MORE ON IRANIAN BLOGGERS: Here’s a story from Shift magazine.
Archive for 2002
August 2, 2002
CYNTHIA MCKINNEY UPDATE: Following up on the Indepundit’s 9/11-related discovery mentioned below, Jim Henley has more about the odd patterns in her campaign donations.
August 1, 2002
LET US NOW PRAISE HOMELAND SECURITY OFFICIALS WHO HAVE A CLUE:
LAS VEGAS (AP) – A presidential advisor encouraged the nation’s top computer security professionals and hackers Wednesday to try to break computer programs, but said they might need protection from the legal wrath of software makers.
Richard Clarke, President Bush ( news – web sites)’s computer security advisor, told hackers at the Black Hat conference that most security holes in software are not found by the software maker.
“Some of us, here in this room, have an obligation to find the vulnerabilities,” Clarke said.
Clarke said the hackers should be responsible about reporting the programming mistakes. A hacker should contact the software maker first, he said, then go to the government if the software maker doesn’t respond soon. . . .
Companies differ in their response to independent researchers. While some encourage or even reward bug-hunters, others are more concerned about the possibility of extortion or embarassment to the company. In some instances, they seek civil or criminal charges against the hacker.
Clarke said that situation is “very disappointing,” as long as the hacker acts in good faith.
“If there are legal protections they don’t have that they need, we need to look at that,” he said.
This is, with blinding obviousness, right. Just so long as it isn’t turned into a backdoor for Rep. Howard Berman’s (D-Disney) bill to authorize corporations to hack your computer. That’s not the same thing at all.
WILL SALETAN EXPLAINS how to suck the President’s blood.
THERE’S A NEW AND DIFFERENT Blogosphere Ecosystem listing based on 2263 weblogs. The universe and ranking aren’t the same as NZ Bear’s. I’m still not sure exactly how meaningful the exercise is, but everybody seems to like talking about it.
CHARLES JOHNSON is rather proud to be the first weblogger attacked by the Arab News.
WOW. THE INDEPUNDIT HAS NOTICED SOMETHING RATHER ODD that happened on September 11, and as far as I know no one else has reported this.
A funny thing to have happened that day, of all days.
SUPERMARKET CARDS AND PRIVACY: Kim DuToit, who used to work on supermarket “loyalty card” programs, has some things to say about them.
JEFF COOPER has some thoughts on politics, including the implications of the Democrats’ falling into the pocket of Big Entertainment.
RAMESH PONNURU is calling on Chief Justice Rehnquist to resign.
A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO ANTITERRORISM: Not “What would Bugs Bunny do?” but “What would Sam Kinison do?”
UPDATE: Had the wrong number of n’s in Kinison. It’s fixed now. And here’s a link to his official website.
WELL, AT LEAST THIS antiterrorism initiative worked.
OF COURSE YOU REALIZE THAT THIS MEANS WAR.
LOOKS LIKE THE EUROPEAN UNION HIRED ITS ACCOUNTANTS based on recommendations from the record industry. (Via Ranting Screeds).
WHY GRAY DAVIS IS LIKE MONTY BURNS: This item from the Simon campaign suggests that it’s too early to count them out. (Via Patrick Ruffini, who has some other cool stuff on his page today, too.)
HERE’S A CORRUPT INDUSTRY screwing retirees out of their pensions:
What if you worked for a company for 30 years – say, starting in 1967 and ending in 1997 – and then realized the company had never paid into your pension fund? You’d be pretty steamed.
That’s what happened to Sam Moore from the famous R&B group Sam & Dave. He had hits with Atlantic Records, which is part of Time Warner, like “Soul Man,” “Hold On I’m Coming” and dozens of others.
Even though new hits stopped coming, the old ones kept selling. He figured that when he reached retirement, Atlantic would have been paying his pension into his union, which is called AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists).
