Thoughts on culture, politics, music and stuff by Eric Olsen, Marty Thau and Mike Crooker, who are among other things, producers.

 
Refresh
For some people - especially those outside of the U.S. - September 11 has already become a tired cliché:

get over it; thousands die every day; why are yours more important than the Afghanis you bombed or the Palestinians killed by Israeli aggression, or the hundreds of thousands of starved Iraqi children? etc, etc.

But we can never let 9/11 become a cliché: not the loss, not the horror, not the injustice, not the inhumanity. Those who would rather forget 9/11 by way of comparisons to other loss of life would do much better to elevate the worth of the lives they do value - including their own - rather than minimize the value of the lives we lost.

9/11 goosed the blogging boom because people felt a compulsion to keep track of the events unfolding before them, to chronicle them, to try to make sense of them; but they also took to blogging to record their own feelings, feelings so deep and powerful that the bloggers instinctively knew they had to be recorded, remembered, kept fresh and vigorous out of sacred duty to the lost and to themselves.

Asparagirl mentioned something like this to me in a recent email but my mind was off noodling somewhere else at the time. Jeff Jarvis’s elegant and profound post, “The Weight,” jarred all of this back into my mind and clicked on my mental “refresh” icon for 9/11 one more time:

I found the book collection of the New York Times' profiles of the victims of September -- Portraits: 09/11/01.

I was shocked at the size of it and the weight of it. The dimensions of the book are big: every page is large and there are more than 500 pages. And this is not even a complete memorial to the victims; it is only the portraits published before February. There are even more to be written, which will be included in the next edition, an even bigger book.

I don't know why I was so shocked at the size. Somehow, in my mind's scale, I thought this book would be smaller. I wonder whether this is a symptom of my memory, fading.

Of course, the book is huge. The loss is huge. Thousands of lives gone. Thousands upon thousands of lives scarred.

I bought the book and finally read the portrait of my neighbor who died. It returned me to September.

If you, too, feel your memory fading, if 9.11 starts to look smaller behind you, I urge you to go to the bookstore and pick up the Times' book, just pick it up. Feel the weight of the grief.

We hope to accomplish something like this with the 9/11 blog book as well.
posted by Eric at 5:48 PM

 
When Labels Dissolve
Bruce Baugh at Writer of Fortune, who I just found through my fiercely blogging wife, has a tremendous post on his own internal political climate:

I don't ever expect much good out of the big political parties in the US. If I thought one could accomplish much of what I wanted, I'd belong to one, but I'd given up on the Democratic Party long before I gave up on liberalism and while the Republican Party has some advocates of causes precious to me, they're grossly outnumbered. Nearly everything of interest to me in American politics happens in independent bodies capable of mountaining more effective critiques and proposing more productive (or at least more interesting) solutions. The general absence of good liberal critique of the current administration's actions, accepting the desirability of action without prior endorsement of the party or president, bugs me. I want to see more folks doing what, say, Patrick Nielsen Hayden does regularly - poking holes and pointing out stupidities without ending up saying "...and besides, the Jews have it coming" or anything like it.

In talking to other bloggers, I have found a substantial subculture who are perceived as some form of “conservative” because they are zero-tolerance toward terrorism in its many forms, support America’s basic ideals, don’t go in for self-loathing, and don’t think the Jews had it coming. But they don’t see themselves as conservatives either, as per our Tour O the Blogs for Charles Johnson:

Interestingly, though Johnson is rather evidently “zero-tolerance” on terrorism, he also sees himself as
“a think-for-yourself social liberal, leaning toward libertarianism, but without the loony stuff.

Before 9/11, I wouldn’t have read one word of the National Review, for example. But the fall of the WTC had an extraordinary clarifying effect for me, and while I still consider myself basically liberal, many of the people most identified with that camp have behaved disgracefully since then.
This sounds like Ken Layne, Matt Welch, and many others, including myself for that matter. Johnson has perhaps captured the very soul of warblogatry: a general liberality, stung by betrayal from without and within, spurred to relentless vigilance and action.

Like Johnson, Baugh has found himself reading the National Review of late:

Right at the moment, unfortunately, there's this problem that people who've long proclaimed their desire to see us all dead or subjugated are acting on their desire in ways that directly threaten us all. I can live with a lot of unpleasant-to-me ideas floating around, but when people start attacking others, then they must be stopped. This is true for the individual mugger and murderer, and it's true for the organized effort at mass murder. As an individual, I have no duty to submit to effort to kill me, and as a member of a society, I have a responsibility to attend to the protection of others from efforts to kill them.

All of this seems relatively straightforward to me, but it seems to cut awkwardly across partisan lines. And I am particularly disappointed at how hard it is to find any organized support for the basic right of self-defense and the basic duty of defending others on the left side of the political spectrum.

I'm reading a lot of conservative publications, in print and online, these days, largely because the editorial departments of places like National Review Online, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal seem to agree with me on this point. I would read more liberal and leftist publications if I didn't find so much institutional counsel that seems to me to amount to "submit and be killed, because we like the cause of the folks trying to kill you or don't think the victims matter". The champions of what I think of as basic justice on the left are individuals, people like Christopher Hitchens and Nat Hentoff, who are as often at loggerheads with their own colleagues as with ideological opponents.

I’m also pretty simpatico with Hitchens these days, although I have a problem with his pathological hatred of Bill Clinton and his lack of regard for Israel.

Bottom line, though, bloggers like Baugh, Layne, Welch, and Johnson represent a new breed of independent-thinking intellectual activists who are beholden to no one way of thinking, who see themselves as basically liberal in outlook but without the profound stupidities of the left, who harbor utopian dreams of a true civil society, but who are willing - even eager (“bring it on asshole”) - to fiercely defend their rights and themselves in a world full of deluded, deranged, dangerous people who are willing to kill others for their ideas and their differences.
posted by Eric at 4:57 PM

 
Swarming Non Sequiturs
This interview is a performance art piece commenting pointedly upon the impossibility of interpersonal communication in a postmodern world: the principals don't even talk AT each other, but hurl sentence fragments out into the maw of eternity and comment disjointedly on the phonemes eternity throws back. The only thing mising is Leonard Pinth-Garnell. What can be next for this "monumentally ill-advised" avant garde duo? Samurai Clip-Art?
posted by Eric at 2:18 PM

 
"Four Dead In O-hi-o"
Today is May 4, the 32nd anniversary of the shootings at Kent State. My friend Mark Urycki has a superb radio documentary of the day and its aftermath here:

"Remembering Kent State, 1970," Reporter/Producer Mark Urycki's hour-long documentary, was originally aired in conjunction with the 30th anniversary of the tragic events at Kent State University that are considered by many as a landmark moment in American social history. On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsman fired on a group of protesters on campus, killing 4 students and wounding 5 others. The documentary has won numerous awards from local, statewide, and national organizations including a national Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, a Clarion Award from the Association for Women in Communications, and Program of the Year from the Ohio Educational Telecommunications Commission.

"Remembering Kent State, 1970" focuses on the sounds of May 4th. Eyewitness accounts combined with historic audio take the listener directly to the scene where students protesting the American invasion of Cambodia were met with live rounds of ammunition that left four dead and nine wounded. Urycki places the historical sounds of the events leading up to the shootings-and those that followed-in chronological order to allow the listener to experience the fear, tension, and tragedy that took place at Kent State and the surrounding communities. The program has no narration. Eyewitnesses tell the story--a story that each sees from his or her own unique perspective.

Urycki's original 30-minute special was produced in connection with the 20th anniversary of the May 4th events. Nearly a year's worth of research and interviews went into the project, which was broadcast in 1990 and again in 1995. The documentary won numerous awards, including a National Headliner Award and the prestigious "National Journalism Award" from the Scripps Howard Foundation. Judges said, "WKSU's dramatic return to the Kent State occurrence brings back its living characters after twenty years. We hear the original sounds of the police radio, the National Guard, and the students. ...Kent State revisited on WKSU-FM allows the perspective of 20 years to enlighten an event that became a national tragedy."

For this expanded version of "Remembering Kent State, 1970" the WKSU newsroom was able to locate and obtain audio recordings that were not available a decade ago when the program was first presented. Hours of decaying reel-to-reel tape, some originally aired on WKSU (then a college station), were edited for the additional moments of sound that help to create a fuller picture of the events as they happened on that day. Some of the new tape hasn't been heard in 30 years and much of it has never been broadcast.

The May4.net site also has a wealth of information on the tragedy.

I am of the opinion that May 4, 1970 was the day Youth Culture completed its ascendancy to dominance in the United States. The process had begun fifteen years earlier in movie theaters across the country as the electrifying downbeat of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” opened The Blackboard Jungle, a shocking film for its time, and ignited the rock ‘n’ roll explosion.

The ‘60s were years of bitter turmoil as Adult Culture - the “Establishment” - fought tooth and nail to retain its hegemony and keep the whippersnappers under heel. Vietnam exacerbated the conflict and became its lightning rod, causing many adults to side with the young against the war and giving the generational struggle an intense objectivity it otherwise wouldn’t have possessed.

Another factor often forgotten is that by 1970 a teenager rioting in the aisles at a 1955 showing of The Blackboard Jungle was 30 years old and in many cases still determined to never “grow old” or to identify with “them.” With “4 dead in O-hi-o,” and thousands of Americans dead or injured in Vietnam, people of all ages suddenly said, “this conflict isn’t worth the price - we have already fought one civil war, we don’t want another. We don’t want to lose anymore of our children over there, or, most especially, here on our own soil. Why were soldiers firing guns at our children on a COLLEGE CAMPUS? This has gone way too far.”

Adult culture - the “Greatest Generation” who had fought and won WWll - basically threw in the towel that day because it no longer wanted to fight its own children. Watergate seemed to certify the corruption and bankruptcy of the “old guard” and herald the moral superiority of the new. “Trust no one over 30” lost its literal meaning as an entire generation grimly determined to always “think young.” And so many have: like, for example, Bill Clinton. There is no Bill Clinton without May 4, 1970, for good or for ill.
posted by Eric at 1:58 PM

 
Francis Fukuyama: Fecund Fount of Foolishness
Francis Fukuyama has taken the kind of beating typically reserved for Russian dogs and the rugs of nomads since he declared libertarianism dead and genetic engineering verboten in a Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday. Fine and wise voices from various bloggy constellations in the libertarian zodiac including Brink Lindsey, Virginia Postrel, Glenn Reynolds, Stephen Green, Eugene Volokh, Josh Chafetz, and Dan Hanson pounced upon Fran Fuk’s words, shredded them like a squad of Edward Scissorhands, and liberally mulched the blogosphere for spring planting. Re this particular FukuFest, my own mulch will not contribute to the already bountiful harvest.

However yesterday’s nonsense was not by any means Fr. Fu’s first trip to the spotlight. With the aid of Godfrey Hodgson in the New Statesman, let’s take a look back at Fukuyama's career heretofore:

The article that made Fukuyama famous was entitled "The End of History", and it was published in the summer of 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and well before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It argued not overtly in favour of triumphalism, but against pessimism. For decades, people had feared the end of liberal democracy. Now, suddenly, a consensus seemed to be emerging in its favour, "as it conquered rival ideologies like monarchy, fascism and, most recently, communism". So liberal democracy would turn out to be "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution", and so "history" - meaning "history understood as a single coherent evolutionary process" - was over.

"The End of History" was published in The National Interest, the neo-conservative journal founded by Irving Kristol to replace the liberal consensus in American intellectual life with a conservative climate. It developed out of a lecture that Fukuyama was asked to give at the University of Chicago, the home of neoliberal economics, by (among others) Professor Allan Bloom, himself the author of a conservative bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. The lecture was funded, indirectly, by the ideologically committed, conservative John M Olin Foundation. Fukuyama wrote it while on leave from the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, a research institution closely associated with the US air force, where he had worked almost continuously since earning his doctorate in political science from Harvard. He had also been a member of the State Department's policy planning staff during the first Bush administration. It was therefore a product of the conservative establishment that had, by the 1980s, succeeded in Kristol's dream of displacing liberalism as the prevailing American public philosophy.

Fukuyama went on to expand his article into a book, The End of History and the Last Man, in which triumphalism for the American way was rather oddly linked to Hegelian and Nietzschean ideas. It was a smash hit.

In what is the rather strained style of a reluctant puff piece, Hodgson concludes:

Fukuyama tackles his great subjects from an essentially Candidean standpoint. All is for the best in the best of all possible societies. Yet we should still welcome the universality of his intellectual ambitions. After all, we complain about the pervasive stranglehold of specialisation. We should be delighted when someone comes along who is willing to take on philosophy, history, management studies, sociology and bioethics, and who has cool, clear thoughts to offer on those and other fields - for us to take or leave. He may not be the Last Man, but it would be a pity if he were the last would-be Renaissance man.

If by “Renaissance man” we mean intellectual dilettante who tiptoes through the tulips of serious inquiry like a precocious child expecting to be admired for his every too-clever-by-half utterance, then Fukuyama is surely that. But I love Hodgson’s damning with faint praise via:

“We should be delighted when someone comes along who is willing to take on philosophy, history, management studies, sociology and bioethics, and who has cool, clear thoughts to offer on those and other fields - for us to take or leave.

I vote “leave,” by the way. Hodgson is saying we should be happy ANYONE is willing to make such a fool of himself, and that fool is Francis Fu. Through Hodgson’s forced grimace, his disdain for any actual IDEA Fukuyama has had shines through, as well it should.

Back in December the WaPo ran a
joint profile of Fukuyama and his grand theory rival Samuel “Clash of Civilizations” Huntington, which clearly indicated that Huntington’s view of no “end of history” in sight seemed to be borne out by September 11. Fukuyama would have none of it:

..."If you get these Islamic terrorists who claim to hate Western civilization and they attack New York City, clearly you have a clash of cultures," Fukuyama says. But he quickly adds that the September 11 attack is merely a "rearguard action," and won't stop "this great freight train of globalization."

Since Fukuyama’s views expressed in yesterday’s editorial stem in part from his recent book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, please allow me to paraphrase some thoughts I had on the subject in these pages about a month ago:

That 9/11 was a “rearguard action” is undoubtedly true, but do the “rearguard actions” ever stop? And if they don’t, can history be said to have ended? What do you do when history - whether alive or suffering post-mortem spasms - kicks you in the jimmies? You change the subject, as Fukuyama has done with his new book, which is the subject of a feature in the NY Times science section today [4/2].
If the human mind and body are shaped by a bunch of genes, as the decoding of the human genome seems to underscore, then biotechnologists will one day be able to change both and perhaps, in seeking to refine the imperfect human clay, will alter human nature.

That prospect should be worrying a lot more people, in the view of the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, because history's central question — that of what kind of society best suits human needs — has been settled only if human nature remains as it is, warts and all.
Talk about Brockian reversal, this new theory seems as dystopian and pessimistic as his “End of History” theory was utopian and optimistic. Does he see “human nature” as immutable? I wonder if our distant cave-dwelling relatives spoke of “Neanderthal nature.” Fukuyama has found a clever caveat to the “End of History” that functions as a link between the books: “The only objection [to EOH] he acknowledges as serious is the argument that history cannot end without an end to science, or at least to science that alters human nature.”

So history should have ended, would have ended, and perhaps will now be allowed to end if we put a stop to all of that silly scientific tinkering. Ah, that’s why half a billion people hate us even more than the communists did, and their more adventuresome representatives tried to blow up our two most important cities, because we didn’t stop science ten years ago.

His case against leaving science up to those rascally scientists is basically this:
Genetic engineering of the human germline — making permanent changes to the genes in the egg or sperm — would pose the most direct threat to human nature but other techniques bear watching, in his view. Mood changing drugs could change society if taken widely enough, and Dr. Fukuyama says he wonders whether Caesar or Napoleon would have felt the need to conquer Europe if either had been able to pop a Prozac tablet occasionally.

Major increases in human longevity could also be disruptive, he fears, because "life extension will wreak havoc with most existing age-graded hierarchies," postponing social change in countries with aging dictators and thwarting innovation in others.
Well, I guess we should all just be happy with the way things are, then. Would mankind have been worse off had Caesar or Napoleon been able to take a pill and lie down? Maybe, maybe not: we’ll never know, but it is pointless to assume change is inherently bad.

This kind of thinking is not only wrong, it is anti-democratic and smacks of the worst kind of top-down collectivism. Individuals will make their own choices whether they want to live longer, and over time, in the main, they will choose to do so, so work will continue in that direction. How, and even why, would you want to stop this?

Yes, we must keep an eye on what is happening to our species in the aggregate; but the species, like a democratic country, is a collection of individuals. The individual is the irreducible unit, not the state, not the species. Even the grand mover of meta-biology, evolution, only moves through individuals. Mother nature doesn’t wave her hand over species and push them in a certain direction: random (or even “designed,” it doesn’t matter) mutations occur in individuals that give them a slight advantage in passing on their genes; these advantages accumulate and the species changes over time. Scientists are just as much individuals as citizens in a democracy, and no more subject to top-down control than evolution.

You can make rules: no cloning of human beings for reproductive purposes, no building new people from old body parts, no creation of untreatable viruses. The rules may even be followed by most scientists in most places; but over time, like in evolution, “advantages,” real or perceived, will accrue. If people want to live longer, science - excuse me - individual scientists will find ways to help them do so.

Even Fukuyama’s best argument is nonsense:
But the most serious threat to the stability of human societies is genetic engineering that may alter, by design or inadvertence, the special balance of contrarieties of human nature.

Human nature, Dr. Fukuyama argues, "is fundamental to our notions of justice, morality and the good life."
So nothing can be changed about humanity, none of the “contraries” can be altered without destroying some grand biological system of “checks and balances”? Why draw the line now? Isn’t this a bit arbitrary? Every cohort fears for future generations: we want them to be like us, but is humankind rid of rabies, or AIDS, or malaria, or fatal birth defects any less human? Every change brings new problems. Look at globalization: pretty darn good overall, and pretty great for those with plenty of capital, but pretty awful for many individuals who are displaced from their livelihoods and lifestyles with no hope of latching on to a new living in their lifetimes. They’re just screwed. Do we stop? No.

There will be similar winners and losers with continued, inevitable-so-get-over-it, scientific advancement: good overall, bad for some individuals. Every new drug finds people who are allergic to it and kills them. No new drugs? Sure, Francis. There is something to his “checks and balances” concept: there is some kind of equilibrium within a species at any given time, BUT THAT EQUILIBRIUM CHANGES all the time, and with every change comes a new equilibrium. It was ever so and will be ever thus.

The Times piece ends with this, perhaps mocking conclusion:
History may have ended, but it seems that special measures are needed to keep it in a state of finality.
History never ends. Science never ends. Now is no more a stopping point than “happily ever after,” and the notion that it is so is no more realistic than a fairy tale.

Those words were true a month ago, they’re true today, and unless the verbal thrashing from the blogosphere and elsewhere jars something loose and causes a break in Fukuyama’s ETERNAL CHAIN OF BAD IDEAS, they will be true tomorrow.
posted by Eric at 10:38 PM

 
Digging In Time
This time it wasn't Blogspot's fault. My freaking cable modem has been down since 3:30. Now I'm on a neighbor's dial-up. This is the 6th ring of hell, the cable company will suffer the 7th. The TVs are out too, so it's some kind of total outage. I have large knots in my stomach, but I feel better now doing this. Back to our normal programming....

I find archaeology fascinating: reconstructing the reality of bygone times from physical remnants, remnants that literally burrow through time like worm holes and join our minds with those of our distant ancestors.

The NY Times has an interesting story discussing new computer modeling techniques that are giving a third dimension to a formerly 2-D past, and bursting some cherished bubbles:

Everyone knows that the Roman Colosseum is an architectural marvel. Built so that thousands of people could be ushered in and out in minutes, it is a testament to the genius of Roman engineering. Or is it?

By reconstructing the building with three-dimensional computer modeling and then virtually "walking through" it, researchers have discovered that in some sections the building may have had all the efficiency of a railroad-style apartment on the Bowery. The model reveals dark, narrow upper hallways that probably hemmed in spectators, slowing their movement to a crawl.

