| A strange loop.
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| A strange loop.
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Debate SummaryKerry did a better job than I expected. However, expect the ads within a few days showing him saying "I've never changed position on Iraq" followed by him stating multiple conflicting positions.
Bush did about what I expected. Not great; not terrible. Failed to put in a few zingers he could have. Shame that.
I should have had more to drink. I think I'll go fix that.
Kerry is a smarmy ass. Bush is not as articulate as he should be.
Kerry didn't do well enough, I think, to move the polls in his direction, which is disastrous for his campaign since he's behind. We'll find out in a few days.
Things that Make me DroolMy area of expertise is directory services, provisioning, identity management and enterprise systems design. That is to say, I specialize in putting together large computer and network infrastructures to host applications, which can efficiently and accurately control who is accessing the applications and how. One of the critical tools in doing identity management and provisioning is directory services, and the best general-purpose directory for small to medium (<5 million objects) applications is the SunONE Directory. Developed from the Netscape Directory Server, SunONE (in any of its many rebrandings: SunONE, SunONE Java System, iPlanet, etc) is a fast, easy-to-administer (especially critical in large environments) directory with a very good implementation of the RFCs.
The open source competitor to SunONE is OpenLDAP. It is closer to Innosoft's product, which was developed out of the same base code from UMich that was used as the basis for OpenLDAP. It is not very fast, quite difficult to administer in enterprise environments, and lacks a robust replication mechanism. (Anyone who wants to debate me on slurpd, please feel free. I have a passionate hatred for it, and a good rant is fun.) In other words, the open source alternative is fine for a hobbyist, but I wouldn't hire someone recommending OpenLDAP for a professional environment.
And that is why this is so cool. This is the same code base used for SunONE, and RedHat will release it open source. Even if the code has not advanced beyond its 4.x releases, it will have the self-storage of configuration, the admin console, the web admin tools, the replication system and the basic architecture that make this code such a powerful product. The major thing that is lacking is a true multi-master model of replication (this is also lacking in SunONE, which last time I looked still allowed only two masters, and required them to be in the same data center - not a winning plan for disaster recovery).
It may very well be the case that within a few years, the open source directory alternatives will outstrip all but the high-end X.500 implementations (eTrust comes to mind), making directories much more affordable in the enterprise, and allowing the efficiencies that directories enable to be pushed further down the food chain. I look forward to that.
Who?Lileks today bleats about a rant by a mainstream journalist about how horrible bloggers are. (Note: not blogs per se, but specifically the people who write them.) I'll leave it to Lileks, Stephen Green - and doubtless a host of others - to pick this apart. I'm just struck by two salient differences between bloggers and mainstream media journalists.
The first difference is that there is no significant difference between Coleman's rant and the many rants that can be found on numerous blogs: it's mildly entertaining and devoid of serious thought. OK, most bloggers who rant put more thought into it than Coleman did, but that's beside the point: the writing in this rant, published in the (Minneapolis-St. Paul) Star Tribune is not notably better than that of many bloggers; nor are the expressed thoughts more original; nor is there any better sourcing (in fact, there's less, because bloggers link). Indeed (pun intended - keep reading), the audience for Coleman's rant would have been smaller than that of any of Glenn Reynolds' tossed-off quick-links, had it not been for the fact that Lileks (whom every blogger except Lileks considers a blogger) linked to it.
The second striking thing about this rant is the notion of identity. To a blogger - even a pseudonymous blogger like Wretchard - identity comes from the contents of our work. How many of my readers (about 1000 uniques per day during the week - it's a small but select group - know me personally? Maybe a dozen? And many of them have blogs, themselves.
By contrast, most journalists are not known by their names. Sure, some columnists are, and there are "journalists" like Dan Rather who are well-known as individuals, but this is not the norm. Most journalists are identified with their news organization. Who's Norm Coleman? Who knows? He's just some guy that writes for the Star Tribune. And rather than being able to see all of his work in one place, so we can judge it as a body and thus be able to trust Norm Coleman as Norm Coleman, we are asked as a matter of course to trust him because some middle management type at some company that publishes a newspaper decided to print his rant, probably with numerous changes which Coleman may or may not have even seen, rather than Coleman being solely responsible for his words. Me? I'd rather trust someone I can judge fairly, and who's responsible for everything published or broadcast under their name.
I don't happen to believe that bloggers can replace the mainstream media. But only in one respect: there's no system to gather and collate facts, which are (theoretically) the basis of all media reports except opinion columns. (I'm trying to figure out how this could be done, but I'm not yet convinced it could be.) What bloggers can and do add to the debate is a mechanism for filtering and fact-checking mainstream media reports, and a good bit of puncturing of over-inflated journalistic egos. Coleman should think about that for a while, but he probably won't.
UPDATE: I just realized I was calling him "Norm Coleman" instead of "Nick Coleman". Not sure if this reinforces my point or his...
UPDATE: It doesn't help mainstream media's credibility any when they write stories in a past tense, filed before the event they were supposedly about. At best, it's just shoddy use of tenses. At worst it's dishonestly posing as being a retrospective article (a statement of facts that have occurred) instead of the speculation (a statement of events scheduled to occur and guesses as to what might happen at the event).
Ritual SeppukuNot content merely to slit their own throat as a "reputable" "news" organization, CBS is now apparently going to also fall on their sword. I was going to ask what's next, but then I realized how easy it is to tell: we just have to wait for the next issue of Democrat Party talking points to see what CBS will lie about next.
Coming to You Every Hour on the HourBack in May, I noted (well before the Killian memos scandal) that while people might wish the blogosphere would overcome the mainstream media, there was something missing: information gathering:
Information gathering is the process of actually finding information, while information filtering is the process of determining which bits of information that you have collected are meaningful, rather than trivial. Information is all around us, but most of it is not meaningful except in very specific contexts. For example, if a city council passes a resolution against US involvement in Upper Slobonia, that is certainly information. However, it's meaningless in and of itself (though it may be meaningful if virtually every city council in the country does so, as it would be an indicator of public opinion).The major media actually does not do a great job at these functions, mostly due to laziness as far as I can tell. For example, no one saw the Savings and Loan crisis coming. Why not? Because the reporters who could have gathered the information in the records offices of the SEC were too busy attending press conferences and parties and listening to what was being talked about to actually go dig up the information. What information did come to light tended to get filtered out as isolated failures or financial difficulties, because there were not enough data points being gathered until the crisis was already upon us.
That said, the major media do a far better job, at present, of information gathering than the blogosphere. There is no blog equivalent to the AP or the staff of the NY Times. Blogs excel at finding information in print - especially information published on the Internet, filtering it and disseminating it (see especially Instapundit), but the gathering of raw information is still all too rare.
The first problem would be the actual accumulation of information. To some degree, information could be culled from mainstream media sources (the mainstream media itself rarely generates news: most reports are recycled from other media). The problem is not in generating new information. INDC Journal did this in the Killian scandal by contacting Dr. Bouffard, for example. All that would be needed would be some information prominently posted giving bloggers pointers on how to contact people, and how to obtain and conduct interviews, and the amount of information blogs could collect would go up dramatically. While any given blogger may only do this a few times on a few topics, there are a lot of bloggers.
The problem, rather, is in how to collect and correlate information. Though there are bloggers everywhere, there is no place to centralize their information, and no way to judge it for reliability. It seems that we need a tool, with the following characteristics:
I'm curious as to what I'm missing that such a system would need, and whether such a system would be interesting enough to people to be used. If it was used, would it serve the purpose of enabling information gathering, and would that be robust enough to supplement or supplant the mainstream media? If it gathered sufficient information and judged it sufficiently well, would it allow blogs to provide primary information in sufficient quantities to become, effectively, news services rather than analysis services?
