Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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I'm underemployed (historically particularly as an editor in book and magazine publishing), recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring severe clinical depression. See here for a major crisis. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. This is a previous update on my situation & this -- and this from December 19th, 2005 update.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their "tendency" is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The lutefisk is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this gefilte fish.
No, really, I seriously need the help at present. And I hate asking.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 606
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 30 sign-ups; 22 cancellations; Total= 8
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 7 sign-ups; 3 cancellation; Total= 4
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And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub,"
chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer
to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals." (Note: I have to say I don't give that much of a damn any more.)
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying.
(Note: Partially suspended for the Duration. Later note: forget I ever said this.)
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog.
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object.
-- Hilzoy
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
A key figure in the Sept. 11 plot who fled Hamburg, Germany, last October has been held in secret detention in Syria after being first arrested in Morocco and expelled to Damascus with U.S. knowledge, according to German and Arab intelligence sources.
The debriefing of Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a German citizen of Syrian origin who has told his interrogators that he recruited key hijacker Mohammed Atta, is an extraordinary example of the way Sept. 11 has redefined U.S. engagement with regimes it once vilified.
No shit.
We're acquiesing, or encouraging, or possibly causing, the disappearing of people so they can be turned over to regimes like Syria, so they can use their famous persuasive techniques, and presumably turn results over to US agencies. And Syria and like-minded regimes aren't doing this out of the famous goodness of their hearts: what have they bought for their colloboration?
And Syrian officials have begun to complain that the United States is not acknowledging its assistance in the war against terrorism. According to Arab intelligence sources, the Syrian debriefing of Zammar, 41, is providing the United States with critical information on the genesis of the plot to attack New York and Washington as well al Qaeda's structure and possible plans.
What have they bought? When will we find out?
Will it have been worth the price?
This is truly dark territory, and I fear it.
And the beauty of this example, is that this is the result of the fierce protection of civil rights against intelligence snooping in Germany, which, for understandable historical reasons, has the strongest laws against domestic surveillance in Europe.
There is, however, no public warrant for Zammar's arrest and he left Germany freely on Oct. 27. While German officials suspected him of involvement, they said they had no evidence to charge and arrest him.
And that's why the US made a deal with the devil, Syria, because the purer Germans respected their own laws.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET PRIORITIES WRONG: if you're the FBI, that is.
For much of the 1990's, some former agents say, the Arizona division, preoccupied with fighting drugs, treated international terrorism as a low priority, even though Tucson had been one of the nation's earliest hubs for radical Muslim groups.
"This has always been the lowest priority in the division; it still is the lowest priority in the division," said James Hauswirth, who retired from the Phoenix office in 1999 but stays in contact with other agents.
[...]
Mr. Gonzalez agrees that the top priority in the office before Sept. 11 was fighting drugs, because of Arizona's standing as a busy transshipment point for narcotics from Mexico.
[...]
Resources to fight terrorism were limited, however. The Arizona division grew enormously during the 1990's, partly because of antidrug programs like the Southwest Border Initiative. Of the division's current total of 230 agents, Mr. Gonzalez said, roughly 60 are dedicated to drug work, while about 16 handle international and domestic terrorism, a task that includes monitoring domestic militias; one former agent says the number of agents dedicated to guarding against international terrorism is about eight. In last year's annual ranking of office priorities, Mr. Gonzalez said, drugs ranked first, international terrorism fourth.
Some would say "they couldn't have known before September 11th how important anti-terrorism should have been," but there's a pretty good case against that position. Even more, though, there's a case that September 11th could be considered a result of the War on Some Drugs.
Using Phoenix as an example in microcosm, if prohibition of recreational drugs had been done away with, or if at least had there had been decriminalization, instead of 60 agents, maybe 6 would have been necessary (how many agents does ATF devote to illegal alcohol:?), leaving 54 for other tasks. And, of course, if therre were legalization and taxation, the amount of tax money raised could have paid for well more than another 60 local anti-terrorism agents.
The details in this story are more than suggestive. I should also note that the story of how the Phoenix office of the FBI came so close to hitting on the September 11th plot, but by being held back, missed it, is damned important, and fascinating.
THE BIGGEST CRITICS: Interesting piece and interviews with the two chief Senatorial critics of the FBI and CIA: Republican Senators Charles Grassley of Iowa and Richard Shelby of Alabama. Grassley will tell you why the FBI needs watchdogging, and Shelby tells everyone that George Tenet, DCI, should be fired. They both think Congress has been far too deferential to both agencies.
