Christian Crumlish (xian): outspoken

Weee're back

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 20:30:19 GMT

Well, that took longer than expected. I'm still getting things re-configured and re-set up at ol' Open Publishing / ezone / x-everything industries, but most of the sites are at least now visible, and I may hope that we've cured the hacked-so-easily problem we had going there. In the meantime, off the air, I found solace in posting via Radio and Blogger even when I knew the publishing action would fail, and hanging around the Well more. Forgive the extensive cross-posting. I'm just trying to push out all the categories with current posts.

The only good terrorist

Thu, 05 Jun 2003 20:06:05 GMT

Orcinus hits the nail on the head (again). He was writing a while back about how Christian extremist terrorists in the U.S. are described as lone nuts or wackos and not identified as terrorists by the FBI or Justice Department. They are always treated as exceptional. I really don't see the different between Eirc Rudolph and Mohammed Atta:

Eric Rudolph and the face of terror. The arrest of Eric Rudolph has made for some interesting stories afterward. I especially was interested in the New York Times piece about the local reaction to the arrest, which opened with this nugget:"He's a Christian and I'm a Christian and he dedicated his life to fighting abortion," said Mrs. ... [Orcinus]

While you were out (protesting)

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 16:19:35 GMT

The war has already started. The Pentagon was leaking all over the place yesterday that we already have special forces inside Iraq. For example, the Washington Post reported:

U.S. Special Operations troops are already operating in various parts of Iraq, hunting for weapons sites, establishing a communications network and seeking potential defectors from Iraqi military units in what amounts to the initial ground phase of a war, U.S. defense officials and experts familiar with Pentagon planning said.

Discussing this on the Well, I was told that this news also appeared last fall. Face it, we've been at war with Iraq since 1998 and in some sense since the cease-fire in 1991. They never accepted the legitimacy of the no-fly zones, so there's been a small-scale conflict going on ever since.

This is one reason why I've felt like the debate over the upcoming shooting war, both domestically and internationally, has been a sham. The Bush team made up their mind to "deal with" Iraq on 9/11 or earlier. The UN effort is a matter of getting their ducks in a row, of how to manage and prosecute the invasion and overthrow, not whether.

Frankly, I accept that Bush is the president and that as commander-in-chief it's his call what the greatest threats to our security are, suspicious as I may be of his motives or strategy overall.

Best we get on with the debate of how to mitigate the worst risks of slaughter and instability and how best to reconstruct the country and move on. The "No Blood for Oil" protesters have been suckered into a fool's game, trying to affect a decision that was made months, if not years, ago.

Putting deficits in perspective

Sat, 08 Feb 2003 18:00:28 GMT

Frank Boosman of Pseudorandom felt that the "record deficit" chart I reprinted from Reuters earlier this week was misleading, in that it did not put the deficit figures into context as a percentage of GDP (which most economists feel is a more meaningful way of measuring deficits than in terms of absolute dollars). I would tend to agree with that. A lively discussion followed in my comments section. Frank pointed out that "[a] chart of deficit growth as a percentage of GDP would be far more useful," and I replied by saying, "I invite you to create such a chart and edify us. I think even if you plot these graphs on a logarithmic scale it's still clear when the numbers are in the black and when they are in the red." Frank asked, "If I do create such a chart, drawn from the same CBO data as the Reuters chart, and place it on my blog, will you blog it here to provide both sides of the story? [By the way, I'm not a supporter of the current administration. My only motivation in this is to avoid misleading statistics.]" I replied, "Sure, of course. I never turn down free content!" Unable to find a ready-made chart of this data, Frank used the raw data provided by the Congressional Budget Office to prepare the chart. (He used CBO historical data as well as CBO projections.) As promised, I'm running a copy of his chart here. I've squished it a bit to fit my column-width, but the image is itself a link to the full-size image, which should be easier on the eyes: As Frank explains (I am largely plagiarizing his blog entry), "The point here is not that President Bush isn't running deficits (he is), nor that budget deficits aren't a bad thing (I happen to believe they are). The point is that this chart looks quite different from the Reuters chart. Both are accurate, but the GDP-based chart is more useful and relevant." So, who holds the record for largest deficits as a percentage of GDP? Why the sainted Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that's who (again, quoting Frank):

An Office of Management and Budget file that can be found here (PDF, 2.25 MB) contains GDP-based budget data going back to 1930. I didn't take the time to chart it as well, but I found it interesting that during the Depression years 1932-1936, President Roosevelt ran deficits in the range of 4.0 to 5.9 percent of GDP, and during the war years 1942-1945, he ran deficits in the range of 14.2 to 30.3 percent of GDP.

