Archive for June, 2004
June 29, 2004
June 28, 2004
SOME INTERESTING STUFF from Iraqi talk radio. Hey, if you’ve got talk radio, you’re free!
A SPACE ELEVATOR IN FIFTEEN YEARS? I’d like to see that, God knows, but that seems pretty soon.
CHIRAC LOSES IT IN ISTANBUL, playing right into Bush’s hands by isolating himself from both Turkey and Britain. Perhaps the Bush folks decided to capitalize on reports like this one:
But the increasingly volatile Chirac is in no mood for pandering to the British.
‘He’s tetchy, unhappy, doesn’t quite know which way to go – his officials are all frightened of him and nobody’s giving him any advice,’ says one Foreign Office source.
Interesting development, anyway. It certainly doesn’t sound as if he’s brimming with delight over the results of his past two years of politicking and diplomacy. But then, as the story says (first link) “Mr Chirac’s outburst reflects the unresolved tensions over Iraq and France’s declining influence in the EU and Nato. ” Ouch.
UPDATE: Reader Nathan Machula emails:
Another Chirac quote from the article:
“He has nothing to say on this subject. It is as if I were to tell the United States how it should conduct its relations with Mexico.”
…or it’s as if Chirac were to tell the US how it should conduct its relations with Iraq.
Ouch, again.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Bush is hanging tough: “In remarks prepared for delivery at a Istanbul university, Bush refused to back down in the face of Chirac’s criticism on Monday that Bush had no business urging the EU to set a date for Turkey to start entry talks into the union.”
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Yet another diplomatic success for the Bush Administration: “Schroeder Says Germany and France Plan to Back Turkey’s EU Bid.” A bit of, er, weasel-room if you read the whole story, but clearly a defeat for Chirac any way you look at it. Heh.
BY THE WAY, SmokyBlog may be history, but Fletch is up and running with a new Texas photoblog, Austin Country Limits. Unsurprisingly, it’s good!
CANADIAN ELECTION DEADLOCK? I’m not sure what this means. Less dynamism up north? Stay tuned.
Colby Cosh is liveblogging the returns.
UPDATE: Damian Penny has been liveblogging, too, and his conclusion is mixed but disappointed:
Just two or three months ago, if you told me we’d get 90 seats and almost 30% of the vote at election time, driving the seemingly unbeatable Martin Liberals into a minority government, I would have been thrilled. But I’m devastated. If we can’t win an election now, when the hell can we win?
Maybe next time.
I GOT AN EMAIL THE OTHER DAY slamming me for not having comments on my site. I get those occasionally, and they’re usually nasty enough that they’re self-refuting — yeah, I really want to give you a platform, buddy. . . .
But, as Eugene Volokh noted in a discussion of this topic a while back (read it, as I agree entirely and he said it better than I could, as usual), the worst part isn’t the flaming by people who don’t agree with you, it’s the nasty comments by people who generally agree with you.
For example, Q&O made a perfectly reasonable point about James Rubin, only to see the comments degenerate into nasty remarks about Rubin’s wife, Christiane Amanpour. I don’t like Amanpour, whom I regard as excessively agenda-driven, but I wouldn’t want her called names like that on my blog. Which means I’d either have to edit such comments out, or live with it. I don’t have the time for the former, and I’m not willing to do the latter.
Some blogs, like Daniel Drezner’s or Roger Simon’s seem to avoid that problem most of the time, but I think it’s a scaling issue — up to a certain level of traffic it feels like a conversation, past that it degenerates into USENET. At any rate, I’d rather blog than deal with comments.
The other problem, which I’ve seen both at blogs I agree with and blogs I don’t, is that bloggers can be captured by their commenters. It’s immediate feedback, and it’s interesting (it’s about you!) and I can imagine it could become addictive. My impression is that often, instead of serving as a corrective to errors, comment sections tend to lure bloggers farther in the direction they already lean. Anyway, I worry about that.
And since anybody can start a blog, I don’t feel that the absence of a comment section on InstaPundit is doing much to choke off free speech. [The Blogosphere is my comment section! — Ed. Er, yeah, something like that.]
UPDATE: Hmm. Looks like Billmon has had exactly the experience I feared:
I thought I was opening the kind of smoky little bar where the regulars outnumber the first-time customers, and, as the Cheers theme song had it, “everybody knows your name.” Instead, I’ve ended up with something that’s more like one of those huge franchise watering holes were you have to shout to be heard over the roar of the crowd.
Which means that playing the role of bartender/moderator has been sucking up progressively more of my limited blogging time, while becoming progressively less enjoyable – a textbook example of diminishing returns.
Perry DeHavilland has more thoughts, here.
INTERESTING REPORT:
Western intelligence officials are examining reports that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards attempted to cover up a nuclear accident that occurred during the delivery of a secret shipment of weapons-grade uranium from North Korea.
