Today the army had to blow up a mosque that a few dozen Iraqi thugs were holed up in. That's sort of been a big taboo so far that said thugs have been able to exploit, so I suppose this was bound to happen sooner or later. Wonder what's going to happen next, cuz this could bounce either way.
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Like a speed user searching for an ever greater high, this White House just can't believe what they can do, and not get called onto the carpet by responsible members of their own party. White House withholds Rice speech.
They've declared this speech to be secret. Never mind that she was scheduled to give it in public on September 11, or that parts of the text have already been leaked to the newspapers. Somehow, now, it's in the realm of the Secret Bush World.
Somebody please explain to me how this is anything other than a naked political move. And before you trot out the very tired "the commission is a partisan political entity" crap, feel free to be specific. Which commissioners are the partisans? Bush picked them all. As far as I can tell, it's pretty balanced. Everything they do is on the official 9/11 commission site. Point out the partisan bits, please!
Bushie whining about the "partisan commission" is pretty flat, given the fact that they've produced no alternative plan and they picked the entire commission.
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Tacitus asks the question that's been on my mind recently: Can any one really argue that the occupation [of Iraq] is not badly undermanned?
Furthermore, Kevin Drum reminds me of something I've been wondering about. Given that there have been many months of sniping between Defense and State, not to mention the NSC, FBI, and CIA, when is Bush going to do the responsible managerial thing he learned to do from his expensive Harvard Business School education and start managing his managers? Infighting weakens organizations, and when that organization is concerned with nationbuilding (I didn't say empire!), you can't afford to have that happen.
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More and more often these days I find myself asking just what the flying hell is wrong with this country? There seems to be a new timidity, a new spinelessness that cuts across ideological lines and geographic regions.
No, I'm not talking about the dumbass Red/Blue thing.
I'm not talking about The Queering of America (or, if you will, the pussification of the American Male), nor the duToitification of the American Conservative.
I'm not talking about abortion, spending habits, class rage, or antiwar agitation.
I'm talking about this new puritianism that's all the rage these days, except it's puritanism with the fun parts removed. The actual Puritans, once you got past their Calvinist, Manichean Great Chain of Being City On a Hill bullplop, liked to drink and screw as much as the rest of us, as long as everyone was up for church in the A.M. and none of the Commandments got broken.
No, now you can't drink. You can't screw. You can't screw. You can't screw. You can't show a boobie on TV, unless the boobies in question are paid for by beer companies or football teams. It was a nice boobie. You can't say stupid shit on the radio without the government fining your ass from here to Tuesday. Chilling effects? You bet! A California college investigated a student for murder, and expelled him, for writing a crudely violent fiction piece in a creative writing class. The professor was eventually fired for teaching the David Foster Wallace story "Girl With Curious Hair." Ohio has mandated that "intelligent design" be taught in science class. Tommy Chong is in prison for selling bongs (and still terrorists run free!)
So sex drugs and violence are on the outs, especially the sex part. But what's the proximate cause of my dismay? The Attorney General-- and it is John Ashcroft behind it this time, really, for real, seriously-- has declared a fatwa against paw-naw-gra-phy, that insidious disease which "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet," and has "strewn its victims from coast to coast."
Right. A Playboy Home Invasion, just forcing itself on you. Now, I don't know about John Ashcroft, but I had to pay for every lapdance I ever got.
Everyone is talking about this today, from blogmother Kathy to instahack. Instapundit, in fact, points to an extended and loving takedown of the entire anti-sex trend at classicalvalues.com which you should read if you think I'm being paranoid. His plea: "But I thought we were at war -- with the enemies of sexual freedom who declared war on us. While I know that we're not there yet, I hate to see the United States moving in the direction of developing its own anti-sex mutawein like the damned Saudis."
Exactly. I cannot-- CANNOT-- vote for Bush if he's going to let this stuff happen on his watch. Terrorism is a threat from outside. This is a threat from within. Both threaten my way of life. What to do?
[wik] An addendum to my esteemed colleague Buckethead, who is juuuust about to comment: yes, dear, the terrorists will kill me if they get the chance and the moralists won't. But life has to be worth living!!
[alsø wik] I know I post this same phrase every couple weeks, but it's like a tic now so here we go again...... "So Glad They Took Care Of The Important Stuff Like Terrorism First!"
[alsø alsø wik] Jeff Jarvis has a long collection of reactions and analysis. Many points for the title "The Daily Stern: This slope slippery with KY."
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No, this isn't that kind of post. No great danes, no leather, and get your filthy mind out of the gutter. Jerry over at Commonsense and Wonder links to an article in the Telegraph about a new book examining the root causes, if you will, of Germany's relative decline over the last few decades. Germany: Decline of a Superstar has become a bestseller in a Germany. Its author, Gabor Steingart, is a political journalist and Berlin bureau chief for the widely read newsmagazine Der Spiegel. So this criticism is not coming from the fringes.
