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Random commentary and senseless acts of blogging.
The first Republican president once said, "While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years." If Mr. Lincoln could see what's happened in these last three-and-a-half years, he might hedge a little on that statement. Blog critics Gryffindor House Slytherin House Ravenclaw House House Elves Beth Jacob Prisoners of Azkaban Muggles
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Tuesday, June 25, 2002
Davis Looks Like Winner With most of the vote counted, it looks as if blogosphere favorite Arthur Davis has defeated incumbent Earl Hilliard in the Alabama 7th district runoff. Miscellaneous Amusements Silflay Hraka has announced a new linking policy. The Nuisance notes that we were one of the earlier internet sites to comply with this policy. On the question of whether we are equally compliant with Silflay's alter ego the mighty Zod, the Nuisance has no comment at this time.
In the interests of public safety, we are pleased to link to this safe driving animation, courtesy of the Red Rock Eater mailing list. (Uses Shockwave.) Moral Clarity Max Sawicky has declared this to be Moral Clarity Week (not to be confused with National Bloggerhood Week) in the blogosphere. Citing several recent examples of civilian casualties in IDF and settler actions in the West Bank, Max is asking if "jingoistic warbloggers" or JWs will respond to these tragedies as strongly as we respond to atrocities against Jews. I couldn't respond because, like any good JW, I've been busy handing out Bible tracts door to door. But the not-so-jingoistic Jeff Cooper, really more of a wineblogger than a warblogger, has done it for me. Monday, June 24, 2002
An Islamic Reformation? Tapped has an item on this Times feature on Paul Kurtz, former TAP editor and perpetual Mickey Kaus obsession. The story has some interesting material, but our own concern with it is this paragraph, quoted in Tapped, that reflects a standard current meme:
"Islam desperately needs a Protestant-like Reformation," he continued. The Islamic system is the product of "a nomadic, agrarian society, pre-modern and pre-urban, which they are trying to apply to the contemporary world."
The popularity of this belief among the punditocracy suggests to me that they should take a break from bemoaning the historical ignorance of the younger generation and take a look at their own. The Reformation did not, directly and in itself, lead to a Christianity or a European culture that was more rational, tolerant, or pluralist, than the medieval version. In the short term, it led mostly to wars, culminating in the Thirty Years War that depopulated large chunks of Germany. Some other highlights include the murder of Thomas More, the Huguenot Massacre of Paris, an increase in public burnings for heresy and witchcraft(Protestants were labelled as witches in Catholic countries and vice versa), and wars in England, France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.
The ultimate outcome of the melodrama was religious freedom under Protestantism in England and the Netherlands, and the principal ultimately spread elsewhere. But for that to happen took over a hundred years, as well as the Enlightenment.
The more interesting point these critics are missing is that a Reformation really is going on in Islam. The most fundamental aspect of the Reform in Europe was that Christians were free to read the Bible and create their own interpretations rather than relying on their priests. Previously the scriptures had been unavailable to laymen due to illiteracy, the lack of printing, and the lack of translations.
Once laymen could actually read the Bible, everyone became a theologian. Although Martin Luther, a priest, kicked the movement off, once the gates were open land owners like Oliver Cromwell could become religious leaders.
Something very similar is going on in the Islamic world. Innovation, referred to by Moslems as bida, is considered a grave sin in Islam - a major reason the Islamic world tends to remain stuck in the Middle Ages. One act which until quite recently was forbidden was printing the Quran. As recently as 1967, the Arabist Philip Hitti could say:
Moslem conservatism as it relates to the treatment of the word of God may have retarded the admission of the printing industry; even today the Koran may be handwritten or lithographed but not printed. Availability of inexpensive Qurans, widespread literacy, and increased use of the Quranic classical Arabic as a medium of communication are all relatively recent phenomena that add up to an echo of the European Reformation. Moslems who previously accepted religious rulings from the ulema are now able to make their own interpretations. With the exception of Ayatollah Khomeini, major leaders and propagandists of Islamofascism have not been trained Islamic scholars. Many have had Western educations.
That this is leading in the short term to violent attempts to enforce particular doctrines is not, as I mentioned above, at all unlike the history of the Reformation. Will it lead ultimately to a post-Enlightenment Islam which can live with or even espouse Western values? My guess is that in the long term it will. Barring the real possibility that the current conflict will lead to a sweeping cataclysm that will destroy most of the Islamic world, the emergence of a more humane Islam seems hard to prevent.
Amtrak is now within a few days of shutting down unless Congress and the Bushies can agree on a bailout. Why is it that we can put together $15 billion on the double for an airline bailout but find it so hard to come up with 1% of that to keep Amtrak running or maybe 5 - 6% to allow real improvements to the outdated equipment and better service?
If I didn't know that our devoted public servants are solely concerned with our best interests I'd tend to suspect that maybe the big campaign donations from airline companies had a lot to do with the airline bailout.
I might even be crazy enough to think that maybe those air carriers don't want to compete against a really good inter-city rail service and use their influence in Congress and the Administration to keep Amtrak on the edge of bankruptcy, and Amtrak is unable to fight back since, being government funded, it can't make the big PAC and soft money donations that the airlines do.
Of course the airlines needed that bailout because they were hit by a disaster that they weren't at fault for. And I'm sure that airline lobbyists sinking the Gore Comission's proposals to improve security, as well as any other attempts at better security for years, had nothing to do with 9/11. There are new stories here and here giving teasers for the upcoming season 7 of Buffy. (Thanks to War Liberal for alerting me to the links. (Warning: Numerous Season 6 spoilers follow)
The new season is reported to be less dark than season 6. The main character dealt with depression for most of the year, while other characters worked through addiction and kleptomania. One got dumped at the altar; two others had a mutually destructive relationship. The only healthy couple going was broken up for most of the season, and just after they got back together, one was murdered and her lover got kind of pissed off about it and almost destroyed the world.
Even for Joss Whedon, getting more dark than that and still being watchable would be a neat trick, so less dark seems to be the obvious route and not too surprising.
The new season will begin with the re-opening of Sunnydale High. This seems to suggest that Dawn will be a central character in the upcoming year, and probably doing more fighting as was suggested by the year 6 finale. This is chancy: Buffy's already done coming of age pretty thoroughly, and Dawn would have to be a lot less bratty.
Amber Benson comes back for another season as Tara. This is also risky. It's the fifth time that a character has returned after dying, and the dramatic tension has to suffer if death starts looking like not much more than an inconvenience.
It has also been revealed that Willow will be in London for the season opener, presumably for a reconciliation or confrontation with Giles. Or maybe she's scheduled a secret meeting with the Watchers' Council.
Spike will remain a vampire, not a human. So the scene in Tabula Rasa where he decided he was a vampire with a soul wasn't only self-parody but also another of Whedon's foreshadowing tricks. How he will rebuild his relationship with Buffy and Dawn is unclear, but I'm predicting it will happen, even though it will probably take most of the season before either of them trust him again. Sunday, June 23, 2002
Bloggers Armed Liberal, Andrew Northrup, and Brian O'Connell have all written positively on my post concerning suicide bombings. This had the pleasant effect of driving my traffic way beyond normal weekend levels. I'll admit it: I'm a shameless whore for hits and I watch my counter about twice as closely as Othello ever watched Desdemona.
Armed Liberal's earlier response to Max Sawicky is part of pretty much the same conversation and especially interesting. In it, he points out that in reading the Times article that started this discussion, Instapundit's comparison of suicide bombing and the culture that spawns it to a cult can be taken quite literally. This is so true that I'm amazed I didn't notice it until it was pointed out to me. Like Armed Liberal, I came of age in California in an era when cults were everywhere. In my case, I actually joined one. I was personally involved in training recruits to think and respond like proper cult members. So my expertise in this area is more than casual. The girl who was the primary focus of the article is an absolutely textbook cult recruitment target: young, intelligent, idealistic, seemingly troubled relationships with her family, and vulnerable due to recent catastrophe in her life.
In this case, there doesn't seem to have been any elaborate indoctrination, and the would-be terrorist herself seems to have been fairly nominally religious. Her handler assumed that, unlike earlier and more dedicated terrorists, just her ethnic identity was enough for her to be willing to carry out the attack. The terror organizers, who originally felt it required months of ritual and preparation to persuade intensely religious youths to give up their lives for the glory of killing and maiming random Jews, now feel no need for preparing a random adolescent like Arien Ahmed. Like other Palestinians, she has been surrounded for the past year with images glorifying 'martyrs' on television, street posters, in mosques. So the Palestinian culture in itself was enough of an indoctrination for her to turn to terrorism at a crisis point in her life. It was very much the same way some one in similar circumstances in another social environment might turn to prayer or intoxicants.
It used to take months of training to prepare a Palestinian terrorist from the West Bank or Gaza Strip to commit suicide in the course of killing Israelis. The attackers were strictly from the fundamentalist Hamas and Islamic Jihad, envisioning a covey of virgins and automatic passes to paradise for loved ones left behind.
