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

 
The Chain of Blame
Gary Farber has a fine pointed post about the blame bombs now being exchanged between the political forts regarding 9/11:

REMEMBER: If you find yourself dying of bacteriological attack, radiation, or simply exploding into fire, be sure to write a note as to whether you blame a Republican, or a Democrat. That is, after all, what's important.

While the the key, after all, is to prevent further atacks, there is plenty of blame to go around in every direction for the previous attacks. While I don't absolve George W. Bush of responsibility for his failure to anticipate and/or prevent the 9/11 attacks, Bill Clinton had even more chances to do something about the growing al Qaeda threat during his tenure in office.

To refresh our memories, here is a review of bin Laden and al Qaeda activites while the former president was in office:

The Terrorist
Bin Laden’s first official terrorist act, according to U.S. intelligence sources, was the bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, in December of ‘92 that killed two Austrian tourists. U.S. soldiers had been staying there on the way to Somalia and “Operation Restore Hope.” Bin Laden associates, including Mohamed Atef, went to Somalia to disrupt American peacekeeping efforts there; 18 American soldiers were killed in a Mogadishu ambush in October ‘93 that featured at least some al Qaeda members in affiliation with the Somali al Ittihad al Islami (AIAI) militant Islamist organization. Bin Laden was both amused and disgusted by what he felt was a gross overreaction by the American public and government to the loss of a "mere" 18 soldiers, as America withdrew from Somalia within six months after the deaths.

Bin Laden is also reputed to have had prior knowledge of, and financial involvement with the February ‘93 World Trade Center bombing by militant Egyptians under the guidance of Ramzi Yousef (who was captured in Pakistan and extradited to the U.S. in ‘95 - he was convicted and sentenced to life without parole in ‘98) which killed six and wounded over 1,000, and some level of responsibility for bomb attacks on American troops in Saudi Arabia in ‘95 and ‘96, which, at minimum, he began publicly calling for in August of ‘95 with “An Open Letter to King Fahd.” In the letter he also complained of the Saudi regime’s misappropriation of public funds and oil revenues, lack of commitment to Sunni Islam, and inability to conduct national defense leading to military dependence upon non-Muslims.

Afghanistan Again
Saudi Arabia formally revoked his citizenship in ‘94, and under intense pressure from the Saudis and the U.S., Sudan asked bin Laden to leave in ‘96. With no place left to go, and with the country still up for grabs in an anarchic scrum of a civil war, bin Laden flew to Jalalabad, Afghanistan in May of ‘96 with 150 of his family and followers (according to a report in the Sunday Times of London - registration required - , the plane refueled in Qatar, which was friendly to Washington, but was allowed to continue unhindered; this was not the only time that the Clinton administration didn’t follow up on an opportunity to apprehend bin Laden according to the report; ). His timing was fortuitous as the militant Islamic fundamentalists called the Taliban - ideological soul mates to bin Laden - under the one-eyed leadership of former mujahedin Mullah Muhammad Omar, were on the verge of taking the key eastern city of Jalalabad. With a pledge of complete moral support and a cash donation of $3 million to back it up, bin Laden ingratiated himself with Omar and the Taliban, who took Jalalabad in September; the capital, Kabul, fell ten days later. The relationship between the Taliban and al Qaeda - and their common fate - was sealed. With bin Laden’s encouragement Omar declared himself Amir-ul-Mohmineen (king of the Muslim faithful), and his religious declarations took on the force of law in Afghanistan.

With his simpatico compadres in virtual control of Afghanistan, the real party began for bin Laden and al Qaeda. With militant Islamic training camps already set up throughout eastern Afghanistan and not much for the volunteers to do with the Taliban largely in control of Afghanistan, bin Laden found an ample supply of eager new members for al Qaeda, which began exporting people, money, and ideas aggressively throughout the world. The Clinton administration took all of this seriously enough to have issued a top secret order authorizing the CIA to “use any and all means to destroy bin Laden’s network.”

His philosophy of fanatical Islam, grievance against the West, and renunciation of modernity found a receptive audience with hundreds of thousands - if not millions - worldwide, especially among the poor and hopeless, the resentful stragglers in a global race who had not only been passed, but haughtily elbowed into the muddy ditch and lapped several times by the “winners.” But the message also connected with many educated, “worldly” Muslims who had seen enough of the West to be confused, frightened and repelled by the uncertainty of its freedoms and the arrogant cacophony of its culture, and who rejected attempts at Westernization in the Islamic world as disasters.

Al Qaeda
Al Qaeda has functioned like a foundation for terror, with bin Laden as chairman of the board. Just under bin Laden on the al Qaeda organizational chart have been two exiled Egyptian extremists: Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri, a surgeon who founded the al Jihad group which took credit for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 (he was convicted only of weapons possession), and Mohamed Atef, a former policeman who has been the military commander (believed killed in a U.S. bomb attack on Kabul in November). Under this triumvirate has been a majlis al shura (“council of leaders”), made up mostly of “Afghan Arabs,” who have helped make decisions, then another level of committees that has handled “religious policy, military training, legitimate business, and even press releases.” A loosely knit network of perhaps 5,000 individuals, many organized in small cells, in 40-60 countries throughout the globe, complete the organization. Members have pledged an oath of allegiance (“bayat”) to bin Laden and al Qaeda. The organization has also continued and expanded the camps in Afghanistan in which its own members and thousands of Islamists from other organizations have been trained.

According to the six-count conspiracy indictment against French/Moroccan Zacarias Moussaoui handed down by a federal grand jury in December of 2001 - the first U.S. charges in direct relationship to the September 11 attacks - these camps were “used to instruct members and associates of al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist groups in the use of firearms, explosives, chemical weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction. In addition to providing training in the use of various weapons, these camps were used to conduct operational planning against United States targets around the world and experiments in the use of chemical and biological weapons. These camps were also used to train others in security and counterintelligence methods, such as the use of codes and passwords, and to teach members and associates of al Qaeda about traveling to perform operations. For example, al Qaeda instructed its members and associates to dress in ‘Western’ attire and to use other methods to avoid detection by security officials. The group also taught its members and associates to monitor media reporting of its operations to determine the effectiveness of their terrorist activities.”

After moving to the Tora Bora mountains between Jalalabad and Pakistan, bin Laden issued a Declaration of Jihad in August of ‘96 with the precise if verbose title of “Message from Osama bin Laden to his Muslim Brothers in the Whole World and Especially in the Arabian Peninsula: Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques; Expel the Heretics from the Arabian Peninsula." Within, he vowed violent action against Americans unless they withdrew from Saudi Arabia and demanded the overthrow of the Saudi regime. He also widened his scope of grievance to include oppression of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis, and spoke of a “fierce Judeo-Christian campaign against the Muslim world.”

Bin Laden remained busy in ‘97, spending lavishly on the Taliban (military supplies, cars for the leaders and families of casualties, new mosques, a lavish new home for Mullah Omar outside Kandahar), slipping a few Stinger missiles to Islamist militants in Saudi Arabia, formalizing his training camps into tiers of specialization with the best little terrorists getting meet bin Laden personally, and making concerted efforts to draw together the international Islamic movement under the wing of al Qaeda.

According to the Federation of American Scientists' file on al Qaeda, bin Laden’s generosity toward the Taliban and charm offensive upon Mullah Omar paid off quite specifically in February of ‘97 when Omar rejected a proposal from the U.S. to turn bin Laden over (calling him a “guest”) in exchange for international recognition of their government and a seat in international organizations. Reported attacks upon bin Laden, including two large explosions near Jalalabad in March, caused him to become very security conscious: he moved his primary residence to Kandahar (Omar’s home and power base), reduced those with access to him to around 50 trusted men, and changed his communications methods.

In February of ‘98, bin Laden returned to the international public eye, issuing a joint fatwa (religious ruling) with Zawahiri’s Egyptian al Jihad group, and similar Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups under the rubric “World Islamic Front,” which bluntly stated that it was the duty of all Muslims to kill Americans - military and civilian, adults and children, men and women - and “plunder their money” anywhere in the world, again citing as justification the American “occupation” of Saudi Arabia and support for Israel, but also adding “the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people” via the “crusader-Zionist alliance” boycott. "They are all targets he told ABC’s John Miller that May.

In June, an American grand jury investigation, in operation since ‘96, issued a sealed indictment charging bin Laden with "conspiracy to attack defense utilities of the United States." On August 7, car bombs exploded nearly simultaneously outside the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, buildings that had not been retrofitted with modern security measures. The Nairobi blast destroyed the embassy, a block of office buildings, and a secretarial college killing 213 people, including 12 Americans. The Dar es Salaam bomb killed 11 Tanzanians. Bin Laden and al Qaeda were immediately implicated in the bombings. U.S. intelligence had been watching the bin Laden cell in Kenya; four members were indicted and extradited to the U.S. where they were all convicted on murder and conspiracy charges and sentenced to life without parole in May, 2001.

On August 20, President Clinton, acting upon the advise of the “Small Group” (Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Director of the CIA George Tenet, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Henry Shelton, counter-terrorism czar Dick Clarke), who had presented evidence implicating bin Laden in the embassy attacks and suggesting that he had been seeking weapons of mass destruction, ordered Tomahawk missile strikes upon training camps in Afghanistan, including the large Zawar Kili camp near Khost in eastern Afghanistan, and al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The pharmaceutical factory was accused of producing nerve gas for al Qaeda. Evidence for such is at best tenuous, and al Qaeda leaders weren’t near the camps hit in Afghanistan. The strikes would appear to have done little but inflame the Muslim world and cast the U.S. in the doubly negative role of ineffectual bully.

At the same time as the strikes, the U.S. added bin Laden to the list of terrorists whose assets are targeted for seizure by the U.S. Treasury in an effort to shut down their operations. In November of ‘98 the indictment against bin Laden, Atef and many accomplices was strengthened, and a reward of $5 million each was offered for bin Laden and Atef; the indictment was amended again in January ‘99. In late ’98 and early ‘99, interviews with bin Laden ran in Time, Newsweek, and on ABC, reiterating his hatred for the U.S., the West and Israel, and his demands that the U.S. leave the Arabian Peninsula, stop the boycott against Iraq, and for the overthrow of insufficiently pious Islamic governments. In a June interview with an Arabic-language TV station, bin Laden called for all American males to be killed.

Amidst mounting alarm, the U.N. Security Council demanded that the Taliban turn over Osama bin Laden to appropriate authorities in October of ‘99. They refused, obviously, and in November member states froze the Taliban’s funds and prohibited the take-off and landing of Taliban-owned aircraft, further isolating the regime and conjoining its fate with that of al Qaeda. Bin Laden, dubbed by former CIA officer Larry Johnson "the 'here's Waldo' of terrorism,” then had at least two plots thwarted: in December, Jordanian police arrested members of an al Qaeda- affiliated cell planning attacks against Western tourists, and U.S. Customs agents arrested an Algerian national, Ahmed Rassam, attempting to smuggle 50 pounds of explosives and detonating devices into the country - all part of a planned “millennium” attack.

Al Qaeda struck again in October of 2000. The USS Cole, a warship, was refueling in the harbor at Aden, Yemen when a number of small rafts pulled up next to the ship ostensibly to deliver supplies; instead, at least one exploded, heavily damaging the ship (over $240 million to repair) and killing 17 crew members. A Palestinian affiliated with al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah (“the Mailman”), is now believed by intelligence officials to have been “field commander” of the plot. Perhaps the successful attack led bin Laden to feel particularly frisky. He married his fourth wife, an 18-year-old Yemeni girl, the same month.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Let's learn from our mistakes and not repeat them.
posted by Eric at 5:46 PM

 
Pointless Return
Here are my thoughts on Star Wars, for what they are worth. Since none of my three kids are all that interested in Star Wars in general, I'm sure I won't see the new one until it's on DVD, barring supernatural intervention. I thought the last one was dull, dull, dull - like a bad parody of the original series - and whatever lingering interest I had was thereby squelched.

I was already 19 when the first Star Wars came out and a junior in college with all of the attendant preoccupations so it didn't have the impact on me that it did on younger or less preoccupied people, but I loved it nonetheless. The magic of the first three movies was the magic of relationships and empathy. Read Ken Layne's moving recollections:

Here was this kid -- a whiny kid living in the sticks -- and he was every kid growing up in an unimportant town in an unimportant time. Sure, it was an exotic place to most of the audience, but the movie did a swell job of making that planet and that "moisture farm" seem like the dullest place around, even with the beat-up hovercraft and the talking robots.

There's a meal scene early on, with Luke and his stepparents, and it's all so utterly common and grim with the tupperware and blue milk and stiff conversation. And then Luke's standing outside, with that fake Wagner soundtrack (like I knew who Wagner was back then) and the hazy desert sky and those twin suns. He's standing alone in the dust with his whole crazy life ahead and no clue what's coming next. And he's pissed off, depressed, moody, romantic. Jesus, he's never even been to the big port town, Mos Eisley. He's like a kid in a San Diego suburb who hasn't even been to Tijuana.

Relationships between the heroes, between the heroes and their robots, between the robots - as fantastical as the surroundings and technology, the relationships were real and that's what people responded to. Somewhere in the years between the third and fourth movies (in order of release, I find this reordering to fit a mythic chronology pretentious and irritating) the magic was lost, the foundation forgotten. With relationships secondary at best, the pedestrian story is just comic book exposition. Who cares if the characters, or more importantly, the creators don't? All of the intricate detail goes from being "rich" to pointlessly "busy" when the relationships no longer work. Lord of the Rings is an infinitely more compelling fantasy for me at this point.
posted by Eric at 4:12 PM

 
Split
Divorce is a subject of deep public ambivalence, somewhat like abortion. Neither of these "last resorts" do the majority want to tightly restrict nor encourage, and for some of the same reasons. Dawn has some painful memories on the subject here and Matt Welch was kind enough to leave some of his own in our comments section below.

Most of us are glad that we are no longer forced by laws, religious dictate (as with many things, Catholicism would seem to lag behind on this - perhaps we are now in a period of Catholic reform), and/or social pressure to stay in an untenable relationship, but even this consensus is very gray and fuzzy: at what point have you tried "hard enough"? What is worse for the kids: staying together and enduring conflict all around, or the effects of splitting?

(The implications of these findings for practitioners are two-fold. On the one hand, the majority of children from divorced families did not have serious problems requiring professional help. On the other hand, a larger percentage of children from divorced families than intact families did have serious problems. Another way to say this is that MOST children in divorced families do not need help, but MORE children in this group than in intact families are likely to need help. This is a complicated message for all of us to deliver and it is why researchers, practitioners and the media often errs on the side of one or the other of these two types of findings. Increasingly, it is important to make both kinds of points.)

The obvious and facile answer is "it depends": surely we all agree that parents who are habitually violent toward each other should separate before someone gets killed, and most would agree that parents shouldn't split on a whim, but everyone calibrates the tipping point between those two poles differently.

All of this boils down to a decision of whether or not two people "belong together." I am pleased that our society agrees that people "who don't belong together" should be allowed to go their separate ways with relative impugnity, and I don't much care what people do who don't have children - they can couple and uncouple like lemmings for all I care - but when children enter the picture, I - and society - do care and it becomes "our business" to a certain extent since children are everone's responsibility. As to the effects of divorce on children, I didn't go through it myself, but look to Dawn's and Matt's experiences for examples of the damage.

When I got divorced my children were 6 and 3 - when we were separated they were 5 and 2 - and while my daughter adjusted rather readily, it took my son until he was about 12 to give up on the dream of his parents reuniting - even though they had both remarried - and to accept that it was all most likely for the best.

We were married nine years and whether we tried "hard enough" I don't know, but I do know that while we loved each other on some levels, we also brought out the worst in each other in significant ways and had some fundamental philosophical differences about life's priorities. She was, and is, all about security and certainty, and I - obviously since I am a writer, DJ, and blogger at age 43 - had and have other priorities. Who is right? Well, neither, it's a matter of opinion, but opinion is what relationships boil down to ultimately, and we just clashed on too many opinions. I brought out her insecurities and jealousies - not unreasonably on her part as I was out DJing parties and clubs and drinking 3-5 nights a week - and instead of feeling drawn in to help assuage these feelings in her, I felt driven outward to get away from, even to punish, these feelings. Not very healthy impulses on either of our parts.

Part of the problem was that we were both spoiled, selfish, immature brats who weren't close to being ready for marriage at 23 and 22 respectively, nor ready for children at 26 and 25, but once you have them, you have them and you can only try to make due. Since the kids have turned out as well as they have, I guess we have handled things reasonably well since the split - we have maintained our joint custody with many a conflict but with no major breaches - and while we basically don't speak - just too painful - we don't fight much either.

We both moved back to Ohio after the divorce in '90 to the solace of our respective families, and have lived about 70 miles apart ever since: far enough apart that the kids had to go to school one place and spend weekends at the other - not equitable but workable - and that place for school was their mother's until my son came over here for school this year, much to my happiness and his mother's displeasure.