UPDATE: Dave Schuler comments at the Glittering Eye. He asks a question that deserves answering: "How does it differ from something like Technorati? Or some of the blog indices that have died on the vine over the years?"
There are structural differences, of course, but these arise from a deeper cause: purpose. Technorati and other blog indexing systems I've seen are intended to enhance information connectivity; that is, they exist to make clear non-obvious relationships between hypertext pages. If I link to a page, it's easy to go to that page, but it's a one-way relationship. If you are looking at that page, you HTML provides no facility to determine who is linking to that page. Technorati provides bi-directional browsing, as do trackbacks for that matter. This is a useful service, no doubt about it, and Technorati is useful despite its flaws.
What I'm looking for is a way of taking real world data and making it available, so that bloggers (and, hey, why not?, journalists) can use it to pull out information. This is much more than a mere structural difference from Technorati. It would not be hosted on the same kind of database or have the same front end, but that's minor. What's major is the way that the data is organized and rated (actually, Technorati doesn't rate information at all, except to note how many incoming links and sources, and how old they are, exist for a given page). Information wouldn't be gleaned from the relationships between pages, but would exist in the abstract. The two together - using this system to find information and Technorati to find commentary about that information - would be a powerful combination.
UPDATE: This seems like a good start for bringing SMEs together with people who need their information. (hat tip: Transterrestrial Musings) The intro post is here. I'm wondering about the rule against self-nomination, though, in that it is unlikely that many bloggers will know the areas of professional expertise of other bloggers. Still, this is a great idea.
Hell, Yeah!As a long-term system administrator (now systems architect), I recognize a kindred administrator soul when I see one. (hat tip: Accidental Verbosity) Yes, it's like that.
The Limited Iraqi InsurgencyI had the feeling from my reading that the Iraqi insurgency was much more limited both geographically and in other ways than the media generally report, but I am surprised by how limited it is geographically. Basically, if you extend the analysis out to the end of the invasion, you get the axis of casualties stretching from Falluja to Baghdad to Najaf to Basra, and that's about it. With Najaf and Basra now quiet (and Basra likely to stay that way), you get Shannon Love's map at Chicagoboyz. (hat tip: Jim Miller) You'd think that at least one of the news magazines, at least, would be able to provide this kind of analysis. Apparently not.
Let's All VoteJonathan Freedland has written the latest in a series of calls for people from outside the US to get to vote in the US Presidential elections. (hat tip: Roger Simon) I won't include Mr. Freedland's "reasoning" - you can follow the link if you want to see it.
I was going to write up a long response, but Norman Geras has already done so, and it's a fine read, well beyond the scope I would have covered. Instead, I'll just make one short observation:
Anyone in the world can vote in the US Presidential (and other!) election in one of two ways: come to the US and become a citizen, or submit your country to US territorial rule and apply to the Congress for statehood.
If you're not willing to undertake the obligations of citizenship, don't expect the responsibilities and protections of citizenship.
Ex Cunabula ad AstraIt looks like Paul Allen is getting together with Virgin Atlantic to form a venture that will provide private spaceflights by 2008. (hat tip: VodkaPundit) Paul Allen is the money behind Space Ship One, about to attempt the X-Prize. In other words, humanity is on the verge of venturing from the Earth's cradle into space to stay - out of the cradle, endlessly orbiting - and it will largely be due to one man's efforts - as most great advances usually are. So any time you are thinking of bashing Microsoft (which I often do, as well), at least keep in mind what it has enabled.
UPDATE: And a follow-on prize: $50 million for getting a 7-person orbital machine by the end of the decade. Excellent!
UPDATE: Virgin Galactic's web site.
Real Life and a PreviewThe posts here recently have been short linking pieces, rather than the analysis that I usually do. Real life (ending my project, moving back to Dallas and starting a new project) intervenes. Coming soon, though, will be an analysis on the state of the world, how the Western Left and the jihadis are spiritually kin, Thomas Barnett's "Pentagon's New Map" theory, how to win the Terror Wars without sparking genocide or inciting the Chinese or Europeans to oppose the US, and ending state-on-state war forever. That's actually all one post, because they are all tied together. Look for it in the next two weeks.
Morality and MindThere's an interesting discussion on morality at Steph's place, and an interesting trio of posts at the Glittering Eye, Brad DeLong's site and Matthew Yglesias's site. They aren't really closely related, but they are interesting when taken together.
Look at the Map, People!You want to know why we're going to be in Iraq for decades, regardless of who wins the Presidential election? Look at a map! (It was Iraq or Egypt, and besides not being nearly as immediate of a threat, try occupying 80 million people (vice 25 million) - and trying getting international support!) Gerard Van der Leun lays it out in words in an excellent post taking a clear-eyed look at the strategic importance of our presence in Iraq.
The Best Laid PlansThe Glittering Eye has a wonderful post about the salient characteristics of bureaucracy, Gammon's Law, and how that applies to issues like education and health care.
It Warms my HeartIt warms my heart to see idiots truly screwed on account of their own bad behavior. Love it.
UnacceptableIt is simply not acceptable for any American to:
1The last alteration was to no longer vote for Libertarians for any Federal office, on the grounds that they oppose defending ourselves abroad.
I Feel a DraftPolitics simultaneously repels and attracts me. On the one hand, there is a truly sordid and destructive aspect to our elections, where the attempts to destroy a candidate's political opponent drown out any kind of attempt to find the right way to move forward on the problems and opportunities that confront us. On the other hand, I love strategy, and there is a huge amount of strategy in campaigns: when and how to make what statements and proposals; which groups can be cleaved to your base or separated from your opponents; how to remove your opponent's ability to act without seeming ridiculous.
Frankly, Bush is a master politician. Where Clinton, also a master politician, used a bludgeon and a smile (Now, I wish I could say that my evil opponent who eats babies in his breakfast cereal agreed with me that motherhood and apple pie are good, but I just can't get over how he always disagrees with me on these fundamental decency issues.), Bush just smiles a lot, makes a few self-deprecating jokes, and then trips his opponents while they are running with knives. It never fails to amaze me when Bush lets his opponents go on for months about his National Guard service, for example, letting them build up an intricate and massive myth and sell, sell, sell it - only to then release all of his records that utterly demolish the myth in a way that wouldn't have happened if the "debate" hadn't moved beyond the purely technical aspects.
There is another opportunity that the Democrats are creating for Bush (besides this one) by pushing the draft idea. Brief recap: Democrats have been sponsoring bills and making statements that the draft will have to come back, then blaming George Bush for secretly planning to reinstate the draft. Dumb, but if you don't pay attention it might score points on the margins. The Democrats are pushing this harder now, with spam mailings to college kids that are frightening them and their parents.
But this is a very dangerous game, because it's pretty apparent that Selective Service will never again be used by the US, at least not in any forseeable future. So all Bush has to do is wait until this screeching becomes really noticable, then call for the abolition of the Selective Service. Something like this should do it:
"Democrats in the House and Senate, such as Charlie Rangel, have been calling for reinstituting the draft. Frankly, this is a dangerous idea. America's armed forces have been fighting our enemies around the world since we were viciously attacked on 9/11, and have done so with an amazingly small number of casualties, both of our forces and of the innocent women and children among which our enemies cower. This unprecedentedly low level of casualties is only possible because of the relentless and realistic training we instill in our long-service volunteers. This cannot be done with draftees, who leave the force just as they begin to become effective.
