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July 30, 2003

The Times’ new plan to restore its credibility, is to print articles critical of itself

Times to Name ‘Public Editor’ to Be Readers’ Representative

Seeking to mend the damage to the credibility and staff morale of The New York Times following a reporter’s extensive fabrications, the newspaper’s new executive editor today accepted the major recommendations of an internal committee, including the appointment of a “public editor” to serve as a representative for readers.

Acting on his first day as executive editor, Bill Keller wrote in a memorandum to the staff that he would soon hire a public editor, or ombudsman, who would “have license to write about issues of our coverage, and to have those independent, uncensored commentaries published in our pages.”

The easy critique of this is that the public editor may be unlikely to be highly critical of the people who sign his checks. But the point I want to make is that even if he or she slams the Times like crazy, it’s not the way to go.

Just as when Liberals go after Bush with disregard for the facts, now the Times is hiring an employee whose job it is to rip on the Times, regardless of the facts. What if the Times doesn’t need any attacking that week? What if they did everything right? That’s irrelevant – the editor’s job is to attack anyway. That’s what he’s being paid for, and he darn well better do it.

The erroneous journalistic and Liberal notion that they make a contribution by slamming whatever people do—is now being directed against the journalists and Liberals themselves.

The last thing I want to read is a lot of self-critical Times articles. The way to help is by helping, not attacking. Improve things and make everybody at the Times look good. That’s what I’d like to see.

Update: This is brilliant.

iTunes Music Store for Windows Due This Year

Peter Lowe , Apple’s Director of Marketing for Applications and Services, http://www.paidcontent.org/pc/arch/2003_07_29.shtml#002622”>said:

Apple for Windows is on track to launch by the end of this year…Usage rules for Windows version of iTunes: certainly it is our intention to have the broad music rights…

The end of the album? Perhaps not:

Out of all our iTunes sales, 46 percent has been sold as albums..the disintegration of the album has not happened, contrary to what people are saying…

Apple’s thoughts on why people will pay to buy music:

The way to go after illegal file sharing services is to compete with them…go after their weaknesses. The reason why people used these services is instant gratification: for most of the people who use file sharing, it is more about flexibility and not about free…we aim to take advantages of weaknesses of illegal sharing services: unreliable encoding; bad connection; no previews; wrong music; no album cover art; and at the end of the day, it is stealing.

Check out what Charles Haddad of Business Week says about iTunes users:

Fans of iTunes represent an unstoppable force. Who wants to keep all those CDs if you can carry around 1,000 songs on an iPod and easily expand that library through the Internet? Not many I suspect. Nor is this growing army of Internet-savvy users going to stop at music. Not too far in the future an iVideo and perhaps an iTome, for downloading literature and audiobooks, respectively, will be available.

From Rolling Stone magazine:

The recent success of Apple’s iTunes Music Store may be the best news the industry has had lately. ... “iTunes has shown that there is a real business potential for selling downloads,” says a source at Warner Bros. “It has been encouraging from a symbolic standpoint even more than a financial standpoint.” Amazon.com and other online retailers now plan to launch their own download programs.

July 25, 2003

9/11 Report: Consider it Good News

The Report is being called “damning” and “scathing.” And perhaps it is, with regard to the past.

With regard to the present, it’s pretty encouraging. Let me point out that terrorists are reading this report and saying, “they were that close to getting us when they weren’t even trying. If we do something like that again they’re going to nail us.”

From the LA Times article:

Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar had more visible links to Al Qaeda than any of the other hijackers. The CIA had observed both men attending an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000.

...Hijackers Hani Hanjour, Mohamed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Alhazmi and Almihdhar all appear to have had contact with individuals who “had come to the FBI’s attention” during counter-terrorism or counter-intelligence investigations. Four of those people were the focus of active FBI investigations during the time the hijackers were in the U.S.

Today, these guys would likely be caught.

And in fact, there has so far been no second attack carried out by terrorists on U.S. soil, likely due in part to efforts by the CIA and FBI.

July 24, 2003

CLINTON BOOSTS BUSH

From a Larry King interview with Clinton (emphasis added):

CLINTON: Well, here’s what happens: every day the president gets a daily brief from the CIA. And then, if it’s some important issue—and believe me, you know, anything having to do with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons became much more important to everybody in the White House after September the 11—then they probably told the president, certainly Condoleezza Rice, that this is what the British intelligence thought. They maybe have a difference of opinion, but on balance, they decided they should leave that line in the speech.

I think the main thing I want to say to you is, people can quarrel with whether we should have more troops in Afghanistan or internationalize Iraq or whatever, but it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks…

DOLE: That’s right.