Such three-dimensional modeling is turning some of archaeology's once-established truths on their heads. Because 3-D software can take into account the building materials and the laws of physics, it enables scholars to address construction techniques in ways sometimes overlooked when they are working with two-dimensional drawings.

As always, though, there are naysayers, those who feel threatened by new techniques:

Some researchers reject the technique because they are wary of changing the way they work or of ceding control to computer programmers. And some are unconvinced that the technique accomplishes anything beyond creating pretty computer models. "There are a lot of archaeologists who look at this as glorified coloring book stuff," said Dr. Sanders of Learning Sites.

"There are always people hesitant to move from their own set ways of doing things," he said. He offered a historical example.

"It wasn't so long ago that there was a technology coming into popular use," Dr. Sanders said. "The equipment used to create it was very expensive, yet the images you got were something that you could never get without it. Within a generation it became indispensable to archaeology.

"That's exactly how photography got started."

Besides making news, archaeology plays a strong role in helping to define how we view ourselves, and plays a central role in addressing one of the really Big Questions: Is there such thing as progress? Put another way, Does history have a direction? More prosaically, the more we know about past peoples, the more our lives can be informed by their successes and cautioned by their failures.

Several months ago I interviewed some experts on archaeology and culture for an NPR radio series I was involved with at the time, the first of whom was Dan Fuller, popular culture expert and English professor at Kent State University, Tuscarawas campus. I asked him what archaeology means:

Dan Fuller - It seems to me that archaeology is simply genealogy in a more scientific sense. People have always been fascinated about where they came from, and that’s what so much of the stimulus for archaeology has been: find the mask of Tutankhamen and he shows up on the covers of over 100 publications and that fascination with this was then and this is what we came from.

EO - So deep down, archaeology may help serve some of the same needs as genealogy - our need for roots, for belonging to something greater than our fleeting existence. Each of us is a point on a vertical line of descendants through time, but we are also points on a horizontal line representing humanity here and now. Learning of our past also allows us to measure current humanity against those who have come before. How do we measure up? Dan Fuller is an optimist:

DF - It usually takes me about 30 seconds to convince someone that the good old days were not better: if you consider a life span over thirty to be a desirable thing. Of course there are things that we don’t like about our civilization but in fact, most of us really subscribe to an optimistic belief that man can progress. We wouldn’t have the United Nations if in fact we did not believe that civilization can improve.

EO - While English professor Fuller sees humanity’s improvement as inevitable and manifest, Curator of Archaeology and Director of Science for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Brian Redmond, is a bit more cautious and measured.

Brian Redmond - In the general sense, I don’t believe that civilization has an intended arrow - I don’t believe there’s a progressive nature to it. I think that’s just how we perceive it. Talk to any culture at any one time, they probably think this is the best of times and it could never get much better than this. If you look at different aspects of culture, things do improve. There is a tendency toward greater complexity: in civilizations things get more complex, whether it’s religious organization, or political organization, government formation, and of course technology. There is a trend to be more and more complex.

But does that mean things are better? I don’t think necessarily. You don’t have to worry about the wolves coming to your door tonight and carrying your children off, or having enough to eat tomorrow, because we provide for ourselves in that way. But I think that there are other concerns that are there and other stresses that we deal with that never existed before, and in that sense we are probably not better off than people 100 years ago in terms of our lives. And there is still warfare, but the wars are worse and more consequential.

EO - Dr. Redmond, where and when would you like to live if you had a choice?

BR - I probably wouldn’t be happy in any other time if I went back with the knowledge of today’s time because you know what you’re missing, what you don’t have. I would like to go back and visit different time periods: I’d love to go back to the Cuyahoga Valley in 1500 AD and see what was going on. I think, of course, it would be great to see some of the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean world: Greece and Rome, or the Middle East - watch them construct the pyramids and how did they do that. it would be fun to go back to East Africa 3 million years ago and see an early human. Wouldn’t that be neat to go and see what your distant ancestors look like? Maybe you would say, “Hmm, that doesn’t look like me at all.”

EO - Much closer to our own time and place is the Maya civilization of Central America, which thrived between 250 and 900AD. Peter Dunham is an archaeologist at Cleveland State University, specializing in ancient civilizations, and in particular the Maya. Why should we be interested in the Maya?

Peter Dunham - I think we identify with them. They had all the complex features that we do: a remarkable system of mathematics, they invented their own writing system. Remember, we didn’t - we borrowed ours. They had absolutely fantastic astronomical knowledge, terribly accomplished architects. They were very, very talented artists and sculptors.

They managed to build this remarkable civilization in the middle of a tropical rain forest: precisely the environment that most successfully resists our inroads today. There are huge areas of Belize that I work in that are full of ancient ruins and not one modern human being because we haven’t really figured out how to sustain our civilization in that environment, but they did.

EO - The Mayas may have thrived in the rain forest of Central America, but after peaking between 600 and 800 AD, their civilization declined alarmingly. What happened?

PD - Many of us labor under the misassumption that the Maya disappeared - they didn’t. There are still several million Maya people today who take exception to the idea that they disappeared, but they certainly underwent a significant transformation in the century between 800 and 900-or-so AD. And, I think one of the things that draws many of us to the Maya is just that: because if we identify with them as being like ourselves and they experienced this dramatic and traumatic decline, then doesn’t that mean that we too ourselves could face something like that? And the answer to that question is “yes.” The rules of civilization are the same no matter where or when you play the game.

EO - Through the work of archaeologists, including Peter Dunham, we have learned that a multitude of factors piled up on the Maya until their civilization could bear the weight no more, including environmental degradation caused by overfarming and overpopulation, climate change, drought, malnutrition and disease, and the inability of the political, social, and belief systems to deal with these problems.

PD - We have the good fortune that we actually recognize these issues and we have sciences devoted to trying to address them. This happened so quickly to the Maya that I’m not quite sure they recognized what the problems were, let alone figure out how to resolve them.

EO - Since 1992, Dr. Dunham has led an archaeological project in Belize, on the Yucatan Peninsula just below Mexico. What’s it like working there?

PD - Basically, what you have there are canyons in the jungle. You also have sheer towers of stone, so the environment is really a glorious one. It’s also for those very reasons, however, a very challenging one. It’s very hot, very humid. When you get into these canyons there’s no breeze whatsoever, and you have to carry a pack full of your gear, and it gives you a real sense of the terrain. Along one of the rivers, this one river in particular is one of the most beautiful hikes I’ve ever seen anywhere: the water is sort of like liquid turquoise.

EO - Regardless of the surroundings, archaeologists dig - are there any changes forthcoming regarding how archaeologists work? Brian Redmond:

BR - The development of instruments to detect archaeological deposits below the ground without digging, where we can actually go out and survey a site, look for artifact concentrations and identify and map them without doing a lot of digging - which essentially, every time we dig something, it’s destroying it. It’s kind of controlled destruction, but that part of the site is gone when we’re done. Also, it’ll help do some of these large scale surveys in the advance of construction and development, and get a better idea of what’s there, and maybe save more things before they’re destroyed.

EO - Discovery, preservation, understanding: archaeologists are helping us find out who we are through knowledge of who we were.
posted by Eric at 7:11 PM

 
Post-Mortem
I'm not going to dwell too much more on the Indians, but the conviction with which they are embracing putridity is possessed of the dark allure of a foggy day at Dead Man's Curve. PD beat writer Paul Hoynes dissected (I was going to say "vivisected" but you have to be alive to be vivisected) the remains thusly:

1. No offense from veteran hitters: In losing 13 of 15 games prior to last night, Jim Thome hit .170 (8-for-47), Travis Fryman .180 (9-for-50), Einar Diaz .222 (8-for-36), Matt Lawton .236 (13-for-55), Ricky Gutierrez .245 (13-for-53), Brady Anderson .263 (5-for-19) and Ellis Burks .265 (13-for-49). Only Omar Vizquel, hitting .280 (14-for-50) has performed as expected.

No one expected this offense to be the same as last year after losing Juan Gonzalez, Kenny Lofton, Marty Cordova and Robbie Alomar, but it had to be efficient to support a young starting rotation. In the last 15 games, the Indians have hit .181 with runners in scoring position. They've transferred the pressure to a rotation not yet ready to handle it.

2. No pop from the cleanup spot: Last year, Gonzalez hit .370 (40-for-108) with 11 doubles, nine homers and 33 RBI through 27 games. He struck out 22 times.

This year, Tribe cleanup hitters are batting .194 (18-for-93) with two doubles, eight homers and 22 RBI. They've struck out 28 times. Thome has hit cleanup 23 times, Burks four.

3. Inability to stop streaking: In winning 11 of their first 12 games, the Indians hit .272 as a team, scored 79 runs and hit 19 homers. The rotation went 10-0 with a 2.59 ERA (20 earned runs in 67?innings) with 52 walks and 84 strikeouts.

In losing 13 of their next 15, the Indians hit .224, scored 39 runs and hit 14 homers. The rotation went 2-13 with a 7.89 ERA (71 earned runs in 81 innings) with 53 walks and 88 strikeouts.

4. Sloppy play: Last year the Indians were 18-9 after 27 games. They made just 15 errors.

This year they've made 24 errors, including 16 in the 15-game slump. Lawton has made three errors in right field, while Gutierrez has made four at second base. Last year Alomar made one error at second and Gonzalez none in right field.

In addition, the opposition has taken advantage of a free pass to steal. Diaz has already made five throwing errors. He made eight in 134 games last year.

The opposition has been successful in 69 percent (27-for-39) of their steal attempts. Last year, the opposition was successful on 53 percent (10-for-19).

5. Double your trouble: The Indians have grounded into 33 double plays, including eight in a two-game stretch against Chicago. Gutierrez, impatient and trying to adjust to a new league, has hit into eight after grounding into 13 all last season with the Cubs.

The Indians had hit into 20 double plays at this time last year.

6. A lack of lightning in a bottle: A year ago, Cordova made the Indians look smart. He hit his way onto the team in spring training and was batting .426 (26-for-61) with six homers and 22 RBI through the first 27 games of the season. He did that mostly from the seventh spot, solidifying the bottom of the lineup.

The Tribe's seven-hole hitters this year are batting a combined .219 (21-for-96) with two homers and eight RBI. Seven players have appeared in that lineup position.

7. Rocky road: Last year the Indians didn't mind scoring runs the easy way. Through 27 games, they had 11 sacrifice flies and eight sacrifice bunts. Gonzalez had four sacrifice flies. Alomar had four of the bunts.

Burks and Thome, the third and fourth hitters this year, have two sacrifice flies between them. The Indians have seven overall and three bunts. Gutierrez, who had 17 bunts last year when he hit second, has one.

8. All or nothing: If the Indians don't hit a home run, they have trouble scoring. The offense has had 47 percent of its runs (55-for-118) produced by the long ball. Supposedly this offense was designed to hit line drives, living off doubles in the gap and aggressive baserunning.

Last year the Indians scored 167 runs, 49 more than this year, while hitting two fewer homers.

9. Too much, too soon?: After the 11-1 start, young starters C.C. Sabathia, Ryan Drese and Danys Baez were a combined 1-8 in the next 15 games. This is Sabathia's second year starting, but Drese and Baez are in the rotation for the first time.

10. Role reversal: Former Indians scout Dom Chiti looked at the White Sox lineup recently and said: "It reminds me a lot of our lineups from 1995 through 2001." Chiti, like most of the Tribe's offense, left after last year. But the only thing Chicago did was get better with the return of a healthy Frank Thomas and the signing of the re-energized Lofton.

They proved it by beating the Indians six of seven times over the last 15 games. It was an impression the Indians aren't likely to forget.

With those kind of numbers it doesn't take Dana Scully to figure out the cause of death.
posted by Eric at 3:21 PM

 
Radio Duties Done- Return to Blogology
posted by Eric at 3:02 PM

 
Some Things We Already Knew
The headlines blare with indignation: "Arafat Linked to Attacks." Dawn Olsen's logical parallel: "Bear Defecates In Wooded Area."
posted by Eric at 10:10 AM

 
Bloggers For Bill
Jason Rubenstein of the very fine new Tonecluster blog, is a fan of both "Bill" and "W.T." Quick. We all should be. Thanks Jason.

Tell me about it! Imagine my surprise, when I clicked on an innocent little link called "Dailypundit," read a few lines, and thought .."hmmm...kind of, well, Ellisonian, in a Larry Elder sort of way."

And then I got a good case of the chills. A frisson of recognition..a slight pause, another slight pause, and finally a 75 watt lightbulb suspended precipitously, but not quite, over my head. "Oh. THAT William Quick."

I didn't know of his pseudonymous work, but I knew of his non-pseudonymous work (whats the word for that? Not Eponymous, which'd mean all of his works were titled "WT Quick". Maybe Quickonymous?? Nevermind.).

The guy is really good, and one of my daily reads.

Anyway,
I have added you to my links, by the way, not only being like-minded in politics (and I enjoy your posts) but also are in the music scam, and I find non-leftist musician types difficult to find.
best,
-Jason

posted by Eric at 9:18 AM

 
Tawny and Rocky
Reader Kevin reminds us the Curse goes back to Rocky Colavito.
posted by Eric at 9:08 AM

 
Of Losers
Reader Marc finds a somewhat comforting parallel to my Indians' schizo start this year, but he doesn't buy my argument that the Arabs see Israel as an extention of American "Christian" power in the Middle East.

Eric,
A couple of completely unrelated observations based on blog entries: First, your lament about the Indians' about-face this year does have a striking parallel in the 1987 Milwaukee Brewers, who began the year 13-0, to tie a ML record, then later LOST 12 in a row in May. They finished up half-decent - third place in the old AL East.

Second, and more importantly, I found your discussion of European/Arabic anti-Semitism fascinating. I remember Bill Quick's original description of the Arab world as an "honor-shame society," and thought it may have some utility in explaining/rationalizing the batshit-lunacy of that society.

However, I'm not convinced entirely by the argument that Israel is seen as the nearest representative of the tremendously successful Christian empire. I came across an argument recently (I can't remember where) that Arabs used to see the Jews as a useful, non-threatening minority. Their transition from servant to regional power so enraged the muslim world that Arabs frantically searched for explanations why their power/their God had allowed this to happen. Anti-Semitism provided a menu of nefarious plots, trickery and barbarity that allowed the Arab world to save face (honor). Obviously we'll never know, but I have a feeling that if Israel was founded as a Christian nation, it would arouse less vitriol in the Arab world. It would spark controversy, and probably a short war or two, but nothing like the fountain of hate and lunacy we see today. They could tolerate, though not appreciate, losing to the other great power. Losing to a servile, dispersed, weak people (like they assumed the Jews were) is just too much to bear.
Marc

posted by Eric at 8:58 AM

 
The U.N and Justice: Oxymoron
With even Egypt giving up on the notion of a "massacre" at Jenin, Yossi Halevi believes the U.N. should turn its warped attentions to more germane lies, cover-ups and perfidies:

The commission thus won't be investigating the real tragedy: how the United Nations squandered the dream of a united humanity animated by justice -- a dream first offered by the prophets of ancient Israel -- and instead joined the unholy coalition of Islamic fundamentalists, far-left moralizers and far-right neofascists in again targeting the Jewish people.

posted by Eric at 8:50 AM

 
Another Voice For Separation
This from Steve Chapman at the Chicago Tribune:

Advocates of separation say it's time to quit talking about a solution and simply create one. Analyst Dan Schueftan of the University of Haifa's National Security Studies Center argues that there is little chance Israel can reach a compromise agreement with the Palestinians. So the sensible step, he says, is what sounds like an oxymoron: "unilateral compromise." Give up most of the settlements and territory and establish borders that can be closed off.

Critics say this plan has lots of flaws: It would cost a lot of money, it would deprive Israel of control over Palestinian areas, and it wouldn't prevent attacks by mortars or rockets.

But the current war of attrition is expensive in lives as well as shekels. Israel has minimal control over areas governed by the Palestinian Authority anyway. And it's easier to stop rocket attacks than suicide bombers who move across an open border. As Barak notes, "We have a fence around Gaza, and there are basically no suicide attacks from Gaza."

Arafat has denounced Sharon's approach, which preserves the existing Israeli presence. But Palestinians might be far more amenable to the Labor Party version, which would abandon most settlements and furnish the basis for a viable Palestinian state.

This wouldn't resolve hard issues like Jerusalem and the rights of refugees, which would be left for later, but it might well take the steam out of the current intifada. Why? Partly because most of the points of friction between the two peoples would be gone. Partly because Palestinians would finally have something valuable--something to lose.

Unilateral separation, true, is inferior to a final settlement that has the unequivocal support of both parties--which is like saying it's inferior to life in the Garden of Eden. Neither option is available. Peace now would be nice. But Israelis are coming to see the wisdom of a different approach, captured in a new slogan: Separation now. Peace later.

posted by Eric at 8:35 AM

 
Tour O the Blogs - DailyPundit/William Quick
Blogger 1: “Bill Quick is a writer.”

Blogger 2: “Obviously, we’re all writers.”

Blogger 1: “No, I mean he’s a writer writer.”

Blogger 2: “You mean he’s written some articles and stuff?”

Blogger 1: “No, Fukuyama-face, he’s a real writer writer writer: he’s written T-W-E-N-T-Y E-I-G-H-T novels including the seminal cyberpunk cult hit Dreams of Flesh and Sand (in which he invented “The Matrix”), the best-selling prehistoric thriller The Last Mammoth, a series of six novels entitled Quest For Tomorrow co-authored by THE William Shatner, dozens of shorter works of fiction dating back to 1979, and several screenplays for film and television. He writes for a living and gets paid and stuff!

He’s such a real writer that doesn’t always use his real name: he’s been ‘W.T. Quick,’ ‘Margaret Allan,’ ‘Quentin Thomas,’ ‘Sean Kiernan’ and ‘the guy who wrote the Quest For Tomorrow series for William Shatner, but don’t tell anyone.’”

Blogger 2: “I had no freaking idea - no wonder he does such a great job on the blog.”

Nor did I, and he sure does. I had known Bill Quick heretofore only as "DailyPundit: Rationales for an Irrational World,” among the liveliest, most closely-reasoned, prolific, readable, audacious, funny, and compelling blogs in existence.

As befits a man who has slung words together expertly for over 20 years, Quick is also a word smith: he invented the ascendant "blogosphere" on the auspicious day of January 1, 2002 - a new word for a new year:

I PROPOSE A NAME for the intellectual cyberspace we bloggers occupy: the “blogosphere.” Simple enough; the root word is “logos,” from the Greek meaning, variously: In pre-Socratic philosophy, the principle governing the cosmos, the source of this principle, or human reasoning about the cosmos; Among the Sophists, the topics of rational argument or the arguments themselves.

Rational, creative, forceful: very Bill.

For sheer output and consistency, Quick is rivaled only by the demigod Glenn Reynolds, with whom he shares a similarly independent political outlook, though Quick’s style has a noticeably sharper bite. He suffers fools not.

This fact comes through plainly in his Statement of Biases (the fact that he even has a Statement of Biases indicates a bracing impatience with crap):

Let me admit it up front: I'm biased.

I'm pretty much small-l libertarian, as much in the "leave me the fuck alone" party as anything. I'm a rabid civil liberties absolutist. I believe that all the amendments in the Bill of Rights either limit the power of government, or affirm individual rights of the people. I believe the 2nd Amendment guarantees the right of the individual in almost all cases to bear arms, and that at least ninety-five percent of gun control laws are unconstitutional.

I want the government out of my pocket, bedroom, and mind. I believe that liberal solutions, especially when they involve massive government power and authority, have done far more harm than good. I prefer a smaller, less expensive, less intrusive government, although not one limited only to the classic libertarian notion of "defense and doing justice."

I believe a large part of the major media - that media which charts the course for most of the rest - is either consciously or unconsciously biased toward the left, and consciously or unconsciously express their bias in their reporting, not to mention their opinions.