Would the children have been better off had we stayed together? I doubt it because our disjuncture was just too fundmental. We would have fought with increasing viciousness; we both drank too much and sometimes got violent: I grabbed her by the throat once, she threw the vacuum cleaner at me narrowly missing my skull and taking out a picture window another time, I slapped her so hard on another occasion she literally spun around, she kicked me in the nads so hard still another time I was black and blue for six weeks, etc, etc, you get the ugly picture, and it wasn't getting better. We both had a lot of problems and seemed to exacerbate each other's inherent defects. We both have bad tempers but neither have been violent toward the kids or others that I am aware of, so it was best we got away from each other. It hasn't been easy for anyone, and on some levels it never will be: divorce fractures on so many levels in so many directons that we can't even calculate all the damage.

My wish for you is that you don't enter into marriage lightly, and even more important, that you don't have children lightly. For a couple there are three entities in their relationship: each individual and a third entity created by their union. Children are the physical embodiment of that third unional entity, and they are as torn as it in the case of divorce. Do your best.
posted by Eric at 2:17 PM

 
Battling Bruce
Another blogger off to a smoking hot start is Bruce Baugh, Writer of Fortune. He is very articulate, insightful and compassionate. He has a very thoughtful piece on Dawn and her situation with extremists from every direction, here:

A very major thing wrong with the world is the persistent belief that if A is true, then B must necessarily be false. Racism in all its manifestations hinges on this, setting some particular part of a person's legacy so high on the scale of importance that it eclipses everything else. Likewise with absolutism in political ideology (it's why the Libertarian Party is doomed, because only an anarchist can in good conscience assent to its pledge honestly), and religion, and every other element of belief and practice that defines us.

I want to live in a world that has more people whose answers to questions like "Who am I?" must be as complex as Dawn's, and without the fear that she quite sensibly feels about it at the moment. This is another part of what we're fighting for, in my view.

Now that's something.
posted by Eric at 11:51 PM

 
Bloggy Buddies
In case you hadn't noticed, we just added these cool-guy comment sections below each entry and already they are bearing fruit. I am getting to know some of my fellow blog-folk better. Under this post on Peter Beinart's TNR piece on Zionist conservative Christians, Andrew Long informed me that he had made a very similar post A FULL DAY BEFORE. I would say they are extremely similar - perhaps we vibed via an itinerant wormhole - EXCEPT HIS IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN MINE. His conclusion is quite eloquent:

A better idea would undoubtedly be to establish connections with the Christians who strongly support Zionism and use the relationship to build trust and affect the beliefs that Christians hold about Israel. Instead of fatalistically accepting that religious right-wingers will eventually abandon Israel on the altar of theological misconceptions, why not approach the hurdle positively and work to enlighten evangelicals and win them over to the moral cause of secular Zionism?

And it led me to poke around his site, A Long View, quite a bit.

Besides possessing a striking Giacometti-like angularity, there is much bloggy goodness to behold. Check him out.
posted by Eric at 10:31 PM

 
Tonic or Propaganda?
Klaus Witz, Jason Rubenstein's partner on Tonecluster, comments on the mode of thinking that led to CBS airing the Pearl tape:

Unfortunately, the airing exhibits the level of moral and intellectual depravity that exists in a major media outlet by persons who sit in their comfy chairs deciding the editorial content of what is aired on our free airwaves as though they are somehow immune from the current and coming struggle. (Although, I would guess that the number of viewers is becoming smaller and smaller – which is what my cynical mind tells me is the real reason behind the airing.) Imagine the cost/benefit analysis that may have occurred prior to airing: “Hmmm, lets see, we can air the tape and offend the dignity of the Pearl family and effectively act as a propaganda mouthpiece for the Islamofascists, or we can do the right thing and put the tape in cold storage and lose an opportunity to create a scandal that benefits our bottom line.”

Josh at OxBlog believes the airing is invaluable:

Anyone to whom the arguments of Moussaoui or Pearl's murderers is convincing will never be an American ally anyway. But to those tempted to equivocate, or to deny that anti-Semitism permeates Islamic radicalism, or to claim that it is not worth the cost of going after these people, showing the tape is invaluable. Seeing the direct link between his assertion of his Judaism and his murder ought to leave no doubt that Islamic fascism cannot peacefully coexist with democratic tolerance. The tape rams home once again the truly evil nature of those whom we're up against. And that is a point worth making over and over and over again.

They both speak partial truth. I have little doubt that something like Klaus's scenario is involved with the reality of CBS' motivation for the airing, and it is certainly an affront to Pearl's family. However, the stark reality of the evil we are up against is a bracing tonic against complacency and collective ADD. It sure got my wife thinking.
posted by Eric at 10:01 PM

 
Stabbed
Joanne Jacobs points to a fascinating article about the sociological implications of slasher movies: not what they do to the teens who watch them, but what they say about the attitudes of the teens who watch them:

"Jason X" is now in theaters, film number 10 in the "Friday the 13th" series. And yet another "Halloween," number eight, is due in July.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it wasn't just screams and blood that made the "teen slasher" movie popular, says Pat Gill, a professor of media studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There was a message that came with the mayhem, rooted in the times, and it struck a chord with teenagers.

The slashers began in the late 1970s, after a decade of explosive growth in the divorce rate, Gill notes in a forthcoming paper, "The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher Films, and the Family," accepted for publication in the Journal of Film and Video. She may be the first to make that historical connection.

I remember distinctly when I encountered divorce IN REAL LIFE for the first time. I was in 4th grade and a neighbor kid came dragging down the street as if his dog had just dropped dead. Only it was worse: his parents were getting a divorce. I had heard of such things, but hadn't known anyone directly involved. It seemed horrifying.

He cried a little and then kept shuffling on - one foot aimlessly in front of the other - like a zombie. I don't think he smiled all year; his eyes were often red and creased like he had just come from a funeral, only the funeral never ended: the body was never buried. He felt betrayed, embarrassed, lost, abandoned: all the bad things. His parents cared more about their own problems than about providing a "normal" home. That's how I felt anyway - it seemed bizarre.

At first most of the other kids tried to cheer him up, be supportive, but he just kept moping and after a while people mostly avoided him. If it happened to him it could happen to us and we didn't much want to think about that. This was Southern California in 1966. Over the next few years I noticed a lot more divorces popping up: friends (none close), acquaintances, even relatives (no one close). It started to become common, even normal, although I still couldn't imagine it for my own parents of immediate circle.

Something was broken over those few years and while parents perhaps found it liberating to be able to get the hell out of bad or inconvenient marriages, kids lost a security that had previously been taken for granted. The net was yanked out from under the trapeze of childhood - everyone scaled back their stunts accordingly.

I got divorced in 1990 and it was the worst experience of my life thus far. By then the stigma was long gone, especially in California - half of all marriages ended in divorce - but I felt a failure nonetheless, especially regarding my sweet little children, 6 and 3. The memory of the look on that boy's face - stricken, lost - stabbed me to my core every time I thought about it, which was very often. I was a wreck for about two years.

These feelings in millions of kids throughout the late-'60s and '70s led to the slasher epidemic according to Gill:

In all of the films, starting with the trendsetter "Halloween" in 1978, the focus is on kids who have to save themselves and others "because the parents aren’t there," Gill said. Even when they are, "they are stupid, they are selfish, they don’t listen, they don’t seem to care about their kids. Or if they do care, they are unable to help their kids face the nightmares of the everyday world."

The kids who become victims are similarly selfish and flawed, Gill noted. The kids who survive are those who care about others and play the parental role. These were themes that not only reflected on the absent parent, but on perceived excesses of the "Me Decade" of the '70s, she said.

posted by Eric at 8:51 PM

 
Islamist Hatred
While we are on the subject, Howard Owens, who is not Jewish, gives us a reminder of why it takes courage to be Jewish - or to publicly identify with your Jewish heritage - in the world today with this example of Islamist rhetoric from the Arab News:

Why should we be afraid of a people whom the Holy Qur'an called the murderers of the prophets and the violators of covenants with God? They are a cowardly and mean people who would not fight us except from behind a protective wall. Had we known the fear and confusion in their hearts, despite their huge arsenal of highly destructive weapons, we would have crossed the barrier of fear in our hearts and resorted to fighting hoping for victory with God's blessing.

...The Holy Prophet ... said: "Whoever arms a soldier is like the one who participates in the battle." Is there any jihad more glorious than liberating Al-Aqsa Mosque and the blessed land around it? If Palestinians, an occupied and persecuted people, cannot receive external assistance, let me ask why the Jewish state seeks financial and military assistance from the US and countless other sources? It is not Israel but we ourselves who should be blamed for its impudence. Our weakness and silence about injustice embolden the enemy to blame us for what it has to do. Why don't we demand as well the cessation of all kinds of assistance to Israel, which terrorizes the Palestinian people and violates all human rights?

....On the contrary, Israel's inhuman treatment will only breed generation after generation of avengers upon the murderers of their relatives and usurpers of their homes. One martyr is followed by a thousand. The reward for martyrdom is worth sacrificing all the transient pleasures of a lifetime.

In the face of such vicious and mindless vitriol and homicidal hatred, it takes great courage for a practicing Lutheran to take pride in her Jewish heritage.

Howard concludes his review of this numbing litany of twisted spite:

And back to my original point: There can never be peace between the West and the radical Islamists so long as they persist in justifying murder and death as a religious rite.

I post this because I sense that many people still do not get how great the gulf is between the West and the Islamists. We hold mutually incompatible world views. Whereas we believe the greatest virtue is freedom; they believe nothing matters but their narrow definition of virtue. To them, hate is not a sin. To us, it is. My heart aches for peace and fears the violence that may yet come, but how can there be peace with people who feel no shame at sending teen-ager bombs to kill people?

Or slitting the throat of an American journalist on camera.
posted by Eric at 6:29 PM

 
A Little Peace
My wife Dawn is a big girl and can take care of herself, but I feel compelled to state some thoughts about her "What Is a Jew To Do?" post and some of the reaction to it.

First, we must separate ethnic heritage from religion. It is the Jewish custom that any children born of a Jewish mother are considered Jewish. That's fine, I guess, but what if the mother doesn't consider herself to be Jewish when the children are born? What if a child is raised in another faith (in this case Baptist) until she is 9 years old? Isn't this the child's legitimate faith? Children do not choose their parents. What if the situation were reversed and the child had been born to a Christian mother and Jewish father, and had been raised Jewish until she was 9 and then told she was Christian and it was time to convert. Wouldn't she feel more comfortable with the Jewish tradition even though she was born to a nominal Christian?

A 9 year old child's parents got divorced, and her mother, reassessing her entire life, decided that since she was born Jewish, she was going to return to her roots and take the children - baptized and raised thus far in another faith - with her whether they liked it or not. I am guessing that everything about this experience was deeply unsettling, and the life experiences associated with the "conversion" - the divorce, moving from rural West Virginia to the northern Big City of Cleveland, being dumped into classes for an almost utterly alien faith, language, and tradition - would paint that "conversion," or "reconversion" if you prefer, in negative colors.

For that person to have overcome those negative associations, and to have come to terms with her heritage should be lauded, not vilified, and anyone with an ounce of empathy or compassion would view the background before jumping to conclusions. The fact that Dawn feels more comfortable with a Christian faith in no way detracts from her pride in her Jewish heritage. She embraces her Jewish lineage AND her Christian faith. But, there are bigots, and absolutists, and those so insecure with their own identity that they feel the need to condemn others for making a courageous effort to reconcile these internal contradictions honestly and publicly.

There are Jews who hate Christians just as some Christians hate Jews. They are all wrong and hateful.

Dawn also expressed her deepest fears regarding the danger in the world after an American man was viciously murdered, apparently for being a Jew. She admits that sometimes she can't help but take pause and feel relief that she will not have to fear such a fate for her daughter: a daughter who is 1/4 Jewish, has three Christian grandparents, has two practicing Lutheran parents and strikingly Scandinavian characteristics.

Or should she be forced to identify with that 1/4 of herself over the other 3/4? If so, there is no end to the mathematical regression. Perhaps it's like homeopathic medicine, and ANY amount of the characteristic in question is enough for branding. The Nazis and American slave owners felt this way - surely the ideas of these dangerous fools have been rejected by the sane by now.

At the same time, Dawn has expressed her desire to not have to choose sides, to be able to partake freely from her two ancestral traditions and be a practicing Christian without giving up her Jewish heritage. Is this too much to ask? For some, clearly it is, but isn't America about the freedom to carve out one's own place in the world? America is full of every kind of hybrid: it isn't just that the country itself is a melting pot, the country is full of individuals who are THEMSELVES melting pots.

Racial purity is an old world myth. The last century gave unthinkable evidence of where concepts of enforced "purity" can lead; apparently no amount of suffering or destruction is enough for some people to become disabused of the notion that decisions as intensely personal as religion should be imposed from without, or that individuals should be prejudged by their religious affiliation, or that individuals shouldn't be allowed to change their religious affiliation if they so desire.

Just because Paul hates the Easter bunny doesn't mean that Dawn hates the menorah. She loves Jesus and Israel both, and most people, at least most Americans, can understand that. All she wants is a little internal peace. She deserves it.
posted by Eric at 5:28 PM

 
The 21st Century
We have entered the 21st century of Blogging! Not only do we have PayPal for your tipping pleasure, but we have a COMMENTS SECTION. Check below each entry: you can now makes comments. We love the emails - keep them coming - but for quicker, shorter responses, comment away.
posted by Eric at 3:29 PM

 
From Dawn Until Afternoon
I'm off to radio, back this afternoon. In the meantime, go to Dawn's site where much is a-brewing after a double dose of InstaPower last night.

posted by Eric at 10:47 AM

 
Of Wolfes and Tigers
Jeff Wolfe is a modest Libertarian blogger from Columbus, OH (and former candidate of Franklin County Commissioner), but he has all kinds of other activity on his site as well: a plethora of government and political links, amateur radio links, a tribute to English actor Jeremy Brett, sci-fi, humor and comics links.

The world is now so small that much of it fits inside a computer: the comics links led me to several sites dedicated to "Calvin and Hobbes," Bill Watterson's late great strip. This reminds me that not only did I go to Chagrin Falls High School with the notoriously reclusive and enigmatic Watterson, but he illustrated at least two stories I wrote for the school literary mag. He was a very quiet, unassuming fellow back then as well, but his prodigious talent was obvious, and he illustrated everything from the school paper to the yearbook. He married the CFHS guidance counselor's daughter, became rich and famous and retreated up his own sphincter. I'm going to track his ass down one of these days. You hear me Bill?
posted by Eric at 9:10 AM

 
The Seeker
Bill Quick - whose writing is both prolific AND in depth - hops on his search engine and debunks Jonathan Chait, Brendan Nyhan, ABC's The Note, and TAPPED in one fell swoop regarding George W. Bush's statements about budget deficits. After fact-checking all of the above, he turns around and fact-checks HIS OWN ASS. And Scott Rosenberg said bloggers can't do investigative journalism. Piffle.
posted by Eric at 8:40 AM

 
We Don't Want Your Help
Peter Beinart looks the gift horse of conservative Christian support for Israel in the mouth and dislikes what he sees:

Christian conservatives dress up their support for Israel in the language of anti-terrorism and democracy. But they pay scant attention to the fight against terrorism in biblically insignificant countries like Sri Lanka, India, and
the Philippines. And on Israel's behalf, they propose the most anti-democratic measures imaginable. In truth, there is no secular moral rationale for the Christian Right's support for Israel because, for the Christian Right, Israel's claims are moral only insofar as they are biblical. That runs counter to the mainstream Zionist tradition, one of the great achievements of which has been to establish moral claims to Jewish statehood--claims Israel incarnates as a liberal democratic state--that do not rely on scripture.

And it raises a question that Jewish allies of the Christian Right should ponder: What will people like Armey and Parshall do when Israel takes actions--such as leaving much of the West Bank--that undermine the biblical justification for its existence? Ultimately, if you don't love Israel for what it is, you can't be trusted to love it at all.

Beinart rather narrowly concludes that if you don't support his cause for the "right" reasons, he'd rather you not support it at all. I'm not convinced that American conservative Christians only support Israel for Messianic reasons: that they would abandon the cause should Israel eventually compromise and give up land in exchange for peace. I'm not willing to characterize our conservative Christians as so faithless. Barring the genocidal, I would take my support where I could get it in these troubled times.
posted by Eric at 10:03 PM

 
I Didn't Know There Were Dogs In Ohio
Hey, cool: after finding Kevin Holtsberry this morning, another Ohio blogger, Greg Hlatky, of A Dog's Life, checked in this afternoon. He's down in Morrow, near Cincinnati and writes penetratingly on politics, culture and SHOW DOGS. Now that's an angle. Check this out:

Naming dogs is an individual thing. Some people use themes and give their litters variations thereon. We did that in naming Satin (Soyara's Nights in White Satin) and Knight (Soyara's Song of the Night). Our most recent litter is out of Bubba and Possum and we tried to do a redneck theme, so two of the puppies are Honey (Soyara's Queen of the South) and Belle (Soyara's Belle of the Ball). Sometimes the theme is carried down several generations. Dream (Ch. Lanel's Sweet Dream of Soyara) is the dam of Uno (Ch. Soyara's Field of Dreams JC) and Misty (Ch. Soyara's Mystical Dream), who's the dam of Diva (Soyara's Beautiful Dreamer).

