Wednesday, March 30, 2005

oops! Don't you hate it when other people in the so-called free, civilized world find more secret evidence of your government approved torture program. Better call in the apologists.

Memo Shows U.S. Inmate Interrogation Plans in Iraq

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top U.S. commander in Iraq authorized prisoner
interrogation tactics more harsh than accepted Army practice, including using
guard dogs to exploit "Arab fear of dogs," a memo made public on Tuesday showed.

The Sept. 14, 2003, memo by Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the
senior commander in Iraq, was released by the American Civil Liberties Union,
which obtained it from the government under court order through the Freedom of
Information Act.

"The memo clearly establishes that Gen. Sanchez authorized unlawful
interrogation techniques for use in Iraq, and in particular these techniques
violate the Geneva Conventions and the Army's own field manual governing
interrogations," ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said in an interview.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Shades of Bernays

Another journalist is caught shilling for Bush Co.

TV Reporter Earned Money from State
At the same time one of Florida's most visible television reporters brought
the news to viewers around the state, he earned hundreds of thousands of dollars
on the side from the government agencies he covered.Mike Vasilinda, a 30-year
veteran of the Tallahassee press corps, does public relations work and provides
film editing services to more than a dozen state agencies.His Tallahassee
company, Mike Vasilinda Productions Inc., has earned more than $100,000 over the
past four years through contracts with Gov. Jeb Bush's office, the Secretary of
State, the Department of Education and other government entities that are
routinely part of Vasilinda's stories.Vasilinda also was paid to work on
campaign ads for at least one politician and to create a promotional movie for
Leon County. One of his biggest state contracts was a 1996 deal that paid nearly
$900,000 to air the weekly drawing for the Florida Lottery.Meanwhile, the
freelance reporter's stories continued to air on CNN and most Florida NBC
stations, including WFLA-Channel 8 in Tampa.On Friday, Vasilinda told the
Herald-Tribune that his business dealings with state government don't influence
his reporting.

Sunday, March 27, 2005

Wired 13.02: VIEW: "'Music,' he explained, 'is different' from other intellectual property. Not Karl Marx different - this isn't latent communism. But neither is it just 'a piece of plastic or a loaf of bread.' The artist controls just part of the music-making process; the audience adds the rest. Fans' imagination makes it real. Their participation makes it live. 'We are just troubadours,' Tweedy told me. 'The audience is our collaborator. We should be encouraging their collaboration, not treating them like thieves.'"

An perfect quote for the IP paper for Arizona. Excellent.

Friday, March 25, 2005

Welcome to GUN GUYS
These guys are nuts.

Friday, March 18, 2005

MEMRI TV

The following are excerpts from an interview with Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi. Al-Jazeera TV aired the interview on February 2, 2005:

Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: In order to really implement religious law we must provide an atmosphere of freedom. First of all, people must have the opportunity to say: "We want religious law." The secularists say: "No, the people don't want religious law. We provide them with liberty so they..." What do you want? Do you want to be ruled by Muhammad's law, or by Marx's law, or by Napoleon's law, or by the Americans' law? In which direction do you pray -- to Mecca, to Washington, to London or to Paris?

When the tyrannical regime in Iran fell, the Shah's regime, which worked for the Americans, and ruled the people by bloodshed, oppression, prisons, and blood, when this regime fell, and Khomeini came to power, they held a referendum: Do you want to be ruled by Islamic law? Ninety-nine percent said: Yes, we want Islamic law. Therefore, freedom should be in the service of Islam. I think that our peoples, for the most part-- there is a faction that has become secularist, Western, and Marxist -- but the vast majority of this people still believes that Islam is the solution and the source of authority and the foundation. They don't want to import anything from the East or from the West.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

A la Gauche: Political News and Commentary from the Far Left

good stuff. quite funny. it would be great if the dems actually picked up on some of this. it might make it halfway feasible to support them as a party.

Saturday, March 12, 2005

Here is a bit of data to support my assertion below that blogging, as influential as it appears to be in generating scandal, is a marginal phenomenon in terms of the people who get their news from it--whether online or off.
Barron's Online - Fighting the Tape

from my furl archive (not sure if this will work)

In February Fox drew an average of 1.57 million viewers a day, more than double CNN's 637,000. Fox has been widening its lead over CNN since 2002, when it first leaped ahead.
But last month, about ten million Americans each still tuned in every evening to those dying dinosaurs, NBC's Nightly News and ABC's World News Tonight. And nearly eight million watched the CBS Evening News.

That show didn't lose too many viewers even after its anchor, Dan Rather, was caught up in the scandal over 60 Minutes' questionable preelection report about President Bush's National Guard service during the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, for those who can't get enough coverage of the Michael Jackson and Scott Peterson cases, NBC's Today show gets about six million viewers a day and ABC's Good Morning America about five million. Three million people a day still watch CBS's perennial also-ran, The Early Show, over their morning coffee.

