September 17th, 2005
You are currently browsing the articles from Jay Currie written on September 17th, 2005.
In the States alert publicists for books and records are beginning to send bloggers review copies. John Scalzi has been moved to publish guidelines.
As the Canwest newspapers in Canada gradually abandon any sort of serious book reviewing and television and radio dispense with author interviews there is every reason for the Canadian book biz to start looking at blogs as a place to publicize their wares.
When I had my magazine, two chairs, I learned about the economics of the review game. Figure a review copy of a hard cover book costs the publisher around $3-$10.00. Sending out 100 copies is, at most $1000.00 plus postage. A mention in a major newspaper is worth ten to a hundred sales. A full on review in even a small weekly is worth whatever the price per column inch for ads in that weekly happens to be. It does not take much buzz for a 100 or 500 review copy campaign to pay off.
A smart publisher in Canada could hit fifty blogs with books for next to nothing. Hit them often enough and there will be lots of mentions of the books arriving and those mentions will add up to real publicity as more bloggers get interested in discussing books.
Plus, and this will be rather different than the current situation at the major papers in Canada, bloggers would be really happy to get the books.
Written by jay on September 17th, 2005 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on blogging.
Insurgents staged a series of suicide bombings and ambushes on Friday that left at least 25 people dead across Iraq, including an attack on a crowd of Shiites leaving a mosque after weekly prayers.
The strikes were the latest in a string of attacks on Shiites that began Wednesday, when 150 people were killed in at least a dozen bombings in Baghdad. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia claimed responsibility, and an audio recording posted on the Internet that purports to be from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist, declared a “full-scale war without mercy” on Shiites in Iraq.
nyt
al-Zarqawi pretty much stated that the Shias were part of the enemy back when his letter to OBL first surfaced.
I will be interested to see whether any on the anti-war end appreciate the irony of a foreign terrorist trying to create the conditions for a civil war in Iraq. Even more ironic is that the Shi’ites and the Kurds have been willing to play, relatively, nice with the Sunni minority both in the street and at the negotiating table.
At some point these two groups, which were oppressed by the Sunnis under Saddam for decades are going to put it to the Sunni leadership, “Either curb the terrorists or we let loose our own militias and remove you from most of Iraq.”
In a perverse way this is precisely what Zarqawi must hope will happen. The alternative, which seems to be occuring at the moment, is a gradual erosion of Sunni support for the insurgency and the quiet use of militas to settle scores racked up by Zarqawi’s thugs.
The reality on the ground seems increasingly to suggest that the formal partition of Iraq and the expulsion of the Sunnis from predominantly Shia and Kurd areas is becoming more and more likely. Which will leave the Sunnis in the same pathetic boat as the Palestinians; a community destroyed by its own inability to control its militants in the face of far superior forces.
Written by jay on September 17th, 2005 with no comments.
Read more articles on Terror and Uncategorized.
Unlike most politicians, David Cameron knows something about the global drugs industry. When he served on the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2002, he conducted a year-long investigation into it, taking more than 50 hours of evidence and long testimonies from the world’s experts. He went in very sceptical of the idea of legalisation: aren’t only crazy pro-heroin hippies in favour of ending prohibition? But as the evidence piled up, the committee was honest enough to admit that - in Cameron’s words - “about the only thing all our witnesses agreed on was that the Government’s strategy was a failure and prohibition of drugs over many decades had not worked”. They explained the truth: criminalisation does not kill the drugs industry. It simply hands it over to armed criminal gangs who flood the country with guns, terrorise their neighbourhoods, and drain resources that would be better spent helping and treating addicts.
Cameron found the prohibitionist rhetoric - stamp, stamp, stamp it out - increasingly ludicrous and self-defeating. So he has begun to advocate the only serious alternative: legalisation at the international level through the UN.
johannhari via andrew sullivan
The Ambler and I were on a long walk yesterday afternoon and discussing our general sense of disillusionment - for entirely different reasons I hasten to add - with the CPC. One of the things which is annoying is how very little vision the Tories seem to have. They have fallen into the trap of letting the Liberal set the agenda and then trying to gain votes with little second order variations on the Liberal theme.
