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Thursday, August 18, 2005Do power to the people liberals care about the impact of environmental regulations on what it costs the working class to get to and from work? Marcus' answer to the question seems about right.By the way, the same anti-development "environmentalists" have made lousy parking options a "feature" of eco-zones like Berkeley. The idea, I guess, is to discourage cars. The result, of course, is hundreds to thousands of cars a day making extra trips around the block and extra stops at crossings, belching their toxins into the atmosphere all the while. If they cared about the environment, they'd close down a few "open spaces" and free up more parking. (But where would Berkeley's homeless live?) The idea, however, is not to improve the environment. It's just to make a statement. That this makes it harder for local shops to do business, their customers to get to their stores, etc, is immaterial. Because it's not about what's achieved. It's about who's punished for wanting to park a car in their quaint enclave. 
posted by gbarto at 5:28 PM Mark Steyn, in an interview with Hugh Hewitt: I think the days when you had one distinguished man in late middle age, who pontificated for half and hour, and basically told you what you should think about what had happened in the world that day, I think those days are over. And it doesn't really matter whether you hire another distinguished man in late middle age, or a couple of sock puppets to do it.Actually, in France they used to have (probably still do have) puppets that did 15 minutes of news every night on the premium channel, Canal +. At the end of the week, France2 (if I recall correctly) ran the weeks updates on Sunday. The puppets had higher trust ratings than several real-life anchors, and their hammering on a Canard Enchainee investigation of the Prime Minister was cited as a major factor in his party's electoral defeat and his subsequent suicide. Maybe sock puppets aren't such a bad idea. Certainly better than Rather.
posted by gbarto at 5:20 PM Wednesday, August 17, 2005How can you do millions of dollars in damage and spend less than two years in jail? Marcus has the scoop. Don't let word get out, though, or the inner-city gang-bangers will trade in their switchblades for C++ manuals.
posted by gbarto at 4:05 PM Alternative history, September 11, 2000: Inside Politics, special edition Judy Woodruff: "Hello, and welcome to a special edition of Inside Politics. I'm Judy Woodruff. At the top of the news today is President Clinton's mysterious Rose Garden statement this afternoon. Let's listen to an excerpt:" President Clinton: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to say that we have won an important victory in protecting our nation from terror. A special FBI-Defense Department operation, Able Danger, has identified sixty people visiting this country who had plans to fly airplanes into major landmarks, killing thousands. Among them was a man, Mohammed Atta, who was taking flying lessons in Arizona for the express purpose of hijacking an airliner and crashing it into the World Trade Center. We can only thank God, and the hard-w0n efforts of our law-enforcement community, for the loss of life presented." JW: "That's quite a statement, isn't it, Candy Crowley?" Candy Crowley: "Yes, it is Judy. And it's a statement that has many wondering how desperate President Clinton is to salvage Vice-President Al Gore's election prospects. Bush aides are crowing over what they characterize as an embarrassing attempt to shore up this administration's lack of credibility on national security. But not everyone's making light. For that story, we go to Jonathan Carl." Jonathan Carl: "Thank you Candy. Yes, while Bush campaign aides are viewing today's arrests as an act of political desperation, civil liberties and Arab-American groups are reacting with outrage to what they say is the worst abuse since the Japanese internment camps established during World War II. Several lawsuits have already been filed, most notably by the ACLU, and two minor legal foundations have dropped their support for Vice-President Gore in response to concerns voiced by the Society of Syrian-Americans." JW: "So, there you have it. Today's announcement, whatever its intended political effect, has so far proved disastrous for the Democrats. Its consequences for national security are less certain, but the public is skeptical, as seen in this e-mail joke that began circulating shortly after the announcement: 'Did you hear they arrested terrorist Mohammed Atta? Yeah, he was making aspirin in the Sudan.' Stay tuned to Inside Politics for more on today's top story..."
