Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
Commenting Rules: Only comments that are courteous and respectful of other commenters will be allowed. Period. You must register to post; this takes about thirty seconds, and you need give no information other than a name/handle you will be known by; just stick gibberish into the line about creating a blog, and forget about it; you'll be done in under 30 seconds.
Also: posting a spam-type URL will be grounds for deletion. Comments on posts over two months old are now closed.
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.
If you like my blog, and would like to help keep me find and stay in a new place long enough to get my disability claim approved, and maybe even afford food and prescriptions --
you are welcome to do so via the PayPal button. In return: free blog! Thank you muchly muchly. Only you can help! (I'll just handle preventing forest fires while you're busy for a moment.) So. LATEST UPDATES here and here.
New Option! Show your support by subscribing for $5/mo.! Free koala bear included! They're so cute!
Additional new options! $25/month Supporter subscription!
$50/month Patron subscription!
"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; 24 cancellations; Total= 6
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 7 sign-ups; 3 cancellation; Total= 4
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 10 sign-ups; 6 cancellations; Total= 4
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
TELL ME WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS, because this is my logic. And it has nothing to do with "Bush" or his administration.
The problem is, not attacking does not eliminate the risks. At best, it postpones them. At worst, it allows small nightmares to grow into big ones.
First, Al Qaeda terrorists do not need the pretext of an Iraq war to come after us. They will attack us, unprovoked, repeatedly and in as spectacular a fashion as their lethal ingenuity allows, regardless of what we do in Iraq. We know this, because they have done it.
Second, any containment regime we can conceive in place of war will eventually unravel, because the outside world does not have the resolve to maintain it and because a dictator with oil has the market on his side. We know this, too, because we have been through it. Saddam is likely to outlast our inspections and our sanctions, and certain to return to the production of the nuclear weapons that he sees as essential to his personal mythology and that any sober person regards as inimical to our well-being.
Third, any clampdown sufficiently draconian to reassure us would amount to a United Nations occupation, which would be a grave humiliation to Saddam. It seems to me a year or two of this would be as likely to stimulate vengeance as war itself.
Fourth, we come to the murky relationship between the terrorist state and stateless terrorism. The administration has surely strained our trust hyping the connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda, but skeptics have just as badly understated the mutual interests of these two thugs.
[...]
But what the antiwar camp offers as an antidote to fear is a false sense of security. In the short run, war is perilous. In the long run, peace can be a killer, too.
THE BUSH DOCTRINE: Huge fancy PBS Frontlinesite offering tons of analyses, commentary, and history of the evolution and pros and cons of. Strangely more informative than many blogs. Which won't stop many from, for years to come, insisting on how the information here is "never discussed in the mainstream press!"
Read The Rest Scale: there's a lot there, but it's worth plowing through. 4.5 out of 5. This is particularly informative as to how Saddam Hussein defeated inspections and containment, and understanding this is integral to understanding why he can do it again if he's given the chance. Read The Rest: 5 out of 5.
SECRETS OF DAVOS: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Laurie Garrettwrites for Newsday, the Long Island, NY newspaper, and has written two Doom & Gloom books, Betrayal of Trust ("The Collapse of Global Public Health"), and The Coming Plague ("Newly Emerging Diseases In A World Out Of Balance").
She was sent to cover Davos, and afterwards sent out a chatty, hasty, e-mail about it to friends. Who sent it on to others. Who sent it on to others.
It's the same sad old story, a tale of ignominy and no glory. Soon enough it was posted online, and then Metafilter picked it up.
You can tell that none of the people there have the slightest experience with professional writers, or editing, because most were convinced that it was a fake because the letter was filled with typos, solecisms, and clumsy errors. Whereas any actual professional editor or person with real experience in publishing or journalism knows that this is precisely how most (not all) professional journalists and innumerable writers write when they are writing quick notes, and in many cases, in their pre-edited professional work. So the Metafilter thread makes for slightly amusing, if quickly boring, reading.
But then Laurie Garrett weighed in with a traditional "get a life!" comeback, which is considerably more embarrassing than her original, essentially innocuous, if interesting, letter.
Soon enough Bruce Sterling reposted it, kindly correcting the spelling, but adding his own annotation. (He wrote about his attendence at last year's conference here.)
So now, you too, can read it, so long as the lawyers hold off. (In my case, via Sore Eyes, but if it's not high on Blogdex and Daypop now, it will be.)
You've probably already read it, but it's a good summary of most of the arguments. Are many people still considering arguments, and open to reconsidering, by this point?
I wonder. I think by this point most people who are going to give intelligent consideration are already, or at least should be, reasonably familiar with most of the arguments which have now been made, and there are unlikely to be any sound new arguments made until we start Looking Back in retrospect.
On the other hand, I think there is, frankly, enough ambiguity and uncertainty as to which evaluation of cost/benefit of the main alternatives is correct, and enough reason for people of sound mind and good will to come to different conclusions, that I'd like to think a fair number of people are still listening to the discussion and continuing to weigh cases.
The arguments in this Slate piece are the, by now, familiar ones, and the plurality, at least, of them, are sound, even if I don't agree with some of them. Some exceptions abound, of course; Spike Lee makes no argument, but merely an assertion, which is unhelpful. Charles Murray is similarly useless on the other side:
I'm in favor, for the reasons that the administration argues.
Since the Administration case has been somewhat incoherent, in toto, this too is unhelpful, without at least specifiying which "reasons" he is referring to.
Nicholson Baker, on the other hand, makes no argument as to why the war should be opposed, but merely argues that it can be. Which is fine, but leaves to others the case as to why. Oh, other than "Republican leadership bad." Which is sufficient argument for many, but not for myself.
Tony Kushner is the only person who makes an extended argument that he's a nitwit.
A number of other people, on either side, make statements that boil down to gut feelings, or just ask ominous questions, which conclude that their gut is correct, from Eli Attie on the anti-war side to Peggy Noonan on the pro-war side.
Paul Berman, from the left, interestingly argues that he doesn't favor the argument for disarmament as sufficient, but that:
I would favor an invasion whose purpose was to foment a liberal revolution in the Middle East.