The Tories in England seem to be made of sterner stuff as David Cameron proves with his clear eyed look at the massive defeat which is the “War on Drugs”. The old golfing rule, “Always change a losing game, never change a winning one.” seems to apply. Not even the most zealous DEA official can keep a straight face if asked if the war on Drugs is being won. They know that drug use in the US and the rest of the world is increasing, that the price of drugs is falling and that all their efforts are doing is tossing poor, often black, kids in jail and blighting the lives of the middle class dope fiends who are unlucky enough to get caught.
It is open to the CPC to actually embrace legalization and harm reduction rather than the silliness of Canada’s half hearted WOD. Will they? Of course not. that would be a position and the one thing the CPC is truly scared of is taking a position.
The Ambler thinks the Liberals will win a majority in the next election. So, sadly, do I.
Written by jay on September 17th, 2005 with 7 comments.
Read more articles on CPC and Canadian Politics and Liberals and Pot.
Blair, a longtime supporter of the Kyoto treaty, further prefaced his remarks by noting, “My thinking has changed in the past three or four years.” So what does he think now? “No country,” he declared, “is going to cut its growth.” That is, no country is going to allow the Kyoto treaty, or any other such global-warming treaty, to crimp — some say cripple — its economy.
Looking ahead to future climate-change negotiations, Blair said of such fast-growing countries as India and China, “They’re not going to start negotiating another treaty like Kyoto.” India and China, of course, weren’t covered by Kyoto in the first place, which was one of the fatal flaws in the treaty. But now Blair is acknowledging the obvious: that after the current Kyoto treaty — which the US never acceded to — expires in 2012, there’s not going to be another worldwide deal like it.
So what will happen instead? Blair answered: “What countries will do is work together to develop the science and technology….There is no way that we are going to tackle this problem unless we develop the science and technology to do it.” Bingo! That’s what eco-realists have been saying all along, of course — that the only feasible way to deal with the issue of greenhouse gases and global warming is through technological breakthroughs, not draconian cutbacks.
james pinkerton, tech central station
The bureaucratic nightmare of command and control which is embodied in Kyoto was never going to work and, cynically, virtually all of the people involved in the creation of the treaty knew it. In a sense Kyoto was a politicians’ tool for demonstrating “commitment” to the enviornment without actually doing anything.
As Blair finally recognizes, no nation is going to voluntarily limit growth. Why would they given that every other nation is striving for growth and the two largest developing economies, China and India, are specifically exempted from Kyoto. From which it follows that, if there is any reason to be concerned about the human impact on global warming, an issue which I bleive is still very much an open question, the means of addressing that impact need to be driven by technical solutions rather than limits to growth.
Pro-Kyoto advocates dismiss technology as being part of the problem and cannot imagine humans adapting to climate change. Instead they presume that humans will, somehow, cease their quest for better lives and become content with a zero growth economy and a lively trade in carbon credits. As social and economic engineering projects go this is simply loony.
In actual fact the best thing to reduce carbon emissions will be steadily increasing oil prices. Those prices will bite all over the world and have far more impact than any number of Rick Mercer commercials. As well, as the price of oil rises the attractiveness of alternative technologies increases and the incentives for such things as solar and geo-thermal increase.
Finally, it is beginning to dawn on the eco-warriors that the single best way of reducing carbon emission is to go nuclear. Pebble bed reactors show great promise as a scaleable, relatively inexpensive, safe way of generating virtually limitless electricity. Little wonder China is working so hard on this technology.
Kyoto is likely to represent the high water mark of the Luddite, no growth, enviornmental movement. From now on the emphasis will be on the creation of economically rational, technically innovative, energy solutions. Carbon emissions will not be the driver for this; the increasing scarcity and expense of oil will make new solutions critical. It’s too bad we’ve wasted a decade and tens of billions of dollars on a non-starter. However, a bright, green future could not be postponed by the politicians’ scientific ignorance and need to pander to the enviornmentalists.
Written by jay on September 17th, 2005 with no comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and tech.