Musings Archive April 2003
Wednesday, April 30, 2003 ELITES TO BLUE-COLLAR WORKERS: GO AWAY! My friend, Ed Olver, has written several fine articles about free trade and the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs. Check this one out.
Posted by izzy @ 06:11 PM EST [Link]
~ IN DEFENSE OF HARVESTING HUMAN ORGANS: Well, not exactly. Joel Miller questions the conventional wisdom on the kidney market in RazorMouth.
Posted by antle @ 02:25 PM EST [Link]
~ DON'T STOP BEFORE BAGHDAD: Michael Leeden argues today that if the U.S. wants a free Iran and Syria, it's going to have to work hard for it. Not doing so, he writes, is akin to America halting its forces before it got to Baghdad during the first Gulf War.
Life is not often like that. If we want a free Iran and a free Syria — and we must, if we really want to win the war against terror — we will have to fight for it. Not militarily, in these cases, but certainly politically. Even as we prepared to invade Iraq, the Iranian and Syrian dictators increased their bloody repression, desperately trying to stave off their own day of reckoning. And, of course, the Iranians sent contradictory messages, alternately cursing us as agents of the devil, only to turn around and sing sweet songs of "better relations" even as they pursued a nuclear program that is on the verge of fulfillment (Revolutionary Guards officers were recently informed that a nuclear test is in the works later this summer).
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 01:43 PM EST [Link]
~ EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND, BUT JUDGE REINHOLD IS SO OVER. Robert Bluey of CNS news writes about the O'Keefes and those of us (ahem) who seem to have nothing better to do than critique a sitcom we've never seen. At the least, I want to know why homeschoolers didn't rate A-list actors to play them. Judge Reinhold isn't even a trendy anti-war protestor.
Posted by izzy @ 10:37 AM EST [Link]
~ AND NOW IT'S BAGHDAD BOB WITH THE WEATHER: More news on the former Iraqi information minister. WorldNet Daily is reporting that an Arab news outlet has offered him a job.
Posted by antle @ 09:13 AM EST [Link]
~ IN DEFENSE OF SWEATSHOPS: Well, not really. But Radley Balko does have an interesting take on them in Tech Central Station. Yeah, they're not ideal but moralists need to remember the consequences of taking away what could be the best of a series of bad options for the Third World poor.
Posted by antle @ 08:49 AM EST [Link]
~ A CANDIDATE WHO MAKES AS MUCH SENSE AS THE REST OF THE DEMOCRATS: Is this for real? Via FrontPage Magazine, an open letter to the South Democratic Party urging that Lyndon LaRouche be included in an upcoming presidential candidates' debate, claiming such signatories as former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders.
Posted by antle @ 08:33 AM EST [Link]
~ SHE HAS A NICE FIGURE: I was just looking over some of the preliminary figures for ESR's traffic in April and was surprised. I'd noticed over recent weeks that our Alexa rating, for whatever it's worth, has been moving up extraordinarily fast. Now I know why.
They aren't Yahoo! numbers (or Instapundit numbers for that matter) but ESR on pace (I use the past year's numbers plus this year's numbers to date in this conservative projection) to draw nearly 1 million unique visitors in 2003 and serve a little over 2 million pages. It's a low page to unique visitor ratio, something I'd like to change, but overall I'm reasonably happy. Since December alone, our traffic has risen 63 per cent with strong gains posted each month. Thanks all for continuing to visit this humble little collective effort.
Feel free to use our "Recommend this site to a friend" service on the front page (right side, halfway down).
Posted by steve @ 05:45 AM EST [Link]
~ MS. BUFFY SUMMERS AND HER APPALLING IGNORANCE OF THE LAW (AMONG OTHER THINGS): Our friend Jeremy Lott praises this blog for the creativity of our entry titles and directs his readers to us (if you're someone who works for The American Prospect, you have my condolences). For this, I give him many thanks. With that done, let me now move on to another, even more important topic which Mr. Lott mentions in that exact same blog entry: namely, the televisual creations of Joss Whedon.
Like Mr. Lott, I too caught last night's episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I count myself not as a fan, but more as a morbid cultural critic analyzing popular phenomenom. As such, I have absolutely no objections to applying rigorous, closed-minded logic while watching the show and drily noting some of the more improbable plot devices Mr. Whedon and his writers feel they must subject their viewers to. For example, as Mr. Lott notes, in last night's episode, our eponymous heroine Ms. Buffy Summers was summarily thrown out of house and home through the concerted efforts of a rather large group of various friends, well-wishers, confidantes, and hangers-on. This was, no doubt, a POIGNANT MOMENT for Ms. Summers who, after seven long years of being the moral and physical centre of her group, is now made to realize that perhaps the group has finally outgrown her. This is all very well and good, but as I remarked to my sister just as Sarah Michelle Geller was getting all teary-eyed on us: "Why the heck is she being forced to walk out of her house? After all, it's HER OWN HOUSE!" She inherited it from her dead mother. It's her property. I kept on waiting for Buffy to say something along the lines of this:
DAWN: "This is my house too."
BUFFY: "Yeah, maybe this is your house too, but only on some deep-down metaphorical, emotionally wishy-washy level. In the legal sense (which is only the sense that matters, Dawn, or don't they teach you law in high school anymore?), this is MY house. Whose name do you think is on the ownership papers anyway? So guys, if you don't want me as your leader anymore, that's fine. But don't you think that throwing me off my own property and onto the streets is going a bit too far here? If you guys want Faith as your new leader, then go right ahead. I'm sure that the motel room she's renting will comfortably fit all fifty of you. So (and I'm only going ask this once before I get all violent on you), will you ungrateful bunch of squatters get out of MY house and off MY property NOW!"
Alas, Buffy allowed the squatters to triumph over all sense of her own property rights (I think she would be more aware of them, if she hadn't dropped out of college).
Here's another nitpick for Mr. Lott to ponder over. I have no idea if he watches Angel or not, which immediately follows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I do. Mr. Whedon and his team have thought of various ways to creatively link the two shows together in order to create some neat moments. One character takes off from Sunnydale in the first hour and we see him or her arriving in Los Angeles in second hour. On one show, an inexplicable phone message is heard; on the other show, a person is seen making that very same phone call. Such a device however creates some improbabilities. As we can see, the episodes of the two shows are supposed to take place in more-or-less simultaneous time-frames. Now, if Mr. Lott had stuck around to watch the second hour, he would have realized that while Buffy and her group of friends had been going through their little emotional crisis, back in Los Angeles, the villain on Angel (the goddess Jasmine) had phoned up the Governor and using her fiendish hypnotic powers, had taken over the entire state of California. Back in Sunnydale, there was nary a peep about this mass transfer of the state government from the secular, incompetant hands of Mr. Gray Davis to the very competant and very evil hands of an other-worldly divine being. Nor do I recall much gnashing of teeth by Buffy and friends, when only a few weeks before, the largest city of their fair state had been plunged into perpetual darkness and demonic creatures had roamed the streets, massacring the population. No wonder Buffy was just deposed as leader of the gang: she's so self-absorbed in her own little emotional world, she doesn't even watch the news.
Now, if you've read up to this, you'll no doubt object that I'm being humourless and literal-minded. After all, these are shows about vampires, for god's sakes! But I am merely asserting my constitutional right to be as humourless and literal-minded as I please. I'm the type of person who worries over the realism of level design in computer games. I'm the type of person who asks questions such as: "if the genius-villain knew I was about to go in and steal this valuable object, why did he disperse his guards instead of grouping them all together in the immediate vicinity of that valuable object?" or "why does this headquarters building I've just stormed into have air shafts that go nowhere, only eight bunkbeds when I count over twenty guards, and no washrooms?" I rather believe such an approach to life has its uses, though personally, I don't think I'll watch too much television anymore for fear of being driven insane.
Posted by Barton @ 03:58 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, April 29, 2003 I SUPPOSE HE WAS ON VACATION IN IRAQ: A member of a terrorist group linked al-Qaida has reportedly been captured in Iraq by U.S. forces.
Posted by steve @ 11:58 PM EST [Link]
~ THIS IS GOOD NEWS...WELL, EXCEPT FOR IBRAHIM SAVED SOLIMAN IBRAHIM: Officials have stated that the Egyptian sailor who died recently did not succumb to anthrax. Nor, apparently, did a mysterious suitcase he picked up on his way to Canada contain anthrax.