And faults Bush for not calling for such.
I will protest because I want him to do more. In our present terrible predicament, a liberal revolution is our best hope -- the best hope for ourselves, and the best hope for the Arab world.
I find the argument that war in Iraq will distract resources from fighting al Queda and anti-terrorism rather weak, though not wholly without merit.
There's the argument that, to use Robert Reich's formulation of the familiar trope:
On the cost side, an invasion will further radicalize the Arab world, thereby playing into the hands of Islamic extremists.
I find this unconvincing. I think this is what might be called a marginal cost. Yes, there will be some inflammatory impact, absolutely; but in general, people who are going to be inflamed against the US will be anyway, and I'm doubtful a war will make an overwhelming difference; and, obviously, plenty of people are already quite inflamed, and I really don't see that suddenly backing down now, without a major change in circumstances, and reason why, will suddenly dramatically lessen their flamitude. Indeed, leaving Saddam Hussein in power to boast of his defiance would seem to me quite inflammatory on its own.
For that matter, say Bush suddenly sat up tomorrow and announced the withdrawal of all US forces, or that we were only going to go for massive inspections through the UN, or whatever your preferred alternative is, would any of the people quite convinced that the US is a huge imperialistic bully, highly out-of-control and dangerous to the world, suddenly slap themselves upsides the head, and say "bigosh, I misjudged that Bush! The US isn't dangerous after all!"? Perhaps I'm wrong, but I suspect not. People would merely say that the massive protests forced him to change his idiotic criminal policy, and go on as they have. I tend to think.
Someone needs to teach Steven Ratter the meaning of the words "flout" and "flaunt" (Slate should have caught this for him).
Colin Powell convinced me that we cannot allow tyrants like Saddam to flaunt international rules and United Nations mandates.
Also, Saddam should stop flouncing.
I'm open-minded, certainly, about Roger Altman's point of view:
Absent abdication by Hussein, I favor a forced disarmament of Iraq. I do not agree, however, with the president's apparent timetable, i.e., 2-3 weeks. I would put weather and other tactical military considerations aside. If waiting 6-8 weeks, for example, would produce considerably wider U.N. support, let that be the timetable.
But, at least Ben Karlin, co-executive producer of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show has an original argument:
I am only in favor of war with Iraq if the entire affair takes place between the morning of February 21st and the evening of Sunday March 2nd. This is because The Daily Show will be on hiatus during this period, and, historically, massive loss of life has proven not conducive to producing a comedy news program. I would remind the president as he and his generals go about their plan that in a war, the first casualty is the ease of my job.
We should certainly give that all the consideration it is due.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5, if you'll actually think about them. (This remains my last big piece on the subject.)
BUGSPLAT: Well, this isn't going to go over any better with those who keep talking about how we're going to "carpet-bomb" Baghdad (we won't, of course, but that doesn't mean it's going to be safe or pleasant to be in Baghdad).
Interestingly:
If Bugsplat fails to resolve questions about a bomb's projected blast effect, a proposed attack can be sent for review to the Joint Warfighting Analysis Center in Dahlgren, Va., which developed Bugsplat and which has even more sophisticated analysis tools.
There it will be found that the attack will wound the autumnal city. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about there, don't worry about it.)
Using a combination of trade tricks and clever programming, hackers have thoroughly compromised security at America Online, potentially exposing the personal information of AOL's 35 million users.
The most recent exploit, launched last week, gave a hacker full access to Merlin, AOL's latest customer database application. As a security measure, Merlin runs only on AOL's internal network, but savvy hackers have found a way to break in.
[Various ways described] Here's my favorite:
In a telephone interview, two hackers using the handles Dan and Cam0 explained that security measures (such as verifying the last four digits of a credit card number) can be bypassed by mumbling.
A third hacker, using the name hakrobatik, confirmed the mumbling method.
"I kept calling and pretending I just had jaw surgery and mumbling gibberish," hakrobatik said. "At first I had no info except the screen name, then I called and got the first name and last name by saying, 'Could you repeat what I just said?' Then each time that I got information I called back making the real information understandable, and everything else I just mumbled."
In the end, hakrobatik said, service reps he talked to got so frustrated having to ask him to repeat information that they'd give up and reset the password. Hakrobatik later proved he could compromise any AOL account armed only with its screen name.
Then you just get more by repeating "Me, too!!!!"
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 for more silly detail on how AOL screws the pooch.
UNBELIEVABLE MORAL EQUIVALENCY in this Grauniadpiece from and about North Korea.
The Guardian's journalism varies wildly, from sometimes quite excellent, to sometimes quite execrable. This is an example of the latter. It's entire point is that North Korea's problem -- it's only mentioned problem -- is bad public relations.
Yet, North Korea has a good claim to be the injured party. It is, after all, the nation suffering most in the region.
I'd have to quote practically the whole article for you to believe how bad this piece of apologetica is. So Read The Rest for yourself.
But how can anybody sympathise while the North's media scream out outlandishly bellicose rhetoric? It seems that the country has fallen further behind in the field of mass communications than in any other area.
A notorious e-mail scam has resulted in the murder of a Nigerian diplomat in the Czech Republic.
Fifty-year-old Michael Lekara Wayid, Nigeria's consul in the Czech Republic, was shot dead by an unidentified 72-year-old Czech at the Nigerian Embassy in Prague on Wednesday.
Yes, it's exactly what you think.
[...]
"This is the first time such a thing has happened to Nigeria in any of our embassies abroad.... The Czech ambassador to Nigeria has been summoned," said Dubem Onyia, Nigeria's minister of state for foreign affairs, in a statement.
Onyia said that in light of the incident, security at Nigeria's foreign offices would be reviewed.
Good idea. Cracking down on the spam would be nice, too, but it's doubtless too much too hope for.