Really, though, it's worse than this. Since Jimmy Carter and the Democrat Congress started Selective Service registration in 1980, millions of young men have been compelled to register themselves with the Federal government, and the cost has been staggering. It is simply not possible to operate America's armed forces with draftees, and it's not moral to keep up the charade of registering young men for a draft that will never come.
And that is why I am asking the Congress to repeal the Selective Service Act and disband the draft boards forever."
Something like that, after the Democrats are in a frenzy about it, is the kind of thing that kills an opponent. Let their fangs grow long, then chop them off. It's what Bush excels at, and apparently the Democrats excel at falling for it. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.
UPDATE: Andrew Olmsted had similar thoughts last night.
UPDATE: John Hawkins succinctly addresses the possibility of a draft: "anyone who tells you there is going to be a draft is dumb as a brick or a liar who's trying to mislead you. In either case, if they tell you there's going to be a draft, you can safely stop paying attention to them."
Trust MeJim Miller notes that the Killian memos story at CBS is likely not a departure from normal practice. From the recent "Israeli spy" story that came and went without a ripple, to the sensationalism surrounding the Abu Ghraib abuse stories, to a story on the Bradley IFV when I was a child, CBS's "standards" have been appallingly bad.
But it's not just CBS, because NBC got into quite a bit of hot water for faking a story on pickup safety, and it goes downhill from there.
And it's not just TV "news" that is at issue. One name for you: Jayson Blair. And if BBC radio mentions the time at the top of the hour, I check my watch first. Reuters and AP cannot even correctly use common English; thus terrorists are anything but.
So the question has to be asked: on what questions of fact can you actually trust the mainstream "news" organizations? I think that the answer has become: none of them.
Most "news" falls into three categories: editorial commentary (aka punditry), straight reporting, and investigative reporting.
Editorial commentary is just expressing an informed opinion; it's what the blogosphere specializes in. It's also what most "news" organizations actually spend their time doing, though they tend to say it's actually the smallest part of what they do. I have no problem with this, as long as editorializing is distinctly separated from reporting. My qualms begin when editorial opinions are inserted into the middle of other stories - as they often are - without any note that what is being said is not fact but opinion.
Straight reporting is simply stating observed facts, without any attempt to insert opinions or draw together strands of evidence. For example, "President Bush gave a speech before the United Nations yesterday, in which he [made certain statements]" is reporting, while "President Bush failed to convince UN delegates yesterday that his decision to invade Iraq was justified" is opinion-mongering. While most "news" organizations claim to do mostly reporting, anyone who reads or watches "news" reports can tell that most stories are largely punditry.
It is not difficult to separate out some of the punditry, but other editorializing goes by unnoticed. For example, choosing not to run stories if they contradict a newspapers editorial line (how many stories on the economy have you seen since it started improving?) is a way of hiding the truth while telling it. Then there are the outright lies and repeated failure to follow initial reports to their actual conclusion.
Investigative journalism is a hybrid, where observed facts are placed together in a sequence, along with supporting evidence and statements, to tell a story that is not evident from the individual disconnected facts. This is what "news magazine" shows like 60 Minutes, magazines like Newsweek, and some newspapers are famous for. But it is apparent from the evidence noted above that investigative journalism is far more selective and often even invented that we are led to believe by the mainstream media. It is this kind of reporting that is actually most susceptible to fraud, because it reports as fact some things which are not, while making inferences which may not be justified and leaving out critical disconfirming evidence. Unlike straight reporting, it is very difficult to separate out editorial opinion from fact in an investigative "news" story.
No one trusts a blogger, until that blogger has established a reputation over time by being right when he reports facts, ready to accept criticism when he is wrong, and honest when he makes a mistake. It used to be different with the mainstream media: we expected every journalist to be a Cronkite or a Murrow. Now we know Cronkite wasn't necessarily any better than Dan Rather. I only hope Ed Murrow and David Brinkley don't turn out to be equally off-base. Now we know that the mainstream media is no more trustworthy than any random person pulled off the street.
"Trust me," says Dan Rather while perpetrating a fraud. "Prove yourself worthy of trust, first," is the only rational response.
President Bush's UN SpeechThe headline on the Washington Post's transcript of President Bush's speech to the UN yesterday is utterly wrong: "At U.N., Bush Defends His Decision to Go to War". Um, he did that, yes. It was a pretty small and pro-forma defense, though, in a speech that is notable for much more. What President Bush has done, in essence, is to articulate a formula for a new world order, based on Thomas Barnett's PNM theory (connectivity trumps all, and we can end major wars and terrorism by developing the most disconnected countries), and an incredibly optimistic departure for someone who came into office as nearly an isolationist.
I'm not going to take apart Bush's speech in detail - no time - but I do want to note that Bush is laying out here a future for the world that is a radical departure from theories held by the US prior to 9/11, and by Europe to this day. Essentially, the President is trying to formulate a world in which the spread of democracy and economic opportunity is the duty and responsibility of the developed nations, in which health crises like AIDS and tuberculosis are treated by the developed nations in order to remove their economy-killing effects, and where the peace is largely kept by regional forces. It's a sweeping agenda, and well worth the read.
It is my hope that the President will make a series of speeches focusing on the various aspects of this agenda, and in particular that he will sell it to the other developed nations. It would be a far better approach than the Axis of Weasels' opportunism and cynicism, or China's attempts to imitate that, or Russia's increasing isolation and belligerance. For that matter, it would be a far better approach than Kerry's cut and run policy.
The Bombing BuddhistsSo let's say you were in charge of emergency planning for, say, a western Michigan county. You want to have some scenario that you can use to test the local emergency response system: are all of the departments able to communicate; how does the dispatching system function and what is your response time; can hospitals handle the incoming wounded; how do you deal with media and distraught families? What scenario would you use?
Perhaps jihadi terrorists have attacked in the area - no, don't want to upset the Muslims, who will immediately let you know that using any kind of Arab or Muslim group is completely unrealistic in the world today, especially since you've chosen a bombing of a school bus as the attack, and everyone knows that Muslims do not bomb buses or kill school kids. Guess that rules out the Bombing Buddhists and other religious groups, as well as any ethnic or national groups of any kind.
Maybe we could make up a group...how about People Against Yellow Buses And Children Knowing Anything - PAYBACK? No, too cutesy. How about Grandmothers for Social Security, whose motive is to free up money for Social Security transfer payments by killing the children who take up so much money to educate? No, too much danger of pissing off the AARP. How about the God Botherers, whose beef is against secular education? No, beyond the pale; religious people don't do that anyway. We need something plausible.
Who then can be safely demonized? Who is so beyond the pale that it is both realistic and unremarkable that they would turn to violence against children to further their agenda? Who would we realistically expect to take such an action against the innocent so that no one would be too busy laughing at the supposed motives involved that the scenario would become useless? I know, how about homeschoolers. (hat tip: Steph) I wish I were kidding.
The exercise, which will involve the aftermath of a supposed explosion on a school bus at 9:30 a.m. at Durham and Holton-Whitehall roads in Whitehall Township [in Muskegon County, MI], is being funded by homeland security grants awarded to several area school districts and Muskegon County.Local school district transportation directors instigated the exercise because they wanted to test their abilities to respond to emergencies, said Tom Spoelman, transportation consultant for the Muskegon Area Intermediate School District. They eventually hooked up with Muskegon County Emergency Services, and planning for the event has been under way for about a year, Spoelman said.
