Archive for 2005
November 5, 2005
THE U.N. AND THE INTERNET: Kofi Annan is trying to reassure us, but I remain uncomforted.
I FINISHED THE JOHN BIRMINGHAM ALT-HISTORY NOVEL the other day, and yesterday I started the new Harry Turtledove alt-history novel and found some interesting overlap. No spoilers here, though.
Birmingham is a blogger, and in this entry notes that his series was inspired by S.M. Stirling.
A REVIEW of right-wing blogs, from Jon Henke.
PHOTOBLOGGING A GLUT OF UNSOLD HUMMERS: Pretty interesting reporting, though I don’t see why it’s Alan Greenspan’s fault. For that matter, I’d say that their rapid loss of marketability isn’t a sign that America is bloated and inefficient, as suggested, but rather that market economies respond quite rapidly to changing circumstances. Hybrid SUVs, after all, are flying off the lots.
It’s also the kind of reporting you’re more likely to see on a blog than in your local newspaper, since blogs don’t have to worry about offending all those ad-buying car dealers.
UPDATE: Linda Seebach emails that I’m unfairly generalizing about newspapers and car dealers, and notes that the Rocky Mountain News recently ran a story about an SUV glut. Perhaps, though I had a friend lose a job for reporting unfavorably on car dealers, and the unwillingness of newspapers to offend the car business is something I’ve hear about in quite a few places. (Then there’s the Tribeca story).
Meanwhile, reader Joe Faughnan thinks this may not be a case of slow sales, but of vehicle stockpiling in anticipation of a Delphi strike.
November 4, 2005
ARE PATENTS HOLDING BACK hybrid car technology? I’m not sure whether I’m persuaded by this.
DANIEL DREZNER: “For me, the big question remains — if New Orleans was such a stagnant economy that those displaced to Houston don’t want to return, just how much money should be committed to reconstruction efforts?”
THE CARNIVAL OF CORDITE is up!
RAY KURZWEIL WAS ON CHARLIE ROSE earlier this week, talking about his new book, the Singularity is Near. You can see the video here.
TWO QUESTIONS FOR GEORGE TENET: I think that’s just a start.
EGYPTIAN BLOGGER UPDATE:
The whereabouts of blogger Abdolkarim Nabil Seliman who was abducted from his home by Egyptian state security on Wednesday Oct. 26 is still not known. The police refused to answer questions by AP, the first wire to run the story. The last report about his whereabouts said he was on his way to an unknown detention center.
It was 3 a.m. when seven police officers took the 21 year old blogger away from his family home in Alexandria. His mother, Yousseira, says the house was searched; books and copies of Seliman’s writings were confiscated.
His friends and family says Seliman was targeting radical Islam in his writings, despite his strong connections to the Muslim community. Seliman is a student of law at Al-Azhar, the world’s highest seat of learning for Sunni Muslims. His pious Muslim family had returned from a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca just days before his arrests. . . .
Another blogger who closely followed Seliman’s detention says it is the fundamentalist Islamic Salafi movement that is behind the arrest. The blogger, Malik Moustafa, said Seliman recently had accused the Salafis of inciting the latest sectarian tensions in his neighbourhood of Mouharm Bay.
Read the whole thing, for an extensive roundup. And Global Voices has more.
MORE ON MUSLIM RIOTS IN DENMARK as well as France. (Via NewsAlert).
JEFF ROSEN DISSES PATRICK FITZGERALD:
On both ends of the political spectrum, however, there has been wide praise of Fitzgerald’s restraint and professionalism in focusing on a relatively clear-cut case of false statements rather than indicting officials or reporters for disclosing official secrets.
