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- posted by thegusdad @ 10/28/2003 08:05:00 AM

 
NEW TEMPLATE. Not as nice as the old one, but after doing some tweaks to my template at the end of last week, my many, many, many readers who still use Internet Explorer were just getting a white screen on loading. My browser, Firebird, had no such problems and loaded the blog correctly, one more reason to switch (one of the best being NO POP-UP ADS). If you haven't done so already, download Firebird for free at the Mozilla site. (Mozilla's open-source email client, Thunderbird, also kicks ass all over Outlook/Outlook Express. Mmmmmmmm...Bayesian spam filters....)
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/23/2003 11:46:00 AM

 
DAVID GEST HAS SUED LIZA MINELLI FOR $10,000,000, claiming domestic abuse. The complaint is a work of art.
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/22/2003 02:03:00 PM

 
TMQ UPDATE: the ESPN2 home page today reads, "To our readers: Tuesday Morning Quarterback will no longer be available on ESPN.com." As California's governor would say, "You've been erased."
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/21/2003 12:25:00 PM

 
CONTINUING THIS ANTI-SEMITISM THREAD, various politicos and media are all up in arms over portions of the address given by Malaysia's Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, to the Tenth Islamic Summit Conference.

Mahathir said, among other things, that "today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.... They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power."

Inflammatory stuff, maybe. But the speech is more notable, in terms of who was speaking to whom, in his criticism of the current state of Islam. It is backward-looking, to the days of hejirah, and forward-looking, to the afterworld, to the neglect of the present. It is a harch criticism of the fragmented state of the Muslim ummah, its acquiesence in its own oppression, and its fanatical anti-secularism, which cripples its ability to exercise world power. In other words, it isn't news when a Muslim head of state criticizes Jews; it should be news when he criticizes Muslims. The link to the whole speech is above. Read it.
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/21/2003 12:11:00 PM

 
TUESDAY MORNING QUARTERBACK: ANTI-SEMITE? I'm late to this party, so let's catch up. First, we're talking about Gregg Easterbrook, longtime political journalist, blogger for The New Republic, and author of Tuesday Morning Quarterback, my favorite football column. One week ago, Easterbrook posted this entry to his TNR blog, critiquing Kill Bill Vol. 1 as trash. Not just arty trash, but trashy trash that makes everything around it trashier. And he continued:

"Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can't possibly miss the message--now Disney's message--that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself."

In short order, ESPN, for which Easterbrook wrote Tuesday Morning Quarterback (each Tuesday afternoon, by the way), fired him. They did it quietly, without announcement or fanfare. He was just gone from the masthead, with all his writing removed. You can see the titles of his column archives if you have a pre-existing link to them, as I do at right, but they link to thin air. Instapundit correctly reports that if you try to search for "Easterbrook" or "TMQ" on the ESPN site you are promptly returned to the main site, as though your search never happened.

Easterbrook's apology was not long in coming, on October 16:

"I'm ready to defend all the thoughts in that paragraph. But how could I have done such a poor job of expressing them? Maybe this is an object lesson in the new blog reality. I worked on this alone and posted the piece--what you see above comes at the end of a 1,017-word column that's otherwise about why movies should not glorify violence. Twenty minutes after I pressed "send," the entire world had read it. When I reread my own words and beheld how I'd written things that could be misunderstood, I felt awful. To anyone who was offended I offer my apology, because offense was not my intent. But it was 20 minutes later, and already the whole world had seen it.

"Looking back I did a terrible job through poor wording. It was terrible that I implied that the Jewishness of studio executives has anything whatsoever to do with awful movies like Kill Bill. Nothing about Eisner or Weinstein causes any movie to be bad or awful; they're just supervisors. For all I know neither of them even focused on the adoration-of-violence aspect until the reviews came out. My attempt to connect my perfectly justified horror at an ugly and corrupting movie to the religious faith and ethnic identity of certain executives was hopelessly clumsy.

"Where I failed most is in the two sentences about adoration of money. I noted that many Christian executives adore money above all else, and in the 20-minute reality of blog composition, that seemed to me, writing it, fairness and fair spreading of blame. But accusing a Christian of adoring money above all else does not engage any history of ugly stereotypes. Accuse a Jewish person of this and you invoke a thousand years of stereotypes about that which Jews have specific historical reasons to fear. What I wrote here was simply wrong, and for being wrong, I apologize."

