The Anger of Compassion

Terrorism Priorities at the FBI

The USA Today headline says it all: "Terror expertise not a priority at the FBI."

We shouldn't be surprised, should we? Is this not the same FBI which denied the existence of the Mafia? Which laid siege to, and ultimately incinerated, dozens of Texans because of a botched ATF raid? Which can't even buy or upgrade a fucking computer system for itself?

WASHINGTON (AP) — In sworn testimony that contrasts with their promises to the public, the FBI managers who crafted the post-Sept. 11 fight against terrorism say expertise about the Mideast or terrorism was not important in choosing the agents they promoted to top jobs.

And they still do not believe such experience is necessary today even as terrorist acts occur across the globe.

"A bombing case is a bombing case," said Dale Watson, the FBI's terrorism chief in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001. "A crime scene in a bank robbery case is the same as a crime scene, you know, across the board."

Ahem, that's fine and dandy unless one of the animating ideas is to prevent the creation of such crimes in the first place. And let's just forget the "promises to the public" nonsense: such "promises" mean nothing, and never have. But these guys are also lying to Congress, which pays the bills, including their own salaries:

The hundreds of pages of testimony obtained by The Associated Press contrast with assurances Mueller repeatedly has given Congress that he was building a new FBI, from top to bottom, with experts able to stop terrorist attacks before they occurred, not solve them afterward.

"The FBI's shift toward terrorism prevention necessitates the building of a national level expertise and body of knowledge," Mueller told Congress a year after the suicide hijackings, as lawmakers approved billions of new dollars to fight terrorism.

Ahhh, now isn't that nice: "terrorism prevention." But I thought that "a crime scene in a bank robbery case is the same as a crime scene, you know, across the board." Silly me.

Again, your tax dollars at work. This country has enemies, including our own home-grown, reflexively "blame-America-first" nutty leftwing nutjobs. We don't need to be paying high-ranking, empire-building bureaucrats to help those enemies accomplish their tasks. I don't know, at this point, whether we're winning the war on Islamic terrorism or not -- but I do know that not all of our "leaders" and "public servants" are even fighting the right war.

"Some of my best friends are tavern owners..."

Forget legendarily corrupt city officials and the baneful influence of Prohibition, including those who aspire to Al Capone's throne: Chicago's problems are caused by local taverns:

CHICAGO (AP) — Taverns and booze are entwined with Chicago's history and lore — from Al Capone's bootlegging empire to the tavern owner whose curse on the Cubs is blamed for keeping them out of the World Series for a half century. But the dark, cool watering holes where for decades laborers dropped by for a belt on the way home are drying up.

The city that once boasted as many 7,600 taverns in the early 1900s has just over 1,300 today. Now Mayor Richard Daley is pushing an ordinance that would make it easier to close taverns — the latest volley in a battle against the kinds of liquor-selling establishments that some say are magnets for everything from prostitution to littering.

Add to that rapidly changing neighborhoods and a growing number of upscale residents who'd rather see a bistro than a bar on the corner, and it keeps getting tougher to find an honest-to-goodness bar to belly up to.

The neo-Prohibitionists we have always with us, it seems. Just remember: no matter what's wrong with your own life or with your community, the solutiion is, always and everywhere, more controls, more regulation, more power to government, more coercion.

Yeah, that's worked out so well everywhere else...

Life (African lives), Liberty, and Property

What should one conclude about the prospects for the Bush-Blair plan to aid Africa? Let Andrew Bernstein help:

Most people forget that pre-industrial Europe was vastly poorer than contemporary Africa and had a much lower life expectancy. Even a relatively well-off country like France is estimated to have suffered seven general famines in the 15th Century, 13 in the 16th Century, 11 in the 17th Century and 16 in the 18th Century. And disease was rampant. Given an utter lack of sanitation, the bubonic plague, typhus and other diseases recurred incessantly into the 18th Century, killing tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands at a time.