Posted by steve @ 11:51 PM EST [Link]
~ CAN YOU SAY JUDGE BORK?: This is the best idea for breaking the judicial stalemate I've heard. Of the Democrats think President Bush's current slate of nominees is too conservative, how would they like recess appointments to their right? Randy Barnett says President Bush should give them the option of choosing that or allowing a vote on his nominees to go foorward in the Senate.
Posted by antle @ 11:05 PM EST [Link]
~
ARREST ME YOU INFIDEL DOGS OR YOUR STOMACHS WILL BROIL IN HELL: My day, which included a snappy new linen sport jacket and a decent haircut, has improved immeasurably. Iraq's former information minister Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf is alive!
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that al-Sahhaf is hiding out at his aunt's house in Baghdad trying to negotiate his arrest by U.S. forces. The Americans are refusing because he isn't in the deck of their "most wanted" playing cards.
Murad said Sahhaf was in Mosul before going to Baghdad and that some PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) partisans saw him in the northern city and that he even asked some of them to intervene on his behalf with US troops, but "we told him that we didn't want to be party to this matter", the paper added.
The Kurdish official told the paper that US troops regularly patrolled near Sahhaf's hideout on Palestine Street in the Iraqi capital and that he sent some of his relatives to inform them of his wish to surrender, but they turned him down.
It's said to be bad for you in Hollywood if you can't get arrested, but what happens if your a formerly high profile member of a dictator's cabinet and you can't get arrested? Nothing short of humilating.
Posted by steve @ 07:40 PM EST [Link]
~ DEAR KAREN DE COSTER, I Rock. You don't. Regards, Kyle Williams.
Refreshing your memories: Miss D.C. flamed Master Williams on her blog.
Posted by izzy @ 06:34 PM EST [Link]
~ IT'S KIND OF GOOD NEWS: A report by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts states that law enforcement in the U.S. sought fewer court orders in 2002 for wire taps.
Federal and state judges authorized all but one of the 1,359 wiretap applications submitted in 2002. The requests represented a 9 percent decrease from the 1,491 applications logged the previous year, according to the annual report by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
Federal wiretaps rose by 2 percent, to 497, while the number of applications filed by state officials dropped 14 percent to 861.
Fears that the Bush/Ashcroft White House would unleash a wave of Big Brother surveillance Americans have turned out to be groundless but the money stat is in the first sentence of that quote. "Federal and state judges authorized all but one of the 1,359 wiretap applications submitted in 2002."
It used to be that law enforcement would have to jump through hoops to get a wiretap approved...a 99.9 per cent approval rate doesn't mean that officers are being real careful about who they want to wiretap and how completely they fill out the forms, it means judges are generally just waving through the applications without thinking twice in most situations.
Of course, you could say that 1 359 wiretaps isn't exactly a mass campaign of spying on American citizens...well, if you forget about Echelon anyway. And we have yet to learn how many were approved in the so-called "spy court."
Posted by steve @ 04:00 PM EST [Link]
~ BUT I THOUGHT ALL THE AMERICANS WANTED WAS AN EMPIRE?: U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld has announced that the United States is pulling up stakes from Saudi Arabia. The U.S. will move air command centre from Saudi Arabia to the al-Udeid air base in neighbouring Qatar and close down its remaining operations at the Prince Sultan base by the end of this summer.
This is pretty big. Though both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia says the move isn't over differences between the two, it's hard to believe that Saudi Arabia's refusal to allow flights into Iraq during the recent war didn't play some role in America's decision.
It's going to have some effect on Saudi Arabia's rulers. Although their people see the Americans as occupiers, Saudi Arabia's royal family saw them as protectors against extremist elements and ultimately the people themselves.
Posted by steve @ 03:36 PM EST [Link]
~ IS IT REALLY A PARODY THOUGH?: The Weekly Standard has a funny parody of a November 11, 1781 copy of the New York Times, errr, sorry Ye Newe York Times, decrying the fact that three weeks after Yorktown, there still was no constitution. Make sure to read who's names are in the bylines.
Posted by steve @ 12:04 AM EST [Link]
Monday, April 28, 2003 HE SHOULD HAVE PUT IT IN THE MAIL, IT WOULD HAVE GOTTEN THERE EVENTUALLY: Brazilian police have announced that a crew member of an Egyptian merchant ship has died in northern Brazil, almost certainly from anthrax, after opening a suitcase suspected of containing the deadly bacteria.
Brazil's Castro said Ibrahim had been given the suitcase in Cairo by an unidentified person and was due to deliver it to somebody in Canada. But he doubted Ibrahim knew what the bag contained, otherwise he most likely would not have opened it.
"He opened it because he was curious," Castro said.
The RCMP says that there is no danger to Canadians and they're probably right. That "somebody" in Canada doubtlessly would have smuggled it across the border into the U.S. with little trouble and God knows what would have happened after that. The only reason it wasn't smuggled across is because one sailor got curious and paid the ultimate price for that curiosity. Yup, no reason for you Yanks to be concerned about cross-border security...
Posted by steve @ 11:52 PM EST [Link]
~ WILSON!: Sorry about the light blogging today. I reserve Monday and Tuesday for myself. ESR isn't my life after all. I read and wrote and decided to watch a DVD that came in the mail today. It's one of my favourites, Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks.
It's a movie that should have ended two minutes earlier than it did -- just before Bettina Peterson (Lari White) rolls up in her pick-up truck to tell Chuck Noland (Hanks) where the highways lead -- but other than that is truly a marvel. It influenced in ways I didn't know back when it came out in 2000. While I wasn't the frenetic clockwatcher that Noland was, I loved keeping busy. If I could do something faster, I used the extra time to do something else. In the end, my life was one giant to-do list.
I began to break that cycle a little over a year ago. I started cutting things out of my life that I didn't need to be doing and I started to spend more of that time on things that really matter. It's not like being on an island in the south Pacific, but it's nice that I smell the roses every now and then. There are more important things than working yourself to death.
At any rate, I bought the 2 disc collectors set so I'm looking forward to all the extras, including a featurette on Wilson and another on how to survive if you find yourself in Chuck Noland's predicament.
Chuck: We live and we die by the clock, that's all we have.
I'm glad he learned he was wrong....
Posted by steve @ 11:44 PM EST [Link]
~ WHAT EVERY CONSERVATIVE NEEDS NOW IS A GAY BEST FRIEND: I'm not going to bother commenting on the Santorum brouhaha (god knows how Andrew Sullivan has already beaten that particular controversy into the ground and then proceeded to beat the ground he buried the controversy in), but it's interesting to read this Elizabeth "Noblesse Oblige" Nickson column in the light of recent events. I originally read the thing on Friday and I absolutely loathed it. Now it's been posted onto the web in all its smarmy, condescending glory. It begins with this outlandish opening line, "I have a much greater sense of how difficult it is to come out as a gay man or woman since the United States won the war," and goes straight downhill from there. The title of the column is "Coming Out of the Conservative Closet," but from the message Nickson seems to be sending us (in as far as I can piece together anything coherent from Nickson's ramblings), the column could very well be called,
"I MIGHT BE A CONSERVATIVE, BUT I'M NOT A CRAZY HOMOPHOBIC FREAK."
Fine, whatever. But how are we to explain the clueless self-absorption of paragraphs like this:
In desperation for someone to talk to in the last days of the war, I went to the Fraser Institute's [ed. Canada's equivalent of a right-wing think tank] Annual General Meeting, walked into the hotel ballroom and my jaw actually dropped. Yes, really, dropped. So this is where they've been keeping all the incredibly handsome men in really beautiful suits, I mused. It was a little like a room in heaven that God had made especially for me.
Why do I get the feeling that Nickson has been watching too much Sex and the City? Then we get to read Nickson boasting about how tolerant and open-minded she is:
I wouldn't be your average conservative perhaps. For instance, I think gay men and women make a unique contribution, without which my life and yours would be a lot poorer and plainer....I am intensely curious about races other than mine, have several friends with mixed-race children, had a long affair with an Indian (dot not feather), and consider one of my best new friends a Cowichan tribe activist.
Elizabeth Nickson, COMPASSIONATE conservative! Friend to all creeds, races, and sexual preferences. The fact that you can easily substitute the phrase "gay men and women" in the sentence about unique contributions and replace it with any minority group you can think of (heck, even "white, heterosexual males" will do) and the sentence remains true, no matter what, only points to the intellectual paucity of Nickson's sentiments. It's meaningless feel-good bafflegab, worthy of any bureaucrat in our nation's "Multiculturalism" program. And must Nickson really air all those intimate details from her life in order to prove just what an incredibly nice and generous person Elizabeth Nickson really, really is? It's kind of like listening to someone crow about how much money she gives to charity each year. Personally, if I were Nickson's former East Indian lover or her "best new friend," the Cowichan tribe activist, I'd be a touch annoyed at the fact that my name was being used in a national newspaper for the sole purpose of promoting the greater glory of Elizabeth Nickson. Not "your average conservative" indeed!