There are good apologies and bad apologies, and this one is pretty good. It inlcudes the words "I apologize," which is always a good start. It strikes a universal chord for Internet users--that "oh shoot" reaction to an email or blog entry typed in passion and sent without deliberation--and a more specific one for Easterbrook's own audience, the readers of TNR, who likely as not engage (as I do) in heaping amounts of self-correction to try to excise vestiges of prejudice from our words and views. It does some self-justification in the form of explanation, which is not good but which is almost unavoidable.

The blogosphere is ringing over this, with some excoriating Easterbrook, some taking the "massive overreaction over poor word choice" tack, and some taking the "I've known Gregg for decades and he's not anti-Semitic, so cut him slack" tack. I won't opine on who's right, but I too string words together for a living, and I too have "gotten it wrong." There is peril everywhere, in the form of the critical faculties of our audience members, for those of us who throw our thoughts out on the 'net for any to inspect. Thank goodness for the "mark this post as a draft" button.

- posted by thegusdad @ 10/20/2003 02:21:00 PM

 
HATE MISLEADING HEADLINES? ME TOO. There's a right way and a wrong way to report objective truth. The facts? The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had rejected the Justice Department's challenge to laws in Washington, Oregon, and California allowing doctors to recommend marijuana for medicinal use. The Justice Department appealed to the US Supreme Court (that's SCOTUS to you), and the Nine Almighty declined to accept the appeal. (That's a privilege of the SCOTUS--very few mandatory appeals--you get to hear what you think is important and will build your legacy.) The justices refuse to hear cases all the time, for procedural as well as substantive reasons, so a refusal to hear a case--technically a denial of a writ of certiorari--communicates nothing other than "we aren't going to hear this case," rather than "we affirmatively endorse what the lower court said." Here's the wrong way to do it, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "High court backs doctors' right to recommend pot". And the right way, from the Arizon Republic: "High court refuses to rule in medical pot case." Was that so hard?
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/15/2003 01:54:00 PM

 
EAT MORE WHALE! Seth Stevenson, writing in Slate, on the joys of cetacean-as-cuisine. Does this fit into the Atkins diet?
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/13/2003 12:36:00 PM

 
GIVING SOMEONE THE FINGER, a complete historical exegesis and tutorial.
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/13/2003 12:10:00 PM

 
LET ME CAUSE SOME TROUBLE. Mainly by hubristically interjecting myself into a spat between a couple of commentators I respect.

First, Kobe Bryant's pretrial hearing engages the public with police officer testimony that Bryant's accuser repeatedly said "no" during their encounter in his suite. Then, Gregg Easterbrook, blogging in the New Republic, suggests that maybe "no" isn't enough--that "because in the real world 'no' does not always mean no," there needs to be an unequivocal assertion of non-consent, e.g., "This is rape." Then, Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate, takes Easterbrook on, demanding a bright line rule: "The law is perfectly clear: When a woman says 'no,' even—take note, Kobe's lawyers—after 5 minutes of necking, she really means no."

The interesting thing is that it is SO OBVIOUS that Easterbrook is right that Lithwick is forced to mischaracterize Easterbrook's suggestion in order to make him look wrong. Easterbrook's suggestion is actually quite modest. He is addressing a narrow social phenomenon:

"When force is used, or a woman taken somewhere against her will, it's open and shut. Cases in which force is only implied bedevil the rape issue; thousands of pages of law-review articles have been written on this point. And what about when the woman initiates the encounter of her own free will? That appears, at least, to be what happened in Colorado. A woman must be able to enter a man's hotel room, or dorm room, or car, or embrace, and later say, 'I'm leaving now.' Going into a man's hotel room late at night, or voluntarily initiating any social ritual that often leads to sex, is not the same as consenting to sex--even if the woman has sex on the mind, too. Women who enter possible-sex situations must always be free to decide to exit them."

Easterbrook's suggestion--that a woman should say "this is rape" in a case where ambiguity might otherwise sneak in--is limited by its terms to times when women "enter possible-sex situations." Note what he's not suggesting: that unless that specific code is said, that forced sex is not rape. What Easterbrook is therefore proposing is both a kind of rule of evidence, and an observation about the power of language that would prevent most accidental rapes, because, as he notes, "Just hearing the word "rape" in this context would give chills to the majority of men who are not criminals." And yes, I meant to type "accidental rapes." Easterbrook's point here is that there is a cognitive dissonance in the mind of most heterosexual men that exists when we equate the actions of a monster leaping out of the bushes and savaging an unsuspecting jogger with those of, near the other end of the "rape" spectrum, those of a man in a consensual sexual relationship who finds himself being told he is a rapist after sex he thought was consensual at the time. Many people talk comfortably about the death penalty for the first type of man. How about the second?

