do shoddy research) for the sake of furthering the academic community's (and hopefully their own, similarly aligned) goals. And it would seem obvious that, say, broadly offensive speech (or, for that matter, false or even illucid speech) would often work to the detriment of these goals, by undermining reasoned, dispassionate debate.

Of course, the common response of free speech defenders to such observations is that university faculties and administrations, if given the power, would use speech restrictions to stifle legitimate political debate on campus. And it's certainly possible that some, or even many, might do so. Then again, those same administrations can easily use their power to grant or deny tenure, to fund departments, to admit or reject and graduate or fail students, and so on to exactly the same nefarious ends. And these instruments are scarcely less potent, in ruthless hands, than the right to make rules about, say, offensive language. It's hard to argue that, say, banning racial epithets on a campus has anything like the chilling effect of, say, requiring students to pass a course in which grades are given for writings and presentations based on their political content.

In fact, too much free expression has sometimes threatened the academic health of universities as seriously as too little of it. Thuggish behavior on campus--shouting down of speakers, destruction of leaflets or newspapers, even physically threatening behavior--often masquerades as "protest", with its perpetrators demanding absolute protection from punishment in the name of "free speech". The endless chanting of the free-speech mantra is thus a pitifully ineffective substitute for vigorous action to protect the scholarly collegiality of the modern academic environment.

Sadly, few academic leaders--let alone students or other citizens--take notions like "the scholarly collegiality of the modern academic environment" the slightest bit seriously these days. As I have written before, the modern liberal arts university is an institution adrift, bereft of serious purpose, and thus at the mercy of interest groups keen to hijack it to advance their own goals. In the hands of these groups, the "free speech" slogan is just another rhetorical bludgeon with which to pummel the university into submission; in the absence of serious defenders, or even a serious alternative vision, the university is helpless to defend itself.

In 1993, when University of Pennsylvania student Eden Jacobowitz was punished for shouting an insult (thought by some to be racist) at a group of African-American women who were celebrating loudly outside his dorm window, disturbing his (and his dormmates') studies, he became an instant martyr to the cause of free speech. Some decried him as a bigot; most deplored UPenn's persecution of him. Nowhere was the slightest attention paid to the real lesson of the story: that the University of Pennsylvania simply did not care about whether some students' raucous behavior might be disrupting their fellow students' efforts to study.

Then again, by 1993 the idea that a university might think to value studiousness over partying had long been relegated to academia's distant past. After all, such a policy might interfere with "free speech".

Andrew Sullivan is baffled that supposedly tough soldiers seem so skittish about the idea of accepting the presence of openly gay men in their midst. "Is it because they're afraid of being raped?", he asks. "C'mon. Assuming all gay men - or even any - are potential rapists is completely loopy. (And the same people who make this bizarre argument would scoff at a woman who screamed rape if a man looked at her in a sexually interested way.)"

Oddly enough, Sullivan doesn't evince the slightest mystification over the elaborate lengths to which the military goes to protect women--tough, hardened military women, mind you--from invasions of their privacy by men. Why aren't military showers, bunks and latrines co-ed? And why all the draconian rules against "fraternization" and so on? Are these women soldiers afraid of being raped by their well-disciplined colleagues? Are they afraid of being looked at by men with lust in their hearts?

Well, yes, actually--and understandably so. One doesn't have to believe that all straight men are rapists, or that the male sexual gaze is inherently brutalizing, to understand why women (in this culture, at least) feel unsafe bathing naked around male soldiers (or groups of them). It doesn't matter if most of the time, nothing untoward happens; it only takes one major incident--or a long-enough sequence of small, subtle, incremental steps--for all assumptions of safety to break down completely. (If you're a weakling to be bothered by glances, after all, then what about playful pats on the shoulder? Or elsewhere? Where does the line get drawn? How? And by whom?)

The instinctive anticipation of this threat of sudden breach or gradual erosion of personal safety is likely the source of that general feeling of discomfort that causes women to want to guard their privacy from men when forced into close quarters with them. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that men would want to take the same precautions with respect to gay men; after all, gay men may not be substantially worse than straight men in this regard, but there's no reason to believe they're any better (and, as straight men themselves are well aware, that's plenty bad enough, in the worst cases).

Of course, military training is designed to break down instinctive anticipations and general feelings of discomfort and replace them with rigorous discipline; and if it turned out one day to be militarily necessary to drill soldiers to get over their discomfort around gay comrades the way they get over, say, terror of enemy fire, then the army would no doubt do what had to be done. But each such psychic hardship imposed on soldiers exacts a toll, and for the military to wish to avoid an avoidable one, so as to be able to concentrate on the unavoidable ones, is hardly a demonstration of bigotry or cowardice. Rather, it demonstrates a recognition of, and respect for, the limits and costs of discipline, and an unwillingness to bury or deny those costs in order to indulge various varieties of political dogma.

In Ha'aretz, Danny Rubinstein argues that Palestinians would actually prefer a right-wing victory in the upcoming elections, because Sharon "did not succeed in reducing the violence or stopping the terrorist attacks", and his continued rule "is the only way Israelis will learn how powerless the right really is - and may in turn germinate the seeds of a just settlement." He may well be correct; the problem arises when one considers just how the Palestinians define a "just settlement". After all, if the definition looked anything like the permanent settlement Ehud Barak offered--or even the unilateral withdrawal being proposed by Labor leadership candidate Amram Mitzna--then surely the Palestinians would be rooting for a Mitzna victory. If Rubinstein is right, then, the Palestinian notion of a "just settlement" must be a much more far-reaching capitulation than even Labor doves are willing to contemplate--that is, something that most Israelis (understandably) consider tantamount to acquiescing in Israel's complete destruction.