CLINTON: ... of biological and chemical weapons. We might have destroyed them in ‘98. We tried to, but we sure as heck didn’t know it because we never got to go back in there.

KING: Yes.

CLINTON: And what I think—again, I would say the most important thing is we should focus on what’s the best way to build Iraq as a democracy? How is the president going to do that and deal with continuing problems in Afghanistan and North Korea?

We should be pulling for America on this. We should be pulling for the people of Iraq. We can have honest disagreements about where we go from here, and we have space now to discuss that in what I hope will be a nonpartisan and open way. But this State of the Union deal they decided to use the British intelligence. The president said it was British intelligence. Then they said on balance they shouldn’t have done it. You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president. I mean, you can’t make as many calls as you have to make without messing up once in awhile. The thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do now. That’s what I think.

This is an astonishing amount of support for Bush coming from a leading Democrat at this time.

Yesterday many conservative talk-radio hosts said that this was a sneaky way for Clinton to promote himself. I heard suggestions that:

• Clinton was trying to undercut all other Democratic contenders for the Presidency so that Hillary would be stronger when she chose to run, possibly as early as 2004.
• Clinton was trying to head off similar criticisms of his own actions while in office.

I’ve got a different take on it. I suggest that Clinton can see that the Democratic party self-destructing via a disregard for the well-being of the country, in pursuit of political goals. I think Clinton is just trying to make a powerful contribution to the future of his party by pointing it back in the right direction.

July 22, 2003

California Democrats Discuss Dereliction of Duty for Political Benefit

Here’s how it ended:

After about 90 minutes, a staffer interrupted to alert lawmakers that their meeting was not private at all:

“Excuse me, guys, you can be heard outside,” an unidentified staff member said.

“Oh [expletive], [expletive],” Goldberg said.

They’d been caught red-handed.

Via JunkYardBlog:

Democrats Discussed Extending Budget Crisis

SACRAMENTO In a meeting they thought was private but was actually broadcast around the Capitol on Monday, 11 Assembly Democrats debated prolonging California’s budget crisis to further their political goals.

Members of the Democratic Study Group, a caucus that defines itself as progressive, were unaware that a microphone in Committee Room 127 was on as they discussed slowing progress in an attempt to increase pressure on Republicans to accept tax increases as part of a deal to resolve the state’s $38-billion budget gap.

The conversation was transmitted to roughly 500 “squawk boxes” around Sacramento that political staff, lobbyists and reporters use to listen in on legislative proceedings.

Participants in the meeting appear to have been looking at this as a strategy to make it easier to raise taxes.

According to Republican staff members who captured parts of the meeting on tape, Los Angeles Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg and others discussed holding up the budget to dramatize the consequences and build support for a ballot initiative that would make it easier to raise taxes.

...Campbell said Democrats also discussed whether delaying the budget would increase the chance of a union-backed initiative that would lower the threshold for new taxes to a 55% vote of the Legislature. The state Constitution currently requires that budgets pass by at least a two-thirds majority, which today would require that a few Republicans join a united Democratic majority.

Great Script Powers PIRATES Movie

The PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN script, written by the brilliant Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, is quite innovative. In a word, for the majority of the story it’s all protagonists and antagonists, with no bad guys. Perfect for the amoral vibe of a pirate film.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Read No Further Until You’ve Seen the Film

Can you consider Barbossa’s pirate crew bad guys because they once stranded Jack on an island? Not really – they’re pirates, that’s their thing. And in the middle of the movie they make a friendly decision to just make a small cut on Elizabeth when they think they need her blood – surprising her because she expected them to kill her. These pirates just aren’t that bad.

Only at the very end of the movie when Barbossa’s crew decides to kill Will rather than waste time with a small cut, do they earn bad guy status.

Can you call Will a bad guy because he leaves Jack in the hands of Barbossa in the middle of the movie? We’re intended to root for Will as one of the good guys. It seems to me that it’s pretty much all protagonists and antagonists, with no bad guys until the very end. When was the last time you saw that in an adventure film?

If you’re into this stuff, Ted and Terry have an excellent film theory web site called Wordplay. Check it out.

July 19, 2003

Re: File-Swapping—Copyright Can be Protected

I’d love it if music could be free; but intellectual property must be protected, or the Music/TV/Film/Publishing businesses will all get hosed.

Really the big error of the music business was the CD, where they wanted you to pay $18 for 12 songs to get one or two good ones. This is a major reason there’s been so much illegal file-swapping—the music business was offering no fair, legal alternative.

Of course, the Apple Music Store looks like it will change all that.

In the meantime, many people have said that the cat’s out of the bag, and there will be no way to prevent file-swapping of copyrighted songs. But today’s news appears to show that it will be possible to prevent this.

