Combustible Boy

2002-09-25T10:31:00.000-04:00

[temporary post removed -- Combustible Boy now posts at The Sound and Fury]

2002-08-23T08:43:00.000-04:00

Removal. Removal.

I have decided to join super-blogger Max Power as his superhero sidekick, part of a dynamic duo fighting idiotarianism at every turn as a contributor to Max's The Sound and Fury blog. The post that was here earlier this morn has been moved over there -- although I don't expect to abandon the Combustible Boy blog completely. I'm sure I'll figure out something to do with it!

2002-08-22T10:30:00.000-04:00

Flickers of glamour

It's the national-news section that gets all the hype, but the Washington Post's Style section is where the real talent is, including not only the longtime Combustible Boy heroes Gene Weingarten and Howie Kurtz but also brilliant up-and-comer Hank Stuever, who brings in the pop-culture-savvy ironic fatalism that makes young gay guys such a national treasure. In today's paper Hank's got a great piece on the neon-accented liquor stores of upper Georgia Avenue, which along the way captures several decades of the hometown D.C. known to the capital's locals-for-life but only glimpsed through rolled-up taxicab windows by the tourists and transients. (Maybe it's the protectiveness of the locals that keeps this hometown under wraps and gives the rest of the world that there's-no-there-there view of D.C. that I like to call Exswampism, after the tendency of outsiders to repeat the old canard that "Washington" was built on nothing but swampland.) Along the way, Hank bestows an appropriate moniker on the local takeout cuisine that had henceforth been nameless: "subchickenchineseseafood".

See also the paper's front page this morning for a cycling look through the photos that accompany Hank's story in the dead-tree edition.

2002-08-21T15:50:00.000-04:00

West Nile hitting home

I just found out that my mother, who lives in a suburb just east of Baltimore, has come down with a mild case of the West Nile fever. Turns out she got bit by a skeeter on the weekend when she was taking out the trash, and after a few days of low-grade fever and flu-esque symptoms she saw something on the news about how her neighborhood was about to be sprayed for mosquitoes, so she suggested to the doctor that maybe that was it. The blood tests say it is!

She should recover fine and thenceforth be immune, but she's going to be getting a lot of rest before that -- she's not supposed to go back to work until she's been fever-free for 24 hours.

Amazing how these things can hit home. I guess everyone out there should pay close attention to their symptoms, even if their area's not due to be sprayed, 'cause you never know whether you'll be the first person in your town to come down with the disease. Best help the epidemiologists track this thing as easily as they can.

2002-08-21T09:57:00.000-04:00

A slogan for an age

As the oft-quotable Montykins puts it, "I mean, we live in the twenty-first century; maybe it's unreasonable to expect people to maintain a point all the way through a bumper sticker."

2002-08-21T09:55:00.000-04:00

Feeling squishy in the middle

Politically centripetal types like myself should be crowing now that two of our least favorite members of Congress -- outspoken ideologue Bob Barr from the Dornanite Right, and outspoken ideologue Cynthia McKinney from the Rage Against The Machine Left -- have been shown the door by Georgia's primary voters. As most blogospherians know, McKinney's ouster was due in no small part to Georgia's open primary system, which enabled traditional Republican voters to cross party lines and cast votes in the Democratic primary. This will no doubt lead to a flurry of editorial predictions of an inevitable change to the state's primary election setup, and I expect that these will pan out about as well as the predictions of inevitable wide-ranging electoral reform following the 2000 presidential election (not to mention the predictions of inevitable adherence to centrism and bipartisanship on Dubya's part as a result of the statistical tie vote in that election)...

2002-08-20T21:45:00.000-04:00

Reuters: Not real leftists

Sure, everybody in the blogosphere gives Reuters a hard time because of that "terrorist vs. freedom fighter" thing, but any real leftist would know better than to start out an article thuswise:

Want to be more attractive? -- then make sure those around you are having a drink.

Scientists have found even modest amounts of alcohol will make the opposite sex appear better-looking.

Because, you know, this'll just encourage certain religious groups to start touting beer as the quick-and-easy cure for homosexuality.

p.s. Somebody ought to let Debbie know.

2002-08-20T10:09:00.000-04:00

Forget Robert Mueller, get Agent Mulder on the case

My knee-jerk prejudices about Guardian-quoting America-bashers were reasserting themselves yesterday when I stumbled upon another site maintained by such a person. The page includes a copy of that now-famous tourist photo of the sun between the Twin Towers, with the sun's rays appearing to form the horizontal bar of a cross. Most people who looked at the photo just noted that symbolism and moved on, but this guy has the real scoop -- there are chemtrails in the sky there!

For those who don't know: The "chemtrails" obsession appears to have gotten its start a few years ago when people started to worry that jet contrails were making them ill, but since then it's metastatized into a full-grown conspiracy theory involving shadowy organizations using airplanes -- KC-135 refueling tankers are sometimes cited -- to spray mysterious chemicals over populated areas. Although it's obvious to normal people that these are just plain old jet contrails, the paranoid have convinced themselves that real jet contrails are just ice crystals and water vapor that should evaporate quickly, while the contrails that remain hanging in the air long after the jet has passed are obviously chemtrails consisting of something more sinister. (Never mind that clouds consist of water vapor and ice crystals too, but clouds don't have much trouble hanging in the air for hours or days. Saner minds, however, are wondering whether persistent contrails might have some effect on climate, given their ability to generate additional cloud cover.)

Meanwhile, other chroniclers on the fringe are touting video and photographic evidence that UFOs were in the air over Manhattan on 9/11, as attested by these three pages -- the second of which seems to think that the two planes hit the Twin Towers something like 45 minutes apart. (Is that another of those things that the government doesn't want us to know?)

Next week: Shocking new evidence that Bigfoot was one of the passengers who fought back on Flight 93!

2002-08-19T12:10:00.000-04:00

Why do us hate we? again

Speaking of small-time alternative papers, one paper that apparently once existed here in the D.C. area was something called Eastern Times, which published commentary critical of the U.S. by one Enver Masud of a sort of Muslim evangelistic group called The Wisdom Fund. It appears the Wisdom Fund's public efforts have centered around presenting a kinder, gentler face of Islam in a flier and posters put up in public places, including one campaign on the Metro subway system here in D.C. a few years ago.

I certainly am not opposed to people proselytizing a gentle form of Islam, but Masud's activities seem to include some other public stands that'll leave a bad taste in the mouths of many in the blogosphere. A couple of years ago, The Wisdom Fund's Madrasah Book Division published a collection of Masud's commentaries under the title The War on Islam (now available in its entirety online in PDF form), which chronicled some of the notorious events of alleged U.S. perfidy that critics of U.S. foreign policy always point to. A glowing review from Mumia Abu-Jamal mentions claims about whether Libyan terrorists were really planning to assassinate Americans in the early 1990s, as well as stuff about the ineffectual attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998. There is also, of course, something about those Christian Falangist soldiers' attacks on refugees in Lebanon in 1982 that everybody likes to blame directly on Ariel Sharon.

Masud has been busy more recently as well, publishing early last year a commentary arguing that people just pay too darned much attention to Hitler's Holocaust (and not enough to what Western colonialism allegedly has to answer for). After Sept. 11, Masud wrote a rather hideous article that hints at an endorsement of Thierry Meyssan's conspiracy book alleging that there wasn't really a suicide-plane attack on the Pentagon -- this from Masud, who lives close to the Pentagon in Arlington -- while also joining in the hoary old Oil Libel outlook that tries to attribute every U.S. effort overseas to some kind of fossil-fuels-related motivation.

The War on Islam was published a good while before the 9/11 attacks, but some local bookstores have been taking advantage of the revived interest in such matters to tout Masud's book -- in fact, the reason I noticed Masud in the first place is that one such bookstore is the Barnes & Noble here in downtown Bethesda, a short walk from my apartment. The Barnes & Noble is scheduled to host a book reading by Masud on August 29. Would any fellow D.C.-area anti-idiotarians like to read through the book and put together a few questions to try to put to Masud at the Barnes & Noble reading? Drop me an e-mail if so.

2002-08-19T10:12:00.000-04:00

Errata, small press, community conspiracies, etc.

The weird thing about Lileks' decision to name-check my moniker for wackiness effect in today's Bleat is that I'm probably one of the few people he doesn't owe an e-mail to. Now, I've been a Bleat reader for years, having been a Lileks fan from afar since even before he started his Web site, and I used to e-mail him now and then under my real name (which shall remain unmentioned) back in the pre-9/11 days, when the amount of e-mail he received each day was merely staggering, and not fundamentally obscene like it probably is nowadays. But I don't think I've ever sent him mail under my Combustible Boy alias.

However, as a native of Baltimore (who now lives elsewhere in Maryland), I have to note that he was mistaken to imply that this idiotarian screed was published in a major daily newspaper. There's only one paper in Baltimore that anyone would call a major daily, and that's The Sun. I'm not sure exactly what the "Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel" is, but a quick glance around its Web site indicates that it's just a leftist alternative publication -- even though the news briefs are filed under "local news", the only local bits in there are what look like summarized press releases about some grocery store's expansion, two "permaculture" lectures and a new substance-abuse treatment facility, while the rest is about people and/or things that only leftists and/or conspiracy mavens care about, such as Julia Butterfly Hill and Gulf War Syndrome. And the links page touts such sinistral sites as Talk Left, BushWatch and IndyMedia.

Over on Steven Chapman's site, I speculated that maybe the Baltimore Chronicle and/or Sentinel was that cheaply printed newsletter-style thing that I used to see on the take-one-free rack at the convenience store when I was still living in Baltimore a few years ago. I recall at least noting that that publication seemed to have a lefty bent, which differs from the crypto-rightist orientation of suburban Baltimore shoppers like the Rooster, which started showing up on my mother's front lawn around 1990. The Rooster was mostly one of those ordinary community shoppers, with lots of articles featuring the names of local residents, pictures of smiling local shopkeepers, and haphazardly edited movie reviews. As the months went by, though, the Rooster got weirder and weirder, regularly running long front-page rants about bizarre Clintonian conspiracy theories; I recall that one time, the Rooster darkly hinted that Clinton's proposal for federally backed mandatory inoculation programs in schools was really a scheme on Clinton's part to pump kids full of mind-control drugs.

Too bad I don't get the same kind of high-weirdness-by-mail in the area where I live now; I kind of miss the Rooster and its trademark blend of cheerful community news and paranoid conspiracy ravings. Apparently, the Rooster now has something to do with another small paper called the Independent nowadays.

2002-08-15T08:54:00.000-04:00

Democracy != pro-Westernism

Steven Chapman is fretting again about some warbloggers' underlying assumption that once we go and regime-change Middle Eastern countries, we'll be able to foster democracies there that will reflect a generally pro-Western body politic:

In fact, I would say that Saudi Arabia's shortfall in cooperating with the US on the WOT is an indication of a leadership desperately trying to appear less pro-Western in an attempt to appease its own people. One of the curious things about this kind of activity is that autocratic governments which try to appease their own people (in order to stay in power) start to look remarkably similar to the kind of governments that said people would have voted for, if they could vote.

What Steven points up is a serious problem that I've had trouble dealing with, as he seem to have had as well, since there don't really seem to be any solutions we can offer as long as we don't really know what it's like on the ground among the ordinary civilians in those countries. I can't help but be of the knee-jerk opinion that liberal democracy is the best thing for all concerned, but of course it's also important -- if only in interest of self-defense -- for us in the West to be concerned about widespread anti-Western sentiment.

I suspect that part of what's going on is that the regime-changers tend to suspect that once the people in these autocratic states get open access to information, they will naturally see the greater justness that inheres in countries like ours. (To them, my saying that might make me seem far more pro-American than I really am; even though I am concerned about creeping flaws in my country and other Western nations, I believe that Western-style liberal democracy is a superior way of running a society compared to the ones in the sorts of countries we're thinking of.)

There is some evidence to back up the expectation that people will be pro-Western if they throw off their homegrown oppressors; we certainly saw post-Soviet people expressing their gratitude for the support they got from people in the West, and today the Iranian dissidents show some gratitude for our support as well. But I think it's too much of a leap from this evidence to the conclusion that the country will be sufficiently pro-Western if democracy does take hold. This is partly because I recognize the problems with the "if they just got to know us, they'd love us" thinking, but also partly because of widespread misapprehensions about what life is like in Third World countries as opposed to Western ones.

As an example of this wild gap in perceptions, take this bit of misinformation posted by some do-gooder to a Web site that is supposed to be for real people around the world to describe what their hometowns are like. It's full of the usual Westerner's perception of Kabul as a place under seige by callous and evil soldiers, with explosive ordnance everywhere, the ever-present danger of sudden death, populated by dreadfully poor people who have never been outside Kabul (never mind all the news stories indicating how much Afghans seem to get around to neighboring regions and other countries) and utterly lacking in cultural opportunities. After Andrea Harris pointed this out and the owner of the Web site popped up in her comments space to endorse the phony Kabul entry as a bit of humor based largely on reality, I reacted in the comments with a bit too much anger, though pointing out the care the U.S. has taken to avoid civilian casualties, and more importantly pointing to the article I linked in the entry below, about Kabul's most popular TV show being back on the air.

The reason I pointed to that article in particular is that it paints a vastly different picture of what life in Kabul is like -- they're lacking in some resources and have got problems, to be sure, but there's also entertainment, happy popular culture, traffic problems, noisy neighbors, and other bits of everyday life that you wouldn't pick up from the one-sided TV news reporting depicting all of Afghanistan as a wasteland of buildings reduced to rubble and people living under the bayonet point of the U.S. Army.