I'M OPEN-MINDED ABOUT THAT: Scott Martens from an entry in Comments on thisElectrolite post:
Not to turn this into a philosphical discussion, but this is basically an epistemological argument. With the benefit of three millenia of arguing about the source of knowledge, the only conclusion I've managed to draw is that it helps to be both open-minded and biased, but not too open-minded or too biased, and it's good to be open-minded about admitting that you're biased, but it's also good to be biased in favour of being open-minded, although you sometimes need to be open-minded about your open-mindedness (when you're too open-minded), and you need to recognise that you may be biased about your biases, and not even know it no matter how open-minded you think you are (which is a good reason to stay open-minded about your open-mindedness, without getting biased about it.) There are exceptions, of course, like those times when it's best to be absolutist about truth and reason and those occasions when everyone really is better off going with the flow.
THE POST-WAR PLAN will, of course, be regarded with horror or approval by the usual suspects. Others will make more useful, less predictable, points.
My observation on this story, at the moment, isn't about The Plan.
Officials said the decision to install U.S. military and civilian administrations for an indeterminate time stems from lessons learned in Afghanistan, where power has been diffused among U.S. military forces still waging war against the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda, a multinational security force of several thousand troops in which the United States does not participate, and the interim government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
My comment is that pretty much only people in Bush administration were in favor of severely limiting the multinational force. The post-war Afghan policy seems nigh-impossible to defend as other than a deeply confused, frequently shifting device, that forces one to speculate was made largely by people as ignorant of Afghanistan as the Best and the Brightest were of Vietnam.
To see the notion almost officially endorsed that it took "lessons learned" to figure out that maybe -- just maybe! -- the rest of Afghanistan might need more than a few Special Ops people, a handful of frightened NGO representatives, and The Exciting Cast of Familiar Warlords -- oh, and a reasonable supply of hundred dollar bills to pass out -- to become stable, and that it might not be a good idea to leave the Multi-National Force (MNF) to be an afterthought kept strictly limited to Kabul while we, every few months, desperately beg some other country to throw a bunch of soldiers into the soup and Take Charge (but only for six months! -- because that leads to stability!), and, oh, yes, the President, Hamid Karzai, gets a Praetorian Guard of Americans (way to not appear a puppet, guys!) -- why, yes, surely it took seeing how that would work out to guess that -- just possibly -- it might not lead to the best of all possible worlds... well, that's my Bush!
Read The Rest Scale: go ahead, you'll want to denounce it or praise it, I'm sure.
Asked in February 1971 if allied troops were preparing to invade Laos, Mr. Ziegler replied: "The president is aware of what is going on in Southeast Asia. That is not to say anything is going on in Southeast Asia."
[...]
In 1974, a statement by Mr. Ziegler on the safeguarding of the White House tapes won an award from the Committee on Public Doublespeak of the National Council of Teachers of English.
He said: "I would feel that most of the conversations that took place in those areas of the White House that did have the recording system would, in almost their entirety, be in existence, but the special prosecutor, the court, and, I think, the American people are sufficiently familiar with the recording system to know where the recording devices existed, and to know the situation in terms of the recording process, but I feel, although the process has not been undertaken yet in preparation of the material to abide by the court decision, really, what the answer to that question is."
Some nights, it is said, you can see Ron Ziegler's spectral presence hovering behind Ari Fleischer, if you turn your head just the right way.
THE PEOPLE WHO REALLY RUN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, Noam Scheiber of TNRpoints out, are the pollsters. Specifically, Mark Mellman's Mellman Group, and Garin-Hart-Yang.
Between them, two D.C. firms, The Mellman Group and Garin-Hart-Yang, handled the polling for just about every important Democratic Senate campaign last year -- Max Cleland in Georgia, Frank Lautenberg in New Jersey, Erskine Bowles in North Carolina, Jean Carnahan in Missouri, Tom Strickland in Colorado, Bill Bradbury in Oregon, Alex Sanders in South Carolina -- and many of the top House and governor's races. At the same time, Geoff Garin and Fred Yang (Peter Hart, the firm's founder, no longer does much campaign work) enjoyed unrivaled influence among the five firms who did polling for the House Democrats' campaign committee. Mellman served as the exclusive pollster for the party's Senate campaign arm.
The result is that, in many cases, the same polling firm was making decisions on both sides of the equation.
Scheiber discusses how they screwed up the 2002 campaign, and where their power comes from.
The latter has a short answer with a longer explanation: soft money.
This is an extremely insightful piece, which anyone who wants to understand anything about how the Party has worked in recent years must read. What's remarkable is that while Scheiber points out the obvious -- the immense dependency in recent years by the Democratic Party on soft money, and how this led to the power of the pollsters -- he makes no comment whatever on what the next election cycle or two will bring now that Mcain-Feingold eliminates soft money (at least, as it has flowed and been directed up to now).
But it's clear from other news reports that politicos across America are only just starting to come to grips with understanding McCain-Feingold, so it's fair to hypothesize that Scheiber might have concluded that this is a large enough separable topic that it is best dealt with in future pieces, and also, perhaps, after we've all had more time to sort out the pieces.
Read The Rest Scale: for anyone interested in nitty-gritty US politics, 4.5 out of 5.
HANNAH ARENDT'S NAZI EDITOR: Absolutely fascinating review of:
Generation des Unbedingten, which can loosely be translated as Generation of True Believers, is a 950-page book that was recently published in Germany. Its author, Michael Wildt, teaches at Hamburg University, and his book is a detailed description, accompanied by dozens of short biographies, of some of the higher echelons of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Main Office of Reich Security -- the Nazi organization that included Adolf Eichmann among its members. The book is based on rich documentary and archival material, and it is the first attempt to present a collective portrait of the most powerful and the most murderous security organ of the Third Reich.
One point:
First, it becomes again abundantly clear that the SS and the Nazi security services numbered among their leadership some of the most educated people in German society. It was not a rabble of street toughs that planned and carried out Hitler's racial policies, which included the annihilation of most of Europe's Jewish population. The genocide was directed by an elite of intellectuals and academics, Ph.D.s in literature, philosophy, law, history, science.
Another is the tale of Hans Rossner. Who is Hans Rossner?