6/19/2002 12:01:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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Tuesday, June 18, 2002
QUANTUM TELEPORTATION OF LIGHT allegedly took place, and I'll declare that I'm not sure there's a lot of point to blogging a couple of hundred words of Yahoo News on this, it's so abbreviated, and, to be sure, nor do I have the technical expertise to fairly evaluate it. But, I'm presenting, you can follow up.
Lam said he believes the process, called "quantum teleportation" and which takes a nanosecond — one billionth of one second — will soon be used for teleporting matter.
"My prediction is if we are not doing it, it will probably be done by someone in the next three to five years, that is the teleportation of a single atom or a small group of atoms," he said.
SPEAKING OF BRILLIANT BRITISH JOURNALISM: Here's a subhead:
For the first time in more than 70 years, Americans may regulate business again.
Uh, right. This is about as accurate as saying "Americans find moon made of green cheese; eat it!" It's a wonder people in Britain know anything about America given how awful, and factually wrong, so much of the reporting is. In a vastly lesser offense, but still simply making it up, another bit of the same sub-head:
Americans have spent the past two centuries legislating to ensure that their politicians can never wield too much power. The Enron scandal has made them realise they have been reining back the wrong people. All the time, the real power and money was being seized by business people, and specifically by executive directors of publicly listed corporations.
Which is basically a combination of a dash of fact, a load of wishful thinking, and a completely subjective opinion. But I'm still marveling at the idea that the EPA doesn't exist, ditto OSHA, the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Americans With Disabilities Act, and about a jillion more business regulations regularly passed every year. And they actually get away with printing this insanity.
6/18/2002 06:37:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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CORRUPT JOURNALISM is what the New Statemansays Britain has.
[...]
Print journalism is now the most corrupt realm of public life in Britain.
[...]
The industry that demands the scalps of lying ministers lies to its own readers by making up stories and quotes - not just in the tabloids and the diary sections, but in the news sections of the broadsheets, too. Standards in journalism are so low that what would be a disciplinary offence anywhere else is seen as a normal perk of the job. Anything that journalists complain about others doing, they almost certainly routinely do themselves. But because we are all in on it and benefit from it, we keep quiet about it with a sneaky smugness.
Leading speakers for each of the major newspapers held a press conference subsequent to the appearance of this article, and, hanging their heads in shame, in turn stepped forward to declare "yes, we, too, are guilty," and explained that they were shutting down their publication at the end of June, hoping new, more honest publications, would soon take their place.
THE ANTI-IMPERIALISM OF FOOLS: quite excellent New Statesmanpiece by Mick Hume, very much worth reading in entirety. A few tastes:
Western leftists find themselves in strange company when it comes to the Middle East. Are they really happy to line up with neo-Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists?
Once upon a time, a hundred years or so ago, it was fashionable to attack something called "Jewish capitalism". August Bebel, a German friend of Karl Marx, described this attempt to give anti-Semitism a progressive spin as "the socialism of fools".
Today's fashion for Israel-bashing seems to me to represent a similar foolishness. It is not old-fashioned anti-Semitism. But there is a growing tendency to endorse dubious ideas under the guise of solidarity with the Palestinians. It is the anti-imperialism of fools.
Particularly since 11 September, a strange-looking global alliance has formed against Israel, incorporating Islamic fundamentalists, European neo-Nazis and anti-globalists. Many, in all three groups, had previously shown little interest in the plight of the Palestinians: the Israeli state has become a sort of ersatz America, a symbol of all that they hate about contemporary capitalism
For Israeli, read western; and for the west, read modernity. What the anti-globalists share above all with their newfound fellow-travellers among the Islamic fundamentalists is a loss of faith in the modern age and in Enlightenment ideas. The spirit of their protests was captured by a banner at a recent rally in Berlin: "Civilisation is genocide".
[...]
Yet these newfound friends of Palestine do not seem to know much about the history of this conflict. Their websites and leaflets sloganise about "NaZionists", and how this is a war between "racism and justice" (a politically correct way of saying "good v evil"). But there is little analysis of the causes.
Some of the clumsy attempts to incorporate the Middle East into the concerns of the anti-globalisation movement border on the bizarre. Jose Bove, the French farmer and green activist, sprang to global fame when he attacked a McDonald's burger bar with a tractor, and wrecked GM crops. Last year, he turned up in a peace delegation on the West Bank. This year, he was back again, visiting Yasser Arafat's besieged compound at Ramallah. Why? Bove told the New Left Review that the Israelis are "putting in place - with the support of the World Bank - a series of neoliberal measures intended to integrate the Middle East into globalised production circuits, through the exploitation of cheap Palestinian labour". This is the kind of conspiratorial anti- capitalist-speak that we might call globaldegook.
