Monthly Archives: October 2002

Serial Killer Celebrities

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Henry Hanks points to a Howard Kurtz column on the most idiotic piece of sniper-related coverage yet — the letter from serial killer David Berkowitz sent to Fox News reporter Rita Cosby.

According to Kurtz, Cosby sent a sychophantic letter to Berkowitz,

“Your personal story and spiritual growth inspired me to write to you,” Cosby told Berkowitz in a letter. Sometimes, she wrote, “the Lord calls on individuals at various times to serve him and serve his people. . . . I believe as a Christian your help is a great service. . . .

“You have a testimony that must be heard. . . . Our world is crying and you can help.”

Cosby insists she wasn’t trying to diminsh Berkowitz’s crimes and reported on Berkowitz’s criminal record.

But she’s missing the point, just like the cable news channels churning around 24/7 coverage of the Maryland-area murderer are doing — the media is turning the shooter in this case into a celebrity, much as they turned Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into celebrities after Columbine.

Look, killing other people is not a particularly difficult thing to do. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to take a rifle, wait in a wooded area, and pick off someone from less than 100 yards.

The tarot card left behind at the scene of one of the killings supposedly said “I am god.” The killer should have added in parenthesis “or at least the media thinks I am.”

Cosby’s message to Berkowitz is especially infuriating. Her basic premise is that since Berkowitz killed several people, that it is appropriate to treat him as some sort of expert on serial killing. What’s next? Larry King interviewing Berkowitz for his views on the best way to taunt police during a serial killing?

Mugabe Blocks Food Aid to Opponents

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Late last week the United Nations confirmed what had been rumored for the past couple weeks — Zimbabwe has ordered Oxfam and Save the Children to stop distributing food aid in areas that Robert Mugabe’s ruling party believes are hotbeds of opposition support.

In a Mail & Guardian (Johannesberg) story”>http://allafrica.com/stories/200210170594.html”>story, UN FAO representative Tony Hall is quoted as saying,

This is political obstruction of desperately needed food aid at a crucial point. If people do not get food now, many will die . . . Government officials confirmed they will not allow those NGOs to distribute food aid for political reasons, because the government views them as loyal to the opposition party. I said that is unacceptable. They are major international organisations with fine reputations for non-partisan activity.

I guess that puts Zimbabwe up to stage 7 in Genocide Watch’s warning of Zimbabwe’s path to politicide.

Source:

Zim Bans Food Aid Charities. Andrew Meldrum, Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), October 18, 2002.

Did Iraq Expel UN Inspectors?

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FAIR correctly points out that many networks and newspapers have been reporting that in 1998 Iraq expelled United Nations weapons inspectors. In fact, after Iraq pretty much ended all cooperation with the inspectors in October of that year (there was a brief attempt in December 1998 at weapons inspections, but Iraq’s idea of full cooperation was much different than the UN’s), UNSCOM pulled out its inspectors in December 1998. This was done in part to protect UN workers against military strikes planned by the United States and Great Britain to punish Iraq for its noncompliance with UN Security Council resolutions.

This particular myth probably was started due to two reasons. First, in 1997 Iraq did expel American weapons inspectors claiming they were spies. Second, many news reports of the 1998 withdrawal contained vague language like “UN weapons inspectors today were ordered out of Iraq” which was probably misunderstood by reporters later as implying that the orders to leave the country came from Iraq rather than UNSCOM (though, there’s not much excuse for such sloppiness).

The withdrawal, however, was clearly Iraq’s fault. Beginning in July 1998, Iraq actively interfered with the weapons inspectors. At various points it refused to allow them to videotape inspections, refused to allow inspectors to photocopy incriminating documents they uncovered, and blocked access to facilities that weapons inspectors had every right to enter.

Death Penalty Doomed in a Democratic Congress? Doubtful

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Criminal lawyer Jeralyn Merritt fills in for Eric Alterman at Alterman’s MSNBC weblog and tries to pass off this bit of nonsense about the importance of voting for Democrats in the upcoming election,

I have a legislative wish-list that will be dead in the water if the Republicans get control. HereÂ’s the short version: A moratorium on the death penalty now, abolition in the future. Passage of the Innocence Protection Act

If a Democratic Congress meant a moratorium on the death penalty, I’d go in and vote striaght Democratic on November 5.