In any case, coming out as Christian or conservative is terrifying, as is, I'm certain, coming out as gay. You will be discriminated against. The crimes of the past will be held against you. Your income, unless you stick close to your kin, will be threatened. People will frown when they look at you. People will hate you without knowing you, they will call you names if you say anything, they will send you coruscating hate mail, you will suck it up. This will make you crazy and you will understand extremism because you'll see it in your own soul, called up from the depths by the hatred in which you are held....My gay friend told me Monday that three of his friends told him they were fed up by the left, hated being portrayed as victims by the press, and were turning right. Perhaps they can teach us a little about courage.
And there you have it. Coming out of the closet politically is just as frightening as coming out of the closet sexually. Like homophobes everywhere, those damn rascally liberals will threaten your livelihood, say mean things about you, write you horrible letters, and generally make your life a living hell. For all I know, liberals probably go around beating right-wingers to death, just like homophobes did to Matthew Shepherd. Quite frankly, when something like 30 to 45% of voters out there would describe themselves as conservatives, when the political right has a majority in all branches of government in the United States, and when (pace Nickson) most liberals are manifestly not violent ignorant goons, Nickson's self-serving "poor little me" claims of victimhood are morally sickening. This is a woman, you must remember, who lives on British Columbia's Salt Spring Island (island motto: "Arts, crafts, and culture in a spectacular setting"), the closest equivalent Canada has to Martha's Vineyard. The fact that Nickson can draw a vacuous "Movie of the Week"-style lesson about how poor, suffering gays can teach their fellow poor, suffering conservatives "a little about courage" just shows how devoid of intellectual substance Nickson's moralizing puffery really is.
Now, I absolutely despise homophobia (as Elizabeth Nickson might phrase it, "some of my best friends are gay"), especially if it comes from our so-called "allies" on the religious right. I welcome any call for a reconciliation between conservatives and gays in general. I feel that it is the right thing to do both morally and politically. But Nickson's kind of smug, patronizing condescension with its refrain of "aren't we all victims of hatred here?" is the type of attitude which gives moral pomposity a bad name. Gays are not to be treated a kind of nice accessory to have along to be used to justify the right's sense of moral superiority nor are they to be invoked as fellow victims whenever the right feels the need to rehearse its long history of "suffering" at the hands of the "evil" left. Far better the honestly-expressed fear and loathing of a Rick Santorum or a Family Research Council than the treacly, self-aggrandizing "tolerance" of an Elizabeth Nickson.
Posted by Barton @ 06:34 PM EST [Link]
~ WWGD?: David Lewis Schaefer has an interesting piece up over at National Review Online responding to all of those campus posters that plaintively asked, "What Would Gandhi Do?". The U.S., the posters hinted, should emulate India's greatest man and seek the path of piece with Iraq.
The analogy, it should go without saying, overlooks major differences between the two cases. Whereas the 20th-century British were far too benign an imperial power to choose to slaughter peaceful resisters to their rule, there’s no evidence that Saddam Hussein, already responsible for the massacre and torture of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen (to say nothing of the many more who died in his aggressive wars against Iran and Kuwait) would likewise have succumbed to friendly persuasion — Jacques Chirac to the contrary notwithstanding. (It’s not that we didn’t try!)
I know it's popular to diss Ghandi these days but I always have some affection for unarmed people in the midst of a freedom campaign who stride up to figures of authority and dare them to respond.
Posted by steve @ 02:58 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, April 27, 2003 BUSH MAY HAVE TO BE A WRITE-IN: The Washington Post reports that the late Republican National Convention means that President Bush will be renominated after the deadlines for certifying presidential candidates has passed in several states. This means that Bush could end up being a write-in candidate in Alabama, California, West Virigina and the District of Columbia. Alabama and West Virginia are two states Bush carried last time. California is the biggest state in the nation with 54 electoral votes; a recent poll found Bush beating a generic Democrat there 45 percent to 40 percent.
This item raises just two questions:
1. Might vindictive Democrats, who control all three state legislatures and the D.C. city council, decide not to change their deadlines in order to keep the president's name from appearing on the ballot? In 2000, Bush could not have afforded to lose any of the states he carried.
2. Would really benefit the GOP to have its convention as close as possible to the second anniversary of September 11 if in the process it forces Bush to run as a write-in candidate in three states?
Posted by antle @ 09:17 PM EST [Link]
~ WMDs A RUSE?: Over at his blog TheAgitator.com, Radley Balko has been giving some play to this ABC News story.
Essentially, this report argues that the main reason the United States went to war against Iraq was not weapons of mass destruction but to send a message throughout the Middle East. WMDs were emphasized to gain public support and legal justification for the war. This sounds somewhat similar to the argument Josha Micah Marshall made against neoconservative warhawks in the Washington Monthly not that long ago.
Given the rationale behind my "squishiness" on the Iraq war, I obviously would not have found "message-sending" to be an adequate reason for going to war. I myself had wanted stronger evidence of a concrete threat from Saddam's regime. Balko, one of the more thoughtful Iraq doves, views this report as something approaching vindication of his position. But I don't think this report supports his contention that we were "lied into war."
This report does not state that the WMDs were a ruse. It merely states that they were not the sole war aim. If the Bush administration did in fact believe (a) that Iraq had WMDs and (b) that they were inclined to threaten us with them in some fashion, then the war was not waged on false premises. Anytime an administration argues for a policy that it supports for multiple reasons it is going to emphasize the reasons that it thinks will win the most public support. This is only dishonest if the justification used is fabricated; if it is just a question of emphasis, as this report suggests, then you may not like it, but it isn't the same as lying the country into war.
It is also the case that the Bush administration and the intellectuals who have supported it have always to some extent argued that regime change in Iraq would have positive benefits in itself. These benefits were said to include increasing the freedom of the Iraqi people and making Iraq an example that democracy can work in the Middle East. I am very skeptical of this argument, but it is certainly one that was made before and during the war.
Finally, nobody else to my knowledge has picked up this story and nobody has gone on record making these claims. So the report may not be accurate on its own terms.
I do think our credibility will be hurt if we don't ever find any WMDs. But I think declaring that rationale for the war to be a ruse based on flimsy evidence is premature.
Posted by antle @ 08:31 PM EST [Link]
~ BLACK AND REPUBLICAN: George Will has a terrific column on the rising number of leaders who happen to be black Republicans. From Colin Powell and Condolezza Rice to Michael Steele and Ken Blackwell, a new generation of black officials is not beholden to the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton Democrats. This is good for African-Americans, who have not been well-served by the Democratic stranglehold on their voters, and the GOP, which would benefit immensely from even a relatively modest increase their share of the black vote.
It might be premature to predict major inroads among black voters - after all, Ed Brooke's service in the Senate and Gary Franks and J.C. Watts' service in the House did not lead to any lasting increase in the black Republican vote - but this statewide corps of black elected officials does look promising. If Blackwell, a solid conservative, won 50 percent of the black vote running for reelection as Ohio's secretary of state in 2002, think of the potential for 2006 - when he would make an excellent candidate for governor.
Posted by antle @ 06:05 PM EST [Link]
~ I'D BE WORRIED: The Iran Press Service reports that the Iranian regime is real worried about their people expressing so much support for America.
Iranian officials are worried. Worried of the American presence next to their doors, on the East as well as to the West, worried of the invasion of Iraq "with so little popular resistance", worried of the fast fall of the Baghdad regime, worried of the sidelining of the UN, worried of the total disillusion of the Iranian people that, since the beginning of the Iraqi crisis, has resulted in a fierce pro-Americanism of the population... but, especially, worried of the vox populi, that asks for "a change of the regime with the help of the American marines", the daily "Le Monde" wrote.
Noah Feldman observes in his new book, After Jihad, that Arab/Muslim people's real animous towards the US is because of that country's support of autocratic leaders. The reason why Iranians are so in love with the U.S. is because the West won't deal with Iran's mullahs. The lesson? The U.S. should shift it's policies to only support democratic movements in Muslim nations. Feldman was yesterday named head of the constitutional team with the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) in Iraq. It will be the team's responsibility to oversee and advise on drafting the constitution for a democratic Iraq. After Jihad is a really good book...you'll see my review of it Sunday night midnight (EST).