But the who, why and how of Palestinian suicide bombing have changed, and the changes alarm not only Israelis but also Palestinians concerned for the impact on their own society. Palestinian militants and Israeli experts warn that the changes could reverberate overseas, should the target list in this metastasizing conflict continue to grow....
The range of recruits to suicide missions continues to broaden in often bewildering ways. This week, Israel's forces arrested a 12-year-old Palestinian boy its intelligence had identified as planning an attack.
Dr. Iyad Sarraj, a Palestinian psychiatrist in Gaza City, has watched the trend toward suicide bombing with growing alarm. He said that having grown up with the idea of suicide attacks, Palestinian children were equating death with power.
There are still limits. In this case, two young Palestinians were sent out for terror attacks. According to the survivor, neither wanted to carry them out. One did, killing two Israelis and himself. The other was caught and is now in prison. Had she been more carefully trained for her 'mission', she and several others would certainly be dead today. When she ultimately is released, she say she will have to live outside the Palestinian territories where she is now a pariah, apparently for valuing her own life and, even worse, the lives of Israelis.
The 'death cult' description here is very fitting and not at all a figure of speech or, as Max would have it, some sort of racial stereotype. Saturday, June 22, 2002
Blogscratching Blogscratching is a neologism I have just coined to describe the exchange of links and/or favorable mentions between blogs. I.e. you scratch my blog and I'll scratch yours. I'm blogscratching Ann Salisbury because she has a fine blog, because she said nice things about this blog, and because she's a member of the California bar, which will come in handy if Indepundit follows through on his threat to sue me. But along with all these valid reasons, especially because she is a fellow banana slug.
So it seems my usage of the word neologism was at least as appropriate as I intended, and perhaps moreso. Same Topic, Different Blogger Max Sawicky has also criticized the same Instapundit reference. I've already done my epic-length post for the day, and I hope that I have answered the claim that suicide terrorism has anything to do with "willingness to die for one's country", as Max says. But I do want to address a few of Max's points. He agrees with me that Palestinians could have won independence by now through non-violence. But he also asks, `But have you ever wondered why nobody ever says, "I wish Israel would embark upon the path of non-violent resistance?" ` Well Max, that would be because non-violent resistance is a method for a people who are powerless in the current political scene to seek change. It isn't a traditional tool of states or the dominant ethnic group in a state. When a non-violent movement gains control of a nation, it goes ahead and builds an army, just like all the other nations have. If you don't believe me, ask Nehru.
Max also says that pejoratives like "psychotic cult" seem `to only attach to those placed in other racial categories. Hence the Japanese kamikazis were described as wacky Orientals with some kind of blind devotion to their Emporer[sic], and the Palestinians are mindless mystical nut-cases.` But we have plenty of cults right here, many of them violent and some suicidal - People's Temple, David Koresh, Charlie Manson, and hundreds equally bizarre but less extreme. These groups are described just as harshly. Really, there isn't much difference between the way phrases like 'violent cult' or 'dangerous cult' were applied to the primarily African-American People's Temple, the mostly white Branch Davidians, and the foreign Aum Shinri Kyo. So I think Max's claim of racial stereotypes here is a red herring. Friday, June 21, 2002
Demosthenes has put up a post criticizing Instaman for asserting that Palestinian culture is "becoming a psyvchotic death cult". Aside from a justified complaint that some commentary in the blogosphere is bordering on racism, Demosthenes mainly discusses various hardships that Palestinians are suffering. We all know that it's bad. We all know that there are legitimate grievances. But the reality is, living in a war zone is nasty. If the Palestinians don't like it - which is easy to understand - they should reconsider their war.
But, we hear the constant response, "The Palestinians are oppressed. They're under occupation. What else can they do?"
Well, a people under occupation has four broad strategic options:
1) Acquiescence - make no attempt to resist. This wouldn't be likely to lead to independence or statehood. But it also doesn't lead to the roadblocks, isolation, and hardships the Palestinians are now living with. Believe it or not, those restrictions on Palestinian movement don't happen because Israeli officers hold contests and award prizes for the most creative idea to make life for Palestinians even worse than it already is. They happen because Israel is trying to save lives.
So this strategy gives up what the Palestinians don't have anyway (statehood) and gets tangible benefits in return. It's better for the Palestinians than what they're doing now.
2) Non-violent resistance - To work, this requires access to sympathetic media to publicize your plight, an opponent who has some compunctions about the use of violence, and demands that your opponent can survive accepting. The Palestinians have plenty of sympathetic media. The two most successful recent instances of massive non-violent (or generally non-violent) movements for the enfranchisement of oppressed peoples, in South Africa and the American South, both succeeded in part because of overwhelming support from the Jewish population of the countries in question, and of Jews in foreign countries. Most Israelis are not just willing to give up the West Bank and Gaza, they're almost desperate to, if they can do so and survive.
Non-violent resistance is the best policy for the Palestinians if a two-state solution is an acceptable objective for them. That it would work is a near certainty. All the elements for successful non-violence are in place except for non-violence. And of course it doesn't involve large numbers of Palestinians dying. It's better for them than what they're doing now.
3) Guerilla warfare - violent resistance against military targets. For Palestinians, this would involve mostly attacks against soldiers and military targets in the occupied territories. This would be costly - it would mean the Palestinians would suffer most of the casualties and personal hardships they are now suffering. They would suffer heavier casualties than Israel, as they do now.
However, it would also likely convince Israelis that there is a direct link between the occupation and the terrorism. Presently, Israelis regard outsiders - or Israelis - who say the terrorism will end when the occupation ends as naive or worse. Since in both rhetoric and action, Palestinians make it clear that they don't accept Israeli sovereignty in Tel Aviv any more than they do in Jenin, the Israelis are right to think so.
A disciplined campaign striking at only military targets, and largely or only in the occupied territories, would also imply that its leadership was both strong enough and reliable enough to engage in serious peace negotiations. So this option would have about the same costs as current Palestinian strategy, but a better chance of paying off in statehood. Again, the Palestinians would be better off switching to this.
4) Total war - This is the strategy the Palesinian leadership has actually adopted. Kill any Iraeli at any place or time possible. Obliterate the distinction between military and civilian to a degree that is unprecedented in modern history. This is a dubious strategy if you are miltarily strong, since you can do better in other ways. It's even worse if you are weak. Israel has the capacity to slaughter the Palestinians by the hundreds of thousands any time it chooses to. What stops Israel from doing so is that their civilized restraint is stronger than their desparation. With every 'successful' terror attack, the civilized restraint grows a little thinner and the desperation a little stronger.
Really, the essence of this strategy is to say that the two peoples can never co-exist. It almost demands genocide, or at least ethnic cleansing, as a final result. As an interim result, it leads to massive casualties, martial law, heavy oppression. Large numbers of people like me who formerly supported a Palestinian state have been forced to question our positions. The pro-peace camp in Israel itself has become almost completely impotent.
The Palestinians are now farther away from statehood than when the terror bombing began. At a cost of thousands of deaths and ruined lives, nothing has been accomplished. But that isn't nearly all the damage.
Much of the unemployment and poverty Demosthenes points to is a direct result of the terrorism. Thousands of workers who formerly held jobs in Israel have lost their jobs because new restrictions due to terrorism have made it impossible to get to their place of employment. Thousands more who formerly worked in tourism, the West Bank's largest income source, are now unemployed because tourists, for some reason, don't want to be blown up. In fact, the possibility of a truly viable Palestinian state has probably been extinguished entirely. Since such a state would be small and almost without economic resources, the only real chance for it to thrive would have been by exporting labor to Israel - a nation with a strong economy and a socialist labor legacy that assures even its unskilled workers do relatively well. In the current situation, even if a Palestinian state is established, Israel will look to foreign sources for any labor shortages and use Palestinians only as a last resort. Even if a Palestinian state should arise, the prospects for any kind of success or major improvements in Palestinian lives are remote.
So this is the outcome of the strategy the Palestinians have adopted. Maximum short-term costs. Maximum long-term costs. No benefits. Not only could a better strategy have been chosen, any other plan would have been an improvement. The Palestinians have made the worst possible choice.
Now, Demosthenes can say that the bombers are only a few people and don't act for the Palestinians as a whole. But that isn't for him to say, it's for the Palestinians themselves. And overwhelmingly, they are saying the exact opposite. Every poll shows that Palestinians support terrorism and oppose any kind of negotiated compromise.
Since the Palestinians still massively support terror bombings, I can only conclude that the payoff the bombings produce is, in their minds, worth the cost. And that payoff isn't improved chances of statehood, or reduced oppression. In both areas, the payoff of terrorism has been negative.
The only payoff the bombings get is dead Jews. And for the Palestinians, dayenu. That is enough.
Demosthenes' own example shows it:`Ahmed is twelve: "calm, together and determined to kill Israelis."` Not 'determined to gain independence.' Not 'determined to get an education and help build his country.' Just determined to kill.
In game theory terms, the Palestinians aim only at the strategy which has the worst payoff for their opponents. That the payoff is even worse for themselves they have deemed irrelevant.
