I continue to be interested in how the extreme right might be reacting to current events. Please send any relevant links. Reuters reports that militia appeal is growing since the attacks.

‘ “America’s anti-government militias, on the wane since the Oklahoma City bombing and the Y2K scare, are trying to drum up new interest and

members after the Sept. 11 hijack attacks, experts and militias say.

While people who track militias are skeptical of a sustained revival, militia leaders say the suicide attacks in New York and Washington and the ensuing anthrax scare

have been a “wake-up call” to the public that has left their phones ringing off the hook.

“There’s a general fear now that we may be attacked again or the lights may go out, so people think they should go to the people who know how to handle survival and

weapons,” said Rick Hawkins, commander of the Missouri 51st Militia in Kansas City, Missouri.’

Recall that I blinked below to the detention of an Aryan Nation type with a microbiology degree and a nasty habit of obtaining lethal cultures from low-security labs. Now Australia’s leading antiterrorism expert speculates that the original, media-directed anthrax attacks are more likely due to the US paramilitary movement than ObL, with a spate of copycat episodes by “mentally unbalanced people” following. He was speaking in response to the spread of anthrax panic to Australia. Although such actions readily spread terror, it is difficult to cause mass casualties without the hard-to-obtain “weaponized” preparation of the anthrax spores. Terrorist groups have shown little interest in acquiring and using biological agents for terrorist attacks, he states. Aum Shinrikyo’s biochemists gave up trying to develop biological weapons using anthrax after nine attempts and turned instead to chemical agents. The Times of India

From Hell reviewed: “The Hughes brothers’ portrait of Jack the Ripper and Victorian England misses the intricate

and disturbing nature of the graphic novel on which their film is based.”

The movie is big on fire-red skies and black clouds, wet cobblestones, flickering gaslight, and cloaked figures moving through the fog. In

other words, it revels in exactly the sort of horror-movie clichés that held no interest for Allan Moore or Eddie Campbell. “From Hell”

evokes nothing so much as a pair of small boys given the budget to make their own version of the Hammer horror movies they’ve gorged

on. Which would be fine if the result weren’t such a brain-dead version of a dark and complex work. — Charles Taylor in Salon

On the other hand, Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times, says that “…the Hughes Brothers’ thriller

about the trail of terror left by

Jack the Ripper is one of the most

breathtaking leaps of directing skills in years… (T)he

directors, the twins Allen and Albert

Hughes, find (many ways) to complement, and then top,

the apocalyptic narrative weaving that

Mr. Moore is best at.

…Like Mr. Moore, the Hughes Brothers are interested in large-scale

paranoid fantasies, though they work closer to the real world. Although a

period film set in late-Victorian London might initially seem outside their

purview, what else is the Jack the Ripper tale but a tableau of urban

violence, filled with characters who don’t know where to turn? The tale is

the European antecedent of the Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society and

Dead Presidents.”

War veterans: Afghan

bloodbath if US troops

invade: “Hard-bitten Russian veterans of the

disastrous Soviet intervention in Afghanistan have

warned of a bloodbath if the United States sends in

ground forces in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, wanted for last

month’s US terror attacks.

Alexei Zelenyov, now a deputy in the Russian parliament but

seen by some as the Soviet Union’s last action hero, predicted

the worst for US troops in the event of a protracted land

campaign.

“The US special forces will be up against people who have

been fighting for 20 years and who have grown up as warriors.

The Afghans have an immeasurable love of freedom. Every

province is a state in itself,” he said. The Times of India

Mark Morford, SF Gate columnist: Evil Evildoers Of Evil — How to feel calmly patriotic and yet not the slightest bit reassured by Bush & Co.

This much is true: It really is possible to

love your country and value your freedoms

and still believe the government is full of

fools and prevaricators and BS artists and

Dick Cheney. Really.

It is still possible to feel warmly patriotic in

personal and important ways and yet believe

the military and the generals and the war

machine do not have your best interests at

heart and really couldn’t care less what

those interests are anyway but thank you for

sharing now please sit down and do as we

tell you and by the way, thanks for all the

flags and the money.

And it is still possible to feel unified and

spiritually connected to all that is good and

righteous about your generally nonviolent

Americanism — you know, wine and sex and

good music, large dogs and literature and

clean water and tongue kissing in the streets

— and still be depressed when our famously

nonintellectual president talks to the

country like we’re all five years old and

heavily dosed on Ritalin.

When Bush employs phrases like “bring the

evildoers to justice” over and over, 17 times

in one speech alone, and he furrows his

brow like a serious Muppet and offers

carefully scripted reassurances deliberately

lacking in polysyllabism and detailed

explanation because that would be, you

know, complicated.

When he delivers very earnest speeches he

had no part in writing, and when he is

forced to speak extemporaneously, sans

script or TelePrompTer, and is reduced to

simplistic good-guy/bad-guy platitudes and

flustered, rapid blinking, and who cannot

for the life of him articulate a complex idea,

some sort of nuanced elucidation of our

nation’s motives and positioning, that

contains more than one possible level of

meaning. [via Looka!]

