We’ll just have to see what this chart looks like over the next year or two if the media’s favorite candidate gets elected. (Chart via WSJ)

David Warren describes the strange jurisprudence of “thought crime” in “Kafkanada”, in the wake of Mark Steyn’s prevailing in his “show trial” put on by Canada’s Human Rights Tribunal:

you can be tried for the same imaginary “hate crimes” in any or all federal and provincial jurisdictions, simultaneously or sequentially. A single complaint by any reader anywhere is enough to launch a secret inquiry. The target has no right to confront his accuser, and will not at first even be told who he or she is.

Truth is no defence, the absence of harm is no defence, there are no rules of evidence — due process is entirely subverted. The inquisitors of these kangaroo courts may ultimately reach any “judgement” they please, after months or years of playing cat-and-mouse with their selected victim.

A Protestant minister in Alberta was, for instance, recently ordered to publicly renounce his Christian beliefs, as well as pay a big lump sum to the anti-Christian activist who had prosecuted him, in a case I mentioned in a previous column, and which I am pleased to see is getting wide publicity in the United States even if not up here. “Re-education” programmes are frequently assigned, for which the victim must also pay.

All of the complainant’s expenses are paid by the taxpayer, as well as all of the overheads and expenses of the jet-setting “human rights” bureaucrats, who do all the prosecutorial work, as well as providing both judge and jury. The system is, in principle, indistinguishable from that in place during the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China. It was perpetrated by leftwing activists on the Canadian people while they were sleeping. It is a system of the activists, by the activists, and for the activists.

When we read the dismissal of the complaint against Mark Steyn, we wonder how it is possible for such people as are on Canada’s HRC to get a paycheck, their logic and writing are so muddled and indecipherable. That they have the power to ruin the lives of others should be intolerable in a free society.

This is an actual press release by a US government agency. It is more disturbing than the situation it describes. The good old days are dead and buried. HT: PJ

To a layman, a key element in any definitive explication of the right to bear arms is perhaps this: what to make of the preamble about the well-regulated militia? The majority opinion in the ruling of the Supreme Court today by Justice Scalia got to the point at page 4.

Antonin Scalia cited Copeman v. Gallant, an English case from 1716, which stated that “the preamble could not be used to restrict the effect of the words of the purview.” In other words, as Justice Scalia said: “operative provisions should be given effect as operative provisions, and prologues as prologues.” Here’s the conclusion of the opinion which unequivocally affirmed the right of law abiding citizens, as individuals, to possess firearms:

we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense. Assuming that Heller is not disqualified from the exercise of Second Amendment rights, the District must permit him to register his handgun and must issue him a license to carry it in the home.

We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country, and we take seriously the concerns raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution. The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns…But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.

Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.

There would appear to be a reason that this matter of the reach of the Second Amendment didn’t need substantial judicial parsing since 1791, namely, there wasn’t much of a controversy about what the plain words of the “operative provisions” meant until recent days. But now that matter has been settled, at least for some significant time.

One of the interesting elements of the Scalia opinion refers to the “whereas” provisions of laws and contracts, and how they do not limit the body of the agreement. In this case the preamble was the rather limited explanation “whereas there is a need for a state militia, etc….” It might be interesting to speculate what other “whereas” provisions were left out of the second amendment in the interest of politeness or reserve (eg, pp. 19-22). As many have said, one of the guaranties of the continued existence of the First Amendment is the threat of armed opposition implied in the Second.

Justice Scalia and then Chief Justice Roberts, via Powerline weigh in on a decision which seems to the layman as pretty much the opposite of the thinking that went into ex parte Quirin, though we are obviously not clever enough to understand the rarefied logic of the majority of today’s Supreme Court:

Today, for the first time in our Nation’s history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war…

Today the Court strikes down as inadequate the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants. The political branches crafted these procedures amidst an ongoing military conflict, after much careful investigation and thorough debate. The Court rejects them today out of hand, without bothering to say what due process rights the detainees possess, without explaining how the statute fails to vindicate those rights, and before a single petitioner has even attempted to avail himself of the law’s operation. And to what effect? The majority merely replaces a review system designed by the people’s representatives with a set of shapeless procedures to be defined by federal courts at some future date. One cannot help but think, after surveying the modest practical results of the majority’s ambitious opinion, that this decision is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants.