[...]
But the anti-globalisation movement is "diving into the Middle East conflict" blindly, in pursuit of a vague and simplistic moral agenda of its own. The delegations of self-styled "internationals" who travel to the Middle East to show sympathy for the Palestinians are lauded as "the real heroes of today" on solidarity websites. Yet few of them would lie down in front of tanks if Israel really were the Nazi state they claim. The internationals seem less keen to travel to other conflicts, away from the eyes of the world media, where they might risk meeting the fate of the international solidarity activists killed during the Pinochet coup in Chile.
For many activists, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to have become a convenient outlet for the morbid emotionalism and victim-centred culture of our age. A solidarity meeting in London begins with people being searched and asked for "passes" (tickets), so that they can "experience" what life is like under Israeli occupation. Writing in the NS, one "international" announced that, having seen a warning shot fired and been woken up by the noisy Israeli air force, "I'm beginning to understand what it must be like to be a Palestinian." I am beginning to think that this might be the point of the exercise for some of these people.
There's a lot more good stuff. Here's something that, while certainly not original, stands out for me:
Western society is infected by a powerful sense of self-loathing and a rejection of its political, social and economic achievements.
This is distinguishable from entirely necessary and desirable critiques of genuine flaws, errors, and crimes that take place in the West. Beyond that -- and let's not gloss over the necessity for self-examination of Western societies and openness to systematic critiques and efforts towards improvement -- is this sense so many people have of something missing in their lives, which they transmute into a loathing of Western civilization in general, beyond all reason. It's an intriguing phenomenon that bears continued examination itself.
UP OR STAY: I'm just a civilian who reads about the military, but this is consistent with virtually every other criticism I've read of the military personnel system all my life.
But all these years later, Vandergriff argues, Marshall's system has produced a top-heavy Army with 50 percent more generals than necessary and officers obsessed with promotions that are based on pristine personnel files, not character, leadership or war-fighting capabilities.
[...]
Vandergriff isn't opposed to new technology on the battlefield. But greater reliance by U.S. commanders on better trained ground units, he said, could have made the siege of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan a lethal encirclement instead of an air operation that "pushed" hundreds of al Qaeda fighters "out the back door" and into Pakistan.
In place of the current personnel system, Vandergriff proposes policies that would emphasize unit cohesion, not individual experience. Such policies, he said, would enable entire 2,500-soldier brigades to remain together for as long as three years in order to hone their skills, be they combat or support units.
Instead of "up or out," Vandergriff proposes an "up or stay" system that would allow many officers the opportunity to concentrate on skills that make them good at what they're there for.
CATS AND HOW TO BE NOT LABELED "CONSERVATIVE": Aside from the other bits in this "Ideas Industry" column, there are two interesting elements to this one:
For the past month, Heritage Foundation computer expert Dexter Ingram has been using a Department of Defense doomsday computer program to launch nuclear strikes against Pakistan, blow up Washington, lay waste to Norfolk, drop anthrax-inducing bombs near Detroit and El Paso and otherwise wreak theoretical havoc on cities and countries around the world.
What's more, he's waging these faux cyberwars at the urgent request of some of the biggest news organizations in the country. On a single day recently, CNN, ABC News, FOX and Time magazine were on the phone demanding that Ingram use his computer to decimate something, somewhere.
Ingram's war machine is the Consequences Assessment Tool Set (CATS). This sophisticated program was developed for the Department of Defense to model what would happen if, say, India launched a nuclear strike on Pakistan -- which was precisely the scenario that ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Ingram to consider a few weeks ago.
What makes CATS unique is that it uses real-time data to make predictions. Ingram will enter the size of a nuclear device, the altitude at which the bomb detonates and the precise coordinates of ground zero. The computer then searches 150 Internet sites to collect other key data, such as the population in surrounding areas and important geographic features, as well as current wind and weather conditions. It then uses these data to produce an estimate of the damage that such a bomb would do right now.
Sometimes the results are surprising. When he ran the Stephanopoulos scenario through CATS, Ingram found that a nuclear strike by India likely would backfire -- literally. "Because of the prevailing easterly winds, all of the fallout is going to go to India. Nobody had looked at the weather," he said.
