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There is a price for fighting for the modern world agaist the medieval. A high price. The alternative is, of course, far more expensive.
Written by jay on March 31st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Terror.
“We absolutely respect our customers’ right to choose what they wish to read and buy and we support the First Amendment,” Bingham said. “And we absolutely support the rights of Free Inquiry to publish the cartoons. We’ve just chosen not to carry this particular issue in our stores.”
sf gate
Faced with the prospect of mad Mullahs Borders follows the craven lead of Chapters/Indigo in Canada and refused to carry a magazine in whih the Danish cartoons appear. Because those Muslim dudes are soooo scarrry!
Hey, in Calgary one of those very scary dudes has filed a human rights complaint against The Western Standard - and that’s scary because it gives Ezra the hook to send out a fundraising letter. I should think a tart “Fuck off” printed on legal letter head and sent to the Commission offices should suffice. Cost, call it $1.00 all in.
Here’s why: the complaint filed is incoherent and even a Human Rights Commission should be able to see that; however, on the off chance that they find against the Standard Ezra has huge PR and a real case for judicial review and a Charter (you know, the stupid one) argument which would combine freedom of speech with a good run at Human Rights Commissions. A twofer!
Written by jay on March 31st, 2006 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and Uncategorized and culture and law and media.
The Zerb posted on the death of newspapers and I was moved to comment
Newspapers are far from dead. Particularily in cities like Toronto blessed with several. And they will not be dead if they a) produce quality product which means spending money, b) recognize that the internet is their friend rather than enemy, c) figure out creative ways of monetizing existing content (and having your own TV station does not count).
What newspapers need to be looking at and looking at hard is the fast advance of “electric paper”, wi-fi and iPod multi GB on the go storage.
Dead tree newspapering with a twenty four hour cycle and a particular closing deadline is dying. However, the skills which can create a Toronto Star or Globe and Mail (or even the Sun) are going to be in huge demand.
The question is, however, whether it will be Torstar which will be demanding them. What second generation, wireless broadband, enabled, electronic pulbishing is getting ready to do is eliminate the need for the printing presses and distribution networks which are the publisher’s contribution to getting the paper out.
Just to give you a flavour: imagine that you subscribe to the Zerb/Heather Mallick/Rick Salutin and Judy Rebick as well as a Reuters RSS and a headline feed from AP/CP. This mix is sent in a constant stream to your wi-ffi enable iPod which stores it until you open your electric paper in the morning. It has live links to video coverage (including A-J) which you access on the e-paper which can show video. Click a link and - if you have not already got a subscription - will charge you half a cent to see the vid.
Here’s the thing…all the technology I am describing here already exists. The only hang is really readable electric paper.
Written by jay on March 30th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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From the Saudi Gazette, March 23, 2006 via The Religious Policeman:
Yikes…I’m offended and I am not even Jewish or American.
Of course, actually believing in freedom of speech - even in nations where there is none - I have no problem at all with the publication of this vile bit of anti-semitism. It simply underscores how pervasive anti-semitic imagry is in Saudi and the rest of the Arab world. And that is an important thing to know.
(And, hey, Antonia, should I have published this or should I show a modicum of good taste and discretion and merely described the cartoon and maybe include a link? Just asking.
Written by jay on March 29th, 2006 with 6 comments.
Read more articles on International and Uncategorized and culture and media.
“In both countries, the lack of reform of the labour code and the social-assistance system make for the most significant part of the unemployment problem,” said Raymond Torres, head of employment analysis at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. “Both countries have 35 to 38 per cent of young people of working age without a job compared to [lower rates] in successful countries like Denmark or the U.K. or Sweden.”Those countries have changed their economies so that they are dominated by the service industries, abandoning much of the industrial manufacturing sector that has moved to the lower-wage economies of eastern Europe and Asia.
But the French and German employment schemes are built around the idea of industrial manufacturing economies dominated by large, state-supported corporations. This month, France set itself against the European Union by forbidding neighbouring countries from buying stakes in its big manufacturers; instead, Mr. de Villepin led the consolidation of competitors into huge, French-only monopolies that seemed like a return to the authoritarian economies of the postwar years.
the globe and mail
The rigidity of the French labour market is very much on the lines of the world of “I’m alright Jack” pre-Thatcher England. And the mass industrialization and state ownership model owes more to Stalin and the New Economic Plan than to relatively modern economic thinking.