For the most part, we prefer to let puppies grow up a little bit and give themselves their call names. Then we come up with a registered name based on that. Sometimes it's by a particular behavioral trait. Rowdy (Ch. Soyara's Sounds of Silence CGC) got his name by screaming in the whelping box when his mother left to exercise. Lacey (Ch. Soyara's Chantilly Lace JC) got hers by showing an unusual facility for untying my lovely bride's shoelaces. Joy (Soyara's A Joy to Behold) is a happy-go-lucky girl.

Sometimes it's a physical characteristic. One of Misty's second litter was a red and white boy, marked quite unlike his tri-colored siblings. While he was a newborn we'd refer to him as "Red" but as we already had a dog named Fred and didn't need the confusion, he became Rufus. Since Allen Drury novels are my guilty passion, his registered name is Soyara A Shade of Difference (and I'd love to have pups registered as Advise and Consent, Capable of Honor, and The Promise of Joy). His sister was the smallest pup in the litter and is known as Lil' Bit (Soyara's Little Dream).

One pup out of Sylvia (Ch. Soyara's Whiter Shade of Pale) got his name in a unique way. He was the tiniest pup in the litter, less than one pound. He was born by C-section and it took a very long time to get him to start breathing. When he came home, he refused to nurse. He was sinking fast when I ran out to the store for Esbilac. He accepted that and eventually began to nurse on his own.

Among the many coolnesses of blogging is learning about all kinds of things you didn't even know you didn't know anything about. Like show dogs.
posted by Eric at 7:10 PM

 
Blogger Busking
Those of you who are regular readers have probably figured out by now that Tres Producers has become a full-time proposition. I'm working on a book, and I do the radio show once a week, and other writing here and there, but right now I blog the preponderance of the time. So we've finally added PayPal over there on the left. Any donations to the cause of any size will always be appreciated.

I'm very excited about the economic discussions under way, especially Jeff Jarvis's Blog Foundation idea. Nick Denton has an interesting idea of his own. There's a lot going on, but for now the tip jar is it. Thanks.
posted by Eric at 6:21 PM

 
Saudi Exposure
Anyone who has gone near a blog - especially Charles Johnson's great site - over the last six months or so knows what prissy, pampered, oil-slurping/gas-expelling, duplicitous, power-mongering, misogynistic, Islamist-placating sandworms the nabobs of the Saudi regime are.

There's this cozying up with Saddam, the man from whom our troops are supposedly protecting the fragile Saudis.

Or this item about Congress finally waking up and stating that U.S. servicewomen in Saudi Arabia should never be required or encouraged to wear Muslim-style head-to-toe robes again. That one gets a big fat freaking DUH.

Here Charles reminds us that

We should have known what was about to happen on September 11. We should have been aware of the intense hatred, fueled by dirty oil money. The
signs were everywhere. Saudi terrorist Osama Bin Laden told us what he was planning. Many times. To our faces. And the Saudis continue to tell us every day, to our faces, that they’re not finished with us yet.

Yep, 15 of the hijackers were Saudis, along with plot-Svengali bin Laden. The Saudis: our partners in the Gulf (there are more comments on that post than some sites gets visitors).

And wrapping up our Saudi-related tour of Little Green Football posts JUST FOR THE LAST TWO DAYS is this little item under the heading "Oil Ticks Mouth Off" (love that title):

Well, the petro-parasites of the Saudi entity are issuing empty threats again.
If Mideast peace efforts fail, the United States will not be left unscathed by the "dangerous result," a Saudi prince said Wednesday.

"If things deteriorate to pleasantries and the Palestinian issue is handled by slow-working committees, peace will be shaken and replaced by more rejection and violence, and at that time, the losses will be proportionate to the size of every side, and certainly America will have a share of the dangerous result," said Prince Sultan bin Turki, a nephew of Saudi King Fahd.

So, thanks to Charles - and many others including Bill Quick - we no longer look benignly upon our eccentric Saudi pals, even though oil-besotted George W. Bush still snurffles Saudi glute.

Just to make sure that this particular "special relationship" should be as dead as Tawny Kitaen's acting career, let's consider Jerry Taylor's comment on the Saudis from NRO:

the Saudi regime has pursued a policy of economic predation and political blackmail for as long as they've dominated world oil markets.

A review of that record is long overdue. In 1967, for instance, Saudi Arabia led an ineffectual oil embargo against the United States to protest our support for Israel in the Six Day War. In 1971, the Saudis again threatened an embargo lest the consuming nations accepted massive new OPEC production taxes, a levy codified in the so-called "Tehran Agreement" that began the long march towards higher prices. The agreement, which was supposed to last five years, was effectively torn up after only six months once the Saudis realized that they could extort more money from the consuming nations. In early 1973, Saudi oil minister Sheik Yamani on two occasions threatened "economic war," warning that "industries and civilizations would collapse" if consuming nations tried to fight further OPEC's price increases.

....In 1978, OPEC, under Sheik Yamani's direction, quietly established a goal of raising the price of crude oil to just below the cost of producing synthetic liquid fuels, which suggested a price of $60 a barrel (a whopping $136 in today's terms). They began their campaign in January 1979 when a series of Saudi production cutbacks set-off the second price explosion, culminating in prices at $34 a barrel ($60 a barrel in today's money) by October 1981.

....After desperate Saudi attempts to stave-off collapse failed, Vice President George Bush traveled to Riyadh in 1986 to implore the Saudis to arrest the price slide because — I kid you not — the administration feared the effect of cheap oil on the world economy.

....Once the price war was over the Saudis encouraged Iraq to put the screws to Kuwait to punish that country's history of cartel-breaking overproduction. Only when "the enforcer turned robber," according to MIT professor Morry Adelman, did Saudi Arabia reverse course and call for Western intervention. But even then the Saudis fed the resulting price spike by refusing to increase production for over a month. Their refusal to fully tap their excess production capacity prolonged the economic damage.

....So, does a well-functioning cartel really serve to stabilize prices? In the past several years world oil prices have bounced around between $10 and $35 a barrel, which doesn't suggest a great deal of stability. In fact, the cartel makes prices more unstable than they otherwise would be. That's because higher prices and higher revenues enable cartel members to withstand financial pressure to cheat on their production quotas, which promotes still higher prices. Lower prices, on the other hand, strengthen the need for cash, which weakens the resistance to quota cheating and promotes still lower prices. Thus, market movement in either direction tends to speed-up-not slow-down-the velocity of price movement, making markets less rather than more stable. Indeed, the oil price explosions faced over the past 30 years have been unrelated to scarcity and entirely due to the cartel.

....The bottom line is that the Saudis, no matter what they might like us to believe, are not doing us any favors by selling us oil at $24 a barrel that, without the collusion, would probably go for no more than a third of that. Threats that the Saudis might turn hostile if we don't change course in the Middle East are laughable — they went hostile a long time ago.

Okay, so the sheiks of crude aren't even our oil buddies. They are our buddies in no way; they are Saddam-lite and should be allowed to join every other "kingdom" that has ever existed in the grand bidet of history.
posted by Eric at 5:33 PM

 
The Fragile
While we're on baseball - all fans know the DL has become more and more crowded over the years. There are many culprits: weight training, over-protective agents, litigation-fearing management, too much money. But what are the facts? Official Major League Baseball historian Jerome Holtzman tracked down some answers:

Randy Hundley, an iron-man catcher with the Cubs who had a
nine-year big league career:

"The clubs are more protective of pitchers than they've ever been. The agents have a lot to do with it. They don't want their players to get hurt. There is so much money involved. They give guys extra time to make sure they're OK. When I played we didn't have agents looking after us. You might not think it's important but it's a big difference.

"If a pitcher hurt his arm or blew his elbow out he emptied his locker and went home. Nowadays, they have all this technology. They can repair tendons and ligaments and there is Tommy John surgery. For a year after his surgery he couldn't hold a ball with his palm to the ground. And then he came back and pitched 14 more years. Who would have ever thought that would be possible? It was a miracle.

....Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller, a strikeout king:

"If they had been raised on a farm they would be stronger. I was lucky. I was brought up on a farm in Van Meter, Iowa, 17 miles west of Des Moines. We grew wheat, oats and corn. Good fresh air in the corn fields. I never heard of a barbell or gymnasium. We baled hay.

"Opening Day in '37, I popped a ligament. I had 13 strikeouts in six innings. I didn't pitch again until July 4. It was the only time I was on the DL. There was no pitch count. When I started I averaged about 130 pitches. A few times I threw as many as 160, 170. I went deep into the count and had a lot of walks.

"Today, there is a lot of pressure on the managers and coaches. That's why they pitch only six or seven innings. They don't want to be blamed if their star pitchers have arm problems. The trainers may be accessories to the fact. They're all covering their rear ends. Today, that's part of our society. It's done in all businesses, not just baseball."

....From Don Zminda of Stats, Inc.:

"According to our records, since 1990, a Major League team uses the DL, on an average, 25 times. It usually goes up every year. Players with most days on the DL since 1990 are Bret Saberhagen, 1,123 days, and Lenny Dykstra, 1,091.

"The active position-players with most days lost are Moises Alou, 640 days, and Sandy Alomar, Jr., 567. Matt Mantei leads the pitchers, 734 days.

"Since 1990, six active position-players have not been on the DL -- Fred McGriff, Rafael Palmeiro, John Olerud, Shawn Green, Garret Anderson and Ray Durham. Tom Glavine is the only pitcher with 650 innings who has not been on the DL"

And last but certainly not least, Bill Weiss, historical consultant for Sports-Ticker Boston:

"In 1941, for the first time, a club was allowed to put two players on the disabled list. It was then 60 days. Nine years later the DL was reduced to 30 days. In 1966 there were two lists, 60 days for serious injuries, 15 days for the others.

"Prior to 1941 if a player was seriously hurt he was told to go home, was taken off the payroll, and advised to return when he was ready to play. Because the reserve clause bound them to their club they were prevented from making a new connection. The present rule was adopted in 1973; players were then fully compensated and credited with pension time. Also there was no limit to the number of disabled players."

Wussies - they should all drink heavily, carry unregistered shotguns, shoot steroids, and smoke marijuana like Chuck Finley. (Thanks to bro A)
posted by Eric at 3:14 PM

 
Squirrels Finding Nuts, Monkeys Tossing Waste
After the Tribe snagged a quick pair of wins out of thin air, the schizo baseballers may or may not be headed back from the Land of the Suck.

Meanwhile, the Finley-Kitaen marital dispute is turning into a dung-flinging fest in the monkey house:

- Actress Tawny Kitaen and her husband, Indians pitcher Chuck Finley, accused one another of domestic violence and drug abuse in dueling court documents obtained yesterday by the Associated Press.

Petitioning to regain custody of their two children, Kitaen claimed that Finley started a fight that led to her arrest in April. She also accused him of alcohol and drug abuse, and said he took steroids.

In his petition to keep custody of the children, Finley alleged that Kitaen's "acts of domestic violence and chronic drug abuse place the children at risk."

The petitions were filed May 2 in Orange County Superior Court. A hearing on Kitaen's request has been continued until June 3.

Finley dismissed his wife's accusations.

"My attorney has already commented on it, but I will say it's all bull," Finley said after the Indians' 3-1 victory over the Orioles last night at Jacobs Field. "It's a typical custody battle. I can't believe she left out the cross-dressing."

Claiming that his wife is addicted to prescription medication, Finley's petition stated, "Her abuse of drugs, legal or illegal, impair her abilities to provide a safe environment for the children."

Finley filed divorce papers and obtained a temporary restraining order after his wife allegedly attacked him in their car. The court order also gave him temporary custody of the couple's daughters, ages 9 and 3.

Kitaen, who appeared in such movies as "Bachelor Party" and "California Girls," is accused of attacking her husband on April 1 as the two were returning home from dinner. Police officers said they saw abrasions and scrapes on Finley's body.

Kitaen, 40, has pleaded innocent to two misdemeanor counts of domestic violence. She faces up to a year in jail and $6,000 in fines, if convicted.

She alleges in the petition that Finley started the fight in the car by grabbing her leg and twisting it, and that she kicked him in self-defense as they were driving from the restaurant to their upscale Newport Beach home.

In the documents, she said she wants custody of her children because she is concerned for their safety.

"I have observed the petitioner [Finley] as a heavy drinker. Petitioner also is a heavy marijuana smoker. I have also witnessed petitioner take illegal steroids. . .. He has previously bragged to me that he knows how to get around drug testing with the baseball league," it read. In fact, major-league players are not required to submit to drug and steroid testing under the terms of their contract with the owners.

I am well aware that there are two sides to every story and I'm sure Finley isn't perfect, but this hag should do the world a favor and impale herself on her spiked heels, although it is far too late to leave behind a beautiful corpse.
posted by Eric at 2:44 PM

 
Time
NO, NO, NO it can't be true, but it is: Kristen Louise Olsen is 18 years old today!! She's an adult, she's not a minor - she's a major. She can vote and join the Army and stuff (I don't have to pay child-support anymore!).

Wow, I remember changing her diaper, and when she smeared cake all over herself on her 1st birthday, and when she was chased by a goose at Pollywog Park and all kinds of other embarrassing things I won't talk about now.

She graduates from high school in a couple of weeks. I'm so proud of her.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SWEETIE, I LOVE YOU
Dad
(Thanks for the tribute Tony, you rule! It's K-R-I-S-T-E-N, by the way, but it's the thought that counts, buddy)
posted by Eric at 1:38 PM

 
President Signs Blog Bill
Fellow Bloggers... This action is critical, I'm ecstatic our president signed it:

Remarks by the President Upon Signing the Blog Bill

Room 450
Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building

7:46 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, and welcome to Washington's grand old building, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building -- or, as we now call it, the Ike. (Laughter.)

Today's event is being broadcast by Blog Radio to bloggers and pundits all across our country. Hardworking bloggers and pundits, whether they be from Texas or Maine, from Mississippi or California, are up early and are working hard. And this morning I want to talk about the tremendous contributions that they make, that our blog and pundit families make to America, the support they deserve, and why I am pleased to sign the Blog Security and Pundit Investment Act of 2002.

I want to thank the members of Congress who are here -- Senator Harkin, Congressman Combest, the leaders in both the House and the Senate. I appreciate you all coming. And when I sign this bill, I'd like for you all to come up here and watch me sign it.

I appreciate Secretary Ann Veneman, who is here. I want to thank her for her hard work, and her staff for their hard work as well.

And I want to thank the members of the blog and punditry groups who represent the people who work the blogosphere. I want to thank you all for your efforts and for your concern.

American blog and pundit families embody some of the best values of our nation: hard work and risk-taking, love of the land and love of our country. Blogging is not the first industry of America - farming is - but it is the industry that informs us, the industry that amuses us, and the industry that increasingly provides more of our reading. The success of America's bloggers and pundits is essential to the success of the American economy.

I was honored to be the governor of the second-biggest blog state in the union. I understand how hard bloggers have to work to make a living. I know they face tough challenges.

I recently spent some time with some of my neighbors at the coffee shop in Crawford, Texas. I know how hard many struggle. Their livelihood depends on things they cannot control: literacy rates, balky servers, uncertain spell-checking.

They need a blog bill that provides support and help when times are tough. And that is why I'm signing this bill today.

This bill is generous, and will provide a safety net for bloggers. And it will do so without encouraging overproduction and depressing prices. It will allow bloggers and pundits to plan and operate based on market realities, not government dictates.

In the past, word rates and the minimum price bloggers and pundits received for some of their babbling were set too high. This practice made the problem worse by encouraging surplus production, thereby forcing prices lower. This bill better balances word rates, and better matches them to market prices.

It reduces government interference in the market, and in bloggers' and pundits' writing decisions. The blog bill supports our commitment to open speculation, and complies with our obligations to the World Writing Organization.

Americans cannot read all that America's bloggers and pundits produce. And therefore, it makes sense to sell more essays abroad. Today, 25 percent of U.S. blog income is generated by exports, which means that access to foreign markets is crucial to the livelihood of our bloggers and pundits.

Let me put it as plainly as I can: we want to be selling our opinions and our analysis and our endless speculation to people around the world who need to read.

My administration is working hard to open up markets. I told the people, I said if you give me a chance to be the President, we're not going to treat our blog industry as a secondary citizen when it comes to opening up markets. And I mean that. I understand how important the blog economy is to the future of our country.