And that is why I and many others are reconsidering our past support for Palestinian statehood. It's why Glenn feels they are becoming a psychotic death cult and I pretty much agree. It's why bloggers are saying that the terrorism has to stop and aren't interested in talking grievances until it does. Not because they made a bad choice - anybody can do that. Not even because their bad choice was also immoral. It's because their bad choice has led them into catastrophe and they don't appear to regret it. They have made the decision that the ruin of their current and future prospects as a people is a small price to pay for the joy of murdering Jews. It isn't violence for the sake of their homeland but violence for the sake of violence.
Thursday, June 20, 2002
19 Ways of Looking at a Stop Sign Bruce Hill over at War Now has listed various possible Jewish responses to a stop sign.
Bruce notes that the piece is not original and has been circulating for some time. This seems to be true since the following modern additions have been omitted:
18: The Jewish blogger never actually sees the stop sign since that would involve getting out of the house and being away from his computer. However, he still links to the earlier interpretations and adds some of his own.
19: The libertarian blogger considers the sign an example of state infringement on his personal freedom and is certain that if the state can demand his car stop at some arbitrary point, that is the first step on the slippery slope to outlawing cars that move at all, after which all cars will be confiscated. He therefore uses one of the 6 guns he keeps under the seat to shoot the sign up.
After looking at the latest self portrait posted on his semi-blog, I can only guess that Josh Marshall must have a very healthy ability to make fun of himself. His last photo, which looked like a man who needed a shave badly but probably needed Prozac even more, has been replaced by one which begs for the caption, "I'm gonna drink several cups of black coffee as soon as I wake up enough to find the pot." The background color is still remarkably ugly, and the content is still mostly good. However, Marshall is threatening recently to replace "Who killed Chandra Levy?" with "Who was Deep Throat?" as his official Site Fixation. Jeff Goldstein has picked up and praised a column asserting essentially that Greenpeace is aiding terrorists by posting on the web descriptions of the results of a hypothetical terrorist attack on a chlorine plant in New York. Just one question: if it is "either deliberately myopic or painfully stupid" to publish the information in the first place to score political points against chemical companies, what would you call further publicizing it to score political points against environmentalists?
Wednesday, June 19, 2002
Mad Kane has a marvelous song parody on blogging: You praise my weblog
Monday, June 17, 2002
More on Enemy Combatants Demosthenes and Jeff Cooper have both spoken kindly about my earlier post discussing ways of dealing with terrorist suspects. Mr Cooper, incidentally, is a law professor. I'm certainly flattered and pleased to find my thoughts on a legal topic being complimented by a real expert. Regrettably, however, Mr Cooper doesn't drive quite as many hits as certain other law professors/bloggers who still have not deigned to notice the Nuisance.
One of Demosthenes' commenters, Brian, (who has his own blog, but who doesn't) was less positive:
I think what's missing from this idea is the status of the defendant as an enemy combatant. Civilian rights should not accrue to enemy combatants, whether or not they happen to be US citizens.
The dual track suggested here, either a civilian court or a military tribunal depending on the sensitivity of the evidence, ignores the fact that we wouldn't want a wartime enemy tried in a civilian court even if all evidence against him were already public.
I do agree that oversight of the executive branch will be necessary in the long term.
Brian and I might not be that far apart. I agree that when a person is clearly an enemy combatant, that person can be held outside the regular justice system. To allow this for US citizens is a step on the slippery slope, scary, but probably acceptable under the circumstances. They can be treated as Prisoners of War and have the rights accorded under the Geneva Conventions - in this case, relatively few rights because they are illegal combatants and not true POWs.
I would tend to agree that if you can demonstrate the intent to act as a combatant for al Qaeda or similar groups, it is less important to demonstrate specific overt acts. Maybe it isn't even necessary at all, but it does seem if you're saying somebody is a part of al Qaeda, you ought to be able to show some sort of specific act in furtherance of some kind of terrorist intent.
The key question is how you determine who fits into this category. The Bush administration answer seems to be: anyone we say. That's clearly unacceptable, and Brian, by agreeing to the importance of oversight, appears to agree.
I think at least US citizens accused of being such combatants are entitled to some sort of legal proceeding to determine if the label is justified. Which gets us back to some kind of adversarial process that might resemble the one I described.
Atrios cites a recent column by Lawrence Tribe, who also is possibly better informed on the technical legal issues than myself, and there is some related discussion by that other professor.
It does seem to me that all of us are agreed here on the broad points, as odd as that may be for a bunch of bloggers. That is, we all agree that enemy combatants are not necessarily entitled to the full Constitutional rights of a normal US criminal proceeding. And we all agree it is unacceptable for agencies under the executive branch to have unchallenged or absolute authority on who is considered an enemy combatant.
Journey to the East Blogs of War mentions a UPI story on Americans training at radical madrassas in Pakistan. Westerners were attracted to Afghanistan soon after the Soviet invasion in 1979 and many joined the Afghan Mujahedin fighting the Russian army. Their numbers dwindled after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, "but both Americans and other Western volunteers continued to come after the Soviet withdrawal as well," says Mufti Muhammad Iltimas, a radical Islamic cleric who runs a Muslim seminary -- Madrasah Arabia Hassani -- near the Afghan border.
"These new converts are more eager to participate in the jihad than their Pakistani and Arab comrades and are not reluctant to join dangerous operations," said the cleric in a recent interview to a group of Pakistani journalists.
John Walker Lindh, the American charged with fighting alongside the Taliban, studied at Iltimas's seminary. He joined the school on Nov. 27, 2000 as a student of Koran and Islamic studies and stayed there till May 15, 2001 "but the harsh Pakistani summer forced him to leave the school for Afghanistan's cooler climate," Iltimas said.
The cleric said converts were "the best students" who had "an unquenchable desire for knowledge" and often studied "late into the night."
So there you have it, straight from Mufti Muhannad Iltimas, lunatic and professional brainwasher: the Westerners at his 'school' are his star pupils.
We have seen the Westerners who go to Pakistan to study what passes for Islam there: Lindh, Reid, Padilla. Small time incompetent thugs mixed with pathetic drifters. The sweepings off our streets.
And Iltimas admits they're smarter, braver, more dedicated than his regular students.
I've got just one thing to say to Mr Iltimas: if you think our worst are major league ass kickers, just wait until you see our best.
Saturday, June 15, 2002
A Moment of Gloating The very first post on this blog critiqued a post by Max Power asserting that Earth First activists Judi Barr and Darrell Cherney planted the bomb that injured them in 1990 and mocking one of their witnesses in the trial in which they accused the FBI and Oakland police of violating their rights in trying to convict them of the bombing instead of searching for the real criminals. I pointed out that the evidence against Barr and Cherney was very weak and there were many reasons to suspect the FBI's handling of the case.
That trial is now over, and the jury verdict is a complete vindication of Barr and Cherney, who have been awarded $4.4 million in actual and punitive damages. The FBI, the Oakland PD, and 6 current or former agents/police officers have been convicted of violating Barr and Cherney's rights under the First and Fourth Amendments.
This case is of considerable importance in the current climate. As a matter of self-defense, there is probably no alternative to giving expanded powers in some areas for counter-terrorist security to law enforcement in general and the FBI in particular. This instance of the FBI responding to a terrorist act not by vigorously searching for the criminal but instead harassing the victims illustrates the importance of balancing that power by accountability. In particular, the FBI and other executive branch agencies working on counter-terrorism must remain accountable to judicial review. Fact Checking Moran's Ass Kesher blog has noted a recent attack by MSNBC blogger Michael Moran against the web site honetreporting.com, for organizing a petition urging lournalists to label terrorists as terrorists. Moran insists:
MSNBC.com does use the word “terrorist” to describe someone who has been convicted of a terrorist act, or someone who has admitted the act or been caught in the act.
Before that, the person is an “alleged terrorist.” ...
Further, we use the word “terrorism” rather liberally to describe suicide bombings and other acts of random violence against civilians. What we don’t do (and this is what irks “Honestreporting”) is throw the word around at every Palestinian who opposes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Does MSNBC's own reporting back up Moran's claim? Here is the lead from their description of the notorious Netanya massacre: "Just hours after a peace plan was brought before the Arab League summit, and on the night of one of the most important holidays on the Jewish calendar, a Palestinian Hamas militant exploded a bomb at a hotel hosting a religious meal, killing 20 people and injuring more than 100." The word 'terrorism' appears only once in the story, in a context which suggests it was used by the State Department, not MSNBC.
By Moran's standards of course, the bomber wasn't a terrorist. Being dead, he had never been convicted. And it certainly seems reasonable to insist on a full trial in these cases. Otherwise, how can you be certain it wasn't a Hamas member who just happened to spontaneously combust while strolling innocently into a Jewish gathering with a bag of nails strapped to his chest? A good reporter can't jump to conclusions.
