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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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Monday, July 22, 2002
The Real Fifth Column Sure, we've got Kaus and Coulter to warn us of the danger from violent leftists. And the Nation is keeping an eye on violent right wing nuts.
But thank God we have Ted Barlow to warn America of the real threats: crazed gymnastics fans and Will and Grace jihadniks. Dawn Olsen's recent foray into online education so impressed Instapundit that he's given her a new name. The Sound of One Commissioner Voting Ernst & Young, one of the Big Somebody at the SEC, doubtless an anti-market fanatic, thought there might be some possible conflict there and started an investigation. But the investigation was recently ruled illegal, because only one SEC commissioner voted in favor of it. Two spots on the Commission are currently vacant, and two Commissioners recused themselves due to business ties with Ernst & Young, leaving only Commissioner Isaac Hunt. Hunt voted for the inquiry, but a court ruled that it was invalid without the votes of at least two members. I Must Be Psychic The Nuisance has been proven correct in its uncanny ability to predict what Andrew Sullivan will write about before he even posts. Randy Andy's abstention from frantic attacks on the New York Times lasted for exactly 36 hours, 26 minutes, and 14 seconds - and for exactly 0 full length posts, as I predicted. At 2:00 am today, Andrew's first full length post since his pledge to abstain from swingin' at the Raines was released to an eager world, containing 6 items: 3 attacks on the Times, 2 criticisms of conservative critics of homosexuality, and a quick mention of Osama Bin Laden.
Personally, I blame Andrew's early relapse on Bill Clinton. Ever since he lied about that blow job, the helpless Beltway media has been unable to refrain from lies, half-truths, and generally asinine conduct. Granted, this started 20-odd years ago before most of them had ever heard of Bill Clinton, but he may very well have been getting blow jobs back then too, so it's still his fault.
Sunday, July 21, 2002
Proving that great minds blog alike, the Kolkata Libertarian made a prediction of the emergence of what he calls the I3 (Israel, Iran, India) axis, essentially the prediction made here the same day, but without Turkey. Aziz Poonawalla observes that part of what unites the I3 nations is that each is a genuine nation, carrying forward a long cultural tradition. This is untrue of many other states in the region (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan), whose borders are often arbitrary lines drawn by the British Empire. Pakistan, for instance, was just those portions of the old British Raj that had a mainly Muslim population at the time of independence, but it had and still has little ethnic, linguistic, cultural, or even religious unity. Until it lost Bangla Desh in 1971, it lacked even geographic unity. Jordan was created as Trans-Jordan by Winston Churchill during the British Mandate, mostly as a reward to the Hashemite dynasty which had supported England and Lawrence of Arabia during WWI, but had lost much of its traditional territory to Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia.
By contrast, the I3 states all carry forward distinct and ancient national identities. Turkey is in this category as well; although not as ancient as the others, it does have an authentic distinct cultural identity dating back many centuries.
Jim Henley is less optimistic about this or any other alliance with Turkey, which he fears will lead us into conflict with the Kurds. This is a possible outcome, but by no means necessary or even probable.
An independent Kurdistan would be potentially destabilizing all through the region. Iran, which has its own Kurdish region, would be deeply opposed. India, with all manner of potential breakaway minorities, wouldn't like the idea any more. Pakistan and Afghanistan could both face problems with Pashtun nationalists who dream of uniting the Pashtun regions of those countries. Russia and China both have restless ethnic provinces and would be vigorously opposed. And so on, all through the region. So there are many good reasons unconnected with Turkey why the US opposes Kurdish independence and is unlikely to change.
What we can and should do is support the rights of the Kurdish minorities in Iraq and elsewhere. If the US is successful in installing a decent government in Iraq after Saddam is gone, this would actually be better for the Kurds than full independence, because the Kurds, as Iraqis, would be able to share in the wealth that is generated by Iraq's abundant oil, relatively little of it on Kurdish land.
If the Kurds are respected in their right to their own culture and traditions, and given a role in the government of Iraq along with a share in the nation's wealth, I suspect nationalism would be a far less powerful rallying cry. The current de facto autonomy in northern Iraq has been largely enforced by US power, and we have made clear from the beginning that it isn't considered a step towards independence. In spite of that, there have been almost no attacks from the Kurds on US or UN personnel.
I think the US will play an important role, along with Turkey, as the I3 axis emerges. We already have close relationships with Israel and Turkey, and close historic ties to Iran which should resume when the current unpleasantness ends.
As for US-Indian relations, they have fluctuated many times, mostly due to India's Pakistan issues. At present, the US feels a need to support a rather shaky government in Pakistan that helped us (with problems Pakistan played a large role in creating) in Afghanistan and seems to be making some attempt to deal with its domestic extremists. This has led to many Indians feeling abandoned by us. But India and the USA are the largest democracies in the world, each almost unimaginably diverse in ethnic and religious variety. These similarities run deeper than ephemeral political disputes. Bilateral trade is also growing quite rapidly, and so is the size and visibility of the Indian minority in the US. For all these reasons, I'm quite optimistic about US-Indian ties in the long run. Safest Prediction I'll Ever Make This is a promise that isn't going to be kept: "I'm gonna lay off the Times for a while. "
Sullivan has cleverly made this possible by using the ambiguous term, a while. So far, it's been 23 hours, which could be construed as a while, and he hasn't broken it yet. But in those 23 hours he's only posted two sentences.
I confidently predict Sullivan's 'while' won't last out a full week. Frankly, I'd be a bit surprised if it lasts out a full post, but I have to concede Sullivan might possibly be able to control himself for that long. Friday, July 19, 2002
Out For a Troll Brendan O'Neill recently wrote a now-notorious troll denouncing bloggers, calling for, among other things, a 'sub-editor' for the blogosphere, and listing various rules we illiterate and unedited bloggers should follow so that we might one day advance to the superior level he automatically holds as somebody who gets paid to do this. Here's one rule he forgot: If you write about something you are massively ignorant about, try not to make it obvious. Maybe a sub-editor would help with that, but it doesn't seem to have helped Brendan in this commentary on the letter to the Iranian People recently published on numerous blogs:
[Bloggers] can send no diplomats or troops to help you - which is a shame, because they really believe that American diplomats and troops are just what you need as you are clearly incapable of running your own affairs. Silly little Arabs that you are.
Free clue: Iranians are not Arabs. Technically some are, since Arabs are in fact one of the country's numerous ethnic minorities. But they are a small minority of the population. Over 90% of Iranians are not Arabs, and will explain this point to you quite emphatically, not always politely, if you are foolish enough to make this mistake in their presence.
The piece doesn't get much better from there. Pejman takes it down in detail, more detail than is really needed for a piece that starts out with such a howling error, but I'm sure he enjoyed doing it.
As supercilious and often obnoxious as he can be, O'Neill isn't as totally clueless as some think. This piece on the echo effect of the blogosphere (the second of two pieces with one permalink) does make a valid point.
Yet another article today on the endgame in Iran. (Link from Pejman.) This graf is particularly startling:
In a further sign that the regime was losing its grip, it then confined its police to barracks in Isfahan, as it had done the previous day in Tehran -- doubting their loyalty. Instead they sent foreign thugs with paramilitary training, chiefly Palestinian and Iraqi Arabs, and Uzbeks and Tadzhiks from Afghanistan, to beat the demonstrators down. It was a desperate measure -- an implicit acknowledgement that the whole Persian people have now sided with the opposition.
One more sign of a dying regime: when you can't trust your own security forces, it's time to keep your bags packed for a quick 'pilgrimmage' to sunny Saudi Arabia.
And when the Iranian people regain their freedom, don't think they won't remember how Palestinian mercenaries served as the last-ditch enforcement arm of their oppressors. As noted here yesterday, the coming free Iran can be expected to have close relationships with both the US and Israel, as does Turkey and for largely the same reasons.
With Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and 3 former Soviet Republics on its borders, Iran is literally surrounded by unstable countries, some of them having various claims on Iranian territory. Russia itself is no longer a direct neighbor, but still has coastline on the Caspian Sea, and the various claims of the nations bordering on the Caspian Sea to fishing and oil exploration rights have not yet been sorted out.
Iran needs a strong ally without territorial ambitions in the area, and that's the US, as it has been for a century. In 1907 Engand and Russia, both fearing the rising power of Germany, decided to settle their disputes and and redrew the map of Iran (then Persia), dividing it into a northern zone of Russian 'influence', meaning de facto sovereignty, a southern British zone giving England control of most of the Persian Gulf coast, and a central zone which was left for the current Shah. No Persians were consulted on the division of their country, or even informed until after the fact.