When Moore applied for his pension, he was told that he had benefits coming to him. What a relief, he thought. Then he got the bad news. AFTRA was all set to pay him a whopping $67 a month. This is the same AFTRA that now boasts a $1.2 billion surplus.
That $67 figure came not from the money Sam thought he was getting from Atlantic, but from radio and television appearances he’d made over the years. It turned out that Atlantic had never paid one dime into his pension fund. Nothing. Nada.
Think of all the times you’ve heard “Soul Man” played on the radio, or in clubs and restaurants. Sam Moore was not getting paid for any of it.
Push has come to shove, though. Moore, along with two dozen or so other artists – including some who’ve passed away – sued AFTRA and the record companies for their proper compensation.
It turns out, by the way, that you don’t have to be a member of AFTRA to qualify. If you recorded songs for a record company that was a signatory of AFTRA – which means all of them – you qualify for a pension. And not just black artists or those from the ’60s. The Eagles, for example, are as mad as Sam Moore about what’s happened.
Last month, AFTRA tried to push a settlement through in the ongoing case. They offered to pay each of the plaintiffs $100,000 apiece, and let the rest of the recording artists twist in the wind.
But many of the plaintiffs, including Moore, objected, and the judge took them seriously. Moore figured that he was probably owed about a million bucks. So the judge told all sides to go back to the drawing board and start over.
Tomorrow, all the attorneys involved in the case – representing AFTRA, its pension fund, the recording industry organization RIAA, the record labels, the plaintiffs, etc. – will meet in Scottsdale, Ariz., to start negotiations. It should be interesting since one law firm, Proskauer Rose, represents both the AFTRA fund and the Recording Industry Association of America.
The record labels are united on one front: They don’t want to have pay about 20,000 different artists 30 years of back pension and health benefits.
So why aren’t Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt calling for hearings and legislation to rake these crooks over the coals? Aren’t they friends of the working people? Or are they just the tools of a different bunch of fatcats? And why isn’t the union doing more (er, doing anything)?
Some questions answer themselves, don’t they?
THE SAUDIS are apparently trying to buy Pakistani nukes. They are not our friends. They know it. So should we.
A LOT OF PEOPLE IN THE BLOGOSPHERE are grudgingly admitting that Eric Alterman is actually a pretty good blogger. Today’s deconstruction of a particularly stupid passage from Newsweek explains why.
This kind of stuff ought to help improve big-media journalism, which obviously needs it. And heck, if it doesn’t, at least we get to have a good laugh at its expense.
CHUCK HERRICK’S POST made me wonder: Have I been too hard on Homeland Security? And then the answer came to me: No, I haven’t been.
Some political advice for the Administration: Homeland Security is a joke. It’s the butt of jokes (and worse) on talk radio, which is inhabited mostly by people inclined to support you. It’s treated (unfairly, as I noted in the post that somehow precipitated all this) as fascism descending by the Left. And, it’s not going to work.
September 11th, 2002 is coming up fast. After the networks are done with their commemoratives, people are going to notice that a year has passed. On the home front, at least, what they’re going to see is a record of screwups and pointless intrusiveness, summed up in many people’s minds by the airline tweezer-ban, and the mentality it represents. If there’s a major terrorist event in America between now and then, all this stuff will look stupid and ineffective (which it is). If there’s not, well, it will still look stupid and ineffective. And there’s no sign that the people who dropped the ball are ever going to be held accountable, even as ordinary Americans are called to account for all sorts of things.
Not long after that, there’s going to be an election.
UPDATE: Here’s an email I got in response, from Clayton Cramer, who I didn’t realize read InstaPundit. But I get these kinds of things all the time:
I really want to support Homeland Security. But they are clearly applying rules in a way that suggests that they have hired a bunch of robots. My son is 14. (And no, his name is not Mohammed, nor would anyone mistake him for one of the suspect nationalities.) He flew to California recently. On his return flight, he left his skateboard adjusting tool in his backpack. Picture something rather like a multipart socket wrench. They confiscated it as a weapon. They didn’t even give him a chance to check it. It was only $10 down the tube, but it shows what morons the TSA has doing this work.