There are going to be several million people in the streets of France demanding an end to a minor liberalization of French labour practices before they are even implemented. At a guess they will force the government to back down. Which will push France even further down the economic league tables.
The French illusion can probably be sustained for another few years; but, rather quickly, France will become even less competitive in the world economy than it already is. Unblessed with natural resources and cursed with slums full of annoyed Muslim youth the loss of competitiveness is going to begin to destroy the French economy’s capacity to continue to deliver the “social benefits” the nitwits in the street think that they are protecting.
This would be an excellent time for Canada to begin seriously recruting young, educated, French immigrants. Those would be the people at the counter demos.
They will not be people like this student quoted by the Globe:
“We have to defend the rights that were won by our ancestors and which the current government is trying to take away,” said Maxime Ourly, a literature student who joined tens of thousands protesting on Paris’ Left Bank.
globe and mail
M. Ourly should stay in the land of her ancestors.
Written by jay on March 29th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Canadian Politics and International.
I have an iPod news aggregator at buyipod.us (and is it possible to spam your own blog??) which turned up this nugget:
One of the two most daring iPod hacks we’ve come across was this build featured on multiarcade. Not content with the 4GB of memory iPod nano? So why not double it. Not for the faint of heart, performing this hack requires that you conduct some major surgery on your nano. First you’ll need to buy a broken nano from eBay. Next up, crack it open and remove the memory. Then, and here’s where it gets really dicey, you’re going to want to open up your working nano. Finally, you’ll solder the memory chip from the broken nano to the empty pad in the working one, seal it back up, and perform a factory reset. You’ll now either have one working nano with 7.2 GB of space, or two useless ones. Either way, this courageous hack should make for a fun-filled weekend project.
playlist
Brilliant!
Written by jay on March 28th, 2006 with no comments.
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Men may be carrying in their testicles an almost limitless supply of spare part cells for treating disease and injury, research has suggested.
times of london
I am praying that by the time I need spare parts these will be parts I can spare.
Written by jay on March 25th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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As ever, Ian Welsh writes a striking primer on power and on how the Americans in Iraq simply missed the boat:
In Iraq, when the US did not stop the rioting in the early days, when it did not challenge the militias during the first few months, it gave up its sovereignty over Iraq. As militias, religious leaders and tribal leaders became the ones who enforced such law as there was, they became, such as it is, the real government of Iraq.
tilting at windmills
Ian goes on with great insight on how leadership and the exercise of power works; but the key to the protracted - if diminishing - insurgency was the gross oversensitivity of the Americans and the rest of the coalition at the beginning of the ocupation following the war.
The transition from the tyranny of Saddam to a free market, democratic society was not and is not an overnight proposition. It may not be a fifty year proposition for Iraq. And part of the issue was that the failure of the Americans to shoot looters in the very early days left a vacuum. That vacuum, as Ian points out, was quickly filled by just the people whose interests were contrary to the happy chat notion of Iraq as a unitary secular state.
I have always thought a huge element of the difficulties the US faces in Iraq was its incapacity to even consider the idea of partitioning the country. But Ian is certainly right when he points out that the more immediate problem was the inability of the US to face down the criticism which shooting a few looters would have brought.
Civil order begins when an authority asserts a monopoly over physical force in a particular territory and backs that assertion with more than pious hopes.
I have no doubt that the foray into Iraq to depose Saddam was a useful and entirely justified exercise. However, it often appeared that the soft power people refused to think through the consequences of Saddams removal and the necessity of using overwelming force early in the peace to ensure it was clear exactly who was in charge.
Back in May 2004, over at TechCentralStation I wrote:
To go from a climate of terror to a civil society is about tens of thousands of small things adding up to a sense of security and freedom. But for those small things to begin to accumulate, the thugs of Falluja and the fat little trouble maker in Najaf need to be taken down. Hard.
If the Bush administration is unwilling to use force then it should indeed get out of Iraq with Spanish efficiency. Which would almost certainly mean a return to barbarism in Iraq and the sure conviction on behalf of the jihadis that they had defeated the United States as convincingly as they defeated the Russians in Afghanistan.
techcentralstation
Falluja duly fell - hard - but Muqtada al-Sadr was left unarrested to fight another day.
War is not pretty and there is no use pretending that it can be made more attractive. To their great credit the Americans have always been rather bad imperialists or conquerers. They are much better at going in, cleaning up the particular problem and then getting out. It is, realistically, almost impossible for a nation founded in the rejection of colonialism to be much good at imperialism. A fact which America should recognize.