I don't much like big concentrations of power, though if I have to choose, I'll take corporate monopolists over government monopolists. The government monopoly guys have guns and, on occasion, the will to use them.

I think most things can be approached, apprehended, understood, and dealt with rationally. I don't believe life is too complicated for anybody but experts or government agencies to understand.

I am an atheist, but I don't begrudge anybody their right to practice any religion they wish, as long as their religious practices in no way infringe on my freedom to act as if they - and their religions - don't exist.

I believe in the right to own property, the right to self defense, and freedom that stops where your nose begins - and mine, too.

I believe in the possibility of self-education, self-improvement, and self-esteem gained through practicing both of them, as well as hard work.

I believe the human spirit is much more good than evil.

I view the world from these perspectives, and write my analyses of the world from them as well. Now you know where DailyPundit's coming from. Where are you coming from?

Damn - that’s a man who knows his mind, has a firm but flexible template through which to process life and the affairs of this world, and the restive energy to propel him through the nonsense that same world kicks up.

Now let’s take a look at Quick’s output: prolific, even prodigious; but never frenetic, never thin. If he posts it, there’s a reason. As of 8:30pm (Eastern), Quick, who lives in “a rambling Victorian flat” on Russian Hill in San Francisco, had made 24 posts this Thursday - that is vast - that is InstaPundit range. (I think we know where we are gong to turn if/when Glenn goes on vacation.) A few are brief links, but most have pithy comments and keen observations.

A few examples:

IDF Shows Tape Showing Fake Palestinian Funeral

The IDF released a videotape Thursday showing the apparently staged funeral of a Palestinian in the Jenin refugee camp. The footage was filmed by an IDF unmanned reconnaissance plane on April 28.

Think of all the superb Palestinian acting - not to mention the superb Palestinian lying - now going to waste since the UN decided to cancel their fault fact-finding mission.

He is staunchly pro-Israel.

The Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram, like all Egyptian media firmly under the control of the Egyptian government, prints something rather unlikely (for them):

The quiet consensus emerging from the dozens of human rights lawyers and military experts who have visited Jenin camp over the last two weeks is that there appears little substance to the Palestinian claim that a massacre occurred.

If, as some have suggested, part of the agreement reached between the US and Saudi Arabia at the recent summit in Texas was for the Saudis to pressure Arafat and the Arab states into a more peaceful line, it looks as if the Saudis may be doing their part. The usual approach for the Arab media to take is to accept any Palestinian charge, no matter how outrageous, at face value, and then amplify it throughout the Arabian world. However, that doesn't seem to be the case here. In Egypt's case, though, it is a fair speculation to wonder exactly who is applying the pressure: Saudi Arabia, or the United States itself?

Quick is also fair-minded. If Al-Ahram does something surprisingly honest, he notes it with a thoughtful analysis. He doesn’t conveniently ignore a story because it may contradict personal dogma as many others might do (subconsciously or otherwise); his personal dogma is the truth.

Calif. Senate OK’s Emissions Bill Targeting SUVs

California's state Senate Thursday approved a controversial bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions, a measure automakers say is aimed at choking off sales of sport utility vehicles through tighter fuel economy standards.

Gov. Gray Davis has not taken a position on the bill, which is strongly opposed by the auto industry. Officials in his office said the Democratic governor was working with the bill's author, Democratic Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, seeking "to make it more palatable to all parties concerned."

The only palatable version of this piece of nanny-state idiocy is one that goes away entirely. However, I can live with a bill like this as long as it has Davis's public paw-prints all over it. Let him step out front as favoring the elimination of the preferred mode of transportation for huge swathes of his suburban supporters.

The libertarian speaks: don’t tread on me, let me make my own decisions.

Bush Spokesman Chides Arafat For Remarks

The White House chided Yasser Arafat Thursday for condemning Israel as "terrorists, Nazis and racists," and said it would be better for all sides to focus on peace issues.

Oh, ho, ho, ho. You're the morons who forced Israel to let this poisonous little murderer out of his box. You rewarded him for doing everything but "focusing on peace issues." What are you complaining about now? He's only continuing to do exactly what he did before to win victory.

But Bill, tell us how you really feel. And on he goes, ranging with verve and insight over state, national, and international politics and culture displaying easy familiarity with a bewildering panoply of topics, all worthwhile, all worth pursuing. But sometimes he’s just astonishing.

I was peacefully cruising through his site last Saturday when I stubbed my toe on this:

Arab League Chief Warns U.S. to Fix Mideast Policy

Speaking to reporters in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, Moussa said Arabs were feeling "humiliated, depressed and helpless" by the United States' policy in the Middle East but would not stand by and watch Washington let Israel stay "above international law."

Islamic Arabia is an honor-shame culture. In such cultures, the primary concern is what others believe about you. If others believe you are inferior, then you are humiliated and shamed, and you will hate not only those who perceive you in such a shameful way, but also the source of that perception. This is the primary reason why the Israeli-Arab "problem" is insoluble at this point. Israel, by its very existence, is a humiliation to its neighbors, who, in all their hundreds of millions, lack the power to conquer a tiny state with seven million citizens. Worse, the quality of Israeli existence is a humiliation: Surrounded, constantly threatened with attack, vilified, dependent ultimately on the goodwill of the United States for survival, and yet Israel, at least in comparison to any other country in the Arab world, thrives. Its people live in freedom. It is incredibly productive. It is the only nation in the middle east to make the desert flower wholesale. Everything it accomplishes, every new height to which it rises, is a living rebuke to Arabia, which has done none of these things.

To a shame culture, Israel's mere existence is absolutely intolerable. The Palestinians are a side issue. The Arabs don't care about Palestine, and they never have. They have slaughtered far more Palestinians than Israel has in all its history. What the Palestinians are is the handiest club with which the Arab world can attack Israel. If there were no Palestinians at all, there would still be Arab hate for Israel, and Arab lust after her destruction. This would be true even if there were no Jews in Israel either.

And there is no obvious peaceful solution. One approach might be to raise the Arab world to Israel's levels of success. But the sort of requirements necessary for such a plan to succeed - mass education, liberalization, a more secular, meritocratic society - threaten both the religion and the regimes of the region. Not to mention that the impetus for such a rise would come from the outside, from the lands of the hated "Great Satans," and hence would be tainted on its face.

Turkey is often touted as being an example of a "successful" Islamic nation. Well, yes, compared to the rest of the Islamic world, it is successful. But it would be considered third world by most of the west, and its regimes is, by necessity, a dictatorship, always on guard against a resurgence of Islamofascist fundamentalism. Turkey is always one successful revolution away from becoming another Iran, and that revolution is always bubbling just beneath the surface. So Turkey is no solution, either, because its secular government is, all by itself, a humiliation to Islam.

And Israel itself is not the ultimate problem, because the existence of the west itself is an intolerably shameful fact of life to Islam. The mere presence of the United States is an unbearable humiliation to a honor-shame culture that perceives any more successful group as a rebuke not only to its person, but its religion and even its God. God promised Islam that all other nations and faiths would submit to it; the continued existence of any non-submissive states or religions is not just a humiliation, it is a humiliation in the eyes of God - and it cannot be borne.

If Israel were to vanish tomorrow, the next day the shamed, humiliated rage of Islam would focus on the United States. For the west to live in peace, the entire culture must be changed, and I suspect that this is not possible without first defeating it so thoroughly that even its religion is discredited. Shame cultures make war on anybody more successful than they. They cannot help it. They cannot be reasoned with, only defeated. That's why almost every festering "struggle" around the world partakes of this equation: SomeNation<-->Islamic Foe.

Honor-shame cultures are culturally incapable of renouncing war unless one of two things happens: Either every other state or culture submits to them ("Islam" means "submission"), or they are defeated so decisively the culture itself is destroyed.

Imperial Japan was an honor-shame culture - and history records how that turned out.

Now this is just jaw dropping insight, writing, logic, research and would do any publication on the world proud, but it was just another post on DailyPundit. I have based at least three posts on this revelatory piece since Saturday, including this, this, and this. That has to be a record, but we’re talking about a classic.

Quick’s medium fits his message: his site is clean, bright, logical. He has a nice comments section, and the “Me, Myself and I” link takes you to his bio, handsome scans of his book covers, and relevant info on his many publications. Also this revealing tidbit:

Since 1996, W. T. Quick has been listed in Who’s Who In America. Since W. T. Quick was too stupid to earn any sort of higher educational degree, this, his only tangible recognition of any achievement, was one of his lifelong ambitions. So while he feels somewhat embarrassed about mentioning it, he will anyway.

And well he should: Bill Quick is a self-made man in the very best sense.

Lest I forget, Bill Quick has not only written 28 novels, but he is the co-author of How to Get Your E-Book Published(with Richard Curtis)

If you're interested in e-publishing, this is the book that tells you how to go about it: everything from html to web sites to e-publishers and marketing, all discussed in simple, non-technical language. Find out how easily you can become a part of what many have said is the most revolutionary advance in publishing since Gutenberg. A Writer's Digest Book Club Main Selection!

And if Bill says it, I believe it.
posted by Eric at 9:51 PM

 
Faster Than a Speeding Matsoh
Where does this woman find these amazing stories? It's almost like she makes them up. I thought Ariel Sharon was SuperJew!
posted by Eric at 6:34 PM

 
Perspective? What Perspective?
Okay, so I’m a whiner and a fair weather fan. Fellow-Clevelander (I knew there had to be someone out there) Chas Rich of the splendid Sardonic Views puts things in a little better perspective for me, even though he is both a Yankee and a Phillies fan (how’s that for yin and yang?):

Why am I waxing nostalgic? This column by Rob Neyer about the history of the Phillies. The Phillies have been one of the worst franchises in the history of baseball. Arguably in all of sports [Clippers?].

I moved to Cleveland in 1994 to start law school. This was the start of Cleveland's great run of winning seasons. As long as I've lived in Ohio, Cleveland has had a winning record. The team has been struggling for the last few years to keep winning, by plugging in veterans and trading young players. This year it is coming to an end, the ownership has recognized this, and is trying to rebuild while keeping a decent team on the field, but the fans are losing it [this was the link to me - I'm guilty]. The team got off to an improbable 11-1 start, then went 2-13, including a humiliating 21-2 loss. Admittedly, this will be hard for any fan to take. The team will probably finish around .500, +/- 5 games before the season ends. Still, read the Neyer article and remember how much worse it could be.

Okay, so I’ve got used to the Indians not sucking. I’m spoiled, so shoot me. I’m still willing to use voodoo because winning has become my right. Certainly a Yankees fan can understand that.
posted by Eric at 6:23 PM

 
In My Day, Panty Raids Were Conducted By Students
While we’re in the mood: what is closest to toilet paper? Underwear, of course:

A California high school vice principal was placed on leave Wednesday while officials investigate claims that she lifted the skirts of teenage girls at a dance to make sure they were wearing "appropriate" underwear, the school said.

Parents at Rancho Bernardo High School in suburban San Diego say the vice principal, Rita Wilson [not Tom Hanks's wife], made the girls prove that they were not wearing skimpy thong panties before they were allowed into the dance on Friday.

posted by Eric at 3:11 PM

 
Waste Not Want Not
I am quite pleased to announce that there is a new history-of-toilets exhibit that just rolled into the Neville Museum in Green Bay, Wisc last week with the inevitable title of “Privy to the Past.”

I am flush with excitement, but toilets are only half the story. There is perhaps nothing I dislike more than addressing a subject in a half-assed manner, therefore we will also add:

Great Moments in Toilet Paper History
500 B.C.-A.D. 500: Roman So-Called Civilization— All public toilets feature a stick with a sponge attached to its end, soaking in a bucket of brine. Citizens use the tool to freshen up.
1391: The King's Pleasure— Chinese emperors begin ordering toilet paper in sheets measuring 2 feet by 3 feet.
1596: A Royal Flush— Sir John Harington, a godson of Queen Elizabeth I, invents the first flushing toilet (a distinction often attributed to plumber Thomas Crapper).
1700s: Damn Niblets!— Colonial Americans wipe with corncobs, later switching to old newspapers, catalogues and almanacs.
1857: Every Sheet Bears My Name— New York entrepreneur Joseph C. Gayetty manufactures the first packaged pre-moistened sheets of bathroom tissue — called "therapeutic paper" — in packs of 500 for 50 cents. Gayetty is so proud of his innovation that he had his name imprinted on each sheet.
1861-1904: The Gifts of Thomas Crapper— British plumber Thomas Crapper revolutionizes the toilet with a series of plumbing-related patents.
1872: Kimberly Meets Clark— Charles Benjamin Clark, a 28-year-old Civil War veteran, recruits John A. Kimberly to join him in building a paper mill in Wisconsin.
1890: On a Roll— Scott Paper introduces toilet paper on a roll. But the paper goods company is somewhat embarrassed to be associated with such an "unmentionable" thing and refuses to put its name on the product. Instead, the toilet paper bears the name of intermediaries. As a result, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Waldorf Hotel in New York becomes a leader in the toilet paper business.
1902: Enter the Green Bay Giant— Northern Paper Mills, the company that later became Quilted Northern, opens, producing Northern Tissue.
1916: Gas Masks Become Sanitary Napkins— Kimberly-Clark begins concentrating on a special wadding paper. With World War I brewing in Europe, this product, Cellucotton, was adapted for use as a filter in gas masks and bandages. Nurses began using it as sanitary pads. Cellucotton was renamed "Cellu-Naps," and then "Kotex."
1920: The Tissue and the Pop-Up Box— Kimberly-Clark introduces the Kleenex tissue. Nine years later, this product is marketed in the patented Pop-Up box.
1928: From Charming to Charmin— Hoberg paper introduces Charmin. The logo — a woman's head from a cameo pin — was designed to appeal to feminine fashions of the day. A female employee called the packaging "charming," and the product's brand name was born.
1932: Wiping Away Depression— Charmin tries to mitigate the pain of the Great Depression by introducing the economy-sized four-roll pack.
1935: Who's Got the Tweezers?— Northern Tissue is hailed as one of the few splinter-free toilet papers on the market.
1942: A Softer World— St. Andrew's Paper Mill in England introduces two-ply toilet paper.
1944: Patriotic Toilet Paper Duty— The United States honors Kimberly-Clark with an "E" Award (for excellence in commercial services) for its heroic effort supplying soldiers fighting in World War II.
1964: Enter Mr. Whipple— He appears for more than 20 years in TV, radio and print advertising. The real George Whipple was the president of the Benton & Bowles advertising agency, which came up with the "Please, don't squeeze the Charmin" ad campaign. He sold the rights to his name to Procter & Gamble for $1. Dick Wilson, the vaudeville veteran who portrayed Mr. Whipple on TV, later recalled his agent calling him about the project. "My agent asked me, 'What do you think of toilet paper?' And I told him, 'I think everybody should use it.'" For his role in making Charmin the No. 1 toilet paper in America, Wilson's salary grew to $300,000 a year, and Procter & Gamble promised him a "lifetime supply" of toilet paper.
1973: The Johnny Carson Toilet Paper Scare— Johnny Carson makes a joke about the United States facing an acute shortage of toilet paper. This prompts viewers to run out to stores and begin hoarding. Carson apologizes the next day for causing the scare and retracts his remark.
1991: Covert TP— The U.S. military uses toilet paper to camouflage its tanks in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War.
1995: The Great Toilet Paper Caper— A Philadelphia city employee is charged with stealing $34,000 worth of toilet paper from Veterans Stadium just before an Eagles football game. The accused, Ricardo Jefferson, was fired. City spokesman Tony Radwanski said: "We don't really know how long this was going on. We only looked at a 10-month period from October 1994 to August 1995, but man, he really wiped that stadium clean."
1999: Paperless Toilet — Japanese inventors unveil the paperless toilet. The device washes, rinses and blow-dries the user's bottom with a heating element.
2000: Men Are From Folders, Women Are From Wadders— A Kimberly-Clark marketing survey on bathroom habits finds that women are "wadders" and men are "folders." Women also tend to use much more toilet paper than men.

posted by Eric at 2:54 PM

 
Dream Police?
I am the father of three children of whom I am fiercely protective. My policy toward pedophilia or child abuse of any kind is zero-tolerance, period: not just one strike and you’re out, but if the pitch is anywhere near the plate, you are out. In this regard I am the kind of umpire I wish I’d had when I was pitching.

But with that in mind, I am 1000% in agreement with both Bill Quick and Gary Farber that the new bill seeking to ban computer-simulated child pornography is absurd.

This paragraph from a NY Times story on the matter pretty well sums it up:

The court has previously held that laws creating stricter legal categories for child pornography were constitutional, on the grounds that such material was "intrinsically related" to sexual abuse of children. But "virtual pornography," by comparison, "records no crime and creates no victims by its production," the court declared on April 16.

Anti-child pornography laws are there to do one thing: protect children. No children=no crime. You don’t have to be libertarian to see this. As Gary Farber mocks:

It's shocking. Damn these courts! They want you to prove that someone was harmed, in order to prove that something is a crime. This is outrageous! Really, isn't it enough for prosecutors to be able to point a finger and declare guilt? Shouldn't thinking things we find disgusting be a crime?

Not if general disgust is the only harm done. If that were the case then Cincinnati would have to outlaw Robert Mapplethorpe photos. Oh wait, they tried to do that.

As Bill says:

prosecuting people for making or possessing child pornography created by methods in which no children are involved is really prosecuting a thought crime.

And until the children, beavers, armadillos, women, men, or whomever can get out of your dreams and into your car, it’s none of the government’s business.
posted by Eric at 2:04 PM

 
Deceptive Hatred: They Don't Want You Dead Just Because You Are Jewish, Which Doesn't Mean They Don't Want You Dead
George Will, who looks like a morose Howdy Doody (I believe he even has the strings), joins the clarion call against anti-Semitism today:

It is time to face a sickening fact that is much more obvious today than it was 11 years ago, when Ruth R. Wisse asserted it. In a dark and brilliant essay in Commentary magazine, she argued that anti-Semitism has proved to be "the most durable and successful" ideology of the ideology-besotted 20th century. Successful? Did not Hitler, the foremost avatar of anti-Semitism, fail? No, he did not. Yes, his 1,000-year Reich fell 988 years short. But its primary work was mostly done. Hitler's primary objective, as he made clear in words and deeds, was the destruction of European Jewry.

Will is as gloomy as Ron Rosenbaum in his assessment of the situation:

Today many people say that the Arabs and their European echoes would be mollified if Israel would change its behavior. People who say that do not understand the centrality of anti-Semitism in the current crisis. This crisis has become the second -- and final? -- phase of the struggle for a "final solution to the Jewish question." As Wisse said 11 years ago, and as cannot be said too often, anti-Semitism is not directed against the behavior of the Jews but against the existence of the Jews.

If the percentage of the world's population that was Jewish in the era of the Roman Empire were Jewish today, there would be 200 million Jews. There are 13 million. Five million are clustered in an embattled salient on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, facing hundreds of millions of enemies. Ron Rosenbaum writes, "The concentration of so many Jews in one place -- and I use the word 'concentration' advisedly -- gives the world a chance to kill the Jews en masse again."

Israel holds just one one-thousandth of the world's population, but holds all the hopes for the continuation of the Jewish experience as a portion of the human narrative. Will Israel be more durable than anti-Semitism? Few things have been.

Back to the Moussaoui story from last night: if this frog-brained Islamist freak and his numerous like-minded amphibious brethren do not differentiate between the Jews and the people of the U.S. of A., rather than their core hatred being some twisted and expanded version of anti-Semitism, isn’t there yet a deeper strata of hatred where the Jews and the Americans really are united, and not just by the fact that the vast majority of Americans don’t want to see the Jews destroyed as Brookhiser asserted? Quoth Will:

Anti-Semitism's malignant strength derives from its simplicity -- its stupidity, actually. It is a primitivism which, Wisse wrote, makes up in vigor what it lacks in philosophic heft, and does so precisely because it "has no prescription for the improvement of society beyond the elimination of part of society." This howl of negation has no more affirmative content than did the scream of the airliner tearing down the Hudson, heading for the World Trade Center.