Born in Dresden in 1910, he studied at Leipzig University, where he drew close to nationalist circles; he joined the SS soon after the Nazis came to power, and served as assistant to Karl Justus Obenauer, the dean of the faculty of philosophy at Bonn University. (Obenauer is inscribed in German literary history as the man who wrote to Thomas Mann in 1936 to inform him that his honorary degree from Bonn was being withdrawn because his German citizenship had been revoked.) In the late 1930s, Rossner officially joined the Main Office of Reich Security and served in Department III (Internal Affairs). He was responsible for the control of "Popular Culture and Art."
Like most Nazis, he pretty much got off scott free:
In 1937 Rossner was granted a Ph.D. from Frankfurt University for this work; he then joined the RSHA as a full-time employee, and spent the war years at its headquarters in Berlin. His personal file attests to the high regard in which he was held by his superiors as an ardent and industrious Nazi, an "implacable National Socialist." Prior to the final defeat of the Reich, Rossner, like other high SS officials, was issued a cyanide capsule, but he did not commit suicide, choosing instead to hide. He was apprehended by the Allies, spent three years in detention, appeared as a minor witness in the Nuremberg trials, and was released in 1948. For his membership in the SS and the RSHA, he was put on trial and fined DM 2,000.
What happened then? Following a trajectory I'm very familiar with, he became a reader for a minor publishing house, and then a major publishing house, and then:
... an editor at the prestigious publishing house Piper, one of West Germany's main publishers of quality.
Where he wound up editing books precisely like the good Nazi he was, suppressing positive mentions of Jews, covertly supporting the Nazi agenda, and, as I say in my header, editing Hannah Arendt, and doing his best to soften, alter her adjectives, and suppress details, including succeeding in deleting the names of various still-prominent "ex"-Nazis.
Thus, the term "murderer" was dropped from the sentence describing the wartime activities of Georg Heuser, who by that time was the attorney general of Rhineland-Palatinate. Similarly, Arendt agreed to omit the name of a Nazi jurist, Theodor Maunz, who was mentioned by Eichmann in his defense: the man had in the meantime made a career in the Federal Republic.
[...]
Five weeks after Arendt's death, on January 12, 1976, Rossner, who was by then the editor-in-chief of Piper, sent a memorandum to the production department of the publishing house instructing them not to prepare a new edition of the Eichmann volume. He was over-ruled by the publisher himself, who insisted that the book remain in print, though at that time it was selling only a few hundred copies a year. Rossner remained in his senior position at Piper. He died in Munich in 1999.
Even the cellphones of these men mapped their varying politics. The liquid crystal display on the phone of a bearded representative of Hamas showed a picture of Osama bin Laden beside an image of the Twin Towers. The representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group with Marxist roots, displayed a picture of Ché Guevara and a single English word: freedom. A leader of the Aksa Martyrs Brigade, a militant group of Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction, had chosen a picture of a semiautomatic rifle.
"I TOLD YOU SO, YOU FUCKING FOOLS": Excellent biographical sketch of Robert Conquest, historian, poet, diplomat, anthologist, and particularly author of The Great Terror, the definitive expose on Soviet Communism, which everyone should read or have read.
The Great Terror came out in 1968, during the Prague Spring. It is extraordinarily confident, the precision, and varied rhythm of his prose matching the clarity of his view of Stalin's evil. The facts about the terror had long been available to anyone who made the effort to find them. But Conquest organised them into a clear, self-evident narrative and he made it clear to a whole generation that you could not be on the side of the powerless and of the Soviet Union.
[...]
The writer Neal Ascherson remembers the impact of The Great Terror on western leftists: "He was very influential in that he immensely encouraged one side and was dismissed by the other, because people were in such entrenched positions. This meant that people accepted his facts; but they didn't accept his conclusions. People were detained in condemning him by the fact that he was a very good poet. That was well known. Everyone by then could agree that Stalin was a very wicked man and a very evil one, but we still wanted to believe in Lenin; and Conquest said that Lenin was just as bad and that Stalin was simply carrying out Lenin's programme." Or, as Conquest later expressed his position:
There was a great Marxist called Lenin Who did two or three million men in That's a lot to have done in But where he did one in, that grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.
[...]
I first encountered Conquest at the age of seven, via the science fiction anthologies he co-edited with Kingsley Amis, incidentally.
Conquest on one occasion loaned Amis a flat for an assignation in which he had taken the trouble to wire up a tape recorder so that when Amis let himself in, a disembodied voice said "Lucky sod".
A mysterious self-cloning female crayfish, popular with German aquarium owners, could pose a threat to native European species if it were released into the wild, scientists say.
The marbled crayfish, called Marmorkrebs, is probably related to a North American species although scientists at Humboldt University in Berlin admit they do not know exactly where it originated.
But they are sure that it can reproduce without mating.
Parthenogenesis, a form of self-cloning, is found in creatures such as snails and water fleas but is unusual in crayfish.
The Marmorkrebs' ability to produce 20 or more clones of itself in six months could be a danger and a competitor to crayfish in the wild, according to Gerhard Scholtz, a comparative zoologist at the university.
"It might pose a threat to European native crayfish," he told Reuters.
Twenty years ago no one knew how fear conditioning worked. But by surgically removing discrete parts of rodents' brains -- and performing the same simple conditioning experiment -- researchers have detailed the underlying mechanisms. The fear system's command center is the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped structure that rests near the center of the brain and is elaborately tied to other regions through nerve fibers. A rat lacking an amygdala won't freeze at the sound of a tone, no matter how often the tone is paired with a shock. And though human subjects can't be carved up or electrocuted for the sake of science, studies of patients with damaged amygdalas show that they have similar deficits. Unlike people with intact brains, they're no more attuned to emotionally charged words such as rape than to bland ones like handkerchief. And though they can recognize individual faces, they don't perceive threatening expressions as unfriendly. Even a split-second glance at a hostile face activates the amygdala in a normal brain.
Our favorite quote:
An activated amygdala doesn't wait around for instructions from the conscious mind.
Runner-up:
"The amygdala tells the rest of the brain, 'Hey, whatever happened, make a strong memory of it'," says James McGaugh, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Irvine. "It makes a strong correlation between the significance of an event and the remembrance of it."
THE AXIS OF EVIL FILM FESTIVAL is one I'd pay to see.