And now the fine lawyers defending these men, who believe they have a religious duty to kill Americans, are preparing to ask that their clients be freed because they have been denied their constitutional right to a speedy trial. What a country.

UPDATE: Scott Johnson has some additional thoughts.

The UN is coming to investigate elections in the US — apparently (and appallingly) at the request of the United States government. It’s quite a boondoggle; we wonder who’s paying the bill. Reuters:

A special U.N. human rights investigator will visit the United States this month to probe racism, an issue that has forced its way into the race to secure the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. The United Nations said Doudou Diene would meet federal and local officials, as well as lawmakers and judicial authorities during the May 19-June 6 visit.

“The special rapporteur will…gather first-hand information on issues related to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” a U.N. statement said on Friday. His three-week visit, at U.S. government invitation, will cover eight cities — Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, Omaha, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Race has become a central issue in the U.S. election cycle because Sen. Barack Obama, the frontrunner in the battle for the Democratic nomination battle, stands to become the country’s first African American president. His campaign has increased turnout among black voters but has also turned off some white voters in a country with a history of slavery and racial segregation.

Diene, a Senegalese lawyer who has served in the independent post since 2002, will report his findings to the U.N. Human Rights Council next year.

So the investigator is from Senegal, eh? That’s poetic justice. Senegal is, after all, the sort of country that dictators flee to, after being run out of their own countries. And perhaps Mr. Doudou Diene would care to discuss Senegal’s own rather dodgy current practices when it comes to slavery, while he and Reuters are busy passing judgment on Americans. This whole thing is shameful, not least because the US is aiding and abetting the ridiculous UN Human Rights Council and its perverse and highly selective moralizing.

Edward Luttwak in the NYT raises an interesting issue about Senator Obama, which, by and large, the media have chosen to ignore or deny. We note that this is not the only story in the NYT to address the question of Senator Obama and his family’s religious background:

it is a mistake to conflate his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith. As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him. His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.) It is true that the criminal codes in most Muslim countries do not mandate execution for apostasy (although a law doing exactly that is pending before Iran’s Parliament and in two Malaysian states)…

another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing. At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House.

This matter would appear to be non-trivial. We have witnessed great intensity of feeling as to what constitutes justice in the situations of other apostates, and the situation of the President would appear to be a special and highly visible case. Criminalizing apostasy ought itself to be a crime, but that, unfortunately, lies far in the future.

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips has quite a bit more to say on this and related topics.

“America’s workers should build America’s defense,” announces the Clinton campaign commercial below. But nothing is quite as simple as it seems.

The Clinton campaign in Indiana is featuring an ad (via Gateway Pundit) of a plant that was closed in 2003. The jobs were outsourced to China, and Clinton blames the Bush administration. Run of the mill trade policy ad, you say. Not quite.

The Magnequench plant that was closed was not making waffle irons. The plant apparently manufactured 80% or more of the sintered NdFeB magnets that are used in the US military’s smart bomb guidance systems. Sounds sinister, yes? And an even better ad for the Clinton campaign. But it gets more complicated. All the transactions that resulted in ownership of the plant by Chinese interests occurred during the Clinton administration.

In 1995, according to ABC, “China National Non-Ferrous Metals…and San Huan New Material High-Tech Inc…joined with other interests to purchase the Anderson, Ind.-based Magnequench…The two Chinese companies were headed by the husbands of the first and second daughters of then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.” The 1995 transaction was approved by CFIUS, the responsible government agency. Then, in 2000, Magnequench bought the factory that appears in the campaign ad. So it would appear that if there is an issue about the transfer of sensitive technology to China, it occurred before George Bush was President, rendering some of Senator Clinton’s claims in the ad moot or ridiculous.