There is plenty of anti-Semitism in Europe, but I don’t get the sense that the Europeans are actually going to try to eliminate the Jews - again. Whatever the psychology of Europeans hating Israel because they hate America because they hate themselves, as per Jonah Goldberg, I don’t think the Europeans hate America enough to want us eliminated either.

But the Islamists and a large chunk of the more fundamentalist Muslims do want both us and the Jews gone - and is in dead. I don’t believe they want us gone because they literally equate us with the Jews - I believe they are aware we are a predominantly Christian country - so I think it comes back to Bill Quick’s honor-shame society thesis:

Israel, by its very existence, is a humiliation to its neighbors, who, in all their hundreds of millions, lack the power to conquer a tiny state with seven million citizens. Worse, the quality of Israeli existence is a humiliation: Surrounded, constantly threatened with attack, vilified, dependent ultimately on the goodwill of the United States for survival, and yet Israel, at least in comparison to any other country in the Arab world, thrives. Its people live in freedom. It is incredibly productive. It is the only nation in the middle east to make the desert flower wholesale. Everything it accomplishes, every new height to which it rises, is a living rebuke to Arabia, which has done none of these things.

To a shame culture, Israel's mere existence is absolutely intolerable. The Palestinians are a side issue. The Arabs don't care about Palestine, and they never have. They have slaughtered far more Palestinians than Israel has in all its history. What the Palestinians are is the handiest club with which the Arab world can attack Israel. If there were no Palestinians at all, there would still be Arab hate for Israel, and Arab lust after her destruction. This would be true even if there were no Jews in Israel either.

This last is a key thought: it isn’t the fact that Israelis are Jews that makes them so intolerable, it is the fact that they are such a successful society on every material, political, and social level - just like the U.S. - that makes them so hateful for the more radical Islamics.

To reiterate, there is rife anti-Semitism in Europe, but other than on the farthest fringes, it isn’t of the murderous kind; there is murderous anti-Semitism in the Arab Islamic world, but it isn’t fundamentally anti-Semitism, it is anti-Everyone Who Makes Us Look Like Fuckwads, as exemplified by Israel (do to its proximity to the fuckwads), the Little Satan, and the U.S., Israel’s guarantor, the Great Satan. This is the reason those titles aren’t reversed: if the feeling was really anti-Semitism at its murderous core, those titles would be reversed regardless of Israel’s physical size.

This view is borne out by history as well: when they were confident rulers a thousand years ago, the Muslims were unusually tolerant of other religions and cultures and had no particular animosity toward the Jews. In fact, it was the Christians the ruling Muslims were most concerned about. Per the august Bernard Lewis:

Like every other civilization known to human history, the Muslim world in its heyday saw itself as the center of truth and enlightenment, surrounded by infidel barbarians whom it would in due course enlighten and civilize. But between the different groups of barbarians there was a crucial difference. The barbarians to the east and the south were polytheists and idolaters, offering no serious threat and no competition at all to Islam. In the north and west, in contrast, Muslims from an early date recognized a genuine rival -- a competing world religion, a distinctive civilization inspired by that religion, and an empire that, though much smaller than theirs, was no less ambitious in its claims and aspirations. This was the entity known to itself and others as Christendom, a term that was long almost identical with Europe.

America is now the seat of “Christian” power, and Israel, ironically a predominantly Jewish country, is seen as the representative of “Christian” power in the Middle East.

For the Islamists, then, it isn’t that the U.S. is seen as a “Jewish” country, it is that Israel is seen as a “Christian” country in the cultural sense: for them, Israel is now more culturally “Christian” than is Europe, which is just kind of there. What the Islamist murderers seek to kill is the gap in cultural success that has been growing ever-wider for the last 700 years, and the shame that goes with it. The Islamists and their sympathizers would hate the U.S. and Israel no less if the two countries were filled with devout Wikkans as long as the countries represented the dominant “Christian” culture that mocks them with its success. The real anti-Semites, as found particularly in Europe, are of little concern beyond the offense caused by the stupidity, vacuity, and aridity of their ideas.
posted by Eric at 12:48 PM

 
Curse of the Merkins
Careful readers will have noted that I haven’t mentioned the Indians much of late. Like a rat in a cage, I tend to avoid stimuli that causes me intense discomfort - for example, a cattle prod to the scrotum - but I can keep my silence no more.

HAS ANY TEAM, IN ANY SPORT, AT ANY LEVEL, ON THIS OR ANY OTHER INHABITED PLANET EVER BEGUN A SEASON 11-1, THEN WOKE UP ONE MORNING BARELY TWO WEEKS LATER TO FIND THEMSELVES 13-14????? I’m not kidding, I really want to know.

This isn’t a collapse, this is an implosion of galactic proportion. There is no way I am venturing near Jacobs Field because I don’t want to get sucked into the black hole that has surely been created by the gravity of the collapse.

I thought it couldn’t get worse than Tuesday, when the worst-ever loss at Jacobs Field put them at 13-13, but at least they weren’t a losing team, they were a .500 team. Now they are a losing team, after an 11-1 start.

There were a record four managers fired in April, can Charlie Manuel be far behind? I was kidding around before about the Curse of Kitaen, but I am kidding no more. When it was announced that Chuck Finley and Tawny Kitaen were getting divorced, the Indians were 11-1. Now they are 13-14, you figure it out. It’s like when Nathan Lane was asked if he is gay: he said, “I’m 46 years old, never been married, work in musical theater, you do the math.”

Do the freaking math indeed. There is a curse plaguing the Tribe that makes The Curse of the Bambino look like a benediction. This is madness. Chuck - appease the woman, get her a movie role, send her to the Betty Ford Center, buy her some peanuts and Cracker Jack, seek council with Robert Blake......ANYTHING. But get her to take the curse off - I am begging you.

Give me back the real team, not the anti-team. I would call this lot impostors, but these merkins aren’t adept enough to be impostors, they are actively evil anti-players. We may have to get help from Haiti on this one.

Addendum
Brother Arne adds saged words from ersatz Indians great Pedro Cerrano:

Bats, they are sick. I cannot hit curveball. Straightball I hit it very much. Curveball, bats are afraid. I ask Jobu to come, take fear from bats. I offer him cigar, rum. He will come.

I hope so, Pedro, I sure hope so.
posted by Eric at 10:22 AM

 
Spelunking With Friends
Marc Weisblott, who has a fascinating entertainment-related blog (knew there had to be a good one out there), suggests that I displayed “unbecoming insecurity” yesterday - I’m guessing relating to all the talk about links and traffic and whatnot.

Gosh - I hope not. This is funny to me because I am more used to hearing such epithets as “arrogant,” “egotistical,” and, of course, “butthole,” so this comes as some surprise. I will admit that this whole blog thing has me a bit humbled, though. I have written articles that millions of people must have seen unless my pages got stuck together or something (which is certainly possible with Playboy, for example), but somehow this has never felt as personal as a blog.

Some bloggers reveal most everything about themselves - they are the subject of their blogs - and others reveal very little (intentionally anyway). I am somewhere in between: believing that the macro can be revealed through the micro and that one of the reasons we live is to have material for stories, but I don’t want to have to ask the world to pass me the toilet paper every time I perch upon the throne, either.

That is part of the excitement of the experiment in personal journalism that is blogging: the search for the self through written expression. I find that the self is not just THERE waiting to be chronicled, the self is actually created, or at least broadened and developed, through the process of exploration. Picture a cave system: it’s there, but as you work your way through it, you clear out debris here, shore up a weak spot there, spot veins and follow them wherever they may lead, digging and examining and sometimes blasting as you go. And a bunch of invisible people follow you around as you go: it’s very exciting and kind of creepy at the same time.

I wonder what would happen if all of the bloggers and all of the readers (many wear dual hats, of course) suddenly found themselves in a huge room without warning. How long would it take them to figure out what the connection was, why they were there? How would the connection be made and who would be the first to figure it out? Would someone take charge and start barking out orders, firing off questions? What would be the clue that would trigger the solution?

So anyway, I guess I was exploring the Help-From-Others branch off of the Humility tunnel yesterday, a less-explored region of the persona cave system so I had to clear out some loose dirt and detritus. I’m sure I’ll still be spending most of my time in the main room of the Self-Assured Dickhead cavern, but it’s always interesting to do a little exploring too.

Nonetheless, I appreciate the vote of confidence from Marc, who has one of the most disturbing pictures I have ever seen on his site right now. The picture is so disturbing because it is alluring and beckoning while shattering a taboo that transcends virtually every culture on earth: women just don’t show their very pregnant bellies around town as a matter of course unless the display is either accidental or clinical. I find pregnancy sexy, but only when I am the cause. Other pregnant women are cute and adorable and have a “glow” relating to fulfillment of biological purpose or hormones or whatever, but here we have a woman displaying her girth as if it were sexy in and of itself. And it is - very freaky.
posted by Eric at 9:19 AM

 
Zac Is Not Quick Out of the Gate
According to Richard Brookhiser, Zacarias Moussaoui has NOT broken out of the gate on top:

The defense of Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman of Moroccan origin who allegedly was meant to be the 20th hijacker, got off to a bad start in a Virginia courtroom last week. Mr. Moussaoui assailed "pagans, Jews, Christians and hypocrites," and said that he prayed for "the destruction of the United States" and of "the Jewish people and state." It’s as if O.J. Simpson had taken the stand to harangue the jury about white bitches. This will be a tough hole to dig out of.

Mr. Moussaoui’s call to destroy "the Jewish people and state"—note the order: people, then state—was logically odd. First we exterminate everyone, then we dismantle their empty post offices. But we can be grateful to him for making the priorities of fanatic anti-Zionists plain. These are not people who will be satisfied with 1967 borders, or 1948 borders, or a multi-religious patchwork like the old Lebanon or the Ottoman empire. They want no Jews, in Palestine or anywhere.

More interesting still is that fact that Moussaoui, with a brush broad enough for a car wash, paints worldwide Jewry and the almost 300 million people of the U.S. as one. This must be why I, a Norwegian-American Lutheran from California and Ohio, feel solidarity with a little country in the sand half a world away: because we are, in reality, one. Thanks Zac. One the other hand, I imagine this is how Indonesian Muslims feel when we toss them in the bag with Arabs. But wait a minute, at least they’re the same religion.

I’m guessing the survivors of Ruby Ridge would be taken aback to hear that they are one with a clan of Ethiopian Jews huddled together near Lake Tana, but Kevin Bacon would understand.

Now the aegis of Jewry is the United States. You may never have had a bris but, willy-nilly, you have been circumcised.

Bards of American-Jewish friendship look for deep resemblances between the new nation and the old religion, and there are some. Jews live worldwide, and people from all over the world live here. America tolerates a variety of ideologies and creeds, and Judaism has shivered into many beliefs and unbeliefs. But it’s easy to push such abstractions too hard. The key point of our present ad hoc alliance is that the United States does not wish for the destruction of the Jews; therefore their enemies wish ours.

Moussaoui will have a very hard time proving otherwise.
posted by Eric at 9:29 PM

 
The Land of Wonder Checks In
You know, we're having a real good week around here. This just came in from Australia, where our whole family had a tremendous time at the Sydney Olympics. We very much look forward to going back, mate.

G'day Eric,

I hope that you don't mind user feedback on your comments about InstaPundit links.

Like many people, I became aware of your site because of a link from InstaPundit. However, it's the content on your site which keeps me coming back.

Consider a link from InstaPundit to be the equivalent of a 20 cents off coupon for a grocery item. The coupon provides a means for the customer to try the item. However, the customer will only buy it again if he or she like it.

In most cases, I follow an Instaundit link and never return to the linked site. However, your site has very good content and I generally read it four or five days a week.

Regards,
Doug

posted by Eric at 8:50 PM

 
More More More
My friends, I am now tingling with acquisitive ecstasy. I am basically now an ex-club DJ: can't stay up that late anymore and can't take the smoke, but I can DJ vicariously. My friend Nik just stopped by to drop off about 2000 12" dance singles that he doesn't use anymore, and about 1000 various CDs, increasing my overall collection by 20% in about an hour of lifting and sorting. What a life! Back to blogging soon.
posted by Eric at 6:49 PM

 
Blogmantics
Deservedly, Bill Quick's "blogosphere" has made it to the mainstream. Now Charles Johnson's "idiotarian" and "anti-idiotarian" (you want to be the latter) have busted through to the big time via Ramesh Ponnuru in the National Review. And you question the blogfluence?
posted by Eric at 3:57 PM

 
Less Dead Than Previously Thought
Spunky new blogger Dawn Olsen has this remarkable breaking news from Jenin:

According to reports in the region, Palestinians have been seen digging up corpses and strategically placing them amongst the rubble. Eyewitness accounts have also backed this claim and added that once the corpses have been dumped, Palestinians have been calling U.N. officials over saying "Look, look, more dead bodies."

U.N. officials have been perplexed by the events and the advanced state of decomposition in which these bodies have been found. A member of the U.N. fact-finding team told this reporter:


"I have seen a lot of strange things at Jenin. After we survey an area and mark it off our list as having been checked, we are then having dead bodies pointed out to us that we must have missed. From the looks of it, these bodies must have been tortured, even dipped in acid. Many are nothing but bones. This is very disturbing. Obviously we are going to have be more thorough in our searches."

Abdul Muhammad, a Palestinian working with U.N team stated, "We will work day and night, with no rest, no water, no food, until every body is dug up. Even my great grandmother's grave is not sacred. We are on a mission from Allah."

Dawn has found her calling.
posted by Eric at 3:22 PM

 
"T" and "A"
Smoking hot Tony Pierce has a titilating but ultimately compassionate and sensible (just like Tony) photo essay on Anna Kournikova today. You'll see a lot but it may not be what you think.
posted by Eric at 3:00 PM

 
John, Glenn, and Traffic
John Scalzi has a numerically challenging but fascinating "Whatever" column today on "borrowed" vs. "native" readers, proving that it isn't only neophyte bloggers (I know John, you're not a blogger) who need links to drive the customers through the turnstyles - and John is better off than most with a "native" readership of around 1000 daily.

I was thinking about the subject anyway, and since John brought it up I want to throw in my three cents (I rarely stop at two). After three months, I am guessing we have a "native" readership of around 400 per day. This is great since after two months we only had about 50 per day we could count on (we love those 50 like first-born children).

Our path has been like everyone else's: struggle to get links, keep pumping out the best material possible, start to get a few links - then the motherload: InstaPundit. Our very first InstaLink a month ago drove about 400 to our dusty door - 10 times our average at that point - and we've never looked back.

My little sob in the dark yesterday about InstaPundit addiction got this link from Glenn:

"NOW THIS IS JUST PATHETIC. Get a grip on yourself, man!"

That's it, not a word more. My finding regarding the correlation between the word length of link and the traffic driven by said link is, interestingly enough, the EXACT OPPOSITE OF JOHN'S (his: "I've noticed that with links from blogs, the longer the discussion of the link and the content it sends the reader to, the more people seem to link through.), but overall our conclusion is the same: "In terms of my audience, linking isn't important, it's critical."

Yesterday, with that enigmatic two-sentence link, we got 3,500 visitors: not page views, visitors. If our native audience is even as high as 500 a day now, that means those two sentences drove 3,000 visits to our site yesterday. That's freaking InstaPower! I'm unaware of other links from yesterday, though they may well exist (Google doesn't pick them up for about two days), and I don't have the sophisticated tracking system John has to do anything more than estimate from whence they came, but let it be known throughout the land: there is nothing like a nice, vague, snappy, enticing, short link from the InstaMan to goose the traffic.

It is my most fervent wish that portions of the "borrowed" traffic driven by links will like what they see enough to come back next time of their own accord - which I am very happy to report seems to be happening - but, all things being equal, there is an ironclad downward curve in traffic the farther one gets from an InstaLink, or a link from any other BIGASS traffic site.

My point is this: for a blog to be healthy it needs content to hold the reader's interest (that's up to you), and links to drive them to you in the first place (up to them, but also up to you to let them know about you). Be generous but discriminating with yours.
posted by Eric at 2:12 PM

 
Email From Cuba
My father, Ray Olsen, is an Olympic buff, collector and expert. He used to publish a popular Olympic newsletter. Through Olympic connections, he was able to finagle permission to go to Cuba, although he didn't get the final word until the day before he left. This is the first we've heard from him since he left last week:

Hi!
I am at the training center for volleyball, taikwando and basketball for this district of Cuba. My days are full visiting different sports centers and meeting the coaches and young teams. Many of the coaches are ex national champs and some have been in the Olympics. Yesterday met the silver medalist from Sydney in triple jump. I gave a lecture yesterday with a translator to all of the sports professors at the university. Will have lunch today with my friend the Olympic professor and his wife at his house. Everyone is extremely friendly and nice.

I have been well on the whole trip - no problems. The hotel is nice and clean, if somewhat primitive. Eric, I am keeping a journal every day, maybe you can use it on your site. Saturday I am going to a District baseball game. I fly to Havana Monday morning, and then straight to Miami. We spent all day Saturday and Sunday morning sightseeing in Havana. No nightclubs. Many interesting stories to tell when I get back.

This is the only computer on the island available to me, so may not be here again. No one has computers at the university or at homes. No one has a car. I have rented one for the week: stick shift Korean car. I have seen my '54 Chevy two-tone blue car several times in Cuba. Arne [my motorhead brother] would love seeing all the old American cars driving around. People use bicycles and some horse-drawn carriages to get around. Lots of buses. See you all next week.
Show this to Mom. Love you all.
Dad

posted by Eric at 1:17 PM

 
I Always Isolate After I Evacuate
I am still mulling over the pros and cons of the Wall, especially Jim Henley's monumental defense of it. I've just found yet more grist for the mill in Brink Lindsey's pro-evacuate and isolate stance:

The reason I prefer evacuate-and-isolate is that Israel takes the strategic initiative. By abandoning exposed settlements and building a wall, the Israelis end, once and for all, the real cycle of violence -- namely, the "peace process." They put a stop to being pressured to give up Jerusalem and concede the right of return. They shed the burdens and self-doubts of being an occupying power. I think that the enemies of Israel would absolutely hate the evacuate-and-isolate option -- in large part because it would render moot so many of their stock grievances.

posted by Eric at 12:57 PM

 
Death to Webcasters?
Today is the national webcaster’s Day of Silence to protest this:

The Librarian of Congress is required to set "sound recordings performance royalty" rates for Internet radio stations by May 21st — and an arbitration panel (a "CARP") working for that office has recommended a rate of $.0014 per listener per song (or $.0007 for broadcast simulcasts). Many webcasters say the proposed royalty rate is the equivalent of 200% or more of their revenues.

Via Doc Searls:

Independent classical station WCPE tried to participate in the CARP proceedings but was excluded, says Deborah Proctor, WCPE station manager. In January 2001 the Copyright Office indicated that small entities would be allowed to file briefs instead of committing to fully participate in the proceedings -- a costly endeavor in terms of legal counsel. WCPE got on the list and readied themselves to file, Proctor says, only to be rejected from participation by the Recording Industry Association of America, an enormous trade group representing the four or five major record labels in America.

"They essentially got us kicked off the list," Proctor says. "We wanted to file. We wanted to represent ourselves. But in order to do it, all of the parties involved had to say OK." Of the five-page list, Proctor says, only RIAA said no, insisting that all parties participate fully. With an estimated cost ranging from $30,000 to $100,000 for full participation (not just filing briefs), says Proctor, "we just couldn't afford the six-figure bill."

Ultimately, the parties to the proceedings consisted of a powerful mix of artist unions and industry trade associations, including the RIAA, on one side, and 27 large and small Webcasters and simulcasters, including Clear ChannelCommunications, MTVi Group and National Public Radio, on the other side.