Of course, though I have my complaints about this ridiculously off-center TV news coverage, I also betray an underly assumption that people in Afghanistan and other such countries will be favorable to us in the West if they get a more accurate picture of what life in the West is like compared to life in their countries -- and this assumption is once again a reflection of the "if they got to know us they'd like us" fallacy. When even the generally pro-American bloggers have plenty to complain about regarding our country -- its diplomatic need to be friendly to regimes like Saudi Arabia's and Egypt's, its Homeland Security overreach and incompetence, its growing neglect for civil liberties in an effort to crack down on victimless crimes, the vast effect on it from the forces of political correctness -- you can be sure that the people living in the countries that we'd like to see become liberal democracies will be hesitant to embrace us with all those flaws. And other Western countries have the aforementioned problems too, in some cases somtimes seeming even more pernicious in Europe than here. So while I think the U.S. is among the best countries in the world for people to live in, I also can see plenty of warts that will be unpleasant news to people in putative Third World democracies.

And I'm barely touching on the perceived foreign-policy faults of the U.S. above, because I was looking for things that broadly apply to the U.S. and Europe, which both have drastic foreign-policy problems in my opinion, but they are very different foreign-policy problems. At any rate, though most of us in the West would agree that the benefits of liberal democracy far outweigh the flaws that have cropped up in our countries, the fact is that the news will always concentrate on the downsides, giving an off-kilter negative impression of what it's like to be in these countries -- just like the off-kilter negative impressions people in the West have about life in Kabul.

In the end, that's probably what upset me the most about the existence of that Kabul entry on the Wisdomsprings Web site, upsetting me so much that my responses were in danger of going off the rails a couple of times there. Basically, I think it would be broadly valuable for people to get a true impression of the real life in places that are different from where they live, with the nice things reported in addition to the bad sides, but the "Kabul" poster's little joke has already ruined that by once again allowing the news-media negative picture to win out.

And of course, even if accurate information does get out there, it's still not necessarily a solution to global tensions, as the fallaciousness of the "if they got to know us they'd like us" outlook illustrates. So once again we are caught in that bind, and I'm still no closer to discovering a solution.

2002-08-14T12:21:00.000-04:00

Teevee subtext

Aussie Tim Mate's blog pointed to an article in the Baltimore Sun about the Test Your Brain TV show, apparently Afghanistan's most popular long-running series, which has been back on the air for several months since the Taliban got the boot. It's something of a variety show, but the centerpiece is a quiz-show contest. Looking over the questions quoted by the Sun, I noticed something interesting:

Still, the quizzes are the heart of the show. "In what month did al-Qaida destroy the Buddha?" goes one question. "If a man flies to Japan and it takes 90 minutes to get there, why does it take a 1 1/2 hours to return?" goes another. In one segment, in English to encourage education, two teams are told: "A man walks out into the rain for a half-hour with no hat and no umbrella. He doesn't get a single hair on his head wet. How can this be?" Answer: The man is bald.

Do my eyes deceive me, or does that first question indicate that even the Afghans feel that it was al Qaeda, and not real Afghans, who destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas? Now there's a revelation worthy of comment...

2002-08-12T13:36:00.000-04:00

Making the case

I had a weird and unpleasant nightmare last night.

In the nightmare, I was sitting in a Burger King surrounded by members of America, the old soft-rock band who did that song "A Horse With No Name", and for some reason, all the members of the band were still fairly young, maybe fortyish. In the dream, I had discovered that back in their days of being big-time hitmakers, the band had accidentally included some symbolism in their songs that was indicative of neo-Nazi sentiment, and I felt the need to warn them of the unpleasant content of these portions of their songs. After I told them all the evidence, the band's bodyguard (who looked like Randall "Tex" Cobb) solemnly intoned that those allusions to neo-Nazi sentiment were in fact no accident. Suddenly, the members of America were holding me in a vise-like grip, yelling, "You're gonna get it now, Jew-boy!", while I screamed "Please don't kill me for being Jewish!" over and over while everyone else in the restaurant ignored me. (I didn't bother with the argument that I'm not even Jewish.)

Man, look at that: "America" is secretly filled with neo-Nazi sentiment, and just waiting for an opportunity to pounce on somebody for the crime of being a Jew, and none of the Burger King customers care in the least about it. And they say that dreams rarely whack you over the head with their symbolism. The interesting thing is, even though I've been pretty despondent about the way things are headed lately, in my waking hours I tend to see America as one of the few places that I don't expect to be given over entirely to anti-Jewish sentiment.

Actually, I've been going through pretty much the same resigned malaise lately as Steven Chapman has expressed, and though the stereotypes of British and Americans would lead you to expect that Steven, the Brit, is feeling dreadfully fatalistic about the whole thing while I, the American, am getting ever more gung-ho and idealistic, in fact he seems to be getting rhetorically revved up on his blog while I've been too depressed to even write anything on mine for the past few days. (It's a good thing it's worked out that way, too, since my blog is maybe one-sixteenth as popular as his.)

Part of the problem is that I don't even know where to begin making a warblogger-like case to people I know who would naturally gravitate toward chomskofiskian views if they aren't convinced otherwise. My own conviction that it's necessary to take a hard line against radical Islamism has grown over months and months of reading about the problem, and a lot of that reading was prompted by reading blogs. I was able to see the slow path of other leftish sorts like Matt Welch or Meryl Yourish toward the same kind of hard line, and able to watch the gradual pace at which Charles Johnson went from being an ordinary liberalish techblogger type to being an indefatigable chronicler of Middle Eastern perfidy.

Now, the convictions of the blogosphere are essentially set in stone, having been argued to death over the past eleven months, and I would hardly be able to point a friend toward a blog or two and say, "Here, these sites will give you more evidence than I could present in an hour or two of arguing." Glenn Reynolds simply links and makes pithy comments that often make sense only to those who have been following his blog for months, while a newcomer to Little Green Footballs might be forgiven for thinking it's a Web site set up by and for right-wing extremists trying to veil deep-seated anti-Arab racism with a few comments about women's rights and the immorality of tyrannical governments. (You and I know that's not true -- not true of Charles, at least -- but would someone who'd never seen LGF before be able to figure that out right away?) InstantMan hinted at this problem himself recently when, in regard to the latest "warblogger vs. techblogger" debate, he said that Dave Winer " came into this debate late, and he's not up to speed."

There are few people who are still trying to make the case all over again for the anti-Islamist hard line, with Den Beste and Chapman usually among them, but the blogosphere in general isn't going to do much to convince the bleeding-heart newcomer that supporting hardline action isn't the same thing as becoming a dreadful right-winger. I do see some sites today that are intended to make the case systematically, but they tend to be put together by people openly motivated by causes and ideologies that would make a sensible but leftish-leaning person reluctant to take them seriously. Someone who's not already inclined to support Israel probably wouldn't be persuaded by this site or similar ones, for example.

I've decided to go back through old blogs and other information sources I've saved in an effort to try to get together what you might call The Bleeding Heart's Guide to Combating Islamism -- a relatively small online tract or pamphlet of writings that would make the arguments in favor of fighting that ideology, but do so in language that is sensitive to the tendency of of liberal-leaning sorts to look at these things in terms of multiculturalism and postcolonialism. In order to get our message across to more people who aren't right-wingers or libertarians, we'd need to demonstrate why those two isms aren't the only way of looking at a conflict that inherently pits the First World against the Third. I'm not thinking of something that would challenge the hardcore antiwar folks the way Diane E. has been doing lately; rather, I'm looking for something aiming to persuade people who haven't taken strong stands one way or the other, who are open to persuasion on the matter, but who would otherwise be inclined toward what you might call stereotypical lefty views.

The essays that leftists like Christopher Hitchens and Polly Toynbee wrote last fall in support of the war in Afghanistan would be a useful start, as would Brian Linse's Lefty Directory and some of N.Z. Bear's writings, among others. If other bloggers have writings to contribute -- either items from blogs, or articles and essays from traditional media -- it would be welcome, as would some ideas about how to organize the Bleeding Heart's Guide.

2002-08-12T10:48:00.000-04:00

Get serious

Kudos to this editorial in which the WaPo expresses a concern that's been dogging me of late too:

THERE CONTINUES to be a mismatch between Bush administration rhetoric with regard to Afghanistan and Bush administration policy. The rhetoric evokes George Marshall and draws comparisons with the great American rebuilding of Europe after World War II. The policy is a lowest-common-denominator effort to buy short-term peace by cutting deals with warlords.

Many bloggers have called for a reconstruction of the Middle East not unlike the course the U.S. embarked upon in postwar Germany and Japan, and nowhere do we have a better opportunity for that than in Afghanistan. It is in the U.S.'s own interest to ensure that Afghanistan doesn't end up with "a puppet government with the probable lifespan of a mayfly," as Tom Tomorrow mockingly puts it.

No, we need a puppet government that lasts longer than that, long enough to build a clear transition to a self-ruling government that creates opportunity for the Afghan people. The potential dangers to us are twofold: we could end up creating another pre-Sept. 11 Afghanistan, full of opportunities for international terrorists only, or we could end up creating yet another state of people who live on the dole of international relief agencies, with two or three generations of people who have never known a self-sufficient lifestyle and might not even be clear on the concept. We could even be creating both of those things at the same time.

I have mentioned before that the Washington Post and other ostensibly liberal editorial pages have lately been making some of the same arguments you see from bloggers who fear the Bush Administration isn't pushing hard enough to make the fight against radical Islamist terrorism a successful one. Just how much more prompting do the Democrats need before they'll see this issue as an opportunity to put rhetorical pressure on the Administration?

2002-08-07T14:22:00.000-04:00

Jackpot plus!

Back when everyone was hysterical about the Y2K bug, one of the things people thought might happen was that ATMs might start spitting out money to all comers. Well, after 9/11, such a thing did happen when the ATM system at New York's Municipal Credit Union malfunctioned, and some 4,000 of the credit union's customers helped themselves to some extra cash, says the Daily News. Some of them took thousands of dollars for themselves, buying cars and other goodies, and are now incensed that the law is coming after them for it. Still, the credit union's officials weren't thinking so clearly themselves, as they had decided to leave the broken ATMs running rather than inconvenience the customers. Now they'll just have to inconvenience the customers with higher fees to make up for some of that $15 million the customers stole -- only half of which the credit union has recouped or made arrangements to recoup.

But the Municipal Credit Union customers' gains were couch-cushion change compared to the haul that erstwhile Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski was cheerfully supplied with by his former company in the form of no-interest loans, according to CNN/Money and the Wall Street Journal. Kozlowski -- who has pleaded innocent to charges that he evaded more than $1 million in state sales taxes for art purchases allegedly made with company funds -- got tens of millions of dollars from Tyco, including at least one loan that was forgiven and extra money that the company handed over for him to pay income taxes on the forgiven loan. Needless to say, Tyco didn't bother disturbing its shareholders with this information. Among the elements of the fulsome lifestyle paid for with these funds:

Tyco also forgave another $25 million in loans to Kozlowski in 1999, which he used to pay for antiques, art and other furnishings for his New York apartment, including a $6,000 gold-and-burgundy floral patterned shower curtain.

Six thousand U.S. all-American dollars for a shower curtain? Well, burgundy and gold -- he must be a Redskins fan.

2002-08-07T13:16:00.000-04:00

Accidental soundtrack of horror

An FBI informant wearing a wire happened to be meeting with a suspect at the Marriott World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11. CNN has a copy of the audio record thus produced:

"That was an explosion -- that was an explosion," says Stephen McArdle, a tax consultant who wore the wire for the FBI, just after the first plane hits. He is in a restaurant of the Marriott World Trade Center Hotel, part of the Trade Center complex, where he and the suspect are having breakfast.

The loud "explosion" McArdle hears is followed by some 28 seconds of roars and fire alarms. The Daily News said officials believe the sounds are of the flaming jet fuel from the plane coursing down through the tower to the lower floors.

The sound of sirens on police cars and fire engines then underscores the disaster occurring all around.

The 90-minute tape begins with McArdle and an FBI agent turning on the wire device to record the undercover operation. McArdle is then heard making his way through a concourse, buying a pack of cigarettes with a Rod Stewart song playing in the background, before he meets the assessor.

Glasses are heard clinking and McArdle has just asked for a glass of water when the muffled boom begins -- the sound of American Airlines Flight 11 hitting the first tower.

"Oh my God, oh my God," comes the voice. "Let's get out of here!"

As with the Naudet brothers' footage, serendipity once again played a part in creating a record of the horrifying moments when ordinary everyday life was suddenly sucked away from us. It's too bad that such records had to exist in the first place, but it's invaluable that we have them now.

2002-08-07T12:17:00.000-04:00

Same ol' same ol'

Palestinian columnist and Al Quds University professor Daoud Kuttab has done another of his WaPo Web chats and has little new to offer us, nor much in his arsenal to deflect pro-Israeli questions other than tenuous allegations of moral equivalence. Interestingly, he wants the U.S. Army to come in and keep the two sides apart "until we both get back to our senses and find a sane solution". Well, a sane solution I wouldn't mind, although the only semi-conciliatory Israeli action I can think of that I wouldn't oppose would be an end to state backing of the settlers. (Private settlement I don't mind, as long as the settlers accept that they will be part of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria if one gets created, rather than being Israeli outposts.)