If you add the ratings of the leading broadcast news shows together--even assuming some duplication among viewers--it's clear that many, many more Americans watch the mainstream network news shows than view either Fox News or CNN.

True, viewership of the network news has been declining for years, and their audience may not be the most "desirable demographic," as the marketing people say.

But even in the cool, dynamic world of the Internet, the mainstream media rule.
The following table from Nielsen//NetRatings shows the 20 most popular news web sites among U.S. users in January.

Top 20 U.S. News Sites -- January 2005
Brand/Channel
Unique Users
Yahoo! News
23,220,000
CNN
22,047,000
MSNBC
20,425,000
AOL News
15,488,000
Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division
12,353,000
Internet Broadcasting Systems Inc.
12,159,000
NYTimes.com
9,774,000
USATODAY.com
9,524,000
Knight Ridder Digital
9,429,000
Tribune Newspapers
9,093,000
Google News
7,811,000
ABCNEWS Digital
7,585,000
Hearst Newspapers Digital
6,720,000
CBS News
6,292,000
WorldNow
6,220,000
washingtonpost.com
5,864,000
Associated Press
5,738,000
BBC News
5,660,000
Fox News
4,848,000
Advance Internet
4,787,000
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

Poor, benighted CNN is a juggernaut here; its site pulls in a whopping 22 million users a month. MSNBC.com, whose namesake cable news network long has been a distant third, drew 20.4 million.

Yahoo, which had 23 million users in January, and America Online, with 15.5 million, aren't news organizations themselves but rely on feeds from established providers like Reuters and the Associated Press.

Other big mainstream media outlets whose websites rack up big numbers are The New York Times, USA Today, Knight-Ridder, Tribune and ABC News.

"It is the large branded providers that people are going to [online]," says Charles Buchwalter, Nielsen//NetRatings' vice president of client analytics.

Conclusion: Tens of millions of U.S. Internet users trust the news they're getting from the mainstream media, and this silent majority simply doesn't buy the "liberal bias" argument conservatives have been pushing for decades.

Some might call these millions deluded or brainwashed, but if you believe in free markets, you believe consumers are smart enough to know the difference between a good product and a bad one.

By the way, Fox News's website ranks 19th out of the top 20, trailing even the BBC among U.S. Internet users. Ironically Fox uses the mainstream AP for the news feeds on its own site.
And while we're on the subject of Fox, you might have seen the recent front-page story in The Wall Street Journal about the apparent falling out between Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation's chairman and chief executive, and Liberty Media's chairman John Malone (see "Stock Gambit Strains Relations Between Two Media Titans," March 3).

In that story, the blunt-speaking Malone gave the game away:

"Mr. Malone suggested Mr. Murdoch start the FX entertainment channel, which later became part of a joint venture between News Corp. and Liberty, and in the mid-1990s encouraged Mr. Murdoch to launch the Fox News Channel.

"The mainstream media, Mr. Malone says, 'had drifted off into too much political correctness, too much socialism and we needed a spokesman...for the free market.'"

"A News Corp. spokesman disputes Mr. Malone's characterization of Fox News and says Mr. Murdoch 'always envisioned it as a middle-of-the-road' channel.'"

And I have a middle-of-the-river bridge to sell anyone who buys that.

Fox News has real appeal to certain people. The point of view it and many Internet blogs propound probably has been underrepresented in the opinion sections of many established newspapers, magazines and broadcast networks.

But when it comes to the news, there's no substitute for the mainstream media. Despite our problems, we do our best to report as honestly and professionally as we can.
The American people clearly agree. Numbers don't lie.

-----
I will also note that, this is something I have been saying for at least two years. No one will ever read this paper as it is long winded and probably mostly banal, but there is a shorter version I tried to edit for a GMU online magazine, but which they ultimately rejected because they wanted it to be written down to undergrads for funding purposes.

Friday, March 11, 2005

Okay so obviously it's been a busy semester. First post of the new year.

I don't know why I have become accustomed to jumping into the blogosphere from Andrew Sullivan. At first it was because I was already getting some information I agreed with and I thought he was a good guage of where the Pro-Bush, neo-cons were headed. He would often piss me off, but at least I could better understand the logic of the people who seemed to be such craven cheerleaders for fascism.

Then, as the shit started to hit the fan last spring/summer, between the absence of WDMs in Iraq and the release of the Abu Ghraib I was sort of shocked to see him as one of the few people who was actually re-thinking some of his positions. So I watched him as a hopeful guage of the direction of the other side of the possible voting public in November. That was, of course, a serious disappointment--the election, that is, not the fact that one guy out of the posse was asking a few moral questions that have since become almost unconscionably spun into something to be valued: that is, the use of torture to get information that leads to saving lives. For some reason the cognitive dissonance learning about these things causes makes people use the most juvenile, transparent arguments as justification. Since there was no information to get out of people in Ghraib; since there have been no convictions for terror since the Patriot Act was instituted, I don't think these "ticking bomb" scenarios are all that relevant.