The effect on life expectancy was predictable. In parts of France, in the middle of the 17th Century, only 58 percent reached their 15th birthday, and life expectancy was 20. In Ireland, life expectancy in 1800 was a mere 19 years. In early 18th-Century London, more than 74 percent of the children died before reaching age 5.

Then a dramatic change occurred throughout Europe. The population of England doubled between 1750 and 1820, with childhood mortality dropping to 31.8 percent by 1830. Something happened that enabled people to stay alive.

What did that early period lack that the later period had?

What was it? The elephant in the living room, the answer that everyone already knows but many choose not to admit, is: Freedom.

I can understand that back in the days of Adam Smith and James Watt and that age of steam that the relationship between freedom and economic and physical progress was only dimly understood. Fine. There were far fewer excuses during the Progressive Era and the Depression. But the success of the brilliant Soviet/Popular Front propaganda, that the essential question of the day was Fascism vs. Communism, is explicable only by considering the high degree of mendacity involved. Ditto for its continuing success down to this day.

I don't claim to know who the next Aideed or Arafat or Mugabe will be. But I know where he'll be getting the contents of his Swiss or Liechtenstein bank account: from enablers like Bush and Blair, supported by idiots like Bono, mewling about "debt relief" for Africa. How about "oppression relief?" Anyone interested in trying that one?

Africa has the identical natural resource fundamentally responsible for the West's rise: the human mind. But it has neither the freedom nor the enlightenment philosophy of reason, individualism and political liberty necessary for creating wealth and health. Africa is mired in tribal cultures that stress subordination to the group rather than personal independence and achievement. All over the continent brutal dictators murder and rob innocent citizens in order to aggrandize themselves and members of their tribes.

Read the whole thing.

Big Brother Is Bullshit? Maybe...

I love Penn & Teller: Bullshit, and this is a good one, about the USA PATRIOT Act...itself a result of a certain "well-executed faith-based initiative."

Enjoy.

(Hat tip: Crooks and Liars via Hit & Run)

Brains and Beauty, That's Me!

Yeah, this'll work:

What military aircraft are you? F-15 Eagle You are an F-15. Your record in combat is spotless; you've never been defeated. You possess good looks, but are not flashy about it. You prefer to let your reputation do the talking. You are fast, agile, and loud, but reaching the end of your stardom.

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

(Hat tip: Pejman Yousefzadeh)

He'd better hope that labels don't matter

So now it comes out that John Kerry's grades at Yale were inferior those earned by George Bush:

According to college transcripts from the top Ivy League school obtained by the Boston Globe, Kerry was well on his way to flunking out during his freshmen year, receiving no fewer than four D's.
Kerry's intellectual deficit revealed itself in geology, two history courses and, most surprisingly for a top politician, political science.
"I always told my dad that D stood for distinction," the failed presidential candidate told reporters.
He showed a slight improvement in subsequent semesters, topping out with an 81 average his senior year. Kerry had a cumulative average of 76, or what some might call "a gentleman's C."
The president received just one D in his freshman year - a 69 in astronomy - to Kerry's four. His cumulative grade point average was 77 - a point higher than Kerry's.

Kerry repeatedly blithered through one of last year's debates that "labels don't matter." Hah! Perhaps it should be becoming clearer to us:
Isn't it possible that labels really don't matter to Kerry, after all, because he can't read them?

Happy Birthday, Frank Lloyd Wright

I suspected something was up, late last night, when I spotted this at Google:

I've visited the Robie House in Chicago and Taliesin West in Arizona, neat visits both, although I'm a fan, not an expert. Having seen pictures of it, I'd like to have the house he designed for Ayn Rand's Connecticut residence (it was never built), but even if I could afford to build it, I'd be hesitant to do so:

Wright built 362 houses. About 300 survived in 2005. Only one was lost to forces of nature, a waterfront home in Mississippi destroyed by a hurricane in the 1960s; although, the Ennis-Brown House in California had been damaged by earthquake and rain-induced ground movement. While a number of the houses are preserved as museum pieces and millions of dollars are spent on their upkeep, other houses have trouble selling on the open market due to their unique designs, generally small size and outdated features.