Other than that, Kuttab puts forth more of the same old disinformation: Sharon started the intifada when he "provocatively entered the Al Aqsa Mosque"; if Israelis pull their troops out then all the Palestinians will keep the suicide bombers from attacking because they don't want to ruin their chances for a state; a tiny group of Jooooish lobbyists has undue influence over the U.S. government; "international law" requires a withdrawal from the "occupied territories"; and so on. Toward the end, the chat turns into a parsing contest over whether U.S. officials "condemned" the civilian casualties in the Shehadeh assasination or just "deplored" them. But Kuttab did also put forth some other half-baked notions that are likely to become standard for the terror apologists' talking points.

Palestinians are divided about their militants (Hamas and the Islamic Jihad) the Israelis are united about their militants (the Sharon government)

...and then there was this regarding the Jenin "massacre":

The war of words is very interesting. twenty Israelis killed during a suicide bombing call what happened the passover massacare but 57 Palestinians don't qualify.

Yes, because the suicide bomber was aiming to kill as many ordinary Israelis as possible, but those killed in Jenin were killed because the Israelis were targeting terrorists that posed a present threat to Israel. But you knew that, right, Daoud? Also, in response to a question about Saddam's payoffs to suicide bombers' families, Kuttab had this to say:

Sadam pays to the families of every palestinian who dies, the majority of them are killed by the Israelis,

Of course, no matter what the case is, Kuttab didn't bother to respond to the questioner's main point, that Iraq's big bucks could do a lot to address the malnutrition in the disputed territory if it weren't just being used to reward "martyrdom". But hey, that would require Kuttab to deviate from the script more than his ad-lib abilities probably allow.

2002-08-06T23:13:00.000-04:00

Rooting among new stems

Federally financed scientists are finding that they can keep investigating newly created stem-cell lines as long as they make sure they keep the private funding for such research separate from their government funding, and the administration has quietly gone along with this interpretation.

Good. Such vital research should never have been caught in the wheels of the anti-abortion bandwagon in the first place. But since it has, at least the research hasn't been shut down altogether.

2002-08-06T23:06:00.000-04:00

Shoring up the firewall

The U.S. has already given the thumbs-down to the International Criminal Court (a decision I've supported on this blog), and the UN Security Council also granted U.S. peacekeepers a year's exemption from prosecution before the ICC. Now, the State Department -- which for once seems to be doing something sensible -- is going around the world one country at a time, trying to get each country to agree to exempt U.S. peacekeeping troops from extradition, reports NYT.

Man, I wish it didn't have to come to this -- though I support the sovereignty of the U.S. and its Constitution above all else on principle, a sentimental side of me wishes we lived in a world that could set up such an international body and trust that it could indeed be used to go after war criminals without the constant threat of being abused by people with axes to grind. Unfortunately, Israel already learned the folly of that line of thinking -- and they're only the lesser Satan! If U.S. peacekeepers aren't exempted, the number of nuisance actions against the U.S. that would clutter the ICC's docket would be enough to make diehard tort reformers think that maybe the U.S. civil justice system isn't all that crowded and inefficient after all.

Anyway, State says it's lined up the support of Romania and (naturally) Israel already, and next plans to take its case to Italy's Berlusconi. I'd ask Italian anti-idiotarians to send Berlusconi their messages of support, but I can't find an e-mail link on his Web page. Anyone out there know how to contact him?

2002-08-06T22:48:00.000-04:00

DoJ to judge: drop dead

A front-page story in tomorrow's WaPo says the Justice Department isn't cooperating with a federal judge's order to turn over documents related to Yaser Hamdi, that essentially Saudi guy captured in Afghanistan who it turned out was born in the United States. U.S. District Judge Robert Doumar -- who earlier ruled Hamdi was entitled to counsel, but an appeals court ordered him to reconsider -- had requested that Justice provide him with documents supporting its classification of Hamdi as an "enemy combatant". The department told Doumar no way, saying among other things that the separation of powers allows the executive branch not to go along with the judiciary's request.

Still, as the "national security law expert" quoted in the article mentions, it's all but unheard of for the government to defy a federal court order like this. I'm not especially sympathetic to Hamdi in general, particularly inasmuch as his claim to U.S. citizenship seems like more or less a technicality, but at the same time I don't want to allow the establishment of legal precedent (official or otherwise) that would make it easy for any branch of the government to wave away a U.S. citizen's civil rights in the name of "homeland security" expedience. In other words, the government's treatment of Hamdi might not be way out of line, but we've still got to be careful and pay close attention to what we'll let them get away with.

What's more, this is the sort of situation that's got the old political junkie in me just drooling, too -- a nigh-unprecedented showdown between two branches of the federal government, generating legal records that will probably be closely studied by law and poli-sci students for decades hence. And for once, it's something that hits all of us in the gut right now, not something that can only be appreciated intellectually.

2002-08-06T22:10:00.000-04:00

Still mirroring

I just noticed that the wtc.planetmirror.com site, put online on Sept. 12 to mirror Web sites' content related to the 9/11 attacks, is still online and full of things I'd forgotten about. Looks like the Philly Inquirer was mistaken about what side of the South Tower was hit by the plane.

Also, could somebody at the site chmod a+r all the files in the misc-images directory? I wanna see 'em!

Update: I've seen a lot of pictures of the towers collapsing before, but I don't remember ever seeing this one before. Damn!

2002-08-05T21:16:00.000-04:00

Googlepainting

You've heard of googlebombing and googlewhacking and just plain googling, but boy do those Simpsons fans know how to abuse Google's query-term highlighting feature.

2002-08-05T16:46:00.000-04:00

Real American Zeroes!

That's the latest sobriquet airport security staff have earned, if this story in Melbourne's Age is anything to go by:

A British tourist told how over-zealous security staff at an American airport confiscated the two-inch-long plastic rifle from a GI Joe toy soldier she was taking home as a gift for her grandson.

Judy Powell, 55, bought the doll in Las Vegas as a gift for George, seven, and packed it in her hand luggage.

But when she passed the bag through an X-Ray machine at Los Angeles International Airport, security staff spotted the tiny replica Armalite rifle.

Powell, from Walton on the Hill, Surrey, told reporters: "I was simply stunned when I realised they were serious."

And well they should have been! Why, you could poke an eye out with that thing if you're not careful. In my day, we had real fake rifles to play with, ones that made little snapping sounds and everything.

So, I was expecting a sort of non-denial denial from the airport, but they didn't even acquit themselves that well:

A spokesman for Los Angeles International Airport said: "We have instructions to confiscate anything that looks like a weapon or a replica.

"If GI Joe was carrying a replica then it had to be taken from him."

Can this story possibly be true? I had my doubts, but then, this is LAX we're talking about -- the security staffers are probably learning brilliant sleuthing and discernment from the FBI's July 4 investigation.

2002-08-05T14:33:00.000-04:00

Per-sun-a non grata

At the end of a story in the Baltimore Sun about the competition between broadcast nets and cable news channels, the reporter makes this fascinating disclosure about sources:

A spokeswoman for MSNBC did not return calls by deadline, while Fox News Channel spokeswoman Irena Steffen declined to comment, noting her employer's blanket policy of refusing to have any dealings with The Sun.

Say what now? The Fox News Channel downright refuses to have anything to do with Maryland's biggest daily broadsheet? The article doesn't give further info, but Doug Hughes' DCRTV site -- essentially a blog (sans permalinks) about the radio and TV biz in the D.C. and Baltimore areas -- speculated in a Friday post that this has something to do with the exposé late last year by the same Sun reporter regarding Geraldo's apparent misreporting of a friendly-fire incident in Afghanistan.

Is Fox News really that low? I tried to put the question to Howie Kurtz in his forum today at the WaPo site, but unfortunately my question didn't make it into the chat. (The chat did, however, feature another one of those incessant "aren't there any smart liberal bloggers?" questions...)

2002-08-05T12:24:00.000-04:00

Auth-ternate universe

Gotta wonder what planet Auth's been living on if this editorial cartoon is supposed to make any sense to us. Yes, there was some remorse in Israel over the civilian deaths in the assassination of Shehadeh and other operations in the disputed territories, but how come the apologetic speech balloon also has a pointer toward the gunman in the kaffiyah? Since when have the Palestinian militants apologized for civilian deaths, or even thought to categorize them as "collateral" rather than the true aim of the bombings of civilian buses, restaurants, cafeterias, etc.?

Then again, Auth's been off a lot lately, as evidenced by this October 2001-esque cartoon that's actually from July 28. Must be the heatwave in Philly.

2002-08-05T09:04:00.000-04:00

In search of...

Last night, somebody got to this blog via a Google Search for:

How easy it is to quote. I think one could get an available line for a column of advertisements if one were put to it.

I dunno about the second sentence, but I guess this blog entry has already proven the truth of the first sentence. Then, this morning, somebody made it to this blog via a Google search for:

"Bruce Hill" sex

...which I guess disproves the conventional wisdom that only lefty men can be sex symbols and you can't get any lovin' if you turn to the right. Either way, this made a nice respite from the constant flood of NAMBLA members whose Google searches can be counted on to turn up a blog with the word "Boy" in its title. Sometimes I wonder why the cops don't smoke out these types by setting up their own blog, giving it a title featuring "boy", and then slapping on an eXTReMe Tracking counter like mine to get a look at the IP addresses of people using the sort of searchengine queries you see in my referrers.

2002-08-02T13:18:00.000-04:00

Firebreathing

I just discovered that the thermonuclear hot sauce I babbled about previously on this blog is now available for online purchase. Go on...take a chance...it's good stuff, I tell you. Just don't eat it every day like I did -- I got so accustomed to it that I was able to mix more than a tablespoonful in a small bowl of soup and still handle the hotness, until eventually my digestive system just couldn't take it anymore. I had to write a formal letter of apology to my gastrointestinal tract after that year-long capsaicin binge.

2002-08-02T13:13:00.000-04:00

S.O.S.

If the Islamic talk-show rhetoric that Marc Fisher's column describes has been accurately depicted, then good riddance to those talk hosts. Too bad, though, that the station is mostly switching over to a right-wing-punditry format -- not that there's anything wrong with conservative commentary, but there's already plenty of it elsewhere on the D.C. airwaves. Maybe eventually some of the blogosphere's leftish anti-idiotarians could parlay their blogs into an on-air career, or perhaps a local station might take a chance with a more creative show like that "Diner" thing that Lileks used to do.

2002-08-02T13:05:00.000-04:00

Nothing's worse than summer flu

The spread of avian influenza has led both Maryland and Virginia to keep bird exhibitions out of county and state fairs. First that West Nile Virus and now this -- can't our feathered friends catch a break? Maybe the fowl can get back in the fair if we hire a smart spider to weave bird-praising words into the web. (Hey, who'd have guessed that E.B. White predicted blogging, decades ahead of time?)

2002-08-02T13:01:00.000-04:00

Sculptor's eye?

Hey, maybe those lousy proposals for the WTC site can be improved as well by this Adrian Smith guy, whose work on the proposed Chicago Trump Tower was described in Wednesday's Trib (username: laexaminer, password: laexaminer). Smith's new design sure is an improvement over the original plan -- click on the picture to the right of the article to look through more images -- but it's too bad it still has such an old-hat glass-curtain look.

2002-08-02T12:46:00.000-04:00

Advertising age

Internet legend James "Kibo" Parry takes on the recent news that Sony Ericsson plans to have people pretend to want to talk to you so they can show you their combination cellphone/camera gizmo. The only thing I have to add is this: They're not just actors and actresses, they're trained actors and actresses!

(Bloggers pat each other on the back for righteous Fisking, and with good reason, but Kibo of course has been doing that schtick on Usenet for years and years now. One of the best recent efforts on Kibo's part is this take on a "virtual" Star Trek convention...)

2002-08-02T12:29:00.000-04:00

Teen spirit

With the help of tools put togther by our man Hossein "Hoder" Derakhshan, Iranians are taking up blogging in growing numbers, reports Shift in an article that can't not warm your heart:

Most of these blogs host musings on the day-to-day lives of young Iranians. Filled with postings on music, movies, recreational drugs and girl/boyfriends, they map out a mental landscape that is heavily populated by references to Western culture. From Pink Floyd to pot smoking, it is clear that Iran's teenagers share a lot of ground with their counterparts in North America. To find these digital tableaux of youth culture frivolous, however, would be to miss the point. Self-expression is a rare privilege indeed in a country where even the elected government is controlled by a fiercely Muslim theocracy. For young women, it's often an impossibility. Yet through the anonymity that blogging can afford, those who once lacked voices are finally speaking up.

I know that Orwell references are cliché, but I can't help but be reminded of Winston Smith hiding from the telescreen while he committed the dreadfully forbidden act of keeping a diary -- and he wasn't even putting his words where anyone else could see them. More power to these kids.

2002-08-02T12:22:00.000-04:00

Requiem for a Heavyweight

Brian Emmett has extended his remarks on the end of DeSoto Records and the seeming demise of the vibrancy that characterised the D.C. underground music scene for the first half of the 1990s. It's true that maybe he and I are just not paying enough attention to the scene now, as he lives in NoCal and I have a job that makes it hard for me to go out weeknights -- but when I do venture out to places once bristling with inventive local talent, they now seem to feature either touring acts rehashing older styles of music or local bands with a distinct Amateur Hour feel. (And without the gleeful Shaggs-adelic charm that made us all forgive Blast Off Country Style for their fumble-fingered mishaps.)

It's true that the bands never placed a premium on Steve Vai-style technical prowess -- these were punk rock kids, after all -- but it seemed their limited traditional chops encouraged them to be twisted and inventive in ways that many schooled musicians appear to have trouble being. The bands I see today, on the other hand, seem to have lost that knack for making their lack of virtuosity a paradoxical virtue, and I don't know how they can reclaim that spark.