The exercise will test not only school transportation directors, but also the Muskegon County Emergency Operations Plan, which involves many agencies throughout the county.
[SNIP]
The exercise will simulate an attack by a fictitious radical group called Wackos Against Schools and Education who believe everyone should be homeschooled. Under the scenario, a bomb is placed on the bus and is detonated while the bus is traveling on Durham, causing the bus to land on its side and fill with smoke.
Bah!
Leadership MattersMichael Totten makes the hawkish case for Kerry. It's pretty weak, as Totten himself admits:
A hawkish case for Kerry is a tough case to make. He's a weak candidate. There is no getting around it.To see the benefits of a Kerry Administration you have to look past Kerry himself. If he is elected a critical cultural and political shift will dramatically change the way the Democratic Party behaves no matter what he actually does while in office.
OK, this is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far. First, I don't think we want to be making political decisions based on whether or not the anarchists and anti-globalization guys are in the streets. There's a technical term for where that leads: mob rule.
Worse, it is a huge assumption to make that John Kerry would react robustly to an attack. While I don't believe that a major attack would be ignored, or even a relatively minor attack in the current climate, by a putative Kerry administration, I do not trust their instincts to respond adequately.
After all, Bill Clinton could be said to have responded robustly to the embassy attacks: he attacked some of bin Laden's training camps and a possibly al Qaeda-related chemical plant which may have been producing chemical weapons. (I'm certainly willing to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt in such a case.) Further, Operation Desert Fox was a quite robust response to the provocations Saddam was making in the no-fly zones and by pushing out the UN inspectors who had been disarming him. Yet neither of these responses was adequate, as has been determined with the passage of time.
Worse, Kerry's public statements (to the extent you can extract a coherent narrative from them) are basically that the Iraq campaign was deeply wrong and the best thing we can do is to run away and give lip service to the new Iraqi government. Handling the War on Terror as an intelligence and law enforcement matter, and handling Iraq as not our problem, will not advance our security one bit; if anything they open us up to further attacks.
And worse, Kerry has ruled out pre-emption as a strategy for dealing with emerging issues. How, then, does he plan on handling Iran and preventing it from obtaining nuclear weapons? Would he depend on the UN, after its ineffectiveness and irrelevance were demonstrated in Iraq and after the Oil for Food scandals? Or would he depend on the Europeans, whose reputations in foreign affairs also suffered from a deep unseriousness on Iraq, and who are similarly entangled in Iranian oil interests? Or, worst of all, would he depend on the Iranian Ayatollahs, who declared themselves our enemies decades ago and continually since then?
Frankly, I cannot conceive of a case where Kerry's response to an attack would be better than Bush's; nor can I determine a way in which his preventative approach would be more effective; nor can I determine a sequence of events that would somehow overcome the proven incompetence of the Democrats at handling international crises. This incompetence goes far beyond Kerry, deep into the heart of the Democrats' foreign policy thinking: the brain trust of the Democrats on foreign policy have moved out of the Democrat Party and into the Republican. There's a collective name for them, too: neocons.
The Democrats don't have a bench on this issue, which is why the last administration ended up with Madeleine Albright as SecState and Les Aspin as SecDef. If the best hawkish case for Kerry is to believe that a weak-charactered President and an inexperienced and (if Kerry's campaign staff picks are representative) sycophantic Cabinet will suddenly develop competence and a backbone when faced with a crisis, there's no real case to make.
UPDATE: See also the comments at Michael Totten's personal blog.
UPDATE: Actually, I should be clear. I think Totten did the Kerry campaign an excellent service. This article is actually the best case I've yet seen for Kerry as an acceptable candidate. I just don't buy it.
Corporal Lonnie YoungThe sacrifices, courage and achievements of our young men and women in battle are too often ignored by a cynical, anti-American and pessimistic press. I would like to highlight some of these fantastic Americans here, beginning with Corporal Lonnie Young. Here is a picture of CPL Young and some Blackwater security contractors in action during the fight for Najaf in April, 2004.
Outnumbered, low on ammo, perched on a rooftop for hours in a battle against Iraqi insurgents, Lonnie Young figured his number was up.It was April 4, 2004, and the war had entered its deadliest month for Americans. Days earlier, four contractors passing through Fallujah had been ambushed, killed, and strung from a bridge.
At least half a dozen other men from their firm – Blackwater USA , based in Moyock – handled security at the Coalition Provisional Authority’s base in Najaf, where Young, a 25-year-old Norfolk-based Marine Corps corporal, was working that day.
[snip]
Moments after the attack began, Young donned his body armor, grabbed his M249 light machine gun, and raced upstairs with a handful of Blackwater commandos. The gun battle against hundreds of members of the al-Mahdi militia, loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, grew so intense that Young had to stop shooting every 15 minutes to let the barrel of his gun cool. He’d tear through 700 to 800 rounds, then spend five minutes filling magazines with bullets until the metal was cool enough to use.
The first break in action for the Kentucky native came when an Army captain near him was shot in the arm and back. Young dug into his medical kit and bandaged the man up, then eased him down four stories to nurses below. Next, Young dashed across the camp to Blackwater’s ammunition supply room, strapped about 150 pounds of bullets to his body, and sprinted back to the roof.
The noontime battle stretched into the afternoon. Young figured he’d die.
“I thought, 'This is my last day. I’m going out with a bang.’ If I had to die it would be defending my country,” Young said Friday.
“I just felt like we were losing ground, and I thought, 'If I’m going to die, I’m not going down without a fight.’ I knew we were seriously outnumbered. They were coming at us with pretty much everything they had. We were seriously struggling to keep our ground.”
The insurgents had machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and a sniper shooting out the window of a local hospital.
Young saw a red flash, then blood spurting 5 or 6 feet out of the jaw and neck of a contractor. He reached into the quarter-sized bullet hole in the man’s jaw and pinched his carotid artery closed, then dragged the man across the roof to where his medical kit lay sprawled open.
Midway across the roof, Young heard a loud smack. Pain danced across his face, chased by adrenaline, and he forgot about it. After a medic packed the man’s wounds with a substance that clots blood, Young strapped the man to his back and carried him downstairs. In all, the Marine left the roof five times: twice to transport wounded comrades, three times for ammunition.
When a group of U.S. Army military police officers joined the fight, Young used his experience as a weapons instructor to talk them through it. Conserve your ammo. Slow and steady before you squeeze. Adjust your sites for range and distance. Take breaks so your gun barrel doesn’t melt.
At some point, Young felt dizzy. He realized he couldn’t see out of his left eye. The doctor found a gunshot wound high on his left shoulder. Young didn’t want to leave the fight, but an Army captain told him otherwise.
“Basically, I refused to get down off the rooftop at first,” said Young, the father of a 7-year-old son back in Dry Ridge, Ky.
Stories, Families and DreamsFrom BlackFive comes this stirring message of patriotism and hope, and most importantly of understanding of this war we are engaged upon, from a Marine helicopter pilot in Iraq.
VarifrankVarifrank has excellent articles up right now on the purpose of the Iraq Campaign, and its place in the Terror Wars and a rather snarky post on previous exit strategies from wars fought by Democrats. Go and read, already.