This is the face of Homeland Security, folks.
I’M NOT APPENDING THIS to the Chuck Herrick “conditional patriotism” post below, because that one’s already damned long. But reader Bob Kingsbery has some good insight on the topic:
Tell Chuck Herrick that giving up your civil liberties in the war on terrorism would make you a loyalist, not a patriot.
A patriot puts the freedoms and rights America was founded on above everything else.
A loyalist puts America’s leaders and laws above everything else.
Perhaps that’s the real idealogical divide in America right now. Right wingers and left wingers both believe in bigger government and fewer individual freedoms.
Middle of the road liberals, libertarians and moderate conservatives share a belief in limited government and greater personal freedom.
Your thoughts?
I’m not sure I think that’s the biggest ideological divide, but it’s certainly what divides me from Herrick. My loyalty is to the Constitution, not blood and soil. That’s for other kinds of countries.
There are lots of good responses in the comments to the earlier post, but I couldn’t resist adding this one from Andy Freeman:
After all, anyone can say that anything is “in the name of the war”, just as they can claim that anything is “for the children”. However, making such a claim doesn’t make it true.
Similarly, one can suggest sacrifices that will do NOTHING to win the war.
If Herrick disagrees, he’ll have no problems with sending me $100 “for the war”. It’s a small sacrifice that he can easily afford and he doesn’t want to be one of those nasty libertarians.
What? The check is not in the mail? Is it that he doesn’t actually believe his little rant or that it doesn’t apply to him?
A bit mean, perhaps, but nicely illustrative. Or as Suman Palit puts it in another of the comments, “The idea that patriotism involves happily agreeing with every administrative bungle or ineffective beauracratic policy is ludicrous.”
GREENS OFTEN LIKEN HUMANS TO A VIRUS destroying the Earth’s ecosystems. Ron Bailey says humans are Gaia’s immune system. I think we’re more like the biosphere’s reproductive system — if Earth life is going to establish itself on Mars, it won’t be Penguins who get it there.
I WAS WRONG (well, the early reports I relied on were wrong) when I posted last night that all of those killed in the Hebrew University bombing were non-Israelis. It turns out two were Israeli citizens. The other five were Americans. I was still right about the Palestinians dancing in the streets, though.
What would things be like for Palestinians now, if Israelis or Americans thought like Arabs?
They wouldn’t be like anything at all, of course. There wouldn’t be any Palestinians.
UPDATE: Reader Faisal N. Jawdat thinks this is a foolish generalization, bordering on racism. Well, it’s a generalizaton: sort of like talking about “Germans” during World War Two. One might have pointed out that there were a few anti-Nazi Germans in Germany, and plenty of loyal, decent Americans of German extraction. But this wasn’t necessary, since it was understood that the reference was to the vast majority of Germans, who were participants in a psychotic death cult that led them to march in the streets en masse and cheer the death of innocents. So we’re really only at odds with the ones who think that way — of which there were estimated to be 10,000 in the streets celebrating last night, and quite a few doing the same thing on September 11.
ANOTHER UPDATE: I’ve emailed back and forth with Faisal, who has this to add after the update:
Noted. If you’d even said “the vast majority”, I wouldn’t have had a complaint. The problem is that *you* understand it to mean “the vast majority” but it’s not clear that you mean it that way, and I doubt most people take it that way (that, at least, has been my experience – Arab Americans who want peace are often shut out and shouted down because people assume their name implies their thinking).
Fair enough. A later email adds:
On the issue of how people think, I doubt the vast majority of Arabs (or Germans or Americans) think about these sorts of things at all. It seems like the thinkers disagree and everyone else goes along with whoever has the loudest voice.