Movies from Iraq, North Korea and Iran, the three countries branded as "the Axis of Evil" by U.S. President George W. Bush, will be shown at a film series opening next week at North Carolina's Duke University.
The series, dubbed "Reel Evil," will give movie-goers a rare insight into unfamiliar cultures and is especially timely as the world faces the prospect of war, organisers said.
It will also feature films from Cuba, Syria and Libya -- dubbed "rogue states" by Washington.
[...]
The selections include romantic comedy, family drama, World War Two action, and a Godzilla-type sci-fi, according to a Duke statement.
I may need to look into the specifics of this; I'd particularly like to know more about the "Godzilla-type sci-fi."
China is adding at least 75 ballistic missiles a year to its arsenal and is likely to have fielded 600 against Taiwan by 2005, the Pentagon's Taiwan desk officer said in remarks made public on Thursday.
"Taiwan faces the most daunting conventional ballistic missile threat in the world," said Air Force Lt. Col. Mark Stokes, the Pentagon official.
[...]
In addition to its ballistic-missile buildup, Beijing is expected to deploy first-generation cruise missiles designed to attack land targets before 2005, Stokes said.
FUNNY MONEY: US currency is going to start using other colors along with green, soon.
The $20 bills are expected to debut by this fall, followed by the fifties and hundreds about 12 to 18 months later.
[...]
Although the bureau hasn't revealed which artisans are creating the new notes, it has begun divulging more tidbits about engravers in recent years. For instance, lead picture engraver Thomas R. Hipschen engraved Benjamin Franklin's portrait on the $100 note . Christopher Madden engraved all the tiny windows, balustrades and other elements composing the Treasury building vignette on the back of the $10 note.
"It's a kick to pull that out of your wallet," said Madden, who began as an apprentice at the BEP in 1988. "They pay me with my own work. It's a strange concept."
BILL CLINTON INTERVIEWED at considerable length by James Fallows here (just posted, but taped in October). I found it quite interesting, though nothing singularly worth quoting.
Okay, here's one, on what future ex-Presidents might do, and then on how Democrats should behave:
And secondly, if we're still all compos mentis, I'd like to see us organize really constructive debates about our honest disagreements -- in a respectful way, so America could hear them. Because I think that so much of the American political life has been poisoned by this intense, destructive nature of public debates. So instead of people having an honest debate about the issues it's which person can you make look unpatriotic, or without a shred of redeeming social value, or whatever.
[...]
A lot of this is not so much, not ever differing, but it's how you say it, and whether you're somewhat respectful. Even when I give these political speeches, almost in every speech I say, I don't want you ever to treat them the way they treated me. Don't do it.
[...]
And you can do it... I said that most of our adversaries are really honorable people. They honestly disagree with us. It ought to be enough to have an honest discussion, honest disagreements.
Officials said a decision had to be made within the next three days or so in order for the Fourth Division's weapons to be unloaded and readied in time for combat.
"It's close," a senior military official said.
In other words, expect war in about three to six weeks.
2003 DUBIOUS DATA AWARDShere. Grand Prize Winner: Raelian cloning.
Let's beat on Bill O'Reilly; that's always fun.
5. WHO STOLE AMERICA’S CHILDREN? -- On Fox News Channel’s July 16 "O'Reilly Factor," the host warned that there were "more than 100,000 abductions of children by strangers every year in the United States." In fact, only 3,000 to 5,000 such abductions are reported annually, and only 200 and 300 of these involve ransom, sexual abuse, or physical harm, including 50 murders. Horrific, yes. An epidemic? No. For the 50 million children under age 13, the chance of being abducted and murdered is literally one in a million.
Number Ten makes a point I'd not seen before:
10. IN CLASS OR INMATES? -- In August, many news outlets repeated the Justice Policy Institute's claim that "more African American men are incarcerated than enrolled in college." This is true, but it compares apples and oranges. You can go to prison at any age, for any length of time, but most people go to college for only a few years during their late teens and twenties. A comparison of African American men of college age shows 469,000 in college and only 180,000 in jail.
Not to say that this changes my mind about our broken justice system, or broken drug laws, but I smack myself in the head for this not having occurred to me on my own.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5; you should know this stuff, right?
URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL: As of now, I have received 390 "Nigeria" e-mails since I started saving them. I currently receive an average of four per day.
I've long ceased having to open them to know what they are; the capitalized subject header, name, and phrasing of the subject are singular. They are, at least, rather more entertaining than all the other forms of spam.
BoingBoingnotes a way to reply, though I don't really see the point.
IRANIAN BOYS WHO ARE GIRLS: Another fascinating Iran story by the excellent Elaine Sciolino (with Nazila Fathi).
In a country where girls and women are required to cover their heads and conceal the shape of their bodies from the age of puberty, some girls have taken to disguising themselves as boys. They cut their hair short, wear loose-fitting clothes and speak as little as possible.
A detail I knew:
But homosexuality is forbidden in Islam and is illegal in the Islamic Republic.
One I did not:
The Islamic Republic allows people who have been diagnosed as transsexual to have sex-change operations, and the subject is openly discussed.
However,
Both Ms. Shirazi and Ms. Kamkar said they believe that most cross-dressers are neither transsexual nor gay.
INTERNMENT IS GOOD FOR YOU!: Excellent coverage in many posts from Eric Muller (who manages to leave his full name off his blog) on the continuing self-inflicted travails of Representative Howard Coble (R-NC), chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, whose remarks on the justification of the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during WWII have slowly attracted more and more attention.
THEY LAUGH NOW, but they also laughed at the claim that Elvis-worship was a religion.
The 2001 census reveals that 390,000 people across England and Wales are devoted followers of the Jedi "faith" made famous by the blockbuster films.
[...]
Out of 52m respondents, 390,000 kept true to the Star Wars cause.
The figures suggest there are large pockets of support for Luke Skywalker and the gang.
The Jedi response was most popular in Brighton and Hove, with 2.6 per cent of census respondents quoting it.