Record Labels Send Flurry of Subpoenas

It looks like the record industry wasn’t kidding.

Three weeks after announcing that it planned to sue those who share songs online, the Recording Industry Assn. of America has obtained federal court subpoenas for the identities of at least 871 people it has accused of violating music copyrights, Associated Press reported Friday.

The subpoenas compel Internet service providers to reveal the names and addresses of people whose accounts allegedly have been used to make songs available for free copying on a file-sharing network such as Kazaa.

...One thing seems certain: The RIAA has no plans to send warning letters to the people it targets. Instead, they will simply be sued.

If you’ve got a computer running Kazaa and serving a few hundred tunes… this is a good time to pack it in.

July 16, 2003

Teachers Need to be Permitted to Discipline their Students

I have several friends who teach high school in and around L.A., and they have stated to me that in many schools things are totally out of control:

• students bring boom-boxes into the classroom and play them
• students use drugs on school property
• students yell at the teachers
• teaching in such classrooms is almost impossible

etc. etc. Yet oddly enough, there is no form of discipline that is permitted. Teachers are not permitted to discipline the kids in any way.

This of course is due to various Liberal views that such discipline is bad for kids. Such arguments, while surely well-intentioned, appear to be ineffective in practice.

It’s gotten to the point that arguments are now being made that teachers should be permitted to bring guns to school to defend themselves from armed students:

Letting Teachers Pack Guns Will Make America’s Schools Safer

Banning guns from schools seems the obvious way to keep children safe. Utah, though, is doing the opposite, and is stirring up debate across the nation.

Acting under a new state law, school districts across Utah have started drawing up regulations allowing teachers and other public employees to carry concealed guns on school property. Opponents are still trying to fight the law, and at first glance their concern about firearms in schools is understandable. Last Sunday in New Jersey, an attack by armed teenagers against three fellow students and randomly chosen townspeople was narrowly averted.

I’m sorry, but that’s pretty stark. Is it better to forget about discipline and just try to shoot the kids when the bullets are flying? Forget about it. This is way out of control.

Sure, if you let teachers slap kids’ hands with rulers there are going to be cases where some teachers abuse the authority. But the worst that happens is, kids’ hands get slapped with rulers. The current status is far worse.

“He that spareth his rod hateth his son, but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” So says the Bible, and the Bible knows a lot about human nature.

Surely we can’t start rapping the knuckles of kids who are packing guns. But we can phase in disciplinary measures starting in the earliest appropriate grade of school, and then each year extend them to the next grade up. We have to support our teachers by providing them with the tools to have an environment in which they can do their jobs.

July 15, 2003

Communism Being Advocated in Class at UC Santa Barbara

In a million years I could never have imagined anything this crazy. At UC Santa Barbara, the Professors are teaching the students to be Communists. It’s being done in the Film Theory Department.

[Professor] Branigan has tangled brown-gray hair, a shaggy beard, large glasses coated with flecks of dandruff and fingerprints, and wears an oversized gray sweater and corduroy pants. As he speaks, his hands grasp at the air, shaping it as he shapes his thoughts. He punches certain words out with an odd, inflectionless emphasis. “The nature of the photography: Benjamin says the camera strips people who are in front of the camera lenslike actorsand alienaaaates them from their labor! Alienaaaation! False coooonsciousness! ... Benjamin says the camera does not show the equipment that’s used to make the film. It obscures or hides or masks THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION! Now in Marxism if you hide the process of production, you are obscuring and further alienating the labor that goes into that, the BOOODILY labor that yoooou are contributing to that manufacture. OK? Which is a bad, bad fact. . . .”

Well, surely that was just one lecture. That’s not really what they’re teaching. That would be absurd. Even Russia has abandoned Communism, for gosh sakes. Let’s see how a UC Santa Barbara student sums up what he’s being taught:

“I love film theory,” says Chris Scotten. ... “We learn how film psychologically manipulates us, and the power inherent in the language of cinema. It can be two things, a useful propaganda tool in a communist revolution, or part of the capitalist superstructure, a way of lulling the working class into a haze to subdue them and give them an escape from the pressures of reality. The old communists writing about film theory in Russia and Germany really had something to say, and it’s still relevant today. You’ve got about six companies that own the biggest, most awesome propaganda machine in the history of the whole wretched world. What are the consequences of that?”

Did you see that? “A useful propaganda tool in a communist revolution”?

From Kevin Brownlow, the world’s leading silent movie historian, author of “The Parade’s Gone By . . .,” and co-producer, with David Gill, of acclaimed documentaries: “You would think, from this closed-circuit attitude to teaching, that such academics would be politically right wing. .... But they are not right wing. They are, regrettably, usually left wingquite aggressively Marxistwhich makes the whole situation even more alarming.”