His final comment, "Though I agree neither with President Bush's specific tax-cutting plans nor his plans for real increases in military spending, I can see why he and his economic team believe their projected budget deficits to be reasonable. From their viewpoint, they're fighting two wars (against terror and Iraq) while suffering through a serious economic slowdown, making the deficits justifiable when viewed in a historical context. I disagree with this, but I understand it." I'd like to point out that no costs for the anticipated war in Iraq are included in the projected deficit figures, nor are the expected costs of reforming the alternative minimum tax, but quibble as I might, I think Frank has done us all a service by rolling up his sleeves and plotting this data. Thanks!

Like father, like son

Wed, 05 Feb 2003 16:27:39 GMT

This Reuters graphic published in Yahoo! News - Politics yesterday speaks volumes:

(Tried posting this directly to Bite Media but problems with Blogger Pro are preventing the FTP upload....)

Vonnegut, a pacifist, despairs

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 17:17:57 GMT

Says Kurt Vonnegut, in this short interview from In These Times: "I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers."

Protesters chant 'Save the Shire'

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 04:18:07 GMT

Scot Hacker has posted a series of photos from Saturday's antiwar protest in S.F.

Great images. A fine contrast to the sourmouthing coming from the pro-war crowd.

I didn't attend. B wanted to bring a sign saying "No Bush War on the Environment" but we didn't have it together. Let the tea-leaf readers interpret that as a vote of support for the powers that be at their peril.

So, Scot, were there closer to 50,000 people there or 350,000?

Who's blogging Karl Rove?

Wed, 15 Jan 2003 22:21:04 GMT

I was just musing on how the right in this country has succeeded at presenting their views in the most poll-tested appealing ways possible, and still they are alienating more than half the population with their agenda items in many areas, especially outside of the multi-front effort against terrorism (which was thrust upon them). Even in that arena their relentless preference for the easy war against Saddam has not won high marks nationwide, though no doubt we will rally around our troops again when the decision is made and of course no one will spit on the veterans. In the meantime, who watches the watchmen? Everyone seems to think that Karl Rove is W.'s brain (as Bill Kristol was once Quayle's). Is there a blogger out there who is systematically watching Rove's every movement and public utterance, every leak related to him, every profile or feature, every on-the-record statement by ex-administration people like DiIulio and Frum? Maybe there already is a RoveWatch blog. I should be searching for that, I realize... OK, Google shows no blog called "RoveWatch." There's a placeholder GeoCities site by that name. A search for "karl rove" blog yields a bunch of snarky posts, rebuttals, and comments but no single blog devoted to dogging the heels of the man alternatively known to his boss as Boy Wonder and Turd Blossom. Any ideolarians or seminarians or semiotarians willing to take on the job? If I had the time, and a clue, and a coherent left-wing oppositional philosophy I'd volunteer, so that rules me out. Humor is essential. Oliver Willis could do it. I'd nominate him as for Antirove, but my gut tells me he is already spread pretty thin (and not just from the lo-carb diet). So, any takers?

Fear of a Muslim Planet

Fri, 22 Nov 2002 23:17:29 GMT

The Well is a private conferencing system, its "current" topic notoriously incivil, and yet there's been a great discussion there lately, with a frank exchange of a wide range of views about geopolitics today and the war on terror, and litttle patience for unexamined truisms. Since I only "own my own words," I can't provide the whole exchange here, but my posts give a taste:

current 1360: Islam and Current Events III
#338 of 349: That came out a little mangled (xian) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (11:07 AM)

What I'm getting here is that the nature of the threat emanating largely from majority-Muslim countries is the fact that Islam is most often expressed in a virulent, hateful, literalist form of the religion. (I suspect the non-hierarchical nature of the religion is an element as well — it strikes my Western mind as strange that a religion could aspire to rule large states and yet run itself as an entirely distributed network: dangerous memeplex!)

Other religions may have had periods more or less like this, but none "of global reach" today have as militant an outlook combined with a large population in the sway of fundamentalist interpreters.

Though I do think we are continually slipping into confusing Islamists for Muslims (I don't think militancy is as widely supported in the Muslim world as we are currently being led to believe, and I suspect passive sympathy outweighs active support proportionwise, but the fact remains that the extremists are not considered beyond the pale by most, and they number many in absolute terms, and a small number can wreak great havoc if not opposed at all levels of society), I'm willing to concede that one of the globe's problems right now might be the grip of the militant strain of Islam as an influence on the lives of so many and its penetration into the genome of the culture it has coevolved with.