I asserted a few months ago that according to "the solid majority view" among Israelis, they are already "the undeclared winning side in the conflict" of the last two years with the Palestinians. But there is a subtle assumption buried in that view: that Israel can continue to impose and even tighten its crackdown on the occupied territories indefinitely, until its residents eventually stop seeing their suffering as a worthwhile price to pay for maintaining their low-level campaign of terrorism against Israel. This assumption may be correct; but it's also possible that the current willingness of (according to polls) a majority of Palestinians to endure hardship of the worst sort, just for the sake of persevering in their efforts to kill as many Jews as possible, will continue for years to come. In that case, Israel faces a long period of walking on an extremely slippery tightrope between, on the one hand, indulging the temptation to resort to extreme cruelty in an attempt to hasten the moment of Palestinian abandonment of terrorism, and on the other, indulging the temptation to forget--as so many Israelis did from 1993 to 2000--that conciliatory concessions to a polity that enthusiastically embraces mass murder are ultimately suicidal.

NEW YORK (ICBW) -- In the wake of the spectacular opening-weekend success of the latest Harry Potter film, "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", authorities are bracing for the likely consequence: a spate of children injuring themselves while imitating Potter's magic feats. "We want to warn the public that magic is a dangerous business," said Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts Academy of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and a technical consultant to the filmmakers. "Untrained muggle children shouldn't even attempt to dabble in it."

After the release of the first film in the series, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", numerous young viewers sustained injuries uttering backfired spells and playing quidditch with dangerously underpowered homemade brooms. This time, there have already been scattered reports of flying-car accidents and careless petrifications. "The magic stunts performed in the film all involved qualified Hogwarts-trained professionals," explained Dumbledore. "But many youngsters see a group of child actors appearing to use powerful spells and potions, and figure, 'hey, I can do that.'"

In preparation for the film's opening, hospitals throughout the US have stocked up on mandrake root and phoenix tears, and Dumbledore said his staff will be available around the clock to handle emergencies. "But the best precaution," he reminds viewers, "is to stick to non-magical pursuits. It's funny, really--if our own students had a choice, most of them would neglect their magic completely and spend all day playing video games and chattering on their blasted cellphones."

Mark Kleiman writes about the harrowing story of thimerosal, a mercury-based vaccine additive that some suspect is responsible for the epidemic of autism that appears to have broken out in California in the 1990s. Republican Congressman Dick Armey has slipped a provision into the new Homeland Security bill that, according to the New York Times, "was apparently intended to protect Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant, from lawsuits over thimerosal". All very shocking--until, that is, one checks out the CDC's position on thimerosal....

There is no evidence of harm caused by the minute doses of thimerosal in vaccines, except for minor effects like swelling and redness at the injection site due to sensitivity to thimerosal.

Now, I hold no brief for Dick Armey, and I don't care at all for special-favor clauses being sneaked into important legislation. But in the absence of proper tort reform (and in the presence of widespread hysteria about technology--including lifesaving technologies like vaccines), I would guess that it's more likely that this particular political move will end up saving lives (by impeding the onslaught of tort lawyers and junk-science scaremongers on the practice of universal vaccination) than that it will actually harm anyone.

Of course, I'm no toxicology expert, and if anybody can point me to actual, substantial evidence implicating thimerosal in vaccines as a cause of serious health problems, I'd be interested to hear about it. Perhaps, though, the CDC ought to be informed first.

The campaign to get universities to divest themselves of Israeli investments is heating up; both supporters and opponents are comparing it to the South Africa divestment campaign of the 1980's. And both sides are more right than they realize.

Of course, Israel is nothing like South Africa was. It's a full democracy with a universal franchise, not at all like the apartheid regime. It has recently engaged in a multi-year process of trying to set up the territories it occupies (as a result of a war provoked by legitimate casus belli) as an independent state, being stymied only by the refusal of the prospective government of that state to abandon terrorism against Israelis. Its own citizens are neither racially segregated nor otherwise politically oppressed, and have the full range of democratic freedoms, including speech and religion.

But then, South Africa wasn't a particularly obvious choice of target, either. It was hardly the worst human rights abuser of the era, even on its own continent. Opponents of the boycott routinely pointed out that South African Blacks were better off than they would have been in just about any other country in Africa, and the boycott itself caused no small amount of suffering among them. If one were to choose a political evil to target in the 1980's based on moral and humanitarian considerations, Apartheid would have been a legitimate but relatively minor choice, paling by comparison with literally dozens of others.

But that's the dirty little secret of politically motivated boycotts: they are not primarily chosen on the strength of their justifications or the urgency of their goals. Rather, their adherents participate in the hope of making a political point in some other, entirely separate context. The South African boycott, in truth, was about many things--race relations in the US, Cold War geopolitics in the Third World, and anti-corporate populism, to name three--but the actual conditions of non-White South Africans were at best peripheral. Likewise, today's university divestment campaigns have many motivations--"anti-globalist" leftism, anti-Americanism, even, on the fringes, some anti-Semitism--but sincere concern for the plight of the Palestinians (for the vast majority of whom the Oslo process has been an unmitigated disaster that a boycott of Israel would likely only further exacerbate) can't be very high on the list. It is fortunate that some major academic leaders are seeing through the sophistries and rejecting the divestment movement's meretricious moral case.