Posted by steve @ 04:50 AM EST [Link]
~ BUT THE DOVES SAID THERE WAS NO LINK: "Documents discovered in the bombed out headquarters of Iraq's intelligence service provide evidence of a direct link between Saddam Hussein's regime and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, a newspaper reported Sunday."
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 04:39 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, April 26, 2003 IT'S HARD TO BE A FAMOUS LIBERAL: Marni Soupcoff has a marvelous column in The American Enterprise On-Line dissecting some self-absorbed drivel from Tina Brown.
What drivel? Nonsense such as this: “In Republican America you can speak out against the Government — you just have to be willing to risk a cancellation of your concert dates if you are the Dixie Chicks, or an anniversary screening of Bull Durham at the Baseball Hall of Fame if you are ‘dissenting scum’ like its stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. But you can’t smoke a cigarette with a roof over your head.”
This diatribe is what Charles Bloomer has described in these pages as misunderstanding free speech. Freedom is commensurate with responsiblity. The use of freedom, including the freedom of speech, entails responsibility for the consequences of one's actions. Celebrities are perfectly free to speak their minds about issues that concern them. The rest of us are equally free to decide whether we agree with their views and the manner in which they expressed them. We may also decide to vote with our feet and our pocketbooks by deciding whether we will continue to financially support these celebrities. That's the essence of a marketplace of ideas. (By the way, I think liberals should get most of the blame for the anti-smoking stuff.)
Fortunately, when it comes to the whining of wounded celebrity liberals, Soupcoff and Bloomer will have none of it.
Posted by antle @ 11:32 PM EST [Link]
~ I CAUGHT A FISH, AND YOU WON'T BELIEVE ME, THAT WAS THIS BIG!: It appeared a couple of days ago but I only saw it today but there was a funny little article in the New York Times about the mayor of Mount Sterling who wants to ban lying. Jo Hamlett is tired of hearing the whoppers told over a cold beer by hunters and fishers.
There was the guy who killed a dozen deer with a bow and arrow. A dozen!
Just last week, a couple of hunters trapped a mouse in their cabin so fat its tail weighed three pounds. A three-pound tail!
And then there was the boy who, after a bullet whizzed past his head in a field, traced its path through the fog back to the muzzle of the man who shot at him. "We better put him in the Special Forces," Bob Clayman said this morning, laughing over breakfast with his buddies at A.J.'s Bar & Grill.
Liars, all of them, according to Jo Hamlett, the mayor of this tiny Fox River town just north of the Missouri border, who fills many a day soaking up the stories spun around the long table here at A.J.'s. Tired of the extra-tall tales, and always on the lookout for cash to pave the town's roads, Mr. Hamlett has proposed an ordinance to ban lying here.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 04:25 PM EST [Link]
~ WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST: Here's a gem from the mail bag. A liberal reader responds to an article of mine, though I'm not really sure which one since he did not specify, with an anti-Bush diatribe that would make Michael Moore blush. Among the arguments in his arsenal was a snippet about Bush having "a condo, a dick and a colon" working for him. This is of course a reference to Condi Rice, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell.
This puerile stuff speaks volumes about the loopiest elements of the left.
Posted by antle @ 03:57 PM EST [Link]
~ DON'T GO AGAINST THE BOSS: "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demanded U.S. Army Secretary Tom White step down Friday, a senior Pentagon official said, a move that follows two years of contention between the two."
The move to push White out apparently was over the Crusader artillery system, a program that White supported. I can say quite honestly that everything I've read about the Crusader indicated that it was a piece of garbage. Nice going Rummy.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 05:54 AM EST [Link]
~ BY THE WAY: I apologize for the light posting lately. I have had a busy schedule and have been away for the better part of the last week. But I am chastened by Jeremy Lott's admonition that we shouldn't let Steve do all the work, and I will hopefully pick up the posting pace in the coming days.
Posted by antle @ 12:58 AM EST [Link]
~ MOSES COMES DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN: Via Toogood Reports, here's a story about Charlton Heston retiring as NRA president. He has done much to advance the case for gun rights and help his organization, showing courage and strength even after being afflicted with what is apparently Alzheimer's disease.
Heston deserves a great deal of thanks for what he has done for the cause of liberty.
Posted by antle @ 12:55 AM EST [Link]
~ FREE STATE PROJECT IN THE NEWS: Yahoo! and other news outlets have recently covered the Free State Project, about which I wrote an article in fall 2001. A sure sign that Jason Sorens and company are doing something right is the frenzied reaction from the political class. Generally speaking, if politicians don't like it, it is probably good for liberty.
Posted by antle @ 12:50 AM EST [Link]
Friday, April 25, 2003 THIS SHOULD GARNER SOME SIGNATURES: After the success of their last petition, The Federalist has launched its new petition, one calling for the U.S. to leave the U.N. Affix your e-John Hancock here.
Posted by steve @ 03:30 PM EST [Link]
~ Fragrance-Free Zone. Fellow Americans and Canadians, you will find this ridiculous example of political-correctness run amuck most amusing. This town of wimps is a stone's throw from where I live.
Sure to lift you out of your funk, Steve.
Posted by izzy @ 12:31 PM EST [Link]
~ NOT A DITZY CHICK. Melissa Parham, a Smith College student, paints an unflattering portrait of this exclusive school for the ladies. Er, womyn. Whatever. Read her column here. If Melissa didn't learn to write at Smith, where did she acquire this delicious ability to be so bombastic?
Posted by izzy @ 10:50 AM EST [Link]
~ TODAY, I'VE BEEN STRIPPED OF MY MANHOOD: I shouldn't be writing this post because I think Jeremy Lott is already concerned about me given a recent email exchange we had, but I've been going through some up and down cycles since losing my job a couple of weeks ago. Everytime I hand out resumes or sell an article I go up, every day nothing happens I go down.
A couple of minutes ago something happened. I recieved my first unemployment insurance check.
I have to admit I almost cried and not out of happiness. I've been working since I was 11 years old -- a paperboy job -- I worked graveyard shifts during university to help pay for my classes (it's fun to work until 5:00am and then go to class at 8:00am), I was in the army reserves, I've held desk jobs, construction jobs, outdoor jobs, indoor jobs...jobs all of them. I got paid for working. I was proud of that fact. Other people slacked off but I just kept working. To do anything less was dishonourable as a man. You work. That's our lot in life.
I applied for the unemployment insurance benefits a couple of weeks ago and the first direct deposted check went in early this morning. I have money that I didn't work for. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel at this moment. Relief, I suppose, because I can pay my bills for another week. But sadness too. I'm 31 and unemployed and receiving money for something I didn't do.
I won't be in a good mood when I wake up tomorrow. Why did I post this?
Posted by steve @ 02:31 AM EST [Link]
~ YES, BUT WOULD THEY VOTE FOR HIM?: A new poll shows that George W. Bush leads all others in the homeland of the Democrats, New York state. That includes Sen. Hillary Clinton.
Bush's approval rating among New Yorkers rose to 58 percent from 50 percent in February, before the war in Iraq, according to the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute poll released Thursday. About 91 percent of Republicans polled approved of Bush along with 38 percent of the Democrats.
Wouldn't that be a gas to see Dubya take New York in 2004?
Posted by steve @ 02:23 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, April 24, 2003 DIXIE CHICKS SHOW THEIR IQs AND THEN SOME: I'm not sure why this is necessary or what it is supposed to prove. Warning: Nothing too inappropriate is uncovered, but it may be more of the Dixie Chicks than some would like to see.
Posted by antle @ 07:17 PM EST [Link]
~ NICE PINCH LADS: CNN has just reported that Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's deputy prime minister, has been captured.
No details but apparently the old boy turned himself in.
Posted by steve @ 06:37 PM EST [Link]
~ LOCKE NOW AT TAC: Columnist Robert Locke, who I find to be an interesting read even when I disagree with him, has moved from FrontPage Magazine to The American Conservative. I had the opportunity to work with Locke in his capacity as associate editor of FrontPage during my couple of contributions to the webzines. I'm not sure when this happened, but I wish him luck and look forward to reading his new articles in TAC.
Posted by antle @ 05:56 PM EST [Link]
~ SPEAKING OF SARS...: Alright, everyone here in Toronto is a huffin' and a puffin' about the fact the World Health Organization, in all its transnational wisdom and glory, decided to put Toronto on its list of no-go SARS hotzones, ranking us with such sanitary wastelands as Beijing and Hong Kong. The travel warning came down yesterday. Today, I just heard that our fair city's Chief Medical Officer has declared the SARS outbreak "contained," which is not something you could say about Beijing and Hong Kong. The Canadian media has been none too subtle in its disgust at the WHO's slur against the place from where most of them are based. But then again, we should not be very surprised at this, given that the world media seems intent on portraying Toronto as "Plaguesville." The local news did a round-up of reaction on American news networks to the WHO's travel warning. May I please ask what idiot writer on Fox News International decided it was appropriate to describe Toronto as a "virtual ghost town?" Who am I going to believe: them or my lying eyes?