To put it all more simply, I think the enemy might be religious fanaticism (especially when combined with political power and popular support, which may be the same thing).

With separation of church and state in the West (and in East Asia to a large extent) we can talk about the superiority of our culture but the real problem is moderating Islam as an actor on the world stage.

I'm afraid we are engaged in an exchange more calculated to radicalize Islam than to moderate it. I don't blame anyone for any impulse to respond, because we are frightened and there are no easy answers.

Friedman has pointed out that some of this depends on the resolution of a civil war within Islamic societies. We may go down a path of horror and atrocity thousands of times greater than what we've seen so far if there ends up being no way to defuse things, or draw them out long enough for those societies to rescue themselves.

...and later, in response to a discussion about whether mainstream Islam is fundamentalist:

current 1360: Islam and Current Events III
#341 of 349: That came out a little mangled (xian) Fri 22 Nov 2002 (11:42 AM)

ok, but 90% of the people in the U.S. say they believe in God (or something like that) but how many go to church? Literalism is literalism but most of us (and most Muslims) live in the real world and do [not] become terrorists.

I've been reading "The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Centruy Jerusalem" by Kanan Makiya, which shed some light on the influence of the Talmudic style of scriptural interpretation on Islam in its second generation. When it suited state power, in our middle ages, it was permissible for the meaning of the suras to be debated hermeneutically (...and the influence of Persian culture was strong, and math flourished, etc.), and Islam has always had that Protestant-style decentralization, so your local sheik has a lot of freedom of interpretation and emphasis.

There does seem to be the problem that a greater militancy was "baked in" (and probably was needed for the memplex, else how could Bedouins carve out an empire from the decadent interface of Byzantium and Persia?).

[Bite Media]

Sour grapes from the left wing of the blogosphere

Wed, 06 Nov 2002 14:59:25 GMT

I wonder if the libertarian-right pundit sector of the blogosphere is to this year's elections as the dittohead talk-radio shows were to those of 1994? Meanwhile, the gloating and the whining are already running rampant. Tacitus bemoans the sour grapes from the left. As a moderate-leftist who is usually disgusted by the behavior of both parties, I didn't have much to be happy about this time around, even within our little California bubble (but they say politics and culture sweep west to east in this country, so maybe you'll all be getting your own graydavisbots sometime soon). It was interesting to see Trent Lott with his newish grayish wig being very conciliatory on one of the morning bloviation shows, and the guy (I'm forgetting his name without regret) at the special edition of the 700 Club fairly gloating and predicting a huge stock-market rally, no doubt a sign of God's favor. Meanwhile, closer to home, Berkeley voted 70% to force local coffee houses to serve only "fair trade" coffee by the cup. You can still get your beans off the backs of the peasantry, though, so don't worry. And here in Oakland we seem to have voted for a bunch of weird "temporary" tax increases to fight violence. The odd thing is they jacked up the downtown parking tax by half a percent and another tax by some similar tiny increment but the third hike is a 3% increase for single-room occupancy hotels. Which means that we are raising taxes on bums at six times the rate that we are commuters and business people! Back nationally, I will be curious to see if the Democrats keep triming themselves into irrelevancy or decide that if they really are the opposition and they really are out of power that they should maybe consider presenting a coherent alternate agenda. After the next two years we should either have a completely stabilized Republican hegemony in place or a massive repudiation of overweening hubris at the polls next time.

Last post at blogs.salon.com

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 06:12:21 GMT

OK, let's try this again: Radio Free Blogistan has moved. The last entries posted to the old address are the ones you see here dated October 25, 2002. For current entries, please go to the new address: http://radiofreeblogistan.com/.