posted by gbarto at 2:13 PM Here's Maguire, one of many writing about the Able Danger bit: did they know Atta was a bad guy before 9-11? The suggestion here is that our fine government had reason to be checking up on Atta but didn't. Just as it had reason to be checking up on Moussaoi, and didn't. If true, these allegations prove once again the dangerous incompetence of our government, bowing to idiotic bureacratic and politically correct formulations when it should be doing its utmost to protect. I am appalled, I am horrified, I am... faintly relieved. Every time one of these revelations come out, we start asking, "What did the government know and when did it know it?" There's another good question, though: "How much should the government know and how soon should it know it?" Within a few days, I imagine, the same people who fought so vigilantly to defend our library cards from the Patriot Act will be making political hay over our governments failure to round up Mohammed Atta six months before 9/11. It is suggested that this didn't happen because people who spend too much time around lawyers were more worried about lawsuits than the massacre of 3,000 people. And rightly so. In the history of the United States, there are only a handful of occasions (Gettysburg, D-Day, 9/11) where three thousand or more lives were extinguished in minutes to hours. But people get sued every day. Lady Luck may not have smiled on the FBI and friends this time, but if you're playing the odds, theirs was the smart bet. I'm of about six minds on this whole thing. I want to be outraged that our government could have done something and didn't. But I hear so much about things that the government could or should or ought do or have done and it always makes me faintly queasy to hear it suggested that what the government did or didn't do is of paramount value in our lives. From problems in schools to ethics in business to the quality of fruit at the supermarket, there are so many places where active and participating parents, citizens, consumers and business leaders setting a decent example would take us farther than any law our esteemed pols could dream up. And so, hearing about one more thing the government should have taken care of, well, turns me off. I don't have the analogy handy about how free citizens in a free society with free markets will, of their own initiative, fix national security. Flight 93 and the citizen border patrols come to mind, but they don't replace the military. And yes, the government is responsible for keeping us safe from foreign invaders through intelligent border patrol, foreign policy and defense policy. In that regard, I wish, obviously, that the government had done better at what I do consider an essential and worthwhile task as opposed to the 90% of government that is little more than abuse of the commerce and necessary and proper clauses. But, there's an easy way to be more effective in this. If you want government agencies handy to say I told you so every time something bad happens, all you have to do is let Big Brother make us all suspects. If, to the contrary, you want our library cards safe in perpetuity, you can require that none of us be suspects. The intelligent approach is somewhere in the middle. But where? My problem with Able Danger, and frankly with the whole 9/11 investigation upon investigation circus, is that we're starting with the assumption that in some regards our government ought to be infallible. Mistakes happen. Sometimes, they're the sort of mistakes that cost thousands of lives. Just consider the damage done by serving alcohol in places with parking lots for automobiles (click here for numbers). Is the logical remedy really to insist that our government become all-wise, all-seeing, all-knowing? It ain't gonna happen. Because it's comprised of people. People who respond to the incentives present in the climate in which they work. In the late 1990s, America was majorly lawsuit happy. It still is. The people who make judgments about tracking the movements of people within our borders can't help but be aware of this and make decisions that factor the cost and risk of lawsuits into the equation. So yes, everybody, let's have an investigation. Let's find out what happened, whether - and if so where - alleged screw-ups occurred and all the other fun stuff. But drop the mock outrage about the government failing to protect us. Tell me what you would have said in July 2000, if the Able Danger folk, pre-9/11, had picked up Mohammed Atta, bad character, and Abu Arras, rug merchant whose Palestinian cousin was an agitator but who himself turned out to be a nice guy. Would you be celebrating Atta's capture for a crime he hadn't committed, or wondering if he, too, had been made into a bad guy but a racist, anti-Arab FBI the way that poor nice rug merchant had? After we work through the hypocrisies, we'll realize that you can't expect a fifty-year old military investigator to risk his pension in his legally incorrect zeal to protect our scrawny butts. Then we'll realize you can't let 3000 Americans get fried in namby-pamby obsession over everybody's so-called rights. Finally, we'll discover you can't lock up every foreigner who forgets to wear his flag lapel pin because it foments anti-Americanism, discourages the immigration of hardworking and innovative people and costs a lot of money. Where did that last paragraph leave us? Oh, yes. An impasse. An impasse in which we have to accept that a) the government can't know and do everything perfectly and b) we, the voters, have to signal which tradeoffs - and mistakes - we want the government to make by the people we select for higher office. Maguire is right that we should investigate this. But I get the feeling a lot of people are missing the point in calling for investigations. If we want another circus, followed by overreaction, overslackening and then another 9/11, we should stick to the classic Washington model. But if we want to get somewhere, we'll have to realize that this isn't about who was wrong, but about the direction in which our society chose to err, the reason people with authority reacted to the legal-social-political culture the way they did and how we can split the difference in an effort to create a government powerful enough to protect us but not so powerful that we and the world need more than anything else protection from its efforts to keep us safe. If we're really smart, we'll also try to cut the government the same slack we hope for when the cop catches us doing 30 in a school zone. Otherwise, we're all in for a lot of disappointment - and worse - when the government fails to be perfect but makes a royal hash of things in trying to be.