This took place during the Constitutional Revolution. Persians who were fighting against both a reactionary monarchy and foreign imperialism looked to the US for help, and although the US in that era avoided direct involvement in such distant disputes, two Americans did play important roles.
Morgan Shuster, who had carried out a similar role in the Philipines, tried to put the finances and administration of the Constitutionalist government on a rational footing, although he ultimately failed and was forced back to the US by British and Russian interests. Howard Baskerville, who had come to Persia as a missionary and teacher, became a leader of the military resistance in Tabriz, and died fighting for the city.
Later, more internationalist US administrations did play a significant role in ensuring a fairer deal for Iran in their share of the profits from the British oil concession, and played the key role in blocking Stalin's attempts after WWII to install a puppet government in Teheran, or regain the former Russian sphere of influence in northern Iran.
Israel is another ally dictated by geopolitical logic. Countries on the edge of the Arab region, such as Israel, Turkey and Iran, or the Islamic region, such as India, tend to find themselves targeted for attack in one way or another. This is even more true of peoples and territories that aren't recognized nations such as the Southern Sudan, Spanish Sahara, and East Timor. Turkey has been largely spared as a NATO member - Turks must be more than a little jittery at the recent talk of the 'end of NATO'. But Iran, India, and Israel certainly haven't been. Since Israel has sophisticated technologies often matched only by the US, in some areas even better than the US, and unequalled expertise in standing up against Arab/Islamic attack, it becomes a natural ally.
California Scheming The Post yesterday ran an article on the struggles of CA Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bill Simon. Some of the conservatives in the blogosphere made hopeful noises when recent polls showed that Gray Davis's lead over Simon had been reduced. I had meant to write a piece explaining why they will be disappointed when Davis wins in November, but Dan Walters pretty much wrote it for me. (Link from Ann Salisbury.) Simon is running mostly on the premise that he is a business professional and therefore morally superior to any career politician. Sorry, wrong year for that one. (In the primary he ran on issues, but his issues work only in a GOP primary, and he'd rather ignore them between now and November.) Between his business history and his far-right positions on issues, Simon is plenty vulnerable to a negative campaign to make him less attractive. Davis has the money and the ruthlessness to run devastating negative ads. And the ads won't hurt Davis much - the supposed unpopularity of negative politics is exaggerated, and besides Davis is already not greatly loved. He doesn't have to be everyone's hero, which is lucky for him. He just needs to be a more attractive option than a guy who has no government experience, right-wing views inconsistent with those of most California voters, and a past shading the law and possibly violating it in his career as a money manager.
By November, this isn't going to be close. I think Davis will equal his runaway victory margin over Lungren in 1998, another race that in the summer many people thought Davis might lose. Tech Tip For bloggers reading this (and sometimes I wonder if anyone else does) who are still on Blogspot: If you're still having trouble publishing, go to archive and open your archive template. Save without making changes and publish. That should fix it. With my publishing now working, my permalinks also are, to the best of my knowledge. If any reader notices something still broken, please let me know. Wednesday, July 17, 2002
Kaus Follies It's no longer a question of whether Mickey Kaus has become a straight right-wing writer or remains in some sense liberal. That's already settled. The question is whether he's becoming a sensible right winger or a wing nut, and the answer is moving toward the latter option. With laughers like "The New York Times seems no more embarrassable on the subject of Bush-bashing overkill than the Wall Street Journal ed-page was on the subject of Clinton-bashing overkill", it's becoming clear why he links to the likes of Ann Coulter: the difference between them isn't huge and it's shrinking. As Atrios points out, (permalinks broken, and WTF is Blogger going to fix that? It's been a week now that most of us haven't had working links.) the Times has, with the exception of Krugman, been softer on Bush than the Times, much less the Journal, was on Clinton. This isn't the only silliness in Kaus's recent blogging, as Avedon Carol points out. Fun Islamic Facts The following is from Ignaz Goldziher, "Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law", as quoted in Ibn Warraq, "Why I am not a Muslim", p 168. The task of interpreting God's word and of regulating life in conformity became lost in... debating riddling questions in which extreme sophistry and hair-splitting are joined with the boldest and most reckless flights of fancy....[Since] demons frequently assume human shape, the jurists assess the consequences of such transformations for religious law; serious arguments and counterarguments are urged, for example, whether such beings can be numbered among the participamts necessary for the Friday service. Another problematic case that the divine law must clarify: how is one to deal with progeny from a marriage between a human being and a demon in human form.... What are the consequences in family law of such marriages? Indeed the problem of (marriages with the jinn) is treated in such circles with the same seriousness as any important point of the religious law. It's Not Easy Being Green Scientists have been asking for the last few years whether the now well-documented decline in the numbers and health of frog populations is due to parasites or pollution. New research suggests the factors may act in concert, with pesticides suppressing immunity in developing tadpoles and creating new opportunities for parasites. Although deformities didn't occur in the experiment in the absence of parasites, deformity rates rose 300 - 400% where parasites and pesticides were both present. Here's a particularly cheering item from the report:
All of the pesticide concentrations used in the experiment were below EPA-recommended levels for safe drinking water. One of the pesticides tested was atrazine, the most heavily used agricultural herbicide in the United States, which has also been linked to reproductive deformities in other frog species.
Staying for Detention Call me paranoid, but I don't think that National Review would find the detention of Joel Mowbray quite this amusing if Albright were still Secretary of State. Nor should they, in fact. This is a pretty outrageous abuse of power and an angry reaction is well justified. Music is the latest challenge to the dictatorship in Iran. Michael Ledeen thinks the end is near (link fron Glenn Frazier), and he's probably right. The real proof the Iranian dictatorship is falling is that there are increasing cracks in what should be its base constituency of Shia clerics. Clerics who are serious about the future of Islam in Iran are increasingly recognizing that the Islamic Republic has been a disaster. A generation of young Iranians associate Islam with repression and mullahs with greed and corruption. A significant number of clerics realize that continuing misgovernment by mullahs could endanger the Islamic identity of the nation.
This is a development with profound significance. Iran had three major revolutionary movements in the 20th century (The Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911, the Mossadegh movement of 1950-1953, and the Islamic Revolution of 1979). Although only the last succeeded in gaining and holding state power, all three were echoed outside its borders in other Moslem countries. Iran has a well-educated populace (thanks in part to the Shah) and substantial economic resources. A real democracy could succeed in Iran, and would certainly be allied with the US and probably, whether openly or informally, with Israel. Especially if it took place in conjunction with the establishment of a new democracy in Iraq, which will be harder to carry out successfully, the example would carry powerfully to other nations. Buffy 7 A press preview of the upcoming Buffy season reveals that Glory will be back for a return engagement. Link via Mac. You know, I can remember back in the good old days, when being dead used to really mean something. Monday, July 15, 2002
A story in the LA Times today gives new information on Bush's sale of Harken stock. The story does seem to clear up some questions that I've been wondering about - one key point is that it seems clear the decision to drop the case was made by lower level investigators and not by Bush appointees. Does this close the case? Not entirely, since there is some evidence that Bush had more knowledge of coming bad news than the investigation learned (link from Jason Rylander), and I would still like to know why the simple step of interviewing Bush to ask him exactly how much he knew at the time about Harken's coming losses wasn't done.
But the relevance of the case has always been political, not legal. Bush's position at Harken was the result of a pattern that ran through his entire business career, of making money not off his skills or work, but his name. The Texas Rangers deal that was financed by the sale of Harken stock was more of the same. And the fact that it is pretty well documented that Bush was at least technically in violation of SEC regulations by failing to submit the proper forms in time doesn't help, nor do his numerous stories in which everyone but him is responsible for the improper filings. Nor does the fact that he isn't the only Bush to have profitted extensively from his name and connections.
Some of this is probably unfair, but given the endless Clinton investigations (some still continuing today), you'll have to forgive me if I don't feel overcome with sympathy.
Bush is inescapably involved in the ethically shady (not necessarily illegal) transactions that Harken was engaged in while he served on its board. Cheney is, if anything, in deeper. Joshua Green's claim that Bush II has had the loosest ethical standards of any recent administration is entirely justified. This means, at the very least, that Bush has little to no credibility as an advocate of the tougher standards that the public - and investors - now demand. Congratulations to the Rittenhouse Review, which has earned a semi-prestigious personal smear from the spectacularly vile David Horowitz. (There are too many of them for it to rank higher than semi-prestigious.) Horowitz calls the Review a dirty commie. Note to my friends on the right: can one of you wake Mr Horowitz from his coma and explain to him it is no longer 1980? Sunday, July 14, 2002
What's the difference between an Israeli Jew and a mass murderer? Okay, it's a trick question. There is no difference. Just ask Kings College Provost Patrick Bateson. (Link via Blogs of War.)
