Monday, October 28, 2002

Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?. For our government to maintain its credibility, we need an open and acccountable independent investigation into the death of Paul Wellstone. [AlterNet] The article here talks about various other political figures who've died in small plane crashes - all of them liberals or at the very least non-mainstream. Uh...right. Maybe it's just that small planes are really, really unsafe? Buddy Holly, anyone?

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I Want to Fly Away As an admitted Mac fanatic and Microsoft critic, I can't claim to be unbiased, but am I the only person who finds Microsoft's MSN 8 "Butterfly Man" logo to be weird and frightening? Look at it. The damned thing is the monster that once inhabited my bedroom closet. Evil and insectile, you wonder to yourself, "On what does this chitonous predator feed?" Its antennae sniff out traces of originality and competitiveness which the demon obediently ferries back to the mother-nest for the lawyerbrood to digest and consume. The ichthyian lower appendages are firmly rooted in hidden black code known only to Redmond plannerlarvae, and the multihued wings beat a miasmic cloud of noxious script that sees all, knows all, cataloging the contents of your hard drive for later inspection at the hive... [The Raven] I dunno - really, it just makes me think of the sidekick from The Tick on acid.

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What does it mean to be part of the Salon blog community?. Last week one of the two filchyboy blogs rocketed to the top of the Salon daily ranking charts with off-the-scale traffic numbers, even though an examination of the referrer logs showed nothing special going. *snip*  So, again, what is the essence of this community? What holds it together? What makes a web page or a web site a member or not a member of this community? I don't see any easy answers. [Radio Free Blogistan] I responded to this (it's worth reading the whole post, but it's big - so I didn't keep the whole thing) in the comments over at RFB, but I'm still working through my thought process. The question is whether it would be wrong for xian to put the Salon blog counter on Radio Free Blogistan now that it doesn't live on Salon servers...also, would it be wrong to put the counter on his Blogger-based mirror of RFB. I don't have a problem with either one...Charly of Driver 8 has suggested that whether your blog/site is a legitimate part of the Salon blog community (and therefore worthy of being ranked) depends on whether the blog/site is generated with the Salon-branded Radio. I'm not even sure I feel a need to be that restrictive. Here's my (rough) definition of what makes a blog part of the Salon community: it lives there or lived there at some point in the past. On some level, I think maybe it should be that the owner of the blog paid for the Salon-branded Radio as well, even if their site/blog no longer uses it, but I'm not really comfortable with that. If filchyboy's blog had moved to safersex.org, then it'd be alright if he recorded all those hits - it was a Salon blog, right? Radio Free Blogistan no longer lives on blogs.salon.com, but xian has chosen to have it still be identified as a Salon blog - so it is one. What filchyboy did was take a pre-existing site, and insert the counters for Salon blogs into it. The site may have been built using Radio, but it was only related to filchyboy's blogs at Salon by a common owner and links - it wasn't a mirror of his Salon blog, nor was his Salon blog a mirror of safersex.org. So xian, I guess what I'm saying is that, as I see it, it's fine to keep your counter on your Blogger mirror of RFB - but it'd be unkosher to put your counter onto another site that isn't part of Radio Free Blogistan. Also, if there were Blogger counters and your Blogger site consisted solely of the mirror of RFB, I'd feel a little uncomfortable with the Blogger site also having a counter for Blogger, if such a thing existed. Am I making any sense? =)

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Mexico Tells Bush It Won't Support Iraq Resolution U.S. Favors. President Bush left a summit conference on Sunday without a pledge from Mexico to support the American resolution in the United Nations Security Council to disarm Iraq. By Tim Weiner. [New York Times: International] Here's an example of just how poorly the Bush administration is working the Iraq situation: they can't get MEXICO to support the US. Their stated reason for opposing Bush's resolution? It doesn't have broad enough support in the Security Council...a 9-6 vote would pass it, but would also signal lack of unity, which, Mexico's foreign minister points out, would be a Bad Thing. "What we want is a resolution that is approved by all 15 — or 14 — members of the Security Council," said Mr. Castañeda. "We think that's more important for the United States' cause." The 15th vote would be Syria's, but no one thinks it will vote against Iraq.

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NYT.  Safire makes the case that only those nations that sign-off on the Bush invasion of Iraq get access to the $ billions derived by the control of Iraq's oil after the war.  One of the unstated goals here is that by glutting the market with Iraqi oil, we will deflate the main source of funding for terrorists. $15 a barrel oil would put Saudi Arabia on the ropes financially and make them less likely to fund terrorists that attack the US and Israel.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Of course, it could also make the Saudis more likely to support anti-American forces in Iraq, in an attempt to regain control of the oil market...