The Canadian government's occasionally impolitic positions with respect to the war on terrorism, to which I've alluded previously, and which are the subject of a piece by Jonah Goldberg in the National Review, may be somewhat puzzling to Americans. I will try to explain (without excusing) them; the explanation may also provide useful insight into some other Western countries' strangely unsupportive attitude towards American efforts against terrorism.

The first thing that Americans should understand about Canadian politics is that Canadians are, by and large, a politically uncommitted bunch. Only a tiny fraction of the population belongs to a political party, and most of the rest are happy to vote for whichever party seems to be addressing the pocketbook issues of the day (or to be winning handily enough to be worth currying favor with, in the hopes of receiving a greater share of federal pork-barrel spending after the election). To the extent that there is any mass partisanship in federal politics, it is largely a matter of inter-regional conflict, with parties increasingly representing their regional power bases. Canadian foreign policy is simply not on the political radar screen, as Canadian voters understand perfectly well their country's utter insignificance in the geopolitical arena.

As a result, Canadian governments target their foreign policy largely at the small domestic constituency that actually cares about it. Naturally, this group disproportionately inhabits the academic and media worlds, where it clings, like its American and European counterparts, to a familiar breed of woolly-minded leftish anti-Americanism with the dogmatic uniformity typical of small, concentrated intellectual groups. Canadian journalists and academics are also somewhat self-selected for anti-Americanism, since the most successful among them usually have the option of enhancing their prestige and paychecks south of the border--an option many of them exercise, unless they are strongly disinclined to do so--and the less successful thus have ample cause for "sour grapes" resentment of an American cultural and intellectual pre-eminence that excludes them.

There is also a strain of anti-Americanism that runs through most segments of Canadian society, and that has little to justify it beyond common "us vs. them" home-team-rooting. It's not particularly intense or virulent, though, and it's counterbalanced by Canadians' general sense of neighborly good feeling towards folks south of the border. (A large fraction, after all, have friends or relatives in the US, visit often, and are deeply immersed in popular culture. Pernicious stereotypes about American national characteristics are hard to sustain under those conditions; one has to live among Americans for years, as I have, to develop them.) But on issues that don't really matter (and let's face it: what Canadian politicians have to say about world affairs almost never really matters), playing to anti-American peevishness rarely causes a politician lasting damage.

On matters of substance--i.e., action--though, I believe that a solid majority of Canadians invariably stand firmly with their American allies. They helped house stranded American travelers on September 11th, when American flights were grounded; their soldiers joined the US in the Afghanistan campaign; and they continue to cooperate with their neighbors on a variety of continent-wide security matters. The longest undefended border in the world will no doubt remain undefended--and friendly--for a long time to come.

Thomas Friedman's at it again. His latest column says a lot of really silly things--such as (I'm not making this up) that the "Bush hard-liners" who hope to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein don't "really want to invest in making the world a different place, or....have any imagination or inspiration to do so". (Wiser souls, he explains, appreciate the far greater world-changing power of--I'm not kidding--"diplomacy".) But his introductory paragraph repeats a canard whose absurdity will be apparent, sadly, to all too few readers. He cites, with approval, a "senior European diplomat" who complained that the Bush administration is failing to tell Israel that it "needs to find a secure way to get out of the settlements."

Now, it may well be that an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement will one day be signed, one clause of which involves the evacuation of most or all of the Jews living in the West Bank and Gaza. (I'm skeptical--it seems unlikely that Palestinians would be willing to live at peace with a Jewish state a few miles away, but not with a Jewish neighborhood on the next hill--but I suppose it's still possible.) However, it doesn't make a lot of sense to start talking to the Israelis about dismantling settlements in the occupied territories when they're currently militarily occupying almost all the West Bank's major cities. As for the Palestinians, they conspicuously do not refer to the violence that first erupted in September 2001 as the "Settlements Intifada", were not responding at the time--even as a pretext--to a visit by Ariel Sharon to a settlement, never refer to removal of the settlements as their primary goal, and do not discriminate between civilians living in Israel proper and those in the territories when executing their terrorist attacks. Nor is there any indication that the failure of the Camp David and Taba negotiations hinged in any significant way on the settlements--an issue on which the Israelis were in fact quite flexible, to no avail.

The real importance of the settlements, though, lies in the role they play in Friedman's worldview and that of his European diplomatic friends. For them, it is crucial that they find something that Israel must be cajoled into conceding--otherwise, their negotiations-based strategy is self-evidently doomed to fecklessness, given the Palestinians' refusal to bow even to harsh Israeli military pressure, let alone to mere diplomatic pestering. But what Israeli concession can they possibly portray as a key goal for the diplomats? Military restraint is a non-starter, from Israel's point of view, since it's been repeatedly and amply proven to be of no use whatsoever in winning Palestinian reciprocity. Likewise, most of the generous long-term offers spurned at Camp David, such as full statehood and compromise on Jerusalem, have lost all their plausibility as bargaining chips in the eyes of Israelis.