I'm so glad we ignorant Americans, who actually miss the moral symmetry of Josef Mengele and an Israeli linguist, have sophisticated Europeans to explain these things to us. Friday, July 12, 2002
The Ann Coulter Experiment No, it isn't an alternative/progressive rock band. I wanted to join in the efforts by TAPPED, Scoobie Davis, and others to fact-check or just generally eviscerate Ann Coulter. I couldn't check the entire book - I'm not about to buy a copy and it's checked out or still in shipment at local libraries. And besides, that would involve reading the whole thing, and in the immortal words of Buffy Summers, "Raise your hand if eww." So I decided to open the book, read one random page closely, and report on the outright falsehoods, fake arguments, and assorted dishonesty found therein.
I read page 152, the second page of a chapter which claims the liberal media inflates the intelligence of Democratic politicians. One page turns out to be more than enough to catch Coulter in direct lies and much more.
It was blindingly obvious... that Stevenson was a boob - certainly clear to the American people who continually rejected him for President - only later was Stevenson discovered to be a lowbrow who rarely read books. When he died, only a single book was found on his nightstand: The Social Register.
Here we have several propaganda techniques. A sweeping statement - Stevenson was a boob - is 'proven' by one piece of marginally relevant evidence, what he read on the last night of his life. In her footnote, Coulter mentions that in the entire Nexis database, only she and George Will cite this factoid. Possibly because they're the only ones silly enough to think it means anything.
Also notice that the fact that Stevenson lost two elections 'proves' that everyone except the media noticed he wasn't as smart as he was claimed to be. Or maybe, just maybe, the 1952 and 1956 elections were not exclusively referenda on Adlai Stevenson's IQ. Could be people actually thought that Ike would be a good President, and figured four years later they had been right
Proof by inadequate evidence and proof by wholly irrelevant evidence. Two Coulter trademarks, and we haven't even gone past the first paragraph yet.
The second paragraph cites several instances of press reports describing Bill or Hillary Clinton as intelligent. Since Coulter cites these as evidence of media bias, presumably she thinks this is untrue. So I am curious on one point: Coulter and her allies generally assert that the Clintons were guilty of criminal acts in Whitewater, Waco, the Travel Office, campaign fundraising, futures trading, the Madison S & L failure, Paula Jones, technology transfer to China, selling pardons, obstructing probes of most of the above, and a lot more I didn't get around to mentioning. Okay, you're entitled to believe that. But if you can successfully commit all those crimes, get caught only getting a blow job after years of multiple aggressive investigations, and still find time to be the first President since Truman to balance the budget, don't you have to be a little smarter than the ignorant hillbilly Clinton haters like to portray? In fact, don't you pretty much have to be Professor Moriarty?
Other Democrats alleged to have been disadvantaged by their oversized intellects include... every other Democrat you've ever heard of.
Every Democrat? It seems you just can't pick up a paper without reading yet another story on the magisterial intellect of Ted Kennedy or Joe Biden. The sweeping generalization; another rhetorical trick and another Coulter trademark.
The next paragraph goes for some gratuitous personal nastiness, raising Kitty Dukakis's diet pill addiction on the theory that Mike Dukakis being allegedly unaware of it proves his stupidity.
Okay, we've had various propaganda tricks and miscellaneous personal attacks. But in four whole paragraphs not a single outright lie! Is something wrong?
Don't worry folks, we're getting there.
Walter Mondale cleverly informed the voters in the middle of a campaign that he was going to raise their taxes. He also deftly sent his media strategists out to explain that the guy who had just walloped him in a debate was a senile old weakling.
What do you call it when a politician speaks out for policies he actually believes in during a campaign, even if it is likely to be unpopular? Ann Coulter has the answer: she calls it stupid.
Some of my readers are doubtless too young to remember the 1984 campaign, but I can assure you: Ann Coulter is the only human being alive who thinks Reagan 'walloped' Mondale in the first debate. (Since the debates were held on Oct 7 and Oct 21, and the reference she cites for this is the San Diego Union Tribune for Oct 12, this has to refer to the first debate.) Every newspaper and every pundit agreed that Reagan was horrible in the first debate. Coulter will of course attribute that unanimous verdict to liberal bias - and never mind that most of those same biased liberals said Reagan won the second debate. It might be a little harder for Coulter to dismiss this assessment of the first debate:
I have to say I lost. I don't happen to have at my fingertips a copy of the Union Tribune for Oct 12, 1984, but Coulter does quote from it in the footnote: "Democrats are saying President Reagan's performance in the presidential debate may be a sign of increasing age..." This quote fails to support either the claim that Democrats said Reagan was senile (or a weakling), or the claim that Mondale instructed them to say so.
In fact, I remember that debate quite well, because the events struck me at the time. It was held on a Sunday. Everybody believed that Reagan, already known as the Great Communicator, would wipe the floor with Mondale. Instead, Reagan was dreadful. The news reports praised Mondale for an upset victory and said Reagan seemed 'confused' or 'uncertain', but when we talked about the debate in my office lunch room on Monday, both Democrats and Republicans said what the media had scrupulously not said: Reagan had sounded senile. On Tuesday, that celebrated far left agit-prop publication, The Wall Street Jounal printed an unsigned paragraph on the front page which, while giving no names, admitted that money managers on Wall Street were saying the same thing.
That opened the floodgates. On Wednesday, the media was openly speculating on whether Reagan was still mentally competent and in the next few days his lead shrank significantly. It went on until the second debate, when Reagan was directly asked about his health. Reagan deflected the question with a lame and obviously prepared joke and the Republican crowd in the room laughed loudly. Through the rest of the debate, Reagan was his usual self: confidently making assertions that were true mainly in his imagination and certain, correctly so, that he wouldn't be called on it. This was decreed by the punditocracy to close the senility question and it wasn't discussed in mainstream media for the remainder of the campaign.
In the debate, Mondale had no comment when asked to respond to Reagan's joke. Through the whole campaign, he stayed scrupulously away from raising the issue, never discussing it in public even for the week it was the dominant theme of media coverage of the race.
So we have our first lies: Reagan won the debate and Mondale orchestrated a campaign to say he was senile.
In the next and fortunately final paragraph of my reading assignment, Our Lady of the Smear Job turns to Jimmy Carter, who is also stupid because he "claimed to have been attacked by a killer rabbit during the 1980 campaign." You can find accounts of that incident here, or here, or here. All agree on some points: it was Jody Powell, a Carter aide, who made the story public. Carter discussed the incident only with his staff. And Carter never used the phrase "killer rabbit", which ran all through the stories that dominated the media for a month or so.
This sounds silly, mostly because it is. But there is a reason why Coulter raises and misuses the killer rabbit incident. Those who were around at the time remember that the story actually had a devastating political impact on Carter. The symbol of a President battling it out with a rabbit resonated with the real story that dominated the period, the hostages being held in Iran, and produced an image of a leader too weak to take on anything more dangerous than a bunny rabbit. To this day, conservatives who want to mock Carter are still pulling that killer rabbit out of their hats.
The example works strongly against Coulter's thesis: a significant factor in the election of her political hero was the 'liberal' media blowing up a ludicrous and trivial incident into major political damage to his opponent. By distorting the facts of this story, Coulter has slickly transformed a true tale that underemines her thesis into a fictionalized one that supports it. Thursday, July 11, 2002
Nice Try, Not Buying Robert Musil has posted a claim that the latest and perhaps finest Bushism (in Alterman's blog, which doesn't permalink items), is really a brilliant witticism. “The problem with the French,” Bush confided in Blair, “is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.”
Now that is clever, even brilliant, from the right angle, and if Mike Kinsley or P. J. O'Rourke had written it, I would certainly admire it as such. But in this case, as usual, the messenger is also the message. We're dealing here with a man who thinks it the height of witticism to call Vlad Putin "Pootie-Poot" or Queen Elizabeth "Queenie". At least he didn't ask her for an autographed copy of "We Are the Champions". This is a man who I am confident doesn't know the French for bon mot and didn't originate this line as a social commentary.
It should be noted that this is said to be a joke being told by Blair, so we don't know for certain that Bush actually said it.
Adventures With Blogger As of right now, the permalinks appear to be up. No guaranteeing how long that will last. Okay, I spoke way too soon. Somehow, the permalink on the Tax Freedom day post has gone kablooey - if you click on it, it directs you to the Bush business record post. But it's only two posts down from here.
In fact, the permalinks on everything posted since the Bush business records, including this post, are now pointing to it. Bizarroland. They do have unique numerical IDs, and the correct IDs show up in the URL space - but everything is pointing to the same post. I've never seen this particular problem on this or any blog before, and am open to suggestions. Maybe the index on the Blogger server is corrupted?
