Norman Finkelstein will be speaking on campus here later this week at the invitation of the local anti-war folks. A Google search on him brings up a lot of pro-Finkelstein materials (much of it from racist hate sites and individuals), but not a lot of critical pieces about his books. If anyone knows of any articles, blogs, whatever that critique Finkelstein’s bizarre views, please post links here or e-mail me at brian@carnell.com.
Thank you.
This report from the Australian Broadcasting Company’s MediaWatch program is downright sickening in showing just how far some people in the media are willing to go to manufacture details to make a news story more sexy.
The article details a news story filed by Australian Broadcasting Company television reporter Gina Wilkinson, who is stationed in Iraq. Wilkinson’s story was about the dangers posted to children by unexploded munitions left over from the recently concluded war. Wilkinson wanted to emphasize that children might play around and on the munitions, and so she and her assistant managed to convince several children to do just that for their cameras. MediaWatch provides the following transcript of tapes that were leaked to it,
Wilkinson’s Assistant, Mr. Saadi: You want to show the children on there?
Wilkinson: Yeah, that would be good. Yeah, if they donÂ’t mind.
Saadi:
- (trans) You want them to stand over there to be filmed?
- (trans) Come on sweetie. WhatÂ’s her name?
- Noona
- (trans) I’m worried about them.
- Sit. Sit on this.
- (trans) I’m worried about them.
- (trans) Sit on the edge.
Wilkinson: Please God, don’t let this thing explode now.
. . .
Wilkinson: Mr Saadi?
Saadi: Yes.
Wilkinson: Can we get these two kids to walk around underneath the missile?
Just around it?
Saadi: Mohammad. Mohammad.
Wilkinson: And this one?
Saadi: (trans) Come here. Go up there. Go with him. Casually, casually. Walk behind him. Go with him.Wilkinson: Mr Saadi, could you ask them to do that one more time for me?
Saadi (trans): This time in reverse?
(trans): No no no.Wilkinson: Excellent.
At least when Jayson Blair manufactured things for the New York Times he didn’t endanger the lives of children to do so. Unfortunately, the only comment that MediaWatch gets from the ABC about how they will deal with Wilkinson are words to the effect that its an internal matter. She should be fired immediately, and in a very public manner for acting so unconscionably.
Source:
ABC Baghdad: Kids and bombs. MediaWatch, Australian Broadcasting System, September 29, 2003.
The one good thing the Patriot Act has done is provide a lot of entertainment as people on the Right and Left alternately work themselves into knots to try to either oppose or support John Ashcroft’s favorite law.
First, on the Left, here’s a blatant distortion of the act by Pete Ponzetti, a Green Party activist and politician, from an op-ed published in the student newspaper at the university I work at,
Under Section 213, the Patriot Act legally allows secret searches by the FBI, in both terrorism-related and general investigations. Agents can now search homes and offices using a warrant, but without ever notifying the individuals being investigated.
Except, of course, Section 213 is quite clear — the FBI can delay notification of a search warrant with the approval of a judge, but it cannot simply decided to never notify an individual that he or she has been the subject of a search warrant. In fact, Section 213 requires that such search warrants “provide for the giving of such notice within a reasonable period of its execution, which period may thereafter be extended by the court for good cause shown.”
A lot of Left-liberals rail against this so-called “sneak-and-peek” provision, but it is one of the more defensible parts of the legislation. This is the same sort of provision, after all, that applies to wiretaps search warrants. You don’t put a wiretap on a suspected terrorist or organize crime figure and then notify them that, by the way, we’re listening in on your conversations. Similarly, there are clearly cases where it would be prudent not to notify a suspected terrorist that his/her house has been searched by the FBI.
The main problem with Section 213, as with wiretaps, is the possibility of abusing that power. Such fears are only exacerbated by the Justice Department’s incredible level of secrecy about how it enforces the Patriot Act. Which brings me to the right winger who is just as obtuse as Ponzetti, but from a different perspective, Rich Lowry. Lowry rants against the new scourge facing the Republic — librarians — and has a good laugh at Ashcroft’s attempt at embarassing this group,
The A[merican] L[ibrary] A[ssociation]‘s opposition to a portion of the Patriot Act that allows counterterrorism investigators to subpoena library records has been total — the ALA is against the very idea of it being on the books (so to speak). So the organization appeared unembarrassed when Ashcroft revealed that this part of the act — hyped by the ALA into a fundamental assault on American rights — has never been used.
But this is precisely the heart of the problem. The fact that this provision of the Patriot Act had never been used was classified until Ashcroft asked it to be declassified specifically to make his point. But how can we possibly be expected to trust a Justice Department that classifies as a state secret the fact that a given law has never been enforced? Far from embarassing the ALA, Ashcroft’s revelation merely underscored the alarming cult of secrecy that obtains in the Justice Department.
Sources:
The ideological librarians. Rich Lowry, King Features Syndicate, September 22, 2003.
