HERE, via Blog Mela, is a fairly lengthy article from Time on outsourcing.

As I’ve said before, I think this may well be an issue in the 2004 election.

UPDATE: Benkat Balasubramani disagrees with the Jeff Taylor piece on outsourcing that I linked earlier.

BLOG MELA, which is the Indian blogosphere’s version of “Carnival of the Vanities,” is up. Check it out.

YOU KNEW THIS ALREADY, but the Saudis are not our friends:

Even as the White House tries to tamp down the furor over alleged Saudi links to the September 11 terror attacks, a U.S. Senate panel is poised to stoke the fire even further. At a hearing this Thursday, NEWSWEEK has learned, it will unveil new allegations that the Saudis are continuing to funnel millions of dollars through Islamic charities that are winding up in the coffers of organized terror groups.

The Saudis, as I think I may have mentioned, are not our friends. Read this, too.

WHAT IS IT with the dictators and buried weapons? First there was this recent discovery of armed planes still buried under Berlin. Now there’s this:

WASHINGTON (AP) – Some of Iraqi’s missing air force has turned up down below.

Search teams, some hunting for Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, found dozens of fighter jets from Iraq’s air force buried beneath the sands, U.S. officials say.

At least one Cold War-era MiG-25 interceptor was found when searchers saw the tops of its twin tail fins poking up from the sands, said one Pentagon official familiar with the hunt. He said search teams have found several MiG-25s and Su-25 ground attack jets buried at al-Taqqadum air field west of Baghdad.

Of course, by burying this stuff to hide it, Saddam took it out of action every bit as effectively as if it had been shot down.

MORE ON BBC CHICANERY: The Guardian has extracts from the hearing into claims that the BBC falsely charged Tony Blair’s administration with “sexing up” intelligence about Iraq. Looks like the Beeb is the one with credibility problems:

Stanley… If what you are now saying is the case, I think that you have led this whole committee, and the wider public, up the garden path in a most staggering way … This is very, very serious, Mr Gilligan. I cannot tell you how serious it is to mislead a committee. I must ask you very, very straight: are you saying Mr Campbell did or did not have responsibility for inserting into the document the 45-minute claim?

Gilligan I have never said in respect of the insertion of the 45-minute claim that Mr Campbell inserted it. I simply quoted the words of my source. The claim was that the dossier had been transformed, and I asked “How did this transformation happen?” And the answer was a single word, “Campbell”.

I then asked “What do you mean, Campbell made it up?” And he said, “No. It was real information – this is the 45-minute claim – but it was included in the dossier against our wishes, because it was not reliable.” We may draw the inference, and indeed the committee may reasonably draw the inference, that the decision to include the 45-minute claim was made by Mr Campbell. That was the allegation of the source …

Stanley You know absolutely that was the interpretation being placed on your remarks. You know perfectly well, from what you have said to us now, that there was no justification for such an interpretation … Can I ask whether you wish to consider before the committee moves to private deliberations, which I think will be extremely serious, whether you now wish to make a very full and frank apology to this committee for having, in my view, grievously misled this committee?

Read it all.

PAUL BOUTIN has a column on electronic voting and fraud in Slate that’s worth reading.

RIGHT-THINKING is moving, and the domain name doesn’t work right now. You can still reach it at this IP address until things settle down.

FORGET GAY MARRIAGE: Dahlia Lithwick is floating the possibility of “legislating mandatory threesomes.” I wonder how that idea would poll?

IF YOU’RE INTERESTED in attending the Accelerating Change conference at Stanford (featuring Ray Kurzweil, Robert Wright, Eric Drexler, Steve Jurvetson, et al.,) you can get a discount with this code from Nanodot. Sadly, I won’t be there — but I’d like to be.

UNILATERALISM:

French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin has apologised to Brazil over a secret mission to the Amazon to rescue a high-profile hostage that sparked a diplomatic dispute.

Unsuccessful unilateralism: the hostage is still there.

DOC SEARLS: ” I see no sign so far that the White House even begins to understand the Net.”

THE POPE: WRONG AGAIN! First the war, now gay marriage.

OCCAM’S TOOTHBRUSH takes exception to a Jack Kelly comment.

ANDY BOWERS LOOKS AT gubernatorial recalls across the states.

UPDATE: Colby Cosh offers some more background.

BRENDAN O’NEILL says that Unicef is cooking the numbers in its “human trafficking” statements.

“HE SHOULD BE WRITING FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; of course, he’s barbecuing it.” Interesting profile of Mickey Kaus, though Kaus slipperily manages to avoid answering the real questions.

LEE HARRIS has an interesting piece on the political problems posed by non-Clausewitzian war.

NOW HERE’S A MOVIE BLURB I’D LIKE TO SEE:

Not entirely unpleasant! — Melissa Schwartz

If truth-in-advertising applied to movie ads, we’d see this a lot. . . .

A MEMORABLE KOREAN FISKING.

DONALD RUMSFELD AND CATASTROPHIC INTELLIGENCE FAILURES — Austin Bay’s latest column is on both. He concludes:

Infiltrating a terror clique to obtain detailed planning information, “the truly accurate information” — is extremely difficult. We do information technology without peer, but in the dirty, gray world of James Bond cloak and dagger deception, we’re Joe Average. America’s gravest intelligence weakness is a lack of HUMINT, human spies, capable of penetrating al Qaeda.

Until that changes, the president should be tossing and turning.

Read the whole thing. And ponder that John Walker Lindh had no trouble penetrating Al Qaeda.

UPDATE: Reader James McKenzie-Smith emails:

I think that he had no trouble penetrating the Taliban, not AQ. In that being a member of the Taliban allowed him a certain interaction with AQ, this avenue of approach for a penetration of AQ has probably closed itself.