How could RIAA want to kill an exploding new marketing tool for music? See Doc’s LinuxJournal story here for more.
posted by Eric at 12:15 PM

 
Protocol Changed
I just got an email from another blogger, Josh Chafetz, announcing that he’s open for business. The blog in question, OxBlog, looks very interesting and policy-intensive, which makes sense since it is run by a graduate student in political theory at Oxford, a graduate student in international relations at Oxford, and a junior at the University of Michigan spending the year at Oxford. Current posts include Cuban dissenters, and a look at the Musharraf “election” with a quote from that great science fiction philosopher Douglas Adams!

The site is cool, check out Bill Quick's rave review here, but I actually want to talk about the email and about how quickly things change in the blogosphere. When we started in February, I did exactly what Josh did: sent out emails to a bunch of bloggers who I thought were worth reading and who might find us similarly so. I got very few actual responses, but I did notice a few links and this helped get us off the ground.

One of the responses I did get was from an unpleasant fellow at MetaFilter (purged his name from my memory) who took great indignant exception to the fact that I disturbed his chi AND his Zen by informing him that we had a new blog up and asking him to take a look should he be so inclined. His central argument was “there are 500,000 users of blogger, what if they all sent me an email?”

My response was that I didn’t send out 500,000 emails, only about 75, and that I picked only the sites I thought might be interested in what we had to say and that we were serious about our new site and weren’t farting around like, say, 499,000 of the 500,000 who use blogger. I also asked how much time does it take to delete an email if you aren’t interested, and how else did he suggest we get the word out about the site, skywriting?

His response was basically, this just isn’t done and you have broken protocol. I believe it was “A-list” protocol I was breaking according to Steven Den Beste’s eloquent discussion of blog clusters:

MetaFilter was originally a group-blog in the A-list cluster, but as time has gone on it's taken on a much more political bent, and that has inspired comments of the form, "But you're doing it wrong!" The A-list doesn't want to talk about politics (and they especially don't seem to want to argue about it); they want MetaFilter to be a collection of the grand and glorious they've found on the web, sort of the distillation of the A-list philosophy of what web blogs are. The result has been something of a guerrilla war to try to drive out the infidels, and with outright pleas for a moratorium on political discussions.

A lot of the disagreements between these groups tend to the religious, and by that I don't mean "christian". The A-list, in particular, often have a kind of contempt or disgust for the war bloggers. Not only do the war bloggers have the wrong politics (the A-list tends to extreme liberalism; if it was left to them, Nader would be President of the US now) but they also see war blogs as a perversion of the medium. It's just not what blogs should be for.

Nor, apparently, is email for alerting bloggers about a new blog. Fortunately the A-list mentality no longer rules the blogosphere. There is nothing wrong with alerting like-minded bloggers of your new venture: how else would they find out about it? How else to get off the ground? How long does it take to delete an email?

Again, Den Beste:

The big disadvantage of blogs [vs. Usenet] is finding them, and for the writers the disadvantage is finding readers, and to some extent that's why the clusters formed. The links tended to be of the form, "If you like my site, you'll probably also like these here." Just putting a new site out there, then, becomes an exercise in futility because without links to it no-one will find or read it. And thus people who are inspired to try to join a cluster are reduced to writing to those already in them and begging for links. (I receive my share of these.)

And so, now, do I. I welcome the information and the initiative - the worst that can happen is I delete the email. Bloggers have no obligation whatsoever to link or even read you, and I might resent a letter implying that I did, but I will never resent a brief informative announcement and invitation. That’s how I got started - what else is there? The blogosphere turns.

Addendum
I just found some excellent auxilliary comments on the same theme from Dr. Weevil:

My advice for those who want to be noticed is that there are better ways to get linked than blunt requests. Here are some possibilities:

1. Link and wait. Many (most?) bloggers autogoogle obsessively, usually every day or two. If someone links or (even better) permalinks me, I soon find out. Although I never feel obligated to reciprocate, anyone who links to me has already earned a fair measure of good will just by displaying good taste in linkage.

2. When writing to established bloggers, there are far better ways of putting it than "I have a new blog. Please please please read it, quote it, link it, permalink me!" Try something along the lines of "You may be interested in the latest entry in my new blog, which takes up something you posted and develops it further." It never hurts to show that you have read and understood the entry you link to, and that you can take the argument further, not just link it.

3. Go to a Blogger Bash, say hello, be amusing, show familiarity with the works of your elders and betters, join in the arguments and show that you have something to contribute on the issues of the day, take pictures, buy them all drinks and pizza . . . . Again, I can't promise to link every blogger I meet, but I do always look at the website. If it's any good, that should be enough.

4. The easiest and quickest method is to take advantage of the comment feature found on all the better blogs (take that, Instapundit!) and write good comments. I read all the comments on my site, sometimes reply to them, and often look at the websites of the comment-authors, if I don't already know them. I can't honestly say that I have yet read a comment, said "that's brilliant", and immediately added a permalink to the author's site, but I certainly find that clever comments on my blog (and others) help me remember people's names and make me look forward to reading more of their words, either in comments or on their sites.

One final bit of advice from someone who hasn't really earned the right to be so avuncular: You Can't Hurry Links. Be patient. Once you have a dozen or more posts up, someone who stumbles across your site is much more likely to find at least one or two of them interesting, bookmark the site for a return visit, and maybe even link to it, then or later. If everyone looks at it before it really gets rolling, they may be less likely to come back.

Excellent advice about lurking in comments sections of more advanced sites than ours, personalizing your email introductions, and attending blogger functions: as usual, common sense is the best guide.
posted by Eric at 11:07 AM

 
From Evolution to Barbie/Dr. Krauss Responds
We heard from Myria at It Can't Rain All the Time, who is less convinced than Lawrence Krauss that evolution has been proved, among other issues:

Hi -

I found some of the quotes in your entry "Science Vs. Belief" to be downright bizarre -


"But we do know, absolutely, how much on-board fuel will be needed to speed up a substantial spacecraft to near the speed of light — an enormous amount, probably enough to power all of human civilization at the present time for perhaps a decade."

He may know how much energy he believes would be required (even that is somewhat questionable), but he most assuredly does not know how much fuel in the total absence of knowledge about what the propulsion technology in question is. The distinction is far from trivial. Imagine the difference between powering a train with a coal fired steam engine and telling another engineer, whose train is powered by a pebble reactor, exactly how much fuel you think he needs when you've never even heard of nuclear power.


"Only those that have satisfied the test of experiment or can be tested by experiment have any currency."

Evolution cannot be tested to any reasonable degree via experiment - pretty much by definition. Whether you extrapolate from the fossil record, genetics, or anything else you are required to make a number of non-provable assumptions because you cannot observe it directly. Evolution has not satisfied the test of experiment, that is why it is referred to as a theory, and indeed it has gone through numerous modifications exactly because it has often failed to explain what has been observed. Why then does it have currency?

I neither believe that UFOs are regularly buzzing small farmhouses nor particularly care one way or the other when it comes to the evolution vs. intelligent design debates, but I find these sorts of claims by scientists to be rather bizarre. It should hardly shock hyper-rationalists that their pleas fall on deaf ears when indeed their pleas are so often less than rational.
Myria

Good points all. I would agree that Krauss has overstated the certainty of science. In fact, as Karl Popper has shown, science thrives on uncertainty in that attempts to disprove accepted theories drives it forward:

"No number of sightings of white swans can prove the theory that all swans are white. The sighting of just one black one may disprove it." Scientists now look for black swans and if they cannot find any, they can feel reasonably confident that their theory is right, although not yet proved. It is, in the present state of knowledge, the best approximation to the truth.

Krauss stated his case rather unsubtly and cut corners, but the fact remains that evolution is “the best approximation to the truth” we have found regarding biological change over time.

I don’t entirely agree with Myria’s statement that evolution can’t be tested via experiment, because on the small and rapid scale it can. We can watch populations of bacteria, fruit flies, etc., adapt and modify in weeks and months in ways it would take larger, slower scale animals like humans hundreds or thousands of years to do so. This is exactly why we have such a problem now with bacteria rapidly developing immunity to our antibiotics: we are observing small, rapid scale evolution in action and to our detriment.

Therefore to the extent that evolution can be observed in action, and that action seems to confirm what is found in the fossil record, genetics, etc., evolution is scientific in ways that intelligent design can never be: we can’t look for the exception to the “rule” of intelligent design because there is no way to “get behind” creation to find the creator. There is no way to prove or disprove a belief in a creator. Simply saying it is more likely that the complexity displayed by life came from the mind of an intelligent creator than evolved by chance is simply stating a personal prejudice because there is no way to prove that life didn’t spring from chance short of God appearing in the sky and saying so.

Upon reflection, though, I agree entirely with Myria’s assessment that Krauss’s statement about knowing how much fuel will be needed to propel some future spacecraft is misleading at best. Perhaps he means we know how much energy will be required, as Myria stated, to propel the craft, and that the fuel required to achieve that energy level can be accurately calculated for any given propulsion system. I’m not sure. I will try to get a clarification from him.

I believe Krauss makes his point that science has more rigorous standards than pseudoscience - though the definition of what is “science” and what is “pseudoscience” is much more fluid than he implies - and those standards leave science at a disadvantage in a debate. But I also agree with Myria that scientific “truth” evolves with our knowledge and is never more than the current best approximation of the way things “really are”: science tends to overstate the factuality of its case, which is really just a more rigorous form of belief.

The fact that Myria is a blogger led me to her cool site, and this item caught my eye. I had meant to do something on the death of Barbie’s creator Ruth Handler, but didn’t get around to it. Myria comes up with a much more interesting take on the story than I would have: touching upon the creation of Barbie and Mattel, the collectable doll market, and the very practical reasons for Barbie’s proportions. Well worth a look.

This Just In: Dr. Krauss Responds

here is a quick response:

1. I used fuel rather than energy because it makes the case clearer. It is absolutely correct that the physical amount of fuel depends upon the type of fuel.. but that is irrelevant. The net power required is still equivalent to the energy needs of human civilization for some time.. i.e. whether it is 700 million tons of water used for fusion, or the mass of the earth in fossil fuels...

2. Whoever thinks evolutionary theory cannot be tested doesn't understand how science is done. One can make hypotheses regarding the evolutionary relationship of various species, and then do genetic tests to confirm or refute these hypotheses. That is a test, in the true scientific sense.
lmk
p.s. one more thing. It is true that scientific knowledge evolves with time, and involves successive approximations to reality, but in fact what has been tested and survived the test of experiment for decades will never be in doubt. that is what you, and your reader, seem to miss.

posted by Eric at 9:20 AM

 
Dawn Of a New Site
My sweet, charming wife Dawn - she of the delicate sensibilities - is tired of submitting her pearls to me and having me edit them to within an inch of their lives. So now she has a blog of her own. I think the title of her site is more indicative than most of the character she will display: Up Yours - And More Helpful Tips.

Her first post is "Superbitch," but she assures us that this appellation applies only one week a month. She's off wrestling with the 2-year-old right now, who neglected to nap today. Check her out, or I will suffer. Bless you.
posted by Eric at 8:16 PM

 
John Dean: National Tattletale
John Dean lingers on like a national bad check. Look at this creepy picture that comes attached to his regular FindLaw column: somewhere between the Joker and the Riddler without the blessing of makeup. I’m no Nixon fan but I find unseemly the glee with which Dean has made a career of trashing his 1000 days with Nixon. Just last year he published an "expose" of the Rehnquist Supreme Court nomination selection process; now, in this column he promises to expose the legendary “Deep Throat” on the 30th anniversary of Watergate, June 17. That WILL be interesting, something this particular column really isn’t.

He sounds like a teenager or a gossip columnist (same mentality), again unseemly:

having steeped myself for many weeks in Bob Woodward's journalism, I thought I'd share what I'd learned about the Supreme Court Woodward-style - all my sources will remain on deep background.

While I didn't get reports on all the Justices, I did get a few insights. All from highly reliable sources, I assure you.

On Chief Justice William Rehnquist

Chief Justice Rehnquist, who has a bad back, is doing fine. He's still cranking out his astounding workload, not to mention giving speeches, and doing his own private research studies. Another book may be in the works.

Fascinating, but then this:

All of my Rehnquist sources think the seventy-seven-year-old Chief Justice will resign after the 2002 elections, regardless of who wins the Senate. And he'll do so well before the end of Bush's first term, so that the vacancy is not held over until the 2004 presidential election. In short, we'll have a new Chief Justice before the next presidential election.

We’ll see, won’t we? He then praises Justice Thomas for surprising intellect and Breyer for surprising passion. Ginsburg and O’Connor: recovered from cancer. O’Connor wants to be Chief Justice. Dean then spends about ten paragraphs telling us that a Senator or Congressman should be seriously considered for the next Court opening, but that none are. Oh. Wake me when Deep Throat arrives.
posted by Eric at 7:47 PM

 
“I Hate Myself, I Hate the Jews”
Our friend Noah checks in with his thoughts on this Weekly Standard article.

Very good article by Christopher Caldwell on the phenomenon of current -- as opposed to previous -- French anti-Semitism. There's a quote in there from Alain Finkielkraut, describing the French Left, that seems most applicable to the "hate America" crowd in the U.S.
“Traditionally," Alain Finkielkraut wrote in the Jewish monthly L'Arche, "anti-Semites are those French who worship their identity and love one another against the Jews. Contemporary anti-Semitism involves French people who don't like themselves, who have a post-national perspective, who are shedding their 'Frenchness,' the better to identify with the poor of the world. They use Israel to place the Jews in the camp of the oppressors. You have a sort of league between anti-Semitic Islamism and self-disparagement, between repudiation of another and hatred of oneself."
Finkielkraut addresses an issue that has puzzled me for a while. Historically the Left, in this country and worldwide, has always claimed to offer a better, more "progressive" and improved version of modern humanist values, e.g., more democratic, more "just", more committed to the fight against racism, sexism, etc. etc. As for anti-Semitism, it was derided on principle by the Left as "the socialism of fools."

Yet today, in taking sides with Islamist terrorists, the Left embraces one of the most retrograde, obscurantist and oppressive cultures on the planet -- when it comes to the status of women, gays, freedom of expression, virtually everything -- as the post-Taliban coverage of Afghanistan revealed very clearly. (Even music was prohibited under the Taliban! Did you see that report on Fox or CNN about the wedding musicians there who were busted by the Religious Police, and beaten and locked up? )

Can you imagine how the typical American anti-globo leftist would actually fare in a society controlled by Islamist mullahs?
Noah Lakritz

posted by Eric at 6:55 PM

 
Let There Be Light
I know Glenn had this up a few days ago and most everyone has seen it, but I very much like the idea of having the world on our site. There is also a geopolitical aspect to this astonishing photo: to grossly overgeneralize, where there is light, there is civilization. Graphic, isn't it?
posted by Eric at 6:25 PM

 
Neutrinos and Ghosts
A satisfying example of the rigorous self-correcting nature of science to which Lawrence Krauss was referring below is our conception of the neutrino. As discussed in a recent NY Times article:

The neutrino, which began in 1930 as a half-baked idea, has simply matured. When heavy particles called neutrons decay into protons and electrons, the energy going into the process doesn't equal the amount coming out — an impossibility. Hence the Austrian-born theorist Wolfgang Pauli was moved to propose that the reaction also emits evanescent little things that conveniently make up the difference. The neutrino ("little neutral one") was born, and christened by Enrico Fermi.

In later years, physicists went on to adopt a more whimsical style of nomenclature (quarks, gluons). Had the particles' debut been postponed a while, they might be known as wisps. They cannot carry any electrical charge, for that would mess up the equations. And until recently there was no reason to think they had any mass at all.

....Over the years physicists have determined that there are actually three "flavors" of neutrinos. Maybe on their way to the earth, most of the plain vanilla ones — the kind the detectors can most easily spot — turn into chocolate or raspberry. That could only happen, the theorists say, if the particles have mass.

Last summer, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, located at the bottom of a Canadian nickel mine, 6,800-feet deep, reported that its new detector — designed to register all three flavors — seemed to have accounted for the missing particles. The latest, more refined results, raise the scientists' certainty to 99.999 percent.

So now experimentation has determined it is extremely likely that neutrinos have mass: the theory has been changed to match the data, neutrinos have bulked up from “ghostly” to a more substantial “evanescent.”

This is how science works. No experiment can locate a creator behind evolution: any presence in the machine is still ghostly. Therefore intelligent design, though theologically appealing, is not science: it can’t be proved or disproved. No matter how hard or long one may look, scientific proof of God will not be found in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, nor in the origin of the species, but that doesn’t mean He isn’t there.
posted by Eric at 4:59 PM

 
Stairway to Blogvalla
Since I revealed myself as a rather pathetic creature earlier today suffering from InstaPower addiction, it is with extreme pleasure and humility that I just noticed Tres Producers has ascended the Stairway to Blogvalla that is the InstaPundit "Recommended" link list. Now mind you, this is a non-zero sum game in that Glenn added quite a few new inductees, but THAT IN NO WAY REDUCES THE HONOR.

Previously, my colleague on the Blog Nation (or whatever title) book, Max Power had devised a system for measuring blog status using the Sullivan Method, which can now be put out in the alley with yesterday's fish sticks. For where we were both Sullivan 2's, we are now both InstaPundit 1's, and damn proud of it. I wouldn't be happier were I Kevin Bacon himself.
posted by Eric at 4:05 PM

 
Science Vs. Belief
My Cleveland-area neighbor, eminent physicist, and Case Western Reserve University professor Dr. Lawrence Krauss has a fine commentary in today’s NY Times:

I vividly remember the first time I was hijacked on the radio. I had agreed to participate in a debate for a Florida radio program that specialized in alien visits and U.F.O. sightings. My better judgment suggested that I should be wary. But I thought if I kept my focus purely on the physics challenges involved in space travel, I might be able to persuade some listeners to be skeptical of the claims that aliens were regularly visiting, abducting and experimenting with our fellow earthlings.

Krauss feels that the odds are stacked against science in a debate against pseudoscience because pseudoscience doesn't require the same rigorous standards of experimental proof.

In a debate that confronts the results of science with pseudoscience, from alien abductions and crop circles on one hand to the health benefits of weak magnetic fields or young earth creationism on the other, the odds are stacked against science.

....Although it is probably true that there is far more that we do not know about nature than that we do know, we do know something! We know that balls, when dropped, fall down. We do know that the earth is round and not flat. We do know how electromagnetism works, and we do know that the earth is billions of years old, not thousands.

We may not know how spacecraft of the future will be propelled, whether matter-antimatter drives will be built or even if time travel is possible. But we do know, absolutely, how much on-board fuel will be needed to speed up a substantial spacecraft to near the speed of light — an enormous amount, probably enough to power all of human civilization at the present time for perhaps a decade.

Krauss’s biggest beef, though, is with those who decry the “unfairness” of science. Much of this stems from the recently concluded debate in the Ohio State School Board about the teaching of evolution vs. the teaching of creationism dressed up in its “scientific” Sunday best clothes: “intelligent design.”

I have a certain sympathy with intelligent design and believe that it is not incompatible with science. But the key word in the last sentence is “believe”: intelligent design may be a way to reconcile science and faith in a creator, but it isn’t science itself and should no more be taught in school as “science” than should creationism.

The reason for the difficulty is simple. Science is not fair. All ideas are not treated equally. Only those that have satisfied the test of experiment or can be tested by experiment have any currency. Beautiful ideas, elegant ideas and even sacrosanct notions are not immune from termination by the chilling knife edge of experimental data.

In Ohio, a debate is raging over whether to teach "intelligent design" alongside evolution in high school biology classes. Intelligent design is based on the belief that life is too complicated to explain by natural causes alone and that some intelligence, ultimately some divine intelligence, must have created the original life forms on earth or guided their development.

Proponents of that idea suggest that including it in the curriculum is simply a question of fairness. If a significant number of people do not believe that evolution provides an adequate explanation of the origin of species, they argue, then it is only fair to present both sides of the argument in a high school science class.

Again, intelligent design may be reasonable, but it isn’t science.