The accident allegedly caused Teheran’s new international airport to be sealed off by Revolutionary Guard commanders within hours of its official opening on May 9.
I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s certainly plausible. I guess we’ll just have to see what develops.
A DIPLOMATIC SUCCESS for the United States.
FAT JOKES ARE BEYOND THE PALE: Well, practically!
UPDATE: Not everyone got the memo, apparently.
RULE OF ECONOMIC COVERAGE: All good news is really bad news! (Both links via Bill Hobbs).
UPDATE: But this story seems to be good news:
Oil prices dropped sharply Monday as Iraq increased exports after mending sabotaged pipelines and as extra supplies from other OPEC members reassured international markets.
.
Some additional pressure was taken off the market by the resolution of a labor dispute in Norway, the world’s third-largest oil exporter, late last week.
.
“You have a lot of good news out there,” said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Alaron Trading in Chicago.
Even the antiwar folks can be happy: If oil prices rise, it’s proof that Bush is helping out his oil-industry buddies. But if they fall, it’s proof that the war was for oil all along. Win/win!
SMOKYBLOG, ALAS, IS GONE, but here’s a nice gallery of Smoky Mountain pictures from Cindy Haggerty.
I WAS GOING TO DO A ROUNDUP of Iraqi blog posts on the sovereignty handover, but Michele Catalano beat me to it.
THE SPECULIST’S weekly roundup of good news has been posted.
And Stuart Buck has some good news of his own.
VIRGINIA POSTREL has an interesting article on operations research, and a fascinating blog post on why the press isn’t covering the big productivity-gain story very well at all.
ACTUALLY, Knoxville suffered considerable damage from an earthquake on the New Madrid fault, the same one that created Reelfoot Lake. And we have earthquake drills occasionally, though we’ve had only very mild tremors (4.6 is the biggest) in living memory.
MORE THOUGHTS ON LONGEVITY, over at GlennReynolds.com.
JAMES LILEKS explores the heart of darkness: “Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their money.”
PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH has thoughts on John Kerry and human rights.
LARRY SOLUM has a very nice roundup on the Supreme Court detention cases.
UPDATE: C.D. Harris recalls a challenge he issued before the decisions.
TIM BLAIR is back from Malaysia, and offers readers a host of delights. Just keep scrolling.
NOTE: Box Office Mojo asked Michael Moore and company to comment for this story, but they wanted to screen the questions in advance. As policy, Box Office Mojo does not conduct interviews under such circumstances, so there will be no comment from them.
Moore used to be a gadfly. Now he’s part of the Establishment.
GINNY AUTHORS an essay worthy of Bill Whittle.
MY EARLIER POST on the Lost in Space DVD collection led a couple of readers to ask how I liked the Gilligan’s Island collection I mentioned a while back. Very much. Surprisingly, the InstaWife — who like me, grew up on the syndicated reruns — liked it, too. The unaired pilot (featuring different actors in the roles of the Professor, Ginger, and Mary Ann, and a different, Calypsoesque theme song) was interesting, too.
THE NEW STATESMAN ON France and human rights:
When it comes to foreign policy, opinion polls as well as a sampling of Hollywood blockbusters show that Americans see themselves as the good sheriff, selflessly sorting out a strange and unpredictable world. But as they chew over the congressional report on 9/11, they are clearly struggling to come to terms with the reality of their latest foreign adventure.
In contrast, the French foreign ministry is unambiguous about its role: France is the birthplace of human rights and the cradle of the Enlightenment. Thanks to giants such as Voltaire, France inspired others – for example, in the United States – to liberate themselves from oppressive, corrupt aristocratic elites.
So much for self-image: in practice, the French are running the cash registers in a Wild West whorehouse. Not only do the French, like Edith Piaf, regret nothing: their determination to keep their arms exports booming pushes them to sidestep their own laws, not to mention the international conventions they have signed. While all countries tend to pursue a foreign policy based on self-interest, the French have a network of arms salesmen and military advisers working in concert within their perceived spheres of influence to supply mass murderers. . . .
She has a leaked memo confirming that the French supplied members of the interim government responsible for the massacres with satellite phones to direct operations across the country. “They hand-delivered them by courier,” she says. “In the run-up to the massacres, the French had 47 senior officers living with and training the genocidaires. French policy is about influence and money and Francophonie,” says Melvern. “They are very professional at manipulating the UN system. By controlling Boutros Boutros-Ghali, their candidate for UN secretary general, they determined what information about the Rwandan genocide reached the outside world.”
Perhaps it is unfair to suggest that business interests might be tipping the balance against France’s taking a stand on human rights in Sudan. Jemera Rone of Human Rights Watch explains that TotalFinaElf has oil concessions in southern Sudan that it cannot touch until the peace deal between Khartoum and the south sticks. The French are wary of giving the regime in Khartoum a hard time about its ongoing ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in Darfur, in case it walks away from the southern peace deal, thus imperilling Total’s prospects.
Read the whole thing.