Student support may have helped boost figures in Oxford (2.0 per cent) and Cambridge (1.9) with more followers coming forward from Wandsworth (1.9), Southampton (1.8) and Lambeth (1.8).
The "religion" was least popular in Easington, on the north-east coast of England between Sunderland and Hartlepool, where it was quoted by only 0.16 per cent of respondents.
And in Sedgefield - Prime Minister Tony Blair's constituency - Knowsley, Blaenau Gwent, Merthyr Tydfil and Wear Valley all showed less than 0.2 per cent of respondents pledging support for the Jedi "faith".
Unconfirmed reports suggests this may due to Jedi Knights falling victim to their "dark side".
I find your lack of faith... disturbing. (Gesture with thumb and forefinger....)
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5, save for Padawan Learners.
Saddam Hussein was last night reported to have placed his defence minister and close relative under house arrest in an extraordinary move apparently designed to prevent a coup.
Iraqi opposition newspapers, citing sources in Baghdad, yesterday claimed that the head of the Iraqi military, Lieutenant-General Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Jabburi Tai, was now effectively a prisoner in his home in the capital.
The minister's apparent detention, also reported by Cairo-based al-Ahram newspaper, is surprising. He is not only a member of President Saddam's inner circle, but also a close relative by marriage. His daughter is married to Qusay Hussein, the dictator's 36-year-old younger son - considered by many as his heir apparent.
Hardly surprising. I've lost track of the number of members of his family Hussein has had tortured and killed. As the story later points out:
In 1996 he had his two sons-in-law executed after he persuaded them to return to Baghdad following their defection to Jordan. His estranged first wife Sajida is no longer on speaking terms with him after the mysterious death of her brother.
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 for more details on Strain In Baghdad.
As I mentioned in comments, while Blogger was down for about the last 21 hours, Salem Pax in Baghdad says this isn't so. You should read everything on his blog, anyway; how many other citizens of Iraq do you know blogging about life in Baghdad?
THE DENNIS CANAVAN PARTY: I freely admit to being no expert in the Holyrood Parliament in Scotland. So I was intrigued to, in the course of dropping the always interesting Jim Henley an e-mail to note that it wasn't terribly accurate to call the mother of Parliaments presently "two-party," check the current makeup of the Scottish Parliament, as well, and see that the listing of parties had something that stuck out.
Scottish Labour Party, Scottish National Party, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, Scottish Liberal Democrats, Scottish Green Party, Scottish Socialist Party, Dennis Canavan, Independent. Say what?
After being a Labour MP for 25 years, Dennis Canavan was excluded from Labour's list of candidates for the Scottish Parliament, despite having the support of over 95% of the members of Falkirk West Constituency Labour Party. At the first election to the Scottish Parliament he stood as a candidate without the support of any party and was elected with the biggest majority in Scotland.
Not news to many readers: present makeup of UK Parliament: Labour has 410 seats, Tories 163, Liberal Democrats 53, Scottish Nationalist 9, Ulster Unionist 6, Democratic Unionist 5, Sinn Fein 4, Social Democratic & Labour Party 3, Independent 1, Independent Conservative 1.
Particularly given the lack of people outside of England who voted for the Conservative Party in the last election, the Liberal Democrats are arguably about as significant an opposition at present as the Tories are. Just mentioning, Jim.
(For near-completism's sake, here is the homepage the Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru (love that Welsh); somewhere in there is, I presume, a party breakdown, but damned if they make it easy to find, and I'm uninterested in spending more time looking at the moment. I'll similarly pass on looking up the precise breakdown for the Northern Ireland assembly.)
A GUIDE TO BLOGGERS is something The Talking Dog has been doing a superb job of, with thoughtful and useful descriptions of more bloggers than you possibly have time to read. He's up to "V" now. Here's his description of our effort, by the way:
Amygdala is the thoughtful blog of Boulder, Colorado's Gary Farber (no relation). I'm not so sure I'd call Gary a "moderate" as I would an "eclectic". Gary, I believe, writes science fiction as well as his blog, and covers a wide variety of subjects in a manner where I am unable to knee jerk classify him as "lefty or rightie". Because of this inscrutibility, TD Designation: Pekingese
Although I've pointed out to Seth (no relation) Farber in e-mail that I do not, and never have, in fact, write or written science fiction, but I have had some work history, over the years, in professionally editing it (as well as a great deal of other experience in the subculture), I'll otherwise take that description as more than acceptable.
2/18/2003 09:07:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page |
Other blogs commenting on this post |
0 comments
That heavy personal price for the failure to win the political battle is already being reflected in this month's ICM survey. Mr Blair's personal popularity has slumped from a positive net rating of plus six points last May to a devastating negative net rating of minus 20 points.
Mystery (to me) solved; this is a form of British polling measuring I was previously unfamiliar with. Interestingly:
In fact, the detailed figures for Labour voters on the ICM Iraq tracker show that more approve of his stand than disapprove. It shows that 44% of Labour voters support military action and only 38% oppose it. This should be born in mind by those preparing to write off Mr Blair's political career.
Jacques Chirac last night launched a furious attack on east European candidates for EU membership, saying they had behaved "recklessly" in making pro-American statements on the Iraq crisis.
Speaking at the end of the emergency Brussels summit, the French president astonished diplomats and dismayed the European commission and other governments by accusing the incoming and aspirant members of "infantile" and "dangerous" behaviour.
[...]
Letters signed [by the East European countries] were "not well-brought-up behaviour," he complained.
"They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet. When you are in the family, after all, you have more rights than when you are asking to join and knocking on the door," Mr Chirac said, warning Romania and Bulgaria that they had been particularly incautious since they were still seeking EU membership.
Americans aren't the only ones who can make diplomatic gaffes and lecture other countries.
"The more complex you sound, then the more not only will sexy females recognise you but also predators. So when you raise these birds in pet shops, they actually develop more complex syntax than birds in the wild."
Oh, er, you noticed that bit about birds, did you? Well, it's a British newspaper. It's just slang.
Okay, we at Amygdala can't fool you. Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 for interesting, overly short, story on brain structure and its role in language and syntax. (Another version here.) (Yes, the AAAS is meeting right here in River City. Er, Denver.)