Moving Day

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 20:59:17 GMT

If my upstreaming changes today work correctly, then this may be the final post to Radio Free Blogistan at the http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/ address, in which case, I want to make it very easy for any future readers directed here by old links (sorry, everybody!) to get to the new home page at radiofreeblogistan.com. If I were really cool, I'd redesign this page so that it contained the moving message and then loaded the new page at http://radiofreeblogistan.com/ automatically, or immediately redirected to that page, or something cool like that. Instead people ending up here will have to follow a link like this one or the one in the title of this entry. If the move fails, then this message will seem kind of lame and embarassing in retrospect. For the technically minded, I will continue to use the Salon hosting and address for my salonika category, and possibly for hosting images and other large files within my storage quota. The blog-related categories (knowhow, metablog, radioactive, syllabus), along with a few knew ones (uh, i don't know... bloggerz, stereomovabletype?) will also be upstreamed to sections of radiofreeblogistan.com. The others will be squirted off to more appropriate hosts (for completists: fireweaver will show up at Dreamweaver Savvy once I get the templating integrated, memewatch will migrate to memewatch.com, outspoken will fold back into Bite Media, and x-pollen will go to x-pollen.com). I'm starting another new category today, unrelated to blogs. It's called "Agent7," it's about my clients and colleagues in the worlds of technology and publishing, and especially their instersection, and it will end up at waterside.com once we get the server-side includes inserted into the appropriate page. Update: The first try failed. I tried to copy the old #upstream.xml file into the subcategories that I didn't want coming over to radiofreeblogistan.com but that somehow resulted in a strange out-of-date rendering of the home page. To fix that I'm editing this file and reposting after throwing away the bad upstream files and restoring Radio to community upstreaming. If things get back to normal, I'll try the FTP approach, possibly by publishing yet another change to this cross-category entry.

War of the worlds

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 20:18:54 GMT

We are the alien overlords. I am reading in the New York Times our detailed plans for laying seige of cities in Iraq. We will attempt to control the minds of the inhabitants (demoralizing the fighters, calming the civilians), and systematically in our now infinitely superior ways conquer each city. (more)

Plutocrats not conservative? I'm shocked, shocked!

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 21:17:48 GMT

Right fringe notices that Republicans are not conservative. Kevin Tuma hates FDR and Lincoln, favoring Goldwater and Reagan. What's interesting about this article is that he voices the "dirty little secret" of the Republican party. It is not now and has never been a conservative party, especially not in the sense of small-government conservatism.

[Bite Media]

Reports of the Death of Publishing Greatly Exaggerated

Thu, 29 Aug 2002 03:58:02 GMT

Don Park responds to Ray Ozzie's obituary for publishing, saying "Publishing is not dead." I would tend to agree. Publishing is definitely sick, buffeted by unfamiliar pressures, in disarray, due for some changes, racing to keep up with technology changes, slow to adopt technology. Publishing is many things. (I feel mildly qualified to comment myself having spent most of my adult life in the publishing industry, wearing a number of different hats—editor, author, agent, book packager, e-book experimenter—and the last eight years publishing online in one format or another.) But the Web has been promising disintermediation for a long time and Tim O'Reilly has written some good stuff about reintermediation, where aggregation services fit into the supply chain, and Amazon.com as a successful web application using the Internet as an OS. Publishing is in trouble if it doesn't change, but I thought we'd all learned by now that these changes take time. Just because you can envision a future doesn't mean that future has arrived. Often, the devil is in the details, and whoever solves the problems of the at-first insignificant-seeming bits of grit in the workings gains the benefits of friction. Richard Tam, a visionary and entrepreneur, started iUniverse he once told me after seeing how major publishing companies deal in false scarcity and voodoo decision-making processes. "They don't know where—or who—their customers are. They have to find them all over again every time they need to market something new." Tam's idea was to publish freely and let the market decide. Stop doing things that don't sell and keep doing things that do. This may oversimplify things the other way. At this point iUniverse is considered a print-on-demand vanity press and its success stories are not well known. As for predictions, while they're taking their own sweet time coming true, existing processes mutate to coopt or respond to changing pressures. Book publishing (just one form of publishing, after all) may take on aspects of electronic publishing (some publishers already produce their books in an XML format for easy expression in multiple form factors). Electronic publishing formats may integrate aspects of the book experience that are still superior to the modes of ingesting writing online. There is always a dialectic. There are always—eventually—hybrids. I'd like to see a hybrid interface: some kind of smart paper, something tactile, something you can skim easily with your hands the way you can riffle the pages of a book, but with the augmentations of hyperlinking, deep structure, updates, interactive content, and so on. In the meantime, we are publishing, and selling, more books today than ever before. This despite the fact of a computer-book recession, an IT recession, a tech recession, a games recession, an optimism recession. Don Park mentions the aspect of time:

Technology will take at least 40 more years to reach the level of availability and convenience necessary to kill off publishing: 10 years to emerge and mature, another 10 years to be cheap and convenient enough, and 20 years of deathwatch (old habits die hard). Rising cost of paper will obviously become a major fudge factor.