Posted by Barton @ 01:16 PM EST [Link]
~ GOOGLE MAKES EVERYTHING EASY: Bruce Rolston asks a question (the link does not seem to be working properly, so check out the "Update" to his entry entitled, "Gone, Gone, Gone, Been Gone So Long"), a little over a hour later, I answer it. The title's a take-off from "My Girl" by Chilliwack. Unfortunately, you won't be drawing any tourist dollars from me. I live in Toronto. Heck, I even work at the exact same place Rolston does (putting up little pieces of paper everywhere telling people possibly infected with SARS to stay far, far away from the university, when they've already made the journey there doesn't seem a very smart policy, does it?). And as for the promised pint, I'd preferred a rich, creamy stout myself to anything from Molson or Labatt (and no, not a Guinness, thank you very much).
Posted by Barton @ 12:38 PM EST [Link]
~
UNRULY RULES. A report about the state of public education from Public Agenda, a non-partisan think tank, reveals that students, especially the high school kind, could use a seminar or two from Miss Manners:
Where We Are Now reveals that more than 4 in 10 teachers say that in their schools, teachers spend more time trying to keep order in the classroom than actually teaching. High school students themselves are concerned about school violence - sizeable numbers report that serious fights happen somewhat regularly (40%) and that there is a serious problem with bullying (32%). Majorities also report that their schools have too much cursing (77%), too many people in the hallways (64%) and too many students who abuse drugs or alcohol (62%). Only about a third say students in their own high school treat each other with respect, and only about 1 in 5 say teachers are treated respectfully by students.
P.S. That's the famed Miss Manners in the photo.
Posted by izzy @ 11:13 AM EST [Link]
~ MAY HE BE FOUND ALIVE: U.S. investigators have found a clue which suggests Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, shot down during the first Gulf War over Iraq, may have been captured alive and held into the mid-1990s.
A team of U.S. specialists looking for Capt. Michael Scott Speicher found what appear to be the initials "M.S.S." scratched into a wall of a cell in the Hakmiyah prison in Baghdad, an official tells CNN.
If the initials are Speicher's, they would indicate he was alive in the mid 1990s, the official said, but investigators have still found nothing that indicates he is alive today.
The importance of the find, according to Pentagon officials, is that it appears to corroborate intelligence from an informer who told the United States Speicher had been held at the prison.
Posted by steve @ 12:48 AM EST [Link]
~ SELF-PROMO ALERT: The Christian Science Monitor has run a review I wrote (different from the one running in ESR this week) about All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad - Rewritten. In all modesty, I have to say that the one I wrote for the CSM was better though after they finished editting it many of my brilliant observations were removed. Oh well. Read it here.
Posted by steve @ 12:29 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, April 23, 2003 I'D CALL IT A THOUGHT CODE: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has filed a suit against Shippensburg University over the school's highly restrictive speech code.
The complaint cites what it alleges is unconstitutionally vague or overly broad language in the schools' racism and cultural diversity policy, which cautions among other things against "unconscious attitudes toward individuals which surface through the use of discriminatory semantics."
Given I was in university only a few years ago, I can just imagine the type of clods that came up with that line. "Unconscious attitudes"? Even thinking unpopular thoughts is verbotten?
Posted by steve @ 09:31 PM EST [Link]
~ TIME FOR SOME NUKE MAKING: Los Alamos National Laboratory yesterday announced that it has made its first plutonium pit, the little bit in a nuclear warhead that makes things go boom, in 14 years.
It's the opening trickle in what is scheduled to eventually become a torrent of new nuclear cores. For the next four years, Los Alamos will make about a half-dozen pits per year. After that, capacity will ramp up to 10 pits per year -- and then to as many as 500 new pits annually, as the new U.S. Modern Pit Facility comes online in 2018.
Not all are impressed, however. Read on.
Posted by steve @ 07:28 PM EST [Link]
~ LE DUH....: It would appear that some French are beginning to reconsider whether opposing the American led war against Iraq was a good idea. What changed them? The scenes of jubiliation after the Americans arrived in Baghdad.
''I still think it was right of [French President Jacques] Chirac to say no to the war,'' says the Paris secretary. ''But when I saw how happy the Iraqis were . . . I had to ask myself whether we didn't perhaps make a mistake.''
This sentiment reflects a growing uneasiness in France about Chirac's fierce opposition to the American-led campaign. Until a week ago, finding anyone here who disagreed with the government on the war was as likely as discovering oil in Paris.
But since the symbolic fall of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and scenes of cheering Iraqis, signs have emerged that the antiwar sentiment is softening.
''Chirac was wrong to say no to the war,'' says bartender Georges Chabat. ''The Iraqi people wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein.''
''Since they saw the rapid fall of Saddam's empire, the French are asking themselves if they hadn't perhaps been wrong in making themselves irrelevant to the course of history,'' says Dominique Moisi of the French Institute of International Relations.
Ma'am, France has been irrelevant to the course of history since the late 1800s. Now if only the French would see that.
Posted by steve @ 07:24 PM EST [Link]
~ DID THEY MISS THAT BIT ABOUT "AXIS OF EVIL": It would appear that Iran hasn't learned the ramifications of what happens when you are labelled a member of the Axis of Evil. You get bombed and your regime is overthrown.
The White House today warned Iran not to meddle in the affairs of Iraq after reports that Iranian agents are going to Iraq. Do they think they'd last longer than Iraq?
Posted by steve @ 03:58 PM EST [Link]
~ IRAQ'S PAST: Mark Steyn has a typically good column on the looting of Baghdad's cultural past.
The National Museum fell victim not to general looting but to a heist, if not an inside job, for which the general lawlessness provided cover. Am I sorry it happened? Yes, because it has given the naysayers, who were wrong about the millions of dead civilians, humanitarian catastrophe, environmental devastation, regional conflagration, etc., one solitary surviving itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny twig from their petrified forest with which to whack Rumsfeld and Co. The retrospective armchair generals are now complaining the generals didn't devote enough thought to saving armchairs from the early Calcholithic age. It isn't enough for America to kill hardly any civilians or even terribly many enemy combatants or bomb any buildings or unduly disrupt the water or electric supply, it also has to protect Iraq's heritage from Iraqis.
Posted by steve @ 03:55 PM EST [Link]
~ SHAKING DOWN A DICTATOR?: The Daily Telegraph reports that British Labour MP George Galloway -- whom you'll remember we talked about yesterday -- asked Saddam Hussein for more money to represent for the Iraqis but that the dictator refused, stating he couldn't afford it.
"The letter from Saddam's most senior aide was sent in response to Mr Galloway's reported demand for additional funds. This was outlined in a memorandum from the Iraqi intelligence chief disclosed yesterday in The Daily Telegraph."
Again, if this is true I can't see why treason charges won't be forthcoming. That and one hour alone with some Royal Marines just out of Basra...
Posted by steve @ 12:33 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, April 22, 2003 I HATE SCREWING UP: I failed to post Jackson Murphy's latest article on Monday...allow me to call notice to it right now. It's about the significance of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum. You can find it here.
Posted by steve @ 07:43 PM EST [Link]
~ TRAITOR?: By now you've doubtless heard that British Labour MP George Galloway may have received between 10 to 15 cents for each barrel of Iraqi oil under the Oil for Food program for allegedly promoting Saddam Hussein's line in Britain. Galloway has been a constant thorn in the side for Prime Minister Tony Blair, criticizing nearly aspect of British foreign policy for years.
In case you missed it, here at the documents British journalists found in Baghdad that allegedly prove Galloway taking money from the Iraqi government while here is Galloway's statement of denial and his vow to sue the Telegraph.
If you read his statement, you find a denial of Clintonian proportions. He doesn't outright deny he received about $800 000 a year, he says "To the best of my knowledge, I have never met an officer of the Iraqi intelligence."
If this is true, Galloway should be tried for treason. He accepted money from an enemy nation and defended it while British soldiers were dying in Basra. It doesn't get any more clear cut then that.
Posted by steve @ 05:37 PM EST [Link]
~ TEKNICKAL MALFUNKSHON: ESR may go up and down over the next bit as Interland, the host service who bought up HostPro -- our original hosting service, moves all of its servers into a central location. Just figured you'd want to know that we aren't gone for good if you can't access the wit and wisdom that makes up Enter Stage Right.