Intelligent design makes assertions that cannot be tested by experiment. Those assertions that can be tested, say about blood clotting or the claimed irreducible complexity of various components of cells, seem to have thus far failed those tests. So intelligent design does not belong in a science class. End of story.

Krauss would appear to have won this round, the draft of the Academic Content Standards for Ohio makes no mention of intelligent design as a scientific alternative to evolution. WKSU has an interesting section on “Science and Intelligent Design” on its website with audio and links.
posted by Eric at 3:31 PM

 
Preaching to the Disentangled
Richard Cohen alternately tiptoes and stomps through 12 paragraphs demonstrating that not ALL criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. I am unaware that anyone said it was. What is anti-Semitic is a reflexive preference for the Palestinians because they are not Jewish in the guise of a reflexive support for the “underdog” and the “oppressed” as has been voiced by the left from Oslo to L.A. What is anti-Semitic is calling Israel a "shitty little country" because it is filled with Jews. It is also anti-Semitic to blame Israel for the 9/11 attacks, as has happened across the Islamic world. Canada is more likely to have committed the atrocities than Israel, but Canada isn't 2/3 Jewish.

Simply asserting that the Palestinians have a right to a land of their own - few disagree at this point - says nothing about the real issues of how that is to be achieved, under what conditions, and under what kind of leadership, among other crucial questions. Arafat and cronies are fanning anti-Semitism to generate leverage and sympathy for their struggle against Israel. Anti-Semitism, like suicide bombing and the murder of children, is not a legitimate weapon in this struggle and needs to be condemned as such.

The effort to disentangle criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism is legitimate and worthwhile, but to yield much edible fruit must be attempted by those most likely to conflate the two: leftists, Europeans, neo-fascists, and Muslims, not American Jews writing in the Washington Post.
posted by Eric at 1:10 PM

 
No Book Before its Time
As you may know, we are working on a book of 9/11-related material by bloggers for charity called Blog Nation. Please check out the site if you get a chance and be sure to nominate your favorite entries and read those nominees already posted.

Marty Thau and I are also working on a book of our own - for the charity of ourselves and our families - on 9/11 and computer communication called America.com: On September 11. There is some concern for both of these projects that the 9/11 ship has already set sail, that interest is waning. I vehemently disagree and think serious interest - while the casual observer may have drifted away - will hold steady and even rise.

This review of three new post-9/11 books elevates my spirits on the matter further, confirming my suspicion that any book already written and published since 9/11 can’t possibly have absorbed its lessons and nuances, nor looked very deeply into its historical setting.

WHY WE FIGHT
Moral Clarity and the War On Terrorism
By William J. Bennett
Doubleday. 160 pp. $19.95

WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT AMERICA
By Dinesh D'Souza
Regnery. 218 pp. $27.95

PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE
How We Got to Be So Hated
By Gore Vidal
Thunder's Mouth. 144 pp. Paperback, $10

A steady stream of books has been chronicling the immediate horror of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but only now are commentators stepping forward to spell out the wider ramifications of the attacks and the ensuing war on terrorism. What does the present conflict seem to presage for the use of American power across the globe? And how does the war on terrorism play out in a cultural framework, with all the ways it resonates as a clash of beliefs – if not, as is often asserted, of entire civilizations? To judge by this first trio of such books, it's still too soon to be hazarding confident answers; patient readers will be hard-pressed to imagine any less thoughtful and illuminating efforts to place the dramatically new atmosphere into perspective.

A key member of the blogosphere even comes into play here:

readers don't need Bennett's and D'Souza's overblown rhetoric to grasp the abysmal shortcomings of the left's reaction to the September attacks. Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan have already trenchantly exposed the nonsense promulgated by the "peace party" and its fellow travelers, while effectively deploying tools of argument conspicuously absent from Bennett's and D'Souza's writing: verve, style and wit. These shortcomings are all the more pronounced in the face of the solemn task that both D'Souza and Bennett have undertaken: to frame the discussion of the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks in terms of good and evil, and to elevate patriotism to a righteous ideology, based on a belief in what Bennett calls "the superior goodness of the American way of life, of American culture in the broad sense."

I would have to add that Andrew isn’t the only blogger to have expressed “verve, style and wit” on these matters, as will be demonstrated amply in Blog Nation, and I believe, America.com.

Vidal fares no better from the left:

The title of Gore Vidal's slim screed, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, is taken from the work of the great – and now, alas, neglected – historian Charles A. Beard, whose penetrating, skeptical, anti-interventionist assessments of American foreign policy would be profitable to read today. Some aspects of Vidal's volume show him to be a worthy heir to Beard, who was impatient with moral justifications of U.S. action abroad. Beard, for example, would no doubt endorse Vidal's dismissal of the simplistic and patronizing rhetoric that accompanies the war against Osama bin Laden. He would also likely join in Vidal's sarcastic dismissal of the Bush administration's explanation of the al Qaeda attacks: "They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." Beard would no doubt point out that Sweden, say, or New Zealand also has such freedoms, but these wealthy democracies aren't the target of Islamic terrorists, who attack the United States because of the global role it plays and its specific policies in the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Beard would probably argue (as Vidal does) that this historic role and those policies should be altered.

But Beard, while an anti-interventionist, was also a realist and a strong advocate of hemispheric defense. Unlike Vidal, he would have recognized that U.S. foreign policy, even a foreign policy he disagreed with, could not be subject to the dictates of a terrorist organization; he would have understood that the threat posed by al Qaeda to the American homeland had to be eliminated. And he would have disowned Vidal's specious assertion that the U.S. air campaign against Afghanistan (organized by what Vidal insists on calling "the Pentagon Junta") was "like destroying Palermo in order to eliminate the Mafia." Beard would know – as Vidal should – that the military forces of al Qaeda and the Taliban would not have permitted an international constabulary to walk through Afghanistan and arrest bin Laden and his lieutenants; those forces had to be destroyed for any police action to take place. Vidal – perhaps the finest American literary essayist alive – is a national treasure, but this book, like too much of his political writing, is snide rather than skeptical and extremely unreliable.

The terrible events of last Sept. 11 demand clear and honest thinking; Bennett, D'Souza and Vidal have chosen instead to slip into their well-worn ideological grooves, unleashing knee-jerk rhetoric to castigate their customary bogeymen. Despite no end of pronouncements that the world has changed irreversibly in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the shadowplay of this sort of cultural warfare remains very much the same.

There hasn’t been enough time for something truly “new” to have emerged in book form since 9/11, though the time is coming and the blogosphere will play a vital role when it does.
posted by Eric at 12:16 PM

 
Of Victor, Chuck and Bluto
Victor Davis Hanson reminds me of Chuck Berry: the same riff over and over with tiny variations, but the truth of the riff is so powerful that people either don’t notice, or it doesn’t matter because they still need to hear it.

Hanson’s latest slams home his most recurring theme again (also see Hanson’s archive on the right of the page):

The fact is that almost any people, at almost any time, can be whipped into a frenzy and yet very soon afterwards also be convinced to drop its fanaticism and recognize its errors — once war and subsequent military defeat bring home to them the wages of such lunatic bellicosity.

Hanson’s litany of the chastened beaten includes an example from our own history:

A review of Confederate rhetoric between 1850 and 1860 might suggest not only that an entire generation was nursed on hatred of the North, but that such a recalcitrant, proud, and militarily capable people could never be reconciled to the Union, could never be defeated, and thus would have to exist as an independent slave society — forever. Yet by 1864 beleaguered Georgians were telling Sherman's Army of the West to "hurry up" and get over to the Carolinians to punish those "who started this damn war." Negotiating with Jefferson Davis in 1863, electing George McClellan in 1864, or restraining William Tecumseh Sherman would not have saved lives and brought peace, but rather would have ensured a nightmare whose consequences would be frightening even today.

Citing Athens after the Peloponnesian War, the Japanese and Germans after WWll, Hanson plays virtuosic Bachian variations on his theme:

Force, then, has a way of making people change. Even the most militant citizenries can be disabused of their rather dangerous ideas — but only after they understand that the logical consequences of their extremism are impoverishment, ruin, and humiliation. Currently in the Middle East we are shown glimpses of small boys with plastic replicas of bomb-belts, and then told that "an entire generation will grow up to despair and anger." CNN reporters stick microphones into the faces of angry residents of Jenin, and logically get the response they hoped for — pledges of undying hatred for Israel "and the Jews." Pundits wrinkle their brows and then pontificate that "violence breeds violence," and that hatred has become so deeply embedded that real peace is impossible. In fact, peace in the region has never been more likely than it is at the present moment.

There is an element of counterintuitive “war is peace” here, but Hanson is always most cheerful and hopeful when surveying a virtual post-devastation tableau in his head: the more apocalyptic the better, the more likely Phoenix will rise from the smoldering ruin.

As the smoke clears from Jenin, many Palestinians slowly — but still privately — will begin to assess the catastrophe. What will they learn? That murdering bombers ultimately draw a devastating Israeli response. That their own leadership that condoned and at times sponsored the terror, and so prompted the war, allows neither dissent nor freedom in formulating its policy — and thus is solely responsible for its own failure. Most will grudgingly admit that 97 percent of the West Bank was a better deal than Jenin and Israeli tank.

....What, then, can Israel really hope for? And how can it translate tactical success to long-term strategic victory? Its continued policy of deterrence is working — most of the Arab world knows better now than to try a fifth invasion with conventional forces. Strong incursions against the nests and infrastructure of terrorism are also making it clear that such murdering brings the perpetrators and their abettors misery, not concessions.

Yet at the same time, Israel must envision some type of Palestinian autonomous state on its borders. This is its dilemma — one that is unfortunately inescapable. Thus its only long-term hope, as we learned after World War II and Korea, but did not fully not grasp in Vietnam, is to continue to defeat the Palestinian terrorists and then to renovate a broken enemy into a proud, but democratic, state with a real market economy — and in a region with no history of consensual government or liberal institutions, no less!

The normally taciturn Hanson, giddy enough to use an exclamation mark! He thrills to the challenge in the truest “darkest before the dawn” tradition. His is a classic “good cop - bad cop” strategy writ large: pummel the wretched foe until crushed and humiliated - humiliation is good! - then when they are at their lowest, their most abject, lift down a hand and offer to help them rebuild, to arise Phoenix-like, to renew their spirit and infrastructure:

It is not an easy thing first to crush a deadly adversary, then help the defeated, and finally join in with that former enemy — but it is the only way to peace. And because Israel remains a democratic, magnanimous, and militarily strong society, there is more hope in all this gloom than pessimists think — as long as the historical order of events that lead to lasting peace is not allowed to be subverted by well-meaning but ultimately reckless outsiders, who seek to impose their own self-serving and often utopian policies from a safe distance.

Meddlers and naysayers beware! He spits out the name “Jimmy Carter” like a bad sardine. Eurocrats, EUniks, hush your mealy, equivocating mouths. Stand back while men of action like Ajax, Curtis LeMay and Ariel Sharon do what must be done. I believe Hanson is right, as was similarly heralded in the pivotal moment of that classic of modern warfare, National Lampoon’s Animal House:

"Bluto's right - psychotic, but right. Now, we could fight them with conventional weapons, but that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, what we need - what this situation calls for, is a stupid, futile gesture on someone's part."

Seriously, “stupid and futile” is exactly how the Eurocrats characterize the kind of crushing defeat Hanson views as necessary to reshape attitudes and disabuse the deluded of their destructive attitudes. Let us hope we have the courage and the fortitude to continue our own war on terrorism with this level of conviction and commitment. We know the Israelis have it - let us also do nothing to hinder them as we both do what must be done.
posted by Eric at 11:16 AM

 
Cool Tunes - Bones
Something different this week: I haven’t said anything yet about the death of Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley. These things always depress me and it takes me some time to absorb them, to ponder their “meaning.”

Though saddened, I also feel a certain inevitability regarding Staley’s death: he was obsessed with death and drugs and one doesn’t dance with heroin for a full decade without greatly increasing the likelihood of an early demise. Some people tend to obsess over the details of a given death: “If Kurt Cobain hadn’t taken the cough syrup in ADDITION to the heroin and the donkey tranquilizer and hadn’t had the gun RIGHT THERE, and if Courtney had been there to talk him down, then he would be working on the 10th Nirvana album today.”

No he wouldn’t. He would have found another way to do himself in, and if that hadn’t worked he would have found another or another. Kurt Cobain had about zero chance of dying of old age and it would appear Staley did too. Some people just can’t handle life, and sometimes “success” gives that kind of person the time, space, and freedom to make life go away, especially when the goal of worldly success has been met.

For such tortured artists, working feverishly toward the goal of recognition and success can be sustaining, and when those goals have been accomplished - especially when the artist is still so young - the resultant empty feeling, the “Is that all there is?” factor, can be devastating.

Self-loathing may set in: “Why me? Why did I achieve this adulation, this money, these awards? I suck, I don’t deserve this. They have stolen my only real reason for living from me, my fire, my driving force. I hate this house, these cars, these drugs, these fans, this pain, pain. I was better off living in squalor, thrashing in the ashes like Cinderella. I don’t want the slipper, don’t deserve it, it doesn’t really fit. Can’t they tell? What’s the use?”

I wasn’t that big of an Alice In Chains fan - the purposeful ugliness of their brand of grunge, especially the vocals, drove me away. Staley’s bitter harmonies with himself perhaps revealed more than I wanted to hear of internal discordance made manifest. Most discussions of Staley’s death brought up overtly drug-oriented themes like this: “’What in God's name have you done?/Stick your arm for some real fun,’" he sang in "’God Smack’" on Dirt from the NY Times rumination, but I think another song from Dirt sums Staley up better, "Them Bones":

I believe them bones are me
Some say we're born into the grave
I feel so alone, gonna end up a
Big ole pile a them bones

And so he did, sooner rather than later.

I interviewed Staley and Cobain once each. They both seemed sad and small and fragile - you could have picked your teeth with Kurt Cobain, probably Courtney did - and now they're both dead, both piles of bones. How sad; most likely, how inevitable.

Cool Tunes is a radio show in a magazine format Saturday nights at 10pm (Eastern) on WAPS, "The Summit," in Akron, Ohio. I play new music, reissues, and preview shows coming to town each week. Musically it is among the widest-ranging 2 hours in the country: modern rock, punk, electronica, jazz, reggae and ska, roots rock, Americana, blues, world, funk, hip hop, avant garde, etc. - if it's cool I play it. Cool Tunes has been proudly serving humanity since 1990. Each week we also do a written feature on Tres Producers about an artist played on that week's show.
posted by Eric at 10:08 AM

 
Mental Badminton
Jim Henley tells me I gave up too soon on the Wall. Right now my head is swimming with plots, schemes and strategies for the Middle East in general and the Holy Land in particular. I am certain that I was in part suaded by the elegance of Steven Postrel's argument - style does count - and right now I’m leaning toward a
hybrid plan that brings in elements of many others discussed here recently.

Rather than continue to play mental badminton, I’m going to hold off on giving my “final” opinion on the matter - whatever that means. I would prefer to appear “open-minded” rather than “fickle” and “feckless,” and therefore am going to shut up about it until I make up my mind. In the meantime please read my original pro-Wall statement, Postrel’s formidable anti-Wall position, and Henley’s massive pro-Wall rebuttal. And while you are at it, here is another "pro-separation" argument from former Rabin aide David Kimche. I need a couple Tylenols.
posted by Eric at 9:05 AM

 
Withdrawal
I woke up down today and couldn't figure it out until I rushed to my computer to check last night's and this morning's early posts on InstaPundit to see if I was linked. "Taste taste taste Nothing..." (like Yukon Cornelius in "Rudolph"). Then it hit me: InstaWithdrawal, not a nibble since last Thursday for the "New Media In the Old" series. This is weird and pathetic on my part. Had to fire off an email to InstaGlenn:

Glenn, How's this for weird: I actually woke up today depressed because of InstaPower withdrawal. It isn't even so much the traffic, which has gradually drifted down since the last InstaBoost last Thursday for the New Media In the Old story but has remained at historic highs (yesterday was highest Monday ever), but I think it is withdrawal from the "official seal of approval" imprimatur of InstaPower - no other link comes close in terms of both traffic, but equally important, prestige conferred upon the recipient. There is a very obvious "that was on InstaPower, it must be good, and not just that story must be good, but the whole site must be good, I think I'll take a look around" feel to InstaTraffic. I can't tell you how many emails I have received are prefaced with: "saw you on InstaPundit and..."

The other fascinating phenomena I have noticed is the whole traffic structure of blogdom breaks down in your absence: when you were gone Friday afternoon until late Saturday, there was chaos afoot in the land, rioting in the streets, people just didn't know what to do with themselves. I get the impression that most people really only have a handful of sites they go to of their own accord, they rely on you for the rest of their blog activity. You are not so much a traffic cop as a tour guide and many are totally lost without your input. I'm sure you saw that reflected in emails, growing increasingly desperate as your absence lengthened, a huge sigh of relief upon your return. God help the blogosphere should you actually go away for a while - people truly wouldn't know what to do with themselves. I'd be very interested to get some bloggy input on this. Best, Eric Olsen

posted by Eric at 8:37 AM

 
And We Think NPR Is Biased
I love this line from the new Time: “Uncensored, except for news dealing with Qatar, and available throughout the Middle East via satellite, al-Jazeera is bringing unprecedentedly graphic images of Palestinians bloodied by Israeli violence straight into Arab homes and cafes.” In other words, al-Jazeera is free to issue any kind of gory, misguided, biased, lopsided, rabble-rousing propaganda against Israel and the West it chooses, as long as it doesn’t shed any unfavorable light on the leadership of Qatar.

“Biased? How can we be biased when all we show is the truth?,” I can hear an al-Jazeera PR man say. Gruesome scenes of death are always “biased” to the extent that they stir disgust, horror, anger, and a mob’s lust for revenge in viewers, who are only human. This is why American media shows restraint: what you might call self-censorship, because these reactions are never conducive to reason, balance or dispassionate thinking. On top of that, victims on the other side are relatively rarely shown, and never with “personalizing details.”

Why? Because

those aren't details that viewers necessarily want; they feel al-Jazeera needn't go out of its way to humanize Israeli suffering, when, in their view, Palestinians receive no such treatment on American or Israeli TV and are instead demonized as terrorists akin to Osama bin Laden.

And so it doesn’t.

We wonder how the Arab/Islamic world can be so biased, so blind, so perverse in its views: they have mass media too, and feeding the hatred is what sells the Wheaties in their neighborhood.

At times, al-Jazeera's coverage has resembled that of a national news channel rallying its people to war. Such was the case four weeks ago, when Israel initially began the siege of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Ramallah compound. Then the visual mix was electrifying: old images of speeches by a younger, more virile Arafat spliced with startling images of bloodied faces of Palestinian victims, Israeli snipers taking aim at children, and a contemporary clip of Arafat declaring that he wanted to be a "martyr, martyr, martyr, martyr." In response, the young men at Cafe Shahine shook their fists and shouted things like, "I'll go! I'll go help fight!”

Every stereotype met, every prejudice enflamed - where else would Osama bin Laden show his home videos? You already fear and resent Israel for its military superiority, its modern lifestyle, its vibrant economy? Well of course you do:

Even if the day's news isn't red-stained, the parade of archived, bloody images marches on. They are everywhere, in trailers for upcoming special features, in advertisements for Islamic charities set up to aid the Palestinians, in a special report on young victims featuring footage of a child lying near death while a medic pumps air into her lifeless, thin chest. Spliced into this footage are scenes of Israeli children frolicking in lush green fields.

After the initial shock of the gore wore off this kind of manipulation would be laughed at in the U.S., but these are not sophisticated people for the most part. These are people who revel in their hatreds, nursing their ancient grievances. Don’t forget Bill Quick's astonishing assessment of Islamic culture as an honor-shame society to see how deep this goes, and how much it is to al-Jazeera’s marketing advantage to continually churn out these images and whip up these feelings.