To help, this new law helps keep our international trade commitments. And that's important for America to understand. And because I believe the best way to help our bloggers and pundits is trade, I need trade promotion authority, particularly from the Senate. The House has passed it; I need it from the Senate. Soon.
(Laughter and applause.)

This bill offers incentives for good English practices on working blogs. For bloggers and pundits, for people who make a living on the language, every day is Better English Day. There's no better stewards of the language than people who rely on the productivity of the language. And we can work with our bloggers and pundits to help improve their grammar and vocabulary.

To help them live up to the newer and higher grammar and vocabulary standards, this bill expands the English Conservation Program, which provides financial assistance to our bloggers and pundits to encourage sound usage. And the bill will greatly enhance the abilities of our bloggers and pundits to protect spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and that's important.

This bill breaks a bad fiscal habit. In the past, Congress would pass a multi-year blog bill, and then every year after continue to pass supplemental bills. These unpredictable supplemental payments made it difficult for Congress to live within its budget. It also created uncertainty for bloggers and pundits, and their creditors. This bill is generous enough, the bill I'm going to sign is generous enough to eliminate the need for supplemental support later this year and in the future, and therefore adds the kind of reliability that bloggers and pundits need.

This bill is also a compassionate bill. This law means that legal immigrants can now receive help and food stamps after being here for five years. It means that you can have an elderly blog worker, somebody here legally in America who's worked hard to make a living and who falls on hard times, that person can receive help from a compassionate government.

It means that you can have a head of a family who's been working hard, been here for five years, been a part of our economy, been legally working. And that person falls on hard times, our government should help them with food stamps. And this bill allows that to happen.

It's not a perfect bill, I know that. But you know, no bill ever is. There's no such thing as a perfect bill -- otherwise I'd get to write every one of them. (Laughter.)

You know, for example, I thought it was important to have what they call Blog Savings Accounts to help bloggers and pundits manage the many risks they face. I thought that should be an important part of the bill. It didn't happen; I'm going to continue to work for it, work with the members here on it.

I also believe strongly there's more that we should do for our blog community. You know, one of the best things we have done for pundits and bloggers is to eliminate the death tax. It's a really important part of making sure that blogs and websites stay in our families. The death tax needs to be -- the repeal of the death tax needs to be made permanent. That happened in the House; I hope it happens in the Senate soon. It's a good signal that we care deeply about those who live on the word and make a living.

The blog bill is important legislation, and it meets important needs. The bill will strengthen the blog economy, and that's important. It will strengthen the blog economy over the long term. It will promote blogger independence, and preserve the blog way of life for generations. It helps America's bloggers, and therefore it helps America.

It is now my honor to sign the bill. And for any of the members who dare have their picture taken with me -- (laughter) -- I welcome.

SENATOR LEAHY: Or vice versa.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, or vice versa. (Laughter.) That wasn't just -- for those listening on radio, that wasn't just some quack yelling out. That was a member of the United States Senate. (Laughter.)

Please come for the bill signing. Welcome. (Applause.)

(The bill was signed.) (Applause.)

posted by Eric at 11:17 AM

 
As Edgar Winter Said to George Hamilton: "Creepy!"
A. Beam and I are so yin/yang opposite/simpatico that we bleed inside each other's wounds and then argue about it! First there was the Adam Curry Affair, then the outlandishly self-referential L.A. Brain Trust fraternization.

There is the fact that he is always sparring with Dawn Olsen electronically; I am too: IN PERSON.

But then, AN ASTONISHING DISCONNECT: the Focused Luminescent One made reference to the great Warren Zevon Tuesday. In a bizarre confluence of TIME AND SPACE, I, completely independently and with no collusion beyond mystical entrainment, made reference to another song from the same album on the same day!!

So far so simpatico; but then: NEITHER ONE OF US MADE REFERENCE TO THE OTHER'S WARREN ZEVON REFERENCE, breaking the Great Chain of Being. I can only hope it is not too late.
posted by Eric at 10:04 AM

 
Music and the Middle East
Another blog I have neglected is Tonecluster by Jason Rubenstein who is a composer, computer scientist, writer, and student of history. He has a plethora of fine thoughts on the Middle East in particular including this one about True Believers, this one on the world's view of Israel, and this one on Arafat.
posted by Eric at 9:14 AM

 
Buckeye Blogger
Hey, I just found another Ohio blogger (let us know if you're out there) - our pack is small but our bark is loud - Kevin Holtsberry from down in Columbus, home of the Blue Jackets, Ohio State University, and the infamous High Street.

I had a friend at Wittenberg from Columbus who was shot in the leg on High Street in the '70s. Fortunately the bullet went between his bone and muscle causing relatively little permanent damage, but making a big old hole that he could wink like an eye after it healed. He used to get a lot of girls that way. Girls like weird stuff sometimes.

Back to Kevin: he has some very real and existential thoughts about his grandmother's ill health snapping his life into focus. Check him out. Go Buckeyes.
posted by Eric at 8:52 AM

 
Big Blog Dirt
At last - the wait is over: Dawn's interview with iconoclastic, irascible media blogger Marc Weisblott sizzles onto the small screen: favorite blogs, most hated blogs, celebrity blogs, it's all there. Read or run for cover.
posted by Eric at 8:48 PM

 
A Little More Theology
I've been having a fascinating (at least for me) conversation with Mark of Minute Particulars regarding aspects of faith and reason. I'm just sort of a generalized "thinker" and not really an expert on anything in particular whereas Mark is a real life theologian (at least as far as I'm concerned).

I was raised Lutheran, and while I don't go to church all that often, it's not an active rejection so much as a matter of laziness and the fact that I REALLY like to sleep in on Sundays, the only day I have that option. I still believe all the things I have always believed, but I imagine I'm a lot more private with it than I should be.

So anyway, I was educated rather intensely in Christianity as a child, but that was a long time ago, so on matters of doctrine I really have to do some dredging to bring up the facts, unlike, say, Mark. He has a very compelling site and his reaction to my latest reaction is a textbook example of clear thinking. Check him out here - a snippet:

If this makes any sense to you, then, even if you think it’s nonsense, you can see that belief and faith in this context has nothing to do with probability and everything to do with recognizing a person and the manner in which we can participate in his or her knowledge. In this sense, the adage that “theology” is “faith seeking understanding” makes a lot of sense. In this sense too, believing is not a shot in the dark, a wager, or a bet, but a very reasonable thing to do.

posted by Eric at 6:50 PM

 
Viva La Muerte
Our good friend Noah has become a regular contributor - we don't want to lose him but can his own blog be far off? More insight:

Eric
I couldn’t agree more with Jonathan Chait’s assessment that it’s hope, rather than despair, that’s fueling Palestinian violence at this time. Actually, I could agree more - I think “hope” falls short of the mark when it comes to describing the apocalyptic, millenarian sort of expectation - an exultation - that appears to be gripping Islamists all over the world right now, generated in no small part by the events of September 11.

Something along the lines of “Look how a small group of mujahadeen succeeded in toppling the Twin Towers and strike the Pentagon. Surely great events are now at hand.”

It gives rise to pronouncements of mullahs predicting the imminent fall of the U.S. as Allah’s will, as well as to the gonzo, viva-la-muerte spirit animating the whole suicide bomber death cult. Who can believe that “ending the occupation” or establishing a Palestinian state will be sufficient to placate anyone who thinks and feels this way?
Noah

posted by Eric at 5:18 PM

 
The Pathology of Suicide Bombing
In addition to being "illegal" per the Oslo Accords, according to Joel Singer in our last post, suicide bombing is also perversely immoral. "Immoral" is not strong enough: perhaps we can coin the term "anti-moral," as in morality twisted back upon itself.

David Brooks takes on suicide bombing in the new Atlantic:

Suicide bombing is the crack cocaine of warfare. It doesn't just inflict death and terror on its victims; it intoxicates the people who sponsor it. It unleashes the deepest and most addictive human passions—the thirst for vengeance, the desire for religious purity, the longing for earthly glory and eternal salvation. Suicide bombing isn't just a tactic in a larger war; it overwhelms the political goals it is meant to serve. It creates its own logic and transforms the culture of those who employ it. This is what has happened in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Over the past year suicide bombing has dramatically changed the nature of the conflict.

Brooks' conflation of two wildly addictive phenomena is apt: the rush becomes its own end. If a normally "transgressive" act - killing oneself, using drugs - can be manipulated into a "good" via a combination of sophistry and practicality, anti-morality has won the day. In the case of crack, the ghetto rationalization for the self-obliterating buzz has been, "There's no work, no hope, no one cares - why not?"

Brooks makes the suicide bombing case:

Before 1983 there were few suicide bombings. The Koran forbids the taking of one's own life, and this prohibition was still generally observed. But when the United States stationed Marines in Beirut, the leaders of the Islamic resistance movement Hizbollah began to discuss turning to this ultimate terrorist weapon. Religious authorities in Iran gave it their blessing, and a wave of suicide bombings began, starting with the attacks that killed about sixty U.S. embassy workers in April of 1983 and about 240 people in the Marine compound at the airport in October. The bombings proved so successful at driving the United States and, later, Israel out of Lebanon that most lingering religious concerns were set aside.

Hey, if it works, it must be Allah's will; and besides, it's so transgressively satisfying: obliterate yourself and as many of the enemy around you as possible in an apparent act of immorality that is redeemed by its effectiveness in combating the enemies of Allah, so that what appears to be a ticket to hell is in super double secret reality a one way pass to paradise.

This exercise is not of course peculiar to Islam: religion has been twisted in such ways since before the beliefs of man were even recognized as "religion." This is why it is so vital to return repeatedly to the source of the beliefs for context and perspective, to cut through the accretion of opinion and interpretation and ask the simple question, for example: "Would Jesus approve of this?" I think in the case of suicide bombing, the answer would be a resounding "No!" I can't imagine that Muhammad would have approved either, although as a political leader and conqueror, his writing is a bit more ambiguous, as I discussed in this post based upon this article from last month:

Yes, the Koran tells Muslims not to "kill or destroy yourselves" (Surah 4:29) – but only when doing so is outside the cause of Allah. Dying for Allah is not viewed as a waste of life.
This rather biased report on the religious justifications for suicide bombing nonetheless makes some hard points:

Consider these verses:

"When ye meet the unbelievers, smite at their necks," Muhammad commands in Surah 47:4. "Those who are slain in the way of Allah – he will never let their deeds be lost."

"Soon will he guide them and improve their condition," he continues in Surah 47:5, "and admit them to the Garden (of Paradise), which he has announced for them."

And look at Surah 4:74: "To him who fighteth in the cause of Allah – whether he is slain or gets victory – soon shall we give him a reward of great (value)."

And Surah 3:157: "If ye are slain, or die, in the way of Allah, forgiveness and mercy from Allah are far better than all they could amass."

All of this is open to interpretation, but the facts are there:
"The only way Muslims can have assurance of salvation and eternal life is by becoming a martyr for the cause of Islam," said Reza F. Safa, author of "Inside Islam."

"To a Muslim," he added, "dying and killing for the cause of Islam is not only an honor, but also a way of pleasing Allah." That explains how a Palestinian grandmother could proudly pose with her beaming teen-age grandson for a final photograph knowing that just hours later he would strap himself with explosives and eviscerate Israeli "infidels" – and himself – in the name of Allah. This adoring old woman was actually celebrating the boy's imminent death, as if he were about to cross the stage at his high-school graduation ceremony. But to her, a death certificate sealed by Allah meant more than any diploma. She said she was happy – overjoyed that her grandson would soon disembowel himself – because she knew he would be instantly transported to a better place.

...The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria, which according to Safa has helped the Palestinians against the Israelis, has this as its slogan: "The Koran is our constitution, the prophet is our guide; Death for the glory of Allah is our greatest ambition."

Greater than land or voting rights. Greater than family or love. Above all, death.

Regardless of Muhammad's thoughts on the matter, suicide bombing has come to be accepted by a wide swath of Islamic society and has become an epidemic over the last two years. Brooks:

Suicide bombings nonetheless remained relatively unusual until two years ago, after the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat walked out of the peace conference at Camp David—a conference at which Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, had offered to return to the Palestinians parts of Jerusalem and almost all of the West Bank.

At that point the psychology shifted. We will not see peace soon, many Palestinians concluded, but when it eventually comes, we will get everything we want. We will endure, we will fight, and we will suffer for that final victory. From then on the struggle (at least from the Palestinian point of view) was no longer about negotiation and compromise—about who would get which piece of land, which road or river. The red passions of the bombers obliterated the grays of the peace process. Suicide bombing became the tactic of choice, even in circumstances where a terrorist could have planted a bomb and then escaped without injury. Martyrdom became not just a means but an end.

This is the appalling cult of death: the anti-human, anti-moral, all or nothing easy way out. As we discussed earlier today in relationship to the Chait article, suicide bombings are not the result of despair, and Brooks indicates they are not conducted by the hopeless:

From 1996 to 1999 the Pakistani journalist Nasra Hassan interviewed almost 250 people who were either recruiting and training bombers or preparing to go on a suicide mission themselves. "None of the suicide bombers—they ranged in age from eighteen to thirty-eight—conformed to the typical profile of the suicidal personality," Hassan wrote in The New Yorker. "None of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed." The Palestinian bombers tend to be devout, but religious fanaticism does not explain their motivation. Nor does lack of opportunity, because they also tend to be well educated.

Often a bomber believes that a close friend or a member of his family has been killed by Israeli troops, and this is part of his motivation. According to most experts, though, the crucial factor informing the behavior of suicide bombers is loyalty to the group. Suicide bombers go through indoctrination processes similar to the ones that were used by the leaders of the Jim Jones and Solar Temple cults.

These educated, if resentful people are inculcated into the "cult of death," their love of death taught to them:

They are instructed in the details of jihad, reminded of the need for revenge, and reassured about the rewards they can expect in the afterlife. They are told that their families will be guaranteed a place with God, and that there are also considerable rewards for their families in this life, including cash bonuses of several thousand dollars donated by the government of Iraq, some individual Saudis, and various groups sympathetic to the cause. Finally, the bombers are told that paradise lies just on the other side of the detonator, that death will feel like nothing more than a pinch.

Arab media contribute to the loathsome cause:

Suicide bombing is, after all, perfectly suited to the television age. The bombers' farewell videos provide compelling footage, as do the interviews with families. The bombings themselves produce graphic images of body parts and devastated buildings. Then there are the "weddings" between the martyrs and dark-eyed virgins in paradise (announcements that read like wedding invitations are printed in local newspapers so that friends and neighbors can join in the festivities), the marches and celebrations after each attack, and the displays of things bought with the cash rewards to the families. Woven together, these images make gripping packages that can be aired again and again.

....Thus suicide bombing has become phenomenally popular. According to polls, 70 to 80 percent of Palestinians now support it— making the act more popular than Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah, or any of the other groups that sponsor it, and far more popular than the peace process ever was. In addition to satisfying visceral emotions, suicide bombing gives average Palestinians, not just PLO elites, a chance to play a glorified role in the fight against Israel.

The vast majority of an entire people held in thrall by the crack-like rush of gory death. Only 20-30% of their people just say no to the pathology.

Unfortunately, after laying all of this out so well, Brooks then concludes with a misguided, simplistic solution:

Somehow conditions must be established that would allow the frenzy of suicide bombings to burn itself out. To begin with, the Palestinian and Israeli populations would have to be separated; contact between them inflames the passions that feed the attacks. That would mean shutting down the vast majority of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and creating a buffer zone between the two populations. Palestinian life would then no longer be dominated by checkpoints and celebrations of martyrdom; it would be dominated by quotidian issues such as commerce, administration, and garbage collection.

The idea of a buffer zone, which is gaining momentum in Israel, is not without problems. Where, exactly, would the buffer be? Terrorist groups could shoot missiles over it. But it's time to face the reality that the best resource the terrorists have is the culture of martyrdom. This culture is presently powerful, but it is potentially fragile. If it can be interrupted, if the passions can be made to recede, then the Palestinians and the Israelis might go back to hating each other in the normal way, and at a distance. As with many addictions, the solution is to go cold turkey.

I'm afraid the solution to this culture is convincing defeat and a new regime for the Palestinians, as we have been discussing today. Steven Postrel made THE convincing case against separation here last month, and his position was reinforced by Warren Bass shortly thereafter.

I will conclude the same way I did last month on the Islamic/Palestinian cult of death:

No matter what our beliefs regarding the afterlife, we live here and now on earth. We owe it to ourselves and our maker, whoever he or she may be, to give our all to this life.

Suicide is never heroism, never brave, it is always the easiest way to deal with the problems of life. It isn’t taking responsibility: it’s the absence of it, the voluntary abdication of it. We wonder why the Islamic world has fallen so far behind the West on virtually every measurable scale, an underlying cause could well be that the value of life in the here and now isn’t properly valued, isn’t held as sacred.

