21. mai 2004

Michael Moore Hates America Speaking of the fat guy: Mike Wilson has put out a secret (huh?) trailer for his upcoming documentary about Moore. 9:52:10 PM    comment []  trackback []

Take my word for it You DON'T want to click this link. 8:51:14 PM    comment []  trackback []

Five (contradictory) reasons Ahmed Chalabi has fallen out of favour The media and the blogosphere and, we can imagine, Iraq is rife with rumours about wht Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress has fallen so badly out of favour with Washington that his premises are raided. Here's a collection of different reasons given for Chalabi not being the flavour of the month in Washington DC anymore: The coup-maker: After Chalabi learned that he was not part of Brahimi's plans for the new transitional government, he has been plotting to overthrow it, in effect planning a Shiite coup or uprising [isn't there already one? -ed. Apparently there is always room for one more!] to make sure the plans fail. The spy: Newsweek says that US intelligence found out that Chalabi and the INC were supplying sensitive information about US operations in Iraq to the Iranian government (this story has the benefit of being published just before the rest of the world found out Chalabi had lost the support of the Pentagon). The fraudster: Chalabi was involved in a scheme to defraud the Iraqi government during the transition to a new currency. This ties in with the famous Jordanian in absentia conviction of Chalabi in 1992. The whistle-blower: Chalabi is being set up, the Telegraph argues, because his "miles of documents" threaten to expose too many important and powerful people in and beyond the UN, including key US allies. Chalabi has been important in exposing UNSCAM, also known as the food for oil scandal. There has been some evidence earlier that Bremer is not too happy about the scope of these investigations. This is the version of events Chalabi & fans are betting on. The clever ploy-maker: The raid is just a plot to make Chalabi more popular with the Iraqis by distancing him from the US occupation authorities. Not to mention combinations of the above, and probably countless others, and this before we venture far into tin hat foil territory. Update: InstaPundit points out a Fox article saying the US government has "rock solid" evidence that Chalabi passed secrets to Iran. "There is no need for an investigation because we're quite certain he did it," one senior Bush administration official said. The official first described the evidence against Chalabi as "pretty solid" and then characterized it as "rock solid." Oh yeah, Chalabi betraying the US after all this will mean a lot of red faces in Washington DC. 6:53:49 PM    comment []  trackback []

Bad spin on worse news WaPo is "revealing" "fresh" new details about the prisoner abuse, from the military interrogations of the prisoners done in mid-January. Rumsfeld did not exaggerate. It is very ugly. The only mitigating circumstance in this story is that it was the US military itself that took action (if late). But obviously, there is a large and significant difference between institutional abuse that is sanctioned and supported by the government (which happens in every Arab country) and abuse illegally committed by prison guards against the government's rules. By the time the story reaches the Norwegian audience, for example in this Dagbladet article, every little detail about the actual abuse is included in great detail, but the article carefully omits that it is the US military investigation itself that has found out about the abuse, based on a soldier whistleblower. In fact, one can almost admire the surgical precision with which the journalist Eugene Brandal Laran manages to avoid that fact. PS: I thought I remembered the name of that journalist. 1:39:20 PM    comment []  trackback []

The end of the world, Version 2.0 Ronald Bailey points out a fact that has puzzled me for quite some time: when doomsayers are proven wrong, it never comes back to bite them. They can be consistently wrong for decades, but still retain their credibility. Paul Ehrlich is as good an example as they come. Environmentalist Paul Ehrlich has proved himself to be a stupendously bad prophet. In 1968 he declared: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." They didn't. Indeed, a "green revolution" nearly tripled the world's food supply. In 1975, he predicted that, by the mid-1980s, "mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity," in which "accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." Far from it. Between 1975 and 2000 the World Bank's commodity price index for minerals and metals fell by nearly 50%. But Ehrlich and other doomsayers are still heroes. They have never been right. Their basic premises have been debunked countless times. Yet, they are the conventional wisdom, and their views are propagated in the media as the scientific consensus abouit reality. Maybe faith in an environmental apocalypse is the secular equivalent to Christianity's end of the world. It is so ingrained in our culture that most people just have to believe in it, and when religious faith decreases, a pseudo-scientific eschatology replaces the religious Armageddom of the Apocalypse. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds. 12:15:23 PM    comment []  trackback []

Ouch! Why you should be careful about putting your picture on the Net. 7:59:19 AM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2004 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.06.2004; 02:24:02.