Even the beautiful Fallingwater house in Bear Run, Pennsylvania had its problems:

The construction is a series of cantilevered balconies and terraces, using stone for all verticals and concrete for the horizontals. The house cost $155,000, including the architect's fee of $80,000. Kaufmann's own engineers argued that the design was not sound. They were overruled, but they were later proven to be correct—the cantilevered floors began to sag shortly afterwards. In the late 1990s, steel supports were added under the lowest cantilever, until a detailed structural analysis could be done. In March of 2002, post-tensioning of the lowest terrace was completed.

Still, I'd like to see more of a vogue for Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, and Art Deco than for all the countryfied, Waltonsish pseudo-nostalgia we have going around.

Sexiest. Cover. Ever.

No doubt: it's the sexiest magazine cover ever published. Ever. "It" was the June issue of Iron Man magazine, and there are still a few scattered copies on newsstands, at least in El Paso. The photograph is by Bill Dobbins and the model is Swedish bodybuilder Pauline Nordin. A nice video can be found here.

I like Iron Man, but they've really outdone themselves with this one.

Days after I first saw it, it was suggested to me that the pose is actually pretty suggestive, which I suppose it is. I really didn't see it that way, not at once. What impressed me was the beauty, the obvious health and vitality. Damn.

Of Petey and Puff and Other Pit Bulls

Both Eric Scheie and Dean Esmay have posted recently on unfair treatment of pit bulls in the mainstream media (of course, no blogger of any stripe would ever stoop to unfair treatment of any critter, person, or issue...). Their comments are worth reading, and their links are worth following. Dogs such as pit bulls and Rottweilers, German shepherds and Dobermans are considered to be frightening and dangerous, while politicians, badged thugs law enforcement officials, and bureaucrats get an undeserved free pass, time after time.

I'm pro-pit bull, by the way. Since I was a kid, my dogs have usually tended to be some flavor of German shepherd, and I could with justice be accused of shepherd chauvinism. Guilty as charged. So I've never owned a pit bull of my own. But pit bulls make great pets and there was a time when most of America felt comfortable recognizing that -- actually, they're still one of the most popular dog breeds in this country, so if they, and their German shepherd and Doberman and Rottweiler cousins were so dangerous, there'd be zero children left in this country, and al-Quaeda could just walk in and take over an aging American populace and impose sharia overnight.

That would be an anti-pit-bull utopia, wouldn't it? We already know how those fine folks feel about dogs.

There was a time when, if the bulldog was a fair symbol of England, then it was seen as fair to have the pit bull stand in for America, as can be seen in this World War I era poster:

With everything else there is to worry about, there are people out there who think we should ban certain animals. Now, pardon me for askin', but wouldn't "ban" imply "kill?" Would it not imply, oh I dunno, extinction? Wonder if they'd run afoul of PETA or any of the eco-freaks?

When I was growing up in Florida, alligators were an endangered species and it was illegal to hunt the damn things. Far as I know, though, no alligator has ever been loved by generations of American children.

Celebrity Tax Protesters

If only.

But P.J. O'Rourke is a funny guy, and he's at it again:

THE GREATEST PLEASURE OF RUNNING a country (although no politician will admit it) is getting to tax people. We Republicans decry exactions and imposts and espouse minimal outlay by the sovereign power. But we control all three branches of government. This won't last forever. Let's have some fun while we can. Moreover, the federal deficit is--contrary to all Republican principles--huge. Even the most spending-averse among us wouldn't mind additional revenue.

Now, I'm a pretty funny guy myself, but even I never came up with "Republican principles."

But he proposes a realistic new fiscal policy:

Actually the resource upon which the media and entertainment industry depends is not fame but its toxic run-off, celebrity. America has vast proven reserves. I bought the May 23 issue of a magazine devoted to vulgar public notice. Its contents suggest that Sartre was ever so slightly misquoted on the nature of perdition: Hell is People. What have I ever done to deserve being exposed to Paris Hilton's Chihuahua, Tinkerbell, wearing four designer outfits? This was in a photo spread titled "Dogs Are Children Too!" Also featured was Tori Spelling's pug dressed as Little Orphan Annie and a quote from Oprah Winfrey about her cocker spaniel, Sophie: "I have a daughter." (Named, no doubt, with an eye to using the William Styron novel in a forthcoming Oprah's Book Club segment.)