It Will Get WorseWith Kerry's standing in the polls rapidly tanking, and even once-solid Democrat states now up for grabs; having picked the lamest attack plan ever; with his supporters making ads that, as Michael Ubaldi points out, are a hairs breadth away from what sent Mildred Gillars to prison for treason, or just beginning to panic on the war; with his list of positions growing towards the infinite on any issue of note; facing a growing economy; with progress in the war of concern but not anywhere near inspiring panic; and with less than two months until the election; it is tempting to ask how Kerry's campaign could get any worse. Here's how: the Presidential debates are yet to happen. But won't that give the "intelligent, good debater, come-from-behind champion" a sure win over the "stupid, simple, cowboy who can't speak clearly at all"? Well, consider this:
MODERATOR: Senator Kerry, with Iraqi elections approaching in January and casualties among our soldiers rising continuously, will you bring our soldiers back from Iraq or continue the occupation?
KERRY: [actual answer does not matter]
MODERATOR: Mr. President?
BUSH: I would just like to know if that is the Senator's final answer, or if he needs a lifeline?
And there's game over. There is one thing - only one - that a politician cannot survive in a campaign: being the object of ridicule. And as with Dean's scream, Kerry's inconsistency on every issue has set him up to be an object of derision and scorn. All that's needed is a trigger, and Bush can pull it any time.
Who Guessed Forgery Was so Funny?
Change in National Debate TopicsIf the new Gallup poll is close to accurate, it's time to stop debating "election issues" and start talking about how President Bush is going to use his second term to advance American interests.
UPDATE: Bigwig nails it - no pun intended.
Afghan ArmyStrategy Page has an interesting article on the Afghan Army. It doesn't discuss the use of the army, so much as the efforts to build it and how they are just now starting to pay off.
I'm mainly putting this here so Scott will see it, so I'll save commentary for later.
FallujahEvery time I start thinking that the Pentagon, or the coalition leadership in Iraq, has a whole drawer of screws loose, I find out that I just hadn't thought about it the way they do, and their way makes sense. Example of the day: Fallujah.
I was completely in accord with the many commentators who called, last April, for Fallujah to be levelled if that was what it would take to kill the insurgency. I was utterly wrong, and here is why:
By allowing a few areas that were totally under the control of the enemy, and beating the enemy senseless everywhere outside those areas, the enemy was compelled to isolate himself from the general population of Iraq. It appears that in Baghdad the enemy's organization is still very loose, but in Fallujah and Ramadi the enemy is forming into not only a static defense, but a hierarchically-organized structure. In other words, our enemy has collected himself in a small number of places, has organized himself into units larger than cells, has given the Iraqi army and police organizations time and space in which to train and grow, and has given the majority of Iraqis not under his control a distinct sense of the stakes if they let the Baathists or jihadis regain control. None of this would have happened had we levelled Fallujah.
But there is another thing the enemy has given us by concentrating and organizing as a regular force: they've not just made it easier to find them, and easier to take them apart, they've also put themselves into a position where it will be Iraqi forces that take them out (my guess, Fallujah will not last as an enemy pocket until the January elections). This will provide both a definitive closure for Iraqis, and a measure of pride that they did this task for themselves, that they would not have gotten had we taken Fallujah in April.
If, in the process, we find serious documentary evidence leading to Iranian or Syrian control (and it's very, very likely that we will), a pretext for war is readily to hand. (Not that I think we need a pretext, but there are a lot of people who will want one.)
"I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things"Betsy's Page points to this George Neumayr article on Dan Rather's version of "Truth", and how it's OK to lie to advance that "Truth" (the title of this post is a quote from Rather about Bill Clinton). I won't excerpt it - it's good enough to read whole - but the basic thesis is that Dan Rather thinks it's OK to lie about anything as long as the "good people" are lying and the "bad people" are the targets. It's yet another bit of evidence of the essential infantilism of the modern Left.
UPDATE: And Mrs. du Toit has a post on trust that is well worth reading, and only tangentially related to the CBS meltdown.
OK, I will excerpt one bit:
Perhaps Dan Rather's liberal defenders who now accept "core truth" fables owe author Gary Aldrich an apology. Shouldn't they now say to him, "Your story about Bill Clinton taking women to the D.C. Marriott, which predated the country's introduction to Monica Lewinsky, wasn't technically true but it contained a basic truth about Clinton. He was doing that sort of thing with women"? And shouldn't they also apologize to Mark Fuhrman? "Sure, you may not have followed every collection technique properly, but that's okay. O.J. was guilty," they should now say.
Donald Sensing talks about why this matters.
"Clothing is wonderful, but let them go naked for a while, at least the kids"Teresa Heinz-Kerry's advice to disaster relief workers would be sad if it weren't so funny. (hat tip: One Hand Clapping)
New World, New Map, New StrategyThomas Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map was the first serious attempt to redefine the world after 9/11, in much the way that "containment" redefined the world in the 1950's. I'm currently about 1/3 of the way through the book form, which is an expanded treatment of the original brief. In summary, Barnett posits that the Cold War rule sets of containment, collective security and mutually assured destruction (particularly once extended to the former USSR and China) ended the threat of great power war, leaving the world divided into two areas: the Core and the Gap. The difference between them is that the Core countries are globalizing, growing and interconnecting and ruled by a Kantian rule set, while the Gap countries are isolated, disconnected and failing.
The implications of this in terms of which rules apply in which places, and how to bring the world together so that everyone is in the core, in the hope of essentially ending poverty and war, are both deep and broad. And this mindset is taking over within the Pentagon, replacing the Cold War mindset. While I quibble somewhat with the PNM framework, it's really not on fundamental points: the PNM framework provides the necessary basis for policy formation in the Core states. (I'll have more on this after I finish PNM.)
It seems to me that the Pentagon has accepted the new world, but the State Department has not yet. In many ways the State Department is still acting like it's 9/10. Part of this has been institutional, and part of it has been a leadership problem from both Secretary Powell and President Bush. I don't know where Powell stands, but Bush by his actions seems to understand the new world that we are in. It remains, though, both to communicate this vision and to bring about consensus. I suspect that the largest block to developing a consensus will not be international, but domestic. At least until after the election, the Democrats are not willing to be serious about these issues.
If we can find a domestic consensus on how the world is working, and how we should approach it, I believe we can sell it abroad. Most of the resistance to the US policies since 9/11 within the Core nations seem to be based on a fear that the actions the US is taking within the Gap may not be limited to the Gap, and on a feeling that the other Core nations will lose access to resources and commercial contracts with Gap nations. Both of these concerns can be addressed, and I hope to see the President doing so soon.
CredibilityThe mainstream media is really just learning about blogs, as the blogosphere is ripping CBS to shreds over fraud in knowingly presenting forged documents to smear President Bush. Ignoring stupid and irrelevant comments about bloggers in pajamas, there are two charges to note: blogs don't have editors and they aren't held accountable for being wrong.
Well, as many bloggers noted, everything we publish is immediately scrutinized, and if we're wrong, we either take it back or die on the vine.
Killing Yourself by Killing the MessengerOne of the things that has really struck me being in Chicago is the difference in the political/current events sections of the book stores. In Texas, you find 5 or 6 Noam Chomsky books and a book pointing out how wrong all of Chomsky's books are, a mix of opinions from across the spectrum, leaning slightly Left (primarily, I think, because more Left-leaning political books are published in general). In Chicago, it's Chomsky's entire catalog, plus Zinn, every copy whose title includes either "Bush" or "Republicans" combined with some variation of "Idiot" or "Liar" or "Pure Evil" and maybe one book that suggests that Republicans aren't actually evil, just deeply misguided and deserving of pity.
