5. april 2003

Sigh! It's been a rather bad day at Salon blogs, really, as the server has been acting up quite badly today. Half the times I try to post, I get the dreaded error Can't upstream because "Can't write stream because TCP/IP error code 10060 - Connection timed out." That is not that much of a deal, as I can always repost and sooner or later it gets through. Much worse, half of the time I cannot access my own blog, and it's a safe assumption that neither can anyone else. This means all of us are losing readers. Not to mention that accessing the comments is such a pain I am not surprised I have received little feedback today. 10:53:59 PM    comment []

"Most Iraqi households own at least one gun." Some time ago, Timothy Noah made a reference to the above statement, and wondered how Iraq could have become an oppressive police state if the NRAs slogan that private gun ownership is necessary to prevent exactly that from happening was true. He invited readers to explain this real-life example of a gun-ridden society that had become a police state of the worst sort. Most recently, Timothy Noah summed up the attempted rebuttals from pro-gun activists (and a few humours ones), and it's pretty obvious nobody can harmonise the NRA's theory with these actual facts. He concludes: The NRA's basic premise is false. Chatterbox resisted this logic as long as he could. But reader Richard Antill notes that the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and many other western democracies (most, in fact) regulate guns much more heavily than the U.S., yet manage not to turn into police states. Maybe he's onto something. There are countless societies with very strict gun laws that have not become police states (like my own country). There are also lots of nations that are extreme dictatures without having serious restrictions on guns. Adversely, there are a few comparable countries that have widespread propagation of guns and yet do not have the extreme murder rate of the United States. Simple slogans do not bode well for explaining complex social phenomena. 10:44:33 PM    comment []

Arabiya TV hires Arnett Reporter Peter Arnett has not been short of job offers after he was fired from NBC. He has since been hired by British tabloid The Mirror and the Belgian TV outlet VTM. Now he is hired by the Dubai-based Arabic TV channel Al Arabiya, one of the competitors of the more famous al Jazeera. This is a quite interesting case of fact copying fiction. Here's a comic strip predicting that Arnett would seek a job opening with al Jazeera (dated 4/1/03). That's about as close as it gets. 9:20:39 PM    comment []

Powell denies Syria and Iran are next targets Colin Powell, in an interview with a London-based Arabic newspaper, al-Hayat, denied that the US has any plans to attack Syria or Iran. He dismissed the speculations as "nonsense." Earlier, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a similar statement. Filed for future reference. One can speculate that North Korea makes a more urgent target, if also a more dangerous one. 8:10:12 PM    comment []

SARS breakthrough expected soon Dr David Heymann of the World Health Organization (WHO), who is in charge of the worldwide fight against the pneumonia-like disease SARS, says he believes a reliable test of the disease will be available within "weeks." A reliable test will be an important first step in fighting the spread of the disease. In another development, China's health authorities have apologised for not providing an adequate response to the disease. Half of all known SARS infections and deaths has been in China, where the disease most likely first spread from animals to humans. The disease appears to be under control in China, and the outbreak in Singapore appears to be over, but it has now been encountered in Malaysia. At the same time, some are criticising health authorites worldwide for being unnecessarily "alarmist" about the disease. The problem is that health experts are working on incomplete knowledge. Surely, it could easily be that the danger has been overblown. The consequences of strict travel measures and other efforts should not be underestimated, as people panic and economies are hurt. However, the possible consequences of an inadequate response to SARS, a worldwide lethal epidemic, would be so much worse. Perhaps we will know in some months that some of the responses were overblown. But health authorites has to act on what we currently know, and given the dire consequences of the worst case scenario, it would be unwise, in my opinion, to fault them for these drastical measures. 7:40:42 PM    comment []

Send that suggestion to war command "We are seeing a curious limbo here, the gates of Baghdad remain open, there are no checkpoints. The Americans could come in by bus if they wanted, the buses are still running from the suburbs." (BBC News' Andrew Gilligan reports from Baghdad) 6:43:27 PM    comment []

Proposed Oregon law would make street protesters "terrorists" Ridiculously eroding the term, a proposed Oregon law defines "terrorist" as one who "plans or participates in an act that is intended, by at least one of its participants, to disrupt" business, transportation, schools, government, or free assembly. It proposes an automatic sentencing of 25 years to life for the crime of "terrorism." Luckily, the law has met with tough opposition, and legislators say it has little chance of passage. 6:02:07 PM    comment []

Radical cleric loses UK citizenship Abu Hamza, a radical Muslim cleric who has repeatedly called for attacks against British and American interests, today had his citizenship revoked by UK Home Secretary David Blunkett. The Egyptian born Hamza has a dual citizenship, and the new Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act gives the government the power to take the British citizenship away from people with joint citizenships when their activities threaten the national interests. 3:47:44 PM    comment []

American Life Madonna decided to scrap her American Life video "out of respect to the armed forces." The Memory Hole has lots of pictures from the video and the background story. Too bad, because it's actually a great video. As you can expect from Madonna, it's a mixture of military hardware, destruction and uniform fetishism. It's trivial to download the video from gnutella or kazaa. Of course, I could not dream about recommending you do such a thing as download it, as that would seriously upset Warner Bros, and who'd want to do that? 1:42:09 PM    comment []

Iraqi information minister claims to have recaptured airport Information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf has claimed that Iraqi forces has expelled the US forces from the Baghdad airport. He has also denied that coalition forces has made it into the city itself. He recently said colation forces were at least 100 miles away from Baghdad, just before having to tell how the Iraqis would retake the city airport through 'unconvenitional' means. Here's an interesting background article outlining how Sahhaf rose to the position as information minister. 12:31:15 PM    comment []

SARS causes neurosis The fear of the pneumonia-like disease SARS causes serious irrational fears in Canada. 1:42:11 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.05.2003; 02:58:56.