And Austin Bay himself emails:

Johnny Lindh was perhaps (ultra wild estimate) three to five years away from being inside the planning clique. That’s a way of saying it takes time and foresight to place the human spy. Like you, I’ve thought about Lindh as a model. At the time he entered Al Qaeda it was relatively easy to become a foot soldier, if you could display the zealot’s fervor. I can see a scenario where the Al Qaeda bigwigs select a Lindh jihadi for a terror strike because he is an American. There might even be a “test” strike to gauge his reliability. Now we’re getting novelistic, but the same imaginative faculties that go into plotting a novel go into “plotting” an operation.

The easiest way to penetrate the terror clique’s planning cell is cash, I suppose, but that also takes inside information to find the “corruptible” religious fanatic.

Both good points. My phraseology above was sloppy, and overstated things. Lindh “penetrated” Al Qaeda to the extent that he met bin Laden and had some contact with his circle, but he didn’t really get on the inside. Still, he got awfully close to the center of things, considering.

I DIDN’T WATCH BUSH YESTERDAY, but his remarks on gay marriage angered Roger Simon, though Simon calmed down a bit in response to comments on his blog. (Read ’em — they’re interesting). Andrew Sullivan was initially confused, then upon reflection unhappy.

I’m against a federal constitutional amendment to prevent gay marriage, though it’s not entirely clear to me that Bush is for one. Certainly support for such a move would violate Bush’s professed principles of federalism — but the Administration has been willing to violate those principles in other areas, such as cloning.

I wonder if such an amendment would pass. If it were attempted, and failed, it would be a good thing for supporters of gay marriage. But I don’t have a clear idea of the prospects for passage. It’s certainly true that gay marriage has less popular support than you might think from coverage in the the pro-gay media (like, you know, InstaPundit). Most Americans, I think, are increasingly comfortable with gay people, but not as comfortable with the idea that gayness itself is truly acceptable. That’s changing, but the process is still underway. That means that there’s a lot of support for non-discrimination, but a lot less support for things seen as “mainstreaming” gays, or at least gayness. On the other hand, I suspect that this ambivalence translates into weak support for affirmative action against gays, too, but I don’t know how that would shake out in terms of a battle over a constitutional amendment.

I’m not sure anyone else does, either, which makes me doubt that canny politicians would want to bring this to a head. But I could be wrong.

UPDATE: Nick Gillespie has more on the subject, including this observation:

As liberals gear up to bash Bush for his reactionary thinking on this point, they ought to remember the actions of the only twice-elected Democrat president since FDR. When Bill Clinton signed The Defense of Marriage Act in September 1996–an act specifically intended to foreclose state recognition of same-sex marriages–he noted that he had “long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages.”

While Bush’s position is no surprise, new Gallup polls on attitudes toward homosexuals are: Over the past two months, support for gay relations between consenting adults is taking a dive, as is support for same-sex unions.

Yes, Clinton was hardly a progressive on this issue. As for the “backlash,” well, I think it’s probably exaggerated. It’s worth noticing that less than twenty years ago the Supreme Court affirmed that it was okay to send gay people to jail for life just for having sex. Now the question is whether gay marriage should be permitted. That’s quite rapid progress.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Michael Gebert emails:

I hope some politicians realize that while you would have had the public support and the votes to pass, say, a Segregation Amendment in 1953, it would have been the last moment in history when you did, and very soon it would have been disastrous for the party that had pushed it.

And for the country.

TOM MAGUIRE has more on the Pentagon’s terrorism-futures plan, and why the opposition to it was, well, dumb.

This column by James Pethokoukis of U.S. News is worth reading, too.

WRITERS AND THIN SKINS, John Scalzi has an interesting story, with links.

THIS COLUMN ON OUTSOURCING IN THE I.T. INDUSTRY got quite a reaction, so some readers might be interested in this piece on the subject by Jeff Taylor, which takes a rather skeptical look at the supposed efficiencies involved.

I think there’s a counter-trend starting here. I have a friend who does software at a big corporation that has been doing a lot of outsourcing. They figured out that they were spending as much time and money fixing “low-cost” Indian coding as it would have cost them to do the work themselves using American programmers in-house, and are now bringing some of the work back.

No doubt over time a lot of work will move overseas, but a lot of times people underestimate the problems involved in spreading work over large groups of people who don’t talk to each other face-to-face. And too many companies focus on “savings” that are only on paper. I have a couple of friends who are aerospace engineers who say that their company’s supply chain is entirely controlled by one factor: purchase price. They’re getting Chinese made parts that are a hundred bucks cheaper than the American version — but they fail more often, and when they do a multimillion-dollar jet engine dies. This is generating a certain degree of customer dissatisfaction. . . .

UPDATE: Trent Telenko emails:

The last three major truck quality issues we had on the US Army’s FMTV truck program I work on have been traces to one each a Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean OEM through American distributors.

In each case the contractor has gone to either in-house fabrication or American OEMs to get reliable quality.

Yeah. It’s not like those folks aren’t capable of making good stuff, or that Americans aren’t capable of making crap. But when you let cost be the sole driver in procurement, well, you get what you pay for. At best.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Belknap, who has a lot of experience with this sort of thing, has more on the subject.

DEREK LOWE on the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying skills:

Oh, there are no limits to what we can accomplish over here in the drug industry. We can stop diseases in their tracks that used to mow people down like ripe wheat. We can bring some people back from the very parking lot of the funeral parlor, and we’re staying up late at night trying to figure out ways to do it some more. And we can then take what should be the biggest reservoir of good will around, drain the whole damn thing, leap into the resulting mudhole and sink clear out of sight. Arrr.

Ouch.