What Easterbrook is asking for is better communication. As he notes, law review articles by the hundreds have addressed the issue of "consent." The well-publicized "sexual harrassment policies" at liberal arts colleges (I'm remembering Antioch...yup, Antioch! An actual quote: "Verbal consent should be obtained with each new level of physical and/or sexual contact/conduct in any given interaction ... Asking 'Do you want to have sex with me?' is not enough. The request for consent must be specific to each act."), where each sexual act had to be specifically and explicitly consented to out loud or it was presumed to be unconsented--is an overreaction, what a colleague of mine would call burning down the barn to roas t a chicken.
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/10/2003 05:39:00 PM

 
THE VATICAN TOOK THE BLUE PILL. Here's a quote from the archbishop of Nairobi, Raphael Ndingi Nzeki: "Aids... has grown so fast because of the availability of condoms." That's right, folks: condoms cause AIDS! In a move designed to prove that divinity schools need remedial science courses, the Vatican's official position is that condoms are permeable to both sperm and STD pathogens, including the HIV virus. Therefore, use of condoms causes AIDS, and presumably pregnancy. But....since the Vatican is pro-procreative sex, does that mean it is pro-condom? Hmmmm....
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/10/2003 02:11:00 PM

 
"FUCKING" IS NOT INDECENT PER SE. That's according to the FCC, at least. This article is interesting mostly because it has a quote from a fella affiliated with the "Cuss Control Academy." Which itself has some detractors. Or at least one.
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/10/2003 02:04:00 PM

 
DIGITAL COPYRIGHT AND PIRACY ISSUES ARE GETTING MORE AND MORE INTERESTING. Today's news is that SunnComm is not going to sue a Princeton grad student for revealing in a published paper that SunnComm's CD copy protection software is easily circumvented. Yesterday, Sunncomm was saying it would sue the student in civil court and ask federal prosecutors to have him indicted.

The facts run like this: SunnComm makes MediaMax, a copy-protection scheme. MediaMax is set up to install itself to a user's system directly from the copy-protected CD. What Alex Halderman, the grad student, observed is that MediaMax will not be installed at all if the user holds down the "shift" key when the CD is inserted, because that prevents Windows' "autorun" feature from running. (Halderman also tracked down the actual drivers that MediaMax uses and explained how to disable them.)

Halderman's paper is interesting because it is specifically analyzes both from technical and legal standpoints the copy protection that SunnComm sold to BMG, the record company. The copy-protection scheme, and the Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme also included on the disc he analyzes, are the result of early adoption by record companies. Record companies, and their infamous association the RIAA, remain focused on getting paid for each copy of a song that exists. That's the premise behind the iTunes and revamped Napster 2.0 services--you pay for each song you download from their properitary servers. It's more complicated to manage "ownership" of a song when it is distributed in "hard copy," on a CD you buy in a store or from Amazon. SunnComm's product is an attempt to exploit that perceived "need" of the industry. Halderman showed that SunnComm's attempt is weak, weak, weak. SunnComm, and the industry, should be thanking him and his fellow academics, for showing the weakness in their product. SunnComm's threat of litigation was probably a reflexive lashing out after SunnComm's stock tanked (losing $10M in market cap) in light of Halderman's paper.

So, a prediction: BMG sues SunnComm for selling ineffective copy-protection software, and hires Halderman as its expert witness. Halderman then explains that it took longer to write his brief paper than it did to "crack" Mediamax. SunnComm goes banko--and good riddance.
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/10/2003 12:35:00 PM

 
THE IG NOBEL AWARDS ARE OUT. This year's batch of winners includes, in the physics category, the authors of "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/03/2003 11:44:00 AM

 
I LOVE MOVIE REVIEWS MORE THAN MOVIES. And the NYTimes' triumvirate of A.O. Scott, Elvis Mitchell, and Stephen Holden are fabulous writers, among the best in the business. I just read Scott's review of "Mystic River," for example, which included this reasoning for the "R" rating:

It has profanity, abundant violence and existential despair.