Heritage is the only think tank to acquire a copy of the closely held program, which also has been obtained by several law enforcement agencies, including the New York police counterterrorism squad.
"Anybody can request it, but you have to demonstrate a need for it," said Ingram, a former Navy aviator. "I told them I was working on homeland defense, working with people on the Hill, and they thought that was a positive thing."
Already CATS has been a positive thing for Heritage. The right-thinking think tank is working hard to win friends in the media, which Heritage thinks have tended to view it with suspicion if not outright hostility.
"When Stephanopoulos credited us on the air, he called us the 'Heritage Foundation' -- the first time ABC has called us anything other than the 'conservative Heritage Foundation,' " said tank spokesman James Weidman.
I barely need point out that CATS itself is quite interesting, just as I barely need point out how interesting it is that, regardless of whether you feel it is or is not appropriate for ABC to be labeling Heritage as "conservative," and in what context of labeling other organizations as "liberal," or whatever, that for ABC, or Stephanopoulus, or his producer, or whomever, to, according to "tank spokesman" (and there's an unusual phrasing) Weidman, change labeling policy based on favors done, is, um, notable.
6/18/2002 01:14:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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The Constitution protects the right of missionaries, politicians and others to knock on doors without first getting permission from local authorities, the Supreme Court ruled today.
[...]
In the doorstep-solicitation case, by a vote of 8 to 1, the court reasoned that the First Amendment right to free speech includes the entitlement to take a message directly to someone's door, and that the right cannot be limited by a requirement to register by name ahead of time.
"The mere fact that the ordinance covers so much speech raises constitutional concerns," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for himself and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
"It is offensive, not only to the values protected by the First Amendment, but to the very notion of a free society, that in the context of everyday public discourse a citizen must first inform the government of her desire to speak to her neighbors and then obtain a permit to do so."
Two of the court's most conservative justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, agreed with the outcome of the case but did not sign on to Stevens' reasoning.
WHY I READ SUPREME COURT DECISIONS AND YOU SHOULD, TOO: Rights, shmights, you may have them, but police don't have to tell you, no matter Miranda.
The Supreme Court ruled today that police officers seeking to search and question passengers on public buses do not have to tell them they have the right to refuse to cooperate, a decision that gives law enforcement more latitude in combating security threats in the U.S. ground transportation system.
I'm not going to quote you the rest, or the decision. That's your job. That's what the Supreme Court said in U.S. v. Drayton, No. 01-631, except for those commieterroristsymps, Justice David H. Souter, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
I feel safer already, given the vast number of buses being hijacked and blown up. After all, I saw Speed.
STRIVE TO BE: Will Willkinson of The Fly Bottlesays it well:
Killing the Intellectuals -- If you're a new tyrant, what's up near the top of your to-do list? Kill the wordsmiths! Kill the artists! Kill the musicians! Or at least, shut them up or ship them out. Why is that? Because political reality is a kind of social reality. Tyrants have guns, and guns can get you far. But the main place it gets you is a valley of acquiescence. The guns themselves cannot secure power. Only deference can secure power. And guns help with that, but don't suffice. You need to establish a set of shared representations -- shared intentions, to regard you, Mr. Tyrant, as the uncontested ruler of all you survey. You need the folk to go along. The problem with intellectuals and artists is that they trade in representations. They excel in spreading them around. And wouldn't you know it, but they're always the wrong representations, like "Mr. Tyrant is a sociopathic moneygrubbing brute of a homocidal megalomaniac and has no real authority over us, a rightfully free people who should be able to live like we want to. (And he's got a tiny cock.)" Not only do these incredibly inconvenient thoughts get around, but the eyeglasses set encode these nasty thoughts in clever little stories filled with emotion, or, heaven forbid, set them to music, which certainly gets the folks mighty riled. No good. Kill 'em all.
Here's an idea: strive to be the kind of person who, if landed in a certain kind of bad place, would be disappeared in days.
ONE OR MORE OF THREE RESPONSES: Speaking of Brad deLong, he has a spiffy account of his encounters with Chomsky admirers, and his "very, very allergic reaction" to Chomsky.
Brad wonders what the appeal of Chomsky is. I think it's simple. Chomsky is an undeniably brilliant man, certainly in his field (regardless of where he's right or wrong; that's a separate issue from brilliance). Since he supplies some of the chief intellectual underpinning for contemporary US-is-evil theory, if you cite him, you must understand the True Depth of his analysis, and thus You, Too, Are Brilliant. And those who don't see how mutually brilliant Chomsky and You are, are Clearly Fools, not to mention dupes of the establishment that Manufactures Consent.