I suggest, therefore, a Celebrity Tax with a low-end base rate of, mmm, 100 percent. Furthermore, let's make the tax progressive to get some Democrats on board. (Probably not including Hillary, Ted, and Barney Frank. They'll be working nights and weekends to pay up.) Given the modest talent of current celebrities and the immodest example they set for impressionable youth, we'll call it a "Value Subtracted Tax," or, better, a "Family Value Subtracted Tax." And it will be calculated on the celebrity's net worth.

I like it. I especially like what O'Rourke never mentions, but I see as a salutary side effect: we would probably begin to see Hollywood and media celebrities join the ranks of tax protesters for the first time. Who could object to that? And wouldn't such a tax itself, and such a side effect, be in accordance with, er, (and don't laugh) Republican principles?

An expanded IRS will be needed to determine who is rightly acclaimed and who is merely egregiously overexposed.

Republicans aren't supposed to grow the bureaucracy. But, being honest with ourselves as Republicans, creating more patronage jobs isn't always a bad thing. The GOP includes large numbers of earnest, morally committed social conservatives, not to say cranks. We need their fundraising and get-out-the-vote skills. Here is a perfect place for them between elections, with civil service benefits and plenty to keep them busy.

Ah yes: cranks. Also known as "Republican activists..."

But...well, what about the power to tax being the power to destroy, and all that? Well, O'Rourke has an answer for that one, too:

Our best economists tell us that increasing the taxes on any enterprise decreases the enterprise's productivity. But in this case--and this case only--I'll argue against Milton Friedman. Everything (by "everything" I mean Reality TV) indicates that the business of being a celebrity does not respond to the usual positive and negative economic stimuli.

People (and by "people" I mean contestants on American Idol) are willing to invest all that they have in the faint hope they'll receive a fleeting and worthless moment as the center of attention for an audience of bored idiots. (If you doubt me, compel yourself to watch an episode, regrettably available on DVD and video, of Jackass.) Tax the media and entertainment industry at a million percent and it will continue to produce a surplus of celebrities with Stakhanovite labor heroism.

True, true, true. Consider how many Americans have been willing to take phone calls from producers of The Jerry Springer Show...

As I said, O'Rourke is a funny guy.

Sudoku Solved

Solved my first two sudoku puzzles yesterday afternoon. More to follow. Much more.

Pride, Productiveness, and a Good Pump

Summer time is here, and the warmer weather means that for many, outdoor recreation is on the calendar. Another baseball season is here. Wherever you look, people will be throwing Frisbees, climbing rocks, and riding bicycles. Americans everywhere will be wearing lighter, more revealing clothes, and spending time on beaches and lakefronts.

Plus, as special tribute every year, we could remember bodybuilding great Steve Reeves, who died on May 1, 2000.

Why don't we just designate May (or June), for example, as Muscles Month?

Think about it: sports are popular because we enjoy the physical skills on display, the unusual excellence in action, the overcoming of obstacles. Sports are a means not only of enjoyment, but of inspiration. And every sport requires some sort of muscle use.

But you can enjoy that same excellence in your own body.

Ayn Rand was emphatic with regard to the importance of the mind in human life: mind, not muscle, moves the world, and even in the caves it was probably always so. A poetic example is given in Atlas Shrugged, when Henry Rearden and Dagny Taggart are driving through Wisconsin. They witness the degradation of muscle that occurs with the removal of mind:

In a distant field, beyond the town, they saw the figure of a man moving slowly, contorted by the ugliness of a physical effort beyond the proper use of a human body: he was pushing a plow by hand.

Indeed, the crucial importance of mind is the primary theme of Atlas Shrugged.