Surprisingly revelant to this discussion is a book last revised 1960, The Truth About Publishing by Stanley Unwin.

Another Null Entry

Wed, 21 Aug 2002 19:20:43 GMT

Posting across all categories to force theme re-rendering. Please continue to ignore.

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Wed, 21 Aug 2002 15:54:10 GMT

It is ironic that having just paid for Radio I am now running into serious difficulties. The main problems are:

My last few posts won't publish
My site design won't update when applied to the home page or to categories
Attempts to reach http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/2002/08/20.html lead to an error message

Unfortunately this means I'm spending all my time trying to diagnose and fix the problem and very little time writing or trolling the web for interesting and relevant material. One issue may be that my "Cloud Status" shows 1% of 10.0MB free. Could it be that my new entries aren't posting because they are too big? But how could I possibly have filled 10 meg with most plain text in just a month? Also, my Radio pplication says "20 meg free," or more literally: Radio UserLand 8.0.8: 20.0MB free, 8:51:29 AM; 5 threads; 9 hits. So, really, I'm just confused, and frustrated. Posting this to all categories in hopes of breaking the logjam.

Differences between Weblogs and Bulletin Boards

Sun, 18 Aug 2002 18:41:20 GMT

I had an interesting conversation with Dave Winer the other day, partly prompted by the drafting of my product comparison into the vendetta of his anonymous detractors against him. The ability of commenting visitors to attack, highjack, or derail a weblog have led Dave to conclude that the two media (weblogs and online discussions) are anathema to each other. In his view, this site is not a weblog in that sense, because it permits comments. I'm still rolling this over in my mind, not fully convinced of that absolute definition, but it has prompted a chain of thoughts about what these differences are. To some extent I think some of it has to do with ownership of your own words. Not just in the Well sense that Ray Ozzie mentioned (referenced in an earlier post in this log), but in a literal sense. An example. I was just reading Tom Friedman's editorial about the fog of war and the lack of clear war aims on the part of Palestinians (and perhaps on the part of Bush's hawks). At the bottom of the column is an invitation to join a moderated discussion of Tom's views. I had no interest in signing in and joining that conversation. If I have an opinion about what Tom wrote, I'll quote him and link to his editorial in my Mediajunkie blog. On some level it's selfish: Why should I donate content to the New York Times? Especially when they reserve the right to moderate it? If I wanted the audience, the tradeoff might be worth it. I made a similar decision when I decided to stop blogging in relative obscurity and sign up for this Salon blogs experiment (six days left on my free trial!). I calculated that there might be an audience of (a) Salon readers, (b) Radio webloggers, and (c) curiosity seekers whom I might reasonably have a chance of adding to my own readership. So far, so good. So, I like discussion boards, but I decide whether to participate based on the audience. I do comment on blogs that permit it, when the mood strikes me. Usually it's to add something reactive that does not inspire me to write up a full view of my own. To my mind hosting an opinion on my own site is a more permanent method, with a stronger aspect of ownership. I can't track down all the various comments I may have posted all over the Net. In effect I've donated that content to whomever curates the specific sites. Back to the problem of unwelcome or unkind commenters. There is an element of badmouthing someone in their own front parlor. My attitude is "there are streetcorners for that kind of trash talk." Asking me (or Dave, or whoever) to host and pay for content that detracts from my work or my mission is a bit of a stretch. Someone said that we have a free press in the U.S. for anyone who owns a press. In 1994 I realized that owning a press no longer required a huge industrial capital investment but rather an investment in a small server and an Internet line. We're reaching a point where just about anyone can host their own words, regardless of content. Just as anonymity (which I believe can be justified in many circumstances) has a tendency to discredit an author's views in the eyes of some readers, so does taking the responsibility to manage and archive one one's words and keep them in the full view of the public tend to reinforce one's credibility. Some semi-baked thoughts for a Sunday morning. (A postscript. My browsing this morning led me—unsurprisingly—to Doc Searls' weblog. In it, among other things, he distinguishes between diaries and journals. Both have roots in words meaning "day" (in the sense of daily), but the connotations are different, at least in English. Journal has the advantage of relating to both journalism and the computer-sense of journaling. I wanted to discuss this and add a pithy comment along the lines of "We lepers" vs. "You lepers" in light of the ongoing discussion of Lessig's warning tone but got confused trying to work his "Discuss" link. How ironic, I thought as, I gave up on the interface. I'll just write about it in my blog.)