Written by jay on March 25th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on International and Terror.
Live by the blog, die by the blog. Ben Domenech resigned from the Washington Post three days after the debut of his Red State column. There is no question at all that the through going over which his past received at the hands of the lefty blogs who went nuts when he was appointed ensured he couldn’t continue.
Interestingly, the lefty blogs went nuts initially without the slightest evidence that Comenech was anything other than provocative and a Bush supporter. That was enough. But a bit of digging apparently suggests that Domenech had a way of using material without crediting it.
This is considered a major ethical breach in the journalism biz - less of one in the political/speechwriting/blogging world where Domenech had been operating. However, with the assorted disasters which have been occuring in the fact checking/crediting end of the MSM recently that was not a hill the Editors of the Washington Post were going to die for.
All of which adds up to a win for the lefty blogosphere and, I would argue, new media in general. While it is sad that it was over something as essentially matter of fact as the appointment of an online columnist - hardly a position of huge influence - it is a furrther demonstration of the power of a citizenry which can fire off a hundred thousand emails an hour or crash the Washington Post’s servers.
This is a fact which should not be lost on the people who run legacy media. As the Washington Posts dead tree circulation drops fast its one hope for the future is online. But online is a very different world from the more genteel and less interactive world of newspapering. The Post is going to have to learn how how to function in that world.
Update: Comenech rebutts the lefts attack with this post at Red State:
I know that charges of plagiarism are serious. While I am not a journalist, I have, myself, written more than one thing that has been plagiarized in the past. But these charges have also served to create an atmosphere where no matter what is said on my Red America blog, leftists will focus on things with my byline from when I was a teenager.
I can rebut several of the alleged incidents here.
The most recent accusation, is that I stole a music review from Crosswalk and passed it off at National Review Online. In fact, I wrote both lists myself; I was one of Crosswalk’s music review contributors at the time.The Left has also accused me of foisting Sen. Frist quotes and some descriptive material from the Washington Post for a New York Press article on the Capitol Shooter. But the quotes I used were either properly credited or came from Sen. Frist’s press conference, which I attended along with many other reporters. So it is no surprise that we had similar quotes or similar descriptions of the same event. I have reams of notes and interviews about the events of that day. I also went over the entire piece step by step with NYPress editors to ensure that it was unquestionably solid before it ran.
Virtually every other alleged instance of plagiarism that I’ve seen comes from a single semester’s worth of pieces that were printed under my name at my college paper, The Flat Hat, when I was 17.
red state
No, not quite Dan Rather.
Assuming for an instant that what Comenech writes is true then the Washington Post should not have made his resignation necessary. What it should have done, quickly and quietly, is found out whether what Comenech was saying was true and then made a decision.
The problem here is that we are left with a lefty blogswarm smear which has been rebutted by its target but which has not been properly investigated. It is a lousy way to end the matter.
Written by jay on March 25th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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“The government is scared of the international community. But the people will kill him if he is freed.”Raoulf, who is a member of the country’s main Islamic organization, the Afghan Ulama Council, agreed. “The government is playing games. The people will not be fooled.”
“Cut off his head!” he exclaimed, sitting in a courtyard outside Herati Mosque. “We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there’s nothing left.”
He said the only way for Rahman to survive would be for him to go into exile.
But Said Mirhossain Nasri, the top cleric at Hossainia Mosque, one of the largest Shiite places of worship in Kabul, said Rahman must not be allowed to leave the country.
“If he is allowed to live in the West, then others will claim to be Christian so they can too,” he said. “We must set an example. … He must be hanged.”
The clerics said they were angry with the United States and other countries for pushing for Rahman’s freedom.
“We are a small country and we welcome the help the outside world is giving us. But please don’t interfere in this issue,” Nasri said. “We are Muslims and these are our beliefs. This is much more important to us than all the aid the world has given us.”
abc news
It is difficult to take these people seriously except that there is very little doubt that they mean every word that they are saying.
So I am now waiting for the moderate Muslims to take up Rahman’s cause. Searching the first three pages of Google news does not seem to bring up any….Hmmmm.
I also note that Christians have not been burning Afghani flags, attacking Afghani embassies or demanding the deaths of the “Muslim clerics” who so greivously insult our faith and propose to judicially execute - or just plain murder - a member of our faith.
Written by jay on March 24th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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