But it’s important for journalists (including me) who vigorously opposed the Kenneth Starr investigation to state the obvious: The Fitzgerald indictments are an embarrassing confirmation of the old Washington rule that, when special prosecutors can’t prove a crime, they indict the target for obstructing the investigation. Far from being typical behavior, indicting suspects for nothing more than false statements or perjury is a vice largely restricted to special prosecutors and independent counsels. And, although Libby’s alleged lies to protect his boss may appear more serious than Bill Clinton’s self-interested lies about sex, neither Clinton nor Libby prevented the special prosecutor from proving an underlying crime. In fact, there’s strong reason to conclude that no underlying crime was committed. Unlike the Starr investigation, moreover, the Fitzgerald investigation represents a disaster for the First Amendment and may do long-lasting damage to political discourse in Washington.
Rosen is right about that. We’ve set a precedent — egged on by the editorialists at the New York Times and those who follow their lead — that leaking classified material to journalists should be prosecutable. If I were the Bush Administration, I’d be sorely tempted to start subpoenaing journalists right and left when they reported on classified information. You want it? You got it.
Some people are worried about that, which is why there’s some support for a shield law. But those damned bloggers are complicating things:
Steven Clymer, a law professor at Cornell University, shared Rosenberg’s concerns, according to the draft transcript. Clymer warned that a federal shield law “would signal that illegal disclosures of classified or otherwise sensitive information … are immune from criminal prosecution as long as they are made to a recipient who could qualify as a reporter under the privilege.” And he added that the pending bill is so broad that it could apply to “a disclosure of sensitive or classified information to an Internet blogger.”
When quizzed by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, about the bill’s application to blogs, Clymer said courts ultimately would have to decide the issue if the current language becomes law. “They may decide that you cannot favor one group of media over another group of media,” Clymer said. “And so if you are going to give the privilege to The New York Times, you necessarily have to give it to the Internet blogger as well.”
Sen. John Cornyn disagrees: “”Internet bloggers, and perhaps others, don’t observe the same professional ethics and have the same review by editors and others that are trying to make sure that they are performing their job in a responsible and accurate sort of way.”
Rosen makes pretty much the same point, adding the suggestion that it’s only “vanity” that makes bloggers care. (I’m resisting the temptation to invoke RatherGate and Stephen Glass here). Yet putting the many famous cases of journalistic breakdown aside, bloggers don’t presume to tell us important things about national security on a “trust me” basis very much. You find those unnamed anonymous sources with hidden agendas in the work of mainstream journalists, for the most part, not bloggers — remember how this whole thing got started? — and the point of shield laws is to let them continue. How exactly does this serve the public interest?
UPDATE: Reader Michael Gebert emails:
So basically, The New York Times screwed up the old arrangement between government secrecy and the press for short-term partisan reasons, and now it wants a new arrangement limited to journalistic institutions like itself because, unlike the rabble of bloggers, they can be counted on to be responsibly non-partisan?
Pretty much.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Heh: “you can very clearly see where the makers had optimistically put ‘shield law’ but then had to cover it up with ‘denim.'”
MORE: Dave Johnston:
So let me get this straight…
We’ve got White House staff now doing conference calls with bloggers, and at the same time Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) still feels the need to drop an al Jazeera-comparison to make his point that we should be fearful of “a certain irresponsibility” that apparently occurs when bloggers exercise their freedoms.
Do I really need to point out how ridiculous this all sounds?
Not really.
Interestingly, this Wall Street Journal story on environmentally-conscious Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s purchase of an enormous Boeing jet for personal use includes this credit:
Mr. Page wouldn’t say whether or not the Qantas plane was the one they bought. The 767 purchase was first brought to public attention by a blog written by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Jeffrey Nolan.
This kind of thing happens all the time now, and yet people pretend bloggers don’t do reporting.
FINALLY: Good news and bad news for Karl Rove.
LOTS OF NANOTECHNOLOGY NEWS over at NanoDot. Just keep scrolling.
VICENTE FOX douses Hugo Chavez.
GETTING READY FOR THANKSGIVING EARLY: Bill Quick has his weekend cooking thread posted.