2002-07-31T09:01:00.000-04:00

Not a partisan issue

It's not just rightists and neoconservatives who want the Bush administration to do more than just talk about spreading democracy in the Arab world, as this WaPo editorial shows:

Apart from his call for reform of the Palestinian Authority, there has been little practical follow-up, especially with those autocratically ruled Arab nations that have produced most of the militants of al Qaeda. Now President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, one of those states, has presented Mr. Bush with an important opportunity to prove that his policy amounts to more than rhetoric.

Yesterday in Cairo an Egyptian court for the second time sentenced the country's most important campaigner for democracy and human rights, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, to seven years in prison on patently trumped-up charges.

The editorial says that Mubarak is dependent on backing from the U.S. "to prop up a regime that is both politically and economically bankrupt" -- the same sort of thing that bloggers and National Review types have long been saying. With even this important bastion of East Coast elite liberalism joining the calls for Bush to get serious about combating autocracy in the Islamic world, exactly which significant partisans are holding him back?

Update: And NYT is saying the same thing, a day after the WaPo did. What is it going to take to clear out the logjam that's keeping the administration (or the potential loyal opposition) from speaking with moral clarity rather than moving onward and onward with the "subtle diplomacy"?

2002-07-31T08:42:00.000-04:00

Rock-a-bye James-y

Lileks' latest Bleat indicates that he's been staying up nights watching Star Trek: Voyager lately, and I guess that explains the tone of the latest Backfence column, which resembles the sort of thing I think of when I haven't been getting enough sleep. Let's encourage Lileks to work like this more often!

2002-07-30T14:42:00.000-04:00

The Beautiful South

Taking up some of Tim Blair's burden of picking on the Sydney Morning Herald, PhotoDude is pointing and laughing at an alarmist article fretting that preparations have been made for martial law and internment camps in the United States. Turns out the article -- which, at least on the Web site, appears in the "World News" section and is not played as an advocacy piece -- is nonetheless written by an advocate, one Ritt Goldstein, "an investigative journalist and a former leader in the movement for US law enforcement accountability." In other words, somebody who built his reputation on fighting against overreach by the state, and who is now writing for the Sydney paper on that issue as though he were an ordinary investigative reporter without an ideological stake in the matter. The author blurb at the end was the only indication I saw that this was meant as something other than a regular news story.

Apparently this writer managed to trick the Morning Herald into thinking he was the only person who noticed the plans for the TIPS program that was effectively canned by Dick Armey after being denounced by every libertarian from sea to shining sea. (The paper touts that latter story as an exclusive, which means it wasn't just another example of the Morning Herald dusting off some ancient syndicated piece and publishing as though it were new -- which otherwise is a practice apparently much loved by Australia's Fairfax papers, as noted time and time and time again by our man Blair.)

Update: Actually, Lynxx Pherrett's chronology of the TIPS brouhaha indicates that it was Goldstein's Morning Herald piece that really ratcheted up the fuss about TIPS by being the first to compare it to the Stasi, something that earlier reports in the Washington Post and The Progressive mercifully avoided doing. (Pherrett writes, "Remember truckers, if you're rolling along at 3:00AM and you see somebody wiring explosives to an overpass, reporting it to anyone makes you a spy and informant, no better than a Communist East German Stasi agent.") Pherrett's now keeping up with Goldstein, who he calls "Ritt the Git", and has issued this expert takedown of the Git's hysterical piece about martial law and internment camps.

2002-07-30T12:36:00.000-04:00

New anti-Israel fronts

We've all heard by now about the Israel Philharmonic's cancellation of its U.S. tour, but the WaPo lets us know that Israel is having a heck of a time attracting artists and entertainers to its own land.

Israel also used to be a regular stop on the pop music circuit, hosting the likes of Madonna, Eric Clapton, R.E.M. and Santana. But it has been more than a year since a mega-star played here. In some cases, Israeli artists have been disinvited from playing abroad. And the Tel Aviv film festival was canceled this year because the organizers feared no stars would come.

The problem goes beyond the arts. In March, the European football federation suspended soccer matches in Israel, citing security concerns. Israeli home games are scheduled to be played in Cyprus.

The article goes on to mention other things that have gotten ample coverage in the blogosphere but short shrift in the mainstream media, such as the academic Israeli boycott petition and the initiative by some Norwegian retailers to label Israeli products.

Hey, Matt Welch and Charles Johnson -- you fellas are musicians, right? Hey, Brian Linse -- haven't you been buddying around with Big Rock Star Warren Zevon? Hey, Jewish-American artists and entertainers -- how about a broad initiative to reverse this vote of no confidence in Israel? Think of it as something like a Bob Hope USO Tour, only this time to keep up the morale of Israel's citizenry at large.

Not content to run just one story on anti-Israeli sentiment today, the Post also reports on the decision to cancel a Chinese tour for a museum exhibit on Einstein, who committed the crime of being a Jew who supported the establishment of a Jewish state.

The cancellation, and the accompanying sniping by both sides, were signs of the deterioration in China's relations with Israel that began two years ago when Israel, buckling under U.S. pressure, canceled the sale of the Falcon airborne early warning system to China's military. Relations have suffered further since the intensification of Israeli-Palestinian violence in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel.

China's government and state-run media rarely report Israel's point of view in the conflict and routinely ignore Palestinian suicide bombings, focusing on the damage caused by Israel's army.

According to news reports in Israel, at a recent meeting to review details of the Einstein exhibition, officials at China's Culture Ministry objected to a paragraph that described Einstein as a supporter of the Israeli state who was once offered the presidency of Israel by David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister.

For some reason, I'm reminded of Glenn Reynolds' comment today about a completely different article about China: "NO, NO, WE'RE YOUR REAL ENEMY, DON'T FORGET US!"

2002-07-29T12:39:00.000-04:00

Rocket to Russia

Sunday's Washington Post Magazine had a big report on the possiblity of turning a South Dakota nuclear-missile silo into a historic site. Among the questions raised by the article is just how to write about history that might not even be over yet -- as the article notes, Minuteman III and Peacekeeper ICBMs remain at the ready at sites in North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. The Post's Web site is also hosting a moderated chat on the subject in a few minutes. (After the chat is over, it will remain archived at the same URL.)

Update: Though the stereotype of general-interest reporters is that they never get anything military right, participants in the Web chat are indicating that the WaPo Mag's writer did a great job of portraying the missile installations. There's also been some more discussion of the unofficially accepted fact that decisions on nuclear response would likely have to come at the spur of the moment, even if official policy called for efforts to ride out a first attack before responding, becaue everybody knew perfectly well that riding out the first attack wasn't going to work very well. With that in mind, it's chilling to look at some of the near-miss scenarios that chat participants have brought up.

One participant noted the common perception that September of 1983 was time of hair-trigger tension between the U.S. and the Soviets, as it was not long after KAL 007 was shot down, and the Soviets were understandably concerned about an upcoming U.S./NATO military exercise dubbed Able Archer 83. Right in the middle of that spine-tingling time, an Soviet early warning satellite set off a false alarm about U.S. ICBMs apparently being launched from a base in Montana. It was later concluded that the false alarm was the result of an atmospheric optical illusion, but in the chaotic minutes after the false alarm was sounded, it appears that a quick Soviet response was averted thanks to the cool head of Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov.

The demise of the Soviet Union didn't rule out such near-catastrophes either, as an incident in January 1995 showed. In that incident, the launch of a Black Brant rocket from an island off the coast of Norway -- part of a scientific experiment aiming to collect information about the Northern Lights -- looked to Russian radars like the launch of a U.S. submarine-based Trident missile. It appears that then-President Boris Yeltsin himself was involved in the decision not to launch a nuclear retaliation. And things haven't necessarly gotten better since then, the above article (published in March 2000) indicates, saying, "because of the prolonged effects of Russia's floundering economy, if a similar incident occurred today, Russian leaders would have far less information than they had in 1995."

2002-07-27T23:02:00.000-04:00

Give it up for the lady

Meryl Yourish's blogathon is less than a hundred bucks from the $3,000 mark at last count -- why not head on over there and add a little to the hefty chunk of change Meryl's helping send to the Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem? (And send along some words of encouragement to keep Meryl going -- or maybe even help out with a guest post like the little playlet I wrote.)

2002-07-27T22:54:00.000-04:00

Watch your language

Seems the Bush Administration has decided to hold a big economic forum at the Crawford ranch during Dubya's annual August vacation; in addition to Cabinet members and White House officials, about 240 others will take part, including "including labor union members, business ethicists, business students, corporate executives, small-business owners and ordinary investors," according to WaPo. The Post's article includes this amusing tidbit from the press briefing:

Fleischer corrected several reporters who asked him about a "summit," the Democrats' terminology. "The White House is calling this an economic forum," he said. "I know the press will not take a role in choosing words used by that one side."

Hey, excuse us all, Ari; it'll be easy to avoid taking sides if we just use the White House's term instead of the Democrats'. Looks like someone put a bug in the White House's ear about some apparent connotative differences between "summit" and "forum", so I had a look at the Merriam Webster dictionary's definitions of the relevent senses of each word:

[summit] 3 a : the highest level of officials; especially : the diplomatic level of heads of government b : a conference of highest-level officials (as heads of government)

[forum] 3 a : a public meeting or lecture involving audience discussion b : a program (as on radio or television) involving discussion of a problem usually by several authorities

Aha! Maybe the Republicans are perceiving Democratic "class-war" themes in the implication that this is bringing together "highest-level" officials and so they want to make it more populist by bringing together just plain "authorities". (But isn't this the party that was constantly harping on Clinton for insisting on careful parsing and specific word choices?)

2002-07-27T22:41:00.000-04:00

End of an Era

Via Brian Emmett I learned of the unhappy news that DeSoto Records is shutting down after 13 years of putting out some of the most interesting music on America's underground rock scenes. DeSoto, like compatriots Simple Machines, Teenbeat, Dischord and others, was among the D.C.-area record labels that chronicled the explosive renaissance in D.C.'s indie-rock scene in the early 1990s -- a boiling-hot, incestuous underground that produced much of the amazingly inventive and spirited music that kept both Brian and me wowed and blissed during our days as college kids in Virginia.

DeSoto Records was long seen as the baby of owners Kim Coletta and Bill Barbot, who were members of Jawbox together and later became husband and wife; now Kim reveals that it's an actual baby who has taken her attention away from the label. "Since my son Nick was born, I've discovered that 'kid's music' really seriously sucks," Kim writes, adding, "I would like to put out a CD of children's music that my family and other indie families would approve of." Now there's a local indie music project I can get excited about all over again.

The DeSoto Web site's catalog still stands as a list of some of the most interesting musicians toiling in obscurity today, including greats like the Dismemberment Plan and Faraquet who do their dirty work just a few short miles from this apartment in downtown Bethesda where I sit. Everyone who still loves rock music should go check it out.

2002-07-26T12:39:00.000-04:00

Telegram!

Unnamed officials and other anonymous gadabouts are still leaking war-in-Iraq plans to compliant newspapers, this time the Miami Herald.

In tomorrow's Guardian, expect to see speculation that the administration deliberately chose a Florida newspaper in order to keep the Bush name at the top of the news there, for both Jeb's and W's benefit.

2002-07-26T12:15:00.000-04:00

Resurrected brainpower

Today's WaPo reports on Kabul's professionals getting back to work as lawyers, engineers and other white-collar sorts after years berobed in Taliban rule. These are the people who stayed around in hopes of being able to help the society rebuild once that years-long cloud of darkness was removed. A wistful note as a lawyer named Aziz Ahmed Sarboz pages through an old photo album, looking at pictures from the pre-Taliban days:

There are also faces of people none of the family has seen in more than a decade: Aziz's older brother Nasir, now teaching law in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan; his younger brother Hafiz, now a shopkeeper in Moscow; his law school classmates at Kabul University, then in a carefree group portrait, now scattered across the globe.

"Everyone in that picture went abroad during the fighting or the Taliban era and never came back," he said. "People without money went to Pakistan or Iran; those who could afford it went to Europe. We have relatives in Germany, Holland, India, Denmark, Canada and America. But my father wanted to stay and serve his country, so we stayed."

While it's a cliché for men in Western countries to disdain neckties as life-draining nooses, Aziz is happy to be dressed in such professional gear again after years of a Taliban-enforced appearance, of which he has saved but few mementos in the photo album:

Tucked in one corner of the album are several grainy, passport-sized photos of a man with a grim stare and long whiskers. Aziz has kept them as a perverse memento of the Taliban years, when all male adults were forced to grow long beards and wear turbans. The photos are Taliban-issued ID cards, and the man is Aziz.

The last photo is a wedding portrait of Aziz and Nabila, hastily posed and somber. They were married in September 1996, five days after the Taliban seized power in Kabul. Within days the new Islamic authorities issued radio decrees prohibiting all women from leaving home, all music and dancing at weddings, and all photographs of living things.

After that, the album's pages are blank.

Somebody needs to send Aziz a few rolls of film and open Kabul's first new Fotomat franchise!

2002-07-26T12:07:00.000-04:00

Misspent youth

Reading the latest Backfence column by Lileks, I was reminded of the fact that as a little kid I really, really loved Pringles, which I only ever had once in a while, usually when visiting friends. It was only later in life that I discovered the truth: Pringles Suck. What the heck was wrong with me as a kid?

2002-07-25T12:08:00.000-04:00

More money in short order?