But that book is a hymn to life on this earth and to the proper pleasures to be derived from it. This description, for example, is of John Galt, in his first explicit appearance in the novel:

It seemed to her for a moment that she was in the presence of a being who was pure consciousness--yet she had never been so aware of a man’s body. The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the hardness, the gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some dimmed, soft-lustered metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy....

Elsewhere in the book the reader is told of Francisco d’Anconia’s flat stomach and of the “gaunt strength” of Rearden’s arms. Dagny Taggart herself is described as having “showgirl legs.”

Your muscles are your own mind, your own pride and self-esteem, on display.

One might ask, what good is human muscle today? It is no longer needed for pushing or pulling the tools of industrial processes — and, as in the plow example cited above, it is inappropriate for modern agricultural tasks as well. What we call the Agricultural Revolution occurred ten thousand years ago, right? What are muscles needed for anymore?

My answer: Muscles provide pleasure. It feels good to move one’s own muscles, and the sight of finely-honed muscle brings pleasure to the viewer.

But, pleasurable though it may be, well-defined muscle comes only from work. Singer Tina Turner is well-known for her shapely, strikingly beautiful legs, which she attributes to years of dancing onstage. That’s muscle.

Muscles represent strength; a well-muscled physique speaks of pride. Anyone can be born genetically predisposed to being big and beefy, but it takes thought and effort to create a sculpted physique. Such thought and effort brings satisfying gains, is worthy of admiration -- and is fun.

We needn’t care about contest competition or about professional bodybuilders. We needn’t take anabolic steroids or human growth hormone concoctions or concern ourselves with looking like Dorian Yates or Tom Platz. I don’t do any of that: I don’t follow professional bodybuilding at all, and I have never used a steroid or diuretic for training or esthetic effect.

But — why not simply be the very best, physically and esthetically, that we can be? Is that not motivation enough? Isn’t it rational to want to feel better and look better?

I say it is.

Building an excellent physique is an expression of productiveness: it involves translating an idea into a realization. It requires thought and — obviously — effort, physical effort. As a bodybuilder myself, I know that I must plan my workouts, recovery periods, and diet in order to achieve the results I want. I must then have the discipline to put in the hard work. Every bodybuilder, amateur or professional, knows this — knows that muscle depends on the mind.

That's right: your muscles depend on your mind. They are your mind on display.

So the corrupt contractor Ben Nealy is horribly wrong when he tells Dagny Taggart that “all it takes to build anything in this world” is muscles. Building anything — including muscle — takes mind, and its proper application to the task.

Of course, the results are worth it: I am proud of my muscles.

I planned them. I built them. They’re mine.

I have good separation and vascularity, good proportions and symmetry. To a great extent, that's a result of genetics, so I can't take credit for all of it. But I like the sweep and flare of my thighs, my lats, my biceps, and for that, I do take the credit, because I did it, I created that sweep and flare. What I do not yet have, although I’m deliberately growing, is substantial mass. But I’ll get there, because I know what I’m doing.

And I am getting there: all of my dress shirts, for example, will need to be replaced before Christmas. My suit jackets are an inadequately, though gratifyingly, tight fit across the shoulders and chest. And I've related, here, how I inadvertently destroyed what was, at the time, my favorite pair of jeans:

On Monday of this week, on my very last day working with some of my fine military clients at the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, I decided that I needed to exit a Black Hawk helicopter. So I did.

Normally, I just hop out. Most of us do. Or I take a very low step -- the Black Hawk deck is not particularly low to the ground, but not particularly high, either.

But for some reason I stepped out backwards. Don't know why. I also don't know why I kept my left foot well inside the cab, and flat on the deck of the cab, as I extended my right leg back onto the runway.

All was well as the ball of my foot touched the tarmac...but when I found myself with left foot flat on the deck of the Black Hawk cab at the same time my right heel touched that Fort Hood blacktop...I lost my favorite pair of jeans.

That's right, my black Levi's 501s gave way, suddenly and violently, and not in the ass, either, but in the thigh bicep area. Quite frustrating to lose them, but also gratifying in a way...

I do believe I'll continue heavy squats and deadlifts.