AN ELEVENTH AMENDMENT FISKING: You don’t see very many of those.
EGYPT’S ARREST OF BLOGGER Abdolkarim Nabil Seliman seems to be getting some attention around the world. The website of the Egyptian embassy to the United States is here.
SAN FRANCISCO POLICE COME OUT against a handgun ban:
Adding a timely twist to the debate, those opponents warn that a major earthquake could lead to chaos and anarchy, akin to post-Katrina New Orleans.
“What happens when the police leave town, just like they did in New Orleans?” asked John Mindermann, a retired San Francisco police officer who keeps a handgun in his home in the low-crime area of West Portal. Only active law enforcement and military personnel would be exempt from the ban.
And even though its officers fight violence daily, the San Francisco Police Officers Association is also opposed to the ban, saying it cannot back a measure that takes away “the personal choice of city residents to lawfully possess a handgun for self-defense purposes.”
Good for them.
IN THE MAIL: Tom Baker’s The Medical Malpractice Myth,
ALLISON HAYWARD WRITES on the House’s rejection of the Online Freedom of Speech Act:
The bill itself was reasonable and modest in scope. It would have codified existing regulations — which are currently the law under which we labor — exempting the Internet from special rules that apply to “public communications.” These rules have the most impact for political parties (especially state and local parties), and groups like some PACs that “allocate” — that is, use money raised outside the federal rules for some general expenses. They also affect which messages require disclaimers — the little “Paid for by” tag you see on direct mail and TV ads.
While the technical reach of the bill was modest, the impact of its defeat may not be. The Federal Election Commission is currently rewriting the existing Internet rule under a court order. It may be that the FEC’s approach will be modest — say, to require disclaimers on paid advertisements and spam on the Internet. But it is also possible that regulators will look at the bill’s failure as some endorsement of the need for greater regulation, because the FEC has also opened the question of whether Internet journalists are exempt from regulation as “press” — an issue not addressed by the legislation but one of great significance to bloggers. Certainly, the bill’s passage would have preempted the legal necessity for the FEC to involve itself in Internet rulemaking. . . .
Why did the measure not pass? Perhaps, in part, because the campaign against the bill was rife with falsehoods about the effect of the exemption. “Reform” supporters like Democracy 21’s Fred Wertheimer, the Campaign Legal Center’s Trevor Potter, and the American Enterprise Institute’s’s Norm Ornstein castigated the bill’s motives (and supporters) in harsh terms. They maintained that it would open up the federal system to soft-money abuses. They alleged that corporations could spend unlimited sums on campaign ads at the behest of candidates. The same claims were made by Rep. Marty Meehan (D., Mass.) and many of the bill’s critics on the House Floor, in what appeared to be a serial recitation of the “reform” talking points.
Read the whole thing.
ANN ALTHOUSE LOOKS AT Alito on the Family Medical Leave Act.
PARIS-AREA RIOTS GAIN DANGEROUS MOMENTUM:
A week of riots in poor neighborhoods outside Paris gained dangerous new momentum Thursday, with youths shooting at police and firefighters and attacking trains and symbols of the French state.
Facing mounting criticism, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin vowed to restore order as the violence that erupted Oct. 27 spread to at least 20 towns, highlighting the frustration simmering in housing projects that are home to many North African immigrants.
As Ed Cone notes this has been a long time coming. Similar to Ed’s story, when Helen and I went to visit her sister in the 20th Arrondissement, the cab driver gave us a long diatribe on how that neighborhood was no good because of all the blacks and Arabs. I actually thought it was rather pleasant. By all accounts, however, the suburban housing projects where the riots are taking place are not.
UPDATE: Meanwhile some people are noting that the BBC is covering the riots far less vigorously than it would cover similar riots in the United States. The Economist comes in for criticism, too.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Much more from Amir Taheri:
When the police arrive on the scene, the rioters attack them with stones, knives and baseball bats.