These ultra-leftwing professors are actually advocating Communism. The author of this article, David Weddle, was shocked to find out he’d spent thousands of dollars to have his daughter taught that she ought to be a Marxist.

This is just too ridiculous.

July 08, 2003

The Left’s Position on Liberia has Boomeranged and Helped Bush

The brilliance of the Bush move into Liberia may not yet have been fully appreciated.

The Left was saying Bush was hypocritical to point proudly to the humanitarian results of freeing the Iraqi people. Why hypocritical? Because he was ignoring great humanitarian suffering in Liberia, of course. Here’s an example of this roundabout argument, from Arianna Huffington, printed on July 2. It’s a perfect example of the Left’s position on the subject:

Atrocities in Africa Not on Bush’s Radar

by Arianna Huffington

With Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction as difficult to find as Hussein himself, President Bush’s Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of “mass graves” and “torture chambers” and encomiums to “freeing the people of Iraq.” He has all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International T-shirt.

If we buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy, then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?

Notice that Arianna didn’t want Bush to actually go into Liberia? She says, “If we buy his new argument”. She’s nothing but skeptical of the notion of actually doing it. She doesn’t care about Liberia. She wants to slam Bush for not going into Liberia, and still reserve the right to slam him again if he does it.

The Left thought they had Bush in a dilemma – they figured he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

As the Left picked up this argument and trumpeted it around, Bush said, “Well, why not go into Liberia and help those people out?”

Now the Left is stuck – unable to say: “Wait a minute – we didn’t want you to actually do it!” Meanwhile praise is rolling in from all directions for Bush’s humanitarian actions:

Even liberals have credited Mr. Bush with doing more than his predecessor to help Africa. In May, Live Aid founder Bob Geldof said Mr. Bush is far more committed than Mr. Clinton to fighting AIDS and famine on the continent.

“Clinton talked the talk and did diddly squat, whereas Bush doesn’t talk but does deliver,” said Mr. Geldof, an Irish musician and activist who in 1985 staged the world’s largest rock concert to combat starvation in Africa.

It’s precisely because the arguments of the Left are so screwy, that they can boomerang like this. What a roundabout argument: “Bush was wrong to help people in Iraq, for the reason that he’s not helping people in Liberia!” So ridiculous.

July 06, 2003

“We Hold These Truths To Be Sacred And Undeniable.”

What if the Declaration of Independence had said that? It would be a different world today. But that was the first draft. Ben Franklin was co-author of the sentence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." From Walter Isaacson, author of "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life:"

On June 21, after he had finished a draft and incorporated some changes from Adams, Jefferson had a copy delivered to Franklin, with a cover note far more polite than editors generally receive today. "Will Doctor Franklin be so good as to peruse it," he wrote, "and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?"

Franklin made only a few small changes, but one of them was resounding. Using heavy backslashes, he crossed out the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" and changed it to read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

The concept of "self-evident" truths came less from Jefferson’s favored philosopher, Locke, than from the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. Hume had distinguished between "synthetic" truths that describe matters of fact (such as "London is bigger than Philadelphia" ) and "analytic" truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition. ( "The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees" or "All bachelors are unmarried." ) When he chose the word "sacred," Jefferson had suggested intentionally or unintentionally that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion. By changing it to "self-evident," Franklin made it an assertion of rationality.

Perhaps Franklin felt that the meaning of "sacred and undeniable" wasn’t sufficiently specified. For example, what exactly does "undeniable" mean here? Certainly someone could literally deny it. People can deny anything – and frequently do : ) Therefore the sentence was unacceptable. Then there’s the reference to religion in the word, "sacred." Perhaps Franklin already, even at that time, saw the importance of separation between Church and State. Can you imagine having a friend as brilliant as Ben Franklin, to show your draft work to and get feedback from? The United States was blessed to have a collaboration of geniuses draft the foundation documents of our nation.

July 01, 2003

You’ve Gotta Love Scrappleface…

...one of the funniest sites on the net.

Democrats Call for Huge Military Buildup

(2003-06-28)—Democrats in Congress, frustrated that Republicans stole their thunder by passing a Medicare prescription drug plan, say this week they’ll introduce a bill to double the Pentagon’s budget for 2003-04.

Another Non-Sequitor from the Left

The same people who were claiming we got out of Afhanistan too soon, are now claiming we’re staying in Iraq too long.

It’s key for us to stay in Iraq and get it back on its feet, as we’ve done in the past in Germany, Japan, etc. – nations that went on to have strong economies and good relations with the United States.

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