Archive for November, 2004

IRAQ UPDATES: Read this and this.

IVORY COAST UPDATE:

A colonel of the Ivorian gendarmerie interviewed by Agence France Presse (AFP) has affirmed that French forces on November 9 fired directly and without warning upon the crowd of protestors gathered in front of the Hotel Ivoire in Abidjan. Colonel Georges Guiai Bi Poin, who was in charge of a contingent of Ivorian gendarmes dispatched to control the crowd and coordinate with the French troops, says that the order to fire came from the commander of the latter, colonel D’Estremon.

If these were American troops, this would be getting worldwide attention.

MORE UKRAINE UPDATES HERE, from King Banaian.

UPDATE: John O’Sullivan looks at winners and losers so far:

The final losers are the U.N. and Kofi Annan. The U.N. has been invisible. As Kofi Annan has been trying to keep his head above oil, he has issued his usual appeal for restraint. But this crisis has brought forth the heroes of the Cold War from retirement — Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa and Margaret Thatcher — to encourage the orange revolutionaries. And Annan cannot begin to compete with their moral authority or the legitimacy they can bestow.

Indeed.

And read this piece, on lessons from Georgia and elsewhere, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here, including a link to video.

JIM LINDGREN: “If the news accounts are correct, the new study distinguishing the brain scans of liars from truth-tellers has a serious design flaw that goes beyond the small sample size. Indeed, it is such an obvious flaw that I wonder whether the researchers really made it, or whether instead the reporters got the story wrong.”

ONLINE SHOPPING IS UP:

U.S. online shoppers, who set spending and traffic records on Thanksgiving Day and the “Black Friday” that followed, were expected to break new ground again as they returned to work on what some are calling “Blue Monday.” . . .

While Black Friday refers to the bustling shopping day that starts brick-and-mortar retailers’ move from “the red” to “the black,” Blue Monday — a name inspired by the Web’s blue links — is one of the biggest days for online retailers as workers return to their jobs, and fast Internet connections.

Businesses: Let your employees surf at work. The economy depends on it!

A MALE HOMECOMING QUEEN? Big deal. The University of Tennessee did that with Vince Staten back in 1970 (though, back in those analog days, we had a paper bag instead of a blue dot). Talk about being behind the times.

CLEANING UP THE U.N.: Is it time for Helms-Biden again?

BECAUSE THERE HAVE TO BE SOME LIMITS, DAMMIT: “I am not about to Photoshop tasteful wall decorations into an informal luncheon snapshot.”

UPDATE: Not everyone appreciates the value of restraint.

AN IMPORTANT POINT:

One of the tragic things I see developing is that the Western media narrative seems to be falling into a US vs. Russia play. And I’m seeing more and more commentary in that vein on the web. So few seem to grasp that this is about an entire system, not about an election. Yes, the people are rallying for Yushchenko, but it goes so, so much deeper than that.

The events in Ukraine are about a people fighting free of the grayness, corruption, abuse and fatalism of the post-Soviet era. All of you, Right or Left, need to see them as people. Yes, there are geopolitical ramifications. But they should be so incredibly secondary to the humanity of the Ukrainian people — these are flesh and blood human beings who are fighting to be free of a vicious, grinding system. People are proud to be Ukrainian, proud that their country is now known for something other than mafia, dead journalists, and corruption. People who a week ago were convinced of their own powerlessness are now standing fearlessly, singing together, “We are many, we are one, we can’t be stopped!”

Can anyone be so dead of heart not to find this beautiful?

Apparently so.

BRIAN MICKLETHWAIT:

Some people, of the sort who confuse (or who like to pretend for propaganda purposes that they confuse) libertarianism with libertinism, might expect a libertarian like me to rejoice at any collapse in marital fidelity. But my libertarianism is about the right to choose what promises you make, not about the right to break them with impunity, to the point where you are not even to be criticised for such cheating. . . .

And if anyone mentions France, where, allegedly, they take a more mature and rational view of these things, my answer is: precisely. Cynicism about private life is directly to be associated, I would say, with cynicism about the more public side of things. French public life is relentlessly corrupt and cynical, and they are oh-so-rational about adultery. I do not think these facts are coincidental.

Read the whole thing, which is about the Blunkett affair and much more.

INTERESTED IN STORYTELLING AND SCREENWRITING? If you are, you may be interested in this blog by Katy Wright. She’s written a book on the subject, too.

HOT FRENCH CHICKS WITH GUNS: The world is becoming a better place.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE has further thoughts on Wal-Mart.

UPDATE: This take is closer to my own: Wal-Mart is just an unpleasant place to shop.

MAYBE THIS IS WHY WAL-MART’S SALES ARE OFF: Target is offering marijuana! Well, it’s easier than competing with Toys R Us! (Via Volokh).

Maybe they’ve got an idea of how the Raich decision is likely to come out . . . .

IT’S NOT ON THE WEB YET, if it’s going to be at all, but I’ve got a review of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle novels in the “Holiday Reading” issue of The Weekly Standard.

UPDATE: Hey, it’s on the Web now.