The police respond by firing tear-gas grenades and, on occasions, blank shots in the air. Sometimes the youths fire back — with real bullets.
These scenes are not from the West Bank but from 20 French cities, mostly close to Paris, that have been plunged into a European version of the intifada that at the time of writing appears beyond control.
The troubles first began in Clichy-sous-Bois, an underprivileged suburb east of Paris, a week ago. France’s bombastic interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, responded by sending over 400 heavily armed policemen to “impose the laws of the republic,” and promised to crush “the louts and hooligans” within the day. Within a few days, however, it had dawned on anyone who wanted to know that this was no “outburst by criminal elements” that could be handled with a mixture of braggadocio and batons.
By Monday, everyone in Paris was speaking of “an unprecedented crisis.” Both Sarkozy and his boss, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, had to cancel foreign trips to deal with the riots.
Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, here’s more on the subject from the New York Sun:
Back in the 1990s, the French sneered at America for the Los Angeles riots. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported in 1992: “the consensus of French pundits is that something on the scale of the Los Angeles riots could not happen here, mainly because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs.” President Mitterrand, the Washington Post reported in 1992, blamed the riots on the “conservative society” that Presidents Reagan and Bush had created and said France is different because it “is the country where the level of social protection is the highest in the world.”
How the times have changed. Muslims in Paris’s suburbs are out shooting at police and firefighters, burning cars and buildings, and throwing rocks at commuter trains. Even children are out on the streets – it was reported that a 10-year-old was arrested. The trigger for the riots was the electrocution of two teenagers last Thursday, which the rioters say came following a police chase, a charge the police deny. But even if the charge by the rioters is true, that the police are culpable in the deaths of the two youths, the fact that such an incident would spark a riot is a sign of something deeper at work – no doubt France’s failure to integrate its immigrant Muslim community.
It turns out that France’s Muslim community lives in areas rampant with crime, poverty, and unemployment, much the fault of France’s prized welfare system.
Read the whole thing here, too. Worrisomely, the riots are spreading beyond Paris.
Lots more coverage at ¡No Pasarán! Just keep scrolling. And Johnathan Pearce has some thoughts.
The Belmont Club looks at what’s next and observes:
The riots have already reached 20 suburbs of Paris. The Reuters story suggests they may now be spreading to other cities. French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy is hinting darkly of conspiracies. Should one conclude even more serious developments are in the offing? I don’t know. I think that neither Sarkozy nor the conspirators he refers to understand the exact potential of this thing, which is behaving like a chaotic system whose trajectory is difficult to predict except in the very short term.
Ideally, Sarkozy would be looking to simplify the situation by fixing some variables so that the remainder of the system will behave in a more linear manner; gradually damping it down until it can be controlled. But splits within the French cabinet have done the opposite: they have added more variables to the mix and now it’s shake, rattle and roll.
In these situations, as most rabble-rousers know, there is typically a race on the ground to see who can ‘harness’ the energies unleashed to best advantage. My own guess, without any special knowledge, is that ‘community moderates’, ideological radicals and even gangsters are in a derby to see who can control events. The French government by contrast, seems tied up in knots and is casting around for leverage, a way to get a handle on the events of the past week. Things could stop tomorrow or zoom off in some unexpected direction.
I’m hoping for “stop,” as I think this could get really ugly if it doesn’t.
Could Australia be next?
PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Could we be seeing some signs of movement from the Administration?
The Bush administration’s highest economic priority for its remaining three years is to control the growth of federal spending and bring down the US budget deficit, John Snow, US Treasury secretary, said.
“The clear priority of the administration right now is the deficit, making sure that we achieve the president’s objective of cutting the deficit in half by the time he leaves office,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times. This would put the deficit below 2 per cent of gross domestic product, low by historical standards.
“This administration knows that deficits matter,” he added. “We know they’re unwelcome.”
Welcome words. Now the action, please. (Via The Armchair View).