MSNBC doesn't use this caution only in Israel. In the site's story on the latest terror incident in Pakistan, a Pakistani official but never the reporter stated what the attack was:
U.S. and Pakistani investigators on Saturday searched the site of a deadly car bombing outside the American Consulate in Karachi, trying to piece together clues about the attackers. A previously unknown group claimed responsibility for the massive blast Friday that killed 10 people and injured 45 others....
Initial reports indicated a suicide attacker was responsible, but police said they also were looking at the possibility that the bomb was hidden in a car carrying the head of a driving school and three female students, then set off by remote control as it passed the consulate.
Karachi Mayor Naimat Ullah offered sympathy for U.S. officials and vowed to arrest those behind the attack.
The foot of the article is a recap of recent terrorist crimes in Pakistan that goes to almost comical lengths to avoid ever using the T word:
Violence against foreigners has increased since Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, threw his support behind the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.
Militant groups were further angered when Musharraf launched a crackdown on them in January. That followed a bloody attack on the Indian parliament, blamed by New Delhi on Pakistan-based militants, which took the two countries to the brink of war.
“Of course it’s a backlash,” Hamid Haroon, publisher of Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, told India’s Star News Television.
Friday’s blast occurred less than a mile from the site where 11 French engineers and three others were killed in a suicide bombing May 8. Police suspect Islamic extremists, possibly al-Qaida members, were responsible.
Karachi was also where Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted and slain in January while working on a story about Islamic militants. Four Islamic militants are on trial in that case.
On March 17, a man ran down the aisle of a church in Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave, throwing grenades. He was killed along with four others, including two Americans — a U.S. Embassy employee and her teenage daughter. The man has not been identified.
"We use the word 'terrorism' rather liberally to describe suicide bombings and other acts of random violence against civilians." Sure you do.
Incidentally, Moran's most recent entry proposes having the FBI consult with suspense novelists about possible terror attacks. That's not a bad idea. It's a pity no blogger ever thought of it. Friday, June 14, 2002
The Ideology That Dare not Speak Its Name A number of liberal bloggers have been pretty hard on Ralph Nader, now that he has openly accepted what has been obvious for quite a while: in reality, he is now a Republican activist. MWO has been even rougher - no permalinks as usual, but they do quote pro-Nader statements from Phyllis Schafly. Those of us who have never been forced to hide our true feelings shouldn't be too hard on Ralphie, now that he has courageously come out of the closet. We can never understand how hard it must have been for him to keep his shameful secret all these years, all the little and big lies he has had to tell: sitting in late night dorm chat sessions praising Che and Sartre when all the time he was secretly dreaming about Von Hayek. Buying Bob Dylan tapes just so he could carefully paste the labels over his Donny and Marie collection. Laughing at Archie Bunker with all of his friends, even though he secretly knew Archie was right and Rob Reiner really was a meathead. Insisting that he only read Commentary 'to understand the other side'. Claiming that he only watched Ronald Reagan movies for the camp. Wearing neckties in public every day when his beloved bow ties could only be worn at home behind locked doors. Closing his eyes every time he shook hands with Jesse Jackson and fantasizing he was with Clarence Thomas. Trying to figure out whether he loved Andrew Sullivan in public but hated him in private, or vice versa. Inventing countless excuses about why he missed the last episode of The West Wing so he wouldn't have to admit that he was really watching O'Reilly. Pretending that there was no difference between Bush and Gore.
So Ralph, now that you have finally found the courage to declare your true identity, the Nuisance salutes you. Be strong, be bold. Say it out loud: "I'm a dittohead and I'm proud!" Serve on a corporate Board of Directors, or serve on a bunch - the pay's good, the work's light, and they owe you big time. Grover can set it up. Don't let up now - you still have a Senate Majority to deliver for Bush to go along with the White House you already gave him.
According to new historical evidence, it appears that Julius Caesar has been widely misquoted. What he really said was: Veni. Vidi. Blogi. On the Serious Side To describe this as disturbing would be an understatement: The United States will not bring American terrorist suspect Jose Padilla before a military tribunal, the Justice Department told lawmakers Thursday, according to congressional and Bush administration officials.
The Justice Department, making its case in a closed meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the United States can hold Padilla until President Bush decides the war against terrorism is over.
"They say it's not punitive, it's just purely prevention to stop him from attacking us," said one congressional official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "He's going to stay in the can until we're through with al-Qaida."
Government officials had said there were no plans to put Padilla before a tribunal, but officials told the Judiciary Committee that the decision is now final.
It appears to now be the position of the US government that an American citizen can be held indefinitely, presumably for life, without being formally charged with a crime.
The claim that it is not punitive is especially strange, bordering on Orwellian. If being locked up potentially for life isn't punishment, exactly what is?
We will win the current war. There is really not the slightest doubt of that. The home team has a record of 3 - 0 in these World War situations, and our previous opponents were all, in most ways, tougher than the batch of medieval fanatics we're up against today.
The only thing that even makes this war complicated is that some small percentage of the Muslims in the US, both among immigrants and among US citizens, are fifth columnists working for the enemy to kill us.
How we handle that situation will determine whether we end this war as we began it, a free people.
There is a real need to conduct intelligence, both human and technological, among Muslim extremists, and we should do so in the US and overseas. When this intelligence does identify terrorists or would-be terrorists, it will at times be necessary to incarcerate them without allowing them to see evidence which could endanger human sources or electronic methods.
It seems that to deal with this problem something along the following lines is needed(IANAL):
I'll be interested to see in the next few weeks how this plays out among the pro-Bush folks in the blogosphere, many of them self-labelled libertarians. My guess is that most of them will see the problems in the government's handling of the Padilla case. Eugene Volokh - who, unlike me, actually is a lawyer and law professor and knows what he is talking about - has addressed some of the issues here and in other posts.
It occurred to me not long after 9/11 that this was an ideal opportunity for somebody who had been in the Towers to just walk away and play dead. Now one case of that has actually been confirmed. It isn't clear from the story that this person ever really was in the WTC - it seems he probably wasn't. But he pretended to be so that an ongoing criminal investigation of him would be dropped. That at least I can understand. The disturbing part is that I found it looking to see if I could confirm this genuinely warped story I found at jekyl.com. (Jekyl has no permalinks.) I just have no comment on this one. The Lighter Side of Terrorist Atrocities The Onion, desperately trying to regain its status as the most trusted news source in China, has scooped the world media on the recent discovery near the city of Potzrebie of the body of Mad Magazine reporter Phil Fonebone, believed to have been murdered by Blecchistani terrorists. Though many of the specifics regarding Fonebone's murder remain unclear, some details are known. The body was badly decomposed, but coroners identified it by its oversized, folded-over feet. As for the identity of the perpetrators, reports suggest the involvement of one or more mysterious, trench-coated espionage agents dressed in either all-white or all-black clothing, and described as "angular, birdlike males with wide-brimmed, pointy hats."
A recently leaked memo from the State Department also confirms the interception of a Morse-coded message suggesting that the plot may have been masterminded by a shadowy figure known only as "Prohias." This same figure may have been responsible for an elaborate swivel-turret backwards-firing cannon found at the scene of the dirigible attack.
At the time of his capture, Fonebone was tracking down members of the al-Jaffi terrorist network, a group widely believed responsible for the devastating Snappy Answers To Stupid Questions Atrocities, a string of May suicide bombings intended to undermine efforts to establish democracy in Blecchistan. Asked if they knew anything about rumored al-Jaffi involvement in the Fonebone murder, suspects detained in connection with the bombings replied only with a series of three sarcastic variations on "No," leaving a fourth response blank for State Department officials to fill in themselves.
It is suspected that the murder may have been caused by Mad's refusal to print several recent pamphlets from the Blecchistan League of Evil America Haters (BLEAH), including the titles 'Israelity Bites', 'Jew Lies', and 'I Know What You Yid Last Summer'. The controversial pamphlets can be found here.
When asked for the White House response to the murder, spokesman Alfred E. Fleischer said, "What - me worry?" New Linkage I've added numerous new links in the blog roll in the last few days. Silt and Sideshow are both part of the growing liberal echo chamber of the blogosphere, and I've been meaning to put them in for a while. Silt has been a bit inactive lately, but Sideshow has some particularly good posts in the last few days that I'll be commenting on further, time permitting. Armed Liberal is a somewhat offputting name for me. I tend to agree with Rabi: "When I hear the word 'gun', I reach for my culture." Guns and motorcycles really aren't my thing, but smart commentary is. This blog is just too good to ignore.
Max Sawicky has a new page design that I like much better than his old one, including a more accessible blog roll that very tastefully includes the Nuisance. And he writes in a language that is, for an economist, almost indistinguishable from English.
I don't really want to link to the same name blogs that everyone else does. That's why I don't link LGF , Pejman, Clueless, or several other big name, mostly conservative, blogs, even though I like them and read them with great frequency. If you're reading this blog, you almost certainly already know about them. I do link Instapundit, but it's the law, what can I do?
I would rather link to newer and smaller blogs. There actually are some blogs out there that are even newer and arguably more obscure than the Nuisance. I've added several to my roll: Terminus, Indepundit, Silflay Hraka, and Chilicheeze.