But is there a legitimate national security angle to the story in the first place? Former Magnequench vice president Andy Albers says no, via ABC. “‘Nothing was done by Magnequench that aided the Chinese military program or hurt the U.S. military program,’ says Albers, who adds that Clinton’s focus on his former company ‘concerns me because it doesn’t address the main issue, which is how to make U.S. companies more competitive globally at’s the question we should be asking, that’s what we should be addressing. We should not be twisting the truth about that this is a national security issue, because it’s not a national security issue, it’s about global competitiveness’.” Former counsel to Congressman Duncan Hunter, Jeff Green, agrees that the matter is not a national security issue: “‘I think it’s more accurate to say that all the technology and production of these Neo magnets comes from overseas,’ he says, including Japan, Finland, Germany and China.”

So either both the Bush and Clinton administrations are to blame, or neither one did anything wrong. It’s a bit hard to say at the moment, but it appears from the news reports that, on a micro level, the system apparently functioned normally, although there are dissenting voices on left and right alike. However, on a macro level, the picture looks a little different, and raises the question as to whether the procedures in place at the CFIUS arm of the Treasury Department are adequate in a world that changes rapidly. At first blush, they do not appear to be.

One obvious question: does CFIUS track purchases or consolidations that occur after it has approved the sale of a company? For example, there are apparently sources for the Neo magnets in Japan, Finland and Germany, as well as in China. But what if a Chinese company or companies were to subsequently purchase those operations in Japan, Finland, and Germany? Would we ever know? Before it was too late to do anything about it? How? The current transactional approach of CFIUS, even as modified by FINSA, looks sort of like Hart-Scott-Rodino procedures for defense related industries. CFIUS procedures do not seem to take into consideration certain plausible or likely future events which could render its decisions unwise in retrospect. This would appear to bear looking into.

Bloomberg reports that the futures prices in agricultural commodities are trading high above the cash prices, as speculators come to dominate those markets just as they have in oil:

Garry Niemeyer is paying the price for Wall Street’s speculation in grain markets. Commodity-index funds control a record 4.51 billion bushels of corn, wheat and soybeans through Chicago Board of Trade futures, equal to half the amount held in U.S. silos on March 1. The holdings jumped 29 percent in the past year as investors bought grain contracts seeking better returns than stocks or bonds. The buying sent crop prices and volatility to records and boosted the cost for growers and processors to manage risk.

Niemeyer, who farms 2,200 acres in Auburn, Illinois, won’t use futures to protect the value of the crop he will harvest in October. With corn at $5.9075 a bushel, up from $3.88 last year, he says the contracts are too costly and risky. Investors want corn so much that last month they paid 55 cents a bushel more than grain handlers, the biggest premium since 1999.

“It’s the best of times for somebody speculating on grain prices, but it’s not the best of times for farmers,” said Niemeyer, 59. “The demand for futures exceeds the demand for cash grains.” Commodity investors control more U.S. crops than ever before, competing with governments and consumers for dwindling food supplies…

Index-fund investment in CBOT corn, soybeans and wheat has increased 66 percent to the equivalent of 902,105 futures contracts, a record, since January 2006, when the government began collecting the data. Each contract represents 5,000 bushels, about what Niemeyer reaps from every 22 acres of corn planted.

Investments in grain and livestock futures have more than doubled to about $65 billion from $25 billion in November, according to consultant AgResource Co. in Chicago. The buying of crop futures alone is about half the combined value of the corn, soybeans and wheat grown in the U.S., the world’s largest exporter of all three commodities. The U.S. Department of Agriculture valued the 2007 harvest at a record $92.5 billion. Commodities are in their seventh year of gains

The momentum speculators in commodities are clever chaps. They know that their massive speculation actually causes behavior in the real world — hoarding — that reinforces the profitability of the strategy they are executing. It is regrettable that no regulations apparently exist to exert some control over the speculators who have no legitimate agricultural business interests, but are allowed to manipulate markets with their various momentum schemes.

(What would happen, for example, if futures buyers were forced to accept delivery of the commodities when they didn’t previously close out their positions, or incur some other substantial penalty? It appears that futures really act quite a lot like options in current trading markets. Wasn’t it the decoupling of futures contracts and delivery obligations that sparked tulipmania?)