Patriot Act violates citizen’s privacy, should be repealed. Pete Ponzetti, Western Herald, September 17, 2003.
Reason is the only magazine that I actually go out and buy even though I usually read all of the content first on their web site. Why? Because of excellent stories like Michael McMenamin’s St. Martha: Why Martha Stewart should go to heaven and the SEC
should go to hell.
Like many other libertarian-oriented folks, McMenamin argues that insider trading should not really be a crime in the first place — or, if it is to be a crime, the govenment should at least be required to define exactly what constitutes insider trading.
But you don’t have to go that far to realize there’s something a bit odd about the prosecution of Stewart. After all, the feds decided not to bring criminal charges of insider trading against Stewart (although it is pressing a civil case on those charges). Instead, the most serious criminal charge she faces is for saying publicly that she was not guilty of violating insider trading laws.
Yes, you read that right — Stewart is being prosecuted for saying she was innocent of a crime for which she was never charged. Welcome to the vagaries of securities law! As McMenamin writes,
The most serious criminal charge against her is not perjury or insider trading but securities fraud, based on the fact that she denied to the press, personally and through her lawyers, that she had engaged in insider trading. This was done, the feds say, not for the purpose of clearing her name, but only to prop up the stock price of her own publicly traded company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. In other words, her crime is claiming to be innocent of a crime with which she was never charged.
As for the SECÂ’s civil case, it hinges on an elastic understanding of insider trading, an offense Congress has never defined. The justification for the ban on insider trading, which makes little economic or legal sense, is just as murky as the behavior covered by it. Given the difficulty of figuring out exactly what constitutes insider trading (let alone why itÂ’s illegal), it is entirely possible that Stewart and her lawyers werenÂ’t sure whether she had broken the rules. In any event, under existing case law, itÂ’s clear that she didnÂ’t.
McMenamin also goes in-depth about the heavy handed way in which Stewart is being treated compared to the relatively light treatment of other defendants who clearly engaged in more clearcut cases of large-scale insider trading.
Source:
St. Martha: Why Martha Stewart should go to heaven and the SEC
should go to hell. Michael McMenamin, Reason, October 2003.
Michael Moore has a bizarre post on the front page of his web site. Bizarre because it is another of Moore’s rambling essays in support of Wesley Clark for president, but on the other hand if Moore is right then Clark is again lying (one way or the other) about that mysterious call he claims to have received after 9/11 telling him to blame the attacks on Iraq.
Clark originally implied that the call came from the White House, but backed off and later maintained it was from a Middle Eastern think tank in Canada. According to Clark, nobody from the White House ever asked him to blame 9/11 on Iraq. Clark’s last version of events was that he simply learned later that people in the White House were supposedly also discussing spinning the attacks to blame Iraq.
But Moore writes,
My wife and I were invited over to a neighbor’s home 12 days ago where [Wesley] Clark told those gathered that certain people, acting on behalf of the Bush administration, called him immediately after the attacks on September 11th and asked him to go on TV to tell the country that Saddam Hussein was “involved” in the attacks. He asked them for proof, but they couldn’t provide any. He refused their request.
Now the person with the Canadian Middle Eastern think tank has already come forward and said that he didn’t call Clark until days after the 9/11 attack and he was relying on information passed along by people he knows in the Israeli intelligence community.
So is Clark changing his story on this mysterious call again? Or is Moore just distorting what Clark said (that wouldn’t be the first time for Moore distorting reality)?
Source:
“And Now a Chance to Bid Farewell to Mr. Bush”. Michael Moore, September 23, 2003.
The other day I noted that one of Wesley Clark’s version of his views on Iraq is that he supports the idea of going to war against Iraq, but thinks “We could have waited” and conducted the war at a time TBA. So far, however, Clark has not offered his opinion on when the stars would have been aligned properly to begin such a war.
Maybe there is a hint of what Clark was looking for, however, in a decade-old blunder by Clark when he was doing that whole Bonsia thing. Here’s the Weekly Standard’s summary,
On August 27, 1994, representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff during a fact-finding mission to Bosnia, Clark “ignored State Department warnings not to meet with Serb officials suspected of ordering deaths of civilians in a campaign known as ethnic cleansing” and paid a courtesy call on Serbian army commander Ratko Mladic. Mladic was already the subject of multiple U.S. war-crimes charges: “artillery attacks on civilians in Sarajevo” and the “razing of Muslim towns and villages,” along with random acts of “mass murder.” According to a contemporaneous Washington Post report: “On Friday [August 26, 1994] and again on Saturday, State Department officials said, they instructed [Clark] not to go, but he went anyway.” The meeting “occurred as the Clinton administration is trying to isolate the Serbs in advance of possible military action against them.”
. . .
“What State Department officials said they found especially disturbing was a photograph of Clark and Mladic wearing each other’s caps. The picture appeared in several European newspapers, U.S. officials said. Clark accepted as gifts Mladic’s hat, a bottle of brandy, and a pistol inscribed in Cyrillic, U.S. officials said. ‘It’s like cavorting with Hermann Goering,’ one U.S. official complained.”