Every anti-idiotarian's favorite government agency, the INS, just arrested an immigration lawyer and an engineer in the D.C. area who prosecutors say were filing phony applications for illegal immigrants to get work permits. The names of several Northern Virginia restaurant-chain locations were put down in the forms as prospective employers who needed to hire foreign workers because of a shortage of local workers. Apparently the restaurants in question were not actually involved in the scam, though -- in fact, it appears the scam was uncovered because one of the Labor Department's certifications was accidentally sent to the restaurant whose name was on the form, rather than being sent to the immigration lawyer, and the restaurant's manager notified the authorities, who apparently didn't notice it themselves:

As one example, [the immigration lawyer] allegedly filed 184 requests for labor certifications from a Silver Diner restaurant in Arlington for short-order cooks. None of the agencies reviewing the paperwork noticed the sudden demand for foreign workers from one restaurant.

Yes, too busy approving student visas for radical Islamist airline hijackers, no doubt. Good thing Joe Sixpack at the Chili's was paying attention or the INS and other government agencies involved might never have noticed.

Meanwhile, a former INS district director darkly hints that this sort of thing might be "going on all over the country" and says the INS just has too darned few agents to track this sort of thing when it's got borders to patrol and other higher priorities because of 9/11. Man, this guy's apparently out of the bureaucracy now but he's still working to safeguard the INS's appropriation, and maybe even step up that funding a bit! Angling for a civil-service medal, maybe?

2002-07-25T11:47:00.000-04:00

Wacko Zacko's Non-Smiling Filings

Today's WaPo has an article providing some armchair psychoanalysis of Moussaoui via his long, rambling court filings.

One of the few consistent elements in his pleadings is the heading. He demonstrates a basic familiarity with the legal format, labeling each filing with the heading "Zacarias Moussaoui V. US." But under his own name he consistently writes "Muslim" and under the initials "US" he writes "Godless Government." That dichotomy reveals the degree to which he views his case as a religious persecution, rather than a contest within a secular court system. He suggests that a Muslim cannot expect justice from a non-Muslim court, and seems to reference passages in the Koran that discourage friendship with, and the acceptance of aid from, unbelievers. Those passages, like any scripture, are open to multiple interpretations, but Moussaoui's own relation to scripture is essentially literal: "The Coran, which is the Most beautiful book of Allah, unchanged for 1400 years."

The article notes several of the attempts at sardonic humor that Moussaoui sprinkles through his papers, which give some insight into the mental workings of a fairly intelligent but murderous ideologue who is hardly the picture of ill-educated "desperation" that critics of the U.S. would like to believe most front-line terrorists are. No banality of evil here, no sir.

And hey, you don't have to take the Post's word for it -- some previous papers documenting Wacko Zacko's courtroom antics have been published by The Smoking Gun.

2002-07-25T10:25:00.000-04:00

A place for your stuff

Today's Wall Street Journal says the furniture industry just isn't keeping up with consumer technology [article available to subscribers only], bemoaning the problems of figuring out where to set a laptop and finding an entertainment center that can accommodate a TV set the size of a drive-in-movie screen. The article mentions that Sligh Furniture is soon to debut its "Home Theatre" entertainment center, big enough for some massive TVs and containing a built-in surge surpressor and four power outlets. Meanwhile, Jensen-Lewis is targeting the laptop user with a mobile laptop stand called Virtual Office -- a concoction with an intriguing twisted-metal look that the WSJ likens to "a torture device for dentists."

For less spendy types, Martha Stewart Living is suggesting sewing "speaker cozys". And one resourceful interior decorator, unable to decide what to do with a client's 65-inch bedroom TV, decided to stick it on the floor and surround it with houseplants and pottery. Hey, whatever works.

2002-07-25T09:43:00.000-04:00

Bandwagonesque

In response to popular outcry from hundreds of thousands of devoted Combustible Boy fans from around the globe, I set up comments on my blog, and even went with the same British hosted-comments outfit that ~~Daddy Warb~~Steven Chapman is touting. I got your transatlantic alliance right here!

2002-07-24T13:44:00.000-04:00

Go Erica Go

Chewing through her duct-tape restraints, busting open a door, smashing a window and crying for help -- apparently that's what a little black girl has to do in order to get national news coverage after being abducted. So now you know.

2002-07-24T12:07:00.000-04:00

Good riddance

The late, unlamented Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh's cold blood barely had time to warm up in the Gaza heat before another piece of anti-Semitic filth was removed from among the living, this time by cancer. While one AP writer hints that William Pierce's death will leave his American neo-Nazi group's future in tatters -- we can only hope so -- another AP writer's judgment was more reserved. So, how many Hamas leaders need to be offed before the AP declares that odious group to be in danger of coming apart at the seams as well?

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Tolerance.org site has more on Pierce's death and life.

2002-07-24T12:00:00.000-04:00

It's all-out war!

Just a few short days after The Poor Man published a speculative schedule of Cinemax flicks, the Onion ups the ante with a TV schedule grid covering several networks, both broadcast and cable. The Poor Man gets big props for including plot summaries and even doing some inspired casting work, but Wall Street analysts say the Onion just barely gets the edge because of the way it uses gray backgrounds in random table cells to add that crucial bit of verité to its simulated TV grid. With bated breath I look forward to The Poor Man's inevitable return volley!

2002-07-23T21:08:00.000-04:00

Well, I guess you better go and wake him up then

Probably at least half the reason they created the Internet Archive in the first place was to eternally preserve moments of 1990s pop-cultural climax, like these Simpsons-style renderings of Pulp Fiction scenes....

2002-07-23T12:28:00.000-04:00

Loan Ranger

Brian Emmett got a phone call from what sounds to me like an identity-theft scammer. He had sense enough to get out of the call, but lots of other people make mistakes -- it's a good idea to stay informed about this growing crime problem.

But really, Brian, you paid off your student loans already? At the rate I'm going, I'll be lucky if I'll have mine paid off by the time I hit 50.

2002-07-23T11:38:00.000-04:00

Accentuate the positive?

Hanah Metchis is fretting that she and her fellow libertarians are really good at telling the government to butt out but are having a hard time figuring out what the government should be doing amid an international crisis that appears to necessitate some government response:

When it comes down to it, Americans haven't thought seriously about how to design a government from scratch since the late 1700s. The Founding Fathers were focused on ways to make the government do X, Y, and Z without doing A through W. Modern libertarians spend so much time running after the government shouting "NONONONONONONONO!!!!" that they rarely give a thought to what government actually should be doing. I think this seriously weakens our position.

True to form, I have no solutions to this.

2002-07-23T08:52:00.000-04:00

Peace Train -- R-R X-ing

After Israel's attack on a Hamas leader yesterday, a Palestinian commentator I heard on the radio last night seemed to be stuck on the old meme of getting the peace process "back on track", even though the hipper Euro-commentators have moved on to another mode of transportation by telling Dumb Old President Bush™ that he needs to lay out a "road map" for achieving Middle East peace. At first, this seemed like an egregious mixing of metaphors, kind of like when computer GUI designers give you "wallpaper" to put on your "desktop", but then I figured if you stretch your brain enough you can take it to indicate an acknowledgement that our new, postmodern view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict offers several possible avenues for reaching ~~utopi~~peace, as opposed to the old back-on-track metaphor that seemed to insist on a single path along which we must inexorably ride.

It's time for warbloggers to counter with our own ill-fitting transportation-related metaphor; I propose insisting that the path to Middle East peace is really kind of like riding a Jet Ski across the Atlantic and the Palestinians are on that Jet Ski. Sure, it's a wide wide ocean ahead of them and they've got a lot of work to do to get to their proposed promised land, but if they stay on good terms with the people on the support ship (that's us in the U.S.) then we can supply them with the fuel they need to make it the rest of the way (that's ideological respect for democracy and the rule of law, get it?). On the other hand, if they tick us off too much (like by keeping Arafat at the helm) then we'll turn our boat around and they'll just have to pray for the spirit of Thor Heyerdahl (I haven't decided what that is yet) to save them. Comments?

2002-07-23T08:31:00.000-04:00

Signs of life

In what I hope is another sign of creeping anti-idiotarianism, a Tunisian Muslim writer living in Paris and working for a London-based Arabic newspaper -- and how's that for globalization? -- has published an open letter to Hamas adding to the call for an end to the suicide bombings. Given who he's trying to get through to, the writer of course must argue that the suicide bombings (and everything else Hamas has done for the past decade) are backfiring, rather than making the sort of argument that warbloggers would like to make (which at the minimum would involve a clue-stick upside the head -- metaphorically of course). The open letter, as translated by MEMRI, says Hamas's bombing campaign and public declarations provide Israel with "a trump card [that enables it] to win the propaganda war with the claim that the Palestinians do not want a state alongside Israel but a state on the ruins of the State of Israel." Now this guy has caught on -- that's exactly what we are thinking. Whether that'll matter to Hamas is another question.

2002-07-22T12:20:00.000-04:00

Exhale! Exhale!

Piro! Snap out of it! Say something, man!

2002-07-22T11:56:00.000-04:00

Per-sian-haps

Really, though, Glenn Frazier is the guy to read if you're keeping up with Iran. Sometimes it seems like he blogs about Iran even more than that Iran guy does.

2002-07-21T23:05:00.000-04:00

Bored?

The hottest hot sauce I've ever consumed is this stuff called Blair's Sudden Death Sauce, which comes in a bottle with a picture of a skeleton dancing amid flames and the exhortation "Come alive!" on the label. With each bottle also comes a keyring attached to a little rubber simulacrum of a human skull, complete with the dingy discoloration of ages. It takes just a dab of this on the tongue to convince even the most he-ish of he-men -- those who think they're tough because they can take a little Tabasco -- that the right concentration of capsaicin is nothing to trifle with. I used to put Sudden Death Sauce on everything, to the point that I could handle it pretty easily, except that after a year or so of this treatment I think I just about destroyed my digestive system.

If I were Steven Den Beste, I would now segue from that personal tale into some broad discussion of the Middle East (or some other event in the news). Here, let me try the Den Beste thing: "You see, Saddam comes from the Arab martial culture that involves swinging your sword over your head and declaiming about your incredible military successes. But tinpot dictators like him usually have the mere experience of dealing with internal rabble-rousers, who are like mere black pepper when it comes to spiciness -- enough that you notice, but not so much that it's bothersome. Even the Gulf War of a decade ago, with the U.S. so restrained by Europeans and Colin Powell types, made our military akin only to a bottle or two of Tabasco. Well, the power our unrestrained military has today will be like a constant rain of Blair's Sudden Death Sauce being presented to a he-man who thinks he's powerful because of his past flirtation with Tabasco! After a mere few days of our coming Sudden Death Sauce-like assault, Saddam's digestive system will be to the point where he'll need to borrow Arafat's baby wipes several times a day."

But I'm not Steven Den Beste; rather, I'm just some guy who has been reading Meryl's Cattales and am suddenly reminded of an interesting diversion. It has been observed by cat-watchers that cats are unable to avoid licking their noses when anything is placed thereupon. This is a means by which some people give medicine to cats -- put it on their noses and let their instinct-led tongues do the rest. It certainly would be interesting if you placed a bit of Blair's Sudden Death Sauce on a cat's nose and sat back to watch what ensues. You might imagine that the cat would lick its nose as usual, then a couple of seconds later its eyes would become wide with palpable incomprehension. You might further imagine that the cat would then zoom toward its water bowl like it had a rocket in its butt, and then proceed to lap up water like it had never seen hydrogen and oxygen come together so beautifully before.

Erm, uh, not that I've ever witnessed this taking place or anything. There aren't any cats living in my apartment anyway. Besides, I never get that bored. (Do you?)

2002-07-19T12:12:00.000-04:00

Real collaborators?

We've been hearing a lot about Palestinians hanged by mobs of more hate-crazed Palestinians accusing them of "collaboration" for being insufficiently hateful toward Israel. Meanwhile, on the Israeli side, it looks like there might be an example of actual collaboration, the New York Times reports:

Israelis buried more victims of a Palestinian attack today as the nation grappled with police accusations that Jewish settlers had stolen army ammunition and sold it to Palestinians.

Five settlers, four of whom are soldiers, and a reserve army officer were arrested this week and are suspected of stealing and selling thousands of rounds of ammunition, the police said. The six men have denied that they intended to help Palestinian militants.

Israeli police and military police had been investigating this alleged ammo-diverting scheme for months. Meanwhile, a new terrorist organization has emerged to take credit for the recent Tel Aviv bombing: Al Nathir, which translates to "The Warning". (And what, pray tell, are the terrorists' victims being warned of? If it's that they're up against inhuman fanatics, well, they already knew that.)

2002-07-19T10:28:00.000-04:00

Their name is Prince

Remember that Saudi prince who handed over a $10 million check to Rudy Giuliani, who promptly told the prince to stuff it when the prince started going on about U.S. support for Israel? Who'da thunk that that same prince is also the largest single shareholder in Citigroup? Now, settle down; that doesn't mean he's anywhere close to being in charge of Citigroup, and it also seems that the low price of Citigroup shares, rather than some takeover attempt or some other sinister plan, are the reason he's purchasing so much more of the company's stock -- something that Citigroup itself has been doing for much the same reason. Still, it's interesting how these Saudi princes manage to keep themselves in the news, what with yet another of the Saudi princes having just been busted for (allegedly) smuggling coke all over the place.

I guess it doesn't come as such a surprise when you consider that about half the residents of Saudi Arabia seem to be members of the royal family. Hey, maybe I'm in the Saudi royal family too! Are you?

2002-07-19T10:03:00.000-04:00

Weird is in the air

Summer is traditionally a slow news time here in D.C.-Land, since many of the lawmakers who regularly give us interesting local gossip tend to hightail it away from this fetid swamp as the mercury rises. (Actually, the dirty little secret of national politics is that most members of Congress spend very little time in D.C. anyway, generally jetting in for a few days of votes and floor debate and then immediately cabbing it to the airport to head back to the old homestead.) But this summer has been full of interesting local oddities such as the attack of the deadly snakehead walking fishies, which War Liberal Mac can't get enough of.