Well, now it makes more sense. In actual fact, I can kind of understand this on the part of the union: they're playing their political part. But, as with entertainers who shoot their mouths off on stage, there's a difference between what you do in your spare time and what you do on the job, and Borders should make a real effort at putting in place measures to identify and fire any of their employees who would so mistreat their property and their customers.
But on a deeper level, this is hurting the Left more than their opponents (they might go so far as to claim enemies). The sales of these books aren't dramatically reduced: the would-be buyers are just driven to go elsewhere to get their reading material. More importantly, what the Left ends up doing is directly harmful to itself, because they've put themselves in the position of third-world tyrants: by creating an echo chamber filled with like-minded voices where no dissent is tolerated, the Left never learns from its mistakes.
We see this all over today: in Dan Rather's credibility melt down as much as in John Kerry's campaign melt down. It starts when you deny opinions different from yours are worthy of consideration. It grows when you deny that inconvenient facts are first relevant, and later even meaningful. It begins to take over when you cannot accept the obvious facts of the world around you, and you are denying everything good and praising everything evil because somehow - you don't know how - what's good for everyone is bad for your self-deception and what's bad for anyone is good for your self-deception and you've got a problem with maps, and you find yourself red-faced and shouting into a void where only your ideological equals can even hear you. And those who hear you, frankly, don't care any more. At that point, you are no more than a virus in the body politic, offering nothing but destruction.
It's a sort of ideological suicide, because you can't adapt to the world and it passes you by. The Republicans did this in the late 1980s and early- to mid-1990s, and it's why I'm not a Republican. Even though they eventually excised Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson from any position where they could do further harm, much damage had already been done.
The Democrats are now in this same position, and the lunatics have taken over. And no one is listening to Kerry, who by the way served in Viet Nam, who is not even talking to reporters (who by and large share his views), but sitting alone in the dark with maps of a great victory that will never be.
Wait a Minute!LGF did a Photoshop experiment: take one of the CBS memos, and change the levels. The crumples used as part of the aging process in the forgery show up. But, if this was photocopied as part of the aging process, wouldn't the crumples not show up on the photocopy? It seems to me that just the distortion would show up. (I don't have a photocopier and scanner near to hand, so I cannot check directly.)
If photocopying gets rid of the direct evidence of crumpling, then this was the original document presented by the forger to CBS, which means that whomever was the source for CBS (or at CBS; I don't think we can rule that out) was almost certainly the originator of the document as well.
Tragedy as ComedyWell, this is fantastic! It's the Kerry campaign, done as Shakespeare.
Start here:
To be or not to be President: that is my platform:
Whether 'tis more nuanced to vote for before against
The 87 billion of outrageous appropriation,
Or to make my case upon the seas of health care,
And by raising taxes get it fully funded? To windsurf: to trap-shoot:
To say "I cannot bring a gun to the debate." Oh end
The heart-ache and the thousand polling shocks
This campaign is heir to, tis a consomme
Devoutly to be reheated. To be elected, to rule;
To rule: perchance to decide: ay, there's the belly rub;
For in decision what results may come
When we have pulled out and hugged Chirac
Must give us all pause: I can't get no respect
Alas, poor Rather! I knew him, Teddy: a fellow
of fine buzzcuttery, of most excellent folksiness: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my flip flops at
it. Somewhere hung that weathered ass I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your crackling hickory now, Dan? your
Aunt Milly? Your Uncle Charlie? your flashes of wild-eyed
dementia that were wont to set the TV screen ablaze? Not one
now, to mock your own thin-lipped scowl? quite chap-fallen?
Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her—
oops, beg pardon—ask her, for she can be quite
the bitch sometimes—to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that. Prithee, Teddy, tell
me one thing.
To fair L.A. the herald now commutes
And to the Simon Castle he imputes
A muse of fire in the Sage above the pool
That he too shall play our Omlet for the fool.
UPDATE: Thanks to Gerard Van der Leun in the comments, Blogfonte has Bill Clinton advising the Kerry campaign:
DUKE CLINTON
Yet here, Edwards! attack, attack, for shame!
Their bile drips from the orbit of your eye,
And you are blind’d thus. There; my blessing with thee!
With these few precepts in thy memory
Damn their character. Give thy doubts no tongue,
Nor any proportioned thought the act.
Be thou familiar, and by all means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, no niceties further tied,
Shift away, or to our cause further steel;
But do not dull thy blade with soft sweetness
Lest some milquetoast, halfheart pundit wilt. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Drive the enemy partisans in disgust to flee.
Give every rumor thy ear, and each thy voice;
Earn them every man's censure, and stay on message.
Costly thy habit that niceness buys,
Politician never so sweet, gaudied;
But the apparel thus will wear the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Will be all you to this ticket pulls.
Neither an explainer nor an excuser be;
For halves oft loses both itself and friend,
And stonewalling locks you in the rigid lie.
This above all: to thine own message be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thine falsity will be found by no man.
Farewell: my nurse is here for my bath!
Too Funny not to Link ToOK, this has to be the best take on the CBS forged documents yet. The mockery is fantastic.
Tax Reform ProposalChaka Fattah, Representative of Pennsylvania's 2nd Congressional District, has proposed replacing the income tax system with a "transaction fee" - as far as I can tell, it's a VAT.
I don't know enough economics to compare VATs to other kinds of sales taxes, nor to determine if such taxes help or inhibit growth nor to what extent. With all of those disclaimers out of the way, I'd be very, very happy to see this proposal discussed. The income tax is a tyrannical way to generate government revenue, and inherently lacks limits. With both Republicans (including President Bush and Speaker Hastert) and Democrats now pushing for replacing the income tax with a better system, we might actually see movement on this in the next few years.
UPDATE: Reading through the bill, there are a couple of comments I have about this specific proposal. First, for all love please call it a tax! It's not a fee; it's a tax. Call it what it is.
It's actually not a proposal for a tax change, by the way. It's a proposal for a study to determine if it makes sense to change the tax system according to the set of guidelines laid out in the bill.
This bill does not actually propose a fee. Instead, it sets guidelines for the fee such that it would match the revenues generated in 1986. I'm not sure why that year was chosen; one would think you'd want to set the fee to match the last fiscal year before its passage. On the one hand, that's before recent tax rate changes, but it's also before the Internet boom and after Reagan's tax cuts. All in all, that might be a quite reasonable standard to use.
Sec.3(b)(4)(B) would have to go, I think. It's a list of suggestions for other uses of the fee. Proposing new programs and other reasons to generate more revenue - even good reasons like enforced paydown of the national debt - do not belong in a tax reform proposal. Those should be separately discussed, or they become stealthy ways of raising actual taxes.
I don't think you can exempt cash transactions less than $500 as a general category, because that would cause a shift in people's behavior that would reduce revenue with no real benefit. The better way to do it would be to exempt categories of spending, such as food and clothing purchases (and several others, I would imagine, such as charitable contributions) of less than $500. In reality, small cash transactions between individuals wouldn't get taxed, because they wouldn't be reported, but they could and should be collected by those entities currently collecting sales tax.
The problem, of course, is that as soon as you start adding exemptions, there's no real end to the exemptions that could be justified. In order to "protect the poor" you would have to exclude certain items, but drawing that line with so many special interests sending lobbyists and money to get their pet exemption, crafting reasonable exemptions would be very, very difficult.
I do like the idea of having a maximum rate of 1% for small transactions, but I'd prefer to see one rate above that, say a maximum of 3%. Otherwise, people will shift behavior for many large purchases, with deleterious economic effects. (Don't believe me? Go look up the "luxury tax" that was passed that killed domestic yacht building and new general aviation aircraft production. It was quickly repealed, but not quickly enough.)