Ironically, as we have seen over and over again, the Arab/Islamic public can’t handle any real truth, believing in huge numbers that the Israelis attacked the World Trade Center, or that Jews drink human blood, or that Osama bin Laden is a hero, or that Islamic culture as it now stands isn’t doomed to wretched failure on every measurable front without drastic, wrenching, even cataclysmic changes. (special thanks to bro Arne)
posted by Eric at 8:48 PM

 
Matrimonial Wishes For the Doctor
Dr. Frank speaks of his new, trans-Anglospherian marriage here, pronouncing it “fine” after three days (with a quick sidelong glance toward fate). Frank is wary of those who pronounce marriage difficult and seems content to find out for himself whether twill be so; but Frank, as someone who has lived through two marriage ceremonies of my own, and spent 14 of the last 21 years married to one woman or another, I assure you, there will be difficulties.

Look at it this way: I find my life generates difficulties spontaneously of its own accord with no help from others. I have found that the addition of close others causes the difficulties not to multiply but to increase exponentially. One wife = problems squared. Child = problems cubed, and so forth. This does not mean that these close others don’t solve some problems and ease others, but when there ARE problems my equation applies. No wonder traditional Catholics are so hierarchical: you have a wife and 10 kids, man, you just want them all to do what you TELL THEM THE HELL TO DO. That cuts down on some of the math.

Now, assuming there will be problems - even Jesus had some big old problems - how will you know what direction the big meter in the sky is pointing vis-à-vis your marriage? I have found that in a doomed marriage the little problems grow in importance and friction-driving capacity, and the big problems fade in importance because deep down you know you aren’t going to be together long enough to solve the real thorny bastards anyway.

I have found the reverse to be true in my second marriage, which is now nearing the four-year mark. We had a lot of little problems at first that caused a lot of friction and arguing, and a few flung household items, but now we basically shine on the small things and concentrate of dealing with the big issues because we know we are going to have to handle them together. This is a very nice feeling, by the way. It’s a bowel-deep satisfying feeling to know that you have someone who is going to stick it out with you and help you deal with the biggies.

I am an irritating perfectionist at times, who doesn’t want the same standards applied to himself because I know what’s going on inside, and I know that I’m working on it SO LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE ABOUT IT. This is not necessarily an attitude conducive to interpersonal lubricity, that is lack of friction, and while I have many fine qualities, I am also a pain in the ass. So I salute this wife for her resilience - a fine and forbearing woman - and 12 years after the fact, don’t particularly blame the other one for throwing in the towel, although SHE WAS WRONG, WRONG, WRONG about me.

It is my most fervent wish that the latter case applies to you and that you live long enough together to solve all the big problems and learn to ignore the little ones.
posted by Eric at 6:24 PM

 
Whither Reid?
Jerry Balsam has noticed a rather deafening silence in the media regarding alleged shoe bomber Richard Reid of late (text of indictment here). My search of the WaPo for April turned up only this 4/18 brief Reuters report:

PARIS -- Police and security agents were questioning five Pakistanis arrested in Paris and its suburbs in connection with the investigation of Richard C. Reid, the British citizen charged with trying to detonate explosives in his shoes on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in December, judicial officials said.

The suspects were arrested yesterday, the officials said on condition of anonymity. They are suspected of providing logistical assistance to Reid, 28, during his stay in Paris.

The investigation is being headed by France's top anti-terrorism judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere.

Reid has been in U.S. custody since Dec. 22, when he allegedly attempted to ignite the explosives in his shoes during the trans-Atlantic flight. He was thwarted by the crew and passengers, and the jet was diverted to Boston. He has pleaded not guilty to nine charges, including the attempted murder of the 197 passengers and crew.

Although Reid’s name turns up with regularity in the WaPo search, it does so only in relation to the Daniel Pearl murder case unfolding in Pakistan. Pearl was kidnapped while looking into connections between Reid and Pakistani militants.

A Yahoo search for April yielded only this seemingly minor 4/22 report about security at Reid’s upcoming trial:

BOSTON (AP) - Federal officials said Monday they plan to screen all attorneys and staff privy to potentially classified documents submitted in the case against a man accused of trying to ignite explosives in his shoes during a flight.

Michael Macisso, a security specialist with the Justice Department, appeared in court to present the plan for a heightened level of security to protect classified material as well as court personnel.

The trial against Richard Reid is scheduled to begin Nov. 4 in Boston. He has been in custody since Dec. 22, when he allegedly attempted to light explosives in his shoes during a flight from Paris to Miami that was diverted to Boston.

Reid, who was not in court Monday, has pleaded innocent to nine charges that include attempting to murder the 197 passengers and crew members. His attorney had no objection to the security plan.

Jerry is of the opinion that perhaps something is up with Reid: perhaps he is cooperating with the authorities. With that in mind, then the above report is perhaps not so minor, indicating an even greater sensitivity to “security to protect classified material as well as court personnel” than was already in place. Why would this be?

The seeming buffoon Reid, whose goofy grin stared out from papers at the world following his December 22 arrest, has tentacles of potential interest stretching out in several directions from his unkempt self, as delineated by this excellent WaPo story:

From 1992 to 1996, [Reid] was in and out of jail, moving on from youth correctional facilities to the tough Brixton Prison.

Occasionally during those years he saw his father, and Robin Reid has said it was he who urged Richard to start talking to the Muslim chaplain at Brixton Prison. The younger Reid reportedly developed a strong interest in Islam. As soon as he was released, he knocked on the door of the Brixton Mosque.

"He was eager to know Islam, to learn Arabic, to be an active member of this community," said Abdul Haqq Baker, the imam who took Reid in at the mosque and found him a job at an incense factory.

Another worshiper at the mosque between 1996 and 1997 was Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman who was studying in London. Moussaoui is being held in the United States on conspiracy charges related to the Sept. 11 attacks. Baker said he doesn't know whether Reid and Moussaoui were friends at the time.

....Both Reid and Moussaoui were known to attend services in North London at the Finsbury Park Mosque. That's where the education of Richard Reid, suspected terrorist, evidently began, investigators say.

Leading that mosque is Abu Hamza, a fiery anti-American, anti-Israel preacher. Hamza has sight in only one eye, and metal hooks instead of hands. These wounds, he has said, came from land mine explosions during the opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

....At a recent Friday afternoon service, Hamza told his flock that the Sept. 11 attacks were organized by U.S. spy agencies as "a dirty plot against mankind in general and Muslims in particular." The only people to benefit from the attacks, he said, were the U.S. military and Zionists.

After several visits to Finsbury Park, Reid became an outspoken proponent of jihad, or holy war. "He had the extremist line down perfectly," recalled Baker of the Brixton Mosque. "That is, 'The U.S. and Israel are the enemy, and good Muslims must take up the battle against the enemy.' "

Sometime in 1999, Reid's new friends at Hamza's mosque arranged for him to attend training classes in Pakistan, authorities contend....U.S. authorities say he was actually being trained by al Qaeda, and probably went to one of the group's camps in Afghanistan.

How long he remained there is unclear, but by last July he was back in London. That month he traveled to Amsterdam. He applied for a new passport at the British Embassy there, declaring that he had accidentally put his previous passport through a washing machine, a British government spokesman said. He was quickly given a new one, without any of the suspicious entry visas that had been stamped in his old one.

On July 7, he was at Amsterdam's airport. There, according to the Israeli airline El Al, he boarded an El Al plane bound for Tel Aviv. The airline's security staff found him sufficiently suspicious to give him a thorough going-over, including a check of his shoes. He was allowed to board the flight, but an Israeli source told the Associated Press that he was assigned a seat in the rear of the plane, with an armed sky marshal sitting next to him.

Reid was questioned on arrival at Ben Gurion airport, but was allowed to enter Israel as a tourist.

Israeli officials are trying to piece together Reid's movements in Israel, worried that he might have made contact with the Islamic Resistance Movement or other radical Palestinian groups. What is known is that after about five days, Reid crossed the border into Egypt, then flew to Turkey and back to Pakistan.

Under the aegis of al Qaeda, Reid may have taken a second Arabic name, "Abdul Ra'uff." When a Wall Street Journal reporter acquired a desktop computer that had been used at an al Qaeda office in Kabul, there were extensive records from a man with that name of reconnaissance trips around Europe and the Middle East. The time and destination of these trips coincide almost perfectly with information authorities have about Reid's travels.

Using a British passport, "Ra'uff" went to Israel and Egypt last year. He reportedly sent back reports on the best spots to place bombs so they would do the most damage.

Reid returned to Amsterdam around Aug. 9, and may have stayed there for several weeks. Investigators believe he purchased the sneakers there that would later be packed with explosives.

It is unclear where Reid was on Sept. 11. But just days after the attacks, Dutch and Belgian police staged simultaneous raids on two safe houses in Rotterdam and outside Brussels, where they discovered fake passports, machines for making fake credit cards, weapons and explosive materials.

One of those arrested in Rotterdam was identified as Jerome Courtailler, who may have been one of Reid's contacts in Europe, officials said.

But no one noticed Reid, and sometime between Dec. 5 and Dec. 7, he went to Brussels, where he stayed at the Dar es Salaam Hotel in a gritty immigrant neighborhood and spent much of his time sending e-mail messages, officials say. "Richard Reid was here for 10 days and visited cybercafes, that we know," said a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in Brussels.

Late December found Reid in Paris. He was spotted in the neighborhood around the Gare du Nord train station, but investigators are still trying to figure out where he stayed. He probably stayed in a safe house, they say, since there is no sign of him in hotel records.

It is known, however, that he came to Happy Call -- a cafe with a bank of computers in a working-class immigrant district in the north of Paris, on a narrow street crammed between Indian and Senegalese restaurants, hair-weaving shops and stores selling African artifacts.

In an interview, the manager, a Sri Lankan who gave his name only as Ravi, said he barely remembers most customers who pass through, either to make long-distance calls from the telephone booths or to send e-mail messages home. But he said he did remember a man who spent most of the day at Happy Call on Dec. 20.

"He was big," Ravi recalled, identifying the man as Reid, who is 6 foot 4. "And a little bit dirty." Reid stayed on the computer for about an hour in the morning, and returned for another four-hour e-mailing session in the evening. Investigators say he was exchanging e-mail with someone in Peshawar, Pakistan, close to the border with Afghanistan. At midnight he was told he had to leave because the shop was closing.

The next day, Reid tried to board an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. His unkempt appearance -- as well as the fact that he had no bags -- raised enough concern among authorities who decided to subject Reid to intensive questioning, forcing him to miss his flight. Security officials eventually concluded it was safe to let him fly, and he was put up at an airport hotel overnight.

French officials say that while at the hotel, Reid used another e-mail service to contact Pakistan and received instructions to continue with his mission. In one of those exchanges, leaked to the French media by investigators, Reid seemed unsure what to do after missing his flight. The reports say the handler in Pakistan messaged back that Reid should try again.

Clearly Reid knows much of great potential interest to investigators regarding al Qaeda, the Pearl case, the Moussaoui case, and potential future terrorist attacks. Perhaps his cooperation regarding some or all of these matters could be the impetus for heightened security at his upcoming trial, and could be the cause of the current hush regarding his case. Napoleon fell for want of a nail; perhaps al Qaeda is as we speak in the process of toppling because a match wouldn’t light high above the Atlantic.
posted by Eric at 2:32 PM

 
"Why Won't Anyone Listen To Me?"
Speaking of babbling, in this case of the mindless variety, Stephanie Salter wrote a column for yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle questioning the veracity of terrorist threats gleaned from captured al Qaeda honcho Abu Zubaydah:

the unnamed government spokespeople chose to confide to the U.S. news media that Zubaydah had shared al Qaeda's plans for dirty bomb attacks. Then, late last week, word somehow leaked out from that secret interrogation spot that Zubaydah had added shopping centers (or possibly supermarkets) to his string of targets.

She then relates that with each disclosure has come governmental caveats that Zubaydah could be lying:

With each disclosure has come a flurry of unattributed quotes about the veracity and value of Abu Z's reported ramblings. Typical was this in Time from "one U.S. official familiar with Zubaydah's remarks":

"If he could screw with our heads he probably would."

Or, in the same story: "How do you know he's not just jerking us around? You can make a case either way."

Yet another "American official" mused to the New York Times: "Do we make this public when it's quite possible that he's lying through his teeth? This could all be mind games on his part."

It seems to me that the government would have an obligation to do two things based upon the content of information gathered from Zubaydah’s interrogation: release the information of possible threats to the public even though the generic “heads up” is of little practical consequence, because you never know when an extra degree of alertness may prevent a tragedy. In addition to the practical implications, the public has a moral right to know when the government has received threats even when they are as vague as “banks in the Northeast.”

The government also has an obligation to pass on concerns as to the credibility of a given threat, which it did in this case with the qualifying remarks Salter quoted above. The government in effect said, “Okay, here’s the information we have, blah, blah, blah. But we also feel that the subject could well be lying through his teeth.”

This is exactly what the authorities did; they also added an additional tacit comment as to the credibility of the threat by making NO CHANGE in the color-coded Homeland Security warning level: it's still yellow (yellow indicates

“Significant risk of terrorist attacks. In addition to the previously outlined Protective Measures, the following may be applied: Increasing surveillance of critical locations; Coordinating emergency plans with nearby jurisdictions; Assessing further refinement of Protective Measures within the context of the current threat information; and, Implementing, as appropriate, contingency and emergency response plans.)

Therefore, the government did exactly what it should have done (to not reveal the threats would be to potentially endanger citizens and deny them access to information they have a right to; to not attach caveats to the threats would be dishonest and incite needless levels of anxiety; this article in the WaPo gives more detail on the governments deliberations on the matter, basically confirming my reasoning). Salter relates the above information, but instead of praising the administration for acting appropriately as logic would seem to indicate, she sees it all as a big conspiracy to

to stir up confusion and insecurity...To keep much of America where it's been since the horrors of Sept. 11: scared and buying anything the White House sells

She explains her paranoia thusly:

maybe I'm just saturated with an accumulation of mendacity and doublespeak that the Bush folks began to seep during the hijacked presidential election [nice word choice, implying a relationship between the presidential election and an act of terrorism] in Florida and that they now spew daily from the White House.

So according to Salter, the “White House” lies every day. This would be an astonishing fact and one that perhaps someone other than Salter may have noticed at some point is the last year+.

But just for argument’s sake, let’s assume that Salter’s conclusion is correct, that the administration wants to keep “America...scared and buying anything the White House sells.” Wouldn’t the government then not add its suspicions of Zubaydah’s honesty to the mix? Wouldn’t the government want to keep anxiety at the highest possible levels? Wouldn’t the government have raised the Homeland Security warning level to further heighten concern?

This level of paranoid, blanket mistrust is neither helpful nor rational, and can never be accommodated or refuted. In this case the government did exactly what it should have done, yet Salter assumed the worst in response. Had the government taken ANY OTHER ACTION, Salter would have also assumed the worst.

I am not saying the Bush administration has never lied about anything, but no rational, and possibly useful, examination can be made of the matter on a case by case basis when one has already concluded that the other side is ALWAYS LYING. Salter has nothing useful to tell us because she has become the little girl who cried wolf.
posted by Eric at 10:59 AM

 
Feeling More Pain - Every Morning
Bill Clinton is in the running to return to the same job he had for eight years: babbler in chief. Good way to meet girls, and a great excuse for a little nip and tuck.
posted by Eric at 9:49 AM

 
Don't Let The Door Hit Your Ass On The Way Out

My favorite Grammy punching bag (a.k.a. Michael Greene) resigned yesterday. An emergency meeting was held to discuss the findings of a report of sexual harassment in the Grammy workplace, but the "investigation had cleared Greene of any wrongdoing." Apparently though, his trail of sexual harassment "issues" has finally pissed off enough of the Grammy board of directors to drop support and accept his resignation.

According to the L.A. Times

Music industry executives traded phone calls Sunday about Greene's surprise exit--wondering why the Grammy veteran would step down if the report exonerated him.

And to top it off, the "highest paid nonprofit executive in the nation" gets an $8 million buyout. That just ain't right...

posted by tofu at 9:36 AM

 
Libertarians Take Note
I’m all for the libertarian position that government should stay as much as possible out of the business of “legislating morality”: I’m for the decriminalization of drug possession - especially marijuana - and prostitution; strict separation of church and state; free speech; welfare reform; free trade; but I am also for strong, even aggressive, national defense; careful but strong environmental regulation; heavy governmental investment in R&D. I am also for keeping track of the results of social policy: not on a normative basis, but on an empirical, results-related basis.

Connecticut was the first state to require an annual social index. Undersecretary of the office of policy and management for the State of Connecticut, Brian Mattiello, a Republican, told the NY Times that such a measure

"allows us to monitor our public human services the way we monitor our financial markets....What I like is that there's no policy recommendations," Mr. Mattiello said. "It's trying to inform policy makers and not direct them. No one is for having more high school drop-outs or child abuse."

Now Marc L. Miringoff, the director of the Fordham University Institute for Innovation in Social Policy, has produced a state-by-state report called "The Social Health of the States," the results of which look “almost exactly like the electoral map most Americans stared at on election night in November 2000.”

Eighteen of the 20 states with the worst records on social health, as measured by standards like infant mortality and high school completion rates, were in the South, West and Southwest and had cast their electoral votes for President Bush. Eighteen of the 20 states with the best scores on social health, most in the Northeast and the Midwest, had voted for Al Gore.

Miringoff’s goal is this:

a Social Index of Leading Indicators that commands as much attention as the Economic Index of Leading Indicators. "It's a way of taking social issues away from a more shrill, adversarial contest and changing the discourse, making it more pragmatic, more objective," he said.

The Fordham study is a report card that combines 16 measures of social health including child poverty, teenage suicide rates, average weekly wages, homicide rates, health insurance coverage and alcohol-related traffic deaths.

Among Mr. Miringoff's findings:
• In New Mexico, 29.4 percent of the population has no health insurance; in Rhode Island, the uninsured percentage is only 8.1.
• The child abuse rate in Montana is more than 10 times that of Pennsylvania.
• Teenage suicide is nine times more common in Alaska than in New Jersey.
• The murder rate in Louisiana is seven times that of Iowa.
• Elderly people are more than three times as likely to commit suicide in Nevada as in Massachusetts or Connecticut.
In his state-by-state analysis, Mr. Miringoff found that three indicators in particular — child poverty, high school completion and health insurance — were bellwethers of overall social health.

Were all states to pay attention to these indicators, they could take action to prevent them from falling into the danger zone. Even from a market standpoint, I see some governmental action, such as education in the broadest sense, simply as investment. As Mr. Mattiello said, “No one is for having more high school drop-outs or child abuse," nor should anyone be for child poverty or inadequate health care.

I agree that it is the government’s job not to ensure equality of outcome, but to ensure equality of opportunity; however, certain minimum standards must be maintained, especially among children, in order to establish equality of opportunity. Those who slip through the cracks of an acceptable floor don’t disappear forever, they reappear as social problems that haunt us all.
posted by Eric at 9:20 AM

 
Israeli-Jordanian Partnership, Pt. 2
No gloating because I am a mere conduit, but the notion of Jordanian-Israeli partnership regarding control of the Palestinian territories, as delineated here by Yossi Klein Halevi in today’s Washington Post, was broached literally here by Leon Hadar yesterday.

Hadar:

My proposal: An interim agreement (with Israel) allowing the Jordanian military to take control of most of the Arab towns and villages in the West Bank and establish order there, while creating the political and economic conditions for some form of autonomy or independence in the future (a few years), something along the lines of what we have in Cyprus today. In the context of such an agreement between Jordan and Israel, perhaps some form of free trade zone, will permit Palestinians to work in Israel, etc. It seems to me that such a plan could probably be implemented following the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the creation of a pro-American Jordan/Iraq bloc.

Halevi:

As a first step, the Palestinian Authority must go the way of the Taliban. Arafat should be placed on a plane to Baghdad and his terrorist "police" apparatus dismantled. Israel would then cede most of the territories to Jordan, concentrating the settlements in areas close to the 1967 borders. Until the situation stabilizes, Israel would remain in control of a united Jerusalem, though it would cede the Temple Mount to the Hashemites who, as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad's family, have a compelling claim as custodians of the site. Finally, Israel would retain a military presence along the Jordan River.