"The GDP of both the British and French is higher than the Germans' and this is a shocking discovery for us. In the 1970s, Britain's GDP was only half of ours."
He is concerned that Germans are unwilling to confront the issue: "It has not been politically correct until now to admit that we're in decline, that the Deutschland Modell is the wrong one."
Mr Steingart says a key reason for the problems lie in what he calls his "core-crust" theory.
The "core" consists of the innovators, the producers and the service providers, while the "crust" are those who contribute nothing to the economy.
At present the crust consists of the two thirds of Germans who are not in work. Germany, the land that produced people such as Einstein and Daimler and inventions such as aspirin, has for the first time been having to buy patents from abroad because it is insufficiently inventive.
That is an incredible percentage - and looking at the demographics, it can only get worse as the German population gets increasingly concentrated in the upper age brackets. If we think we have a problem getting politicians to think about the Social Security and Medicare problems lurking in the not to distant future, its nothing compared to the problems that the Germans and other Europeans face.
"Since 1945 there has never been as small a core and as big a crust as there is today," Mr Steingart says.
According to the Federal Office of Statistics, the average German now spends only 13 per cent of his or her life in paid employment, while men devote 18 per cent to sport, television and visits to the pub and women 12 per cent to eating and personal hygiene. Britons work 250 hours more per year than Germans, Americans 350 hours more.
It is for this reason that Germany is haemorrhaging jobs abroad at a rate comparable with no other industrial land. According to the Institute for Economic Research around 2.6 million jobs have been relocated. This week it was announced that the electronics giant Siemens was on the verge of moving 10,000 jobs to eastern Europe.
Not to be all alarmist and everything, but unless the nations of Western Europe change their course, they could be laying the foundations for some truly bad times.
Just think - an aging population grasping desperately at welfare benefits that simply cannot be supported. Low and declining productivity, and a relative decline in power, prestige and international standing as a result of backward economic policies. A ready supply of foriegn scapegoats - however, the new potential scapegoats are not Jews eager to assimilate but intransigant and increasingly militant Muslims. A pan-European bureaucratic superstate being constructed; one that will write into its constitution the very welfare benefits that will destroy the European economy, that has little if any provision for individual rights, and will give power to unelected bureacrats who have a demonstrated desire to rule, rather than serve, the public.
If fundamental reforms aren't made, I don't see how the Europeans can avoid dire economic problems. And we know what happened last time Europe had a depression.
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I've been thinking. For all that I read, the book title thing just wan't jelling for me. So, movies crams:
I won't even start with the porn titles.
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Ralph Peters' analysis of the recent clashes and rioting in Iraq is right on the money.
SEVEN American soldiers died in Baghdad on Sunday because we failed to respond to last week's Fallujah attacks. Whatever our motives, we looked weak and indecisive. Additional enemies believed their moment had come.
In the Middle East, appearances are all.
Intelligence personnel are routinely warned to avoid mirror-imaging, assigning our values and psychology to an opponent. Imagining that our enemies think like us has cost us dearly in Iraq. The bill will go still higher.
Combined with the administration's folly of trying to occupy Iraq with too few troops, our notion that patience and persuasion are more effective than displays of power has made the country deadlier for our soldiers, more dangerous for Iraqis and far less likely to achieve internal peace.
Americans value compromise; our enemies view it as weakness. We're reluctant to use force. The terrorists and insurgents read that as cowardice.
When U.S. forces arrive in a troubled country, they create an initial window of fear. It's essential to act decisively while the local population is still disoriented. Each day of delay makes our power seem more hollow. You have to do the dirty work at the start. The price for postponing it comes due with compound interest...
On the day of the ambush and mutilations in Fallujah, we made another inexcusable mistake. The Marines, who expected to control a major city with a single battalion, failed to respond immediately. The generals up above seconded the decision. The chain of command was concerned about possible ambushes and wanted to let the situation burn itself out. The generals in Baghdad proclaimed, in mild voices, that we'd respond at the time and in a manner of our choosing.
In a textbook military sense, it was the correct response. On a practical level, it was the worst possible decision.
We viewed our non-response as disciplined - rejecting instant emotional gratification. But the insurgents, the terrorists and the mob read matters differently: Our failure to send every possible Marine and soldier, along with Paul Bremer's personal bodyguard and a squad of armed janitors, into the streets of Fallujah to impose a draconian clampdown created the impression - not entirely unfounded - that we were scared.
We broke a basic rule: Never show fear. No matter how we may rationalize our inaction, that is what we did.
Instead of demonstrating our strength and resolve, we have encouraged more attacks and further brutality - while global journalists revel in Mogadishu-lite.
Of course, we're not going to flee Iraq as President Bill Clinton ran from Somalia. But our hesitation to respond to atrocities against Americans has renewed our enemies' hope that, if only they kill enough of us, as graphically as possible, they still can triumph over a "godless" superpower.