Overall, I strongly approve of the idea of gathering the kind of information that the bill requires, including comparisons of economic impacts of this system versus the current system.
Sacred TerrorismMark makes an interesting find at MEMRI. It is an Iranian arguing that Islam and Western liberalism (classical liberalism, not the Marxist spouting that is generally called liberalism) are fundamentally incompatible.
I've had the honor to attack your liberalism, your civil society and your human rights. I am honored to say that the forces of heresy… the forces of God's enemies and of the Muslim's enemies… Isn't it true that these are the infidels' forces? If it is possible to do something so that the infidels will be seized with fear and trembling, then this terrorism is sacred. Go ahead and write: "Abbasi is the theoretician of violence and of sacred terrorism." This terrorism is sacred. We have been claiming this for a long time. The Lebanese Hizbollah was nurtured by these hands. Pay close attention! Mr. Khatami, this is not violence. It is the dialogue between civilizations that is tying the hands of organizations like Hizbullah. Do you see these hands? These are the hands that have nurtured Hizbullah, Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad.
There are certain disagreements where the disputants do not share even basic premises, and neither side can give up its premises. In some of these cases, one side is evangelistic about their premises, and will not rest until everyone else adopts them. In some of these cases, the evangelistic side is willing to kill or die for their beliefs. This is such a case.
I think we should accomodate their desire to die for their beliefs. The person quoted here by MEMRI, for example, is clearly an enemy of the US. The problem is that the war as legally defined, and the war as it actually is in the real world, are not the same. Until we actually name the enemy, we will be limited in our ability to defeat our enemies. Our enemies, it should by now go without saying, do not suffer under this limitation: they know who they are fighting and they are willing to do anything to win. Are we? Sometimes I wonder.
Must. Control. Fist. Of. Death.It took me a few minutes to calm down enough not to spew a profanity-laden rant. In fact, I'm not there yet. Hold on a sec.
OK, that's better.
I suppose I should have seen this coming: comparing George Bush to Hitler isn't working, but there has to be something that not tortured quite enough tortured artists and Leftist idiots can do. How about this? (hat tip: The Wild Hunt)
I'm slowly coming around to Steph's way of seeing it: this is just so pathetic it's actually funny. I mean, if people don't vote the way you think they should, it can't be that you are off the deep end of moonbattery, and your head is so far up your ass you can see your tonsils, can it? No, no! It must be...Satan:
Now, since I've decided to go for outright mockery, I've called in my lovely wife.
Isn't it funny that it's "a tragedy in two acts"? At least they know they're going to lose, and lose badly, in November. And it's presented by the "Sacred Fools" Theater Company - well, at least they've got one right: they are fools. But they are honest: if you go to their site, they quite openly tell you "you are being lied to".
Oh, and while I'm at it, they need to fire the "artist" who made the poster: the invert pentagram on Bush's forehead doesn't have the proper orientation or aspect ratio to match the head it's purportedly attached to.
Now, if Bush is Satan, does that make Texas Hell? It would explain the summers. And Houston. And Eddie Bernice Johnson. Hey, my cats are cats from Hell! COOL!
They're going to have voter registration forms in the lobby. Now, imagine Steph talking with a really exaggerated East Texas accent:
"I was all set ta vote fer George Bush, but now that I know he's Satan, I guess I'll hafta go an' vote for John Kerry. He ain't Satan; he's just French. Well, mebbe I'll go on an' vote for Bush anyways."
If I lived in LA, it might be fun to go in costume. Nah; I don't want to give them any money, considering how they would use it.
What do you want to bet that if I put on a play with John Kerry dressed as a transvestite and talking with a fake French accent, I'd be the one they call intolerant and hateful? What would be the dialogue though? "I served in ze Viet Nam - but not on ze French side!"
Oh, forget it; they're not worth any more of my time.
Blogs and ScandalThe CBS presentation of badly-forged memos as evidence to smear President Bush has been pulled in a lot of directions. On the part of the libertarian and Republican-aligned blogs, as well as more than a few sane Democrat-aligned blogs, the issue has been the veracity of the documents: if the documents are unreliable, the charges are unreliable and must be discarded. This is leading many of these blogs to question the reliability of all mainstream media reporting. CBS, and the far-Left bloggers, seem to want to ignore the evidence and get right to the discussion of how much of a liar George Bush is - never mind about "evidence."
I reject (as would any reasonable person) the idea that accusations are sufficient proof of wrongdoing, and evidence is immaterial. Facts are requisite to truth, if not to Truth (which is really just another word for religion). While I have quite a bit of interest in the media reliability angle (indeed, my previous posts on this issue have mostly centered on that), I'm actually more struck by the undiscussed ramification: the effect of blogging on creating and sustaining a scandal.
Blogs are new, coming into their own only after 9/11, and this is the first event with national implications in which blogs have played a key role. But why? After all, the precursors of blogs existed during, say, the Clinton impeachment. USENET, personal web pages and email all fulfilled the functions of collaboration (USENET), communication (email) and rich content provision (personal web pages), and certainly a lot of people were online by the late 1990s. But there are some key differences, some ways in which blogs enhance communications and opinion formation well beyond what earlier technologies could provide.
USENET provides a meeting place, ostensibly divided by topic, for a large number of people. This architecture has two problems (even ignoring the fact that USENET is only text-based) with forming opinion and filtering good information out of the stream, both of which are overcome by blogs: noise levels and specialization. USENET has so many people talking in one place that the useful information (signal) is drowned in useless information (noise). The high volume of useless information hides the useful information one might be trying to find, and filtering and searching mechanisms are not particularly well-developed. In addition, any given newsgroup addresses only a narrow topic, at least in theory, so it is unusual to find a typographic expert, for example, reading a newsgroup dedicated to discussing military memorandum formats, and vice versa.
Blogs are not structured around topics, by and large, but around personalities. The fact that Rand Simberg blogs primarily about space access doesn't mean that he won't indulge his other interests. Because of this, there is an immense cross-disciplinary polinization of ideas on blogs that doesn't occur in other formats. Experts in one field often read blogs written by experts in another, and find items that intrigue them. This sparks off a chain of discovery and allows far more broad and deep information to come together than, say, USENET does.
Further, blogs have both active and passive filtering mechanisms built into them. A blogger who proves untrustworthy loses his audience. A blogger who doesn't provide useful information does not gain, or cannot keep, his audience. InstaPundit and others act as a filter by pointing to interesting information on other blogs. Most blogs maintain blogrolls, directing users to related information. Bloggers link to each other (as well as to non-blog sources), and trackbacks further enhance the connectivity on related topics. The comment mechanisms on many blogs further enhance the discussion. Finally, the use of blogrolls tends to result in the formation of communities with related interests or worldviews, which enhances the information flow. In each of these mechanisms, the key point is that the blogger has to have something useful to say, or he gets filtered out of each of these mechanisms over time.
But USENET has another problem as well: it's text-based. Being unable to easily provide rich content, it is difficult to make a point which has visual elements. Consider trying to do this on USENET. Personal web pages, of course, can and still do provide this kind of rich content, but it is provided in an isolated medium. Yes, Google provides a way of finding this information, but it's not self-selecting in the way that blog links are. So while USENET provides great connectivity of information, but no filtering and no rich content, personal web pages provide very highly-filtered rich content, with no connectivity.