The speculation-without-consequences might be jolly good fun in tulips, platinum or silver, but it is hard to feel the same way when it comes to food. The speculators’ activities have caused bankruptcies, food riots, panics and killings. Should they be publicly flogged? Or is it all just something that the marketplace will ultimately sort out?

These days it seems that everyone is wearing a wire to political fundraisers. Barack Obama got stung last week through a recording of some of his remarks at a San Francisco event. This week it’s Senator Clinton’s turn. The Huffington Post has a clandestine recording. The WaPo provides some background. Here are Senator Clinton’s thoughts, as recorded by some unknown party:

“We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn’t even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that’s what we’re dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions, and it’s primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don’t agree with them. They know I don’t agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me.”

Hugh Hewitt thinks that Senator Clinton’s “admission that the activists of the Democrats are far to the left of American political opinion” is highly significant. We’ll see about that. One aspect of this story that does appear to have significant implications for the future is that clandestine recording or transmitting via cellphone of off-the-record meetings seems to be becoming widespread. Perhaps future fundraisers will have to be held in the Cone of Silence.

Chi Mak was a Chinese sleeper agent in the US for over 20 years. Two decades is quite a nap. But he’s awake now. WaPo:

Prosecutors called Chi Mak the “perfect sleeper agent,” though he hardly looked the part. For two decades, the bespectacled Chinese-born engineer lived quietly with his wife in a Los Angeles suburb, buying a house and holding a steady job with a U.S. defense contractor, which rewarded him with promotions and a security clearance. Colleagues remembered him as a hard worker who often took paperwork home at night.

Eventually, Mak’s job gave him access to sensitive plans for Navy ships, submarines and weapons. These he secretly copied and sent via courier to China — fulfilling a mission that U.S. officials say he had been planning since the 1970s.

Mak was sentenced last week to 24 1/2 years in prison by a federal judge who described the lengthy term as a warning to China not to “send agents here to steal America’s military secrets.” But it may already be too late: According to U.S. intelligence and Justice Department officials, the Mak case represents only a small facet of an intelligence-gathering operation that has long been in place and is growing in size and sophistication.

The Chinese government, in an enterprise that one senior official likened to an “intellectual vacuum cleaner,” has deployed a diverse network of professional spies, students, scientists and others to systematically collect U.S. know-how, the officials said. Some are trained in modern electronic techniques for snooping on wireless computer transactions. Others, such as Mak, are technical experts who have been in place for years and have blended into their communities.

“Chi Mak acknowledged that he had been placed in the United States more than 20 years earlier, in order to burrow into the defense-industrial establishment to steal secrets,” Joel Brenner, the head of counterintelligence for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in an interview. “It speaks of deep patience,” he said, and is part of a pattern.

The Chinese have been hacking into advisers to the Defense Secretary, and into all sorts of commercial enterprises in the Free World as well. Nasty piece of work.

In responding to the first question in last night’s debate, Senator Clinton said this (see video), a reference to a funny SNL skit that showed the MSM fawning over Senator Obama, as her campaign recently complained about:

And if anybody saw ‘Saturday Night Live,’ you know, maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs another pillow.

That line wasn’t a hit, far from it. But the most interesting aspect may be that it appears currently impossible to view that SNL spoof debate video on YouTube, even though a much longer (and strange) political video from the same program (albeit apparently in altered form) still makes the rounds.

We saw a report that 78% of Daily Show clips were removed from YouTube for copyright reasons, the same explanation that is given for the removal of the debate skit, but there would appear to be an argument for legitimate fair use posting of the entire Clinton / Obama clip, since it has been so widely discussed in the media and political circles. (We did find a brief, but only partially representative snippet still available, but maybe that will disappear as well.)

Given the new and critical importance of the internet in electoral discourse, (which we discussed several years ago here and here) companies such as YouTube would appear to have an obligation to err on the side of making political content available, rather than censoring it, particularly when discussion of that content has clearly entered the public domain.