POLITICAL MANIACS: Cheery little report/review on how China continues the grand communist tradition of political psychiatry by putting dissidents in "psychiatric hospitals."
According to an account given to Munro in 1987 by a former prisoner at a Shanghai facility, inmates were punished by intravenous injections that made their tongues bulge out of their mouths and by extremely painful acupuncture which applied an electric current to the sole of the foot. But whatever further inquiry may show, the fact that dissidents are sent to an Ankang, diagnosed there as "political maniacs," and imprisoned, according to official sources, for an average of five years is a violation of their human rights and of the international medical standards which China insists it follows. According to Chinese psychiatric documents cited by Munro, by 1992 the total number of Ankang hospitals had risen to twenty, with several others under construction. According to one source, large Ankang centers can accommodate around one thousand inmates; the Tianjin facility, however, is now believed to have around twice that capacity. According to another official source, some inmates are being held for as long as twenty years. The government's eventual goal is to establish one Ankang center for every city in China with a population of one million or above.
[...]
One of the main categories of "people taken into police psychiatric custody" for diagnosis, according to an official police encyclopedia cited by Munro, are those
commonly known as "political maniacs," who shout reactionary slogans, write reactionary banners and reactionary letters, make anti-government speeches in public, and express opinions on important domestic and international affairs.
I thought we called these people "bloggers."
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 for depressing detail on how to be "politically deluded" and so on. (Yet another example of that rampant leftism I so often read The NY Review of Books accused of, by the way.)
OHMIGOD!: We learn from this breathless profile of Richard Powers, entitled "The Author as Science Guy":
Richard Powers wrote his new novel, "The Time of Our Singing," in bed, using a wireless keyboard to beam his prose to a giant computer screen across the room.
The contraption broke down a month ago, but Mr. Powers's reserves of electronic hardware run deep. There is a desktop monitor on the swivel stand next to his bed; on the coffee table in his living room lies a gleaming, featherweight laptop that deciphers his longhand and even takes dictation.
Unbelievable! Definitively the science guy!
At 45, this tall, thin, bluntly handsome and appealingly unpretentious man is widely considered the country's pre-eminent literary chronicler of the technological age.
[Much adulation elided.]
"I've been dictating more and more," Mr. Powers said, flipping up the lid of his laptop to reveal a page of notes for his next novel, a book about memory. "I can lie in bed, stretch out or walk around." He did a quick turn about his living room to demonstrate, the machine balanced on both hands. "My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible," he said, a touch of wonder in his voice. "Now I can compose the way Wordsworth used to, wandering around the Lake District."
Hey, I've heard about this amazing new technological transcription device: it's a solid-state stylus, can be as short as an inch, thinner than a finger, and allows transcription on portable sheets, or endless sorts of media, and is also biodegradable! Some call it a "pen-cell" device....
Read The Rest Scale: 1.5 out of 5 to hear what a genius Powers is, though not actually so much more on how "his reserves of electronic resources run deep." Deep, yet, apparently, shallow.
BILL CLINTON ON POWELL AND IRAQ: (and other stuff).
"I thought Secretary Powell gave the best part of his presentation, which I thought was quite effective, as he always is, was showing those pictures of the trucks taking stuff out the back door before the inspectors would get in the front door. Because that raised the prospect that Mr. Blix and his group, who are very vigorous, wouldn't get to do the job we hired them to do. And then of course, those transcripts were pretty, pretty condemning, too."
[...]
Couric: "Do you think the U.S. should wait for a second Security Council Resolution authorizing force?"
Former President Bill Clinton: "As a matter of international law, I don’t think we have to."
Couric: "Do you think the U.S. should wait politically?"
Former President Bill Clinton: "I don’t think the president needs another Security Council Resolution, as a matter of international law. I think politically, if he could get it, it would be great. For the simple reason that, if we had to go without another UN resolution -- if we had to go and European powers or Russia or China are vocally opposed to this, then there will always be the suggestion that this was, in effect, a pre-emptive strike.
[...]
On the other hand, if it is the UN, carrying out the UN mandate, and we’re doing this because for 12 years he has defied the UN mandate to disarm, that is not a pre-emptive strike. It’s a police action designed to protect the world from chemical and biological weapons. I want the UN and the international community to be stronger and more united when it’s over than when we started."
Interesting, eh?
Read The Rest Scale: sure, go for it, unless you're someone whose head explodes from Clinton cooties; but, then, you'll miss finding stuff to rant about him.
THE AL GORE SCRIPT: Geez, they haven't even given this one a slight rewrite:
The most consistent critique is that he is insincere, a little too ready to say whatever seems politically convenient regardless of whether it's really true.
Haven't I seen this play before?
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 if you like reading scripts in advance of the show. (Amygdala knows that if it's said enough, it becomes true, but we still think it's a bit silly to be dubbing Kerry the "Democratic front-runner" yet; talk about an "inside-the-Beltway" view!)
Because of an editing error, a front-page article yesterday about diplomatic developments in the Iraq crisis misidentified the Bush administration official who said about the weapons inspectors in Iraq, "At some point it will become obvious that it's time for them to go." It was an administration official speaking on condition of anonymity, not Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser.
This is a senior Amygdala editorial official writing this entry, of course.
WE HEAR A LOT ABOUT HOW AMERICA "CREATED" SADDAM, which is nonsense, of course. Gave him some support during the Iran-Iraq War, yes; created him, or brought him to power, no. (No more than we "created" bin Laden when both he and the CIA were opposing the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan, any more than we "created" Stalin when we aided him during WWII.)
France also didn't "create" Saddam. Neither government had the slightest bit to do with the creation of the Ba'ath Party, nor its coming to power, nor Saddam coming to power via his coup.
But we hear less about France's involvement with Iraq than we do about the US's.
THE DARKNESS OF DARK ENERGY: (not to be confused with dark matter).
"It's kind of weird," Dr. Peter Garnavich, an astronomer from the University of Notre Dame, noted at one point. "You look across billions of light-years and hope the photons get here by Tuesday."