You don't have to be liberal to get on the Nuisance blog roll, although it does help. Happy Fun Pundit is way to the right, but makes the cut anyway by being very funny.
Muslimpundit has been commented out because to make the roll, you actually have to do some blogging. Nothing would make me happier than to have Adil end his silence, inshallah, so I could slay the fatted calf and welcome him back to my list. Kausfiles is also gone until he gets a linking address at Slate that actually works. Thursday, June 13, 2002
According to Silflay Hraka, we have a ways to go before the war on terrorism can be considered officially won. (Link borrowed from Edward Boyd.) Wednesday, June 12, 2002
Lies, Damn Lies, and Conservative Statistics Instapundit today posts an item quoting from an article in Reason attacking Rachel Carson for misuse of statistics in her Famous book, "Silent Spring".
Although it sounds alarming, Carson’s statistic is essentially meaningless unless it’s given some context, which she failed to supply. It turns out that the percentage of children dying of cancer was rising because other causes of death, such as infectious diseases, were drastically declining.
In fact, cancer rates in children have not increased, as they would have if Carson had been right that children were especially susceptible to the alleged health effects of modern chemicals. Just one rough comparison illustrates this point: In 1938 cancer killed 939 children under 14 years old out of a U.S. population of 130 million. In 1998, according to the National Cancer Institute, about 1,700 children died of cancer, out of a population of more than 280 million. In 1999 the NCI noted that "over the past 20 years, there has been relatively little change in the incidence of children diagnosed with all forms of cancer; from 13 cases per 100,000 children in 1974 to 13.2 per 100,000 children in 1995."
Of course, these aren't those squishy, soft-headed, statistics that relativistic, Luddite, anti-Enlightenment liberal environmentalists love to terrify the innocent with. A good conservative/libertarian writer would never resort to such tricks, especially after just attacking an environmentalist for them. These are firm, trustworthy, conservative statistics with rock-hard pecs and abs, ready to stand up to the toughest challenge.
Aren't they?
The 81% increase in child fatalities looks unimpressive compared to the 115% increase in population. But the first problem is exactly that the comparison is to total population. We know that the percentage of the population in older brackets has increased dramatically in this period. Logic dictates that the percentage of younger groups in the population, including children, would have gone down. In the 1940 census, 36.3% of the population was under 21; in 2000 28.6% was under 20. So by comparing rates in children against total population instead of comparing against population of children, Baily is distorting the numbers by about 20%.
But this isn't the real trick. The real problem is that Bailey is comparing cancer fatalities and ignoring the dramatic improvements in treatments over the comparison period. From 1960 to the late 1980s, chances for 5 year survival of a child diagnosed with cancer went up dramatically , from 28% to 70%. For the period from 1938 to 1998, the difference would be even higher. So if cancer fatalities have stayed fairly constant for that period, it follows that cancer incidence must have risen dramatically.
According to this NCI report, from 1975 to 1995 mortality rates for children dropped 40% while incidence rates were rising at 0.8% per year. Incidentally, this report defines 'children' as birth - 19. If Bailey's report does the same, that's one more problem in comparing it to a report on children aged birth - 13. Bailey has just thrown out some numbers to make it look impressive - as long as you don't look too closely.
The bottom line is that you just can't make any meaningful statements about environmental risks for cancer by comparing mortality rates over generations. Any environmental factor more subtle than smoking 4 packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day while working in an asbestos mine will be drowned out by the treatment improvements.
Sunday, June 09, 2002
Thanks to blogger N. Z. Bear, who mentioned this site with some kind words on Thursday. And now that I've installed a new counter, I can confirm my belief that it was the Bear who put visits to this site at an all time high on Thursday and Friday. The Bear incidentally mentioned a post which I put up concern Media Whores Online and the watch blog that criticises it. You can find below a post which responds to a critique responding to my post which attacks Instapundit's mention of the watchblog which attacks the blog which attacks the mainstream media which attacks everyone except itself.
Dude, my meta can whup your meta's ass.
Saturday, June 08, 2002
Tapped is being uncharacteristically silly in this item on Salon's MWO article: Salon deserves praise for running a piece critical of MWO, even if the article itself left something to be desired. Wingnuts: Remember this the next time you accuse Salon of being a Democratic mouthpiece.
What exactly is so praiseworthy about running an article that you concede isn't especially good? After all, back when it was worth checking out every day, Salon ran some brutal articles criticising Clinton with real reporting. The New York Times savaged Clinton and Gore time after time for 8 years while being a lapdog for Bush. I didn't notice the wingnuts noticing.
Why is it, incidentally, that the few liberal outlets have to please (and print) conservatives to be respectable? Salon for years was a regular outlet for Vincent, Horowitz and Paglia. With the exception of Paglia, who is utterly trite and worthless on politics but often insightful on culture, it certainly wasn't because they either wrote well or had anything original to say.
And it isn't only Salon. Sullivan, before he made his living complaining about conservatives being frozen out of the media, made his reputation in the US as editor of the New Republic. Slate has many conservatives in its Breakfast Club feature, not to mention Kaus, who really isn't fooling anybody when he claims he's still a Democrat. Even the Nation has Hitchens, who really isn't a conservative pundit, but is so addicted to nasty personal attacks against Democrats that he might as well be. TAP is about the only major liberal publication that doesn't have an obvious house conservative, and good for them. It's not as if conservatives lack TV, radio, and print outlets where they can whine about the liberal media.
The total number of house liberals I know of in National Review, Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page combined is 0. (I have looked, but if any reader can point out one I missed I'll correct this.) The Endangered Texas RINO A group of Texas GOPers is pushing to prevent anyone from running as a Republican whom they consider to be insufficiently sincere in backing the state party's platform. The Texas platform calls for, among other things, teaching creation science and re-occupying the Panama Canal, but it seems that those positions may not be 'core principles' and are therefore optional for Party candidates. At first I was amused by this, since a party really doesn't determine its own candidates. But they do have a plan for kicking out candidates who don't match their standards, and some ambiguous precedents that suggest it might possibly be legal. So if a candidate fails to match some Central Committee's standards of ideological purity, other factors - for instance winning a primary election - just might become irrelevant. As a descendant of one-time members of the Communist Party, I can certainly respect their goals. If it hadn't maintained its firm opposition to all forms of revisionism through repeated expulsions, the CPUSA wouldn't be the major political and intellectual force it is today.
And as a Democrat, I wish Robert Johnson and his allies the best of luck. Friday, June 07, 2002
Rant and Counter Rant Jay Caruso, one of the bloggers at Media Whores Online Watch, which I blasted on Wednesday, has put up a response to my criticisms at Daily Rant, his other blog. Who's got time to write 2 blogs, by the way? Especially since Jay also says he has a young child. I would barely have time for one, except for my convenient lack of a life. Anyway, to get to Jay's criticisms:
I wrote: MWO Watch copies the loud, in your face attitude of MWO, but it doesn't copy their interest in actual facts. It prefers insults and sneers to troubling exercises like research.
Jay answered:First of all, I'd like to know what 'actual facts' Alex is referring to on MWO. Here is a quote from a commentary they had regarding a new story coming out in Esquire about President Bush:
I would definitely agree that MWO is an opinion-rich environment, with more than an occasional cheap shot. But if you look around, there are plenty of facts there.
For instance, one current article, "BUSH, CHENEY, AND THE HALLIBURTON SCANDAL", has numerous facts, apparently mostly cribbed from an article in the Boston Globe, that I have seen reported sparsely or not at all elsewhere:
Another story describes Tucker Carlson on 'Crossfire' repeating the bogus claims that FBI agents set the Waco fire and Dee Dee Myers meekly going along with him, with extensive quotes from transcripts.
So there is some significant meat on the site, along with the invective.
MWO Watch:
I don't know what MWO said about this. They either keep no archives at all or hide them someplace very hard to find, which is atrocious.
About this story in general, what amazed me, and also demonstrated how badly the media elite is in need of an aggressive watchdog, is that the Post was universally credited with 'breaking' a story that had appeared in a major newspaper the previous year.
I noted that in two consecutive posts, MWO Watch had mocked MWO for an ad hominem shot at Rush Limbaugh, then engaged in some pretty crude insults of its own to readers sending critical e-mails. Jay replied:
There has been a common misconception that MWO Watch is a site that is written with one voice, and the critics refer to posts by two separate people as though Henry and I have some kind of rules to abide by. This is not the case. I post when I feel like it and Henry posts when he feels like it. We'll email each other tipping each other off to certain things, but what we post is done on our own. Henry decided to make a comment about MWO and their use of the term 'fathead' with respect to Rush Limbaugh. My comments responding to other comments are irrelevant in that regard.
As for me, anybody who has read this site, knows that I am respectful to dissenting views, and do not engage in ad hominem here, and I appreciate that my liberal readers have not done so either. I like the dissent, and there are times when faithful readers like Midderpidge offer some rebuttal to what I write, which makes me think more about the issue. However, I am not about to offer a shred of respect for some left wing nut who is going to call me a fucking Nazi!