Email provides directed, highly-filtered connectivity, but is non-public, so only the sender and recipients ever see the content. And, again, this content is not easily made rich: it's primarily text-based. Trackbacks and links provide the openly-available two-way discussion path that email lacks. (And mailing lists, while more publically-available, frequently suffer from most of the drawbacks of USENET.)
Blogs, by providing all of these mechanisms, can do something that until now only television, newspapers and magazines could do: blogs provide rich content, publicly available, filtered and analyzed and readily found. It is this that makes blogs such a threat to mainstream media: blogs can do everything journalists can, but generally blogs bring a higher level of subject matter expertise to the topics they cover than can mainstream journalists.
Given this, what impact are blogs having, and will they have in the future, on political scandals and for that matter on campaigns in general? It is pretty clear that blogs are at the forefront of the CBS document forgeries. The history of the beginning of that story is largely told at the New York Post. Basically, after "Buckhead" at Free Republic raised a question, bloggers took off with it, calling in experts and making their own tests. This signals something critical: blogs are capable of killing a scandal if the sources are not absolutely accurate. There is simply too much expertise available when you start playing six degrees of separation for a scandal to get away with unnamed sources and innuendo any more.
This will make negative campaigning much more difficult in the future. The filtering mechanisms on blogs will drive partisans naturally into blogs with similar affinities, and these groups will eagerly pounce on anything provided by the other side. If the negative charges are factually false, they will be disproved in short order. On the other hand, if the charges are true, the scandal could grow more quickly than it has in the past. Remember, it was Matt Drudge who broke the Lewinsky scandal, and that was what amounts to a personal web page at the time, without a network of blogs and the experts they can bring to bear.
UPDATE: Andrew Olmsted is following another line of reasoning: using blog-like decentralized methods for intelligence analysis. It's certainly worth thinking about.
UPDATE (9/14): Read this post by Bill Quick at Daily Pundit, which has a well-reasoned take on the incentives of the mainstream media and the blogs. (hat tip: Kevin Murphy)
The Essence of ChildrenSgt. Mom puts children into words:
< blockquote>I had the experience of holding my baby daughter…my…own…baby… daughter… and immediately and violently falling into a sort of love— completely different from the way one falls in love with one’s intended, a deep and primal emotion. For your child, you will unhesitatingly put yourself between any danger around, and that child. To defend the safety of that child you will pick up any weapon available, and use it. To keep my child safe, I knew without the slightest doubt, that I would kill— anyone, and with anything at hand, no matter how up close and personal, with bare hands and slowly, if the threat to my daughter (my daughter!) were imminent. And afterwards, I would sleep like a babe myself, without a shred of regret, no bad dreams, even if I were left covered in the innards and gore of whoever had dared… dared… to attempt violence on my child. Actually, the depth of this conviction, the absolute certainty, that any threat to my daughter could only be carried out over my dead body, came as a bit of a shock to me… so very primal, so very basic… like an animal, ferocious in intensity.
I only have sons, but, yeah, it's like that.
Bad LogicLet me make an argument, and let's see if it holds up:
I can create a document on modern word processing software that is a very close match (at first glance) to a document made on a 30-year old high-end typesetting machine that looks like a typewriter; therefore,
if document A matches document B, and document B was made on modern word processing software with its default fonts, margins and so forth, then document A must have been made on a 30-year old high-end typesetting machine.
In other words, if A can reproduce B, then B can reproduce A. It's just nonsense., and it's a shame that our schools have gotten so bad that the PC Magazine authors did not immediately realize that the argument was nonsense.
I would have been more impressed if they'd attempted to make the same document that CBS presented, but even so they have failed to match the documents, once the slightest investigation is attempted.
Time to Say ItWith the available evidence - of which a small fraction is here, here, and here - it is now beyond reasonable doubt that Dan Rather and CBS are peddling forged documents as a key element of libelous charges against a sitting President; and I suspect that they not only know that these documents are fake, but that their refusal to provide indications of their sources and the provenance of the memos shows that the true source is either not credible as a witness to their authenticity, or is in fact a Kerry campaign or DNC operative or a CBS employee. Of the first part, that the documents are false, I am certain. Of the second, that CBS knows they are false, the only alternative is that CBS is complete unable to determine the credibility of information that comes to them (which makes them useless as an information source in and of itself). Of the third, that the documents' source would discredit the documents' authenticity, I am reasonably certain. Otherwise, CBS would have produced the source (given that there is no harm to the source if the documents are genuine).
Had CBS admitted the possibility of error, and made a forthright attempt to investigate (including the identification of the provenance of the memos), they might have been able to come out of this looking silly but not complicit. As it is, they've attempted to bury the charges under misdirection they would never stand for had it come from any elected official.
Dan Rather is either lying or a fool. CBS has no further credibility as a news organization, and any information whose only source is CBS must henceforth be assumed true until and unless another source confirms it from a separate line of evidence.
TrustReporting of any kind depends upon trust. If you do not trust a source of information, the information is worthless; and by extension, the source is worthless. For the mainstream media, whose only job is to be trusted source of information, and whose financial health depends upon being a trusted source of information, losing the trust of the public means losing your advertisers and eventually your job and maybe your business.
Trust is built by a history of being right, a willingness to name sources and the credibility of those sources, reference to other trusted sources, including all evidence, and treating stories and audiences with respect. CBS has failed on each count: they have a history of bad reporting, refuse to name their sources for questionable stories or only name questionable sources, denigrate competitors, exclude evidence contradictory to their desired story and assume we're all idiots.
When it comes right down to it, I find I'd trust a blog whose authors I don't otherwise know, such as Powerline, before I would trust CBS, because blogs have no natural credibility: they must source their points and argue believably or they are ignored.
Tactical maneuver is no aid on a nuclear battlefield.
One Way to Tell...There's certainly one way to tell if CBS's apparently-forged memos were in fact created on an IBM Composer.
"The race is over – and we've got bigger problems than that"The title is Democrat pollster Patrick Caddell, quoted at Powerline. I am actually not sure that he is correct: I suspect that the problem is more likely at CBS than at the Kerry campaign. That is, I suspect that the DNC and the Kerry campaign were not involved. (Purely, mind you, on the basis that I think that both the Kerry campaign and the DNC are venal, short-sighted and partisan, but not so ineradicably stupid as to forge documents implicating a sitting President.)
I will say that if these documents originated at the DNC or the Kerry campaign, Caddell is correct. In political terms alone, it's possible that the Democrats would lose pretty much every contested House and Senate election, as well as the Presidential election. In more fundamental terms, it's not inconceivable that the Democrat Party would schism over this, with someone like Zell Miller or Joe Lieberman starting up an alternative Party.
Worst case for the Democrats would be if this were a result of Kerry bringing on the old Clinton hands, because that would almost certainly split the Party wide open.
But CBS? If I were a CBS shareholder, I'd be dropping stock as fast as the market could buy it, and at any price. With the audience drain that will likely occur, advertisers will be dumping them or bargaining down the rates, and it's not unlikely that Dan Rather will resign or be fired.
It's the coverup that kills you. And CBS is in on the coverup whether or not it was committed by CBS or by the Kerry campaign or the DNC.
Kerry's Ill-Considered RhetoricHere is an excerpt from a John Kerry speech Wednesday:
The cost of the president's "go it alone" policy in Iraq is now $200 billion and counting. Two-hundred billion for Iraq? but they tell us we can't afford after-school programs for our children. Two-hundred billion dollars for Iraq, but they tell us we can't afford health care for our veterans. Two-hundred billion dollars for Iraq, but they tell us we can't afford to keep the 100,000 police officers we put on the streets during the 1990s.