Settlement-dismantling, on the other hand, is not a completely quixotic goal; it still retains a modest constituency within the Israeli body politic, mostly for various internal political reasons. Hence, if Friedman et al. can (mis-) represent settlement evacuation as the potential breakthrough step in a process of mutual compromise, then--voila!-- they can claim a vital role for diplomacy in resolving the conflict. It's a slender reed, to be sure; but it's the only one available, and without it, they would literally have no justification, however feeble, for trying to insinuate a diplomatic component into Israel's muscular (and comparatively far more effective) response to terrorism.

A few months ago, Slate somehow managed to cajole the unlucky Virginia Heffernan into subjecting herself to an episode of HBO's "Real Sex" television series and then reporting her impressions to readers. Her staggering conclusion: the program's "soft sociology provide[s] an excuse to look at soft pornography". The article must have drawn a high hit count, though, because now they've sent Emily Nussbaum to check out New York's Museum of Sex. While Ms. Nussbaum is actually fairly upbeat, describing one exhibit as "an impressive combination of titillating and educational", she can't quite disguise the museum's real target demographic, admitting that the guards "have to shoo people away" from the hardcore stuff. Odds are that most of the patrons "transformed....into zombies" by the "lurid close-up genital pistons of a Dolores Del Rio porn film" don't share Nussbaum's gender.

Why, then, did Slate twice send a woman to do a man's job? Perhaps because an honest male assessment of this ever-so-slightly-dressed-up smut would have to be brutally frank about its producers' obvious goals in presenting it--and hence, by implication, about Slate's obvious goals in reviewing it.

Lisa Dusseault tells an amusing story about an encounter with Canadian tourists in San Francisco who, on hearing that she is an expatriate Canadian living in the US, commiserate with her plight. I understand her nonplussed reaction; I must at least partially disagree, however, with her claim that "it's not so different" living in the US, as opposed to Canada.

In one sense, she's clearly correct: many of the horror stories that Canadians tell each other (and themselves) about America are built around serious misunderstandings of their southern neighbor. I can say this with some authority, since I labored under several such illusions myself while growing up in Canada, and was only thoroughly disabused of them when I moved to the US. For example, Canadians hear about the horrific American crime rate, and assume that life in America is a daily crap-shoot for survival. In fact, the means to insulate oneself from crime--peaceful, safe suburban neighborhoods and well-protected shopping areas, workplaces and recreational districts--are readily available (and affordablly accessible) to a very large fraction of Americans. Like Lisa, I have never been a crime victim in the US, and I certainly haven't had to spend a fortune to buy my safety, as Canadian myths would suggest.

Similarly, health care was once the canonical example of the contrast between terrifying American chaos and reassuring Canadian orderliness. Again, though, most Americans have employer-provided healthcare that provides a level of protection comparable to the standard Canadian regime (indeed, arguably superior to it, given the tales I've heard lately about the collapsing Canadian health care system). And US politics, for all its faults, is much harder to criticize these days in light of the appalling way that Canadian officials have embarrassed themselves when commenting on American foreign policy.

And then there are the attractions of American life. For example, the US has a service ethic far superior to Canada's; being a customer of any kind in America is a real joy compared with Canada's more, uh, European approach to customer care. And, as Lisa points out, economic opportunity can also be considered a quality-of-life issue: a more enjoyable, interesting, challenging job represents a lifestyle improvement above and beyond any material standard-of-living increase it may provide.

And yet...there are real cultural differences that can make the adjustment to American life difficult for a born-and-bred Canadian, even after the misconceptions have been discounted. For example, I find American interpersonal culture to be marked by a peculiar level of unabashed self-centeredness and self-indulgence--a kind of naive thoughtlessness about the feelings and concerns of others when it interferes with one's own "pursuit of happiness". I'm not making a political statement here, or alluding to any grand philosophical principle; rather, I'm speaking of the very fabric of day-to-day American social interaction. I once had lunch in a restaurant in California with a group that included a German friend; when this friend needed to squeeze behind another diner's chair at the next table in order to leave the restaurant, the other diner, rather than shift his chair to allow my friend to leave, continued his conversation for several minutes, happily oblivious to the buttocks mere inches from the back of his head. Eventually my polite friend was forced to bring his problem explicitly to the gentleman's attention, at which point he was happy to assist by shifting his chair forward slightly. "Only in America", muttered my friend after we had left. I believe he's right; many other cultures tolerate behavior that North Americans might consider deliberately rude, but only in the US is it unsurprising that an otherwise non-hostile person would so egregiously fail, in all innocence, to take others' concerns into consideration at all. To someone raised on diffident Canadian politeness, the adjustment to this American-style solipsism can be difficult.

There are other differences, as well. America is a much more class-conscious society than Canada, in which people are keenly aware of markers of social status. (I can't imagine a Canadian, for instance, conspicuously dropping blatant, smug references to his or her alma mater, the way many ivy league-educated Americans seem to--sometimes literally within minutes of meeting me.) On the plus side, the level of diligence, industry and entrepreneurialism in the US far outstrips the Canadian norm. (The experience of shame at one's own laziness also requires some adjustment, as it turns out.)

None of these differences is in itself particularly taxing to deal with, of course; nor do they, taken together, justify receiving condolences from visiting fellow Canadians. But they do cause me to miss, on occasion, the country of my birth--and to experience a certain feeling of warm comfort on each return visit to the country I still think of, in a way, as home.