Right now the loudest voices in the Arab world are coming from religious extremists and tin pot dictators (looking to distract their populace by sicking them on someone else (us)), so our obvious task is to get the vast majority listening to someone else. As to Americans, you have a lot of voice right now – use your powers for good :)
And speaking of religious extremists and tin pot dictators, I just read the bit about the Saudi government looking to buy Pakistani nukes. I’ll be hiding under my desk now. Good thing I work across the street from a military base, I’ll be safe here! “Oh, wait.”
Oh, wait, indeed. Here, if you’re interested is a link to Faisal.com.
A SAUDI MELTDOWN? Reader Trent Telenko writes:
I think that the Saudis have been in a ‘Pre-revolutionary state’ longer than the Iranians. Maybe as far back as the late 1980s.
A friend of mine thinks that I am right about the Saudi condition, but dates the ‘pre-revolutionary’ condition since the Khobar Towers bombing.
In short, he doesn’t think either the Iranians or Al-Qaeda had anything to do with the Khobar bombing.
That is because the Saudis have created their own version of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the ‘Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,’ which did the deed. The Iranians and Al-Qaeda are misdirections by the Saudi intelligence circles to cover up for their roque government faction.
The way things are going according to David Warren, my friend seems to have a point.
The David Warren column he cites does support this theory. Excerpt:
It is not, however, the uniformed police, but the Mutawaun who are the real face of the Saudi regime at street level — the agents of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. They don’t wear uniforms, but like the Taliban in Afghanistan (which modelled itself on the Saudi regime) may be spotted by their austere robes and headgear, and personal theatricality. Their job is to threaten women who are not covered head to toe in the plain black “abaya”, prevent men and women from talking to each other, see that shops are closed at prayer times, herd the men into the mosques, and beat up kids who look excessively happy. They patrol the streets in airconditioned SUVs, or walk through the American-style shopping malls with their bullhorns and sticks.
They finally triggered nation-wide demonstrations, starting March 11, when they prevented at least 14 girls from escaping a fire in their school at Mecca, lest they appear in the street without their abayas. While the story was suppressed in the state-controlled media, it quickly travelled throughout the kingdom. (Only people who have lived in totalitarian states can understand the efficiency with which news can be distributed by word of mouth.)
The same Arabian grapevine is now carrying numerous accounts of large public demonstrations. The Western media assume that these demonstrators are screaming for Al Qaeda and Palestine, and indeed there is plenty of evidence that (the late?) Osama bin Laden enjoys a cult following. But my own sources insist that many of the demonstrators are women, and that the protests are aimed almost entirely at the House of Saud and its Mutawaun.
This hardly means the “good guys” will win. There are no good guys. For in a country as backward as Saudi Arabia, where no form of civil opposition has ever been tolerated or been able to survive, all this present, disorganized protest plays into the hands of the worst elements within the regime, and the worst elements outside it.
I do believe that the Saudi government (or, if you prefer “elements within the Saudi government”) is behind Al Qaeda and similar organizations. Indeed, as I speculated way back at the beginning of October, “Bin Laden’s involvement is most likely as a facilitator and as a front and distraction for others.”
This is probably the big question that has vexed the White House. We have two enemies, really: Saudi Arabia and Saddam Hussein (Iran, too, but it’s more likely to fall if we do nothing and so can be left out of the calculations for now). But which do we go after first? Beating Iraq weakens the Saudis strategically by further reducing their oil revenues and their market power (which is why they hate it) — but that will inflame their legions of idle-yet-entitled citizens, making them more dangerous (though mostly to themselves) in the short run. Which is also why the not-very-secure Saudi ruling class is against an invasion of Iraq.
Invading Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, though easier and in the long run essential, still leaves an armed and dangerous Iraq on the border, and might encourage Saddam to try to play Savior of Islam by using weapons of mass destruction to “defend the holy places” or somesuch.
But the Sauds have to go, sooner or later. I think even the White House has figured that out.
MERYL YOURISH has an update post on her amorous preferences where superheroes are concerned. It makes me feel kind of sorry for the poor Silver Surfer, but The Shocker has won Meryl’s, er, heart.