Tuesday, September 10, 2002
Here's a "Best of the Icon Report" to keep you busy:
>>PJ O'Rourke has another characteristically smug essay in the new Atlantic. It incorrectly assumes April's Palestinian protesters had no "intelligable demand." Considering it was an AIPAC meeting they were crashing you'd think the message is clear. The US ships one-third of it's foreign aid to Israel and it's sent in lump sums completely unaccountable. They recieve almost $3 billion annually to do as they please, while most countries recieving aid are greatly restricted and must account for all purchaces.
Lame as the 4-20 protests may have been, every jab O'Rourke takes at the tie-dye and the cute acronyms has been said a million times before. The article could have been written by any funny-guy Cato intern in twenty minutes flat. How he got the correspondenship baffles me. O'Rourke's schtick wears thin quickly, and his column is not up to par with the eloquent works of Richard Posner, David Brooks, and Jonathan Rauch.
That leads me up to another point; that it is unbelievably frustrating to see major libertarian organizations mum over the conflict. As George W. Bush incorrectly correlates terrorism in Tel Aviv to our "War on Terrorism," and billions of dollars continue to be spent, the only people brave enough to question the status quo have been on the left
>>We were going to have a little section in Protocol called "briefs." This was too good to go to waste:
When it come's to the oldest profession, the job market is not quite so ... tight. Recent restrictions on foreign sex workers in the Netherlands led a Kerkrade clubowner to a government job agency to find replacements for Sexclub Tiffany's 10 vacancies. Harrie Bosch, in the Dutch newspaper De Morgen claims, "They will receive a regular pay of 1,600 euro a month, can go on vacation, can receive sick pay and have a mortgage. For the job, they don't need experience, they will have a medical examination four times a year, they have the right to refuse clients and can choose how to make love."
>>
this is something I've been meaning to sign off on for quite some time: thick, black-rimmed glasses are as timeless and classic as chinos and collared-shirts. I don't want anyone to stop wearing them because of incorrectly identified correlations to the emo-ilk
>>Victor Pelevin's Omon Ra, a snarky look at a kid enrolled in the Soviet space program, is one hell of a good book. Good enough to get banned in his homeland. Check out his interview in Bomb. While you are at it, read Index's article on the censorship of his work. Or just read anything in Index
>>Remember cell phone snobbery? I'm glad it ended as soundly as that other late-ninties "un-wired" elitism. "No, I dont email. I've never touched a computer," said every indie guy until he discovered makeoutclub. But here you go, the phenomena has ended as 61% of us have walking lines.
>>According to the NY Times, Strom Thurmond
"was 66 when he married Nancy Moore, a 22-year-old former Miss South Carolina who had been an intern in his office."
>>Joanneuary: we get 70 unique hits a day!
Joanneuary: most people end up there looking for porn and find us
Diplomacy101: oops!
Diplomacy101: guilty
>>The Wilson Quarterly hasn't got a link for Joseph Epstein's "Snobbus Americanus," but the book from which the essay is adapted, is on my immediate to-read list. Epstein's well-supported thesis is that "snobbery thrives where society is most open." There is little record of this behavior when people graciously accepted their social status as iron-clad. Enter democracy and the concept of social mobility, and there you get an undeniably pretentious society with "much room to exercise condescension, haughtiness, affectation, false deference, and other egregious behavior so congenial to the snob." Epstein's a clever guy, so don't take his criticism as anything anti-democratic. He checks Mencken and Tocqueville and rightly hates the playaz, not the game.
>>Reason's editor-in-cheif Nick Gillespe proves he's worth his Brit-pop haircut in today's post.
Our national literature is thick with comic male characters who are dragged kicking and screaming -- and rarely successfully -- into something approaching maturity, responsibility and adulthood. The type has often been used to memorable effect. Think, for instance, of the eponymous heroes of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint or of Geraldo Rivera in his memoir Exposing Myself.
Replacing the more ascetic, less self-infatuated individualism of an earlier era of the with the narcissism of the nineties, Reason under Postrel's stewardship steered away from the bread-and-butter economic issues that had built and sustained it under the venerable Robert W. Poole, and concentrated much of its attention on social issues: drugs, homosexuality, and wowie-zowie technology worship. Under Postrel's tutelage, Reason gradually became an ideological sideshow – a weird combination of High Times and Astounding Stories, touting drug legalization and the virtues of cloning – yes, cloning! – as the signature issues of the libertarian ethos.
-- but Gillespe's got talent. Reason, although "self-conciously hip," is defining libertarianism's social component -- something the think-tanks often neglect. And it's worked. I can find the magazine in any suburban Barnes and Noble, while only five years ago readership was limited to economics professors. Perhaps if some other publication could push the economics (I vote for Liberty magazine, which is begging for a makeover,) and with Protocol focusing on the creative aspects, we'd have libertarian media nirvarna.
Moreover, Gillespe can throw a good party. I'd really like to thank him for that swanky open-bar event at 18th St Lounge last winter, although not for a minute did it beat Definition magazine's fundraiser last night; a pool party at the Embassy Hilton, followed by several DJs by the porch of a conference room. Good times.