Mark Kleiman and Eugene Volokh are apparently both of the opinion that the Boy Scouts' policy of excluding atheists amounts to a kind of religious discrimination. (Both concede the Scouts' Constitutional right to their policy, but consider it morally wrong nonetheless.) As Volokh puts it, "[i]f the Scouts excluded Catholics -- everyone else, Jewish, Protestant, or what have you is fine, but not Catholics -- we'd rightly condemn them, even if they said 'Rejection of Catholicism is one of our core beliefs.' Likewise, I think, when they exclude atheists." (Kleiman makes the same point, right down to the choice of analogy.)

I rather doubt that the Scouts' opposition to atheism is as narrowly defined in practice as Kleiman and Volokh claim; would the Scouts accept, for example, a Satanist troop, or one that worships only a particular (living) charismatic cult leader? If the Scouts turn out to have bona fide doctrinal standards compatible with most religions but exclusive of a few, then they would be no different from a group that rejected, say, believers in performing child sacrifice rituals or murdering all heretics (except, of course, in the sense that Kleiman and Volokh probably find adherents of such ideas far more worthy of exclusion than those, including atheists, who happen to offend the Scouts' somewhat woolier religious principles).

I also wonder whether the two professors have paused to consider in just what company they have placed themselves with their choice of analogy. The most conspicuous advocates of the idea that atheism is a religious conviction--comparable to, say, Catholicism--are fundamentalist Christians attempting to inject "Creationism" into the public-school curriculum. After all, if atheism is a religion, just like literalist Christianity, then it's perfectly valid to claim that Darwin's theory of evolution is as much a religious position as is the "Genesis theory" of human origins. Likewise, if absence of religion is just another religious creed, then school voucher programs that encompass confessional schools are not only Constitutionally permissible--they might even be mandatory, under the judiciary's current broad reading of the First Amendment, to prevent the government from "establishing" atheism, over all other religious doctrines, as the official "faith" of the public school system.

But atheism is not a religion; the absence of religion is very different from the presence of one. Teaching evolutionary biology in science class, and rejecting all of its religious alternatives, is not the same as teaching a single religious alternative. Forbidding the promulgation of any religion in public schools is nothing at all like exclusively promulgating a single one. And likewise the Boy Scouts, in requiring their members to affiliate with a religion--any religion--are not "excluding" a particular religion. Kleiman and Volokh should be happy about that; the consequences of atheism being designated by convention as just another religious belief would be most unlikely to please either of them.

As I read the eulogies to the late Senator Paul Wellstone, I notice an odd absence: there seems to be precious little of what one would normally define as, well, praise. Here's a typical one, from Mickey Kaus: "He wasn't a poser, a trimmer, a schemer, a dissembler, a self-aggrandizing egomaniac or a vicious infighter." Joshua Micah Marshall: "Most successful pols are steely operators. Not a few act serious, without at all being serious, but are rather jokes and whores. Or if they're first-rate men or women they've long since gotten gated-off behind walls of flacks, caution and self-protection. Paul Wellstone just wasn't like that." And these are liberals (albeit somewhat centrist ones).

Now, part of the problem is that Wellstone didn't leave a spectacular legacy of public-sphere accomplishments. The encomia from several leftist allies of his at Mother Jones, for example, attest mainly to his personal warmth and his various quixotic political stances, apparently lacking a concrete achievement to celebrate. That's not intended as a criticism; being mourned as a beloved husband and father, dear friend to many, and general exemplar of integrity to all is in itself the kind of high honor to which anyone ought to aspire. It's just that one might expect members of the most exclusive club in the world to be associated with a somewhat lengthier list of specific acts of heroism, leadership, or generosity, especially if they are being widely and publicly mourned as outstanding men.

An obvious explanation for all the accolades is implied in Marshall's observation: Wellstone's decency was in itself a rare, and hence outstanding, accomplishment for a politician. But there must be more to the story--after all, politics is hardly the only profession known to attract a disproportionate share of creeps. Yet we don't see, say, CEOs of large corporations, Hollywood celebrities or rock stars receiving fulsome posthumous praise, despite a lack of notable achievements, simply for having been known to friends and family as sweet, fuzzily huggable all-around princes. Why, then, does a merely non-reptilian politician inspire such enthusiasm?

I think the answer lies in the popular mythology of (small-d) democratic politics--the "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" ideal of a politician-as-ordinary-person humbly representing his fellow citizens in the halls of the powerful. CEOs and showbiz types are expected to be vain and ruthless more or less as a job requirement; but the slimeball politician, despite his ubiquity, is somehow seen as a disturbance in the natural order of things.

Perhaps this illusion is a necessary one, in order to prevent voters from losing faith in democracy altogether. (Then again, few abandon either capitalism or pop culture upon discovering its heroes' warts.) But even among those willing to recognize that the late Sen. Wellstone's principled personability and his political ineffectuality might have been related, it seems that not one of them is ready to concede that politics is no more about principle than is tycoonhood or stardom, and that it, no less than commerce or entertainment, is a vehicle by which the morally empty can still (under the right regime of constraints) play a useful role that benefits society. Instead, everyone hopes, searches, naively, desperately, for that absurd chimera: the brilliantly effective politician who's as honest, straightforward and principled as the late Paul Wellstone.

Devilishly clever monster that he is, the "beltway sniper" and his accomplice seem to have timed their actions perfectly to first mislead foolish bloggers such as myself into pegging him as a possible terrorist, then humiliate us by shifting his behavior to fit the profile of a typical none-too-bright, rather disorganized lone nutbar. (Oddly enough, some bloggers, including Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, are still seeing hints of terrorism in the latest developments. We can only hope, I suppose, that all terrorist organizations are clueless enough to leave incoherent notes for the authorities, telephone them repeatedly with hints about their identities, and demand that $10 million be credited to their credit cards. Kudos to Susanna Cornett for her prescient early analysis.)