Permalinks on posts before the business record post seem to be working, but I'm not in a mood to promise anything right now.
Update: It isn't just this blog. Matthew Yglesias has the same bug, so there are probably lots of others.
Israel is starting to import foreign workers to take over jobs once held by Palestinians - a development that was predicted here several weeks ago. The first batch will come primarily from Thailand. Link from Mid-East Truth. In other Israel news, Mohammed Dahlan, best known as the most powerful military and political leader in the Gaza Strip, has been appointed as Arafat's new National Security Adviser. Isn't that just the dream job of all time? The PA is not a nation, it has no security, its President isn't a President and he doesn't take advice.
And while we're in the region, congratulations to Brazilian/Israeli blogger Renatinha on her aliyah. After sticking around just long enough to catch the World Cup victory parade, she should be arriving in Israel today.
Wednesday, July 10, 2002
Conservative blabbers in recent years have spent a lot of time talking about 'Tax Freedom Day', the theoretical day up until which you're wroking for the government and after which you get to keep your money. One reason why Tax Freedom Day is so late for individuals is that it comes so early for corporations. This article gives a good description of some of the breaks being given to hard-pressed small businesses like Ford, Microsoft, and GE. Although for these guys actually every day is Tax Freedom Day, it allows me to calculate what the day for 2002 would be, based on their 1999-2000 tax rates, and including only federal taxes. (In several cases, the day is actually in 2001, because credits left them paying a negative tax.)
Is Our Children Learning? The basis for the Cleveland voucher program recently upheld by the Supreme Court is the theory that vouchers will get kids out of failing schools into better ones. But a study of the program shows largely discouraging results. Many parents tried to use vouchers to take children from 'bad' city schools to 'good' suburban schools with higher test scores. But the suburban schools uniformly refused to accept voucher students, apparently because they didn't believe they could do any better with these students, and were at risk of being seen as 'bad' schools if voucher students hurt their test scores.
Due to a lack of funds, many parents who applied for vouchers didn't receive them. A comparison of test scores for those who did get to voucher schools, mostly parochial schools, and those who applied for vouchers but had to stay in their failing public schools shows no substantial test score improvements for the voucher students.
Monday, July 08, 2002
Bush Ethicists to the Rescue So let me see if I've got this straight:
This is the crack team which is now working on the problem of unethical business conduct. They certainly don't lack in expertise. Sunday, July 07, 2002
Global Nuisance The Nuisance has just recorded its 2,500th hit. To whoever came by from verizon.net and all the rest of you, my thanks. I do largely write this for my own enjoyment - I think you have to look at a blog that way to stay sane. But it's more rewarding writing for your own enjoyment when others find your work worthwhile. Since it took 32 days to go from 0 to 1,000 and only 22 more to get to 2,500, the overall trend in my readership is definitely up.
In addition, with a reader from Brazil stopping by yesterday, the Nuisance has now been accessed from 24 different countries in all 6 populated continents, although probably 90% of readers continue to come from the USA.
The Beltway Bozos Bob Somerby is back with another fine Daily Howler. In it, he quotes a Washington pundit (Charlie Cook, but it doesn't matter which one, they all say the same thing) talking about Gore's recent speech: Listening to former Vice President Al Gore’s graceless remarks over the weekend, when he effectively blamed his 2000 presidential campaign loss on “polls, tactics and all the rest,” one question kept coming back to me: “Does he really believe what he’s saying?”…[F]rom my vantage point it seems that Gore was the weakest link in the Gore/Lieberman campaign—not his pollsters, his strategists, his tacticians or his other consultants. Even if it were the campaign's fault, it is completely tasteless to blame others - but, in this case, it simply isn't credible for Gore to pass the buck.
What was Cook so upset about that Kaus, in quoting the same column (July 2), referred to him as "the normally mild-mannered campaign maven Charlie Cook "? Well, essentially Gore said that he ran a bad campaign. Which is what every pundit in the beltway has been saying non-stop for a year and a half. Except it was Al Gore, so most of them didn't want to settle for 'bad' and called it the worst in recent history.
In other words, Gore was agreeing with what the pundits said. So naturally, they all jumped up to blast him.
Beltway pundits are, like most unintelligent pack animals, consistent. Partying like it was 2000, the hack pack who couldn't attack Gore for what he did say, all attacked him for what he didn't actually say, but they decided he had said - that the problems of the campaign were the faults of his aides and not his own. Apparently they all believe Al Gore, who has been running his campaigns for 28 years now and been around them since he was a child, never noticed in all that time that the candidates make the final decisions and set the tone of a campaign.
Bob Novak noted that Gore "named no names", in other words criticized nobody but himself, and drew the same conclusion that he was criticizing everybody but himself. And just to show he was in campaign form, Novak managed to work in two explicit and one implicit references to Gore 're-inventing' himself and one to his wardrobe.
On Capital Gang, Margaret Carlson was even more incoherent. Aside from hitting her spin points, she seemed to have no idea what she was saying:
CARLSON: Absolutely. And Mark, you know, right before that second debate, and speaking of consultants, Rick Berke in the "New York Times" reported that the consultants showed Al Gore the parody on "Saturday Night Live" of himself, and as a result, he was like a figure out of Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in that second debate.
But Gore never knew who he was. Was he the alpha male in the earth tones? Was he the, you know, aggressive hard hitter? And if a guy can't run his own campaign and his own consultants and is blaming them a year and a half later, that's not very presidential.
And even though I don't think he had the best advice in the world, and he had way too much of it, be a man, don't blame them. Take the blame yourself.
And, by the way, if he had good advice right now, he wouldn't revisit 2000 even for a second.
She started out by - blaming Gore's consultants! She then proceeded to hit a string of old favorites: stiff "like a [wax] figure", "never knew who he was", "earth tones", "alpha male". She goes on to say that he was right in saying he got bad advice, but condemned him for blaming the advisers while studiously never mentioning he hadn't said that.
It always amuses me that these imbeciles just repeat the same pet phrases over and over - and it's Gore who gets trashed for being robotic.
HUNT: Mark, I've written a number of times over the last year and a half that Al Gore did, did -- before he considers running again, has to explain that jury (ph) performance in the 2000, why he was able, how he was able to snatch defeat during the greatest economy of our lifetime.
After hearing his explanation, I wish he'd go underground for a while now, I -- it was just terrible. It was not, it was, it was, it was also not accurate, it wasn't the consultants that were responsible for that dreary debate performance, it wasn't the consultants that were unable to distinguish between Clintonomics, which was loved by most Americans, and Clinton's character, which was despised by most Americans.
It was Al Gore that was unable to distinguish between the two, and so therefore just went into his own shell position on that.
Carlson has just said that Gore is foolish for talking about 2000. Hunt says Carlson is wrong and Gore has to talk about it, but manages to phrase it as a criticism of Gore rather than of Carlson. Gore's speech was closed to the press and neither Hunt nor other reporters heard it - but he still goes on to trash the explanation he has "heard" Gore make. It seems he has confirmed his opinions with so many fellow pundits by now that he is completely unaware that he is attacking not Gore's unheard speech but the voices in his head making up an imaginary Gore speech.
But if Hunt's content was peurile, at least you can't fault his eloquence: "I -- it was just terrible. It was not, it was, it was, it was also not accurate."
Damn, I wish I could turn a phrase like that.
Kausfiles on Friday actually noticed that Gore was being blamed for something he never said. He then goes on to criticize - Gore, of course.
Could this be one of those cases of instant pack misintepretation? I suppose so, although there were also things Gore could have said to prevent that intepretaion -- like "I had a great staff. I'm talking about my own mistakes here" -- that he apparently didn't say.
In other words, if somebody attacks you for saying something you never said, it must be your fault - you should have not said it more emphatically.
It's interesting that in this rehash of the old Gore themes, the "Gore is a liar" theme doesn't seem to be in play. Of course, that's the one that has to be backed up by some sort of facts, and if the pundits go back to it at this point, they run into the problem that in almost all of his 'lies' Gore told the truth and the reporters lied. So it's safer to go back to the 're-inventing' theme - absolutely anything Gore says or does without exception can be, and I guarantee will be, dismissed as him trying to re-invent himself yet again.