But, of course, Congress cannot impose a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty. A moratorium on the federal death penalty perhaps, but Congress does not (and should not) have the authority to create a moratorium on state death penalties (anymore than it could or should be able to force states like Michigan to adopt a death penalty).

More importantly, though, the Democratic Party showed how committed it was to death penalty reform in the early 1990s when for two years the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency. That was a period when Bill Clinton proposed all sorts of radical actions that backfired in the 1994 House elections, but death penalty reform/abolition was nowhere to be found as an issue.

And it won’t be if the Democrats end up with control of the House and Senate again this year. In fact, I doubt the Democratic Party as a whole wants such legislation to succeed. It is better served politically by having members of very liberal districts introduces such legislation and let it die in committee.

This way candidates in heavily liberal districts can say they’re trying to do something but keep running into obstacles from Republicans, while at the same time the Republicans can’t bash them over the head with the soft-on-crime label. If a Democrat-controlled Congress took up this issue, it would be a tailor-made issue for the Republican president going into the 2004 presidential elections. (I.e., it will never happen).

Source:

The Elections. Jeralyn Merritt, MSNBC.Com, October 18, 2002.

Doc Searls on Andrew Orloski

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Doc Searls has some interesting comments about this pathetic hit piece from The Register aimed at a Microsoft employee who keeps a weblog. The article basically is one long insult toward the MS employee because she apparently devoted her weblog to pictures of her cats, descriptions of her XBox-playing habits, etc.

Doc should just come out and be blunt about it — Andrew Orlowski’s being a John Dvorak-sized asshole there.

It amazes me to no end how obssessed some people are with pointing out that people post “trivial” data about their lives on their weblogs or web sites. With some of these columnists, you’d think that posting a picture of your cat or dog online was akin to spreading child pornography.

I wonder if there were similar critiques of the phone system. I can just see an early 20th century John Dvorak or Andrew Orlowski complaining that people were wasting precious telephone bandwidth merely talking to loved ones and sharing the daily minutae of their lives rather than doing truly important things (as the John Dvorak’s and Andrew Orlowki’s of the world are offering indispensable insights — not).

Jim Roepcke Looking for Employment

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Jim Roepcke is looking for employment after the economic downturn hit the software company he’s been working for.

Jim’s got an online resume. I know him largely because he worked on Conversant, the groupware system I use, and through his weblog where he comes across as someone who would be really cool to work with.

In fact, even though I’m a pain-in-the-ass on his site occasionally (okay, more than occasionally), Have Browser, Will Travel is one of my favorite weblogs.

Glenn Reynolds on the Economics of Weblogging

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Glenn Reynolds hits the nail on the head in an article on big media vs. weblogs,

But while weblogs may not be lucrative, they’re very powerful and – as Nick Denton has pointed out, they’re very cost-effective. My traffic is (depending on how they count it) about one-thirtieth of the Times’ website, but I feel sure that my costs are much, much less than one-thirtieth of theirs. Which raises the question: what if it really is almost impossible to make money on the web, but so cheap that practically anyone can afford to have a Web presence?

Actually, forget the “practically” part – and, for that matter, the “what if” part. Pretty much everyone agrees that making money on the Web is damned hard. And it’s true that practically anyone can have a Web presence – there’s even a homeless guy with a weblog (called, straightforwardly enough, “The Homeless Guy.”) And with even fairly high-volume webhosting plans available for ten or fifteen dollars per month, (here’s the page for one outfit I know; I’m sure there are others in the same range) the barriers to entry are pretty damned low.

Which is why I get so annoyed at the liberals and leftists whining about how all the political weblogs are right wing. If you don’t like it, stop your whining and start blogging already.

Just How Many PC Users are Switching

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In Apple’s otherwise lackluster quarterly financial results, the company is trying to make hay of the fact that a relatively high number of units sold at its retail stores — 40 percent — were sold to people who are new Mac users. The only problem is their measuring sales by processor rather than units sold.

The only area Apple is seeing any increase in sales is in its newest dual-processor PowerMacs, so measuring new adopters by processor is a nice way to massage the numbers.

Apple’s getting royally screwed thanks to Motorola, and it’s only going to get worse for the company as Intel and AMD continue to jack up speed of their processors.