Still, the entire episode contains important lessons about terrorism and the best way to respond to it. After all, if a couple of lunatics could severely disrupt the entire capital region with a few random murders, what could a well-organized terrorist campaign do? And why were the public so terrified--terrorized, if you will--by a fairly small-scale random crime spree?

Two Washington Post opinion pieces published at the hight of the hysteria, by Paul Appelbaum and, earlier, by Marjorie Williams, argued that the extreme public fear stemmed from the lack of a clear pattern that can allow people to reduce (or simply to tell themselves they're reducing) their risk by taking certain precautions. "This killer seems especially frightening for his apparent determination to mirror, in the randomness of his acts, the brute impartiality of death itself," writes Williams. "This fear....is worse than most because of the unpredictability of the threat," writes Appelbaum.

No doubt that's part of the story. But unpredictable dangers--lethal diseases, freak accidents, or outbursts of violence--are hardly unfamiliar, and many of them (and certainly all of them together) are no rarer or more escapable than the DC sniper. Indeed, they are often less so; there was in fact a fairly established pattern of behavior on the sniper's part that suggested some obvious techniques for minimizing one's risk of becoming his next victim. What was particularly disturbing about the sniper, I believe, was that the mystery of his motive implied an open-endedness about the scale of the danger that he (or his kind) posed. Had he been known to be a typical psychotic, homicidally disgruntled crackpot, serial killer or even terrorist, DC-area suburbanites would have had some idea of the expected scale, frequency and targets of his actions; these are by now well-studied types whose behavior we can at least measure and assess, even if we can't understand (much less predict) it. But the cold-blooded distance-killers in this case seemed more like a new, previously undiscovered disease, with an unknown etiology--and no one had any idea how bad the epidemic could eventually get. How long would he continue? Would he ever get caught? Would there be copycats, and if so, how many? Would the danger spread elsewhere, or to other targets?

The optimistic flip-side of this observation is that as time goes on, and a fairly clear pattern of events emerges, with the killer either being captured, discontinuing his attacks, or continuing them at a constant or diminishing rate, such dangers eventually pass into the realm of estimable risks, and the anxiety they trigger thus declines. (Think of the case of Israel, where far worse atrocities occur regularly, with far less public reaction--indeed, often virtually no reaction at all, as one Israeli blogger recently reported.) Thus, though the mood of terror gripping the capital region may have been intense during the snipers' rampage, it is unlikely that a similar sequence of attacks will ever again have such a paralyzing effect. In fact, terrorism in general seems to suffer from this fundamental flaw--that societies inevitably develop a tolerance for shock, and more and more extreme (and thus difficult and dangerous) acts of violence are thus necessary to effect the intended level of fear and despair.

If this analysis is correct, then the DC-area and federal authorities may have erred by keeping such a tight lid on the details of their investigation. The existence and contents of multiple tarot-card messages, for example, may have frightened the public further had they been revealed; but they might also have, by creating a kind of public "profile" of the killer, contributed to a general sense of his knowability, even predictability, and thus dispelled some of the more open-ended scenarios (numerous co-ordinated terrorist cells, for instance) that contributed greatly to the public's fear. Should another serious terrorist attack (God forbid) occur, the authorities may want to keep this effect in mind, as they consider what to reveal about their investigation.

Life imitates comedy...

"I began using the date rape drug Rohypnol. I took it twenty times. I didn't know you were supposed to give it to the woman."

--From "The Autobiography of Larry Sanders", by Garry Shandling and David Rensin (quoted in Salon)

"Actor Nick Nolte was driving under the influence of the date-rape drug GHB when he was arrested last month, dazed and drooling, behind the wheel of his automobile, prosecutors charged today."

--Reuters

It is not particularly shocking (pace some bloggers) that the New York Times would publish an opinion piece by Mohammed Aldouri, the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations. After all, the op-ed page is meant to provide a forum for a variety of viewpoints, including, especially, those not normally given voice in the rest of the newspaper. Nor is it surprising that Ambassador Aldouri would complain that "[f]or more than 11 years, the people of Iraq have suffered under United Nations economic sanctions, which have been kept in place largely by American influence," and that "no American political figure has been seriously interested in discussing these matters with our government."

But consider for a moment how the Times reacted this past May, when Canadian political science professor Anne Bayefsky submitted an opinion piece on the UN's human rights activities. According to Prof. Bayefsky, the piece was accepted only on the condition "that [its] dynamic be significantly altered", and that numerous passages be deleted. After "six new drafts, four additional drafts with smaller changes and corrections, seven drafts from the editors and 6 hours of editing by telephone", the op-ed was finally published; excised were passages in the original that noted the membership of "some of the most notorious human rights violators in the world today: China, Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria" in the UN Human Rights Commission, and the failure of that organization to take action regarding human rights violations in China, Syria or Iran.

Now, we don't know how ruthlessly Ambassador Aldouri's writing was edited prior to publication, and it is in any event entirely the Times' prerogative to control the contents of its newspaper as it pleases. However, we are also entitled to judge the Times based on its choices, and we should note that the Gray Lady is happy to publish criticism of American influence at the UN--but not of Cuban, Saudi or Syrian influence there; and of the failure of American officials to embrace the Iraqi government--but not of the failure of UN officials to embrace victims of Chinese or Syrian repression. Such decisions are simply incompatible with a spirit of diversity of opinion, and are extremely difficult to explain without positing a deliberate effort on the Times' part to protect and indulge several of the most brutal, murderous dictatorships on the face of the earth.