Saturday, July 06, 2002
Ooh, That's Gotta Hurt Slate has nailed Hesham Mohamed Hadayet for the 'Whopper of the Week'. That would really damage the guy's reputation if he wasn't, you know, a dead terrorist. Fall Into the GAAP First the pundits blamed corporate crime on Bill Clinton getting a blow job. And it was dumb. But for some people, it wasn't dumb enough. The honor rape atrocity in Pakistan is being condemned there as well as here. And the Pakistani Supreme Court is now involved in the case. Friday, July 05, 2002
Unqualified Responses Unqualified Offerings has mentioned my earlier post on 90s politics. I mostly agree with what he says, but would disagree a little with this: "Boo to the Dems for fostering a metacontext in which any program any government ever institutes gets treated as a critical need that only the heartless or myopic could possibly imagine cutting." I don't suggest that the Demos are at all above criticism, but I think the guilty party on this is mostly the electorate itself. Everybody approves of 'cutting government' and 'reducing waste' in the abstract; those promises poll well so are made repeatedly by Republicans and a growing number of Democrats. But when you go past vague talk of 'cutting government' and get to cutting actual lines in the budget, you discover that every one of those lines has some constituency supporting it. Ironically the largest items, the ones you would have to take on if you were serious about really reducing the scope of government, have the largest constituencies, and are for all practical purposes sacred cows.
An annual ritual lately in Washington has been the GOP making a stand to reduce or eliminate funding for PBS and/or the NEA. You can take reasonable positions on either side of this question, but what can't be reasonably supported is the narrative that Republicans have been quite successful in building up around this yearly event: that this is a serious debate about the size and extent of the federal government. This is a debate about $0.1 billion, in recent years even less, in a budget that is now running to $1,900 bn. It's a purely symbolic move by people who like to say they're against big government but don't want to take on the political risks of really meaning what they say.
The major places Repubs really have sought big cuts is in regulatory programs that they don't like to start out with, such as OSHA or EPA. This is mainly disguising an unpopular plank (weakened environmental protection) as a popular one (smaller government, reduced deficits). And even here the GOP isn't really prepared to stand by the logic of their position. The National Highway Traffic Safety Board (NHTSB) suffered several years of budgets that had increases below the cost of living or outright reductions in the 90s, along with some reductions in their ability to regulate or study the powerful automotive industry. When the Exploror/Goodrich scandal hit, legislators were unanimously shocked, shocked that it hadn't had the resources or clout to find out earlier what was going on. Nobody said, "Well, I've always stood for free markets and reduced government oversight. Naturally, that means that tragedies like this will be punished by damage to the companies responsible rather than by government action. The system is working just as it should."
Jim also put up an interesting post for the 4th about leftists and patriotism. The Nuisance is definitely on the left, proudly patriotic, emphatically pro-Israel, and more than slightly irritated when certain bloggers suggest that the first implies that you certainly aren't either of the last two, and are probably idiotarian to boot.
I do agree that there is a tendency to knee-jerk anti-Americanism in some sectors of the left. When the same people who denounced the US for not intervening during the slaughter in Rwanda turned around and denounced the intervention in Kosovo, I tried to find some consistent principle other than, "if the US is doing it, it must be wrong" and failed miserably. (Substitute Clinton for the US in that sentence and you'll see why some on the right did exactly the same.)
I think the left was right about Vietnam and is right today on missile defense and some other topics. I have reservations about the anti-globalization movement, although there are some compelling arguments to be made in its favor. But the left as a whole, particularly the hard left with which I once identified, has had more than its share in recent years of international positions that are not only wrong but very hard to explain or excuse by any normal standard of progressive values. For instance, much of the left used to support a unified Jewish-Arab secular democratic state in Israel/Palestine, back when that was the position of the PLO. This is a reasonable stance from a liberal, if not a practical, standpoint. But as secular nationalism has faded in the Arab world and Islamic fundamentalism has risen, the Palestinian movement increasingly embraces an open call for a state which has no place other than subservience even for Muslim women or Palestinian Christians, much less Jews. And some leftists have failed to turn away from either the increasingly reactionary objective or the utterly inhuman means used to promote it.
I don't think you can explain these positions without to some degree invoking anti-Americanism as well as a romantic attachment to non-Western cultures.
Jim has a shrewd insight in linking this attitude to varying views of the American past. Rightists tend to look to an idealized picture of our past and see that as a model. Leftists often overstate the very things in our past that rightists ignore, and look to models from the French Revolution and other more radical crises. They ignore that the more gradual mode of American liberal democracy has addressed problems like racial oppression, women's rights, and working class poverty far more effectually than Robespierre, Lenin, or Mao ever addressed equivalent issues in their societies.
In the US at least, the far left has become isolated and increasingly just irrelevant. This may explain why the Greens relish doing the one thing they can do that really effects the process and keeps them important - siphoning off enough Democratic votes to elect Republicans. The excitement of having an impact may outweigh the fact that the practical result of that impact is reactionary.
So what's a flag-waving leftist to do? Well. there's always bashing the right, which the Nuisance does with zeal and pleasure. I don't spend equivalent energy going after the American far left simply because at this time they don't matter very much, although I always enjoy a shot at Ralph Nader.
Beyond that, all I really can do is state what my positions are and try to show that they form a consistent outlook which embraces the traditional values of progressive thought that have somehow gotten lost in a significant portion of current left dogma. This blog, like other political blogs. is mostly a mechanism for generating and propagating memes, with the hope that the memes, if they are as sound as I believe them to be, will ultimately have at least some mild impact.
In stopping by Jim's place, don't miss this wonderful Frost poem. I know Frost mostly through the few standard pieces that are taught in every American High School English class and have never encountered this superb piece before. And Jim has put up a fine poem of his own right next to Frost's, which is certainly an act of great courage. The Rittenhouse Review has temporarily ceased posting due to a death in the editor's family. My condolences and best wishes go to Mr Capozzola and his family. Thursday, July 04, 2002
Clued vs Clueless Through History We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!!Wednesday, July 03, 2002
How is Andrew Sullivan Like Ari Fleischer? They both demand the very highest standards of truthfulness and integrity - from anybody who dares to criticize George Bush or the GOP. Their side, however, can say any lying bullshit it pleases. Sullivan is crowing loudly today about TAP's revised and lowered traffic estimates.
TAP, and every other site, uses software to determine their traffic levels. The software gives an 'exact' number of visits, hits, page views, and various other stats, but in fact that number has very little meaning. Most try to count unique visitors by counting unique IP addresses, but that is unreliable for a variety of reasons.
One problem is that firewalls, which the vast majority of users coming from an office or school will be behind, generally hide the originating IP address and only give you the domain. It's the equivalent of trading a full street address for the name of a city. If you have 10 readers with 10 different addresses, you have 10 distinct readers. But what if all 10 addresses are just 'Chicago'? It could be the same reader 10 times, 10 different readers, or anything in between.
I personally access the web through DSL using Win 98. It crashes regularly and has other problems, so I reboot almost every day and often twice a day. Each time I go back to the web I go back with a new IP address. (If your ISP doesn't do this, you have a major security problem.) Without using cookies, the sites I go to have no way to know I'm the same person at a new address. Many surfers don't accept cookies, and even their use, for various reasons too boring to detail here, by no means ensures accuracy.
These are two problems with counts; there are others. At this modest site with 50 - 125 readers a day, almost all of whom go to the home page and don't access any others, I use two traffic counters. They consistently have different numbers. For reasons I don't fully understand, when I first installed both the discrepancies were large; sometimes the high number was almost double the low. Now they tend to be smaller.
All of this just means that the numbers given by a traffic counter should be taken with considerable skepticism. The counters can be deceptive for those who don't understand web traffic because a number like TAP released today, 161,025 unique visitors in June, looks so exact. But it's really an estimate, and without taking a very detailed look at exactly how the numbers are arrived at, you can't even say whether the estimate is likely to be low or high.
TAP ran into another common problem: they simply had a buggy counter. The counter overcounted, essentially because of miscounted cookies. TAP published the number their counter gave them; when they were challenged they checked with the company that produced the counter and found out it had a bug. They then installed the upgraded counter and reported the corrected, lower figures the following month.
Now look how heavily Sullivan has spun those facts to try to substantiate the claim that TAP was lying:
HOW IS THE AMERICAN PROSPECT LIKE WORLDCOM? You've probably read lots of articles in the American Prospect, bemoaning big CEOs fiddling numbers, inflating profits, engaging in all sorts of creative accounting. Well, Bob Kuttner's online magazine should know. In the Columbia Journalism Review, they claimed 450,000 unique visitors a month. Amazing traffic. Eric Alterman, always alert to factual accuracy, pointed out that this showed the hegemony of the Left on the web. Well, after the equivalent of a blogger SEC investigation, they've finally released their amended report. Their actual unique visitors for June was 161,025 - a little over a third of their previous claim. In classic fashion, they don't admit their error; they don't apologize; they barely explain; they release the news the day before July 4. More spin. And I thought Chris Mooney was a straight-up kind of guy. These guys fibbed about something as basic as their web stats. And you're going to trust them on the economy?