So far, Dr. Riess's art had yet to fail him. The weekend search was his team's third. In each of the earlier searches, the team had found a supernova about nine billion light-years out, worth "pulling the trigger" and commanding the Hubble's attention.
This time around, they have chosen to name their supernovae after characters in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings."
[...]
At 11 a.m. the next day, Dr. Garnavich bounded up the stairs to Dr. Riess's office, breathing hard. "Did you see the one in 34?" he asked, referring to the patch of sky that he had been scrutinizing.
"Holy behemoth," Dr. Riess said as he quickly called the image up on his computer screen. The bright dot in a spiral galaxy was clearly a supernova. But then enthusiasm waned.
"It's way too bright," Dr. Riess said.
That meant it was too nearby for their purposes. From its size and color, they estimated that the spiral galaxy was about four billion light-years away, almost modern in cosmic terms.
They agreed that it was a good candidate for the Essence team.
Within minutes, they came upon another burst, next to a scruff of spiral structure. "Hey, this looks pretty good," Dr. Riess said.
But again it was too close, a mere six billion light-years away.
"We're going after more distant prey," Dr. Riess said.
[...]
By the end of the weekend, they had logged four supernovae -- called Denethor, Bilbo, Frodo and Smeagol, after the gollum in "The Lord of the Rings" -- that were good enough to give to the Essence team. But none were good enough to "pull the trigger" on Hubble.
Happiness filled the humble cottage of Ri Myung Shim today, as her 5-year-old son awoke to find a gift bag of cookies and candy. This was not an offering from the tooth fairy, but a birthday present, of sorts. The gift celebrated the most important day on the North Korean calendar -- the birthday of Kim Jong Il, the country's leader.
"This morning, he took the gift and stood in front of the portrait of the Dear Leader and expressed his gratitude to the Dear Leader," Mr. Ri, a 27-year-old park guard, said today. He beamed at the memory of his little son bowing before the household shrine to the 61-year-old Mr. Kim, whose formal title is chairman of the national defense commission but who is also known as the "sun of the 21st century."
[...]
"It is great that children get these gifts," said Li Ok Hwa, a 27-year-old park guide outfitted in stylish white parka and shiny black boots. "That way, they learn who the Dear Leader is and that he is their king."
[...]
Many people are certainly not reserved about professing it in public. In a nation where legions of soldiers at parades chant "May Kim Jong Il live 10,000 years," granite cliffs at the park here are carved with slogans praising the family.
"Revolutionary Warrior Kim Jong Seok: Her Name Will Shine Forever!" proclaimed one, praising Kim Jong Il's mother. The campaign to elevate Mr. Kim's mother into the nation's pantheon of heroes heralded his own elevation to power on his father's death, in 1994.
On Saturday, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported the start of a propaganda campaign to hail Kim Jong Il's wife, Ko Yong Hee, as "mother" and "loyal subject." This campaign may herald the grooming of their 21-year-old son, Kim Jong Chul, as dynastic heir.
[...]
Since foreign visitors were barred from entering local villages today, the government staged a peppy musical performance by the Pyongyang Youth Brass Band, an all-female group attired in outfits that looked like a style collision between Maoist Red Guards and the Dallas Cowboys' cheerleaders.
And only a genius such as the Dear Leader could think of that! Just remember:
"The U.S. would not dare to invade North Korea because we have mighty Kim Jong Il," said Ms. Li, the park guide.
Indeed.
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5 for more detail.
But the fear of terrorism, Mr. Lamson said, made getting to the protest all the more important.
"That is one of the most convincing arguments of the antiwar movement," he said. "An attack on Iraq will stimulate terrorism against the United States."
Oh, yes. We're safe now, as long as we don't anger anyone (more). If we don't attack Iraq (more), we don't anger anyone. Just like we didn't anger anyone on September 10th, 2001. It's a safety argument.
Minor point:
Michael N. Nagler, the founder and former chairman of the Peace and Conflict Studies Department at the University of California....
I am intrigued to learn that the University of California has given up having individual colleges, and has merged into one massive system, with only Departments. I am thinking of enrolling in this exciting new system. Where do I go? Can the New York Times tell me?
Read The Rest Scale: 1 out of 5; there were anti-war demonstrations; in San Francisco, they were a day late. I feel safe now. Don't you?
Anti-Americanism is rampant. I'm not trying to look particularly American, but it seems to come across; I speak decent French, but nobody cares. I've made sure to speak French--these folks are very testy about language--but it doesn't seem to help. I was buying the International Herald Tribune, the international version of the New York Times, and was asked if I was American or Australian. (Why the person would assume America or Australia are the only two English-speaking nations is beyond me, but these are the French.) I said I was Australian (no need for a fistfight) and she launched into a tirade about the United States and Israel. "Les israeliens, ils tuent les Palestinienns tous les temps." ("The Israelis are killing the Palestinians all the time.") I decided to listen to her, mostly out of curiosity, then responded, in broken French, "what about the bombings of Israeli children?" She shrugged and said "la colonialisme est un horreur." (Colonialism is horrible.) Irony abounded, of course, given the French legacy of failed colonialism. (Vietnam and Algeria stand out as examples.)
WHY THE DISHONESTY?: A lot of leftist bloggers respect and quote Media Whores Online. Okay, fine. Sometime it tosses up worthwhile results, other times not.
But what I note is that nine times out of ten, this site is referred to by those who honor it as "the Horse" or "Horse says." It's almost as if they find the name embarrassing, or something. Whatever. What I don't respect are people who lie about a site's name, for whatever reason.
A Whore is a Whore. Good results or not. Call a Whore a Whore. Honor it, or not. Do it. Don't change a name. A horse is a horse, of course, of course, and so is a Media Whore. Basically, if you quote that site, and call it "horse," I think you have something to be embarassed by, or hide. Because, apparently, you have. So, you know, stop.
GOOGLE OWNS OUR ASS: No, not just you searchers. Us bloggers. My.
The best news?
For Williams and his five co-workers, now Google employees, the immediate impact will be to put their blog-hosting service, called Blog*Spot, on the vast network of server computers Google operates. This will make the service more reliable and robust.