Shoot, sounds like my practice.

Scott on Sean Penn:

"Mr. Penn, his eyes darting as if in anticipation of another blow, his shoulders tensed to return it, is almost beyond praise. Jimmy Markum is not only one of the best performances of the year, but also one of the definitive pieces of screen acting in the last half-century, the culmination of a realist tradition that began in the old Actor's Studio and begat Brando, Dean, Pacino and De Niro.
"But Mr. Penn, as gifted and disciplined as any of his precursors, makes them all look like, well, actors. He has purged his work of any trace of theatricality or showmanship while retaining all the directness and force that their applications of the Method brought into American movies."
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/02/2003 03:59:00 PM

 
ZACARIAS MASSAOUI IS MAKING THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT LOOK VERY, VERY BAD. Dahlia Lithwick has good ongoing coverage here and here of the circus-like pretrial proceedings in the Massaoui case. This is a case where Massaoui looks crazy--he insists on representing himself, and files incoherent briefs--and the DOJ looks dopey. The big-picture issue here is what Massaoui is being tried for: is he the "twentieth hijacker" who would have been on a plane on 9/11/01 but for logistical screwups? Or is he a terrorist wannabe who would like to kill lots of American infidels, but wasn't trusted by the real 9/11 conspiracists?

So Massaoui and his court-appointed "standby counsel" have demanded to be allowed to contact prisoners that the US has in military brigs, notably "9/11 mastermind" Ramzi Binalshibh. Binalshibh would presumably testify that Massaoui was either not part of the 9/11 plot or was so distrusted by the other conspirators (due to his nuttiness) that he was diverted into minor roles, and in any event wasn't a significant player. Believe it or not, "I'm too dumb and wacky to be trusted" is not a far-out defense in the world of criminal conspiracy prosecutions. And of course, the right to know the origin of charges against you, and the right to know about evidence that may disprove your guilt, are fundamental rights of defendants under US jurisprudence.

The Justice Department has refused, refused, refused to give Massaoui or his lawyers access to Binalshibh or two other US captives, saying that anything the captives could tell Massaoui would be classified. Judge Leonie Brinkema, the federal judge in Virginia who is presiding over this Bedlam, has twice ordered the DOJ to allow the interviews, and the DOJ still refuses. Massaoui has demanded sanctions, including dismissal of all charges against him. On the last go-round on this issue, the DOJ did not even contest that dismissal was the appropriate sanction, figuring that this was the fastest ticket to review of Brinkema's decisions by the Fourth Circuit. Stunningly, today Judge Brinkema did something radically different: she barred the DOJ from seeking the death penalty against Massaoui, and further ordered that "the Government will be foreclosed at trial from making any argument, or offering any evidence, suggesting that the defendant had any involvement in, or knowledge of, the September 11 attacks."

This effectively cripples the DOJ's ability to present the Massaoui case as a showpiece of US justice applied to horrific international terrorism. Massaoui will not be convicted of beingthe "20th hijacker," at least in Judge Brinkema's court. It also makes his transfer from the civilian justice system to a military tribunal all but assured.

Much of what we treasure about our system of government is process--the opportunity for regular citizens to have their voices heard (through voting), have their grievances aired (through the civil courts), and have a "fair shake" when they are accused of crimes whether petty or monstrous. This is "due process" within the meaning of the Constitution, and we se it eroded every day in myriad tiny ways. But the DOJ's attitude in the Massaoui prosecution has been one of "the crime was so terrible that the rules don't apply." Not so--the rules are what we value, they ARE our values. Judge Brinkema's decision was a brave one, and shows why we give these judges secure lifetime jobs.

- posted by thegusdad @ 10/02/2003 11:42:00 AM

 
RUSH LIMBAUGH IS A BIG FAT JUNKIE! Seriously, it shouldn't surprise us that Rush is being reported to have been hooked on illegally obtained prescription painkillers--addiction can happen to anyone. But the public can smell hypocrisy. Rush has spent much of the past fifteen years spewing vitriol at little people, poor people, drug-addicted people. The backlash from this story is therefore stronger, as it should be. Same for Bill "Book of Virtues" Bennett being outed as a profligate gambler. Or the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandals, or Jimmy Swaggart, or Newt Gingrich, or Strom Thurmond...
- posted by thegusdad @ 10/02/2003 09:24:00 AM