Worldcom deliberately misreported billions of dollars in formal filings required of all public companies in order to hide a lack of profitability. TAP released numbers in good faith, which were inaccurate due to an error by their supplier, and which they were under no obligation to make public at all. Even Sully can't possibly be serious when he pretends to see these instances as parallel.
And this isn't even his worst spin on the topic. On June 17, Sullivan posted the following smear:
Finally, some candor from the American Prospect. The Kuttner claim that they had 500,000 subscribers to their magazine has been reduced to 50,000. This discrepancy has been blamed on a reporter for the Boston Business Journal....Score one for blogging pressure: without me and Mickey on their asses, do you think they would have ever conceded error? Remember that when I first raised the question, they accused me of being a "creationist" because I couldn't care less for empirical data. I'm too hardened to expect an apology, but if they haven't reported real new numbers within a week, I'll keep at 'em.
Sullivan's fellow conservative Instapundit had the integrity to point out that TAP's 'claim' of 500,000 subscribers was only a reporter's typo, made by the jounalist writing about TAP and not by the magazine. He even posted her e-mail to him to confirm it. But 'blogging pressure' has never forced Sullivan to retract or apologize in any way for this outright falsehood.
On the plus side, I am pleased to note that Andrew is finally spinning and distorting with working permalinks. So he's made some progress on the technical end. Now he just has to clean up his content.
Al Gore Invented the Trifecta The source of Bush's much-noted "trifecta" fabrication has now been traced down: "Barring an economic reversal, a national emergency, or a foreign crisis, we should balance the budget this year, next year, and every year." I suppose that the Supreme Court naming George Bush President probably does count as an economic reversal and/or national emergency, so I would say this promise has been kept.
Link from Lean Left.
Tuesday, July 02, 2002
A Nice Place to Visit, But You Wouldn't Want to Bet There The payouts on Las Vegas slot machines have recently been published. The most striking if unsurprising fact is that the string of recently-built, ultra-elaborate resort/casinos that are still paying off expensive construction costs are terrible places to play. The tightest slots in Vegas are at the Venetian, with almost exactly twice the house edge of the #1 casino, Palms. Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, and Rio hold the next three places at the bottom.
Why I discovered this intriguing if useful tidbit at BartCop is something of a mystery to me. Search Strings The Nuisance is proud to announce that we are the #3 Yahoo result on the entire WWW for the search string "the real life spiderman is a cia fbi agent". The next time you see a bunch of al Qeada terrorists conveniently bundled up in a web for the police to take in, remember you read it here first. Or actually third. However, the satisfaction of this accomplishment was reduced by discovering that Unqualified Offerings has beaten us out for the #2 position on this highly strategic search string.
Burning for revenge, we soon discovered that we are the #8 Google listing, and the only blog in the top 20, for "is al qaeda a gay cult?".
We also hit the #2 spot, 3 places ahead of NRO, for the Yahoo search "arab babies naked movie". Exactly what this searcher was looking for we aren't sure and strongly suspect we don't want to know. Josh Marshall has an amusing requiem on the career of Providence Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci, recently convicted of conspiracy to engage in racketeering. Although this wasn't his first felony conviction, as Marshall recounts, Cianci was a popular mayor and would probably have been comfortably re-elected. The USA Today article notes, "[Cianci] has presided over a renaissance in Providence that includes new parks, a $460 million shopping mall and more than $300 million in transportation improvements." Marshall says, "Cianci was just an incredibly good Mayor. Not just for the entertainment factor but equally in terms of rejuvenating the city."
Cianci is a clownish figure, as Marshall's recounting of his earlier adventures makes obvious, but he is an example of a phenomenon very common in the politics of the 90s. Numerous governors and big city mayors gained undeserved reputation as political genuises by riding the economic and social improvements that took place during the decade. Rudy Guiliani was perhaps the most conspicuous example, gaining a reputation as the man who saved New York due mainly to the sharp drop in violent crime during his administration. But almost every major US city had drops in the same period; several who didn't adapt Guiliani's celebrated "broken windows" policies actually had even more dramatic reductions than New York.
Providence and many other cities revived their downtown in the 90s. With jobs increasing, not enough new retail space in sprawl-conscious suburbs, and the cost of both office and retial spaces in the suburbs ever rising, it was pretty easy for big city governments to design new projects to revitalize downtown districts, and most were successful.
Governors such as Tom Ridge, Chris Whitman, and Tommy Thompson became known as a new kind of Republican, mostly because they implemented the popular part of the Republican agenda (tax cuts) while the Clinton boom meant they could ignore the down side (service cuts and/or budget deficits). During the height of the boom, a Governor could pretty much get sworn in, take a six month fishing vaction, and return to the capital just in time to take credit for the tax cuts that had just been enacted and the new jobs that would offset the revenue loss. George Bush was more hard line than the Republicans mentioned above, but even he was able to burnish his unimpressive moderate credentials by putting new money into education.
Most of these politicians were Republicans, and most were labelled as "moderates", guaranteeing a generally fawning press coverage. Quite a few, like Richard Riordan, came from successful careers in private industry, and an invariant mantra of theirs was that if elected they woud "run government like a business." Finding themselves more flush with money than any prior office holders due to the general economic good times, they spent the windfall buying their own popularity with new programs and lower taxes. Barely one of them did what a well-run business in the same circumstances would have and put money away for the inevitable slump. As a result, state and local governments all over the country are now facing the worst budget crises in decades, since nobody wants to undo those popular progams and the end of the boom means there are no longer tax funds to support them. Watch Blog Watch A number of blogs have been specialists in the blog ecosystem, devoted to examining the failings of some other blog or blogs. I noted here last month at some length the numerous failings of Media Whores Online Watch, one of the earlier examples of the species.
At about the same time I noticed, but didn't bother to comment on, the earliest efforts of InstaPunditWatch, a blog which "Fact checks Instapundit's ass, because he doesn't bother to." Those early entries were pretty weak - shrill and commenting on silly topics or picking fights for the purpose of picking fights. And the IPWatch didn't mention more substantial criticisms of Glenn's reliability, both on this site and elsewhere.
Having made a poor first impression, I was surprised to find IPWatch being mentioned positively on other left blogs I enjoy. But I checked it out, and in fact the blog has gotten over early jitters and is now much better. This post gives an interesting and accurate description of the backslapping that often passes for debate on Instapundit, and this one has a good description of Glenn's attacks on Stanley Hauerwas, a man whom I (and nearly everyone else) have never heard of, who overnight became on IP the embodiment of Everything Wrong With Liberalism. The actual fact checking promised is still a little weak, but some is done and done well.
I was going to say that the best I could say for WarBloggerWatch was that it was a little better than MWO Watch. But on reflection, maybe it isn't even worth that much praise. The top current post claims that Bush has an IQ of 88. The 'source' for this claim is this article which shows that the claim is only a repeat (an inaccurate one at that) of a long-discredited falsehood. It isn't the first time that WarBloggerWatch has been careless with facts. And when they try to be funny, they lose the effect by mocking writers who are, unfortunately, a lot funnier than WBWatch.
Two new entrants have raised the level of the genre. Scoobie Davis, who has actually been blogging on various topics for quite a while, has lately been devoting himself to the worthy task of fact-checking the most recent drivel from the photogenic but intellectually impaired Ann Coulter, and has put up several excellent posts. There isn't a whole lot up yet on the new SullyWatch blog, but what I've seen so far is promising. But Sullywatch will be hard pressed to top some recent delicious takedowns of Sullivan by the excellent Rittenhouse Review. Maybe Sullywatch can regain top spot in the Andrew-bashing competition by fact-checking Sullivan's recent boast that he still has a 32 inch waist.
Monday, July 01, 2002
The Law Is Silent Not only is this story hilarious, it appears to be true. Sure it sounds like something The Onion dreamed up, but that's the problem with being a satirist these days. You have to be on your toes or reality will scoop you. Tom Lehrer (or maybe Paul Krassner) said he gave up satire after Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize because he couldn't think up anything stranger than that.
A producer named Mike Batt has released an album which includes a 1 minute track of silence. Representatives of the late John Cage are now threatening to sue Mr Batt on the grounds that Mr Cage has already composed a silent piece and now holds the copyright on silence.
It is not yet clear whether Mr Cage's copyright extends to related media. Will radio stations have to pay fees every time they go off the air? Will the fees be extended to TV stations, or does the test pattern they broadcast with their silence make it an original work?
Is silence also intellectual property on the internet? If I have to pay the Cage estate every time Blogger crashes, I'm definitely getting a new hobby.