To possess the strength to do what is necessary, but to refuse to do it, is appeasement. Since Baghdad fell, our occupation has sought to appease our enemies - while slighting our Kurdish allies. Our attempts to find a compromise with a single man - the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani - have empowered him immensely, while encouraging intransigence in others.
Weakness, not strength, emboldens opponents - and creates added terrorist recruits.
We came to Iraq faced with the problems Saddam created. Increasingly, we face problems we ourselves created or compounded.
The cardinal rule is, show mercy after you've won. To do it before makes winning a lot harder.
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Back when I worked in the music biz, we used to joke when times got desperate. Toward the end of my time at one company, when it was clear that the revenue stream had become a brackish drip, the marketing people came up with a bunch of naked pleas we thought would be funny to use as marketing taglines: "Wave/Particle Records: Catalog Sales Are Down." "Wave/Particle Records: Hey... We Gotta Eat Too."
The companies I worked for were not, and never will be, big-time labels with multiple chart topping releases. When the entire music industry suffered at the dawn of the new millennium, we suffered too. Broadly speaking, when industry-wide sales were off 11% one year to another, we could count on a dip too. It never seemed right to me to blame downloading for our woes. It stands to reason that the most-downloaded tracks, and therefore the albums most ostensibly affected by the loss of revenue that downloading might suggest, are blockbusters, not critical darlings or cult hits selling fewer than 50,000 copies (that's three orders of MAGNITUDE lower than a big #1 hit record sells). The records I worked were obscurities, not teenybopper rages, and even if they were being downloaded, it was not at any appreciable clip. And yet, everyone's sales dipped in lockstep.
(Interesting side note... it's actually a little disheartening to log on to KaZaA looking to see if anyone is sharing copies of the record you just spent six months working on, only to find that nobody is.)
Now there's actual Facts and Research to back up my gut hunch about downloads. A new working paper from two professors of business, titled "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales,' has concluded that "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates."
Professors Koleman Strumpf and Felix Oberholzer-Gee took a 17-week sampling of downloads made from the major filesharing networks, corrected for a galaxy of variables, and mapped the popularity of downloads to the Billboard sales charts and SoundScan data for a given week. Their findings: in the worst cases, downloading may cannibalize one in every 500 record sales, and for most releases it's more like 1 in 5000. Not exactly the stuff of industry holocausts.Although I'm not much of econometrician, and can't speak to the math, their conclusions are sound and reasonable based on the methods they used.
Predictibly, the RIAA is firing back (see this NY Times piece). Unfortunately for them, they're bad shots, pooh-poohing the notion that statistical sampling can be an accurate indicator of an entire population. Unfortunately for us, most people don't know or understand that.
Amy Weiss, an industry spokeswoman, expressed incredulity at what she deemed an "incomprehensible" study, and she ridiculed the notion that a relatively small sample of downloads could shed light on the universe of activity.The industry response, titled "Downloading Hurts Sales," concludes: "If file sharing has no negative impact on the purchasing patterns of the top selling records, how do you account for the fact that, according to SoundScan, the decrease of Top 10 selling albums in each of the last four years is: 2000, 60 million units; 2001, 40 million units; 2002, 34 million units; 2003, 33 million units?"
Critics of the industry's stance have long suggested that other factors might be contributing to the drop in sales, including a slow economy, fewer new releases and a consolidation of radio networks that has resulted in less variety on the airwaves. Some market experts have also suggested that record sales in the 1990's might have been abnormally high as people bought CD's to replace their vinyl record collections.
That last bit there is the nut of the matter. The 1990s were the decade in which the first and possibly the last generation to treat recorded music as a major entertainment commodity went back to buy all the Beatles and Stones albums on CD. While they were at the store, maybe they stuck around to pick up the Stone Roses too. Those days are gone, and the that one change, along with other certain structural changes in how records are distributed, have hosed the deal for good.
The Times article makes another good point. Each album downloaded doesn't necessarily represent a lost sale. The burns I have in my collection are of records that I wasn't going to buy anyway, at any price.
Go read the paper-- it's long and mathy, but I can't find much to complain about. The numbers are there. Downloading represents a continued consumer interest in music, and if the labels cannot understand the difference between paying $0 for an album and paying $18, tough. The RIAA are a bunch of dupes, and it's too bad for them they, and the labels they purport to represent, can't understand that demand is not a given, profits are not a right, and that if they shit their own bed, it's they who have to sleep there.
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See, it works better when the books are incongruous. Kundera and Sartre are just kind of a bread sandwich made with bread in the middle and garnished with dense, depressing bread. Black bread made with sawdust.
Anyway, I just wanted to apologize to our three and a half readers for slacking off my usual feverish pace of posting. I'm not stupid; I know that most of you come here for Buckethead's right-wing eggheadery and outer-space knowledge, Ross' dyspeptic erudition and GeekLethal's trenchant milblogging rather than for my ill-informed centrist handwringing and music wonkery. But even so, sorry. "Real life" intrudes.
Like you want to hear what a 29 year old white college administrator has to say about the deployment of image in rap music, anyway.
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