And so I shall.

Did I mention fun? I enjoy the triumph of completing twenty full squats with heavy weight and in good form. I'll also back off the weight and do even deeper squats on occasion, "ass to the grass," as the Olympic weightlifters say. It's a different challenge, and a different victory. Next on my to-do list is overhead squats -- holding the barbell overhead, as in the military press position, while squatting. I can't wait.

And nothing compares to deadlifting a new personal best, whether it's a greater number of repetitions at a heavy weight, or increasing the lifted weight itself. Nothing.

Trainers, powerlifters, and bodybuilders occasionally speak of the "knock-off" effect of those two exercises, the squat and the deadlift. I can attest to it myself: I do no direct work on my neck (and with my neck, trust me, I'll never want to), shoulders, or biceps, yet I see gratifyingly regular increases in all three areas. Squats and deadlifts are taxing, which is why many lifters don't like them -- or don't even do them. But they produce results: one of own bodybuilding heroes, Vince Gironda, hated squats and the sport of powerlifting, but I'm sticking with squats and deadlifts both. The old-time strongmen were known for tearing phone books; I want to do that, too, but meanwhile...well, I've torn denim. :-)

I feel satisfaction when, after I’ve lifted, my arms are so pumped, so swollen with blood, that I cannot bend my arms back to wipe the sweat from my own face. Those arms are on their way to getting bigger.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand wrote: “Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned….that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul….”

I would add: we are also beings of self-made physique.

Building an excellent physique is a great source of pride: I did this, it’s mine, and it’s good. It is also an expression of pride: I’m worth it.

And you are.

So it’s summer again. Consider that it is good and appropriate that we like to look at good bodies, that it is good and appropriate that we are drawn to strength and health and vitality. Consider, then, that it’s only good, only appropriate, that we create something worthy of a look.

Looking is pleasurable, and being looked at is pleasurable. We all enjoy seeing muscles move, whether we're sports fans or not.

Remember Tina Turner’s legs (or Dagny Taggart’s). Give thought to Jennifer Lopez’s most celebrated feature, and bear in mind that it is a muscle, the gluteus maximus, which is directly amenable to work. And how many women, over the past forty years or more, have found Sean Connery sexually attractive? He, too, was a competitive bodybuilder — in the Steve Reeves, pre-steroids era — before finding success as an actor.

Summer fashions in America include golf shirts on men and short skirts on women. Why not take advantage of this? Why not look good in whatever you’re wearing?

And by all means take pride in it, too: after all, you will have created it.

(The original version of this piece, edited by Andrew Schwartz, appeard at The Atlasphere on April 26, 2004.)

"Now, if we could just move Asia a few yards to the right..."

This is cool. Take a look at the photos.

Of course, I am no "environmentalist": the fact that human beings are changing the planet is, for the most part, good.

A Man's Home Is His Castle...Maybe

Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. (R) on March 17 signed into law Senate Bill 184, effectively preventing the exercise of eminent domain authority by redevelopment agencies, which otherwise had the power to transfer land from one private entity to another. Local governments may still use eminent domain for more traditionally defined and understood "public purposes."

A damn good start. Eminent domain itself is bad enough, but using it as an excuse for economic "development" is no more than using the power of government to steal property from one and give it to another: it's no more than a particularly evil form of welfare. And just how bad is the situation?

The Utah bill is in many ways a prelude to the issue soon to be decided in the federal courts. In the Kelo case, the Supreme Court is deciding whether a local government can use its eminent domain power to seize property from one private party and transfer it to another private party. The seven plaintiffs in Kelo are property owners whose homes and small businesses were "condemned" by the city of New London solely for the purpose of helping a prospective developer acquire 90 acres of land.

According to New London officials, condemnation and taking of the property by eminent domain is necessary not because the property is uncared-for or a nuisance, but because the new development would support more jobs and create more city tax revenues than the current homes and small businesses.

