WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, and The U.N. cares about human rights.
Archive for February, 2006
February 28, 2006
We interviewed Claire Berlinski, author of Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis is America’s, Too, about Europe, Muslim integration (and the lack thereof), and the political, diplomatic, and military consequences thereof. I think it’s one of the most important books of the year, and that this is one of the most important podcast interviews we’ve done. Her advice to the White House and State Department on Europe: “Make contingency plans in case it all goes to hell, because it very well might.”
You can listen directly (no iPod needed!) by clicking here, or you can get it via iTunes.
There’s also a podcast archive here, and there are low-bandwidth versions for dialup users, etc., here.
Music: “Too Many Goodbyes,” by The Defenders of the Faith, from Original Sins, the first album I ever produced. That’s the Insta-Brother, Jonathan Reynolds, on guitar along with Hector Qirko, and Doug Weinstein plays drums and Hammond organ.
As always, my lovely and talented cohost is soliciting comments and suggestions.
INTERESTING REPORT FROM IRAQ:
In the days that followed the bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine, Iraq seemed within a hair’s breadth of civil war. But an aggressive U.S. and Kurdish diplomatic campaign appears for now to have coaxed the country back from open conflict between Sunni Arabs and Shiites, according to Iraqi politicians and Western diplomats speaking in interviews on Monday.
Read the whole thing.
In the southwest, where most of Iran’s oil, and Arabs, are found, two bombs went off in government offices. There were four injuries. These bombings have been going on since last Summer. The government blames foreign instigators. That may be true, but not the British foreigners the government names, but Iraqi Shia Arabs who feel the connection with their fellow Shia Arabs across the border in Iran. Like the Iraqi Shia Arabs, the Iranian Shia Arabs have not gotten much from all the oil produced around them. The ethnic Iranians (an Indo-European people) control the oil, and the money it brings in. The 1980 war between Iran and Iraq was started when Saddam Hussein tried to “liberate” his fellow Arabs just across the border in Iran, along with the oil they were sitting on. Saddam already had a reputation for treating Shias badly, and Iran’s Arabs remained loyal in resisting Saddam’s army. But now, the situation is different. Shia Arabs are basically running Iraq. This bothers the non-Arab Iranians, and encourages the Arab Iranians.
There’s also this:
Iran would also like to get rid of all the foreign spies. Increasingly, Iranian intelligence is getting reports of more foreigners offering money for information. This is a common intelligence gathering technique in the Middle East, where information is just another item to be bought, sold or bartered. In Iran, where smuggling has been big business for a long time, information is one of the items carried into, and out of, the country. Foreigners want to know about resistance to the government and attitudes towards Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Hmm. I wonder who is behind that.
AN EXTENSIVE, AND MOSTLY RIGHT look at the Bush Administration’s political problems.
IS BLOGGING LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP? My Dean says so, which makes me, on a word-count basis, at least, one of the most productive scholars around!
Here’s an article on that topic from the National Law Journal. And Paul Caron rounds up some thoughts from quite a few law professors.
Ann Althouse has further thoughts, and adds:
And speaking of U.S. News, wouldn’t it be funny if it used faculty blogging as a factor? There would be all these blogs by lawprofs trying to move their school up the rankings.
Indeed there would.
THREATSWATCH looks at Iran’s efforts to gain influence in the Middle East, which seem to be succeeding while the world is occupied with nuke rumors and cartoon wars:
But, typically, the nature of the Iranian nuclear program is not revealed by the UN agency tasked with investigating the crisis, but rather by the swirling events that continue to define it. And while the world remains affixed on the state of the Iranian nuclear countdown and the IAEA as it haplessly tries to get a fix on a moving target, the nature of the Iranian crisis transcends developments on the atomic front. . . .
While the Iranians are seemingly making little progress convincing the world of their ‘peaceful nuclear power program’ save for buying time, they are making considerable progress elsewhere throughout the region with visible, tangible gains in the Palestinian Territories, conditions inexplicably favorable in Lebanon, constant bloody tinkering in Iraq (especially through Basra) and a regional diplomatic ‘charm offensive’ ongoing.