Monday, September 9, 2002
Aaron Biterman, emerging libertarian scholar, has formed the MiddleEast_Libertarians yahoo group. Let the games begin
Monday, September 9, 2002 Robert Fisk is lecturing at Mason tomorrow night about the 9-11 aftermath. I have a statistics exam concurrently, but maybe I'll catch the first several minutes. I'm also looking forward to the Cato conference on Cyber-security, "Digital Pearl Harbor." Dorothy Denning isn't on the bill, but it's a hot topic nevertheless
Monday, September 9, 2002
As much as I hate to admit it, employing robots to do the dirty work in Afghanistan is pretty cool of the US Goverment; although the Tactical Mobile Robotics Program is "a five-year, 50 million Pentagon effort to develop machines capable of carrying out dangerous tasks so that soldiers won't have to."
While we're talking artificial life, go check out Ram's post on identifying computer simulation
Monday, September 9, 2002
The other day I asked my father who will replace the aircraft mechanics when he and his coworkers retire in ten years. The youngest guy at his station is fourty-two, and it doesn't seem like anyone my age is interested in the job. He explained to me that growing up in 70s everyone was a gearhead; today kids tool with computers. However, that doesn't mean no one is there to fill the positions. Now, aircraft technology is accessible to poorer regions of the world. Pilots can easily fly to Asia or South America to get work done.
Monday, September 9, 2002
Two items: don't miss Paul Auster this Friday at the Metro Center Olsen's. Secondly, go see 24 Hour Party People.
Saturday, September 7, 2002 US Ignored Terror Warning". You think? UK paper The Independent confirms the US received clear warnings in July before the 9-11 attacks. Sure, the news never trickled to us, but most politicans high-up in the ladder were told not to board public air-travel.
Saturday, September 7, 2002 Zoe Mitchell has a more refined response to my hasty anti-protest post.
I agree with Joanne, that a bunch of candy ravers on the Capitol, will not influence the decisions individual Senators make. However, if ROAR exclusively served as a means to educate people about government operations or look critically at the government itself, then it was highly effective.
Saturday, September 7, 2002
There is a very interesting travel narrative in the Chicago Tribune, about a mother visiting her son, an expat in Pristina.
Greg's friend Ilir summed up the dynamic as he drove us to the airport to catch our flight to Slovenia: "If they hear your American accent, they won't charge us to park," he said. When I asked why, he matter-of-factly told me, "It is out of respect for what the Americans did for us."
Friday, September 6, 2002
Since I archived the last page, my site has been getting a couple hits daily
from people googling "Sibel Edmonds." It's no wonder they end up here, her name generates only 5 pages of results and a quarter of those are synidications of Justin Raimondo's column. Here's a rehash from the Sunday Herald:
According to her lawyer Steven Kohn, [Sibel Edmonds] was fired because she wrote to her superiors and inadvertently highlighted how the bureau was still operating poorly, long after September 11. Edmonds, an Arab-American, had detailed her suspicions about a female colleague, a member of a Middle East group on an FBI watch list who was trying to recruit her and who left out parts of wiretapped conversations when translating them.
Edmonds was fired in March, says Kohn, after repeated warnings to keep quiet about the embarrassing information. FBI officials say she was fired because her 'disruptiveness' hurt her performance.
Friday, September 6, 2002
Rep Ron Paul's speech to congress last week is up on Lou Rockwell:
There is a military reason for not going to war. We ought to listen to the generals and other military experts, including Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft, Anthony Zinni, and Norman Schwarzkopf, who are now advising us NOT to go to war. Some have even cautioned against the possibility of starting World War III. They understand that our troops have been spread too thin around the world, and it is dangerous from a purely military standpoint to go to war today.
There is a constitutional argument and a constitutional mistake that could be made. If we once again go to war, as we have done on so many occasions since World War II, without a clear declaration of war by Congress, we blatantly violate the Constitution. I fear we will once again go to war in a haphazard way, by executive order, or even by begging permission from the rotten, anti-American United Nations. This haphazard approach, combined with a lack of clearly defined goals for victory, makes it almost inevitable that true victory will not come. So we should look at this from a constitutional perspective. Congress should assume its responsibility, because war is declared by Congress, not by a President and not by a U.N.
Friday, September 6, 2002
I've changed email. Send forwards and lists to my yahoo account, but attachments and interesting things go to jomc-at-opera-dot-com
Friday, September 6, 2002
This afternoon is the Rave against the RAVE act. It should be a fun time. There's a good line up of speakers. That being said, not for a minute do I believe this or any protest makes a difference in the statist heart of our legislative branch
My first day at Cato, the coordinator stressed the importance of dressing conservatively and maintaing decorum, "because the things we believe are so weird, we have to put a effort into being taken seriously." Call it conformist, but that's good advice. It's for that reason, protests never work and instead create an adverse effect.
I've been lurking on several "activist" yahoo groups, and found it funny that never did anyone alledge they were out to make a difference. Protests serve exclusively on a social level, as an example to make Robert Putnam beam. Protests are not marches. A march, i.e. the Million Man March or the upcoming Godless American March, is a way to signify the number of people holding a certain belief. Protests, however are uncouth; loud, obnoxious, and ultimatly ineffectual.
So how do you make a difference? Blogging. Really. One thing Cass Sunstein didn't anticipate in his book Republic.com, is that people like to argue. His thesis is similar to Putnam's only he identifies the internet as the cause for a disintegrated culture. But weblogs pretty much discredit that idea. People are actively seeking out arguments for debate, and maybe changing their minds in the process.
archive 8/30-9/3 Running regressions on radiation and liberty