So maybe Clark’s upset that hostilities with Iraq started before he was able to exchange hats and ceremonial side arms with Chemical Ali.
Mladic, by the way, is still a fugitive wanted for crimes against humanity.
I measure the success of this and my other blogs/web sites by three criteria: 1) how useful they are to me when I’m looking for information that I wanted to track; 2) number of page views; and 3) number of discussion group posts.
When it comes to page views, last week was the busiest week here ever with almost 160,000 page views served (that’d be 8.3 million page views annually if I could sustain that level of traffic year round).
And as for the discussion group, today the total number of posts on all of my sites hit the 80,000 mark. That’s millions and millions of words about every topic under the Sun — and a surprisingly high signal-to-noise ratio.
As for the last (but most important part), like many people when I want to find out pretty much anything I usually turn to Google first. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how often I do a Google search on something and it returns exactly the information I needed . . . except it happens to be a page on my site (this happens a lot with the animal rights stuff).
Gizmodo.Com had a brief mention today about the Mirra network backup device which is targeted at home users.
Looks like this is a box running embedded Linux that polls any other boxes hooked up to your home network and backs up the files on them automatically. The product site isn’t big on details, but it looks like the software is configurable so you can tell it exactly what to back up on each machine (i.e. so you’re only backing up the data). It also has some sort of software that has to be installed on each machine that keeps track of newly created or modified files, so if you’re off at Starbucks rewriting that Great American Novel, the devices detects this and automatically backs up the new version of the document when you’re back on the network.
A Mirra with a 120gb hard drive goes for $499. Assuming it actually works as advertised, that’s not a bad price at all, especially since it has USB connectivity (hopefully that’s USB 2.0) and the site talks about future software upgrade plans to allow the device to use external USB 2.0 drives for additional backup space.
Can’t wait to see the reviews on this puppy. If they’re positive, this might be the answer to my ongoing backup woes (there doesn’t appear to be a fast way to back up 30gb of data, especially when it is all sitting on my laptop’s crappy 4200 rpm drive.)
Update:
Interesting item from the manufacturers’ overview on this product,
Mirra automatically synchronizes your files on your PC to your Mirra appliance, and from your Mirra appliance over the web to trusted friends with whom you have set up a Mirra Share.
Hmmmm…so if I’ve got one and my friends got one, we can set it up to so the MP3 file automatically synchronizes?
Update #2:
Actually, the friend doesn’t need a Mirra appliance, they can access your MP3 directory using a web account (assuming you authorize them to), but that runs through some sort of special Mirra web site. Their web site talks about how secure this is, so will they be monitoring such transfers to stop music file sharing, or simply argue they are a backup service provider with no interest in violating the privacy of their users? The best option would be to simply encrypt traffic so even the company doesn’t know what is being transmitted, but I bet that’s a can of worms they’re unwilling to open.
For a project at work, I am trying to find anyone who might have experience using ED-X.Com, a distance learning-specific search engine, as a marketing vehicle for distance education programs. Please post any thoughts here or e-mail them to brian@carnell.com. Thank you.
I am sick of hospitals, having spent way too much time in them over the past couple weeks (though thankfully not as a patient).
It all started a couple weeks ago with a scheduled procedure for my grandmother. She had a stent procedure a couple years ago, but she’s still having problems with circulation, so they ran some dye through her and took some pictures. I drove over to her apartment (about 20 minutes) and stayed the night so we could get her there bright and early the next morning.
No sooner was I back from helping out with that, than my daughter developed a kidney infection and was in the hospital for several days while they pumped antibiotics into her. Now she gets to go through all of the wonderful procedures we thought we had left behind after she had surgery for this sort of problem a few years ago.
So my daughter gets out of the hospital last week, and all seems well for a relaxing weekend for a change when I get a call from my brother that my grandmother is back in the hospital and is acting goofy. So it’s off to Battle Creek again where my grandmother acted like she had a stroke or maybe advanced alzheimers. Complete personality change accompanied by delusions/hallucinations. She tells me she’s waiting to receive a phone call from people who have been dead for almost a decade, and half the time she doesn’t realize she’s in a hospital (she spooked a lot of family/friends by calling them and explaining that she was trapped at a funeral home and needed someone to come get her).
That was very scary, but fortunately it seems to have been a drug reaction. The dye gave her an allergic reaction and she had hives all over her body, which is why my brother took her back to the hospital. She hadn’t been sleeping because of the allergic reaction anyway, and then the hospital pumped her full of prednisone. Prednisone is a steroid which is known to cause such hallucinations and delusions (and occasionally even psychotic episodes) in a very small percentage of the population, and the effect is exacerbated by lack of sleep.
She’s back home now and she occasionally says something that sounds like it’s the residual effect of the medicine, but she’s about 95 percent back to her old self. My brother wisely confiscated her car keys until we’re sure she’s 100 percent, and we’re trying to keep as close an eye on her as we can.