Thus: Us: appreciate and understand Chomsky -- Brilliant. You: don't understand him -- Dupe and Fool.
Which would you rather be? It's not as if one could not accept in toto the theory that the US is overwhelmingly evil, after all. (The fact that an extremely attenuated version of this -- namely, that the US certainly has, of course, done some evil things, and that corporations at times do evil things, etc. -- has considerable truth to it, and that attention need be paid to that, and that some on the other side gloss that, gives plenty of supporting evidence for those looking for it, of course, and that does the rest of the job.)
What I object to is that Chomsky is an intellectual totalitarian. What I object to is that Chomsky tears up all the trail markers that might lead to conclusions different from his, and makes it next to impossible for people unversed in the issues to even understand what the live and much-debated points of contention are. What I object to is that Chomsky writes not to teach, but to to brainwash: to create badly-informed believers in his point of view who won't know enough about the history or the background to think the issues through for themselves.
What I object to is the lack of background, to the lack of context. In telling the history of the Cold War as it really happened--even in ten pages--there has to be a place for Stalin, an inquiry into the character of the regimes that Stalin sponsored, and an assessment of Stalinist plans and programs for expansion. And Chomsky ruthlessly suppresses half the story of the Cold War--the story of the other side of the Iron Curtain. A naive reader of Chomsky would not even know that there was a complicated and much-debated set of issues here.
MERCHANTS AND PRINCES: Brad deLong's theory of merchants and princes got a nice write-up in long-time NY Times "Big City" columnist John Tierney's last column.
My favorite explanation of the New York-Washington relationship, not to mention the history of urban civilization, is the economist Brad DeLong's theory of merchants versus princes.
Cities have always been created by merchants, the peaceful deal-makers who flourish under the protection of a relatively hands-off prince. The city becomes cosmopolitan as the merchants import money and talent: entrepreneurs and artisans to create industries; artists and entertainers to serve the new class of patrons.
But the city's growing wealth and glamour eventually attract the age's most ambitious princes. Once these conquerors add the city to their empire, their taxes and decrees drive away the merchants and artists.
MEATBAG IN SPACELAND: Rudy Rucker has posted his 37,000 words of notes for his new novel, Spaceland.
Spaceland is a retelling of Flatland, from the perspective of four-dimensional beings who discover Earth's poor, benighted three-dimensional inhabitants.
I PLEDGE ALLEGIENCE TO BIN LADEN: Extremely useful story on how the Saudis arrested in Morocco were captured, their plans to use Zodiac explosive-laden (no bins) boats to suicide bomb American and British warships passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, among other intents, and much interesting detail on their contact with bin Laden in Afghanistan, and how masses of al Queda made their way out via Pakistan with orders to go back, throughout the world, to their geographic areas of expert knowledge, to "attack American and Jewish interests."
Worth reading in entirety; too bad that these and the many other such accounts won't make any difference to those maintaining "we don't even know bin Laden was in Afghanistan, but we bombed the whole country, and killed innocent people!"
Kenneth Pollack, director for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, says the Middle East policy "seems a little like a cushion: it seems to take the shape of the last person to sit on it."
THE AL QUEDA TACO BELL: Dr. Frank has the skinny on Jose Padilla, the alleged "dirty bomb" plotter and his recruitment at the Islamically run Taco Bell he worked at with his wife:
For some reason, the anecdote about Padilla's Taco Bell name tag still makes me giggle:
In early 1993, after about six months on the job, Padilla told Javed that he had taken the name Ibrahim. Javed, the founder of a Muslim school in Sunrise, knew his employee had taken the shahadah oath, a declaration of faith that marks a conversion to Islam. But Javed refused to change Padilla's name tag because the name change was not yet official, and Padilla accepted the decision without argument.
Yes, they run a tight ship down at the al Qaeda Taco Bell. You can't just start using your terrorist name without the proper authorization. All name tag changes must be cleared in advance by the shift manager. And when the name tag decision is handed down, you don't argue: you salute smartly and charge up the hill.
"Would you like our Fried Beef, Bean, Sour Cream, and Everything, Burrito Special, sir?
PICTURE THIS: Nick Denton has produced a Blogallery of photos of major bloggers.