Meanwhile, the story that's been really terrorizin' us in recent days, but which hasn't gotten as much national publicity, is a string of drive-by blowgun attacks by a person or persons unknown targeting random people in the District and nearby suburbs in Prince George's County, Maryland. It seems the authorities are relieved to learn that the darts fired don't appear to be poison-tipped, but that doesn't change the bizarre nature of the attacks -- which have got to be the weirdest crime spree I've heard about since that time a few years ago when somebody was throwing tacks on highways in Philadelphia to give drivers tire blowouts.

(Last I heard, the Philly cops thought maybe some rogue tow-truck operators were tossing the tacks in an effort to drum up business. Will the tow-truck drivers start buying blowguns and learning to propel the darts with sufficient force to puncture vulcanized rubber? War Liberal Mac -- who grew up in a city with a giant Vulcan statue -- might be able to aid this speculation!)

Mac has also been traumatized to learn of West Nile Virus showing up in birdies near where he lives. Hey Mac, we've got that here too! And it's not affecting just any plain old birds, it's hit flamingoes and a duck!

2002-07-17T15:19:00.000-04:00

Oh my goth!

After Andrea Harris unveiled incriminating evidence of her past life as a gothy teenager, it immediately made me ~~glad I avoided cameras when I was a teen~~ wonder just what it is about this teen subculture that's made it endure and thrive for a couple of decades now. Or turn the question on its head and ask why such an obviously durable subculture took so long to emerge -- sure, it had its precursors in late-nite monster-movie marathon hostesses, Bettie Page pinups and '70s heavy-metal theatrics, but it wasn't until the emergence of British post-punk bands like Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees that teenygothness really came into its own.

Of course, in older times it actually took a little work to goth out; why, I had to go to one store for Cure and Joy Division t-shirts and then to a whole nother store for a long long black coat, and then to the biker boutique out in the rundown redneck suburbs to ogle the wallet chains and really tall Doc Martens, and I think it was at a tourist-tchotchke shop at the beach that I found the cheap pendant of a skeleton hand holding an eyeball. Nowadays these kids can just go to the mall to that "Hot Topic" store, which was recently nice enough to open a plus-size shop. What's more, in those days we listened to music that was actually distinguishable from cheesy heavy metal, and we wouldn't have gotten guns and shot all the kids at our school because it was easier just to bore them to death with our non-rhyming poetry.

I guess I wasn't really a full-fledged goth; I was more of a nerd who hung out with the goth kids because I was such a loser that the goth kids were actually cooler than me. What's more, I'm unfortunately younger than Andrea, which means I was probably one of the kids she looked down on as being insufficiently true to the ideals. My friends and I helped usher in the shift from wiry neo-psychedelia to guitar-oriented stuff, as bands like KMFDM and Ministry left the old Wax Trax! sound behind and started crafting the more obnoxious noise that then got progressively watered down and watered down until that Marilyn Manson guy came into being a few years after I was safely out of high school. (Has anyone else in my birth cohort listened to a Marilyn Manson album and marveled at just how amazingly scary he isn't?) Anyway, you could easily track this shift at the time by watching as the number of Ministry t-shirts I owned actually came to eclipse the number of Cure t-shirts I owned.

So where does that leave us today? Goth kids who can get the look going really easily -- sure, they look flamboyant, but it takes something away when you know you can get it all at one store at the mall in the rich-kids suburb -- and who listen to music that's increasingly loud yet decreasingly spooky and frightening? That's what I thought, as I saw that kids were falling for one samey power-chord band after another. But then recently I managed to hear that System of a Down song that's called "Simplicity" or "Complicity" or "Synchronicity" or whatever, and while I wouldn't call it a classic, it actually wasn't that bad. The instrumental parts weren't anything you haven't heard a million times before, but they're competently executed, and the singer sings really weird, like a male version of Kristen Hersh on that first Throwing Muses album that came out back when she was like 17 and still really insane and not medicated yet. (You know, the one with "Delicate Cutters" on it. One of them are closed!) So maybe there's yet some hope for these damned kids today.

We just need to pool our money and parachute Morrissey into the parking lot at the mall with the Hot Topic so he can show them you don't really need the distortion pedals as long as you've got a fey voice and your lyrics are...well, non-rhyming poetry. It kills!

2002-07-17T14:28:00.000-04:00

Nibble

O N.Z. Bear, your wish is my command. Now can I have a spot in the blogosphere ecosystem? Swimming with my fellow insignificant microbes may not sound like much fun, but as long as Andrea See is down there too, it's got to be a pleasant place.

2002-07-17T13:29:00.000-04:00

Googlebot's watching...

Over at Microcontent News, John Hiler is musing on how much easier it's become for people from your past to look you up on the Internet and find out what you're up to. (Hey, there are reasons why I blog under a wacky pseudonym!) John's post on the subject mentions a newspaper article about one young woman who got an interesting surprise when she discovered what a guy she'd started dating was writing about her on his blog.

John's also working on an review of all the different blog software that's out there, which he's apparently finished up now and will soon publish. (Hey John, are you going to include a mention of your content-management software company?)

2002-07-17T10:01:00.000-04:00

Bedfella

Mike Silverman, another of those longtime lefties who have found themselves transmogrified into warbloggers, argues on his blog that Pat Buchanan has essentially been left behind by the evolution of American conservatism in recent years. So who might be Pat's constituency now?

So what group is left to support Buchanan? Ironically, it is the far left , which agrees with much of what Buchanan stands for....hatred of capitalism and popular culture (check!), bigotry towards Jews and Israel (check!), a desire to greatly shrink the military and pull whats left of it home (check!) and a belief that terrorism against us is our own fault (check!). The far left even has an undercurrent of neo-puritanism that while not 100% compatible with Buchanan, does find plenty of overlap with him on many of his social views.

Silverman grabbed this idea from a New Republic column by Franklin Foer. Justin Raimondo, Pacifica Radio, and even David Duke supporters find their way into Foer's column as well.

Looks like the Charles Johnson-coined term "anti-idiotarian" is getting more relevant every day.

2002-07-17T08:49:00.000-04:00

Links land

Check out Aussie Tim Mate this morning -- he's got a brutal skewering of Johnny Walker PLUS evidence that Wacko Zacko will be the new Mumia PLUS proof that the term "ZOG" has spread beyond the racist American far-right loons who are most identified with it.

Meanwhile, Bruce "War Now" Hill has cranked out another of his excellent little thumbsuckers examining the danger of feeling invulnerable, keying off the sense of dislocation he felt upon returning to New Zealand after spending time in Israel when the First Intifada was going on. It's clear that Bruce's experiences in Israel under attack constituted an important epiphany for him, as he's mentioned it here and there in his blog before. I hope someday he can screw up the courage to explore these feelings in detail on his blog.

Speaking of vulnerability, check out this piece from yesterday's WaPo looking at Israeli kids starting out on the worst summer vacation ever. The Flash presentation ("One Land, Two Peoples") is worth a look too.

2002-07-17T08:41:00.000-04:00

Yeeowch!

Damn, Kimiko! Do you always hurt the ones you love?

2002-07-16T12:45:00.000-04:00

Who's still your daddy?

For a few days now I had been toying with a post on the subject of "What happened to Daddy Warblogs?" -- or rather, wherefore the change of tone at his site, which once was like a ray of light for someone like me, in search of a blog written by someone who had sensible, non-Fisk-like views on combating terrorism yet wasn't given to the sort of backslapping groupthink that seemed to have taken over so many warblogs. For the past month or so, it seemed that the Daddy -- who has given up that moniker in favor of his real name -- was spending much more time outlining his differences with the rest of the warbloggers than defending the just points of the warbloggers' cause from the sort of daft Pilgerite criticism it was receiving.

When the change in tone first started to take place, I thought maybe he was just overreacting to the criticism he was getting from the Warbloggerwatch kids and to the debates he was having with Brendan O'Neill for so much of June, but in time I came to recognize that it was more complicated than that. The reason I hadn't posted my thoughts on this until now was because I hadn't reached a satisfactory conclusion yet, but only had a vague sense that the Daddy's reorientation had something to do with the spent energy of the warblogger cause -- the same thing that seems to be dredging up the political differences between warbloggers on the left, right, and libertarian sides who had once spoken with one mind on the justness of the war in Afghanistan.

Today, Steven posted a lengthy discourse on the subject that seems to go along with my vague suspicion -- as Steven looks at the emergence of the American warbloggers' attacks on Europe, he says that it "began to surface at about the time the War on Terrorism began to lose its way at the turn of this year, when it stopped being about applying just punishment to a gang of murderers holed up in Afghanistan and started becoming more abstract." While I don't agree with all the conclusions Steven comes to in his post -- more below on that -- I think that the momentum of the War On Terrorism (WOT) pretty well spent itself with the questionably successful "cleanup operations" in Afghanistan and the turning of our attentions to the seemingly insoluble conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. In addition, the warbloggers' temporary, war-inspired support of the U.S. government crumbled as the spirit of battle was lost and the warbloggers, so many of whom are either center-leftists who'd always disliked Bush or libertarians who dislike government on principle, began rediscovering all the reasons why their temporary support of the Administration was so remarkable to begin with.

Thus you see things like Meryl Yourish regaining her distaste for conservative polemicists, beginning with that batshit nutjar Ann Coulter, and DailyPundit daily discovering more of the sort of governmental idiocy that hardly gives us much reason to trust the Administration anymore. My inclination is that the desire to preserve the spirit and camaraderie that drove the warblogosphere early on is one reason why warbloggers have been digging down further into the barrel of antiwar sentiments in order to keep finding things to point at and mock.

Though this is not entirely unjustified -- I think, for one thing, that the warbloggers' continued yelling about the apparently fine line between opposition to Israeli policies and anti-Semitism might help keep people who are sometimes disquieted by Israel's actions from stepping over that line -- it is also bringing about some of the spiritless invective that Steven points up in his blog post.

That said, I don't think Steven is particularly on-target with his criticism of bloggers' ramblings about Europe as being a sign of a gnawing realization that Europeans are right that the WOT has gone off the rails. He's probably right in some cases, but I think overall it is partly motivated by a need to keep the warblogger spirit up, so the bloggers don't lose the aformentioned camaraderie altogether, and partly a matter of being truly offended by the way Europeans look at the U.S. with apparent cluelessness.

Understand here that I'm not talking about the aforementioned backslapping bloggers who just link to each other with shoutouts and hosannas and rarely contribute any original thoughts of their own. I know those bloggers are out there, because I see their blogs every once in a while, but I generally stick to the blogs written by people who actually do try to find something original to say. But even those who do post thoughtfully and intelligently, including Jeff Goldstein, Steven Den Beste, Andrea Harris, and even Steven Chapman himself have taken facile European commentators to task time and again.

That's not so much a matter of Raskolnikov-like defensiveness (which would seem to awkwardly cast Europe as a sleuthing, knowing Petrovich) but a matter of trying to articulate the fact that Americans really are looking on the world with as much sophistication as we can muster, which is as much as Europeans can muster as well, and that when our views diverge the reason is something other than Americans' putative dimness. The seeming venom of warbloggers' response, in my opinion, really stems from anger and frustration at being constantly tweaked and condescended to, the same treatment warbloggers were sure they were getting from Brendan O'Neill (see my post just below this one for more on the O'Neill flamefest). In many cases, this condescension is wrapped around outlooks on war and terrorism that the thinking warbloggers have already considered and rejected, which is what temporarily turned them into fist-pumping warbloggers in the first place.

However!

However, I think the warbloggers were too quick to take the bait and turn right around with flaming condescension and vitriol directed back at Europe, with trumped-up charges of endemic racism and peace-in-our-time naïvete that don't stick very well to the real Europe, which we know perfectly well (partly from reading European bloggers!) doesn't any more agree with the wibblings of Chris Patten than Americans agree with every bit of self-contradictory silliness coming out of the Bush Administration nowadays.

The anti-Europe mockery was kind of fun for a while, because it was a gut thrill to give back the kind of insults we were so used to receiving, but it's high time we got back to rediscovering all the common sentiment we discovered with Europe in the early weeks after 9/11. Reading great blogs by Europeans (and sentimental ex-Europeans) like Vegard Valberg, Maarten Schenk, Teemu Lehtonen, Emmanuelle Richard and Léo Le Brun is one of the ways we can do that.

I also have to disagree somewhat with Chapman's complaint that the WOT has become far too nebulous and is no longer the simple search for the perpetrators of 9/11 that we initially were promising. I agree with him that the scrambling to downplay Osama bin Laden's importance since we still haven't found him is disingenuous, but I would also point out that we've known all along, and Bush has been saying ever since 9/11, that the WOT he had in mind would be a years-long campaign that would not be limited to a single "hot war" or a simple search for bin Laden and his pals.

Meanwhile, though I sympathize in general with the warbloggers' hope that the moral conviction behind the war might enable the U.S. to cut off its friendly ties to odious regimes like the Saudi entity, and with luck to eliminate those regimes altogether, I nonetheless think Chapman and I agree that the warbloggers' calls for "regime change" in one country after another have been far too glib and ignore the difficult reality of trying to do such a thing without unduly jeopardizing the people with the misfortune to live in those countries. After all, one of the main reasons we'd like to "regime change" those countries is to open up the possibility of a better life (by our standards, naturally) for the people who have to live there. Right, guys? Um, right?