Jay, there's an old Jewish saying: When you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. The Rant (which is ultimately just as partisan as MWO Watch) posts intelligent, respectful commentary and gets respectful critiques of your positions. MWO Watch posts red meat invective and gets responses comparing you to notorious murderers or calling you a Nazi. Maybe there's a lesson in that.
Now we enter, with grave trepidation, the swamps of Florida. MWO routinely refers to the 2000 election as stolen, a position with which, for the record, I agree. MWO Watch posted an article under the headline "MWO's BIGGEST WHOPPER - SO FAR" on the recount.
MWO:"As everyone knows from subsequent reports making clear that overvotes would have been included in the recount - and making clear that Al Gore won under all six scenarios counting overvotes and undervotes - the US Supreme Court did cast the deciding vote installing Usurper."
MWO Watch:That is a total lie. Overvotes would not have been included in the recounts. Florida law at the time said as much.[Emphasis in original.]
The overvotes in question were ballots where a vote was entered for one candidate and the same candidate's name was entered on the write-in line. There were overvotes that included votes for multiple candidates, but these ballots could not have been counted. The countable overvotes are known to have tilted significantly to Gore.
The order by the Florida Supreme Court called for only the counting of undervotes. However, Slate showed that the Judge who was supervising the recount, Terry Lewis, was considering adding overvotes to the count. If he had, and the recount had been completed, Gore would have very probably won.
Contrary to the flat statement of MWO Watch, we simply don't know whether the overvotes would have been included. But it seems likely they would have:
By the way, this is all focusing on minutia while ignoring the basic question. MWO Watch doesn't seem to dispute that Gore would have won if all the legal votes had been counted. They're pretty much just saying that, even if the recount had gone forward, due to mistakes by the Gore attorneys and the Florida Supremes, enough valid Gore votes would have been missed for Bush still to win. Once you concede that Gore, along with the national popular vote, seems to have won the plurality of legal Florida votes - and also there's little dispute that Gore had a sizable majority in votes that had to be thrown out because of confusing ballot design - you're pretty much admitting that Bush's legitimacy rests, at best, on a legal technicality.
Jay also disagrees with my characterizing Instapundit's item as 'endorsing' MWO Watch. It doesn't explicitly say that the blog is good, and MWO Watch isn't on Glenn's lengthy blog roll. (Neither are Daily Rant or Public Nuisance.) I still think that's a reasonable interpretation of Glenn's line, "Advantage: Blogosphere!". Feel free to decide for yourself.
Thursday, June 06, 2002
How Can I Fraudulently Inflate My Stock's Price and then Sell? See Page 143. A fascinating article recently about financial shenanigans at Digital Lightwave and the connection to the Church of Scientology. The article actually seems to pull some punches. Previous reports I've seen on Digital Lightwave documented massive insider selling by Scientologists in key company positions shortly before the January 1998 admission that an incredible 80% of sales in 3rd qtr 1997 were phony.
Presumably this detail, and some others we may never know, were left out at the suggestion of lawyers. What's left is still quite good.
Jihad vs McCrusade Da Professor today comments on the oddity of objecting to the word 'Crusades' while criticizing anyone who objects to the word 'jihad'. As my regular readers (both of you) know, the Nuisance discussed this point at length a week ago.
Advantage: Nuisance! This Isn't Getting Any Prettier The Catholic sex scandal is hitting what seems to be a new low today, with police effectively investigating defrocked priest Stephen Kiessle for murder. Kiessle's vacation home in Truckee, near Reno, is being searched for evidence in the disappearance of Amber Swartz. Swartz was 7 years old when she disappeared from her home in Pinole June 3, 1988. She has never been seen since.
Kiessle at the time already had a criminal record for molesting boys, which led to his removal from the priesthood. He wasn't investigated in 1988, although he was living on the same block as Swartz, because his record had been expunged.
In May, Kiessle was arrested after 3 women came forward to charge him with allegedly molesting them while he was a priest in the 1970s. The women reportedly were close to Amber in age and appearance when they charge that Kiessle molested them. There is no solid evidence as yet connecting him to the Swartz case.
Wednesday, June 05, 2002
You Can Lead a Horticulture... Glenn Reynolds today praises a new blog dedicated to attacking Media Whores Online, suggesting that it raises serious doubts about the factual reliability of MWO.
I'll put in a link to MWO Watch because this is a blog and that's what blogs do, but I'll put it in with a warning: I've read at least 60 blogs and likely more, dozens with an aggressive right-wing tilt that I completely disagree with. I've blogrolled and/or linked to quite a number of them. But I can't recall ever seeing one less worth your time than this.
MWO Watch copies the loud, in your face attitude of MWO, but it doesn't copy their interest in actual facts. It prefers insults and sneers to troubling exercises like research.
Of the articles presently on the site, the top one attacks an article in Salon written by Jean-Charles Brisard apparently suggesting links (I don't have a Salon subscription, so I can't see the full article) between pipeline negotiations with the Taliban, the 9/11 attacks, and the attack on Afghanistan. To refute this claim, they cite a Nation article by David Corn which does have a few paragraphs challenging Brisard's accuracy, but is primarily concerned with debunking the entirely different 9/11 conspiracy theory that the US government ignored specific, detailed prior knowledge of the attacks. MWO Watch also mentions the crackpot theory that there was no Pentagon crash, just to associate the people they're criticizing with an obviously nutty claim that they have never endorsed. The link of all this to MWO is that "the Horse will go nuts over this later today, I'm sure."
The next item criticizes MWO for using the term 'fathead' for Rush Limbaugh, saying, "MHO desperately hangs onto their ad hominem attack... Or, you know, you could criticize people based on the merits of their arguments."
The third shows the MWO Watch watchdogs following their own advice with their critics: "Hey guys, when you stop sniffing your fingers after having them up your rear end, try and actually thing[sic] of something original to say "
To support Glenn's claim that they've challenged the accuracy of MWO, they put up a link to what they themselves cite as their best proof that MWO is unreliable. It's an article on the Florida 2000 mess that brings nothing new to the table
I could convert this blog to only arguments about the Florida election/recount and have enough items to go on blogging for months. But it's a dead issue, and I wouldn't convince a single person who disagrees with my take on it; pretty fast I wouldn't be read by one. So I won't go there. I'll just say that the MWO Watch article on the topic will convince you if you already believe that Bush's 'election' was clean, it won't if you don't. And if you followed the controversy closely from either side, it will tell you nothing you don't already know.
It doesn't prove that MWO is unreliable about facts, only that there is a vast chasm between the interpretation of the Florida recount as seen by highly partisan Republicans and highly partisan Democrats. And at least some Republicans assume that anyone who doesn't see things their way is deliberately lying. None of this is news.
I feel pretty confident that I could turn in work far better than the junk on MWO Watch to Professor Reynolds and in return, get a shining new 'F' along with a firmly-worded recommendation that if I'm really determined to follow a career related to law, I should look into current openings in the highly competitive courthouse janitor job market. Obviously the standards for a blog and a law school paper aren't the same, but good writing and good argument are reasonably constant factors whatever the medium. Since the Instapundit endorsement is probably the most influential in the blogosphere, it should be reserved for more worthwhile material than this. Josh Marshall, in his indispensable Talking Points, has a nominee for Slate's Whopper of the Week feature, but does he really have the goods? Marshall nominates Weldon Kennedy, who said of the Moussaoui search warrant imbroglio, "The computer was searched and guess what? There was nothing significant on there pertaining to 9/11. "
Marshall says this is false, citing an article from Newsweek:
People close to Rowley and her Minnesota colleagues say they were devastated after the attacks, convinced that they could have done more to stop the plot if only Washington had listened. (Moussaoui’s computer, searched after September 11, revealed information about crop-dusting and large jets, and his belongings included the phone number of lead hijacker Mohamed Atta’s roommate.) (Emphasis added.)
Was the phone number on the computer or elsewhere in his property? If it wasn't on the computer, Kennedy wasn't lying. He maybe wasn't even really spinning, since the computer seems to be the only item agents were trying to search prior to 9/11. I have seen stories that seemed to say the number was actually on the computer. This article implies that it was in a separate notebook, and the Newsweek story doesn't contradict that. Andrew Sullivan, who still hasn't figured out how to do that permalink trick, has found another and more shocking way to surprise: he actually has something nice to say today about Bill Clinton. Hey, don't look at me like that. It's really true! As soon as I finish posting, I'm headed down to Hell for the snowball fight.
Sullivan quotes and links to this Post article with figures showing the 90's boom did lift poorer Americans as well as the rich. He uses this to make the point that "These numbers should undermine the notion that free markets and free people cannot generate wealth without immiserating the poorest. Wealth really does trickle down and up - even when a country is absorbing unprecedented numbers of poor immigrants."
Sullivan is arguing against a straw man here: nobody that I know of argues that generating wealth automatically hurts the poor. Really, such a claim would be prima facie absurd. The question is whether it automatically helps them - even with a government like the current one that actively tries to redistibute wealth upwards and mostly ignores whether any is actually being created.