According to Alex Epstein, a fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, "This type of justification was given more than 10,000 times between 1998 and 2002, and across 41 states, to use eminent domain (or its threat) to seize private property. The attitude behind these seizures was epitomized by a Lancaster, California city attorney explaining why a 99¢ Only store should be condemned to make way for a Costco: '99 Cents produces less than $40,000 [a year] in sales taxes, and Costco was producing more than $400,000. You tell me, which was more important?'"

As reported by Epstein, Institute for Justice attorney Dana Berliner put the issue in more personal terms. "If jobs and taxes can be a justification for taking someone's home or business, then no property in America is safe. Anyone's home can create more jobs if it is replaced by a business, and any small business can generate greater taxes if replaced by a bigger one."

Yes, you read that right: government-coerced transfers of property from one private owner to another, ten thousand times between 1998 and 2002. That's ten thousand, as in, a lot.

Do you own your own home? Vacation cottage? The building in which you operate your business? Really, you think so? Remember that Utah is the very first state to enact such pro-property, eminent-domain-limiting legislation, and that courts at all levels traditionally have sided with governments over property owners.

Now: do you still think you really own your home? By whose leave? You might want to watch the Supreme Court for its decision in the Kelso case.

(Hat tip: Google News Alerts)

iSpoof

Like to have a laugh at the expense of those iPod silhouette commercials?

The Anger of Compassion is here to please.

In Pod We Trust

In yet one more sop to the iPod cultists, The Guardian solicited comments from two of its critics, Kitty Empire (pop music) and Anthony Holden (classical and opera). First up, Kitty Empire:

Like the Walkman, the iPod sticks two fingers up at John Donne's dictum that no man is an island. Personal stereo wearers are all islands; but the iPodder has his or her very own instalment of Desert Island Discs with them. What's more, instead of just eight songs, you get six gigabytes of songs (1,500 tracks). And that's just the iPod mini. The massive 60-gig 15,000 tracker is (to badly paraphrase Nathan Barley) totally archipelago.

Make no mistake, what you programme into your iPod says things about you.

I like it. Although I appreciate the "archipelago" comment more for its linguistic novelty than for its application to me, because I don't use my iPod Mini to shut out the world (with one exception, which I'll talk about below). And she's absolutely right about your iPod contents saying things about you. In my case, you'll see plenty of Maria Callas, plenty of Beethoven piano and all of the late string quartets, The Killers, Verve Remixed 2, and Pimsleur's Russian and French lessons. Her thoughts on the nature of the digitization of music are worthy of a thought or two as well.

Next up is Anthony Holden, the paper's classical and opera critic:

Something new? Well, I could listen to that on my hi-fi. Store my day's writing? I've got a memory-stick for that. Take it on holiday, or on my travels? Yes, there is that - especially when I play in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas next month, to insulate myself from the babble. And, come to think of it, on the long-haul flights each way. And, yes, on holiday, if I ever get one... OK, I'm beginning to see the point of this thing.

[...]

But for me, except on distant travels, it's back to the real thing.

"The real thing," in Holden's case? "I attend three or four concerts or operas a week, while auditioning scores of CDs to select the handful I recommend in these pages." As a Guardian critic, too, Holden gets his music free, as he admits. But I do not live in such a rarefied environment -- culturally, El Paso is no London -- and for me, the iPod definitely has its uses, even if they amount, largely, to what Holden would do with the thing.

For when I'm at home, in my library, I move to my stereo when I wish to hear music. Why bother with the iPod? But when I'm elsewhere, on the road for my employer, then my iPod Mini makes its value known. In hotel rooms I have none of my Beethoven or Beatles CDs, nor my stereo. But I do have the music.

Airports are generally too noisy for the iPod to be of much use, but on the plane itself, ah...yes. In fact, I recently learned, on a flight from Atlanta to El Paso, that I'd screwed up in iTunes, and when transferring my Pimsleur French to the iPod, I'd somehow managed to put Lessons 1 and 2, followed by Lessons 1 and 2 again, onto the same track in the playlist. Very, very cool: I just sat back and went through it, both lessons and the repeats, just as I probably would have done anyway.