2002-07-16T10:46:00.000-04:00

A quick take on the O'Neill flamefest

I was a little disquieted by the vast flaming response that Brendan O'Neill got for what he calls his post on bad blogging, albeit not out of any great sympathy on my part for O'Neill. I tend to regard O'Neill as overly smarmy and (like much of the blogosphere, including yours truly on occasion) far too quick to misstate others' positions for the sake of a cheap shot (the most recent example being his reprehensible mischaracterization of the letter-to-Iran thing; sorry, Brendan, but when someone insinuates that I'm nothing but a condescending racist, I have a right to be pissed off, and I am).

However, it seems that another of these cross-pond differences in terminology made the flaming much more acrimonious than it needed to be. Brendan wasn't calling for an editor to tell people what to write and what not to write about, he was telling people they need a "sub-editor", a Hiberno-Britic term that I understand is roughly congruent with the U.S. term "copyeditor". In other words, he was calling for someone who could correct bloggers' misspellings and punctuational anomalies and help them clean up their overly labored prose -- not exactly something that should have inspired as much righteous indignation as has poured out of the rest of the blogosphere. (Iain Murray tried to stress this distinction as well.)

2002-07-15T19:54:00.000-04:00

Trojan cargo ships?

A few days ago I noted some news surrounding the early "homeland security" initiatives aimed to prevent ocean shipping from being subverted by terrorists, and the transportation industry's interest in being able to work with these security efforts without their commerce being overly delayed or disrupted. It looks like the issue is gaining more prominence, figuring into a New York Times op-ed today by Bob Herbert.

Herbert's column discusses a few of the ways terrorists could take advantage of the containerized-cargo system, including an anecdote regarding "an Egyptian-born Canadian citizen" who was caught in October by Italian authorities who found him hiding out in a cargo container outfitted with all modern conveniences, even a satellite phone. Herbert's first big politico-quote in the piece comes from Sen. John Breaux, but it looks like the early legislative action is a bill co-sponsored by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and John Warner (R-Va.) to fund high-tech sensors designed to detect "nuclear material" within the cargo containers aboard a ship.

In my earlier post, I recommended looking to transportation trade publications such as the Journal of Commerce to get the early view on how the industry's response will shape up. The couple of columns published thus far are mostly overviews and speculation, which gives me the impression that the industry response hasn't completely crystallized yet in the absence of clear indications of how the new regulation will shape up. Meantime, the JoC's press releases page contains a release about a transportation-security summit scheduled for Sept. 18-19 at the Javits Center in New York.

I'm going to be keeping an eye on this area of the news because I have a feeling it's going to turn into something big. (Longtime D.C. watchers are also probably wondering when Norman Mineta is going to formulate a response to the fact that he, as Transportation Secretary, appears to be out of the loop on this important transportation issue, with the apparent regulatory focus being on the Homeland Security department.) In the meantime, I note that this transportation trade publication has a sort of blog of its own.

2002-07-15T14:20:00.000-04:00

The question's on everyone's mind

There have been ripplings through the blogosphere already regarding just what is up with the constant drumbeat of newspaper stories claiming to lay out all the U.S.'s plans for fighting a war in Iraq. In his column today at the WaPo site, Howard Kurtz is also musing about whether there has "ever, in recorded history, been such an open discussion of war plans as with Iraq". He quotes from a Wall Street Journal piece then concludes, "Why don't we just send Saddam a telegram and save the newsprint?"

Kurtz has been out ahead of the pundit pack before, so 'twouldn't surprise me to see this question gaining more prominence in the punditocracy over the coming days. If we do assume there's some kind of strategy behind these leaks--not for nothing is this administration known as having seriously tight control over its people's contact with the press--then the remaining question is whether it's all being orchestrated as a single strategy or whether there are different factions within the administration pursuing their own tactics through leaks to favored reporters. (This latter phenomenon was not unknown in the Clinton administration, as Kurtz himself extensively documented in his book Spin Cycle.)

Howard also hosts a weekly Web chat on the Post's Web site, and this issue came up in a couple of questions during today's chat session too. In response to a questioner from Houston, Kurtz expresses doubt that this is a strategy of misinformation and says if it is one, it's just confused everyone by the constantly changing storyline. At the end of the chat, Kurtz confesses that "It's hard to figure out the administration's motive at this point." Not that that'll stop us from trying, eh, Howie?

2002-07-15T13:45:00.000-04:00

Back with a vengeance

Meryl Yourish is blogging again from her new digs somewhere to the south of me and is already far enough back into the groove that she's sporting the best headline ever: "Anti-semites of the world: Die". Looks like that's only the beginning of what will be a productive week of off-the-bandwagon blogging. That southern air must be good for her -- or maybe it's the easy access to that special institution that I miss the most about living in the South.

Been there yet, Meryl? And if you need somebody to show you the difference between "scattered, covered and chunked" and "scattered, smothered and topped", hey, there are several locations between you and D.C. along I-95, including the Dumfries location that's maybe an hour's drive from where I live. My treat.

2002-07-15T12:45:00.000-04:00

Because it's that important:

AN OPEN LETTER IN SUPPORT OF THE PEOPLE OF IRAN FROM THE WEBLOGGING COMMUNITY

We are not politicians, nor are we generals. We hold no power to dispatch diplomats to negotiate; we can send no troops to defend those who choose to risk their lives in the cause of freedom.

What power we have is in our words, and in our thoughts. And it is that strength which we offer to the people of Iran on this day.

Across the diverse and often contentious world of weblogs, each of us has chosen to put aside our differences and come together today to declare our unanimity on the following simple principles:

- That the people of Iran are allies of free men and women everywhere in the world, and deserve to live under a government of their own choosing, which respects their own personal liberties

- That the current Iranian regime has failed to create a free and prosperous society, and attempts to mask its own failures by repression and tyranny

We do not presume to know what is best for the people of Iran; but we are firm in our conviction that the policies of the current government stand in the way of the Iranians ability to make those choices for themselves.

And so we urge our own governments to turn their attention to Iran. The leaders and diplomats of the world's democracies must be clear in their opposition to the repressive actions of the current Iranian regime, but even more importantly, must be clear in their support for the aspirations of the Iranian people.

And to the people of Iran, we say: You are not alone. We see your demonstrations in the streets; we hear of your newspapers falling to censorship; and we watch with anticipation as you join the community of the Internet in greater and greater numbers. Our hopes are with you in your struggle for freedom. We cannot and will not presume to tell you the correct path to freedom; that is for you to choose. But we look forward to the day when we can welcome your nation into the community of free societies of the world, for we know with deepest certainty that such a day will come.

Interested readers can also visit these blogs:

Hossein Derakhshan - in English

Not Exactly - in English

Zahra - in Farsi

Shoutouts to Random Jottings and Spleenville.

2002-07-12T12:21:00.000-04:00

Al who? Qaeda? Never heard of him

Well, at least Richard Reid will have a hard time claiming that his attorneys didn't try to give him a vigorous defense, even though they failed again with their latest ploy -- an attempt to get the words "al Qaeda" removed from the indictment against him because it might be prejudicial. Hell's bells, Dickie, I'd say it's even worse that nobody will ever write about you again without using the term "shoebomber". Frankly, I think this idea of coming up with mocking and condescending terms like that one should be the new fad for the press, to take the place of giving baddies (and suspected baddies) dangerous and mysterious-sounding sobriquets like "Night Stalker" and "Hillside Strangler".

Meanwhile, as Reid's defense bumbles along, Johnny Walker's lawyers are similarly grasping at straws with an attempt to claim that Johnny's comments to a CNN reporter in Afghanistan ought to be thrown out of court because Johnny wasn't read his rights first. Sure, the interview did take place in a part of the world where government control of the media is the accepted way of doing business, but Johnny's lawyers are going to have a helluva time convincing anyone that a CNN reporter was acting on behalf of the Bush-era U.S. government.

The lawyers are, of course, doing what defense attorneys have to do -- casting about for any theory they can think of that might get the defendant off the hook. But with half-assed efforts like these, it's no wonder that Wacko Zacko is so desperate for the chance to fend for himself.

2002-07-12T11:44:00.000-04:00

No, no, dear God, no!

The Verizon DSL service at my apartment has been pretty good as long as only the machines are involved. Unfortunately, through a series of snafus, some humans got involved last week and I was cut off. Now, they're saying my service might not be back up until Wednesday! That's five days from now!

I need to take some deep breaths and figure out how I'm going to survive until then with only an old 56k modem at my disposal. Send in your suggestions.

2002-07-12T07:22:00.000-04:00

Deconstruction

After a physics prof at Swarthmore speculated that the hijacked jets on 9/11 may have come closer to toppling the Twin Towers than the conventional wisdom has it, the Little Green Footballs discussion board started up quite an interesting discussion of the possibilities. LGF's comments boards sometimes collapse too quickly into backslapping bash-the-Arabs festivals, but most of the comments on this thread have something interesting to say. (And Dan Hartung of Lake Effect adds these words of reassurance: "There is, at least, one thing we can count on: there's no such thing as an experienced suicide terrorist.")

2002-07-11T14:18:00.000-04:00

Memespotting

Over at War Now!, our buddy Bruce Hill thinks he's got the perfect name for whatever totalitarian regime might be instituted by Greens looking to keep his homeland ideologically pure. Taking a page from the Cambodian playbook, Bruce suggests Khmer Vert.

Hey, I'm more than happy to help spread the neologism around, although I'm still disappointed that not many people have run with "oil libel" as the indisputably apt name for the tiresome cliché that military actions in certain parts of the world are always motivated by petroleum. (Or will we just have to wait for the next grand fisking of Rall before we get a chance to test that one out?)

2002-07-11T13:30:00.000-04:00

Memo to Bud Selig

I don't particularly follow baseball, but I've been hearing a lot about this All-Star Game that had to be ended with a tie score because the teams had already used up all their pitchers and couldn't reintroduce any that had already been taken out of the game. The game reportedly ended with boos from the crowd, and apparently all the fans are still up in arms about this neglect of the audience's desire for a conclusive score -- but apologists for the baseball officials keep insisting you can't play a game of baseball without a pitcher to put the ball over the plate.

Come on, what's the matter with you people? Haven't you ever heard of tee-ball?

2002-07-11T13:00:00.000-04:00

PT Cruiser

Robert Ballard, already famous as the guy who finally found the wreckage of the Titanic, has announced that he's pretty sure he's found the wreck of PT-109, which was commanded by twentysomething John F. Kennedy during World War II. National Geographic has the story along with pretty pictures, including heartwarming images of sea life making one of the PT boat's torpedoes a nice new home.

Oh, if only it weren't for the Kennedy connection, we could sit breathlessly and wait for Ann Coulter to trumpet this photo as proof that weapons of war really can be life-giving to children and other living things.

2002-07-11T12:03:00.000-04:00

American badass

The Bin Laden Boys should have plenty to fear once it becomes clear to them that the fringes of American society remain full of lawless men drifting from one gritty saloon to another to make some quick lucre from the cutthroat competitions that play out under the smoke-stained neon lights. Lawless men such as Montykins.

2002-07-11T09:45:00.000-04:00

War chest

Hooray for American strippers! Not only are they providing another reason for radical Islamists to get hot under the collar, but they just might be at the front line of our defense against would-be baddies. Remember the reports that some of the 9/11 hijackers had spent time in a Florida strip club bragging vaguely about their upcoming exploits? Well, it appears that one of the young ladies at a Texas topless joint dutifully spoke up about similar braggadocio from some customers of hers recently.

(If you've read the article to the end -- I know what you're thinking, but the "Want to be kept abreast of news, as it happens" tag apparently shows up at the end of every wire-service piece on JWR's Web site.)

[Link via Taranto]

2002-07-11T08:48:00.000-04:00

Fear of Outlook unabated

War Liberal Mac notes this AP article and comments:

Hey, PGP has a flaw that "could allow hackers to attack a user's computer and, in some circumstances, unscramble messages". Oopsie!

Microsoft immediately announced a research program to figure out who's stealing their security flaws.

Actually, the article makes clear that the security flaw is not with PGP itself but with a plugin (apparently made by Network Associates) designed to make it easier to use PGP with Microsoft Outlook. Ah, Outlook -- is there anything that program can't do to help out the crackers of the world? (The flaw also reportedly affects only the plugin for the official Outlook, not the plugin for the free version Outlook Express.)

The wire service's article also contains some of that entertainingly baffled general-media reporting on technology mattters: Even Philip Zimmerman, the guy what thunk up PGP, uses a plugin to encrypt his mail with PGP! Except he uses the plugin for Eudora! Because he uses Eudora! Not Outlook! This proves something, we're sure!

2002-07-10T11:24:00.000-04:00

Pump Up the Jamnet

So, if there really are going to be "Janet Reno Dance Party" fundraisers -- will Reno at least attend them herself, dressed as a candy kid raver girl?

Please?

[tip o' the keyboard to Bill Quick]

2002-07-10T10:26:00.000-04:00

Wartime notes from the Pink Lady

Britain's Financial Times is continuing to post its enormous special report on weapons of mass destruction, consisting of a number of articles contending, among other things, that Iraq is trying to get weapons expertise from Ukraine and that biology will dominate 21st Century weapons development just as physics dominated 20th Century weapons development. I think there's still another day to go before the FT finishes publishing all these investigative reports, so bookmark this special section and keep going back till you've read it all. (If only I were VodkaPundit, so I could make this Required Reading.)

