Archive for 2003

MORE ON THE MISSING 727: Rand Simberg links a story that suggests it was an unsuccessful repo effort.

BELLICOSE WOMEN UPDATE: I’ve mentioned many times that there’s a culture change underway regarding women and firearms. Here’s more evidence. The rather frothy friend-bio of pop star Jewel, Revealing Jewel: An Intimate Portrait from Family and Friends, contains this bit:

Q: What are your guilty pleasures?

A: I love lingerie and jewelry. And I don’t know if I should say this, but I like firearms. Ty just gave me a lever action Winchester 30-30. It’s pretty much a vintage gun — the gun that won the West. They made a limited series of 500 with Ty, to honor hsi breakign the record with seven all-around titles. It’s beautiful. I have number two.

Having looked at the book, I feel pretty sure that this passage wouldn’t have appeared (the bio isn’t exactly hard-hitting) if anyone thought that this revelation would hurt Jewel’s reputation in her target market. Which suggests to me that attitudes are definitely changing.

HIAWATHA BRAY IS BLOGGING AGAIN. Check it out.

READER DAVID NISHIMURA EMAILS:

I am constantly astonished how “Old Europe” routinely comes up with
scandals of this sort, of a depth unthinkable to most Americans —
yet still see fit to lecture us on everything from individual rights
to modes of governance.

Indeed. Here’s what he’s talking about:

AN anti-pornography campaigner, who heads France’s broadcasting authority, has been accused of attending sadomasochistic orgies and conniving in the murder of a transvestite prostitute who threatened to expose him and other pillars of the establishment in the city of Toulouse.

So serious are the allegations against Dominique Baudis, 56, the former mayor of Toulouse, that President Jacques Chirac may be forced to sack him from his post as director of the watchdog Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovision.

You gotta watch those anti-pornography crusaders. And it does give a bit more credibility to Eva Joly’s remarks made in connection with a different scandal:

“Mme Joly, 57, said the French establishment was one of the most rotten in Europe. “It is a country of networks that don’t like to be challenged.”

In their defense, I believe that the French regard rampant and widely-acknowledged corruption as a powerful protection against totalitarianism. David Carr, who’s doing a better job defending France than Woody Allen, seems to think it works.

CHANGING HIS NAME TO COLBY CASH? He’s got a PayPal button now. Go give it a breaking-in.

INTERESTING REPORT from a reader in Washington:

Around 2:00PM, we drove past the French Embassy, and traffic was stopped by the D.C. police on Reservoir Rd., in front of the gate. They were pulling guys waving a huge Iranian flag off of the gates, and there were about 50 people across the street with signs saying “No Oil for Blood.” They were still there on the way back, but the flag wavers were gone. Geepers, my first Iranian protest.

Quite possibly, not the last. There’s a bit more in this report from the Post.

THE INSTA-DAUGHTER AND I are only on page 60 of the new Harry Potter book, but here’s a blog review that says the book has libertarian themes. No spoilers, exactly, but some plot details are mentioned.

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE: Megan McArdle:

Jane’s Law: The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.

David Brooks:

Something similar seems to be happening domestically between Republicans and Democrats. It’s not just that members of the two parties disagree. It’s that the disagreements have recently grown so deep that liberals and conservatives don’t seem to perceive the same reality. Whether it is across the ocean or across the aisle, powerlessness corrupts just as certainly as power does. Those on top become overly self-assured, emotionally calloused, dishonest with themselves, and complacent. Those on the bottom become vicious. Sensing that their dignity is perpetually insulted, they begin to see their plight in lurid terms. They exaggerate the power of their foes. They invent malevolent conspiracy theories to explain their unfortunate position. They develop a gloomy and panicked view of the world.

Powerlessness corrupts, indeed.

UPDATE: This post by Armed Liberal provides an interesting counterpoint.

INTERESTING REPORT FROM THE WINE SPECTATOR:

Are Americans still holding a grudge? For the third consecutive four-week period, sales of French table wines in the United States have declined substantially, following drops in March and April.

French wine sales dropped 26.2 percent in case volume and 27 percent in dollar value for the four weeks ending May 18, 2003, compared to the same period a year ago, according to retail data from Information Resources Inc. That’s the biggest decrease in French wines for any four-week period since the calls for a boycott heated up in response to France’s refusal to support war in Iraq; for the 12 weeks ending May 18, the decline averages out to 23.9 percent in volume and 24 percent in dollar value.

At the same time, sales of table wines from around the world have been on the rise compared to a year ago. According to IRI, overall wine sales increased 4.4 percent in volume and 1.5 percent in value for the four weeks ending May 18. Those numbers would have been even higher if it had not been for the drop in French wines. IRI’s InfoScan tracking service collects scanner data from multiple retail outlets in the United States.

I’ve become quite partial to Chilean, Argentinean, and Australian wines myself.

UPDATE: Reader Peter Ingemi suggests that a lot of people preferred other wines but bought French labels out of snobbery or insecurity, and are now feeling free to buy the many excellent cheaper wines out there. That’s very possible. The French are likely to face more of that, if stories like this one keep appearing:

LYON, France — For the second straight game, fans at the Confederations Cup booed when the “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played before the United States took the field.