posted by gbarto at 1:16 PM Not a bad question... from a commenter at A Confederate Yankee: If,say, Mindy Sheehan, Cindy's Conservative cousin, had lost a daughter to suicide after the daughter had had an abortion, would The MSM cover Mindy's protest in front of Planned Parenthood HQ?Obviously, the grief stricken cannot be relied upon to form calm and measured opinions. Unless they agree with the MSM. That would show their reason was intact. Right?
posted by gbarto at 3:07 AM Monday, August 15, 2005Why the Media is UselessI wandered by the newstands today and kept seeing a similar image: People hugging each other and staring off into the far distance, beset by worries and cares. Who were these people? Israeli Jews, of course. We're always concerned about Israeli Jews, right? The MSM has spent the last decades telling us how evil the Israelis were to stay on land they won in battle in response to attacks from all sides. They've pounded it into our skulls that this was "occupied" territory, with only Ward Churchillites noting that the same could be said of most of the United States, if you want to split hairs in the right manner. In short, we've been battered with verbiage about the need of the Israelis to let the Palestinians have their homeland. Finally, Ariel Sharon relented. So, what are the pics from Gaza? What's the story from the region? Jubilant Palestinians awaiting the reclamation of lost lands? Do we have declarations from the French about the pain of leaving a land you'd called home? Maybe with an interview from a native Algerian who had to move to France to avoid recrimination? Or how about a chat with a Soviet apparatchik no longer welcome in the state he'd governed about how one tries to do well by the new land and the motherland both but meets impossible difficulties? How about just a few quotes from world leaders about how great it is that Israeli is taking this bold and brave step toward a more peaceful Middle East? Nah. Let's hear about families that grew up here and don't want to leave. About settlers who vow to stay. And about tensions within Israel as hardliners announce plans to disrupt evictions. Even when the whole world gets what it ostensibly wants from Israel, the story of the day is the same: more families uprooted by Ariel Sharon. Ain't it funny? For years, these have been awful people who drove Palestinians from their towns, fired on innocents in "misunderstandings." Created headache after headache for the big dreamers who couldn't let such small-minded Zionists prevent the coming of peace. Now that Sharon's against them, suddenly we discover they're human. Not to worry though. In six months, a Hamas activist will declare that Israel was forced to withdraw from Gaza and will one day be forced to retreat from Israel itself, into the Mediterranean. When it does, these people will swear never again to be driven from their homes. Then they'll be recalcitrant Jews again, just part of a motley population that is so inconvenient to French ambassadors and other sophisticates working for a stable Middle East. By the way, Sharon is probably right to consolidate his positions and in the long run he'll be seen as having done a lot to keep Israel on the map. But in the mean time, you can count on the Palestinian nutcases (as opposed to those who just want to go to work but have to summon the nerve to say so if they want their own country) to make this as bad as possible for all involved. Not to worry about that either though. Their comments will go largely unreported, their actions will be justified in victimology blather and reporting from this end of the Middle East will slow for a while again, until there's another good image handy of someone to whom Ariel Sharon has brought grief.
posted by gbarto at 5:18 PM Sunday, August 14, 2005Venezuela might deny visas to U.S. citizensAmerican citizens could be denied visas to visit Venezuela in response to a U.S. decision to revoke the visas of three Venezuelan military officers, the vice president said Friday.If I were a Venezuelan hotelier or restaurateur, I'd be thrilled to learn that my government was cutting off my business so that Chavez could appear to stand up to Bush.
posted by gbarto at 11:59 AM 121 killed as Cypriot airliner crashes in Greece Pilots reportedly unconscious, possibly because of a lack of oxygen in cabin A man whose cousin was a passenger on the plane told Greece’s Alpha television he received a cell-phone text message minutes before the crash. “He told me the pilots were unconscious. ... He said: “Farewell, cousin, here we’re frozen,” Sotiris Voutas said.There are conflicting reports about the maintenance of the plane in question. If it proves to be the case that pressurization/internal climate control systems were improperly maintained or utilized, it's bad news for Helios, given the questions already raised. It's not clear where Boeing fits into this. Helios uses their jets, but so do lots of other airlines that don't seem to have this problem. One other quote: Family members wept in anguish as they waited at the Athens and Larnaca airports. When news of the crash emerged at Larnaca, relatives swarmed the airline counters, shouting “murderers” and “you deserve lynching.”Greek temperament? Or do relatives of people who fly Helios know something about the airline's record that the rest of us don't?
posted by gbarto at 11:46 AM |
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