Baxter Labs has temporarily stopped making the blood thinner heparin because of adverse reactions. Part of the investigation involves China, and questions are being raised about the inspection process of the FDA: is it a little too thin perhaps? WSJ:

Baxter International Inc.’s investigation into the cause of deaths and allergic reactions linked to its blood-thinner heparin is focusing on variations in batches of the active ingredient for the drug, most of which were supplied by a Chinese manufacturing facility co-owned by a Wisconsin company…Heparin is a complex sugar molecule that normally exists on the lining of blood vessels in people and animals. It is now made from pig intestines, but processing them can lead to impurities. “Crushing tissue to get extracts means you can get contamination from other things in the tissue,” says John R. Hess, a blood expert at the University of Maryland…

China’s rise to become the world’s largest manufacturer of drug ingredients has helped drug companies elsewhere trim production costs, particularly for generic products like heparin, where margins are generally slim. Changzhou SPL, also known by its Chinese name, Kaipu Biochemical Co., is one of hundreds of Chinese manufacturers that have quietly become a linchpin of the global pharmaceutical industry. In 2005, China had $4.4 billion, or 14%, of the world’s $31 billion market for active pharmaceutical ingredients, topping India and Italy, according to a report written last year by Jinsong Du, a health-care analyst in Hong Kong with Credit Suisse…

The FDA isn’t legally required to inspect every foreign drug facility, but it generally does examine them if they are named as a maker in a new application to market a drug in the U.S. If the holder of an existing, approved application switches manufacturers, the new facility would usually get inspected as well. However, a legal requirement for drug manufacturers to get inspected every two years applies only to domestic plants, not the growing list of overseas facilities.

The FDA apparently inspects only about 2% of Chinese facilities that are making drugs or their ingredients that are exported to the US, as the chart above indicates. On the surface, this would appear to be some cause for concern, given the problems that China has experienced with other exports.

We thought that nothing could top the ridiculous Arlen Specter’s desire to have Congress investigate some people in the NFL. We were wrong. The live broadcast of the Congressional circus put on by Henry Waxman in interrogating baseball players was much worse.

Buffoons who think that no minutiae should be beyond the purview of Congress questioned a baseball pitcher and his trainer for hours. Unfortunately we pay for these buffoons. Apparently Waxman has now been hearing from some of his constituents, since he is now distancing himself from his own hearing:

“I’m sorry we had the hearing. I regret that we had the hearing. And the only reason we had the hearing was because Roger Clemens and his lawyers insisted on it.”

The above statement would appear to be entirely untrue. Henry Waxman’s new campaign slogan: “bringing Democrats and Republicans together in revulsion at their elected representatives for over thirty years.”

It is very interesting to read the advice that Senator Rockefeller gave to Hillary Clinton in 1993. Excerpts from the original document appear below:

Comments: (a) how far would someone be prepared to go in “exposing the lifestyles” of opponents of the legislation; (b) look at how the government-media complex of the left is taken for granted by Senator Rockefeller: “News directors, planners and editors, and features producers and editors are anxious and willing to receive guidance on how to time and shape their coverage.”

It’s funny how different an initiative that is supposedly “for the children” looks when you can see the man behind the curtain.

We won’t bother to give you the context of this government inquisitor’s attempt to probe the mind of a magazine publisher to determine whether his inner being is acceptable to the state. The whole story is fairly chilling. For many years, the proper response of a publisher to the thought police would have been a three word interview (”go to hell”) but it appears that times are different now:

The performance of the grand inquisitor in the video, a “blandly unexceptional bureaucrat,” is, its way, Oscar-worthy and reminiscent of past films that cover similar ground. The government apparently thinks it is its business to enforce a regime where “tolerance means accepting and defending everyone’s values but your own.” More of the interview here and here. (Finally, Scott Johnson manages to work Alexis de Tocqueville into the discussion.)

AP:

Hurricane Katrina’s victims have put a price tag on their suffering and it is staggering — including one plaintiff seeking the unlikely sum of $3 quadrillion. A whopping $3,014,170,389,176,410 is the dollar figure so far sought…

These folks need a good lawyer. Hmmm. John Edwards should be available soon.

Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, wrote to Powerline to expand on the contention that the CIA interrogation tapes were, in effect, withheld from the Commission. He seems to make a good case:

we posed, in writing, two lengthy sets of questions in October 2003. The second of these, the one I sent directly to the CIA general counsel, requested any information that the CIA had that was responsive to numerous questions about the context of the interrogations, how they were conducted, the demeanor of the detainees, and so on. The report you have has clauses describing the topic headings in my memorandum, and there were various questions posed underneath each of these headings.

Our disappointment with the responses to those sets of questions then led us to the conclusion that we had no option, if we were to find answers to these questions, except to question the detainees ourselves, and the interrogators too, in at least the cases of the seven detainees most important to our investigation (which included Abu Zubaydah). The report to Kean and Hamilton describes what then occurred.

I have been careful not to accuse anyone of committing crimes. But it is important to understand that, under the applicable federal law, this is not a parlor game of “twenty questions.” Under the applicable federal criminal law, our written and very detailed requests established certain issues as being material to our investigation. Officials were obliged by law to provide any responsive information in their possession (or withhold with a claim of privilege) and they were obligated not to conceal, knowingly, any fact related to such material issues.

Zelikow adds: “Lee Hamilton pointedly reminded DCI Tenet and his chief aides of the breadth of their obligation at a meeting, one occasioned by these very issues, on December 23, 2003.” That Medal of Freedom just keeps looking more peculiar.

The ever brilliant and sensitive RIAA has been at work during the Christmas season, as reported via the Washington Post:

In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings…

Sony BMG’s chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, testified that “when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Copying a song you bought is “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy,’ ” she said.

Don’t you just expect to hear one of these pleasant RIAA types intone at some point, “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” God bless us lawbreakers, everyone.

France has its environmentalist non-conformists, as do the Czechs and so many others now. The list is growing. Thank goodness for that. Bloomberg:

The most conspicuous doubter in France is Claude Allegre, a former education minister and a physicist by profession. His new book, Ma vérité sur la planète (”My Truth About the Planet”), doesn’t mince words.

He calls Gore a “crook” presiding over an eco-business that pumps out cash. As for Gore’s French followers, the author likens them to religious zealots who, far from saving humanity, are endangering it. Driven by a Judeo-Christian guilt complex, he says, French greens paint worst-case scenarios and attribute little-understood cycles to human misbehavior.

Allegre doesn’t deny that the climate has changed or that extreme weather has become more common. He instead emphasizes the local character of these phenomena. While the icecap of the North Pole is shrinking, the one covering Antarctica — or 92 percent of the Earth’s ice — is not, he says. Nor have Scandinavian glaciers receded, he says. To play down these differences by basing forecasts on a global average makes no sense to Allegre.

He dismisses talk of renewable energies, such as wind or solar power, saying it would take a century for them to become a serious factor in meeting the world’s energy demands. To his relief, France has taken another path: Almost 80 percent of its electricity comes from nuclear reactors. What’s more, France has a talent for eating its cake and having it, too: Although it signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the country is nowhere near meeting the agreed targets.

So others around the world apparently think that Al Gore is some sort of dope or ignoramous or con artist. That’s refreshing. Alas, free thinking in France and the EU has its limits. Bloomberg again:

France bans smoking in cafes, hotels and clubs on Jan. 1, stamping out the habit popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre puffing Gauloises in hazy brasseries. In Germany, 11 of the country’s 16 states plan similar restrictions for 2008. Six of those, including Berlin and Bavaria, start Jan. 1. France banned smoking in offices and public places this year. Germany prohibits puffers at train stations and federal buildings. The limits are part of the European Union’s public health plan initiated in 1985.

You may like or dislike smoking as you wish. We’ve always enjoyed the pungent fumes of Gitanes in the Paris cafe air; and the aroma of pipe tobacco seems positively pleasant to us. Chacun à son goût. What we abhor is the odor of government regulation of such petty freedoms, as it makes the infringement of greater freedoms all the more acceptable.