Meanwhile, where it appears Iran is employing a short to mid-term regional strategy, the United States seems entrenched employing long-term strategies of seemingly endless UN-centered wrangling and funding supportive broadcasts into a largely immobile internal Iranian opposition.
I’m afraid that it’s going to come to open military action against Iran, sooner rather than later.
It’s also worth reading this piece on what Hamas is planning. Meryl Yourish has some further thoughts.
KARL ROVE comments on the Army of Davids:
Rove considers Memogate a watershed in the rise of the alternative media.
“The whole incident in the fall of 2004 showed really the power of the ‘blogosphere’,” he said in his West Wing office.
“Because in essence you had now, an army of self-appointed experts looking over the shoulder of the mainstream media and bringing to bear enormously sophisticated skills,” he added.
Still, Rove cautioned that the Internet’s political potential has a darker side.
Like all things. And the Bush Administration’s ineptitude where the ports story is involved demonstrates that it’s always a two-edged sword.
UPDATE: More thoughts here.
DOUGLAS MURRAY WRITES that we should fear Holland’s silence:
‘Would you write the name you’d like to use here, and your real name there?” asked the girl at reception. I had just been driven to a hotel in the Hague. An hour earlier I’d been greeted at Amsterdam airport by a man holding a sign with a pre-agreed cipher. I hadn’t known where I would be staying, or where I would be speaking. The secrecy was necessary: I had come to Holland to talk about Islam. . . .
The event was scholarly, incisive and wide-ranging. There were no ranters or rabble-rousers, just an invited audience of academics, writers, politicians and sombre party members. As yet another example of Islam’s violent confrontation with the West (this time caused by cartoons) swept across the globe, we tried to discuss Islam as openly as we could. The Dutch security service in the Hague was among those who considered the threat to us for doing this as particularly high. The security status of the event was put at just one level below “national emergency”.
This may seem fantastic to people in Britain. But the story of Holland — which I have been charting for some years — should be noted by her allies. Where Holland has gone, Britain and the rest of Europe are following. The silencing happens bit by bit. A student paper in Britain that ran the Danish cartoons got pulped. A London magazine withdrew the cartoons from its website after the British police informed the editor they could not protect him, his staff, or his offices from attack. This happened only days before the police provided 500 officers to protect a “peaceful” Muslim protest in Trafalgar Square.
It seems the British police — who regularly provide protection for mosques (as they did after the 7/7 bombs) — were unable to send even one policeman to protect an organ of free speech. At the notorious London protests, Islamists were allowed to incite murder and bloodshed on the streets, but a passer-by objecting to these displays was threatened with detention for making trouble.
When other groups decide that the way to get favorable press is to use violence, those who have wimped out now will have no one to blame but themselves. As a reader emailed me a while back, what use is a free press if it doesn’t believe in free speech?
People talk about Eurabia, but what’s really happened is that Europe has become Weimarized, with governments and institutions too morally and intellectually weak to stand up for the principles they pretend to embody. And we know what that led to last time . . . .
UPDATE: Related thoughts here.
BOINGBOING IS BANNED IN VARIOUS MIDDLE EASTERN COUNTRIES: Here’s some advice on how to get around the censorware, but since it’s on BoingBoing, and hence presumably blocked to the people who need it, I’m also reposting it below; I’m pretty sure the BoingBoing folks won’t mind. [LATER: Xeni Jardin emails: “Mind???? We’re thrilled!”] Click “read more” to read it.
What’s really lame is that these countries, which include Iran, are using filtering software made by a United States company to block content. Selling the rope, and all that.
BLOGGER BOB “CONFEDERATE YANKEE” OWENS is interviewed in the Washington Post.
STANDING UP TO BARBARISM: Gateway Pundit notes that Poland is no France.
ANOTHER ARMY OF DAVIDS SIGHTING — Ian Schwartz emails: “I just picked up a copy of the book at Books a Million — one of the last few.”
Words to warm an author’s heart.