The Booker Prize for Fiction 2001: goes to The True History of the Kelly Gang by the enthralling Australian novelist Peter Carey, who becomes wih JM Coetzee one of the only two authors to win the Prize twice. Carey won the 1988 Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda. Two of his non-Prize-winning novels, Jack Maggs and The Unusual Life of

Tristan Smith , have been more to my taste. Here’s the shortlist.

Neuropsychological Performance in Long-term Cannabis Users: Investigation of the question of residual deficits in cognitive functioning after longterm heavy cannabis use has been inconclusive. A new study by Harrison Pope and associates from McLean Hospital compared active heavy users, abstinent but formerly heavy users, and non-cannabis-using controls on a comprehensive neuropsychological battery including measures of general intellectual function, abstraction

ability, sustained attention, verbal fluency, and ability to learn

and recall new verbal and visuospatial information. Findings: “Some cognitive deficits appear detectable at

least 7 days after heavy cannabis use but appear reversible

and related to recent cannabis exposure rather than irreversible

and related to cumulative lifetime use.” Archives of General Psychiatry

Our first line of defense: Laurie Garrett, the investigative reporter who wrote two excellent (and massive!) books pertinent to current events, The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, is interviewed on responding to the threat of bioterrorism.

“Our government is buying ciprofloxacin, and we’re buying tons of it. We’re buying so much cipro that Bayer in Germany has to reopen a long-shutdown factory to accommodate the American demand. That seems to be the primary thrust of this administration’s commitment at this point.

In my book, purchasing massive quantities of ciprofloxacin is a medical response, not a public health response. The appropriate public health response, it seems to me, would be to look for the most frontline primary antibiotic that appears to be effective. As far as we can tell, the stuff that’s floating around right now in people’s envelopes is completely penicillin-susceptible. It would make a whole lot more sense and it would save hundreds of millions of dollars — not to mention you wouldn’t be breeding broad-spectrum, drug-resistant bacterial disease in millions of Americans — if you use penicillin. Why in the world are we going for the world’s most expensive, broad-spectrum, highly resistance-prone antibiotics?” Salon

“To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.” — George Santayana

A Closer Look At Weblogs from law librarian and legal researcher Cindy Curling. [via Fred]

I idly worried the other day about whether the Freedom of Information Act was going to be gutted in the current climate of ‘giving up freedoms for liberty’ (or is it vice versa??}. Well, lo and behold, Attorney General John Ashcroft is now insisting that a new standard allowing rejection of a FOIA request whenever there is a “sound legal basis” for such DOJ opposition will replace the former, Reno-era standard that noncompliance with a FOIA request would need to be justified by a “forseeable harm” standard.

The article about Bellesisles’ research and the gun ownership controversy generated alot of comments from Followers. It seems Bellesisles’ work has been seriously called into question, to judge from these links I’ve been sent. However, let me make it clear that I found the issue noteworthy not so much because of my belief in his work as due to the degree of ongoing controversy, and the apparent conversion of some former gun control advocates by the new legal commentary. Thus, these responses are less corrections than corroborations of my point.

• “People who have checked Bellesiles’ claims against the probate records that he says he consulted have found that he drastically under
  
  > states the number of guns they show.” Fox News

• “The government steadfastly maintains that the Supreme Court’s decision in
  
  United States v. Miller, 59 S.Ct. 816 (1939), mandated acceptance of the
  
  collective rights or sophisticated collective rights model, and rejection of
  
  the individual rights or standard model, as a basis for construction of the
  
  Second Amendment. We disagree.” [Decision text], [news reports], [more].

• “Today, at Harvard Law School, Bellesiles’s most adamant critic, Northwestern
  
  University law professor James Lindgren, plans to detail evidence that
  
  Bellesiles may have stretched or distorted the historical record in trying
  
  to prove his claim.

  The Boston Globe has reviewed substantial portions of records Lindgren will
  
  cite: 18th-century probate records in Vermont and Rhode Island. The Globe
  
  has also checked into Bellesiles’s claim to have studied certain records in
  
  San Francisco, records county officials say were destroyed by fire in 1906.
  
  In each case, the records appear to support Lindgren’s accusation and
  
  suggest a disturbing pattern of misuse of data by Bellesiles in his book and
  
  in an article defending his thesis which he published on his Web site.” Boston Globe, 9-11-01

• “I thought that you might be interested
  
  in a recent report of some critiques of Bellesiles’ study, done by Glenn
  
  Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. You can find the
  
  piece at:

  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,36122,00.html.”

• 
  site_name=GunCite

  site_url=http://http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_bellesiles.html

  comments=”This is a pro-gun site, but refreshingly free of paranoia, as these sites generally go. The URL points to a long article which attempts to demonstrate how Michael Bellesiles is more of a propagandist than a historian. I don’t know how much of it is true, but I always find it interesting to see how much disagreement a single issue can generate.”

Thanks to everyone who wrote in. Yes, FmH can be a conversation.