Posted by steve @ 04:37 PM EST [Link]
~ AL-QAIDA DEAD? NOT QUITE: U.S. intelligence agencies have confirmed that a number of terrorist plots, including some from our old friends al-Qaida, aimed at U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf have been busted up in recent weeks.
"There were a number of disruptions to terrorist efforts around the world over the last month or so," a U.S. intelligence official told UPI, adding that some of the efforts were by al-Qaida operatives.
"Rolled up is probably too precise a phrase," the official, who requested anonymity, went on, "If you think of it as someone snuffing out a burning fuse, that's not the case, but people who were planning bad things have ended up getting deported or arrested or detained."
Posted by steve @ 04:32 PM EST [Link]
~ YOU DON'T HAVE ALL DAY: Michael Leeden argues that the United States doesn't have a very big window of time in order to get Iraq's Shiite community on side. If they don't Iraq may well become an Islamist nation regardless...
We have a very narrow window in Iraq to win the support of the Shiite community, which constitutes a majority of the Iraqi people. If we do not manage that in the next month or two, the radical Iranian regime will almost certainly succeed in its ambitious and, thus far, brilliantly managed campaign to mobilize the Iraqi Shiites to discredit the Coalition victory, demand an immediate American withdrawal, and insist on “international” — that is, U.N. and European — supervision of the country. That would leave Iran with a free hand in Iraq, strengthen the regime in Tehran to our detriment, and give a second wind to the terror network. Our victory, as the old saying goes, would turn to ashes in our mouths.
Posted by steve @ 02:47 PM EST [Link]
~ JUST IN TIME FOR LENIN'S BIRTHDAY...I MEAN EARTH DAY: Mark Steyn reprints one of his columns from last year about Earth Day. He warns us, unless we humans change our ways, the Earth is only going to continue to be better off.
Ah, yes. The end of the world's nighness is endlessly deferred but the blame rests where it always has. With us -- with what the UN calls "the current 'markets first' approach." Klaus Toepfer, the UN Environment Program executive director, believes that "under the 'markets first' scenario the environment and humans did not fare well."
Really? The "markets first" approach was notable by its absence in, say, Eastern Europe, where government regulation of every single aspect of life resulted in environmental devastation beyond the wildest fantasies of the sinister Bush-Cheney-Enron axis of excess. Fortunately in Communist Romania there was very little clear-cut logging because Ceausescu had the tree. But in Iraq, the report points out, 30% of arable land has had to be abandoned because of bad irrigation practices. Those crazy speculators on the Baghdad Stock Exchange with their Thatcherite economics will kill you every time, eh?
But what's this? "In richer countries water and air pollution is down, species have been restored to the wild, and forests are increasing in size." So the environment's better in rich countries? Rich countries with ... market economies?
Posted by steve @ 02:20 AM EST [Link]
Monday, April 21, 2003 I THINK THE SENTENCE WAS FAIR: West Virginia's Supreme Court today threw out a prison sentence of at least 1 140 years for a man convicted of sexually assaulting a 7-year-old girl.
"The man, identified by the court only as 'David D.W.,' was convicted in 2000 of multiple counts of sexual assault and sexual abuse. Circuit Judge Charles McCarty set most of the prison terms to run consecutively, resulting in a sentence of 1,140 to 2,660 years."
152 counts related to sexually assaulting a child? 1 140 years sounds pretty generous considering what could happen to him.
Posted by steve @ 06:15 PM EST [Link]
~ HE WON'T LOSE HIS JOB THOUGH: A Canadian health worker may have put hundreds of people at risk at being infected with SARS after he refused to be voluntarily quarantined and became "obnoxious" and "threatening" when questioned.
"The man, whose name officials did not disclose, should not have attended a funeral or church services over the Easter weekend, Dr. Hanif Kassam, medical officer of health for the region of York, just north of Toronto, told a news conference."
This raises some interesting questions...one, will he lose his job as a health care worker for deliberately putting the public at risk? Of course not, the union will argue that he only care about health care while he's being paid to worry about it. Two, what quality of health care does this man provide when he's on the job? I'm sure the union will argue he did his job as well as anyone else does.
Posted by steve @ 06:00 PM EST [Link]
~ NOT AGAIN: After today I am placing a ban on reports on this blog about finds of "suspicious chemicals" in Iraq. Once again, American weapons experts -- thanks to an Iraq scientists -- have found ingredients and equipment that can be used to make a chemical weapon.
"The military officials, involved in the weapons hunt and based at Camp Doha in Kuwait, refused to name the scientist or identify the material which had been buried in the ground. Many chemical weapons ingredients have non-military purposes and officials cautioned that the findings, which are being analyzed, do not confirm the presence of chemical weapons at this particular site."
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 05:27 PM EST [Link]
~ HOW DOES THE KOOL-AID TASTE?: The New York Times had an interesting story yesterday about the newest cult they've discovered -- meanwhile the rest of us knew about them three years ago -- TiVo owners.
If your not familiar with the TiVo, or its sister product Replay, it's essentially a hopped up VCR with a hard drive. Instead of recording television onto a tape, you save it to a hard drive. You can time shift your television watching, pause live television, ask it to record every instance of a program throughout the season, skip through commercials...in order words, it's a marvel that changes the way you watch television.
And not for the better.
Now here's where the TiVo owners try and Jim Jones me. They argue that you can watch television more efficiently. A 30 minute sitcom? Try 22 minutes after you blast through the commercials. Want to make sure that you catch every new episode of your favourite program and then watch them when you want? Easy as pie. Fight the power and watch TV when you want!
All true. Except there's a word that keeps popping up everytime I write about TiVo. It's the word "television." Now I know I'm a print and online writer so you might think I have this highbrow bias against television. You're right, I do. Instead of watching television last week (outside of hockey coverage) I read four books. I wrote. I played with my niece. I cooked a meal. I kissed someone. I had random original thoughts pass through my head which I wrote down for future reference. I planned my immediate future.
These are things I wouldn't have done even if I had "efficiently" watched more television. Note what I said, "more television." It turns out that TiVo owners not only watch television efficiently, they watch more television. They save a penny and spend a dollar. Here's an interesting tidbit from the story:
But how successful a racket is it, considering that TiVo owners watch more TV, spend more money and give up more details of their private lives to companies than those without TiVo? It's not a question TiVo users are quick to posit themselves, but in the brief blips between reruns of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," at least some can spot the paradox.
Mr. Hawkins, the technology consultant, remains a TiVo evangelist, but his devotion is not entirely blind. "The freedom that Tivo allows you may be a bit more fleeting when you find yourself glued to the TV for 12 hours straight watching a `Saved by the Bell'-`Fresh Prince of Bel Air' marathon," he said.
I can appreciate why people are such fans of this device. It's the same reason why I fell in love with my PDA a couple of years ago. It does something that markedly changes the way you do things. I'm as much as a technofan as the rest -- I haven't missed an issue of Wired in years and I love drooling at stuff at Gizmodo -- but at some point you have to look at the technology and really ask yourself: Is it helping or hindering? If you love television you'll love the TiVo. If you love television you may be missing out on something else in life. Turn off the television and kiss the person you love. Now that's entertainment.
Posted by steve @ 03:53 PM EST [Link]
~ ALL OR NOTHING: Great post over at Peeve Farm about why no one asks the question "Why do they hate us?" anymore, bring Afghanistan into the modern world and other stuff.
Posted by steve @ 05:23 AM EST [Link]
Sunday, April 20, 2003 THE FIRST MUSLIM SECRETARY OF STATE?: New York Metro has a good story on Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria.
"Would he want the job? Before he can answer, Mort Zuckerman, who’s been having lunch with Ed Kosner, the editor of Zuckerman’s Daily News, heaves into view. Zuckerman praises the young man genuinely, then moves on. But a few feet away, at the top of the restaurant’s stairs, the real-estate developer and media dabbler stops to examine a blowup of the cover of Cosmopolitan, directing guests to an advertiser’s lunch in the Pool Room next door. Zuckerman considers the voluptuous model who seems to be staring at Zakaria with a smoldering look, then delivers his punch line: 'This guy’s so hot even the cover girl wants to meet him.'"
Actually, everyone says that about me...well, okay...they don't.
Posted by steve @ 11:02 PM EST [Link]
~ AS MUCH AS I HATE CARL EVERETT: But there has to be a line. Texas Rangers OF Carl Everett was hit by a fan's cell phone earlier tonight. My cell phone cost an ungodly amount of money, being the trendy idiot that I am, so whoever threw it must be fanatic.