Life is always hard: there must be an underlying assumption that it is always worth living with all our might, for as long as possible - that the “better place” can, indeed must, wait. We can never be encouraged to hasten our departure or life - all we have for now - will not be credited with its full value. Religious leaders - and in this case Islamic leaders - must unambiguously assert the sacred value of life here on earth or their people will never put out the effort sufficient to achieve their full potentials: physical, moral or otherwise.

Addendum: James Taranto in Best of the Web Today provides another grim piece of the death cult puzzle:

Enemies of the United States are spreading on the Internet a gruesome piece of propaganda," CBS News reports. "It is a videotape of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered earlier this year in Pakistan. And it is being used by terrorists to recruit new soldiers for the cause."

..."Snuff films"--movies depicting an actual murder for the purpose of entertainment--have long been rumored to exist. But according to the urban myth-busters at Snopes.com, "Not so much as one snuff film has been found. Time and again, what is originally decried in the press as a film of a murder turns out, upon further investigation, to be a fake."

...Muslim fundamentalists often boast of their own piety and complain about the "moral decay" of the West; this Arab News article lamenting the influence of MTV on young Saudis is an example. Now it appears their coreligionists have generated a cultural product so obscene that it has no precedent in the purportedly depraved West.

posted by Eric at 3:25 PM

 
The Legality of Oslo
Joel Singer of the Legal Times clarifies many questions I had about the details of the Oslo Accords and their current status:

Given the recent bloodshed in the Middle East, people might be forgiven for forgetting the significance of Sept. 13, 1993. That day, under the welcoming arms of President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, publicly sealing the Mutual Recognition Agreement those leaders had signed days earlier. That agreement was the precursor to approximately 10 subsequent agreements known collectively as the Oslo Accords. While no one seems to be explicitly acknowledging it today, a number of broad and indisputable legal principles underlying the Oslo Accords still survive, at least formally.

Among those issues is the current status of "Palestine":

under both international law and explicit language later agreed to by the Palestinians, Palestine is not yet a sovereign state.

....the PLO argued that, as a sovereign state, it was immune from suit under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this argument in Klinghoffer v. S.N.C. Achille Lauro (1991), explaining that the PLO did not meet any of the internationally accepted criteria necessary for an entity to qualify as a "state." Those criteria, according to the court, are (1) a defined territory; (2) with a permanent population; (3) under control of a government; and (4) having the capacity to engage in formal relations with other such entities.

The Palestinians are obligated under the Accords to fight terrorism, and they have no right to fight against the Israeli "occupation":

It is clear that for Israel, no Oslo Accords provisions are more "material" or "essential" to the accords' "object or purpose" than the Palestinian commitments to fight against terrorism and prevent violence. It is also clear that the Palestinians have failed to carry out these obligations and that this failure is a material breach of the Oslo Accords.

....in the Oslo Accords the PLO, "representing the Palestinian people," undertook "to renounce the use of terrorism and other acts of violence and [to] assume responsibility over all PLO elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance, prevent violations and discipline violators." Subsequent Oslo Accords agreements included numerous additional commitments to cooperate with Israel in security matters, fight against terrorism, and prevent attacks against Israel. Therefore, the claim that the Palestinians have a right to fight against the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza is, pursuant to the Oslo Accords, clearly baseless.

Singer then addresses the various possible solutions out of the current stalemate, which he concludes are all fraught with difficulty. Until such time as the Palestinian authority can prevent terrorist attacks upon Israel - and the current authority under Arafat has not only not prevented the attacks but has in fact fostered them - it is Israel's right and duty to defend itself by any means necessary. Singer makes clear it is the Palestinians who have violated the Accords, legally and morally. Only they can make amends and that appears impossible under the current leadership.
posted by Eric at 11:38 AM

 
Tocqueville, History and the Palestinians
Jonathan Chait's "Exploding Myths" says Israel's war on terrorism is working, contrary to the liberal/State Department party line of

Palestinians resort to terrorism out of despair. The corollary to this theory is that all Israeli military action will inevitably backfire since it simply makes Palestinians more desperate and angry. For those who believe this--a group consisting of most liberal newspaper editors, the foreign policy establishment, and virtually the entire outside world----the case against Israeli military action (such as the recent one in the West Bank) is simply an a priori truth.

This fallacy also ignores history. Palestinian terrorism does not result from Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but from Israel's existence.

History diametrically contradicts the root cause theory of despair:

Suicide bombings started only after the 1993 Oslo Accords, which provided Palestinians with their best opportunity for a state. They intensified massively after Israel withdrew from Lebanon and offered a series of generous territorial concessions.

If anything, then, history suggests that Palestinian violence results not from desperation but from hope. I'm not saying things are quite this simple. People's brains work in different ways. Some Palestinians are radicalized by despair and pacified by hope. For others the reverse is true. But historical facts mesh better with the idea that Palestinian violence results from Israeli weakness than with the idea that it results from Israeli strength. The Palestinians may never really accept Israel's right to exist, but they may make peace if they conclude that destroying Israel is impossible.

A corollary to the "hope" theory is found originally in Tocqueville:

As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his treatise on the French Revolution, "The most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways. Only consummate statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when, after a long spell of oppressive rule, he sets to improving the lot of his subjects." Chaos rides in on rising expectations.

This would seem to argue against any kind of incrementalism in dealing with the Palestinians and would argue for the Hansonian/Quickian notion that only humiliating defeat can disabuse the Palestinians of their notion that Israel can be somehow shoveled into the sea or buried in the sand. In the meantime, only vigorous military action to keep the pressure on the terrorists can hope to suppress the daily threat to Israeli civilian life and limb.

Chait's next point puts the whole thing in stark perspective:

Even if an Israeli charm offensive could convince an overwhelming majority of Palestinians to reject suicide bombing, even a tiny minority of holdouts--say 100 or 200 volunteers a year out of a population of nearly 4 million--could sustain a massive terror campaign. Trying to protect Israel from suicide bombers by dampening Palestinian despair rather than fighting terrorism directly, then, is sort of like safeguarding your house by trying to give every potential burglar in town a well-paying job rather than installing an alarm.

The time for appeasement is over: only the shrillest of alarms and taking the fight to the "burglars" will defeat this "crime wave" and the misguided notions that underlie it.
posted by Eric at 10:50 AM

 
Lucre: Filthy and Otherwise
I'm very pleased to see that Richard Bennett, who is obviously intelligent and broadly knowledgeable if periodically cranky, has turned his attention to the Jarvis Blog Foundation idea, and especially the panorama of reactions buzzing about blogtopia. He addresses the pollute-with-cash argument:

This post from web elf Matt Haughey on Jarvis' Big Idea is interesting, in a way:
I'm skeptical of paid journalists in general, and the media outlets that employ them. I've always tried to maintain a healthy skepticism of weblogs (especially post-Kaycee), but it's usually easy to spot a writer's bias, opinions, and general viewpoint on subjects that cross their site. Throwing money into the mix would no doubt spike my bullshit detectors, as the motivation to post changes from personal satisfaction to personal checking accounts.
It never ceases to amaze me that some technicians, generally of the Chomskyite school, feel that other professionals have an obligation to give their services away for free. Would this post sound at all rational if we substituted the word "programmers" for "journalists?"

But there is a segment of the blogging public that undoubtedly believes that blogging is Free Journalism, just as they believe Open Source is Free Software ... But the reality of Free Software is that much of it's written by consultants as a resume-builder, for which they're compensated in contracts, and the rest is written by employees of service companies like Red Hat as part of an overall business plan. There's no real difference between a programmer at VA Linux or one at Microsoft, except the Microsoft guy is better-paid. Similarly, many journalists publish blogs for the interaction with their readers, and they're compensated by the tips they're sent which they can turn into articles for sale.

The aversion to Filthy Lucre is characteristic of a certain privilege and a certain age; it's quaint, but shallow and counter-productive.

Right on, Richard. There are all kinds of bloggers and those who wish to remain pure amateurs are welcome to remain so, but there is an entire class of bloggers who wish to pursue blogging more or less full-time: who see the advantages and satisfactions of staying in touch with the process - with the ebb and flow of news and bloggish reaction to it - as fascinating and worthwhile from dawn until bedtime. This takes time and attention and skill of an undefined sort, and people who choose this line of blogging deserve compensation as does anyone else who contributes to society.

I see the purpose of the foundation pretty much as does Jeff: as 1) a declaration that this work deserves compensation, and that people who choose to provide this service to the public shouldn't be compensated for their efforts with starvation. In a capitalist system, compensation equates with prestige and bloggers do not deserve zero prestige for their efforts; and as a result, 2) a collective safety net of some kind is in order to facilitate the transition to the inevitable bloggy market economy that is coming.

Bennett concludes his post:

When gifted writers can make a living exploring their own interests on the web, without editorial boards and metro editors telling them what to do and when to do it, the world will be a better place.

I couldn't have put it better. The danger is not that bloggers will be inevitably polluted by compensation, but that their independent, individual voices will be silenced by lack of it. We all need money upon which to live and provide for our families; market systems don't just appear overnight and if we do not wish to perversely penalize most those who dedicate themselves most completely to their craft, then a system of support is required to allow that market system time to develop, and even to nurture it along.

Those who would prefer that the blogosphere remain a domain free of commercial influence either don't trust themselves to remain true to their expressive selves, or they don't trust others to do so. This quixotic vision of autonomous free agents pecking away for free is ALREADY A THING OF THE PAST, if it ever existed in the first place. How long has Dan Gillmor been paid to blog for the San Jose Mercury News? Romenesko is paid by Pointer. Mickey Kaus has gone to Slate. Dave Winer's blog is an adjunct of his blogging software. How long have PayPals or the equivalent been on sites? If you have PayPal or sell merchandise, you aren't an amateur, buddy, you're a professional blogger, and the Foundation is merely an attempt to organize the system a little better.

Constructive criticism and refinement of ideas are two of the things bloggers do best: grabbing the Jarvis idea in our collective teeth and wrestling with it until the bugs are shaken out is exactly what should be going on right now, but grasping tearfully to the notion that blogging will be defeated by adequate compensation is a neo-socialist conceit as dead as Marx. The time has come to lead, follow, or blog for your friends from your hall closet and leave those of us with grander ambitions alone.

Matt Welch has an excellent post along similar lines:

Within three months, there will be at least five companies dedicated to monetize and enhance the blogging phenomenon. Two or three will be owned by especially smart friends of mine; from what I’ve heard we’ll have all kinds of exponentially different new toys at our disposal very soon, plus some handy variations on the different tip-jar concepts. What Jeff’s idea does, in theory, is to pre-emptively organize a big batch of bloggers (and only those who wish to join), so that they can negotiate/brainstorm/act as a sort of bloc, when the day comes that people want to implement these new schemes. It could be like a much looser and far more interesting National Writer’s Union (which, incidentally, treats online writers like the plague when it comes to things like libel insurance). Yes, there’s the usual cat-herding problem, and I’m guessing many of the blog kids aren’t exactly AFL-CIO types (nor am I), but I’m continually surprised by the stimulating fun generated whenever three or more bloggers actually meet in person, and I think there’s some tangible use in having a loose, opt-outable organization of a bunch of us for when the Idea People knock on our doors.

With all of this in mind, estimable and high-minded youth, and the worthy middle-aged should agree to disagree and leave each other alone for a while in my opinion.
posted by Eric at 10:13 AM

 
Sharon
Marty sends this on:

EO:
Thought I'd mention this -- my landlord is an Israeli and when I him asked what he thought of Ariel Sharon he said he loved him. Said he fought in two wars with him and that most Israelis feel the same way. When I mentioned I thought the Likud Party made a mistake in saying they never wanted to see a Palestinian state, and that the world would frown on that stance, he said Israelis don't care what the world thinks. He said why should Israel care what the anti-Semitic world thinks. He has a point there. I think, as a Jew, Sharon is the best man Israel has had in office in years, and 68% of Israelis agree.
MT

posted by Eric at 8:56 PM

 
Becoming
Dawson, who has the most visually stimulating (I'm still dizzy) site this side of Tony Pierce, says he never thought he'd print something like this. Well, I'd have bet my left nut I'd never print anything like this - I'm not even "conservative" (I'm a mutt). Check out what he dug up from the Bull Moose:

the previous Presidency may be viewed as more conservative than the current one.

Politics moves in mysterious ways. President Bush has already signed into law a dramatic expansion of the federal role in education. He has violated free trade principles by signing on to increasing trade tariffs (taxes) for steel and lumber. W is about to put his John Hancock on a monstrous farm bill that reverses the conservative reform farm legislation passed a few years ago. [which he just did a few minuites ago -ed.] After a period of surpluses, we now have deficits as far as the eye can see.

Contrast that with the Clinton years. President Clinton bucked his party and supported free trade and helped pass NAFTA. He signed an historic welfare reform bill that ended the federal entitlement to welfare. He signed the soon to be reversed Freedom to Farm Act which reformed agricultural subsidies. Along with a Republican Congress, he agreed to a balanced budget that helped eliminate the deficit and create surpluses.

This goes way beyond "Nixon goes to China" triangulation and gets into the territory of "you become what you pretend to be."
posted by Eric at 8:52 PM

 
Balls, Bats, and Embargoes
Matt Welch's superb, touching new feature in Reason about Cuban baseball, historian Severo Nieto - the Bill James of Cuba - and the embargo is of particular interest to my family, especially my father who just got back from 10 days in Cuba visiting members of their sports establishment. Small world, great article.

For now, Nieto just continues to get older, while his historian colleagues in the U.S. become far more wary of traveling to Cuba because of Bush’s policy of tightening the embargo yet again.

"I talked with a friend in Havana yesterday," Berman told me. "He says he’s well aware of the crackdown and is suggesting to American friends that they stay away until after Jeb Bush is re-elected."

Does the diplomatic standoff leave any room for hope? Members of the Cuba Working Group say yes, and plan to reintroduce a bill overturning the travel ban this spring. Maybe a politician running against the Cuban American National Foundation will actually win a Florida election.

Perhaps Severo Nieto’s long-suppressed works will finally be published in the U.S. and in his native Cuba, to great acclaim -- the literary equivalent of a last-chance, game-winning home run. But such moments are rare enough in baseball, let alone in life itself.

posted by Eric at 7:39 PM

 
Layne In Space
Sick of the new Star Whores movie before it is even out? Too much digital mumbo jumbo and not enough blood, sweat and matted hair? Ken Layne is your answer, my friends, a retreat from the madness, though he is the maddest of the mad linkers: everyone one of them worth the click for sheer hyper-level pleasure. Another "A" column of wit and surprising heart.
posted by Eric at 7:15 PM

 
Give Us Back Our "Good" Left
Brian Linse keeps interesting company and has some very interesting thoughts:

Had dinner with Welch, Layne and Blair last night. What a trio! Layne was threatening to write a piece on how the term "Left" has been highjacked by the wacko fringe, and also used by the "Right" to lump us all in with our Chomskys and Sontags. Interesting topic for a bleeding heart like myself who keeps being mistaken for a Repub because I support Israel.

Personally, I think that it is the frequent use of the term "left" without qualifiers such as "European", "Academic", "American" and such by commentators mostly of the (American) "Right" that has led to this situation. Though I'd have to say that the lack of disdain for the fringe left by the mainstream American Left prior to 9/11 is also to blame. Sorry to ramble, but if you see anything that takes this topic up, I'd appreciate a heads up.
Strange times.
Best, Brian

Addendum: Layne blogs same gathering here.
posted by Eric at 7:02 PM

 
Anarchy
Afghanistan-like factional anarchy between coked-out leftist narco-terrorists, right-wing paramilitary terrorists, and a radicalizing hard-line government terrorists are making Colombia an arms dealer's paradise: something along the lines of "Lawyers, Guns and Money" are needed to get them out of this.

For three years Colombia tried and failed to negotiate with its extremists. Now it is about to get its Ariel Sharon. The overwhelming favorite in presidential elections two weeks from now is Alvaro Uribe, a 49-year-old former state governor who promises to wage a war without quarter against both the FARC and the rightist United Self-Defense Forces (AUC). He says he will double the size of both the army and police, create commando teams to root the terrorists and drug traffickers out of Colombia's vast jungles and recruit hundreds of thousands of civilians for security squads.

All of this, of course, will require more help from the United States, which already has invested more than $2 billion in Colombia during the past several years. "We need you guys," says Francisco Santos, Uribe's vice presidential candidate. "I know you have big problems in the Middle East and Afghanistan, but this is the backyard. And the backyard is on fire."

....The state of Colombian democracy might be summed up like this: The FARC holds hostage one of the four other presidential candidates, five members of Congress, 11 state legislators and a provincial governor. The AUC meanwhile claims to have elected dozens of candidates in the congressional elections held in March and has killed a few it didn't like.