The problem is that once you tell someone to do whatever they can to get "the information" it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy-and rarely in the way that it does in Sartre's "The Wall." The hitch the the "ticking bomb" scenario is that most of the time the interrogators, almost as a structural response to the situation, have to assume that something bad is about to happen and that the reason that they have resorted to these methods is to find out for sure. It is the logic of the pre-emptive Bush/PNAC doctrine taken to its micropolitical conclusion: you torture, you bomb, you kill relentlessly because you don't know--or claim not to know--what is a reasonable threat and what is simply an irrational, primal response to a fucked up situation, then afterwards you say things like Col. Jessup i.e. Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men and anyone who asks questions is some liberal softie for believing in the value of the law. In the end, I think it has to be a complicated negotiation between the two positions, but if you don't have, to extend the metaphor, the Kaffee (Cruise) position, then there really isn't anything worth protecting on this side of the wall, as far as I am concerned. Then again, I am obviously one of the softies so I would think that.

I digress, but not far, because what I was initially going to say was that there are a couple of pieces that Sullivan has recently put up, neither of which are all that original, but which remind me of patterns that are continuing to emerge.

http://www.andrewsullivan.com/main_article.php?artnum=20050220

In the first, he sets the ground for the second by noting something that Cultural Studies folks noted long ago about the Sony Walkman and which is, anyway, a fairly obvious observation made by someone who doesn't normally try to talk about these things. The piece is about how the Apple iPod has become "ubiquitous" and has changed our culture fundamentally so that there is an end to society. Since we are no longer forced to interact with our fellow humans in the public sphere because we are stuck behind our ear buds, the social fabric is rotting. I have already lived through this and haven't been keen to jump onto that bandwagon: after riding the bus to elementary and middle school in my own little insular bubble, embarassing myself by singing out loud to my favorite (often very bad) songs, I have come to appreciate the value of not having music in my ears every second of the day. That and I am a grad student who simply can't rationalize spending $300 on a machine, however awesome, that I don't really need. Besides, I have too much reading to do. Anyway, the wide-eyed Sullivan is largely trapped behind a whole other set of blinders which is basically the perspective of an upper middle class fellow who notices his fellow iPod users more than the immigrant mothers and homeless vets and assesses that they are society and since they are listening to the iPod, something new and exciting (or disturbing) must be happening. But this techno-centered view of the world is to be expected from a blogger, especially one as triumphalist and elitist as Sullivan. As with the financial outlays for an iPod, many people (technically, including myself: this machine was bought totally on credit and has yet to be paid off) can't afford a computer with regular internet access. So to think of either of these things as widespread causal factors of anything in the broader society is fairly elitist. Yes they may have an interesting conversation with a good 1-5% of the population, and they certainly have an effect, but they certainly aren't something anywhere close to a mass medium. It doesn't seem to occur to him that, as Putnam and others have pointed out, and Hardt and Negri and others hope to change, civic society has been disintegrating and dessicating for years.

Nevertheless, he is trying to think this stuff through and, in the second column, he manages to come up with, roughly, the same sort of conclusion that Habermas comes to in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Namely, that the distinction between public and private has been erased, which, destroys much of the private sphere as a necessary counter balance to the public sphere. His final words in this section are, I think, useful: "the technology that has liberated us in so many ways is also capable of suffocating that inviolable personal space that once had another name. That name was freedom." I try not to think in these terms, but it is still an important argument, I think, for what it points to.

But Habermas doesn't give a technological explanation to how this came to be. Though technology obviously played a role, the distinction between public and private had to do with two movements which, in sequence, began the dissolution of the liberal order. With the commodification of culture people were no longer asked to participate in the cultural sphere as more than consumers and cultural objects were simply there to be consumed. (with the strengthening of copyright, this is becoming even more pronounced.) And this movement was met with another, which made the distinction between public and private even more tenuous and degraded the function (or even existence) of civil society. The latter was defined as a space for the discussion of the society that was not subject to the interventions of either the state or the market. As large corporations and non governmental organizations (lobby groups, activist groups, etc.) began to refuedalize the notion of representative democracy, i.e. instead of representing the people, they represented their power over the political process to the people through publicity, much like the monarch of the fuedal order. This left less space for civil society to have power to change the political order. An interventionist state is the last component of the structural stransformation. In an almost libertarian argument, Habermas points to the loss of privacy, or at least the disctinction between public and private, with the expansion of the welfare state. (232-236 basically sums up this part of the argument.)


I will have to pick up on this argument later and bring it back to one of the books I am reading at the moment by Tyler Cowen.