2002-07-10T10:06:00.000-04:00

Taking the pith

I was over at Jeff G.'s Protein Wisdom reading the discussion of Jeff's parody of a Tom Tomorrow strip and found this little nugget of wisdom from Jeff that may as well be the motto for the entire warblogger cause:

When someone blows shit up, says he's going to blow more shit up, and bothers to tell me why (over and over and over again), I listen. I don't feel the need to psychoanalyze them.

Somebody frame those words.

Meanwhile, Jeff is hoping that more people will take an interest in another post of his, this one dealing with claims that the Kamehameha historical narrative ought to be the sole property of people of Hawaiian ethnic ancestry.

2002-07-08T18:58:00.000-04:00

No such thing as a trivial reason

Over at OpinionJournal, Brendan Minter writes of the little reasons to hate Osama -- for putting terror into so many otherwise barely remarkable events in New York. Heat lightning mistaken for the flash of a small nuke, smoke in a subway tunnel arousing suspicions of chemical or bio attacks, or police activity endlessly delaying a cab ride. Minter thinks these reasons to hate Osama are "comparatively trivial", but I see no reason to trivialize the desire to reclaim a normal life.

I moved to an apartment a short walk from my workplace a couple of months ago, but before then, I rode Washington D.C.'s subways nearly every day, and I remember the anxiety that sometimes built up, particularly when the anthrax attacks were claiming one D.C. postal worker after another. The merest hint of a fellow passenger's perfume had me worrying that some terrorist had mixed a pleasing scent into a toxic brew to encourage us to breathe deeply. I remember seeing all the commuters in a crowded rush-hour train look around nervously when the train made a big THUMP on the tracks that otherwise would have passed unremarkably.

Sometimes I got so nervous that my flop sweat would fall from my forehead onto my forearm and I would get a brief scare that it was a droplet of something deadly being spread around by a terrorist walking down the center aisle like a priest with a censer of incense. I was a wreck, and it took some serious willpower to get myself back under control. Now I'm mostly doing fine -- or so I tell myself, until I get one of those chills like I got the night of July 3 when I suddenly began hearing the explosions of a fireworks display in my neighborhood that I didn't know about ahead of time.

I got over that quickly and walked outside to watch the festivities, standing along the street near a bunch of happy kids wearing those cheap multicolored glow-in-the-dark necklaces.

All the more reason to make sure Osama, or whoever succeeds him, doesn't have the opportunity to take that carefree childhood away from them.

2002-07-08T12:55:00.000-04:00

Counterterrorism vs. free trade?

The Associated Press reports that there has been some business backlash against the idea of integrating the Customs Service into the new homeland-security department, as some businesses and port officials fear the department's focus on combating crime would trump Customs' mission of faciliating crossborder trade. It might be easy to dismiss these fears as those of an industry unable to come to grips with how The World Has Changed since the 9/11 attacks, but at least to some extent I'd say the businesses' concerns are of a piece with air travelers' frets about how increased airline security is just making their travel more difficult without actually doing much to fight terrorism.

With that in mind, it's probably a good idea to consider some of the other arguments pointed up by people complaining about the passenger airlines' security measures. Specifically, just as people think it's a little kooky to be patting down 95-year-old grandmothers and former U.S. vice presidents on the way to the departure lounge, it would probably also be a good idea to avoid a scattershot examination of every container coming through every marine terminal if possible. In the interest of keeping the ports moving while doing something genuinely productive to fight terrorism, the homeland-security folks would be well advised to link their proposed shared database of terrorist intelligence to the systems the Customs Service uses to screen questionable cargo as it arrives. I'm not altogether optimistic about whether this could actually be implemented without being sidetracked by one political boondoggle or another.

An interesting bit in the AP article is the Bush administration's suggestion that the counterterrorism effort could actually improve crossborder trade:

For example, officials point to a program called Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism that offers companies faster clearance at U.S. borders if they invest in better security all along the supply chain. Another program, the Container Security Initiative, expedites processing at U.S. ports for ship containers that are screened at foreign seaports.

Now, the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism program doesn't sound like a bad idea in the abstract, but the reality is that freight companies already invested billions in supply-chain management technology during the IT boom of the late '90s, when it was easier to make a business case for throwing megabucks at companies like Manugistics and SAP in return for hardware and software that's just as susceptable to the downside of Moore's Law as any other. Now that the economy is barely pulling itself out of the doldrums, and the oil prices that are life-and-death to fuel-dependent freight companies are poised to rise, the companies are expected to invest in security technology on top of all that? You know what that means: More big government handouts are likely to ensue, I'm sure. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but we'd best start considering now just how much we're willing to let the government spend in getting the freight companies up to date with security technology, and how to avoid the sort of government tech-contracting nightmares that California Gov. Gray Davis has run into with his dealings with Oracle.

Be on the lookout for more on this from transportation-related sources like the Journal of Commerce.

2002-07-08T12:22:00.000-04:00

International pop overthrow

Tim Blair points to a story about a dancer who has found himself sentenced in Iran for corrupting the youth by giving dancing lessons -- even though he wasn't giving the lessons in Iran, he was giving them in Los Angeles.

I'll pass up the opportunity to make the obvious sneer ("oh, so that's where Belgium got the idea of trying anyone for anything they do anywhere in the world that the Belgians consider a crime") and just mention that this makes me wonder what would really happen to the protagonist of SF writer Bruce Sterling's 1999 novel Zeitgeist, in which international hustler Leggy Starlitz is promoting a pathetic prefab girl group in the Middle East (until he meets up with his 11-year-old daughter and feels the need to teach her how to live on the fringe more productively than he does). Reading this bit of magic-realist pastiche recently, I was struck by the similarity of its clash-of-civilizations banter and world-encompassing political sweep to the sorts of things the warbloggers today are obsessing over. Sterling's protagonist namechecks Jihad vs. McWorld and Osama bin Laden and ponders whether the country Ataturk created can lead the rest of the Islamic world into the future -- and this in a short, breezy novel written a few years before the 9/11 attacks happened. To warbloggers looking for some quick and entertaining reading over the summer, I recommend giving Zeitgeist a look.

2002-07-08T10:13:00.000-04:00

Girl on girl

Asparagirl is proudly speculating on which sexy part of her site has consigned her to being blocked by certain child-protection software. Unfortunately, I suspect it's something as simple as the last four letters of her nickname, because someone I know also discovered that his nanny-protected computer at work was preventing him from accessing the brilliant Web comic Cat and Girl. Surely no kid would ever have a reason to want to visit a site with the word "girl" in its title -- right? And it wouldn't surprise me if I'm getting blocked for much the same reason, particularly considering some of the bizarro search-engine terms that have apparently brought quite a few disappointed deviants to my site.

2002-07-07T19:54:00.000-04:00

The customer is always...

So the EU paid for economists at a London-based think tank to do a study on how globalization has affected the poor of the world. Unfortunately, the economists came up with the wrong answer, and the European Commission felt the need to distance itself from some of the report's analysis, even as it endorsed the broad conclusions of the report. (Why, the report even notes that places like China have developed impressively amid economic globalization, and wonders whether Africa's poor performance could be, rather than a result of globalization's effects, actually the result of internal problems keeping it from seeing the benefits of globalization.)

2002-07-07T19:46:00.000-04:00

Loosening the ~~apron~~purse strings

The NYT has an interesting piece on stock traders who are seeking psychological counseling to help them cope with their responsibilities during a market downturn:

Now that the bubble has burst, investors are not seeking the courage to be poor. Patients want their heads examined to regain their wealth.

Behavioral economists warn of "the endowment effect," the tendency of investors to endow stock they own with more value than it has. (A variation on the old Neopolitan saying, "Even a cockroach is beautiful to its mother.") A corollary is that even seasoned investors place too much faith in tips and insider hints.

Interestingly enough, even this seemingly innocuous bit of psychobabble has its detractors:

There are, however, traders who argue that the financial world in the 1990's relied too much on therapists — and antianxiety medication.

"My own view is that one reason the investor class, including me, missed the downside was serotonin," James J. Cramer, a former hedge fund manager and author of "Confessions of a Street Addict" (Simon & Schuster, 2002), said, referring to a substance in the brain that antidepression drugs augment. "Prozac and all those other drugs banish the `this is the end of the world' thoughts," Mr. Cramer explained. "Which means you are not as anxious as you should be about an obvious down side."

And to think people used to use the term "market psychology" as a metaphor.

2002-07-07T19:36:00.000-04:00

You see why we hate them?

The WaPo has released the results of its latest comics-readers' poll, and it's all I need to remind me of why I use a Perl script to filch comics from all over the Web for me every day.

Believe you me, I can understand the sentimental appeal of sticking with long-lived comics forever, but letting some of the creaky old strips die is a way to open up spaces on the page for interesting new artists doing interesting new things with the comic form. That's something Bill Watterson understood, which is why I can't lament too much his decision to end Calvin and Hobbes after 10 brilliant years.

Unfortunately, this reader's poll shows why editors are resistant to drop the older stuff. Out of the strips in the top 10 for "love it!", only Zits and Dilbert are less than 15 years old. I guess I'll just have to admit to myself that I'm the odd man out on this one. And thank my lucky stars for the Net, which improves on the old print media in so many ways even in cases when it relies on them for some of its content, as with blogs and online versions of syndicated comics.

2002-07-07T19:30:00.000-04:00

You see why we love him?

Sure, you got your pundits all over the blogosphere, but it would take Den Beste to come up with object-oriented terrorism. What a guy.

On a tangentially related note: I'm only an amateur programmer, but I can say that my understanding of object-oriented design improved dramatically when I started using a MOO a few months ago. Any learning programmers out there having a hard time getting their brains around OOP, I recommend trying a MOO sometime. That's what they're there for.

2002-07-05T17:27:00.000-04:00

Treacher's Disease

For the past three days I've seemingly been experiencing the same illness that has befallen Gentleman Jim Treacher. Could we have given it to each other? Where does Treacher live, anyway? Wait, this is D.C.! It must be ANTHRAX!

One of the problems of the surfeit of bloggers is that I sometimes miss out on ones that are really good, like Meryl Yourish. How come nobody told me until now that her site is so entertaining? Have you all been holding out on me?

2002-07-04T23:40:00.000-04:00

More on Hatfill and the "Greendale School"

Following up on my previous discussion of allegations that bioweapons researcher Steven Hatfill had lived near a "Greendale School" when he was studying in Africa, a reader writes (in part):

Google "Greendale" and "maurice_clayton" in the newsgroups and you'll find the definitive evidence that there is no Greendale School in the Harare or Greendale area and never was one.

Someone (not law enforcement) planted the false suggestion based on their recollection of a Greengrove school, one of the schools there.

Doing the search he suggests reveals that a Usenet poster named Maurice was looking into the names of schools in the Harare area and indeed can find no evidence of there being a Greendale School there. One of Maurice's posts, regarding a Nick Kristoff column, criticizes the press for relying so heavily on the ABC News report that seemed to be the sole source for most of the news stories about Hatfill allegedly living near a Greendale School.

Though I'm still open to evidence that there was a Greendale School near Harare when Hatfill was there, this new information has led me to the provisional conclusion that the "Hatfill lived near a Greendale School" meme was a juicy bit of info that made it into one press account and spread around a lot from there, without further substantiation.

2002-07-03T18:01:00.000-04:00

Wrong and wronger.

Anti-warblogger Amir Butler is more than just a little bit skeptical of the reports that al Qaeda is working with Hezbollah. While he's right that I shouldn't have called the report "proof" (rather than "evidence"), he otherwise seems to have failed to read the news story. He complains that the U.S. is too clueless to recognize the sizable rift between Wahhabi and Shi'ite Muslims -- and while it's true that the news story doesn't mention Wahhabism specifically, the very second paragraph of the article does treat it as remarkable that the predominantly Sunni al Qaeda would be working with the largely Shi'ite Hezbollah, and later paragraphs cite some officials' doubts that the two groups could have completely buried their differences.

In addition, he indicates that the only source for the news story was "unnamed U.S. officials", although the story itself goes farther than that, citing "U.S. and European intelligence officials and terrorism experts." There's a great deal more in the story, sufficient detail to indicate to this reader that even if the alliance is not what the unidentified sources are making it out to be, it's hardly just the tiny, glib bit of disinformation that Butler would like it to be.

2002-07-03T08:25:00.000-04:00

A strange, hippie-like consistency

Tim Blair is requesting submissions of the worst political lyrics in popular song. Well, if you're willing to stretch the definition of "political" only slightly, I think this one can't be denied:

"Someone's always playing corporation games!
Who cares? They're always changing corporation names!"
(from "We Built This City" by Starship, formerly named
Jefferson Starship, formerly named Jefferson Airplane)

2002-07-03T07:32:00.000-04:00

Ignore this juvenilia

So, up until now you could just go tinkle and poo-poo with abandon all over SF? Does that mean you could pee off the Golden Gate Bridge if you were careful to stand in a part of the bridge within the city limits? What if you didn't just have to pee -- could you rig up one of these to the bridge's superstructure and play "bombs away"?

(I know, I'm sorry, but I couldn't hold it in any longer.)

2002-07-02T14:48:00.000-04:00

...and so on ad infinitum

Ted Rall tells us that "Bush is Ariel Sharon's bitch," while the much wiser political commentator George Michael is convinced that Tony Blair is Bush's poodle. Given that Bush must be one of the bigger breeds of lady dog (a greyhound, perhaps) in order to keep a poodle as a pet, just what sort of tiny animal friend does Blair have? And how many more links do we have to follow down this chain before we find a single-celled organism small enough to represent Crown Prince Abdullah?

(Or is this one of those Disney cartoon-style things wherein Mickey Mouse can perfectly well have a dog smaller than him as a pet plus another bipedal dog a little taller than him as a good buddy?)