First of all, there was the timing: in concert, it seemed, with a sudden, deadly outburst of Al Qaida terrorist activity. Then there was the methodology: a strange combination of lone-nutbar tactics (cheesy, taunting warnings), extraordinary high-tech skill, and such meticulous planning and care that virtually no usefully traceable evidence has been found to date. And then there was the choice of victims: though all of Washington, DC was terrorized, the death toll was actually very small--a few random, unlucky souls who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And none of it fit any of the standard patterns: too impersonal for a typical serial killer; too indiscriminate for a revenge killer or a fanatic with an agenda; and too ineffective for a terrorist cell, which could no doubt easily cause far greater damage and mayhem--if those were really its goals--given the deadly techniques and skill levels it had displayed. It's no wonder, then, that although the FBI's primary hypothesis continues to characterize the perpetrator as a lone American-born male with a military background that provided him with the requisite skills, no solid evidence--let alone a culprit--has turned up to confirm or even support this guess.

I am referring, of course, to last fall's anthrax mailings. And one of the most conspicuous features of that spate of attacks, it should be recalled, was that it ended as quickly as it began--again, not fitting any of the typical patterns of a psychopath, domestic radical or foreign-based terrorist. I have a sneaking suspicion that the DC sniper will also suddenly halt his activities (if he hasn't already, now that the heat is on) and disappear without a trace. If so, then perhaps it is time to consider a new hypothesis: that some terrorist organization has decided to cheaply and anonymously generate periodic panics, rather than massive casualty counts.

The obvious next questions: "who?", and "why?"

When Instapundit Glenn Reynolds agrees with the New York Times editorial page, something funny is surely afoot. In this case, both are encouraging the Supreme Court to overturn--on Constitutional grounds, mind you--a 1998 law extending the duration of copyrights by an additional twenty years after the creator's death. Their argument is that the Constitution's language empowers Congress to set copyright law for "limited times", in order "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts", and that extending copyrights on existing works cuts undercuts both of these expressed intentions, by threatening to make copyright terms indefinite, and rewarding creators long after they have ceased to be able to respond to the increased incentive.

Now, I sympathize with these arguments, and freely concede that copyright protections might deserve some weakening, particularly with respect to duration. (Patents only get twenty years, after all.) But deciding the correct length of copyright terms is a matter of balancing the benefits to society from rewarding creators against those that the public garners by having free (or freer) access to their work. Gauging that balance is exactly the kind of public policy question that the courts are completely unqualified to decide, and should leave to the democratic process, in all its imperfect glory, to work out for itself. Sadly, the judiciary's hubris with respect to judging what's good for the public knows no bounds these days, and I have no confidence that the Supreme Court will exercise any uncharacteristic restraint in this case.

In Slate, Robert Weintraub claims that football quarterback-turned-commentator Boomer Esiason's stint on Monday Night Football in 1998-99 "was undercut by a frosty relationship with Al Michaels, major domo of MNF", who "froze out the cocky Esiason early in their tenure together". But, says, Weintraub, things are much better now that Esiason is working with Marv Albert, who has the "ability to elicit the best out of whomever he is partnered with" (although not with his teeth this time, presumably).

Imagine--someone teaming up with Marv Albert as a way to avoid backbiting....

A postscript to my previous posting: According to the New York Times, the New Jersey court system had already granted Toricelli's (and now Lautenberg's) Republican opponent, Douglas Forrester, an exemption a few months ago from the same law that the Supreme Court ignored in allowing Lautenberg to replace Torricelli. Partisan Democrats like Mark Kleiman and Joshua Micah Marshall are waving this discovery as a victory banner, and it's certainly highly likely that the matter is now closed as a political issue. But as an actual defense of the court's behavior, the comparison is a pure "tu quoque" argument of no exculpatory value; interfering with the electoral process to grant injunctions in flagrant violation of state law is more--not less--outrageous if the court has actually done so twice rather than once.

The argument does, however, neatly illustrate the crucial interplay between ruthless partisanship and the erosion of democracy. The first time the New Jersey court rewrote the election statute, there was no significant outcry, presumably because the Republicans involved preferred to downplay an intraparty squabble rather than stand firm on a matter of principle. (Or perhaps, like so many Americans, they had simply been too inured by decades of judicial overreaching even to notice the shame of it anymore.) And the second time, when interests in the outcome split along party lines, most of those on the "victorious" side thought nothing of accepting (even glorying in) a partisan victory at the expense of repect for duly enacted legislation. Just as war results when at least one side of a conflict values victory over peace, democracy flounders when at least one powerful partisan faction values victory over the preservation of the democratic process.

One of the few silver linings of Bush v. Gore was seeing some of my good progressive friends, raised from birth on liberal torturings of the Constitution and steeped in the belief that the judiciary is morally superior to the elected branches of government, suddenly feel a twinge of doubt creep into their blind faith in the Supreme Court. Sadly, that feeling vanished just about as quickly as it arose. In fact, the greater long-term effect seems to have been to further whet the appetites of conservatives; having long cultivated a bitter disdain for the activist judiciary as a decadent redoubt of rigid liberalism, they've now had a glimpse of what a few arrogant, dictatorial justices can do for them, and--wouldn't you know--they rather like it.