Jordan is the only Arab country that has entered into a strategic relationship with the Jewish state. The Hashemites fear a PLO state no less than the Israelis do. Ironically, Ariel Sharon, who once advocated transforming Jordan into Palestine, has become one of the stalwarts of the Israeli-Jordanian relationship. Perhaps Sharon is the man to help transform Palestine back into Jordan.

Bloggers and their readers: a pretty good combination.
posted by Eric at 2:47 PM

 
A New Strategy Emerges
Barry Rubin, in the Jerusalem Post, sees the outlines of a new Israeli strategy toward the Palestinians forming, incorporating various elements we have discussed here but identical to none of them: no unilateral withdrawal, no expulsion of Arafat, elements of a defensive network including a “fence system,” continued military action where necessary, etc.:

* There is no belief that the current Palestinian leadership is going to make peace with Israel. There is considerable doubt that it is even willing to agree on a real cease-fire.

* The peace process initiated by the Oslo agreement is clearly finished. This end came against Israel's wishes and as a result of Palestinian behavior. Thus the interim agreements and territorial designations laid down during a very different era no longer apply.

(They could be reinstated if the Palestinian leadership demonstrated to Israel - not to the EU, the Arab League, or the Western media - that it is seriously ready to live up to its commitments. Such an outcome does not, however, seem likely in the near future.)

* Given Israel's experience with the Palestinian leadership and external actors, it seems unlikely that more concessions, or even returning to some of the concessions already offered, is a solution. Before offering anything unilaterally Israel wants to know for sure what the other side is going to do in return.

* Yasser Arafat will not be expelled. Since he seems overwhelmingly concerned with his own welfare and not his people's, his removal to some other place would only increase his indifference to the material consequences of his policies. He would feel even less pressed to seek a cease-fire and be more able to mobilize - or at least believe he was mobilizing - international support.

* If Israel needs to hold certain territorial areas - mostly non-urban ones - for the protection of its roads, borders and settlements, it will do so for as long as necessary.

* When required, Israeli forces will go anywhere and stay there for as long as possible to wipe out safe havens being used by terrorists and their backers to launch attacks on Israel. This includes any town in the West Bank or Gaza.

* There is no interest in recapturing all the territories or even a considerable proportion of them, nor in annexing any territory.

* There is no expectation that the military will win a victory which will make existing problems will go away or cause the other side to sue for peace. The root of the crisis lies precisely in its reluctance to make peace.

* A small victory is any added pressure on the Palestinians that increases the likelihood of their ending the war - even though that process will take months, or even years; also reducing their capacity to wage war by destroying military and bomb-making facilities, gathering intelligence, and killing or capturing terrorists bent on attacking Israel's population.

* A limited, but welcome, victory would be a reduction in the number of successful terrorist attacks against Israelis, even though attacks would continue at some level.

* A major victory would be forcing the Palestinians to end their war or agree on a real cease-fire.

* This war must be conducted on the highest possible moral plane, with the greatest effort made to avoid civilian casualties, despite the fact that the other side - and most of the world - will never give Israel credit for acting in this way.

* In addition to an offensive policy, the time has come for Israel to create a reasonable defensive system. This would include a fence system with sensors, strong points, mobile forces and other features. It would not be 100% effective, but it would reduce casualties and provide leverage for "winning" (i.e. ending) the war as soon as possible. The precise placement of the wall would be determined by military criteria, though political factors may have an influence. The line drawn would not be intended as a final border in any way.

* Israel will not withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank and Gaza, or evacuate settlements. If the Palestinians want Israel and the settlements to leave these areas they will have to agree to a real and lasting peace.

* Since much of the world has chosen to slander Israel and disregard the real situation, Israel will not be overly influenced by international pressure. In addition, the world can neither deliver Arafat, nor does it seem interested in offering Israel any incentives to take even more risks. US advice and interests will be carefully considered and heeded whenever possible, but Israel must put preserving its existence and its citizens' safety at the top of its list of priorities.

* This war is going to go on for some time. It will only end when the Palestinian side gets tired and persuades, or forces, its leaders to change course. Many Palestinians already know that their strategy is folly, but fear to say so in public.

The real question here is when Arafat will wake up and decide to change his policy. If such a alteration in course ever comes about, it will not be because Arafat feels Israel is weak, or making concessions; or because he believes the world will come to his rescue if only he keeps on fighting.

* While remaining open to diplomatic initiatives and ready to explore any options, Israel views a diplomatic solution as being extremely unlikely.

* The best thing the world can do to help both sides is persuade Arafat that he is on his own, that no one will save him, that continued fighting will lead to even bigger disaster, and that more terrorism will lead to support of Israel, against him.

* The worst thing the world can do is persuade Arafat that it is on his side, that terrorism will be overlooked, that Israeli retaliation will lead to a boycott of Israel, and that it will demand more Israeli concessions to get him to stop the violence.

For if they tell Arafat he is winning, why should he stop?

I hope the Europeans heed this if they truly want peace in the region. I hope my kinsmen the Norwegians aren’t too disappointed to be returned to irrelevance.
posted by Eric at 2:28 PM

 
Pro-Semitism
Many of us have been discussing with growing alarm the rise in both the incidence and virulence of anti-Semitism for some time now, but especially since Israel launched its military crackdown against Palestinian terrorists several weeks ago.

NPR and some of its listeners seem to be suffering from a peculiar form of anti-Semitism: finding the light-hearted high jinks of Yiddish-American entertainers of the '30s and '40s amusing, but the stern warriors of Israel appalling.

Dr. Frank sees anti-Semitism underlying European anti-Israel sentiment (summed up in this recent statement by France’s ambassador to England: “Israel, that shitty little country, is causing all of this trouble”), the connection of which reader Noah also notes. Ron Rosenbaum is alarmed to the point of being concerned about a "Second Holocaust," and many others from Italian leftist writer Oriana Fallaci, to American neocon Charles Krauthammer have also written eloquently recently on anti-Semitism in Europe.

While the rise in the expression of anti-Semitism from Europe to the U.N. is disgusting and disturbing, among the Muslims it is finding its most pure expression since the Nazi death camps. The redoubtable Victor Davis Hanson sees it as nothing less than fascism:

The only way to confront the new fascists is to speak honestly about them and not remain silent. Each time a Palestinian extremist uses the word "Jew," each time an activist praises Libya, Iraq, or Iran and either condones or praises suicide murderers, each time a screaming protester slanders the present president of the United States as a killer, terrorist, and war criminal, each time we hear of conspiracies that explain our aid to Jewish Israel, we must all simply remonstrate, "Hitler would smile at every thing you say."

And, of course, he would.

The NY Times checked in on the matter yesterday:

Stay in a five-star hotel anywhere from Jordan to Iran, and you can buy the infamous forgery "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Pick up a newspaper in any part of the Arab world and you regularly see a swastika superimposed on the Israeli flag. Such anti-Semitic imagery is now embedded in the mainstream discourse concerning Jews in much of the Islamic world, in the popular press and in academic journals.

The depictions are not limited to countries that are at war with Israel but can be found in general-interest publications in Egypt and Jordan, the two countries that have signed peace agreements with Israel, as well as in independent religious schools in Pakistan and Southeast Asia.

Attempting the tired alchemy of separating the oxygen of anti-Semitism from the hydrogen of anti-Zionism, it’s still the same poisonous water the Muslims are drinking and washing with:

The use of Nazi imagery, the newspaper caricatures of Jews with fangs and exaggerated hook noses, even the Arab textbooks with their descriptions of Jews as evil world conspirators — all of that, Arab leaders often insist, reflect a dislike for Israelis and Zionism but not for Jews and Judaism.

Yet in many Muslim countries the hatred of Jews as Jews, and not only as citizens of Israel, has been nurtured through popular culture for generations.

Take for instance an official Jordanian government textbook for high school students. It describes Jews as innately deceitful and corrupt. "Up to the present," it states, "they are the masters of usury and leaders of sexual exhibitionism and prostitution."

No vicious stereotyping there, right Shylock? And of course it is the radical Islamists who are most vile:

Islamic fundamentalists frequently refer to Jews as either the sons or the grandsons of apes and monkeys. These sorts of descriptions can sometimes be heard in sermons at mosques in the Palestinian territories as well as from some Saudi religious leaders.

Ah yes, the Saudis, our allies in the region. And now there is this, per Joanne Jacobs:

A politically connected Saudi cleric, host of the telethon that raised millions of dollars for Palestinian fighters, calls on Muslim Palestinians to enslave Jewish women.
Muslim Brothers in Palestine, do not have any mercy neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don't you enslave their women? Why don't you wage jihad? Why don't you pillage them?

The religion of peace. Anne Wilson and Charles Johnson suggest that this story may have something to do with Islamic reluctance to make any moves on Jewish women:

The book of Judith is an apocryphal text that appears in the Roman Catholic Old Testament but in neither the Hebrew nor Protestant Bibles. During a siege of the otherwise unknown Jewish city of Bethulia, the beautiful widow Judith is determined to save her people by assassinating the Assyrians’ general, Holofernes.

She pretended to flee the city with her maid, reached his camp, and encouraged him to believe that victory would soon be his. Holofernes invited her into his tent for an evening banquet, intending to seduce her; instead, Judith waited until he fell into a drunken sleep, grabbed his sword, and cut off his head, bringing it in a sack to Bethulia. The Hebrew defenders mounted the head on the town’s ramparts and soon routed the leaderless Assyrian troops.

Steve, of the hilarious Happy Fun Pundit, has a go at the "Saudi Jerry Lewis" with this loose translation of his "enslave the Jewsish women" sermon:

Muddling Brothers in Palestine, do not have any mercy nor compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Not that you have, it's just that your ineptitude has made it seem that way. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. And they don't wear giant fabric birdcages to the beach. God made them yours. Why don't you enslave their women, apart from the fact that they would kick the crap out you. Why don't you wage jihad? Yes, my friends, why not take up the well-proven jihad thang, which has worked out so well every time it's been tried? Now excuse me, my limo is waiting. Give 'em hell, Hamas.

All kidding aside, I’ll take the women of Israel over the men of Saudi Arabia in a fight any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Back to the Times article for more Saudi absurdity:

Last month the Saudi daily Al Riyadh published an article that accused Jews of consuming the blood of Christian and Muslim children during the holiday of Purim. The author, a lecturer at King Faisal University in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, called this medieval fiction a "well-established fact."

After the article was translated from the Arabic and publicized by an Israel-based group called the Middle East Media Research Institute, the editor of the newspaper repudiated the article, saying it was nonsense and should not have been published.

The recycling of such stories has become a fixture of Muslim discourse, said Bernard Lewis, a historian of Islam and the Middle East, who has called this trend the "Islamization of anti-Semitism."

....[The Jews] figure in the Koran, which Muslims call the final and perfect revelation of God, as obstinate antagonists to the prophet Muhammad's efforts to bring Islam to the people of the Arabian Peninsula. Of the tribes he encountered, the Jews were the most hostile to his message. But in the end, the Jewish tribes were defeated, and the Koran refers to them as a people whose rebelliousness had always been punished by God.

In more modern Islamic teachings, which can be found in Arab textbooks and mainstream newspaper articles, the Koran's description of the Jews' opposition to Muhammad takes on monumental importance. The Jews corrupted the word of God from the start, the more recent interpretations say, and their scheming against the prophet was an expression of their innate wickedness.

Of course, historically Judaism predates Chrisitianity and Islam by a few thousand years, so a Jewish claim of having its religion “corrupted” - first by Christians, then by Muslims - would make a little more sense; but I don’t believe I have heard that argument from them. With all of this hatred being vomited upon Judaism, perhaps it is time for a small reminder of what the Jews have contributed to life on this earth. The following is from the Random House reading guide to Thomas Cahill’s The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, the title of which is instructive by itself.

"So, wayyelekh Avram ('Avram went') - two of the boldest words in all literature."

Western civilization would not be what it is today, were it not for our Jewish ancestors. Christian, atheist, Jew, believer, each of us can look at Avram and see that had he not responded to what his God told him (lekh-lekha--"go forth"), we would not be the people we are today. As Cahill boldly puts it, "There is no way that it could ever have been 'self-evident that all men are created equal' without the intervention of the Jews." Cahill backs up his bold statement with history. With stories. With details and informed opinion.

The Jewish people shaped the very way we think and live. In The Gifts of the Jews, we learn that processive time, individual destiny, and social justice are so peculiar to the Jews that, for all practical purposes, they invented them. Jewish men and women left their homes and journeyed when God told them to, changing who they were, changing who we are. We see it in the stories of the Bible. From Avram, who gave us the possibility of faith in a single God in the midst of a Sumerian world that included many gods and who broke out of the ancient model of seeing life as a wheel, to seeing life as processive time that includes personal destinies. To Moses, who gave us the radical morality and strict monotheism of the Ten Commandments, as well as the gift of seeing that we will die without finishing what we began, showing us that accomplishment is intergenerational. To David, who gave us the gift of personal repentance and redemption in his genuine grief and spontaneous honesty about the sins he'd committed. In short, as Cahill says, "The Jews gave us the Outside and the Inside--our outlook and our inner life."

In The Gifts of the Jews, we are shown the value of revering the past while standing in the present moment and looking forward to the future. The Jews developed an integrated view of life and its obligations. They saw life as governed by a single outlook. They saw the connection between the realms of law and wisdom. They saw God as One, the universe's principle of unity. And, as we see in Cahill's book, we do well to recognize this and thank them for these priceless gifts they've given us all.

Here’s more from an interview with Cahill by David Gergen on the PBS Newshour from 1998.

DAVID GERGEN: Tom, you make clear in your new book that one cannot appreciate the gifts of the Jews without first understanding what preceded them. So take us back some 5,000 years to the Tigris and the Euphrates.

THOMAS CAHILL: Well, the Jews are the beginning of the western world. They are the fountainhead. Before the Jews there is no West. And we have come to live their ideas in such a way that we think that our reactions to things are the ordinary human reactions that everybody in the world has always had.

And that's why you really have to go back beyond the Jews and the place to go is Sumer, which is where Abraham came from, and it's the oldest civilization that kept records, the oldest civilization that had writing. So it enables us to see what people thought and felt in the very earliest times.

DAVID GERGEN: Now, Sumer was this area between the Tigris and the Euphrates, what some of the people refer to as Mesopotamia.

THOMAS CAHILL: Mesopotamia. And today really it's Iraq, modern-day Iraq.

DAVID GERGEN: And what was the culture like there?

THOMAS CAHILL: Well, it and all early cultures were very similar, even though there were many differences among these cultures, in that everyone thought of reality as a kind of wheel. They thought that the past occurred again in the future. They didn't really think of people as individuals, just as temporary manifestations of some sort of divine process, so that we were more like sheaves of wheat than we were like individuals. We came and we went. There would be more wheat in the future. There would be more human beings. The reality, the great reality was what they saw in the stars, which was the great drama of the night sky and which was thought of as a kind of recurring message from the gods. But what's really important is that they thought of time as something that recurred and, therefore, there was no such thing as an individual.

DAVID GERGEN: And this went on for hundreds and hundreds of years and then Abraham-

THOMAS CAHILL: Thousands and thousands.

DAVID GERGEN: Thousands.

THOMAS CAHILL: Probably. I think from the beginning of humanity really to the advent of Abraham. Abraham is the first person--because of this vocation that he has, he hears this voice, and the voice says, "Go forth," or this great insistence--in Hebrew L'ech L'chah-Get out of here!

DAVID GERGEN: Move.

THOMAS CAHILL: And it's a wonderful-it's so insistent in the original. And Abraham in this experience becomes the first human being to set out for the unknown, without having an idea of where he's going or why. And he becomes the first person to welcome adventure and surprise, and the possibility of something new, so that for him the future is no longer simply a repetition of the past. It's going to be something new.

DAVID GERGEN: It's not a circle. It's a journey-

THOMAS CAHILL: Yes. It's a journey-maybe sort of up and down and in and out-but it's a journey. And so we called that old way of thinking a cyclical way of thinking, and we call the new way a processive way of thinking. The West, which we all belong to, is processive, welcomes the new, it expects something different tomorrow from what was yesterday, and it assumes that each person has a destiny that is individual to him or her. All these ideas-these great ideas that we take for granted come out of the story of Abraham, and they didn't exist anywhere in any recognizable sense before Abraham.

DAVID GERGEN: Take us on now to Moses, who seems to be the next major figure in your story.

THOMAS CAHILL: Well, Moses deepens this whole idea. I doubt very much that Abraham was ever a strict monotheist. I think he sort of-he certainly started off as a polytheist, like everybody else in the world, but Moses really-for Moses, the idea of God becomes much, much larger, and also it becomes much more concerned with individuals in a new kind of way. Moses is the one who receives the Commandments, so that monotheism becomes ethical monotheism.

It's not really that God is God and that there is only one God but that God expects something from human beings. And what he expects is that they treat other human beings as individuals also. So that the idea of individuality, which begins with Abraham and Moses, begins to be asserted of everyone. And that's really what underlies the Commandments.

DAVID GERGEN: Moses brings the people out of Egypt into the wilderness. They eventually make it to Canaan again, and then the kings become the next major figures in your story, especially King David.

THOMAS CAHILL: David's a great character, I think. He's both a great sinner and a great poet, which is a terrific literary combination. You know, you can't do better than that, so he's a very lovable figure, even when he does terrible things. It's difficult to dislike David. But what's really interesting about David is what goes on inside of David. It's not the external story, the political story. David is very much a politician. But I think throughout the world what's really interesting about David is the drama that goes on inside of David. There's a kind of interiorization in David's story that doesn't occur before that. David keeps talking about the inward parts, the hidden parts of himself.

And it's the-it's groping for the language of spirituality, which now we find very easy to talk about, but the idea of spirit and spirituality in the days of King David was very odd, very difficult to get at, the interior silence inside a human being, and the idea that the Commandments are not really external, as they had been presented in the story of Moses-they're internal, they're inside of us, and that they live in the silence inside each individual, and that that's also where God lives.

DAVID GERGEN: And that journey continues in the Old Testament that increasingly the temple of God is discovered on the interior.

THOMAS CAHILL: Yes. Yes, that all these externalized things such as the temple where God lives turn out to be the individual human being where God lives. And more and more you see this-how human beings become fully rounded in the later books of the Hebrew Bible.

Whereas, in the early books they're almost a little bit like the characters from Sumer, in the later books they're so obviously-they're so obviously human beings in the way we think of them. They're three-dimensional, and they have an interior life, so that someone like Ruth in the Book of Ruth is such a beautiful, completely rounded figure, and we are so sympathetic with her and with what she does and with her sympathy for others, particularly for her mother-in-law, Naomi.

DAVID GERGEN: So how would you summarize then The Gifts of the Jews to the way we think and live?

THOMAS CAHILL: Two clusters of ideas and feelings that we all have and which we couldn't live without-namely our approach to time and especially our idea about the future-and secondly our idea of individuality, but the third thing, which we don't talk about that much, is the Jewish idea of justice, the idea that we each have a responsibility to other human beings, particularly to human beings who have less than we do. That really is the original idea that the Jews had that say that even the Commandment against murder was really a Commandment against injustice, that you had no right to pass by someone who didn't have enough to eat if you had more than enough to eat.

You had a responsibility toward that person. This Jewish idea of justice never existed before the Jews. You can find nothing like this anywhere, and the truth is this is the idea I think that we have still haven't gotten down very well. We're very good at time and individuality. We're sensational at that-at those things. But I think justice is still the little bud that has yet to bloom.

Impressive. Actually, mind-boggling: that we owe our conceptions of time, individuality, and justice to one people, the Jews, who also created monotheism. Perhaps a modicum of appreciation and respect is in order.
posted by Eric at 1:01 PM