Sunday, June 30, 2002
Chicken vs Egg Damian Penny and several other bloggers have linked to this report on a new poll measuring anti-Semitic opinions in Europe. However Damian misses this little hint of propaganda slipped into the opening paragraph:"A new form of anti-Semitism has taken hold in Europe, fuelled by anti-Israeli sentiment, according to a survey which shows almost one in three Europeans now harbours some anti-Jewish feelings."
There's an implication there that rising anti-Semitism is caused by the situation in Israel. (And as everyone in Europe knows, that problem is entirely caused by the occupation, so anti-Semitism can safely be blamed on Zionism.) It's a suggestion supported by neither evidence nor argument. Since the poll in question shows substantial numbers of people have anti-Semitic beliefs such as "Jews have too much power in the business world" which predate Israel and have no association with it, it is at least equally plausible to argue from the data that anti-Semitism is the cause of European hostility to Israel.
Once More With Stupidity This doesn't even surprise me any longer: The Emmy nominations were sent out recently, and 'Once More With Feeling' - probably the best episode of series television ever made - didn't even make the nominating ballot. Thanks to the Spoons Experience for the story. He overrates it as a scandal, though, because none of the major show business awards has or deserves enough real prestige to worry about. Reason has an interesting article suggesting that the decline of Doonesbury from its height in the 70s reflects the decline of baby boomer liberalism. That's a lot of freight to put on one strip created by one man. But the biggest problem is that there is a basic Iron Law of comics that author Jesse Walker only briefly suggests: No comic strip stays in top form for over 10 years.
Cathy and Garfield both came along well after Doonesbury; both were once fresh, and have years ago sunk to tedious repitition of a few formulaic gags. Peanuts retained some charm and whimsy to the end of Charles Schulz's long life, but it was sweet, whimsical, and bland. If you look at the early strips, they were sweet, whimsical, and funny. Even Blondie, which has been comatose since before I was born, was a good strip when it gained its popularity in the Depression era.
The rule is so strong that many of the best and most popular cartoonists of recent years, Larson, Breathed, and Waterston, didn't even try to fight it. They ended strips when they were still on top and high quality. The choice must have been hard, since all walked away from enormous piles of money that they could have made drawing their strips on cruise control for decades to come.
Scott Adams doesn't seem to have any plans to quit and so far is far from slumping. Adams is smart and wildly funny, even if he has no real talent for drawing. It will be interesting to see if he can beat the odds.
Doonesbury isn't as good as it was 25 years ago, and certainly it's cultural cachet and political impact are drastically reduced. But by the standards of the comics page it has aged very well indeed, and is probably the best 30 year old strip in history. Blame it on Bill Nathan Newman has a good piece on the hypocrisy of Republicans blaming Clinton for the current crop of business scandals. Republicans spent the 90s loosening the rules for accounting and stock manipulation while Clinton tried, although pretty half-heartedly, to maintain some more protection for stock owners than the GOP wanted. The current tendency to blame Cliton for not stopping terrorism runs along the same lines. Republicans weren't attacking Clinton when he was in office for being too cautious in using force. They were doing the opposite, attacking his use of force. I was listening to right wing talk radio during the Kosovo campaign, and they ranted at great length about Clinton's 'aggression' against Yugoslavia, stopping just short of holding pledge drives to buy the Serbs anti-aircraft missiles. The charges that were made that Clinton 'wagged the dog' and used the military for his own political purposes had a strong effect in restricting his military options. It was very clear to Clinton that if he attempted a more extensive campaign which led to US casualties, he would be accused of killing American soldiers to keep his poll numbers high, and much of the media, which went along with so many other unsubstantiated and now discredited Clinton pseudo-scandals, was likely to go along with it. Today the same people who did all they could to tie Clinton's hands are attacking him for not being aggressive enough.
Pakistan may be an ally of convenience against al Qaeda, but before that it was the principal supporter of the Taliban. That ideology is reflected in its domestic policies. Unsurprisingly, women are little better than slaves there: Under Pakistan's draconian hudood laws -- which criminalize extramarital relations between men and women while dictating that a women's testimony carries no legal weight -- human rights groups estimate that half of the women who report rapes are charged with adultery and sentenced to prison terms...
In particular, human rights experts here and abroad charge, Musharraf's crucial support in the U.S. war on terrorism has caused Washington to turn a blind eye to the fact that life for women is little better here than in Afghanistan.
"Priorities have changed, and as long as America considers Pakistan a reliable ally in the fight against Taliban and al Qaeda remnants, violations of human rights can be virtually ignored," said Professor Khalid Mehmood of Islamabad's Institute for Regional Studies.
Saturday, June 29, 2002
Fun With HTML I went into blogger today and fiddled with my color scheme, to produce something a little less generic. You can use the new comments feature to tell me how successful or otherwise I was. Most bloggers seem to use YACCS; I decided to try the enetation system that is being plugged on the front page of blogger. It seems to be fine. It has one odd tendency in that it puts in a couple of line breaks before the comment prompt, and I couldn't find a way to turn that off. I wanted to have the comment prompt and the permalink on the same line, so I had to put the prompt at the beginning of the line. Friday, June 28, 2002
Glenn Reynolds points to this Krauthammer column on Israel and the Bush speech. Remarkably, Glenn doesn't point out that Krauthammer sounds a bit as if he's been reading Glennn Reynolds:
After a decade of ignoring the Palestinian Authority's corruption, its incitement to hatred, its militarization of Palestinian society, its glorification of violence, indeed, its creation in Palestine, as nowhere else on earth, of a deeply disturbed cult of death, the United States has declared that with this leadership there can be no peace.
Didn't Da Professor use a phrase that sounded a lot like that?
Hits for this site on Thursday reached an all-time high. Based on this fact, I can offer some advice to the blogger just starting out and hoping to be noticed. Forget the Middle East strategies and Supreme Court decisions - just talk about gastropod genitalia.
Hey, it worked for me. Your mileage may vary.
The Public Nuisance: your one-stop internet home for political analysis, cultural commentary, and invertebrate porn.
Banana[slug]Rama Slug-bashing blogger Meryl Yourish has attempted to slime the Nuisance with another vicious attack on the banana slug.
To answer Meryl's obvious rhetorical question, yes UCSC students do have better things to do than watch slugs having sex. After all, it's not as if we're living in New Jersey.
Biologists apparently don't, or maybe they make grad students do it. But that's their problem, and irrelevant to the current discussion.
Meryl reports that she routinely salts the slugs that she finds in her own yard. Since Meryl doesn't live within the range of Ariolimax dolichophallus, the Nuisance takes no position on her conduct towards other and vastly less charismatic varieties of slugs. Meryl's behavior in this regard I leave to her conscience and the local chapter of PETA.
I am prepared to entirely retract my question concerning what planet Meryl comes from. Since we are both Buffy fans, I should certainly have realized that the appropriate question is what dimension she comes from.
In dealing with slugs, however, one should always be cautious of those from another planet.
Meryl seems to believe that I devote excessive attention to the slug's sexual prowess. Hey, I know what my audience wants. Slugs devote most of their lives to eating, reproducing, and excreting. This is yet another fact that makes them highly appropriate mascots for many college students, although perhaps not UCSC students, since slugs don't seem to smoke marijuana or publish zines. Although banana slug dining habits are a fascinating topic, I thought the sex gave a clearer demonstration of why the banana slug is the finest of all possible mascots. And as for the excretion, even this blog, believe it or not, has some standards.
The Armed Liberal has another theory on the adoption of the slug. He is correct; even in the midst of an exciting game it's almost impossible to shout "Go Slugs!" without feeling silly. And UCSC to this day doesn't have a football team, although on a few occasions there have been attempts to start one.
Thursday, June 27, 2002
The Washington Post describes an attempt by the RNC to get double mileage out of its suit against McCain/Feingold. While trying to get the law overturned, it is also using the suit to force pro-Democratic political groups to reveal their internal planning. The Republican National Committee has issued subpoenas to a wide range of liberal and Democratic-leaning interest groups, demanding detailed financial records, internal communications and strategic political documents as part of its battle against the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.
Groups that received the subpoenas, which were issued last week, include the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, the National Education Association, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and EMILY's List....
James Dyke, RNC press secretary, defended the subpoenas, contending that "we are not asking them for anything broader than we have been asked. Organizations that believe in their causes and have nothing to hide should be proud to disclose their political donors because the core of any legitimate campaign reform should be the full disclosure of the financial activity of those involved in the political process."
Responding to Michelman's claim that the RNC was engaging in a political strip search, he said, "We have been al fresco for over a decade with monthly reports of our federal and non-federal receipts."
Dyke said the purpose of the RNC subpoenas was to prove that the new campaign finance law violates the equal protection laws of the Constitution by allowing special-interest groups to continue to raise and spend "soft money" -- large, federally unregulated contributions -- and conduct other activities that the national parties are prohibited from doing.