So while it's true that I don't use it much at home, it's also true that I love my iPod Mini. Now I just have to put the rest of the Russian and French lessons on the thing the way I did with those first two French lessons...

O Brother, where art thou?

Christopher Hitchens (he who publicly disses Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, and the late Pope John Paul II) and Peter "The Abolition of Britain" Hitchens are brothers, but not exactly drinking buddies, and that's down to more than just the fact that Peter lives in Britain and Christopher in Washington, DC. More on that, in an actual face-to-face interview with the two Hitchens boys, in The Guardian.

On Baking, Arbiters, and Filters

Jeff Jarvis, at BuzzMachine, has some interesting comments on how blogs differ from presentations offered by the mainstream media outlets: he's using Fred Wilson's idea of fully baked vs. half-baked. Jeff writes:

Fully baked is a lecture or a book or a show. It says, "I'm done. Eat what I tell you."

Half-baked is a conversation. It says, "Join in. Add some pepperoni before it's done, make it better, make it right for you. Enjoy."

Old media necessitated fully baked thought and expression: You had to "finish" it and get it "right" before you used precious paper, production, and distribution and you couldn't go back and do it over again; you couldn't rethink.

New media allows half-baked notions to be distributed and shared and improved upon and rethought.

At the end of the day, I believe, the half-baked approach will end up with better thought, thanks to the conversation.

Of course, quality is still a factor. A stupid notion, whether fully or half-baked, is still a stupid notion and no amount of remixing or baking can fix it. Bad sauce makes bad pizzas.

And there certainly are plenty of stupid notions out there, as Jeff goes on to illustrate:

But what's interesting about this notion of fully v. half-baked is that it addresses an assumption behind all media, an essential snobbery that, by necessity, got cooked into old media: The limitations of old production and distribution -- the fact that someone owned the printing press and paid for the paper and would not allow anything to get onto that paper until it fit his definition of baked -- meant that we all thought something wasn't good or right until it was declared done by someone with the power to do so: The tyranny of the chef.

But when you think about it, that attitude reveals such hubris: believing that a thought can ever be done, that one author or one editor can know more than all their readers is so egotistical.

I bring this to your attention because of a piece by P.J. O'Rourke that I found yesterday. No, it's not a new piece, but I don't read The Weekly Standard, so I'd missed this one, in which John Kerry explains his defeat in the last presidential election:

Addressing the audience of tame Democrats, Kerry explained his defeat. "There has
been," he said, "a profound and negative change in the relationship of America's media with the American people. . . . If 77 percent of the people who voted for George Bush on Election Day believed weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq--as they did--and 77 percent of the people who voted for him believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11--as they did--then something has happened in the way in which we are talking to each other and who is arbitrating the truth in American politics. . . . When fear is dominating the discussion and when there are false choices presented and there is no arbitrator, we have a problem."

America is not doctrinaire. It's hard for an American politician to come up with an ideological position that is permanently unforgivable. Henry Wallace never quite managed, or George Wallace either. But Kerry's done it. American free speech needs to be submitted to arbitration because Americans aren't smart enough to have a First Amendment, and you can tell this is so, because Americans weren't smart enough to vote for John Kerry.

"We learned," Kerry continued, "that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"

There's more, and you should read it all.

Oh yes: as we all know, the Democrats' electoral defeats are all attributable to their failure to get their message out to the American people. Americans have fallen for some bad, goofy ideas, but this particular set of bad, goofy ideas, with the torch carried by a particular set of wannabe-dictators political leaders, is being rejected by more and more American voters. But John Kerry, inhabiting one of the safest seats in the US Senate, doesn't see it.

Nope: according to Kerry, we just need a better set of arbiters of the news, that's all. Jeez, he sounds remarkably like that idiot EU president who insisted that referendums on the EU constitution should be run and re-run and re-run until voters get it right. Yeah, we need more leaders like him -- and Kerry.

Right, arbiters is just what we need: more people in both politics and in media, telling what to think and what to avoid. Which latter, according to most of them, would probably include The Anger of Compassion. Oh, the humanity of it all...