"Luckily I was wearing a hat," Everett said. "If it wasn't for the hat, I'd be cut back there. That fan should be ashamed of himself."
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:45 AM EST [Link]
~ LIES LIES LIES: Since no one else is posting anything...a good blog entry by Steven Ben Deste about our lying European allies.
Posted by steve @ 03:24 AM EST [Link]
Friday, April 18, 2003 ED SPEAKS: (Heads up thanks to Steve Lendt) The most preeminent talking head has spoken. That's right, Ed the Sock says he's really angry at anti-war activists.
"Those of us who supported the war had said this all along, and shrill voices on the left told us we were inhumane and insensitive. Well, the Iraqi people have borne us out. Why don’t you hop on a plane to Baghdad and lecture them on how wrong they are? Maybe hold a concert and candle-lighting vigil in the city square and inform the dancing Iraqis that they’re miserable?
"If I sound uncharacteristically angry, it’s because I am. I don’t like being labeled as immoral, bloodthirsty and insensitive to the suffering of others because my opinion is different than yours on this war."
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:42 PM EST [Link]
~ SELF-PROMO ALERT: I have a piece in today's Vancouver Province about the case of "Nancy", an Iranian woman who will be deported back to her native land because the federal government believes she faces no danger back home. Nancy is a convert to Christianity, something punishable by death in Iran. In any case, she's already been mistreated before fleeing to Canada.
I juxtapose her case with that of holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, currently fighting to avoid deportation to Germany.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 04:02 PM EST [Link]
~ RESISTING POLITICAL CORRECTNESS can get you assaulted. Another report from the Rome of the Left. This time the star of the story isn't the American flag or a Marine. Nope. It's a pretty co-ed.
Posted by izzy @ 02:49 PM EST [Link]
~ TOO BAD, THEY COULD HAVE BROUGHT HIM TO LAS VEGAS: The Sun reports that Iraqi "Information Minister" Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf killed himself.
"Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who entertained millions with ridiculous claims of Iraqi victories, is said to have hanged himself as US troops stormed into Baghdad last week."
Pity...think of the money he could have made being an opening act for Paul Anka...
Posted by steve @ 04:49 AM EST [Link]
~ HOW CAN YOU NOT HATE THE LEFT?: Matt Welch takes on a lefty who decides to decry human rights abuses in Cuba by comparing that country to the United States.
What the hell? You can’t even condemn a wretched dictator without comparing him, inaccurately, to the non-dictator John Ashcroft? You can’t condemn Cuba’s illegal, arbitrarily enforced police-state laws without comparing them to the not-remotely-as-horrible PATRIOT Act? And why on earth would you be “sorry” that news of atrocities were emanating from Havana (which is run by a murderous totalitarian) as opposed to Guantanamo, which is run by the U.S. government? I’m sorry, the dictatorship is worse than the democracy I live in … huh?
My family came from a communist tyranny, one where my grandfather -- after he left for Canada -- could never visit the family he knew that wasn't slaughtered during WWII because he would have been put up against a wall for refusing to be a communist. I suspect Marc Cooper has never known that fear.
Posted by steve @ 04:43 AM EST [Link]
~ MICHAEL KELLY'S LAST COLUMN: Enough said. Read on. God rest your soul Michael.
I'll just say this....*$%^ing brilliant as always. I already miss him.
Posted by steve @ 04:25 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, April 17, 2003 ANATOMY OF THE IRAQ WAR: Victor Davis Hanson writes today that the quick victory in Iraq was simply because the U.S. was so capable, more so than that the Iraqi army just plain sucked.
"A fair historical assessment will soon emerge that attributes our victory not to Iraqi weaknesses per se. Rather it was the American ability on the ground and air in a matter of hours to decapitate the command-and-control apparatus of the Baathist regime that alone allowed bridges, oil wells, power plants, and harbors to be saved, and chemical weapons not to be used.
"There were a number of inherent — indeed deadly — risks in the operation. Much is made of having few troops on the ground. But a greater worry was the need to deploy from the rather narrow staging area in Kuwait, once access was denied in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Assembling 300,000-400,000 ground-combat troops in such a small area over such a long period of time in essence would have left half the available aggregate land forces of the United States vulnerable in a few thousand square acres to missile or chemical attacks. And such a Gulf War I-type mobilization — given the deep cuts of the 1990s — would have left the U.S. army scarcely able to have met a sudden attack from North Korea."
Posted by steve @ 12:12 PM EST [Link]
~ THAT WOULD EXPLAIN A FEW THINGS: A colonel in the Republican Guard says most of his men fled as Americans approached Baghdad.
"Demoralised soldiers from Iraq's Republican Guard thought Saddam Hussein was 'mad' and deserted en masse before the first American tanks rolled into Baghdad, according to a colonel in the supposedly elite force.
"Speaking in the shabby family quarters given to Republican Guard officers in Baghdad, Col A T Said explained how the units that Saddam relied on most never had any intention of fighting for his regime."
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 02:59 AM EST [Link]
~ WHY DUBA REALLY CANCELLED HIS TRIP TO CANADA: It's because we didn't support the U.S. on Iraq.
"And Paul Cellucci said Washington's coalition partners will be the first to be consulted on rebuilding a postwar Iraq. Bush was have visited Ottawa on May 5, but cancelled citing the pressures of dealing with the Iraq situation. Just a day after Prime Minister Jean Chretien confirmed the trip was off, Bush announced plans to host Australia's prime minister at his Texas ranch on May 2."
I don't blame him.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 02:52 AM EST [Link]
~ IS ADDICTION A DISEASE OR A CHOICE?: That's the question the newest John Stossel special on ABC aims to answer. If you've ever watched a Stossel special before, you know he's great. Here's some from the press release:
"Watching television, one might think the whole country is addicted to something: drugs, food, gambling - even sex or shopping. Stanton Peele, author of The Diseasing of America, says, "The United States has elevated addiction to a national icon. It's our symbol, it's our excuse." In his newest special "Help Me, I Can't Help Myself," ABC News Correspondent John Stossel reports on conflicting views about addiction and popular treatments and asks: is addiction really a choice? The ABC News special airs on MONDAY, APRIL 21, (8:00 - 9:00 p.m. ET) on the ABC Television Network.
Stossel interviews Sue Silverman, a self-professed sex addict. "It was such a compulsion that I felt I had to do it over and over and over again." She went to 10 therapists and not one told her to stop having sex, or that it was her fault. Silverman wrote a book about her experience titled Love Sick in which she says TV talk shows loved the idea of sex as an addiction."
Click on "More" to read the rest
[more]Posted by steve @ 02:48 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, April 16, 2003 AH, COME ON...IT'S FUNNY: Jesse Walker reports that Charleston Post and Courier fell for the "Heywood Jablome" gag. Don't know what it is? Read on.
It's childish but I have to admit I laughed outloud.
Posted by steve @ 07:29 PM EST [Link]
~ WHAT? NO ONE REPORTS THIS?: U.S. Marines worked three days to batter a building down in Baghdad this week, not to destroy it but to reach underground bunkers.
"The Marines found 123 prisoners, including five women, barely alive in an underground warren of cells and torture chambers."
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:56 PM EST [Link]
~ SPEAKING OF BEING SCARED: America's victory has spooked Russia, who saw Iraq's army as a clone of its own. As you may remember in this space, several retired Russian generals visited Iraq just before the war and predicted good things for Saddam Hussein.
They were obviously wrong. Very wrong. Given that the Russian military would likely fight in the same manner as the Iraqi military -- albeit somewhat better armed -- it's clear that these days the Russian army doesn't pose much of a threat to anyone moderately skilled at warfare.
"Like its Soviet prototype, Iraq's Army was huge but made up mainly of young, poorly trained conscripts. Its battle tactics called for broad frontal warfare, with massed armor and artillery, and a highly centralized command structure. But those forces were trounced in a few days by relatively small numbers of US and British forces, who punched holes in the Iraqi front using precision weapons and seized the country's power centers more rapidly than traditional military thinkers could have imagined.
"'The military paradigm has changed, and luckily we didn't have to learn that lesson firsthand,' says Yevgeny Pashentsev, author of a book on Russian military reform. 'The Americans have rewritten the textbook, and every country had better take note.'"
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 03:52 PM EST [Link]
~ THINGS HAVE CERTAINLY CHANGED: Daniel Pipes has an interesting little essay in the New York Post about how American victories in Afghanistan and Iraq have completely changed the face of warfare. It means uncomfortable realities for other people.