Have I mentioned the many excellent wines from California?

MATT WELCH WRITES ON HOW HORIZONTAL KNOWLEDGE CAME TO BASEBALL:

James had one other quality that helped make him the cranky pied piper for the “sabermetric” revolution: He actively solicited help from readers and other amateurs, and encouraged them to form parallel structures of information far superior to what Major League Baseball had to offer. This collaborative, open-source movement was an early adopter to the Internet and World Wide Web, predating and predicting such things as the modern-day explosion in Weblogs.

By the late 1980s, members of the James-organized “Project Scoresheet” (now called Retrosheet) were attending nearly every professional game, writing down minute details of each play, and sharing it in a centralized database. People started proposing new theories and formulas, engaging in brutal but collegial peer review, and buying enough James books to make him a perennial best-seller.

“All these exquisitely trained, brilliantly successful scientists and mathematicians,” Lewis writes, “were working for love, not money.”

Read the whole thing.

THE MULLAHS ARE STILL TRYING TO CRACK DOWN. Will it work? I hope not.

IT’S TOO EARLY TO MAKE MUCH of this WMD story, but a British reader emails that the folks at the BBC “radio PM” are “utterly prostrate at this development.” So stay, er, tuned.

Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time the BBC has gone overboard with bogus early reports that didn’t pan out.

STILL MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT — and it’s dissent about the crushing of dissent!

A cold war has broken out at a librarians’ conference in downtown Toronto as accusations fly that pro-Castro elements within the American Library Association are trying to silence debate over Cuba’s crackdown on independent libraries.

The battle has laid the groundwork for the improbable scenario of a shouting match among librarians at a meeting tomorrow.

The ALA has “secretly manoeuvered to have only pro-Cuban voices” on a discussion panel, said Robert Kent, a co-founder of the Friends of Cuban Libraries and a librarian with the New York Public Library. “And the extremists within the ALA are going to try to pack the meeting to exclude people who might be critical of the Cuban government.”

I blame John Ashcroft.

UPDATE: Here’s more.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Librarian-blogger Alan Powell writes: “librarians who profess a foundational commitment to a non-negotiable “Freedom to Read” have no business ignoring the plight of Cubans taking a stand to do the same.”

MCDONALD’S — a force for good, even in France:

In order to counter the strike by its school canteen staff, the management of the Robespierre middle school in Epinay-sur-Seine ordered 160 meals from McDonalds to feed its students taken hostage (nutritionally speaking) by the strikers. The manoeuvre stunned the strikers who were counting on hungry protestations of the students to amplify their demands. One student declared, ‘When can we do that again?’. The strike was called off this Friday.

Some teachers tried to block delivery of the meals. That’ll win friends. The French strikes in general seem to be fizzling, which suggests that good sense may be breaking out.

POTTERBLOGGING: Fritz Schranck was on the scene at midnight and has recorded the results, with photos. The InstaDaughter and I went to the local bookstore at 10, but she pronounced the scene boring and we came home by 11. We’ll get the book this morning.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn wonders how much life the series has left in it.

PRIVATE LYNCH UPDATE: BBC Correspondent John Kampfner’s version continues to unravel: and what Kampfner reported as an attempt by Iraqi doctors to return Lynch to American custody in an ambulance turns out, according to Nicholas Kristof’s report, to actually have been something rather different indeed. Here’s the key bit:

The hospital staff also said that on the night of March 27, military officials prepared to kill Ms. Lynch by putting her in an ambulance and blowing it up with its occupants — blaming the atrocity on the Americans. The ambulance drivers balked at that idea. Eventually, the plan was changed so that a military officer would shoot Ms. Lynch and burn the ambulance. So Sabah Khazal, an ambulance driver, loaded her in the vehicle and drove off with a military officer assigned to execute her.

“I asked him not to shoot Jessica,” Mr. Khazal said, “and he was afraid of God and didn’t kill her.” Instead, the executioner ran away and deserted the army, and Mr. Khazal said that he then thought about delivering Ms. Lynch to an American checkpoint. But there were firefights on the streets, so he returned to the hospital. (Ms. Lynch apparently never knew how close she had come to execution.)

Kampfner has never fully explained the many problems with his report, and this only makes it worse.

UPDATE: Wilbur’s Blog notes that the usual conspiracists at Indymedia are still peddling the old BBC story.

ERIC OLSEN has a very nice piece about Warren Zevon up over at MSNBC. My favorite bit:

Last October, after the news of his cancer was out, Zevon appeared on television as the only guest of David Letterman (a huge fan) in a special episode of the show. Zevon was witty, charming, even profound. Besides his musical performances, the highlight of the show was this exchange:

Letterman: “Do you now know something I don’t know?”

Zevon: “I know how much you are supposed to enjoy every sandwich.”

Indeed. Read the whole thing.

RIGHT THOUGHTS (formerly “Right Thinking from the Left Coast”) has moved. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

UPDATE: Ooops. I was confused. Right Thinking from the Left Coast is a different blog, and it’s here now. There are too many blogs for me to keep straight nowadays. I’m blog-saturated!

HIGH SCHOOL BLOGGERS will be the bane of officious principals I suspect. Certainly this story, if accurate, reflects poorly on one high school’s administration.