TOUR THE INDIAN BLOGOSPHERE at this week’s Blog Mela, where, among other things, Arundhati Roy receives unfavorable attention.

MY HAPPY EXPERIENCE with BellSouth’s robot-driven repair service this weekend led to a column, which will be up later in the week at TCS. But here are a couple of thoughts that didn’t make the column.

One is that when it comes to reliable phone service, you still can’t beat the Bells. One of the local cable companies, Knology, offers phone service, as do some other local-phone competitors. I’m glad they’re competitive, but I have serious doubts about the quality and reliability of their service compared to BellSouth’s. (I haven’t heard anything bad about Knology, to be fair, but my mother-in-law has local service from some other provider, and her service calls take, literally, months.)

Another is that the move to internet telephony as something more than a hobby or add-on is going to make reliability worse. Internet telephony seems to be on the verge of becoming a mass-market consumer item — but the Internet itself isn’t especially reliable, by phone standards.

Call me old-fashioned, or more concerned with reliability than most people (and I probably am the latter, at least) but I wouldn’t rely on a VOIP setup as my sole telephone connection. I gather that some people are, but they obviously feel differently about these things than I do.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I concur with your assessment of VOIP and POTS; when hurricane Charley came through Orlando we lost power for 3 1/2 days, others lost it for over a week, some for longer. I have a good size UPS that supports my PC, cable modem and router, but I didn’t have internet access because the cable company didn’t have power to its boxes.

Being law enforcement and an emergency responder to the county courthouse, I’m on the “special” list for my county-issued cell phone, so I had cell access while my neighbors did not. They could receive calls but couldn’t make them because for the first day after Charley public cell access was restricted to ensure emergency service workers could communicate (911 calls would go through, others would not).

My “dumb” phone from Bell South worked the entire time because Bell has battery backup and generators, and their wired network is independent of everyone else’s.

I was seriously considering VOIP up until we became Hurricane Central. Now, I might add VOIP to get real cheap long distance, but it will be in addition to POTS because of the reliability.

That’s certainly my view. The Bells have a different attitude — and network setup — than most other people. On the other hand, reader Stan Davis emails:

As a Senior Engineer for a small, up-and-coming VoIP company, I can assure you that your fears about the unreliability of VoIP telephony are fast becoming unfounded. It very much depends on the company, of course, but our network has double and sometimes triple back-ups for every piece of mission critical equipment. Our goal is to not have a single dropped or choppy call and we are 99.9% successful in that. Our biggest obstacle lies, ironically, not with the Internet per-se, but with the Bell companies, and others, that provide the DSL (and cable) to the home. This piece is the weakest link and entirely out of the VoIP industries hands. You might be surprised to hear that a very large portion (sorry, don’t have exact numbers, but would guess 80%) of all domestic long distance telephone calls today travel over a VoIP network at some point! The same is true for mobile calls. I hope this will help you to understand the extent that VoIP has penetrated the telephony industry already, unbeknownst to the general public.

Actually I did know that the numbers are big. I’m delighted to hear that people are taking this seriously, because I think that peoples’ primary phone lines should be extremely reliable. Of course, the local-loop segment is the most important, and I don’t think those are treated as carefully for Internet access as for Plain Old Telephone Service, meaning that POTS is still likely to be more reliable.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Steele emails:

Further to your item about POTS vs VOIP I can second some of your correspondents comments. We were without power for 5 weeks after Hurricane Andrew and NEVER lost phone service. Without power for that long no matter how reliable they make a VOIP backbone there is no UPS available to mankind that will last that long :-)

Indeed.

SPEAK OUT AND BE FIRED: More McCarthyite crushing of dissent in John Ashkkkroft’s Alberto Gonzales’ America!

ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY ROUNDUP of media bias regarding firearms is up.

FACULTY CLUBS AND CHURCH PEWS: Harvard law professor Bill Stuntz tries to bridge the gap:

The past few months have seen a lot of talk about red and blue America, mostly by people on one side of the partisan divide who find the other side a mystery.

It isn’t a mystery to me, because I live on both sides. For the past twenty years, I’ve belonged to evangelical Protestant churches, the kind where George W. Bush rolled up huge majorities. And for the past eighteen years, I’ve worked in secular universities where one can hardly believe that Bush voters exist. Evangelical churches are red America at its reddest. And universities, especially the ones in New England (where I work now), are as blue as the bluest sky.

Not surprisingly, each of these institutions is enemy territory to the other. But the enmity is needless. It may be a sign that I’m terminally weird, but I love them both, passionately. And I think that if my church friends and my university friends got to know each other, they’d find a lot to like and admire. More to the point, the representatives of each side would learn something important and useful from the other side.

Yeah. I’m not terribly religious myself, but I grew up as a preacher’s kid and I don’t find religious people, or symbolism, as threatening as many university folks do. On the other hand, as someone who has spent most of his life around universities, I don’t think they’re the centers of evil that many non-university people do, either. Read the whole thing, as Stuntz makes these points much better than I do.

KING BANAIAN has a Ukraine roundup.