Shocking as it may be, the Republican spokesliar doesn't seem to be telling the entire truth. The RNC is required to file publicly extensive records on the sources of its The last paragraph, less than convincing, is the only claim attempted to find some vague relevance of the fishing expedition to the litigation issues. And if indeed the subpoenas were intended only to develop evidence that special interest groups carry out activities the law forbids parties, there's no reason for the subpoenas to be issued only to groups that support Democrats.
As for Mr Dyke's proud assertion of the GOP's long tradition of being "al fresco" in financial disclosure, the Nuisance's soi dissant usage experts, when asked for an ad hoc translation to au naturel English, responded en masse, "Que?"
Wednesday, June 26, 2002
Slug Fest (Warning: although the Nuisance is normally a PG blog, the following is rated R for definite adult content. I say this so that any adolescents reading this will know to go straight to this post and skip all the other stuff.)
Meryl Yourish has crossed the line. I don't mind that she disses my neologism, and I'm pleased to be listed among the Buffy bloggers. She can say what she likes about the contents of my blog.
But nobody puts down the banana slug and gets away with it.
The banana slug was adopted as an informal mascot within a few years of the opening of the UC Santa Cruz campus. The reason was obvious to anyone who knows the campus: they're a very frequent part of the local fauna. It could have been the more majestic redwoods which dominate the forests that much of the campus is set in, and which actually have a symbiotic ecological relationship with the humble slug. But after a group of students formed the Banana Slug Theater in the school's second year, the slug took off and soon became the school symbol.
In the '80s, a formal mascot was needed when the school joined the NCAA. Chancellor Sinsheimer passed over the banana slug for the sea lion, sparking a student revolt. In a campus referendum, the banana slug, for reasons I will show, took about 94% of the vote against the sea lion.
The scientific name for the banana slug species found on the UCSC campus is Ariolimax dolichophallus, which translates roughly as "slug which makes Milton Berle feel inadequate".
The hard facts are exposed here:
If you measure [penis length] as a percentage of body length things are a little different. Goose barnacles, with inch-and-a-half-long appendages, rate about 150%. Unbeatable, you think, until you learn that a rare species of Alpine banana slugs (Ariolimax dolichophallus) measure 6-inches long and possess 32.5-inch tumescences, or 542% times their body length. Incredible.
Actually, that could be an exaggeration. I have seen no other source which puts the slug's endowment at more then twice body length, which is still pretty impressive.
And Meryl asks why a male student would embrace this mascot? You have to wonder what planet she's from.
However, if it had relied only on the male vote, the banana slug would have at best eked out a close victory. By looking further into the realm of slug sexuality, we can see how the banana slug's appeal cuts across all groups, leading to the sweeping victory of the referendum.
Banana slugs are hermaphroditic, having both male and female organs, and a mating pair will generally use both sets at once. (The gay/lesbian/transgender vote.) Slugs don't form long term relationships, but they do take the phrase 'one night stand' literally, since their mating, often nocturnal, routinely lasts for 12 hours or more. (The women's vote.) As the mating progresses, especially with those slugs who have particularly earned the dolichophallus title, a problem often arises. As described by amateur slug biologist Alice Harper, "It appears the slug's retractor muscle isn't strong enough to pull out."
Nature is creative, and the slug has a solution for this difficulty. The slug whose partner fails to withdraw after a reasonable interval chews its penis off. (The feminist vote.) This process is referred to as apophallation. Just in case you want to start a conversation at your next dinner party.
The banana slugs hermaphroditism and sizable equipment leads to another possibility, gently noted here: "Although slugs are hermaphroditic, each animal equipped with both male and female reproductive organs, they mate with themselves only if no other slugs are around. " And what college student hasn't been there?
It isn't hard to see why there's such a market for banana slug fetishes.
With its cross-gender appeal to all student bodies, the banana slug naturally ran away with the election. Chancellor Sinsheimer surrendered, and we have been the few, the proud, the banana slugs ever since.
Seldom, But At Least Once Legal blogger the Blithering Idiot notes this sentence from Scalia's recent dissent in Atkins v. Virginia (execution of retarded defendants): "Seldom has an opinion of this Court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members."
Now in opposing this particular decision, there is a plausible argument to be made for that position. But is Scalia really the man who should be making it? I seem to recall that around December 2000, Scalia was himself part of the majority in a ruling that made such a mockery of the law, the Court openly stated that its own decision was too strange to be used as a precedent for any other case. I guess Scalia can live with Court decisions based "obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members" as long as they're his decisions and his views. Reading the Speech Daniel Pipes has a harsh assessment of Bush's speech. (Text here.) Steven Den Beste draws radically different conclusions.
I believe that Den Beste has the better side of this debate. Pipes alleges that Bush is rewarding terrorism:
He should have told the Palestinians clearly and unequivocally that their 21-month campaign of violence against Israel is unacceptable and must conclude before any discussion of rewards can be started. Instead, the President outlined his vision for a "provisional" Palestinian state and demanded an end to what he called "Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories." Both of these constitute very major benefits to the Palestinians; as such, they represent rewards for suicide bombings, sniper attacks, and the other forms of terrorism.
But what is the reward Pipes refers to? A Palestinian state isn't a new American position; it has been Bush's explicit position since last year. It was the logical outcome of the Oslo process until Arafat walked away from the table. It was part of the Clinton proposal for a final resolution.
The call for an end to new settlements is even more established. American governments going back to at least Bush I have been opposed to settlements.
So there is no reward for terrorism here because there are no new positions, Bush has merely restated established American positions. Indeed the call for a "provisional" state is arguably a major step back from previous American positions that called for a more conventionally sovereign nation.
Pipes charges Bush with moral falsehood:
- Moral equivalence: Bush implies a basic commonality between the plight of Israelis who suffer terrorism and the Palestinians who inflict it. "It is untenable for Israeli citizens to live in terror. It is untenable for Palestinians to live in squalor and occupation." To see the error of this statement, change it to "It is untenable for American citizens to live in terror. It is untenable for Afghans to live in squalor and occupation."
Again, what is objectionable in this statement? Both statements are correct. Bush has simply stated the truism that the conflict harms both peoples and a settlement would be in the interests of each. The moral equivalence Pipes objects to can be interpreted into this statement if you wish - but it is never actually stated by Bush.
In this paragraph and elsewhere, I think Bush - actually the writers since Bush isn't that smart - is playing a cunning game, making rhetorical gestures in the direction of audiences in both Europe and the Arab world. He echoes their concerns; he steals a Clinton trick and feels their pain. But he doesn't make any actual concessions and he never gets pulled away form the main point: There can be no progress until the terror ends.
Pipes even criticizes Bush for criticizing the treatment of Palestinians:
- Victimology: Palestinians have "been treated as pawns" says the U.S. President. Not so: Since 1967, the Palestinians have had an increasingly autonomous and powerful voice in running their own affairs. Especially since the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, they have been in control of their own destiny. To portray them as victims suggests they would behave differently once they have a formal state. In fact, every sign points to a continuation of the present policies.
This objection can only be explained with the assumption that Pipes is grasping at straws. The Palestinians have been treated as pawns for decades by Arab states that nurture and proclaim their grievances while treating actual Palestinians like garbage. Anybody familiar with the history of the conflict is aware of this.
Bush has made very clear the steps that must be taken for a Palestinian state to be formed:
Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born. I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror.
I call upon them to build a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty.
If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts.
If the Palestinian people meet these goals, they will be able to reach agreement with Israel and Egypt and Jordan on security and other arrangements for independence.
And when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbours, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state, whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East.
There has to be a new Palestinian leadership, not composed of terrorists, new political and legal institutions, an end to terrorism, and new security arrangements. Only when all this is in place will there be a Palestinian state.
The irony in this is that Bush in one sense is asking for no concessions at all. A new leadership, new political structures, a market economy, and the rule of law are all reforms that would benefit the Palestinian people. A substantial portion of the Palestinians themselves seem to be coming to this understanding. And it is certainly also true that without these things a Palestinian state would be an empty accomplishment bringing no real relief to its citizens, just as Palestinian government under the Oslo accords was.
And yet the current leadership, corruption, and violence are so entrenched in Palestinian society and politics at this point that it is hard to imagine these conditions being met. In fact, the unlikelihood that these conditions will be met in the near future is largely why a Palestinian state is undesirable at this time.
So I come back to Den Beste's position. Bush has offered the carrot. He would be delighted if the Palestinians actually accept it and move toward reform of their own society and a peaceful settlement with Israel. But his national security team knows that while this may be the rational path, Palestinians have been shying away from the rational path for 70 years and aren't likely to change now.
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. |
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