GRAND ROUNDS is up. So is the Carnival of the Capitalists, and the Blawg Review. Plus, the Carnival of the Cats! Lots more carnivals at BlogCarnival.com.
UPDATE: Also, Haveil Havalim and the Carnival of Homeschooling.
And The Manolo reminds me not to miss the Carnival of Couture.
February 27, 2006
Maybe you’ve heard: Blogs are a vanishing fad — this year’s digital Pet Rock. Or a business bubble about to pop. Or a sucker’s bet for new-media fame seekers.
Recent weeks have seen the rise of a cottage industry in Whither Blogging? articles. New York magazine cast cold water on newly minted bloggers’ dreams with an examination of the divide between a handful of A-list blogs and countless B-list and C-list blogs that can’t get much traffic no matter how hard their creators work. Slate’s Daniel Gross spotlighted signs that blogs may have peaked as a business. And a much-discussed poll from Gallup concluded that growth in U.S. blog readers was “somewhere between nil and negative.” From there it was off to the races, with all manner of commentators weighing in, led by the Chicago Tribune, which smirked its way through an anti-blogging editorial that got Mr. Gross’s name wrong while taking odd potshots at Al Gore and snowboarding.
Reports of blogging’s demise are bosh, but if we’re lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging. Which would be just fine, because it would let blogging become what it was always destined to be: just another digital technology and method of communication, one with plenty to offer but no particular claim to revolution.
He’s mostly right. Blogging isn’t so much a revolution in itself as a symptom of a larger revolution. You can read my thoughts on blogs in particular here.
DAVID WARREN has more on the Cartoon Wars:
The reason I have written so copiously on this subject — not the cartoons themselves, but what I have called the “organized apoplexy” in response to them — is because it is important. In my judgement, it is the most important thing that has happened since the Al Qaeda attack on the United States, in 2001. It is important in combination with other fast-developing events, including the victory of the openly terrorist Hamas in a Palestinian election; Iran’s public promise to “wipe Israel off the map”; collapsing public order in Pakistan, Nigeria, and elsewhere; the recent Muslim riots, and continuing low-level Intifada in France; and now the destruction of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, triggering vicious sectarian strife in Iraq. And quite literally, hundreds of lesser events of the same nature — each revealing an Islamic world in combustion, and a West retreating into contrived apologies and other confused gestures of cowardice and panic.
One cannot keep up with all these events — the wheels of history are turning too quickly. The world in which we will find ourselves, a few years hence, will not resemble the world we inhabited a few years ago. Yet this is among the few predictions that can be safely made.
It’s not a good time to go wobbly.
BRUSSELS JOURNAL REPORTS:
Vladimir Bukovksy, the 63-year old former Soviet dissident, fears that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union. In a speech he delivered in Brussels last week Mr Bukovsky called the EU a “monster” that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a fullfledged totalitarian state.
I doubt the E.U. will last long enough for that. I certainly hope that it straightens out, though.
YEAH, I’ve watched a lot of Jimmy Neutron in my time, too.
THE PORKBUSTERS PAGE is now at Porkbusters.org — make a note of it.
EUGENE VOLOKH NOTES a new opinion on the right to keep and bear arms by the Kentucky Supreme Court, in Posey v. State. (Big pdf file). I haven’t had time to read the whole thing yet (it’s 64 pages) but it looks pretty interesting.
I HAVE A NEW BLOGCHILD: “I must admit, although I’ve read many blogs recently, I never considered starting a blog of my own until I caught Glenn Reynolds, the creator of Instapundit, on C-SPAN yesterday.”
THIS LOOKS LIKE A NON-STORY: Lots of people are talking about this AP story, which scarily begins:
Citing broad gaps in U.S. intelligence, the Coast Guard cautioned the Bush administration weeks ago that it could not determine whether a United Arab Emirates-based company seeking a stake in some U.S. port operations might support terrorist operations.
Of course, Rob Port notes that further on the same story says:
The Coast Guard said the concerns reflected in the document ultimately were addressed. In a statement, the Coast Guard said other U.S. intelligence agencies were able to provide answers to the questions it raised.
So what’s the big deal, exactly?