My friend Andrew Loog Oldham is down there - I sure hope he is okay.
posted by Eric at 6:50 PM

 
Adroit
Exemplary new photo essay/review of the new Weezer CD by - who else? - Tony Pierce. Tony has literally created a new art form - I hope he gets credit for it 100 years from now.
posted by Eric at 6:14 PM

 
Cool Tunes - Ed Harcourt
Now that I'm starting to geeze - with a child who will be a legal adult IN TWO DAYS - most very young singer-songwriters sound either adolescent and callow or precocious and overreaching to my graying ears. I know, between the two you can't win if you're a musical youth, but that's why they have Triple A radio, kid.

There are of course many exceptions to the rule: Norah Jones is certainly one, but so is the tremendous 24-year old Englishman Ed Harcourt, whose first full-length CD Here Be Monsters hit stores in the U.S. in late-March.

I have been trying for two days to pin down Harcourt's classic, melodic, but up-to-the-moment and experimental sound, and I think I have it: Here Be Monsters is as if Jeff Buckley were singing lead for Tindersticks, with a little Hunky Dory-era Bowie and Travis/Coldplay thrown in for good measure. Harcourt loves the ringing physical purity of the strummed acoustic guitar layered with a sturdy but unobtrusive drum, some way-up-high bells tinkling out a descending countermelody of languid beauty, an unforced but intensely PRESENT vocal, and bold electric guitar flourishes for emphasis and violin occasionally sawing through for poignancy.

Hey, I just described the exceptional first song on Monsters, "Something In My Eye." I love the relatively young Brits like Harcourt, Travis, Coldplay, even David Grey who are secure enough to not fear beauty. Deep beauty took its leave from popular music for the most part between the punk era and the grunge era - chased away by insecurity, aggression and angst - but has made a welcome comeback of late.

Next is the slightly sinister, "God Protect Your Soul," with a rumbling low-end piano and bass drum backbeat riff periodically filigreed with horns, trading appearances with an airy fantasia section presenting a convincing - Harcourt is always convincing - yin/yang duality that has something to do with building a wall around himself. There is apprehension here, but no Eels-like despair.

"She Fell Into My Arms" is ideal single material in a perfect world, the most overtly Jeff Buckley-like of Harcourt's vocals: soulful, insinuating, sly. More rolling piano and offbeat horns punctuate an almost New Orleans feel in the chorus:

And if you need to kiss me
Then, you'll definitely miss me
When I'm gone

Once Monsters is on you won't want Harcourt gone for some time. Per MTV News, Harcourt

grew up in the remote English village of Lewes, known chiefly for its annual Guy Fawkes Day gathering at which townspeople congregate to burn effigies of Pope Paul V and other historical figures. Harcourt eventually left the nest and formed the pop-punk outfit Snug. "It was amazing," Harcourt said. "We had such good fun, but I was writing songs that were very different and weren't really working out."

But Harcourt wasn't just a small-town boy. His father was a diplomat, so the family traveled quite a bit. He says he can remember being convinced the Swedes were spying on him through a bathroom wall in Stockholm. He also did hard time in a boarding school, dressing "up as soldiers once a week, pathetic."

After Snug, the usual odd jobs like waiter, chef-in-training, and circus geek (I made that one up) supported him while he wrote close to 400 songs, which were whittled down to 11 for the CD. Drawing two more disparate but appropriate names out of the musical influence hat, Harcourt told the MTV interviewer,

"It's the Beatles meets Tom Waits, I guess. That's what a lot of people say."

There is certainly Tom Waits in the stout-hearted melancholy of "Those Crimson Tears," and there is a fascinating smash-up of Sgt Pepper falsetto melodicism and My Bloody Valentine-like drunken guitar on "Hanging With the Wrong Crowd."

Sometimes Harcourt IS the wrong crowd, as he told an interviewer from his Canadian label EMI,

"I smashed my piano at a gig recently," giggles Ed, crackling with malicious glee. "The crowd weren't paying any attention, and I was getting more and more irate. It got so bad I picked up my stool, smashed it onto my piano and yelled 'Thank you and good night!'. I've done it before - I do get a little carried away at times. I'm the Yngwie J. Malmstein of the piano!"

..."All this 'New Acoustic Movement' crap, it all sounds completely insipid to me, it doesn't connect with real emotions. I'm a very passionate, driven, sometimes aggressive person, And that comes across in my music."

"Beneath the Heart of Darkness" opens with a shuffling, jazzy, late night urban feel oddly reminiscent of Springsteen's "Meeting Across the River" from Born to Run, before the Jeff Buckley voice returns to reveal what goes on beneath that heart. A cacophonous art noise middle section and extended denouement throws Harcourt into the land of Sonic Youth, or Flaming Lips in their wildest sonic landscapes; the latter is fitting as the song features additional production and mixing from Dave Fridmann of Lips fame.

This is a brilliant singer-songwriter with an unlimited future, but with a present good enough to have produced what may be the album of the year.

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. This feature can also be found at Hear/Say online.
posted by Eric at 5:58 PM

 
Okay, the Vicious Silliness Is Out of My System
The learned and thoughtful Mark of Minute Particulars mostly agrees with my post from yesterday, "Can Faith Be Measured in Percentages?" He had some difficulty with this part:

"As intellectually stimulating as these discussions may be, I'm afraid that faith and reason, though not incompatible, cannot be used to prove or disprove each other. They are simply disconnected at their roots: reason can be used to temper faith when faith can be shown to be factually incompatible with sensory observation, or logically inconsistent internally, but absent these kinds of jagged contradictions, faith and reason sit side by side and don't interact, like milk and jello in the refrigerator."

His thoughts:

In the Catholic tradition, a truth of reason and a truth of faith can't contradict each other; if they do, then one of them is wrong. This is because the tradition holds that truth is one. Because some truths are held by faith alone, e.g. the Trinitarian nature of God, some by both faith and reason, e.g. the existence of God, and some by reason, e.g. the whole is greater than its parts, this doesn't mean that the truths arrived will at times contradict each other. I know you don't quite say this, but "logically inconsistent internally" suggests this.

My point was that "faith is faith" and "reason is reason" and they stem from different parts of the brain. Reason is either the application of sensory observation to a given circumstance and arriving at a solution or course of action accordingly (induction), or the application of the rules of logic and/or mathematics to a given circumstance and arriving at a conclusion that way (deduction - "elementary my dear Watson").

Facts (induction) can be used to modify faith when facts contradict that faith. For example: if a person believed that the end of the world was at hand yesterday, and yesterday came and went as per normal, then that belief would have to be modified as factually wrong (unless you choose to disbelieve your God-given senses, but that's another matter).

By my use of the phrase "logically inconsistent internally," I don't mean to imply that there are contradictions between elements of the One Truth, I mean that there could be a given belief that just didn't make sense logically: the equivalent of 2+2=5. For example, if I believed that Jesus was a mortal man, but I also believed in His resurrection, wouldn't this then be an internal contradiction? If the purpose of his resurrection was the defeat of death, then Jesus would have had to be immortal. A belief in both the mortality and immortality of Jesus would be logically inconsistent. If one trusted reason, one would have to modify one's belief one way or another.

I also appreciate Mark bringing up the interesting assertion that faith and reason can be used together in some instances: his example is faith in God. I am of the opinion that belief in God does not use faith and reason together, but is purely a matter of faith. Reason doesn't necessarily contradict faith in God, but I don't accept that reason can be used to defend faith in God. There is no "proof" either way.

This is why Swinburne's elaborate computations that somehow arrive at the statistic of 97% probability for the resurrection of Christ is so absurd: either you believe of you don't, probability has nothing to do with it, nor appeals to reason. Other than the fact that people don't go around getting resurrected every day, there is nothing reason can offer to defend or contradict the resurrection. There were no contemporaries who have told us He wasn't resurrected, and either we choose to believe those who say he was, or we don't. All or nothing, no probabilities, no reason - just faith either way.

For Mark's convincing take on the use of probability in faith, see here.
posted by Eric at 3:05 PM

 
Salt and Pecker
Rick Grime of the sumptuous and multi-syllabled The Blog of the Century of the Week takes off after mobile mannequin Matt Lauer (a raven-coiffed Adam Curry?), who was bugging the Brazilians yesterday:

citing some fact about the high concentration of plastic surgeons in Brazil, Mr. Lauer seeks out the chief authority on the subject of the country's obsession with beauty, a soap opera star. He then proceeds to drill her with questions like (paraphrased): "I've seen young girls here on the beach with obviously enhanced body parts. Is that healthy?"

Give me a goddamned break. While at home in the US, Matty must not spend much time walking down the street, in front of a television, or standing in a line at the grocery store. Brazil has an unhealthy obsession with beauty? No, we (Americans) have an unhealthy obsession with beauty. Our billboards, t.v. commercials, magazine covers, web advertisements, etc., are saturated with airbrushed, exaggerated, and unrealistic images of beauty. Let's take a look at our own country's health: It's en vogue for parents to give the wonderful gift of plastic surgery as a birthday gift (one of my ex-girlfriend's got breast implants as a graduation gift). The rate of diagnosed cases of bulimia and anorexia in both males and females continues to rise. And what about the fifty infomercial wonder diets we hear about every day?

As I was watching the show, the question that many Americans must ask themselves these days kept popping into my head: "Is this why the world hates us?" Way to break the stereotype, Lauer.

posted by Eric at 1:30 PM

 
A Beam of Curry
Our good friend and legendary Boston Probe columnist A. Beam has chosen to mildly reprimand a few of us for indicating that perhaps the world would be a better place if certain robotic ex-VJ's named after THE VERY FIRST MAN, and an Indian spice would take a vow of silence and return to diddling his computers in the permissive Dutch manner.

Beam's points:

[Curry], living in the Netherlands, has the huevos to post his opinions about the Pim Fortuyn murder on his weblog! Quelle horreur! Buddies! Take a big ol' Amsterdam toke! This is what the bloggin's all about! Dude's onsite, tellin' us what he's seeing and hearing! Yeah, he's uncool and hairy and self-involved and can't spell, but the sad fact is, he had more context in the first day or two than the By-God New York Times! And he's still the only blogger I've seen to actually link to an English version of Fortuyn's platform. Let's have a little tolerance for our faded '80s celebs!

Okay now, Mr. Tolerant, Multi-Culti, Give-the-Indians-Back-Their-Land, Many-Colors-in-the-Homo-Rainbow, Mohamed-Atta-has-feelings-too, Que-Fucking-Sera-Sera apologist: this is just the kind of wobbly thinking that led us into this mess in the first place, bro-ham.

When we start allowing semi-autistic (sorry Rainman) expatriate ex-video-whoring semiliterates to infiltrate our minds, can sharia be far behind? I think not, my friend!

I don't care if he has exclusive 8"x10" glossies of Saddam Hussein blowing himself on horseback - with exclusive context and platform in English and Eskimo - I still want "I Know So Many Languages I Mash Them All Up Together Like a UN Translator With a Brain Tumor" Adam "He Wishes He Was That Spicy" Curry to kindly return to quietly boring the shit out of his tulips and leave us Americans the hell alone. Curry wouldn't have been on the Fortuyn story in the first place if he weren't a Hague-humping traitor. Good thing we deported his feathery-haired ass for being so mama-freaking annoying, or he'd still be here trying to stick his beak into our collective nutsack.

If there is anything about Adam Curry that doesn't suck the pubic hair off a syphilitic Islamist, I'd like to know about it... eventually... but not now, I'm busy.
posted by Eric at 12:33 PM

 
Hangin' With Mr. Brown

One of the perks of my job as webmaster for the cooking school is that I get to meet some interesting folks that I might not normally, holed-up here in my little webmaster bunker, errr office. Case in point, last night I got to meet and hang out a little with Alton Brown as he dutifully signed a giant merchandise pile of his signature salt-cellars. The school apparently got the last 96 in the warehouse, and he signed most of them under the lid in record time ("So, when do these show up on eBay again?" I joked). He also signed copies of his new book "I'm Just Here For The Food" Alton said, "I don't like the dust jacket much, but the hardcover looks good, more like a textbook"

His publishers (Stewart Tabori & Chang) set up a little book tour between the shooting his show "Good Eats". Alton says they shoot three times a year and that they just finished season 6.1 and will start on 6.2 when he gets back.

His publishers screwed him on the accommodations though, nixing the schools reservations at the local B&B that vising chefs are usually offered, instead placing him in a the local Holiday Inn, "At least it's got HBO, and I get to catch up on all the pay-per-view movies."

He graciously signed all the books and salt-cellars proffered to him and took pictures with the class after his demonstration on how to make souffles.

And little known fact about Alton -- he's a blogger too. Or at least his webmaster is, check out his atom-splitting tomato knife story, "Bad Day At The Café Français".


posted by tofu at 11:38 AM

 
My Ass Just Got Fact Checked
In an email from last week I just found under the bed, Brian Linse of the cool Ain't No Bad Dude informs me that it was Ken Layne and not Matt Welch who said one of the great strengths of blogging is its interactive nature, which creates the necessity to "fact check your ass," because if you don't someone else will: like Brian just did for me. Thanks, buddy, and apologies.
posted by Eric at 10:22 AM

 
The Essence of Blogging
My biggest problem with yesterday's Plain Dealer article on blogging is that it left out superior Cleveland blogs by Chas Rich of Sardonic Views, Dawn Olsen of Up Yours, and our own Mike Crooker's Vegan Menu blog in favor of so-fringe-he-never-heard-the word-blog-before Norm Ezzie, and perfectly reasonable but obscure law, economics and technology blogger Larry Staton, the pair of whom served as the article's leads.

Stressing the vagaries of interviews, Staton had some disagreements of his own:

The article quotes Mr. Robert Thompson of Syracuse University regarding the phenomenon of weblogs. Mr. Thompson thinks that most bloggers blog to gain renown. I do not blog to gain any type of renown. Rather, I blog to improve my communication skills, to learn from others who are interested in the same topics as myself, and to connect with those people who read this weblog. "Thompson said blogs will lose readers as more people get online and build Web logs." No, our blogs will connect to each other. They will grow organically as we discuss our interests. Bloggers welcome new weblogs on the same topic as it only furthers the conversation rather than invite competition.

I also failed to stress to Chris my niche topic of law, economics, and technology. I feel that 50 readers a day is a fairly good number of readers considering the extreme niche in which I am interested. I am not spouting off about the law or economics or technology, but rather how these three topics combine to play a role in our daily lives. This niche is very small and there just aren't that many people out there who care about these topics.

The admittedly self-limiting scope of Staton's blog shouldn't preclude him from being included in a blog article - certainly Mike's vegan blog is as focused - but it would seem to preclude him from being highlighted as emblematic. Frankly, Ezzie's blog consists of the disjointed ramblings of a man who sees socialism as the biggest threat to America today: this way to the door Sen. McCarthy.

I'm biased, but by way of counterexample, Dawn's largely satirical site is of broad interest, has 10 times the traffic, and is vastly more representative of a "successful" blog than the included two. Her interview with Tony Pierce reached #10 on Blogdex last week, indicating vast interest and linkage throughout blogdom.

Chas Rich not only has thoughtful and penetrating views on the news of the day - he is a lawyer as is Staton - but he often focuses on Northeast Ohio, including keen observations on one of our favorite topics, sports, especially baseball:

The Cleveland Indians, this year are playing roughly .500 ball. For the first time since the strike shortened 1994 season, since they moved into Jacobs Field, they will not sell 3 million plus tickets. The fans are frustrated and feeling easily distracted (how long until the next Browns mini-camp?). Roughly ten years ago, pre-Jacobs Field, Cleveland would have been the team considered for contraction. The Jake, however got built, and an amazing combination of circumstances, made the Indians the rulers of Cleveland. Jacobs Field opening before most other new stadiums did gave the Indians a head start on revenue streams allowing them to spend money like a large market team; remarkable player development (Thome, Belle, Lofton, Baerga, Alomar, Jr.) all together making them a winning team; and the Browns sucked, then moved to Baltimore leaving the Indians alone in the Cleveland sports world (the Cavaliers don't count).

Now individual ticket prices range from $7 for the cheap high seats, to $40 for the field box. Never mind the cost of parking downtown, concessions, etc. Within 80 miles of Cleveland there are three minor league baseball teams in Canton, Akron and Niles. Now given that there are three minor league teams and a declining attendance, the last thing you would expect would be to place a fourth minor league team within 20 miles of the stadium. Well 3 miles from where I live, that is exactly what they are doing:

Mike Edwards, general manager of Lake County's Class A minor league baseball team, said "a powder keg of excitement" is building around the baseball team, which will play in a 6,500-seat ballpark at the corner of Ohio 91 and Vine Street next spring....

Edwards said ticket prices will be slightly higher than those offered in Columbus [GA] this season. The offer 70-game season-ticket plans for $275 to $350. Single-game seats go for $4 to $7.