Housekeeping & Navelgazing

Sat, 17 Aug 2002 19:24:15 GMT

I'm pushing the new site design across all the categories, hence this post into every category. Apologies for its off-topicness outside of 'metablog' and 'radioactive'. Or rather, let me make it on topic, by discussing my categories a little, which I have just rationalized. While the mission of this blog is to talk about blogging, the nature of blogging is such that I want to be able to do other things in this space. I could keep them off the home page when not about blogging, but I'd rather use my discretion about when something belongs on the home page (most of the time) and when to just send it to a category or two. Rather, I'd say that if you're reading this blog just for the news, tips, and comparisons of blog products, then consider going to the 'metablog' category as a matter of course (or subscribing to its RSS feed). This will filter your Radio Free Blogistan flow to just posts about blogs and blogging. I will try to implement a dynamic filter so you can view or hide different categories all on the home page, but I'm not there yet. In the meantime, a brief explanation of my categories as they currently stand: metablog
Blogging about blogging, and blogging about blogging about blogging, but never blogging about blogging about blogging about blogging, I promise! knowhow
What does blogging tell us about content and knowledge management in the enterprise space? syllabus
Required reading about weblogs and the state of writing online. memewatch
Counting memes by candlelight. All are dim but one is bright. fireweaver
Dreamweaver, Fireworks, web design and web practices. radioactive
Radio questions channel aggregated by dws. outspoken
Occasional intemperate outbursts. salonika
Salon, Salon blogs, blogs.salon.com x-pollen
X-references to and from my other blogs. RSS Monkey help me.

Instapundit.com: The Boy Who Cried "Politically Correct"

Mon, 05 Aug 2002 21:50:57 GMT

I must sat that for a pinko-liberal I myself am leaning toward the "we must do something about Iraq" side of the equation, so that makes it double hard for me to stomach Glenn Reynolds's put upon attitude in this post.

The Case Against Peace in the Middle East

Mon, 05 Aug 2002 21:45:10 GMT

Isn't it about time those involved in the latest Arab-Israeli war admit that peace in the region is—at this present time—impossible? Everyone always says they want peace (along with love and understanding), but I think more progress could be made with more realistic goals. Instead of peace, perhaps the goals of international efforts should be equilibrium, some kind of balance of power. With the momentum behind the cycle of violence, the legacy of grievances, and the structural imbalances currently in place, not to mention perverse incentives that enable the most militant people on either side to reinforce each other's power and agendas, talk of a peace "process" takes on ever more absurd dimensions with each passing day. While the Palestinian or Israeli on the street, when asked, would probably say the right things about wanting peace, or preferring peace to war, or perhaps wanting "peace with honor" or "a just peace," it's not at all clear to me that either side is willing to make the kinds of painful concessions and sacrifices that would be involved in any kind of lasting peace that didn't involve the elimination of one entire side of combatants. Any armistice or cessation of fighting would almost by definition leave in place "facts on the ground" that would stick in the craw of large populations on either side of the conflict. The circumstances and rhetoric that encourage Arab terrorists to continue to target innocents and Israeli settlers to continue to colonize the West Bank will not disappear just because diplomats sign another agreement. It seems to me that the only real alternatives are to let the situation continue to spiral out of control or to impose some sort of global occupation on the entire disputed region, hunting down war criminals and policing the borders. Don't ask the Palestinians to agree to stop suicide bombers. Make them stop, but don't leave it to Israel to do so. Don't ask the Israelis to dismantle "some" of the "outlying" settlements. Dismantle them and encourage the settlers to move back into Israel proper. None of these ideas will be popular, neither with the global powers who'd be expected to sacrifice and die for the sake of clamping down on the horror unfolding there now, nor with the citizens of Israel and the unincorporated quasi-state of Palestine. Rather, a quixotic quest for peace will most likely continue to be the global community's response to the outrages and atrocities erupting daily. My hope is that abandoning the unrealistic goals of peace, forgiveness, and brotherhood of man, we might just be able to deal with the reality of the situation. [junk mail]

Double Standard on Drugs

Mon, 05 Aug 2002 21:14:37 GMT

I've never liked the way politicians hypocritically excuse their own "youthful indiscretions" and those of their family members while advocating throwing the book at unconnected offenders.

Noelle Bush gets rehab, the poor and black get hard time. Fed up with draconian drug penalties, a coalition led by angry mothers is threatening to overturn some of the country's harshest laws. [Salon Headlines]