What the Clinton boom really proved is that policies that conservatives have long argued, and still argue, are always destructive are in fact quite consistent with nearly ideal economic conditions. Clinton raised marginal income tax rates, which Republicans loudly predicted that would cause a recession. Instead it caused a budget surplus and soaring employment. He tightened environmental enforcement and improved worker safety. The catastrophe that conservatives confidently predicted never arrived.
Well, actually, it did. But only after Clinton left office and all his 'class warfare' policies were replaced by 'pro-growth' policies.
In addition to permalinks, Andy has trouble with just plain links. Here is the Times story he tries unsuccessfully to link to. (Registration required.)
Andy's complaint that the Times story works extra hard to make the numbers sound bad is pretty valid. The headline is Gains of 90's Did Not Lift All, Census Shows, and the lead paragraph says:
Despite the surging economy of the 1990's that brought affluence to many Americans, the poor remained entrenched, the Census Bureau reported today. The bureau's statistics for the 50 states and the District of Columbia show that 9.2 percent of families were deemed poor in 2000, a slight improvement from 10 percent in 1989.
Other numbers further down in the story do show the substantial improvements that took place in the decade.
Since Sullivan is always and exclusively looking for and finding liberal spin, he never mentions the most obvious oddity about the stories: both the Times and Post managed to publish fairly lengthy stories analyzing the 90s boom with the same thing missing - neither story ever mentions Bill Clinton. Clinton's role in the boom is so plain that even Andrew Sullivan no longer entirely denies it, but the 'liberal' media still manages not to mention it. Sunday, June 02, 2002
So you think you know how to deconstruct gangsta rap lyrics? The Poor Man is ready to test your skills. He is also ready to challenge your understanding of Led Zeppelin, but I thought the use of Zeppelin lyrics by Captain Scott was even cleverer. Friday, May 31, 2002
Eric Alterman and Charles Kuffner, both of whom seem to know baseball better than I do, have been discussing the lack of respect given to Barry Bonds, and agree that it is at least in part due to his unpopularity with professional sports journalists. That brings to mind a story I read years ago about another player who was famous for surliness to reporters. I believe the man in question was Alex Johnson , a quality player from 1964 - 1976, but well short of Cooperstown numbers.
A reporter asked, "Alex, last year you had 12 homers at the All Star break; this year you only have two. What's the difference?"
Johnson stared at the reporter, thought for a moment, and replied, "Ten, asshole." More Speech Issues Google is allegedly censoring ads by noted businesswoman and now blogger Anita Roddick. Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop chain, took exception to the recent statement by John Malkovich that he would like to shoot Robert Fisk. Specifically, she said, "His threat to shoot Robert Fisk for his honest reportage on Israel is but further evidence that Malkovich is a vomitous worm."
Now on my personal search engine, the name Fisk is much more likely to come up under 'vomitous worm' than 'honest reportage'. But that's no reason why Ms Roddick shouldn't be able to express her contrary view.
After Roddick made the Malkovich statement, google decided that her site violated their policy against "sites that advocate against groups or individuals." That's a pretty broad category. If taken at face meaning, it would ban every political blog I know of that is worth reading, along with quite a few that aren't. (Deciding which category the Nuisance fits into is an exercise left for the reader.)
On Jihad at Harvard Harvard commencement speaker Zayed Yasin has now announced that he is removing the word 'jihad' from the title of his speech, although he is not changing the text, which very few people have seen. If you need to be brought up to speed on this controversy, the place to go is blogger Matthew Yglesias. Yasin seems to feel that negative reaction to the word 'jihad' is over-sensitive: “It’s a speech about the privileged opportunities and responsibilities we have as graduates...and about how these are enunciated in both the Islamic concept of jihad and in American ideals,” Yasin said.
“The idea is that we live in difficult and trying times and we will have to struggle both within ourselves to do the right thing and with very difficult problems that affect our communities,” he said.
Yasin said he is not surprised by the outcry that followed the announcement of his speech title.
“That is part of why I wrote this speech,” Yasin said. “Jihad is not something that should make someone feel uncomfortable. It’s a matter of other people deciding what they think jihad is and attributing to the word the product of their own imagination.”
While not surprised by the reaction, Yasin did say that he was surprised at the vehemence of the response.
“More disturbing is ad hominim attacks upon the work that I’ve done and on my personal life,” he said. “They’re very disappointing. I expected more from the Harvard community. I’m referring to people who have called me anti-Semite, to people who have said I support terrorism...All of these are untrue.”
Now, some of us may remember that last year, shortly after 9/11, George Bush referred to a 'crusade' against terrorism. This was widely condemned and resulted in a mini-controversy that stayed mini mostly because Bush himself immediately withdrew the statement and apologized for using the word.
In the course of this controversy, it was generally allowed that Muslims had the right to be offended by the use of the word crusade. I didn't particularly hear people saying, "Look, those wars ended around 800 years ago. And besides, news flash: your side won. Get over it, for pity's sake."
Nor did people say: "OK, Christians got together and launched a war of aggression against Moslems. So what? The main thing that was unusual about the Crusades is that they were a counter-offensive in a period when Moslems were generally stronger and launched wars of aggression against Christian states in the West, and other non-Moslem states in the East, routinely."
Historically, the Crusades weren't even all that anti-Moslem. The First Crusade took time out on its jouney East to burn and pillage Jewish communities in numerous European cities. Perhaps the most successful Crusade, certainly the one which won the richest booty, was the Fourth, which in 1205 sacked the Greek and Christian city of Constantinople. Crusades were subsequently preached against Cathars and other heretical movements well after any serious attempt at recovering Jerusalem or other strongholds in Moslem lands (other than the remaining Moslem areas of Spain) were forgotten.
In fact, persons of Jewish or Eastern Orthodox faith have easily as much cause to jump at the word 'Crusade' as Moslems. They have, however, managed to live with events of almost a millenium ago.
While it seems to be entirely acceptable that Moslems leap into indignation at a mere mention of medieval atrocities, it is judged in some circles to be less acceptable that Americans are offended by the word 'jihad'. This in spite of the fact that less than one year ago, 3,000 of us were murdered in the name of jihad. In spite of the fact that millions of us personally knew one or more people who were murdered on 9/11 or in the terrorist acts of the present intifada. In spite of the fact that we know without doubt that others as I write are nurturing plots that they hope will result in equal or greater slaughter, in the name of jihad.
Having said this, I am not opposed to Mr Yasin giving his speech. To block the speech based on its subject would be unacceptable and contrary to our values.
However, I do note that the audience at the commencement has their own free speech rights, just as much as the speaker. I do not suggest any attempt to shout down or interrupt his speech, which would be consorship just as bad as barring it.
Speech can, however, take various forms.
Mr Yasin asserts that his concept of jihad is based on the idea "that we live in difficult and trying times and we will have to struggle both within ourselves to do the right thing and with very difficult problems that affect our communities ." These problems are universal, so we should see true jihad as being an opportunity for each of us, not linked to only one culture or religion.
In this broad interpretation of jihad, there are many jihads occurring at any time. A conspicuous current jihad is the struggle of the peoples of the United States and of Israel to maintain our nations against an evil and cowardly enemy that, being unable to strike at us directly, seeks to fight by killing unarmed people, in 'martyrdom' attacks that have no other purpose than to kill and maim the largest possible number of civilians, many of them infants, children, or elderly.
Part of this struggle, in fact much more challenging than mere military victory which is easily attainable for both Israel and the US, is the struggle to remain democratic societies which protect the rights of their Moslem citizens even when some of those citizens seek to undermine their societies, and which respect the rules of law and the laws of warfare while fighting against an enemy that has no respect for either and openly proclaims that their greatest strength is their 'love of death'.
By bringing American and Israeli flags to the event, and displaying them prominently when Mr Yasin is introduced and throughout his speech, Harvard students can demonstrate that they understand that the struggle for a better world is important for all of us, showing that they take Mr Yasin at his word in making their own commitments to jihad as 'struggle for personal growth and for wider peace and justice'. Res Ipse Loquitur "I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we're doing business and how we're operating—over and above just the sort of normal by-the-books auditing arrangement." - Dick Cheney, in a promotional video for Arthur Andersen, explaining how Andersen helped him to cook his company's books while he was CEO of Halliburton. Stolen from a typically excellent piece by Michael Kinsley. Wednesday, May 29, 2002
SF State University Blogburst The following column by John Podhoretz appeared originally in the New York Post. May 14, 2002 -- The San Francisco Bay area is the new France - and that's not a compliment.
There's been a great deal of attention paid in recent weeks to the horrifying outbreak of anti-Semitism in France. Far less attention has been paid to an outbreak of anti-Semitism in Northern California that seems to be spreading like the awful spiritual disease it is.
Since the start of the year, there have been 50 documented cases of anti-Semitic acts in and around the Bay Area. That is more than three times as many as in all of 2001, according to Jonathan Bernstein of the Anti-Defamation League. He also reports that his office is the only one of the ADL's 30 regional bureaus to note an increase in anti-Jewish incidents.