He then dives into the pros and cons and tells me things I didn't know: again, much more representative of what blogs are about and of much great general interest.

What it really comes down to is the representation of the essence of blogging. Sure, 499,000 of the mythical 500,000 bloggers are hobbyists who write for themselves in a benign form of public onanism, but the other 1,000 (totally a guess figure pulled from my back pocket) feel they have something to say, feel compelled to share it with others, and are willing to take the medium seriously enough to get the word out - one way or another - about themselves. This latter group represents the bloggers who will make a difference, who will be heard. They were underrepresented in this article.

LARGE ADDENDUM: Dawn has the first in her new corporate comic series "Fleas and Ticks" up right now (scroll down below links)
posted by Eric at 9:41 AM

 
Icky Statistics
Writers are always throwing statistics around, but how many of us actually know how to compute statistics, or check the stats of others? I hate this crap but I hate always having to check my spelling too. Some things you just have to do. Don't forget: there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

This site gives you a remedial course in the basics: mean, median, percent, per capita, standard deviation - all of that hateful nonsense, but at least you won't get duped.
posted by Eric at 9:05 PM

 
9/11 Bibliography
Most boggers and most blog readers are viscerally concerned with the events of September 11 and their ongoing aftermath. I just stumbled across a tremendous research tool into these topics: the "Annotated Bibliography of Government Documents Related to the Threat of Terrorism & the Attacks of September 11, 2001." The introduction to the 98-page document reads as follows:

The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, came as a terrible surprise to most Americans – from the upper echelons of political power to the streets of small-town America. Though most Americans do not live in New York or Washington, all were deeply affected by the terrorist attacks. And perhaps for the first time in many Americans’ lives, the complex web of interconnected political and social threads in which we live came into specific relief. The new world that we now inhabit comes as a sharp contrast to the heady and seemingly more carefree era of the dot-com economic boom, the Oslo accords, and relative peace.

Since the founding of the United States, we, the people and our elected representatives, have participated in an ongoing debate about the nature and responsibilities of federal government. But regardless of political leanings or opinions about the role of government in our daily lives, few would dispute the proposition that at its very core, preparing for and responding to events such as those of September 11 are two of the most essential purposes of government. Just as the first societies, we exist as a collective because we cannot live as we do otherwise. We band together for the common good, and more fundamentally, for the common defense.

Before the attacks occurred, before they were planned, before some of the participants were even born, chains of events leading to the present situation were already in motion. Officials and strategic advisors over the years have predicted that some day events such as the September 11 attacks would occur, and the federal government responded to those predictions by evaluating, planning, and training. As the documents included in this bibliography attest, that work continues, and will continue into the foreseeable future.

This bibliography is intended to serve as a means of access to information produced by the United States Government concerning the events of September 11. Unlike so many of the nations of the world, the United States considers fundamental the right of its citizens to know what their government is doing, the logic behind its actions, and the ramifications of its policies. To this end, our government produces copious quantities of informational materials that are freely accessible to the public through libraries and the Federal Depository Library system. This bibliography presents a sampling of the materials available through the Depository system, via the Internet, or both.

Since the attacks – and our responses to them – grew out of historical circumstances, this bibliography is not limited to documents that directly concern September 11. Many of them do, but others show how we have dealt with terrorism in the past, what the political circumstances of past terrorist acts were, how we have prepared in the past and for the future, what our weaknesses to future attacks are, what kind of future attacks are likely, and from whence those future attacks are likely to come.

The documents themselves include Congressional hearings, reports, acts, and resolutions; Presidential proclamations, addresses, and important White House press releases; U.S. defense, national security, and policy materials from the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, and the State Department; intelligence materials from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation; medical information from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and miscellaneous materials from the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, the Library of Congress Federal Research Division, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Justice Department, the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Coalition Information Centers, the Naval War College, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the General Accounting Office, the National Committee on Terrorism, the Department of the Navy, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the Army War College.

An invaluable resource.


posted by Eric at 8:49 PM

 
Dexter Einstein
This is my kind of guy: egomaniacal genius of Einsteinian proportions, funded by a cash cow of his own design, laboring in gleeful secrecy behind the back of the Big Science Establishment publishing a book tomorrow on his own imprint with the nose-tweakingly audacious title of A New Kind of Science.

Edward Rothstein took a whack at Stephen Wolfram Saturday in the NY Times:

Mr. Wolfram is finally publishing his work, and his claims surpass the most extravagant speculation. He has, he argues, discovered underlying principles that affect the development of everything from the human brain to the workings of the universe, requiring a revolutionary rethinking of physics, mathematics, biology and other sciences. He believes he has shown how the most complex processes in nature can arise out of elemental rules, how a wealth of diverse phenomena — the infinite variety of snowflakes and the patterns on sea shells — are generated from seemingly trivial origins.

Conducting experiments on a computer, where he says he has logged 100 million keystrokes in the last 10 years, Mr. Wolfram wrote simple programs that generated odd and intricate patterns to test his ideas about complexity. He then tried to imitate designs found in nature. He argues that natural phenomena can be explored as if they were, in fact, computer programs, their evolution and behavior the products of intricate calculations.

Here's what kind of crazy-smart freak he is:

Mr. Wolfram, who was born in Britain, published his first paper on particle physics in 1975 at age 15, and obtained a doctorate at Caltech at 20 (where Richard Feynman called him "astonishing"). He won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship at 21, reshaped the ways in which complex phenomena (like the movements of fluids) were analyzed before he was 26, founded an institute for the study of complexity at the University of Illinois, and then left academic life and research science, starting a software company, Wolfram Research Inc., in 1987. His main commercial product, a program called Mathematica, has become an international standard, used as a mathematical tool by over a million scientists and students and engineers in areas ranging from medical research to the analysis of weather.

Mr. Wolfram freely confesses to a high opinion of his accomplishments. In a recent interview, he explained that if he were more modest he would be less clear and less successful. "Ultimately," he said of his book, "confidence is necessary in order to undertake a project of this size." Its goal is to change the very direction of scientific research. He ranks one of his discoveries about complexity among the most important "in the whole history of theoretical science."

Sounds like the Segway - I hope no one gets hurt on the damned thing.

He really is proposing, as the book's title puts it, a "new kind of science." He wants to displace the projects and theories and priorities that now characterize academic science. And he refuses to be limited by disciplinary boundaries or by the assertions of experts in other fields. "No doubt," he writes, "this book will draw the ire" of some of them. "I think I was a somewhat brash teenage scientist," Mr. Wolfram said, adding that he still seems to affect people the same way.

Can't imagine why, Doogie Howser. This guy is the meat incarnation of Dexter - he's a little taller though. I wonder if he has a sister named Dee Dee.

The simple is complex, the complex simple:

His theory developed out of a series of elementary computer experiments he conducted in the early 1980's. He was examining the way simple computer programs can generate shaded patterns on grids composed of square cells. A computer would be given a row of cells, some black, some white, along with a set of simple rules that determine how succeeding lines of shaded cells are to be generated. Such programs have been called "cellular automata."

As one might expect, simple rules generally yield simple patterns. But Mr. Wolfram found one rule for generating a cellular automaton that yields no clear pattern at all. Its appearance is bizarre, unpredictable, seemingly chaotic. No one, Mr. Wolfram writes, could have expected this. Complexity was thought to arise only out of very complex rules; here it is generated out of simplicity.

Such cellular automata are at the heart of this book, for Mr. Wolfram argues that many complex processes — the movements of a fluid, the shapes of leaves, the patterns on a mollusk shell — can, in fact, be modeled by simple programs like cellular automata. Such elementary programs, he suggests, can even be used to explain the nature of space and time or outline the vagaries of visual perception. Existing mathematics and physics, Mr. Wolfram argues, are inadequate to the task.

Here is where matters get quite difficult very fast. Not only can complex designs and processes arise out of the simplest of rules, but, Mr. Wolfram asserts, simple rules actually lie behind the most sophisticated processes in the universe. Indeed, the universe itself, he argues, is generated by such rules. He presents an example of one cellular automaton program that produces such sophisticated patterns that it can act like a powerful computer. The details are highly technical, but this automaton can actually replicate other processes and patterns just as a computer can be turned into a word-processor one minute and a game machine the next. It has what are called "universal" properties.

This is why his book has lots of pictures, but Wolfram has no doubts about his theories:

"I am quite certain this is going to work. I have never deluded myself before."

The process of sorting all of this out begins tomorrow.
posted by Eric at 6:29 PM

 
Smooth
And now for something completely different: consorting with known Revenuers, this man is making LEGAL moonshine whiskey in Morgantown, West Virginia:

Whatever your designated poison, it is the crystal-clear corn liquor of Appalachia, the illegal essence of three centuries of mountain hollow stills. Payton D. Fireman, a local lawyer with a taste for marketing, has begun bottling and selling the volatile potion legally for the first time in state memory under the label Mountain Moonshine.

"Of course it's rough: it's moonshine," said Mr. Fireman to a visitor brought bolt upright and teary-eyed by a shot of the clear white whiskey. It was made from corn mash in three hot-water-boiler stills in the back of Bo McDaniel's transmission shop.

This legalized firewater ("less than 30 days old" is the label guarantee) might properly be called Boutique Booze, for Mr. Fireman, 44, has visions of doing for the economically stressed hills of Appalachia what microbrewing and vanity winemaking have done elsewhere by slaking the nation's thirst for something new to buzz about and be buzzed by.

I'll tell you what, though, buddy: if this stuff is rough, it isn't the moonshine I came to know and love back in the ol' days when men were men and the moonshine would singe your sphincter but taste like sweet mountain water in the process.

When I went to Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio in the late-'70s, it was remarkably cosmopolitan for a little Lutheran school on the edge of the cornfields: there was a large East Coast contingent, students from 49 states (I forget if Alaska or Hawaii neglected to send a rep), and a lot of intermingling of upper-middle class youth from all over the land. I became friends with a doctor's daughter from W.Va., and one year a bunch of us went down to her family's annual barn dance and hoedown to join in the festive carrying on and generalized frantic shenanigans.

Upon arrival in town our first stop was Doc's office, where he turned his back upon us like a magician before spinning around with a flourish, brandishing a fruit canning jar filled with a translucent liquid. Our eyes widened.

"Go ahead and take a BIG swig of this, son," he drawled. "Don't think, just drink." I did what I was told - he was a doctor after all - and the elixir was light, airy, effervescent without bubbles, tasteless in the best possible way, as free of impurities as the most delectable water. Smoooth. But what was light and cheery on the way in became dense and menacing as it reached its gastrointestinal destination. An internal tsunami welled and rolled.

"It's got quite a kick to it, don't it son?" chuckled Doc. I don't remember much after that very clearly: buffalo gals goin' round the outside, a buffalo stampede goin' on inside, snatches of lightning bluegrass picking, something about a mule and a croquet set, straw in my underwear, generalized whooping and spinning merriment. Altogether too much spinning. Even flat on the ground staring up at the alarmingly effulgent moon, there was still spinning. Never could take spin rides at the fair again after that.

Now that's real moonshine: angel going in, devil coming out, and a lot of straw and spinning in between. Yee-haw. I wish I could remember more about that mule, though.
posted by Eric at 2:48 PM

 
"Do You Know the Way to San Jose [Correctional Facility]?"
Though I admit to possible bias, I think Dawn O is often both hilarious and perceptive: check out her new lyrics for "I Say a Little Prayer." Poor Dionne - I DJ'd a party for her son at her house in Beverly Hills in the '80s. Very nice woman, though she never offered to share her stash with the hired help.
posted by Eric at 12:50 PM

 
Meta-Bill
Why fight it? The meta-blog is in the air today on a number of fronts (see just about every post below). Nimble and creative minds (including Richard Bennett) have been set to pondering by a confluence of recent factors including intense discussions of blogonomics and the ontological foundations of blogging, the spate of almost daily old media examinations of the blogosphere, and attempts to reconcile various methods of blogging and diverse blogging communities.

Displaying the imaginative talents that have made him one of our top writers of sci-fi and fantasy and the practicality that has made him of of our most important bloggers, Bill Quick has a go various meta-blog concepts here:

...my hunch is that at present - and probably for the forseeable future - the blogosphere as it currently exists is faster than any likely candidate for a search algorythm around today. Take Google, for example: how many times have you searched for some piece of current (breaking) news on Google, and not found it? The same applies to the beta version of GoogleNews, and to ColumbiaNewsblaster as well. But then you go to three or four of your favorite blogs, and there is what you're looking for, complete with links and sources.

....Once we get the "commented-upon" out of the way, there are two components remaining to the blogosphere: the blog-commentator, and the blog-reader. Each would, I presume, use the search facility in a slightly different manner. The blog-reader would supposedly use it to create a daily "personal blogosphere." But I submit that such a blogosphere would pall almost immediately, because it is premised on the notion that humans (and their preferences) stay the same day after day.

I don't know about you, but some days I wake up and I'm just not in the mood to read the latest atrocities coming out of the Middle East. So on that day, maybe I browse through Searls, or Kottke, or some other set of blogs that don't concentrate on current events commentary. Another day I might whiz through blogdex, just clicking on stuff that looks interesting. Another day I might not read anything at all. I honestly can't see any conceivable algorythm that can model that pattern, at least not effectively (unless it's a mind-reading algorythm - and by that, I don't mean a statistically-likely predictor algorythm - humans aren't only masses of probablities - or at least not just that). There is a reason all those dreamy predictions of everybody signing up for their "personal newspapers" never panned out.

That is about exactly how I go about blogging as well: sometimes focused on a given topic and searching around for related facts, angles and opinions - a horizontal approach; sometimes looking at individual writers (mainstream and/or blog) and trying to assimilate where they're coming from - a vertical approach; and sometimes just wandering around aimlessly, following this or that or no train of thought, stumbling upon interesting tidbits - the serendipitous approach. Bill concludes:

It has been the dream of some humans for a long time to find a replacement for the human mind, but we aren't there yet, and we may never be. In order to do what the human mind does in the blogosphere right now, I think we are going to have to find that surrogate. And absent handwaving on the order of "Yes, that's exactly the point - you don't know how, but others do, as you will see shortly," well, I'm waiting.

Taking Bill's theme to a (good gravy, not again) meta level, this is the difference between a deterministic and a phenomenological view of the world: the difference between Freud and Jung. I'm a Jungian myself.
posted by Eric at 12:23 PM

 
Connect the Dots
As has been diplomatically pointed out by a friend or two, I have been talking an awful lot about meta-blog issues lately, peering intently into that portion of my navel through which blogdom can be viewed. Heck, even I have noticed it, but there is no way I would have the imagination and meta-meta vision to connect blogging with the film The Crying Game, as the incomparable Doc Searls does here. Startlingly perceptive - check him out.
posted by Eric at 11:38 AM

 
Can Faith Be Measured in Percentages?
I find it fascinating that Christian apologetics has come full circle and is once again trying to prove matters of faith with the tools of philosophy. Please see this post on apologetics, which is an "outtake" from our forthcoming America.com book.

Emily Eakins details how Richard Swinburne is trying to quantify matters of faith in this NY Times article:

Economists use probability theory to make forecasts about consumer spending. Actuaries use it to calculate insurance premiums. Last month, Richard Swinburne, a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, put it to work toward less mundane ends: he invoked it to defend the belief that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

"For someone dead for 36 hours to come to life again is, according to the laws of nature, extremely improbable," Mr. Swinburne told an audience of more than 100 philosophers who had convened at Yale University in April for a conference on ethics and belief. "But if there is a God of the traditional kind, natural laws only operate because he makes them operate."

Mr. Swinburne, a commanding figure with snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes, proceeded to weigh evidence for and against the Resurrection, assigning values to factors like the probability that there is a God, the nature of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime and the quality of witness testimony after his death. Then, while his audience followed along on printed lecture notes, he plugged his numbers into a dense thicket of letters and symbols — using a probability formula known as Bayes's theorem — and did the math. "Given e and k, h is true if and only if c is true," he said. "The probability of h given e and k is .97"

Swinburne is an "evidentialist":

they accept the Enlightenment doctrine that a belief is justified only when evidence can be found for it outside the believer's own mind. According to the classic evidentialist argument, for faith to be considered rational it has to be supported by independent proof, and there simply isn't any. (Asked what he would say if God appeared to him after his death and demanded to know why he had failed to believe, the British philosopher and staunch evidentialist Bertrand Russell replied that he would say, "Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence.")

In "The Existence of God" (Oxford University Press, 1979), Mr. Swinburne, a Greek Orthodox Christian, tried to meet the evidentialist challenge using Bayes's theorem. Supplying pages of intricate, technical argumentation to back up his claims, he wrote that many natural phenomena — including the universe itself — are, well, if not incontrovertible proof of God's handiwork, at least "more probable if there is a God than if there is not." (Mr. Swinburne, it turns out, is not the first to enlist Bayes's theorem in defense of religion. In a 1763 paper presented to the British Royal Society, the minister Richard Price used it to show there was good evidence in favor of the miracles described in the New Testament.)