The result can be seen in a Washington Post "man in the street" piece which, says Joshua Micah Marshall, proves that "everyone but hardcore Republicans seems fine with" the New Jersey Supreme Court's ruling. In fact, the article portrays intensely cynical voters playing their appointed parts in the partisan charade: among Republicans, the article reports, "outrage was extreme", while "Democrats said overwhelmingly that they're so relieved to be rid of Torricelli that it cancels out their reservations on how it occurred." Is there any reason to believe that my scenario of a Supreme Court exploiting partisan divisions in the elected branches to seize control of its own succession would play out any differently?

The most appalling thing about the recent ruling of the New Jersey Supreme Court is how few people are appalled anymore when a court runs roughshod over the law. The New York Times was predictably satisfied with the ruling, in which the court interpreted the phrase, "not later than the 51st day before the election" in the New Jersey election statute to mean, "later than the 51st day before the election, if we feel like it", because "the greater need was to ensure 'full and fair ballot choice for the voters of New Jersey.'" (As Robert Hochmann pointed out in the Weekly Standard, the Times' notion of a "full and fair ballot choice" apparently includes a special slot on the ballot for a candidate to be selected by the New Jersey State Democratic Party leadership, irrespective of the state primary result; for that is what the ruling granted.) Joshua Micah Marshall termed it "a liberal, though not unreasonable, construction of the statute"--even as he dropped sarcastic comments about the travesty that was Bush v. Gore. (In other words, when judging judges, it all depends whose Bush is Gored.) The folks at The American Prospect's blog, Tapped, bought the court's supposed legal reasoning as well. The New Republic's blog conceded in passing that the ruling arguably "violates some cherished abstract principle like rule of law", but chose to concentrate instead on its practical harmlessness as a legal precedent. The most dignified response I've seen from a partisan Democrat is (perhaps unsurprisingly) that of Mark Kleiman, who noted with some discomfort that "the decision doesn't even pretend to interpret the statute", but otherwise accepted the good tidings philosophically, invoking Bush v. Gore and in effect saying, "this is the way we live now".

But even among those who disagree with the ruling, a shocking (but perhaps entirely predictable) number are treating the case not as a flagrant abuse of judicial authority, but rather as an incorrect, unwise, and possibly corrupt use of a legitimate judicial responsibility. Hochmann, for instance, feels compelled to argue that "the decision threatens to poison our electoral politics with last-minute manipulations", as if it would have been a completely legitimate overruling of the statute, but for the potentially unpleasant outcomes that render it dangerous. Eugene Volokh (a lawyer and a libertarian, to be sure, and hence entirely untrustworthy as a defender of democracy) even concedes that the court's "odd interpretation of the statute" was "not an utterly ridiculous one", and then constructs a long hypothetical meant to prove that the decision was nevertheless not necessarily a wise court's best option. All of this is a disturbing echo of the 2000 presidential election, in which Republicans burned by the Florida Supreme Court ran around talking about the sacredness of machine counts and appealing to the Supreme Court on completely implausible Constitutional grounds--happily jumping into the same jurisprudential mud that the Democrats had sullied themselves with--instead of defending the orderly functioning of the electoral process (as far as the House of Representatives, if necessary) unimpeded by the irresponsible meddling of power-mad judges.

Granted, there have been some voices (such as John Fund's, in the Wall Street Journal) willing to attack the judicialization of elections head-on. More typical, though, is a kind of cynical resignation, such as Robert Alt's in the National Review: "I know that it is too much to ask the court to actually apply the law, but....I expect judges to pretend that they are interpreting a statute, even if what they are really doing is rewriting it." (Alt also goes on to argue for the wisdom of the New Jersey statute's 51st-day deadline--again, as if the court would have been entitled to overturn an unwise one--and to suggest some potential legal justifications for a federal Supreme Court reversal.)

I take back everything I said about the elected branches of the US government being content to exercise their power vicariously, through their judicial selections. The situation is actually much worse: the day may not be far off when a president and Senate of the same party attempt to ram through a controversial judicial appointment, and the Supreme Court simply overrules their nomination, holding the vacancy open until such time as the executive and legislative branches are willing to do the Court's bidding and select a replacement deemed acceptable to it. Think about it--the outrage would most probably be brief, limited to whichever party deemed itself the "loser", and followed by the same muttering capitulation that we see today each time the courts take yet another step beyond the previous boundaries of their usurped powers. The long process of dismantling American democracy, and replacing it with pure judicial authoritarianism, would then, at last, be complete.

ANKARA (ICBW) - A canister intercepted near the Turkish border with Iraq, and originally believed to contain more than 33 pounds of weapons-grade uranium, has been discovered to be a souvenir paperweight.

Turkish customs officials were at first alarmed when they shook the roughly egg-shaped container and observed the tell-tale "blizzard" effect displayed only by highly radioactive nuclear bomb raw materials and inexpensive "tchotchkes".

Inspectors' suspicions were further aroused by what they termed the "transparently false" shipping label on the object, believed to have originated in one of the former Soviet republics, despite the "Niagara Falls, Canada" inscription along the bottom.

When asked to explain the smiling Mountie figurine at the center of the clear plastic ovoid, officials shrugged and replied, "surely we're not the first people to wonder about the composition of that white stuff that seems able to snow over and over again inside these things."