Ever wondered what your favorite writer looks like? Okay, maybe you found the relevant picture on the relevant site. If you're really good, you found it on an irrelevant site. If you're obsessed, even just a bit, you went to Google image search. And then you really started seaching. And not long after, the restraining order was issued.
But here they are, en masse, yet separate! Just like in real life!
Nick promises that the next step will be links between those who have slept with one another.
Okay, just kidding about that last. Blame me, not him.
Twice since Sept. 11, Mr. Bush has signed findings authorizing more spending for Iraqi opposition groups, with a focus on intelligence-gathering and on the infiltration by American Special Operations forces and C.I.A. operatives.
The latest order authorizes those forces to kill Mr. Hussein if they are acting in self defense....
Picture it: two US Delta Force operators happen to be taking a stroll down a corridor in the Presidential Palace at Karradat Mariam.
Nathan: "Where's that damn bathroom, Salazar?"
Salazar: "I thought sure it was that last room. Just more damn sarin gas. Let's try... around the next corner on the right."
Nathan: "If that's not it, I swear I'm going to piss off a balcony."
They open door.
[simultaneously]
Nathan & Salazar: "It's SADDAM HUSSEIN!"
Saddam leaps to his feet, and grabs the AGS-30 Automatic Mounted Grenade Launcher System mounted next to his desk, just by the pencil sharpener he so loves to spend afternoons sharpening at.
Nathan: "Quick, Salazar, it's self-defense!"
Salazar: "You're right, Nathan, I see no alternative! We must follow the Presidential National Security Decision Memorandum!"
Both fire carbines at Hussein, putting eight bullets through his head.
Salazar: "At last, a place to pee."
They can kill Saddam Hussein, but only in self-defense. That makes so much sense.
But it does not waive the prohibition on assassinating a foreign leader, officials familiar with Mr. Bush's Iraq planning said.
NICK DENTON, ARCH-RIGHT-WINGER: Here's Nick's take on the Letter:
How exactly do you refuse? There I am, working myself up into an enjoyable lather over the Bush administration's prosecution of the campaign against Al-Qaeda, and a bunch of useless fools spoil my mood: the signatories of yesterday's letter of protest against external imperialism and domestic repression. There's Noam Chomsky and Tony Kushner, of course, but don't forget Carol Downer of the Chico Feminist Women's Health Centre. The most jawdroppingly paleolithic line: "We refuse to be party to these wars and we repudiate any inference that they are being waged in our name or for our welfare." What a extraordinary way to go through life. Something comes along -- holocaust, terminal cancer, an attack on downtown Manhattan -- and we can just refuse to participate. Pathetic.
MY ISH, YOURISH, I USED TO PUB MANY AN ISH: Meryl Yourish says:
Gary Farber was hurt that I forgot to include him in the list of Buffybloggers. I think he deliberately put a Xander reference in his Scooby-Doo post to yank my chain.
I'm not sure, but I may have irreparably damaged my relationship with him. Oh, wait--we don't have a relationship. Never mind.
And adds in e-mail: "The ball is in your court, Sir." My response:
Wait, this is sports? That means I'll -- well, whatever the sport is, drop the ball, or miss, or get hit in the head, or something. I thought this was writhing and reeling. I'm better at that.
However, if you wish to be Nancy Drew, Ms. Yourish, and check your referral logs for the time you got a hit from my page to yours -- hint, a few minutes before getting e-mail from me -- and compare it to my posting time, you will see, Inspector, that I could not possibly have read your blog before independently writing my Xander reference!
Okay, hard to prove, but dust for IP references! I swear it on the stack of $.12 Sixties comics I don't have because my father threw them out when I was nine, and I spent all my spare dimes after that on used sf paperbacks.
Besides, we have a relationship: we're interblogging! (Heh, heh. He said "inter." Heh, heh.)
I'd claim I say all this to steer readers to Yourish.com, since it's chock full of percolating great stuff, but she needs more readers like, um, the gout I discovered this week I have , since she has umpty-times my piddling readership. But, what the hey, our readerships are not necessarily all the same people.
She also points to this invaluable essay on how Arafat imposed dictatorship on the territory of the PA, by Daniel Polisar, former head of Peace Watch, the only non-partisan Israeli organization accredited by the Palestinian Authority as an official elections observer during the January 1996 Palestinian elections.
Why know what you can look up? And why look up what you can extract from the minds of your enemies? There are those who think and those who act. I am the latter. I am a problem solver. I have a gift for reading people. I take pride in my wit and speed, not my strength or power. My power is of the mind. The ball is under the middle dish... Pay up.