Other prominent apologists, including Alvin Plantinga at the University of Notre Dame and Nicholas Wolterstorff at Yale, are "reformed epistemologists":

These scholars reject the evidentialist insistence on independent proofs. After all, they point out, the ability to distinguish good evidence from bad requires reason, but why trust our ability to reason? Where's the proof that our reason is any good? For the evidentialists, reason is considered a "basic belief," one that doesn't require additional evidence to be true. But if reason can be considered a basic belief, then so, too, say the reformed epistemologists, can faith in God.

Accepting faith as a basic belief, they say, does not make faith irrational. On the contrary, they insist, a belief can lack independent evidence and still be rational. Some beliefs are simply self-evident. Most people know that 1 + 1 = 2, Mr. Wolterstorff points out, just as they accept beliefs about their bodily state — like "I feel dizzy" — without having to consult other sources. "We believe lots of things that don't have publicly formulated arguments," Mr. Wolterstorff said. "Reformed epistemology challenges the need for arguments."

To buttress their case, the reformed epistemologists lean on Thomas Reid, an 18th-century Scottish "common sense" philosopher, who, arguing that many legitimate beliefs are simply instinctual, complained: "Are we to admit nothing but can be proved by reason?"

...Mr. Plantinga has devoted three thick volumes and the last 20 years to the effort, stressing, among other things, that for a belief to be justified, it must be held by a person whose mental faculties are functioning properly.

More aggressively, he has suggested that our capacity for true beliefs is proof that a divine creator — rather than Darwinian natural selection — is behind evolution: if human beings evolved by random process from mentally primitive creatures, how could we be sure that any of our beliefs — including our belief in evolution — are true?

As intellectually stimulating as these discussions may be, I'm afraid that faith and reason, though not incompatible, cannot be used to prove or disprove each other. They are simply disconnected at their roots: reason can be used to temper faith when faith can be shown to be factually incompatible with sensory observation, or logically inconsistent internally, but absent these kinds of jagged contradictions, faith and reason sit side by side and don't interact like milk and jello in the refrigerator.

It can be claimed that faith is required for us to trust reason just as much as faith is required for religious belief, but the former is a meta question regarding the reliability of our faculties, the determination of which is not inconceivable at some point in the future when we might develop the capability to step outside of our current constraints of time and space and actually measure the reliability of our senses and the consistency of our logic. Yet barring the appearance of incontrovertible miracles, which some will always attempt to explain away in nonreligious terms, religious faith will always be a matter belief without "proof" either way.

I'm afraid attaching concrete figures like "97%" to the probability of the resurrection of Christ is meaningless at best since the computation still ultimately derives from assertions of pure belief. On this matter I take the Bible at its word that God can only be comprehended with faculties that lie beyond the powers of reason; and logically, either Christ was resurrected or he wasn't: 100% or 0%, there is no in between. Like Schrodinger's cat, Christ is either alive or dead: He isn't 97% anything.
posted by Eric at 10:47 AM

 
A Rolling Blog Gathers More Readers?
Marc Weisblott has a typically perceptive suggestion for saving Rolling Stone magazine: a blog. There's a bit more to it than that - see for yourself.
posted by Eric at 9:58 AM

 
Another Bloggy Feature
A milestone of sorts for us: I am quoted for the first time in an article about blogging. Chris Seper of the Cleveland Plain Dealer has constructed an eccentric, if balanced, take on blogs, quoting a pop culture professor from Syracuse who predicts the collapse of the blogosphere, two obscure Cleveland bloggers - one of whom had never heard of the term "blog" - but also Rebecca Blood and I at some length on the nature of blogs and their growing influence. I don't remember saying half the things on which I am quoted, but I'm sure I said them at some point in about an hour of discussion. It's always odd to see what specific aspects of a lengthy discussion are actually quoted. Most memorable quote: "I'm not just some Utopian idiot [!]" At least I hope I'm not.
posted by Eric at 9:43 AM

 
The Weblog Foundation
Jeff Jarvis has startling, bold and brilliant post on his proposal for a giant leap forward for blogonomics: this could be the most important blog-related material you read this year:

I'm not waving the white flag of financial surrender and declaring weblogs to be unprofitable. Quite to the contrary, I believe that we need to take action such as this to prove that weblogs can be profitable. We need to demontrate their value to the Web, to media, to advertisers, and to society. We need to bring business discipline to the world of weblogging so we can show advertisers (aka sponsors or underwriters) how to use weblog to reach influencers and give them the responsiveness they demand. I had at first thought of this as a for-profit company, a weblog ad agency. But based on experience on the Internet, that's getting ahead of ourselves. This is too new, too strange to advertisers (as Stott makes clear). We must prove our value first.

You must check it out post haste.
posted by Eric at 8:56 AM

 
The Fruits of Trolling
For some indecipherable reason, Richard Bennett seems to be lashing out in several directions at once regarding disputes originating from his Noosphere post. It appears to have become personal here, a state of affairs always best avoided. Hillary Carter's substantive argument is similar to mine:

In reality Instapundit is a source of opinion and a “router” to other useful postings. In essence, he’s to bloggers as CNN or Fox News is to TV viewers. I have Lexis Nexus, but I don’t use that to get my daily news. I turn on the TV to a news station. Similarly, when I want to find good blog posts, I won’t turn to Google or some indexing application that is yet to be invented. I’ll turn to people like Instapundit.

Ironically, all of this attention being paid to Bennett is precisely the motivation behind a troll-type posting in the first place. All publicity is good publicity - just get the URL right.


posted by Eric at 8:42 AM

 
"Not Troll..., Troll"
Richard Bennett and I would appear to be having some trouble communicating: First, I didn't call Richard a "troll" - I said his POST was a "troll," there being a significant difference between a scary Norwegian mythical creature creeping around under a bridge, and a post made with the express purpose of generating outrage and indignation. My statement referred to the latter.

Second, just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean he/she didn't read what you wrote. I read the entire original post, twice. Swear. It made some good points about the Big Bang nature of the blogosphere and noosphere, with reference back to visionary Vannevar Bush, "the first blogger," and his seminal 1945 article in which he predicted hyperlinks et al.

None of this changes the fact that what brings people back to blogs are the personalities, ideas, and quirks of the bloggers - not their indexing or linking abilities. If you took away the links, Glenn Reynolds would still be interesting to read. I fail to see how this is kissing up, or perhaps we were a-trolling once more.

Addendum: Since Richard would still appear not to be able to differentiate between being called a "troll," and having his posts labeled "trolls," please see this discussion of trolling from John Scalzi, and this one from Steven Den Beste.
posted by Eric at 10:18 PM

 
"Thinking Of Youoooooooo!"
Happy Mothers Day! It's mighty hard to pile an entire year's backlog of appreciation into one day, but we all try. A CNN/Money story tells us a mother's work is worth about $60,000 per year:

Your mother's love is priceless, but the work she does costs plenty. If you outlined a job description and set a salary for the countless tasks, services and errands the average mom does for her family, you'd be talking big bucks.

But of course she'd be grossly underpaid at that. And don't forget stepmoms: please see my tribute to them in general, and in particular to my wife Dawn, who is an exceptional stepmom (and mom-mom) and mean blogger.

My first vivid memory of my mother is of her looming huge, beaming, benevolent and golden, back-lit by the California sun hanging over the Pacific, as she reached down to free me from the monstrous wattled fowl with which I had become entangled. Yes, my mother saved me from the turkey that was kept as a pet at the pre-preschool I attended on the edge of the sea in Palos Verdes. I was 18 months old, she was 27.

My next vivid memory is the unalloyed thrill I felt at being asked to accompany her to work. She taught Second Grade and I oozed with pride as we parked in the teacher's lot and walked hand in hand to her class. I felt so special being so special to this beautiful ("Miss Teenage Lomita," 1947), charming young woman. I was a "big boy" of 4 by then so I got to sit at the back of the class and watch her go about her business with the kids - kind but firm, caring but dispassionate - knowing that she was their teacher but MY MOTHER.

By the time I was 7, I was the oldest of four and things were a lot more complicated: my mother's attention was divided, she was increasingly harried - especially as my dad started to travel more on business.

Middle age was tough on my mom. My dad was promoted to the corporate office back in Cleveland when I was turning 14, and we had to move 2,500 miles away from her friends, her mother (her father had died of cancer three years earlier), her teaching, her life. She became fast friends with the woman across the street - the mother of two young girls - and the woman promptly died of cancer.

What was an exciting adventure for us: new people, new schools, new environment - "Wow, we don't have to drive to the snow?" - was traumatic withdrawal and adjustment for her. She was no longer young, no longer thin, no longer a teacher - her teaching license didn't transfer automatically, she would have had to go through an accreditation process and she was too proud and too stubborn for that. She missed her mother terribly.

Fast forward 30 years. My mother turned 70 on Friday; we didn't make too a big a deal about it because she was appalled by the figure, but we sort of had a souped-up Mothers Day today to make up for it. My mother seems very happy and contented now. My dad retired a few years ago and they travel a lot together. They're not rich but they own some properties and live in a very large house on the leafy grounds of a country club.

They have three grandchildren between the ages of 2 and 17 (well, 18 next week but I'm not rushing it) living nearby, two of whom they see almost every day. They have two more preteen grandchildren in the suburban DC area whom they visit regularly, and their four children are all more or less "successful" adults, whatever that may mean. All of their children, children-in-law, and grandchildren love them dearly - life is pretty good.

My dad, who is nine months younger than my mom and has been teasing her about it for about 55 years, had a near-fatal heart attack about 13 years ago but it was largely work-induced. He changed his eating habits, consciously reduced his stress from work, and greatly improved his health. But he REALLY improved his lifestyle when he retired - banishing stress and eliminating most strife - and after a very brief adjustment period, they have both taken to a relative life of leisure like pigs to mud.

For a couple who looked rather careworn, portly, and aged at 60, they are a very cheerful, vigorous, and youthful couple at 70 (okay, 70 and 69). The whole clan - plus aunts, uncles and cousins - are shipping off to Hawaii at the end of June at my parents' insistence to celebrate my daughter's' graduation from high school, and just life in general. That's the kind of people they are. May they have another 30 or 40 more years together. I love you Mom (Dad too, but this is Mothers Day).
posted by Eric at 8:04 PM

 
No Lack of InstaPower
Now I REALLY have to hit the road to pick up cards and floral arrangements before the GATHERING OF THE MOTHERS, but I have to mention something about the Richard Bennett (who would appear to be aspiring to the bloggy contrarian position temporarily vacated by John Scalzi) troll-like assault on the link-throwing powers of Glenn Reynolds.

In the case of our site, InstaPower is secure: a link from Glenn has ranged from a few hundred hits on a Saturday, when the pickings are slim anyway, to 3,000 visitors as discussed in great detail here.

Please also see Bennett's very lively comments section for spirited defense of Glenn and his impugned InstaPower. Bennett's statements there pretty much confirm the troll nature of his post: he asserts that the post wasn't really about Reynolds at all, that Glenn was merely the "hook":

But the post wasn't really about Glenn, folks, it was about the size of the Noosphere and the nature of navigation in an era where no one guy, no matter how cool he is, can cover it all. Why are you all missing the point so studiously?

The essence of the issue seems to me to be that Bennett reduces Glenn's importance to his ability to drive traffic. The real matter - and the original source of this traffic-driving power - is that people like to read Glenn for his ideas, his vast range of vision over material available via the Internet, his authoritative but humble personality, and his generosity of spirit.

No one says he has to be the traffic director for the blogosphere: that is a role he has taken upon himself not out of vanity, but out of an obviously genuine enthusiasm for the ocean of personalities, opinion, insight, and independent spirit that is blogland. None of this will change no matter how the "Noosphere" expands. This argument in defense of Glenn applies to bloggers in general: they are read for their personalities, insights, and individual quirks, not for their ability to sleuth out interesting stories, which is just icing on the cake.

Jeff Jarvis has more on this, and Matt Welch shipped Glenn more supportive numbers here.
posted by Eric at 2:35 PM

 
More Blogonomics
As I mentioned here, this stuff happens fast. Reid Stott is back with an extraordinary continuation of the blog marketing/advertising/corporate support discussion kicked off by the Chris Locke interview/profile in the Guardian last Thursday.

Reid's continuation:

Sponsorship could give the perception of a changed environment, but ads do indeed pay for content. I'm reminded of it everytime I'm trying to read an article at [insert news/mag site here] and some Flash ad scrolls down to cover most of my screen. My momentary irritation is immediately answered by the thought, yep, that's how I'm paying for this free content.

Of course, I couldn't tell you what the ad was for.

....Instead of presenting a Revolution, we must present an Evolution, and appeal to the native competitive spirit of capitalism: "We've all seen how the old ways of advertising didn't translate well. Be a part of shaping a new way." Promote cost benefit, and present this as a new form of niche marketing that enables conversations/communities from which the company benefits. Couch it in somewhat familiar terms, as new ideas can scare the status quo into complete inaction. Be flexible, and open to doing what makes the deal work, even if the client drags a portion of the Old World along, like a forlorn but comforting favorite blanket from childhood. Remember there are two sides, and the benefit must be clear ... in plain language ... for both sides.

The piece is chock-full of good sense and wisdom - read the whole thing.

Jeff Jarvis is spending the weekend cogitating on the same subject: can't wait to see what he comes up with.
posted by Eric at 2:02 PM

 
The Comb Is Fine-Toothed
You know you have penetrated an outer veneer of the collective psyche when you get letters like this (regarding my "Blowback" piece on Andrew Sullivan), which is quite "granular" as the computer people say (I'm still used to people telling me I am totally full of crap):

Some quibbles about usage:
The verb is "loathe," the adjective is "loath." Moreover, "loath" is a pretentious archaism; modern English has adequate words like "reluctant" or "unwilling"; stick with those.

"Willy nilly" does not mean "indiscriminately" or "helter-skelter," or the like. It means "willingly or not."

As to substance, you may well be right about Sullivan. Keep up the good work.
Sincerely,
Aaron Baker

Aaron has me on the spelling of "loath" - I was 100% wrong. Thank you.

As far as its usage, I can't agree that the term "is loath to" is either particularly "pretentious," or so out of circulation as to be "archaic." People know what it means. Part of my style is to play with language, and a certain amount of "pretension" is inherent in this. Also, as "pretentiousness" was a secondary subject of my post, a modicum of it was apposite. If "adequacy" in conveying information was all we sought from language, then we wouldn't have a half-million words in English. There is a world of connotations and subtleties out there that has little to do with "adequacy," so I will stand by my usage in this instance.

Regarding "willy nilly," I was more wrong than right on that one. Although a common usage of the term has come to mean "here and there" with the implication of "enthusiasm," dictionaries do not yet reflect this. There is irony in this discrepant usage though, as Sullivan certainly seems to dispense links to bloggers with some reluctance. Thanks for keeping me in line, but I imagine my style will always tend toward the florid, though I would hope not incorrect.
posted by Eric at 1:27 PM

 
More Occidentalism
Virginia Postrel points out that the term "Occidentalism" predates the Margalit/Buruma NTRB article as well. Charles Paul Freund published a lengthy, thoughtful piece on the subject in Reason in December:

While a serious, sustained study of Occidentalism lies in the future, its content will not turn out to be a mystery. It draws on the same sources of belittlement and dehumanization from which hatreds—including Orientalism—have always drawn. Indeed, its outlines are visible in the documents of extreme Islamism.

For example, critics of Orientalism have generated an enormous literature addressing the West’s reduction of the East in erotic terms. But the Occidentalist murderers and their celebrants have developed a parallel discourse that addresses Western women in terms of erotic corruption, immorality, and decadence. According to some news accounts, Osama bin Laden is reported to have been especially disturbed at the presence of American women soldiers in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s most sacred ground.

....Like conspiracism, Occidentalism appears to play a scapegoating role for some, "explaining" Eastern political failure by positing a satanic foe and extending the revolutionary struggle against him, just as Orientalism played an exculpatory role justifying a brutal Western colonialism.

Occidentalism of this sort thus becomes quite useful, because the unavoidable fact is that Islamism has proved a failure. Far from establishing a benign, new relationship between rulers and people along traditional theological lines, political Islamism’s most notable characteristic is repression. As the author Olivier Roy argued as long ago as 1992, the two models of Islamism from which to choose are the Saudi model of "revenue plus sharia" (the Islamic code of law) and the Sudanese model of "unemployment plus sharia." But Islamists cannot think that way and continue their struggle. Occidentalism provides part of that struggle’s continuing justification.

Thanks Virginia!
posted by Eric at 12:49 PM

 
HAPPY MOTHERS DAY
None of us would be here without them. I'm going to talk about my sweet maternal parent later on - we have a world of celebrations to attend to this afternoon, will post on moms later.
posted by Eric at 12:38 PM