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Embryo mix-up at IVF hospital. An IVF blunder at a London hospital left two women with the wrong embryos put back into their wombs¸ it has been revealed. [BBC News | Front Page] Whoops! What a comical mix up! Ok, not really, but I swear I saw this on a sitcom once...
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While reading about the protests against war in Iraq in DC this weekend, I had some doubts. Do I really want to associate myself with the whacko "left"? The point was really driven home by this paragraph from Michelle Goldberg's excellent piece on the protests (sorry, cheapskates - Salon Premium. Go subscribe! Good stuff!): Nearby on Constitution Avenue a drum circle formed, and a few hundred people started dancing. Chants went up -- to the tune of "Who Let the Dogs Out," some sang, "Who kills Iraqis? Bush Bush Bush Bush. Who is a Nazi? Bush Bush Bush Bush." A young blonde woman wore a sign that announced, with staggering self-congratulation, "I speak for the voiceless victims of war." I'm sorry, what? I hate Bush as much as any rational radical can, but comparing him to a Nazi is even more flawed than comparing Saddam to Hitler. The whacko "left" demonstrate their ignorance and disdain towards the ideals they claim to serve by ignoring and ridiculing Iraqi victims of Hussein's tyranny. Not that I expected much better from these guys - Michelle Goldberg wrote a great article a couple weeks ago on the truly strange organizations sponsoring the protests. We're talking about groups like the Revolutionary Communist Party and the International Action Center (a quote from their website: "No one in the world, however, has a worse human rights record than  the United States itself." Hmm...China, anyone?), after all. Here's the thing - I'm about as left wing as you can get. I've yet to achieve a coherent political philosophy to describe how I believe the world should be organized, but I can guarantee it's pretty far out there - I'm a fan of Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, and other anarcho-socialists. I'm a fervent pacifist - I have never touched a gun, and I will never bear arms for any reason. I believe that the Bush administration is not the legitimate government of the United States; after all, it's not like they were elected or anything. But my opposition to overthrowing Saddam Hussein does not derive from some moral high ground I claim, some holier-than-thou sense. Not in the least - it's my belief that George Bush The Elder deserves a lot of blame for the current situation, for his unwillingness to finish off Hussein in '91, and even more so for inspiring revolt in Iraq and then abandoning it to be crushed by Hussein's forces. No, Saddam Hussein needs to be removed from power - he is a truly bad person who has abused his power on an epic scale. He's no Stalin or Hitler, but that's pretty faint praise, isn't it? No, the problem I have with the current war fever is not that goal - it's pretty much everything else involved. If you honestly believe that Iraq poses a threat to the United States right now, one that we will be unable to counter a few years down the road, I've got a bridge in New York to sell you. And if you honestly believe that the Bush administration's only motivations are the defense of the US and an altruistic desire to help the Iraqi people, well, you're too gullible to even pay attention to. Now isn't the right time to go into Iraq - the entire Arab world is at least mildly pissed at us for our unabashed, unrestricted support for the Likud government in Israel and its reprehensible behavior in the West Bank and Gaza. We've got a commitment to rebuild one country already (of course, we've pretty thoroughly given up on Afghanistan already, but we can still achieve peace there if we work at it), we've already got a "war" to fight against terrorism. Going into Iraq will mean abandoning Afghanistan completely, allowing it to become a haven for terrorists again. Going into Iraq will provoke yet more anti-Americanism in the Muslim world - leading to increased terrorist recruitment and activity. Don't forget that we've got a shaky-at-best economy at home - and claims that war is good for the economy only have relevance when you're talking about turning the entire country to a command economy to benefit war effort, a la World War II. Vietnam wasn't good for the economy - could anyone really expect war and sustained violence in the Persian Gulf to be good for the economy? So why is the Bush administration pushing so hard for war now? Political cover. Sure, Bush wants vengance for Hussein's attempt to kill Daddy, and US oil companies want a new government in Iraq that they can sign contracts with (and one that invalidates previously signed deals with French and Russian oil companies), but the big cause seems to be politics. The economy is in the tank, Bush's corporate cronies are taking perp walks every couple weeks, the voting public looks like it may be tending towards a more liberal position, oh, and don't forget the corporate crime and corruption allegations against Bush and Cheney themselves. We've known since late spring that Karl Rove was telling Republicans that war was a good campaign tool for them. The war drums got really loud when the Harkin and Haliburton stories blew up. There was Andrew Card's statement that August wasn't the time to "sell" war to the American people. The push for a vote in Congress came just when the Democrats were trying to campaign for November on the economy. This war the Bush administration is pushing down our throats isn't a selfless war for the good of the Iraqi people. It's not a defensive war, to protect us from weapons of mass destruction (after all, North Korea has the Bomb and we're not invading THEM, now, are we?). It's just a distraction, a way to keep the American public from realizing how poor a job the Bush administration has done, how corrupt they are. I'm willing to bet that if they get this war and it goes quickly, they've got another scheduled for late '04 - the electorate won't throw a president out of office during a war, will they? Maybe that's just paranoid cynicism, but this administration and its treatment of the Iraq issue has given me plenty of reason to suspect things like that. And THAT is the reason to oppose the war - not "US out of the Middle East!"

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