"In both the Afghanistan war of 2001 and the Iraq one now concluding, traditional features of warfare have been turned upside-down. But it's not just an American phenomenon; the same rewriting also applies in Israel's war against the Palestinians."
I wonder if a certain Asian country named North Korea also came to the same realization. That would explain why they're suddenly very eager to talk to the U.S. rather than rattle their sabre over their nuclear weapons program.
Posted by steve @ 03:43 PM EST [Link]
~ SO WHERE IS SALAM PAX?: (Via Instapundit) The entire blogosphere is wondering that. Salam Pax, in case you don't know, was the blog name de guerre of a chap named Raed who said he lived in Iraq. During the war, until late March, he blogged his observations of the final days of the Iraqi regime, the attacks on Baghdad and what the country was going through. Then he disappeared. Poof. Nothing had been heard from him since March 24.
A lot of people are worried and justifiably so. Raed could have been picked up by Saddam Hussein's intelligence service or police and simply disappeared.
But there was always some questions about him. Was he real? Was he a U.S. government propaganda project?
Musings favourite Steve Den Beste ponders the question about whether Raed is the same Raed who was arrested in New York last month for aiding Iraqi intelligence agents in the U.S. Paul Boutin responds and says that it's not likely they are the same person but nothing can be ruled out at this point.
Posted by steve @ 03:37 PM EST [Link]
~ THE HARD WORK OF BEING A DISSIDENT in the Rome of the Left.
Posted by izzy @ 02:34 PM EST [Link]
~ MORE ABOUT HOW CNN REPORTS THE NEWS: Former CNN reporter Peter Collins tells about his experiences in Iraq during the early 1990s in the Washington Times.
"... I was on the roof of the Ministry of Information, preparing for my first 'live shot' on CNN. A producer came up and handed me a sheet of paper with handwritten notes. 'Tom Johnson wants you to read this on camera,' he said. I glanced at the paper. It was an item-by-item summary of points made by Information Minister Latif Jassim in an interview that morning with [CNN President Tom Johnson] Mr. Johnson and [Eason Jordan] Mr. Jordan.
"The list was so long that there was no time during the live shot to provide context. I read the information minister's points verbatim. Moments later, I was downstairs in the newsroom on the first floor of the Information Ministry. Mr. Johnson approached, having seen my performance on a TV monitor. 'You were a bit flat there, Peter,' he said. Again, I was astonished. The president of CNN was telling me I seemed less-than-enthusiastic reading Saddam Hussein's propaganda."
The more stuff that comes out, the more CNN's already tarnished image takes a blow. And yet the network has yet to do a story on it...
Posted by steve @ 05:16 AM EST [Link]
~ COWARD IS THE WORD I'D USE: Scrappleface has a funny story about Abu Abbas, the terrorist captured in Iraq yesterday.
"Muhammad 'Abu' Abbas, who in 1985 took over an unarmed pleasure boat and ordered the shooting of a handcapped man in a wheelchair, said today he is thrilled with headlines calling him the 'mastermind' of the Achille Lauro hijacking."
Posted by steve @ 02:24 AM EST [Link]
~ LIGHTNING DOES STRIKE TWICE: Scene 2002: Kansas City Royals visit Chicago White Sox. During game, clod father and son attack Royals coach Tom Gamboa.
Scene 2003: Kansas City Royals visit Chicago White Sox. During game, clod fan attacks first base umpire.
"Laz Diaz was attacked by a fan who came out of the stands in an eerie reminder of what happened near the same spot last season at Comiskey Park."
Fortunately Diaz, a former member of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, wasn't hurt and took care of himself...or rather took care of the clod fan.
Something about Comiskey we need to know about? Read on.
Posted by steve @ 02:18 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, April 15, 2003 THIS IS GOOD NEWS: The buried labs U.S. troops found last week were not the mobile chemical and biological weapons labs one U.S. Army general suspected, according to the head of an expert team brought in to examine them.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:42 PM EST [Link]
~ SERIOUSLY, THERE ARE NO TERRORISTS IN IRAQ: U.S. military personnel in Iraq have arrested Abu Abbas, the Palestinian terrorist who masterminded the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean Sea.
"The hijacking of the ship led to the killing of disabled passenger Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jew. Klinghoffer was shot in his wheelchair and thrown overboard by Abbas' men."
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:38 PM EST [Link]
~ ASSASSIN HAS THE RIGHT TO TRY AGAIN: (Courtesy of Steve Lendt) Tolerance was the key in the sentencing of the first assassination in the Netherlands since WW2, but not likely the same kind of tolerance the assassin had for Pim Fortuyn's political statements on unrestricted and unregulated immigration. Don't worry, the presiding judge tells us, the environmental nutcase will get a chance to learn how to express his views more sanely. I wonder, how can a murderer carry out a crime "at close range and with deadly precision" and still be considered to have a small "chance of repetition?" Only a euro-judge can hold such fuzzy logic.
Read on.
Posted by steve @ 06:12 PM EST [Link]
~ LOVE SHA-A-ACK BABY!: Love and Casino War has a funny parody of the B-52s song "Love Shack" featuring Saddam's swinging bachelor pad that coalition forces discovered a few days ago.
"Everybody's fightin', everybody's lightin' baby
Folks linin' up outside to hit the hookah
Everybody's jammin', Iraqi body be slammin' baby
Funky Saddam's shack, funky Saddam's shack!"Hmmm, reminds me of a party I went to in high school...
Posted by steve @ 03:37 PM EST [Link]
~ WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON AT COLUMBIA?: First Nicholas De Genova and now Edward Said. Tomorrow, Columbia University will celebrate the 25th anniversary of Said's Orientalism. Said, of course, is a professor there and a leading shill for the Palestinians.
"Why would it do this?
"Because Said, although not himself a specialist on the Middle East, has laid down the rules on how the region is studied at his university (and on many other campuses too). His radical leftism, his apologetics for militant Islam, and his advocacy of Palestinian violence have become the norm. So paramount are his ideas at Columbia that an endowed chair has been named after him, virtually canonizing his views."
At this point I wonder if it worth sending my future children to university or college...
Posted by steve @ 03:31 PM EST [Link]
~ LUCKY I'M UNEMPLOYED AND DON'T PAY TAXES: (Via Colby Cosh) Because I'd be plenty angry right about now. The Correctional Service of Canada, which believes in sending cop killers to medium security prisons, has produced a cartoon for children who's fathers are in prison.
I knew the police officer I referenced above, Cst. Joe MacDonald, and I doubt that the two men who murdered him as he pleaded for his life were like Paul's father.
Posted by steve @ 03:26 PM EST [Link]
~ EASON JORDAN RESPONDS: Under fire for his recent editorial in the New York Times about what CNN didn't report during the Saddam Hussein years, CNN executive news chief Eason Jordan has written Media Log to defend himself.
"Some critics complain that the op-ed piece proves CNN withheld vital information from the public and kowtowed to the Saddam Hussein regime to maintain a CNN reporting presence in Iraq. That is nonsense. No news organization in the world had a more contentious relationship with the Iraqi regime than CNN. The Iraqi leadership was so displeased with CNN's Iraq reporting, CNN was expelled from Iraq six times -- five times in previous years and one more time on day three of this Iraq war. Those expulsions lasted as long as six months at a time. CNN's Baghdad bureau chief, Jane Arraf, was banned from the country in response to her reporting on an unprecedented public protest demanding to know what happened to Iraqis who vanished years earlier after being abducted by Iraqi secret police. Christiane Amanpour, Wolf Blitzer, Aaron Brown, Brent Sadler, Nic Robertson, Rym Brahimi, Sheila MacVicar, Ben Wedeman, and Richard Roth were among the other CNN correspondents and anchors banned from Iraq. If CNN were trying to kowtow and maintain its Baghdad presence at any cost, would CNN's reporting have produced a contentious relationship, expulsions, and bannings? No. CNN kept pushing for access in Iraq, while never compromising its journalistic standards in doing so. Withholding information that would get innocent people killed was the right thing to do, not a journalistic sin."
I can sympathize (and believe) Jordan's contention that releasing some information would have led to the imminent deaths of Iraqis. Journalists are sometimes faced with ethical issues that "civilians" never have to consider -- sometimes issues that involve life and death. It's one thing, let's say, to destroy a politician's career because you reported some malfeasance they committed and another thing to report a story that will led to someone's death. Things are rarely cut and dried at that philosophical level.
That said, the blogosphere has exploded about this admission by Jordan. Matt Layne declared all news bureaus in totalitarian nations as "