There have been serious arson attempts on two synagogues. One temple, in Berkeley, would have been destroyed had a neighbor not spotted the fire on the roof. Another, in San Francisco, was pelted with Molotov cocktails.
It's worse at the universities. A man wearing a Jewish ritual skullcap was severely beaten on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Students and faculty attending religious services at the Berkeley Hillel, the Jewish meeting house, were pelted with rotten eggs.
The Hillel house itself has been defaced with graffiti.
The comparison with France, where leading politicians have made public statements that stop just short of anti-Semitism and private statments that don't stop, feels to me, as a lifelong Bay Area resident, like a cheap shot.
It doesn't reflect what life through most of the area is like, and it doesn't seem to be based on close study of the facts - the arson incident that Podhoretz places in Berkeley actually took place in Oakland, and press reports I have seen don't mention Molotov cocktails in acounts of either incident.
In fact, the level of tension seems to me and nearly all the Jews I know to be lower than Podhoretz suggests. Even in the notorious People's Republic of Berkeley, the newly-elected president of the ASUC, the highest position in student government, is Jesse Gabriel, a Jew and an active Zionist.
I do not wish to trivialize the incidents that have occured, or imply that there is some 'acceptable' level of anti-Semitic violence that hasn't yet been exceeded. I just mean that the article, which almost sounds as if Jews in the Bay Area can no longer walk down the street without looking over their shoulders, is somewhat overheated.
The worst incident happened last week at San Francisco State University, where there is clearly no division between anti-Israel political sentiment and naked anti-Semitism. Demonstrations against Israel have been a daily occurrence there for months, and the rhetoric on campus has taken a literally medieval anti-Semitic turn.
Laurie Zoloth, a professor at San Francisco State University, put it bluntly and powerfully in a widely circulated e-mail: "I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled 'canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites.' "
That's the explicit return of the "blood libel," the foul accusation leveled against the Jews of England in the 12th century that they were killing Gentile babies and using their blood in religious rituals.
The poster in question can be found here. It is assuredly true that such blatant racism directed at another ethnic minority (and financed in part through University funds) would never be tolerated.
It is worth noting that none of the groups which issued this repulsive poster have since apologized, with the exception of a pseudo-apology from the Muslim Students Association which essentially states:"We previously announced that Jews are inhuman monsters who murder Arab babies and drink their blood as a religious rite. We have since discovered that they do this for strictly secular reasons. We regret any error, however trivial."
When such expressions of infamy are not challenged, fought and defeated, those who voice them will only get more virulent. And that's what happened on May 8.
In an account confirmed by other witnesses, Laurie Zoloth described the disgusting denouement following a "Peace in the Middle East" rally sponsored by the SFSU Hillel.
A group of students, numbering around 50, had remained to chant afternoon prayers. At that moment, "Counter demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews to 'Get out or we will kill you' and 'Hitler did not finish the job.' I turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators from the plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised. The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone . . .
"The police could do nothing more than surround the Jewish students and community members who were now trapped in a corner of the plaza, grouped under the flags of Israel, while an angry, out of control mob, literally chanting for our deaths, surrounded us. . . . There was no safe way out of the Plaza. We had to be marched back to the Hillel House under armed S.F. police guard, and we had to have a police guard remain outside Hillel."
I can't really comment directly on the demonstration, which I wasn't at. Along with Podhoretz's version of Laurie Zoloth's account, at least one other first person account is included in the blogburst.
It seeks clear from the accounts both of the demonstration and the aftermatn that the SFSU administration has tried to maintain a scrupulously even approach throughout. The moral vacuity of attempting to be 'even-handed' when faced with a conflict between a peaceful demonstration supporting legitimately controversial positions and a counter-demonstration/riot screaming for genocide has been superbly dissected by the Armed Liberal.
Yesterday, following almost a week of silence, SFSU President Robert Corrigan issued a statement about the incident. "A small but terribly destructive number of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, many of whom were not SFSU students, abandoned themselves to intimidating behavior and statements too hate-filled to repeat," Corrigan wrote. "That encounter puts at risk all that we value and represent as a university community."
That's true, but it's insufficient. Had Corrigan more directly addressed the rise of anti-Semitism on his campus in the months preceding the riot, it might have been forestalled altogether. "Despite the claims of some," wrote Corrigan in an obvious effort to criticize Laurie Zoloth, "this is not an anti-Semitic campus."
Jews and especially Zionists facing a degree of hostility on left-leaning campuses is hardly new. There has been much discussion recently of a course taught at UC Berkeley which openly discouraged any students who were insufficiently committed to the cause from enrolling. The same thing happened almost 25 years ago when I was a student at Santa Cruz. A course in beginning Arabic was advertised in flyers with the statement "Anti-Arab racists need not apply." The obvious reference was to the UN resolution that "Zionism is a form of racism."
For some time now, such attacks at SF State have been considerably harsher.
In fairness to University President Robert Corrigan, who has not been looked on favorably in the blogosphere, it should be noted that the major local Jewish publication recently published an editorial asserting that he has been unfairly blamed for the situation. But I found myself unconvinced by the editorial; it mainly persuaded me
That's cold comfort to those Jewish students who have to endure being told on a daily basis that Hitler didn't finish the job. "The students are so brave," Laurie Zoloth told me, sighing. "But they shouldn't have to be brave."
This blog can only comment on one or two facets of the travesty at SFSU. Other dimensions of this incident and the alarming trends it represents are detailed in the full SFSU Blog Burst Index at Winds of Change.
The HappyFunPundit has a clever piece mocking the MPAA for blaming internet file trading for the 'mediocre' (only $100 mil a week) box office returns for Episode II: I submit that about 99% of the downloads of that movie were by dedicated fans who simply couldn't wait for the movie to open. Do you think such people would then avoid going to see it in the theater? Of course not. The people who downloaded that movie on the internet were the same ones standing in line at theaters for three days and being mocked by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
In short, the downloaders of that movie are your best customers, Rich. You didn't lose a penny to them. You won't even lose the DVD sales. Those people will buy the DVD, the T-shirts, the toys, the 'Special Edition' DVD, the 'Collector's Edition' DVD, the 'Ultimate' DVD, the "Director's Cut" DVD, the "Foley Artist Commentary" DVD, and a DVD showing the grips working on the droid costumes if you want to sell it to them. They'll buy any Star Wars tie-in product you can come up with. Except, of course, for Star Wars condoms. That idea should die in the planning room for obvious reasons.
Now, Dan is certainly right here on the central issue. But what's wrong with Collector's Edition Star Wars Episode II condoms, made in Yoda, Anakin, and Mace sizes? We all know that authentic fans never open the original packaging on their collectables. This is a perfect match!
Tuesday, May 28, 2002
The already-famous memo by FBI agent Coleen Rowley is now available on the web and makes grim and fascinating reading. The memo certainly strengthens the case that an independent investigation of the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11 is vital. Nothing here implicates Bush or senior administration officials, except in the very broad sense that as the man in charge Bush is finally responsible for the successes and failures of his watch. And although Mueller certainly doesn't shine in Rowley's picture, it should be remembered that he had been in office only for a few days on 9/11. What Rowley does implicate is the overly centralized and bureaucratic culture of the FBI, which comes across in her account as almost comically unwilling to take any risks. In describing the FBI bureaucrats as risk-averse, I am of course referring to their unwillingness to risk their career prospects, not the lives of Americans which they seemed quite willing to take chances with.
The problems in the FBI are clearly deeply rooted, going back probably to J. Edgar Hoover, the consummate bureaucrat and ultimate control freak. To obtain a simple search warrant for the belongings of a man already in custody, Rowley and her colleagues had to go through several layers of bureaucracy. Incredibly, they still faced bureaucratic roadblocks after 9/11. They had no knowledge of or access to the memo by Phoenix agent WIlliams, who the Post says "marked his memo 'routine,' knowing that it typically takes 60 days for such documents to go through the chain of command at FBI headquarters."
To meet its obligations in the current situation, the Bureau needs major reforms. It has to move into the 21st century, and allow agents who have similar concerns in Phoenix and Minnesota to communicate directly, instead of sending memos to Washington and praying that somebody there will take notice in a month or two. It has to empower its agents to act, instead of waiting for multiple levels of bureaucracy in Washington to review their plans.
A related point has been well made by Charles Dodgson: before we empower the FBI to take extensive new bites out of the Fourth Amendment in order to gather every piece of information it might possibly want, let's first try having it analyze and act on the information it already has.
Are there similar problems with the CIA? Very likely there are. Certainly the CIA, like the FBI, has a history of operating with little external review or accountability. Much more than the FBI, which is fairly continuously tested by the judiciary, it has had the power to mark its failures as 'top secret' and avoid responsibility for them. And before 9/11, it had problems forecasting other minor events, like the complete collapse of the entire Warsaw Pact.
An independent inquiry is the best means to start fixing the problems so that our security agencies can actually make us more secure.
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