Monday, January 17, 2005

Journalists Recall Tsunami Disaster



Click here for AmazonThe silence from Banda Aceh and a big swath along the western coast of Sumatra gave me the chills. I was alone in The Associated Press office in Jakarta trying to find out details about the earthquake that had shaken Aceh province, calling number after number with no luck. All the lines were dead.

An editor on AP's regional desk in Bangkok, Thailand, reported they felt their building sway. What kind of a quake has an epicenter off Sumatra and is felt in Bangkok, 700 miles away? What kind of quake could silence so many people?

AP photographer Achmad Ibrahim, Associated Press Television News cameraman Andi Djatmiko and I rushed to the airport and flew to Medan, in the province adjoining Aceh. We got there at 9 a.m. only to spend over an hour haggling with drivers. Nobody wanted to go the 250 miles to Banda Aceh, because they feared aftershocks and reports were starting to come in that huge waves had smashed ashore.

Finally, we convinced one. We drove for 12 hours to arrive bleary-eyed in Banda Aceh, stunned at nature's carnage.

The provincial capital was a wasteland of rubble and mud. Watermarks up to 25 feet high stained the sides of buildings, marking the tsunami's path as it rampaged through the city. Hundreds of bodies lay in the streets

Scenes of chaos are imprinted in my mind: Motorized rickshaw drivers hauling bodies wrapped in straw mats, people on foot struggling to carry bloated corpses, unclaimed bodies partially covered by plastic or cardboard.

"A parent should never have to bury their own children. I spent all night burying 11 of mine," said the first village man I spoke to, his hands bloody from digging. "I don't have any energy left. But I have to search for two more -- my daughters."

People tugged on my arm, wanting to tell me their stories.

I called AP's Jakarta bureau by satellite phone with one of the first eyewitness accounts from Aceh.

There I remained for 14 days. One of my most touching experiences was interviewing the local APTN cameraman's 10-year-old son, who survived the tsunami up in a coconut tree.

I froze a few times as Ardiansyah recounted seeing his mother and little sister swept away to their deaths. I was terrified the interview would cause him psychological damage. But his father, Ferry Effendi, knew his son well. He let me know when to pause and when to go on...


Editor & Publisher: Journalists Recall Tsunami Disaster

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Delicious Monster



Click here for AmazonDelicious Monster is the Mac software company behind the hit Delicious Library, a program for cataloging collections of books, movies and games. The software is selling like hot cakes and has garnered rave reviews and awards, yet the company's headquarters is a Seattle coffee house.

Co-founded by graphic designer Mike Matas and programmer Wil Shipley, the company's first title, Delicious Library, was launched in November 2004. It generated $250,000 worth of sales in its first month, and the company has a crowded, popular booth here at Macworld.

Mike Matas co-founded Delicious Monster, the company behind popular Delicious Library software that is used to catalog media files. The application has garnered rave reviews and awards, yet the company works out of a Seattle coffee shop.Wil Shipman, co-founder of Delicious Monster, is hard at work in the company's offices at Seattle's popular Zoka coffee shop. The Zoka coffee shop in Seattle's university district is the central office for employees of Delicious Monster. They pay the coffee shop 'rent' by buying cup after cup of coffee. The tab runs to several hundred dollars a month...

...Delicious Library catalogs collections of books, movies and games. A video camera can be used to read the product's bar code, and the software downloads its details from the web.

...Delicious Library won an "innovators award" from O'Reilly & Associates. One of the software's niftiest features is its ability to use a video camera to read a product's bar code, which is used to fetch product details from the net.

Matas said the first week's sales of Delicious Library generated enough revenue to pay salary for the previous seven months.

...But from the start, the software was planned to be social, allowing friends, neighbors and colleagues to see what's in each others' media libraries, and turn collections into personal lending libraries.

...Version two, due later this year, will allow users to browse each other's libraries. It will be location-aware, letting users know who has what in their neighborhood or city.

It will also work on local networks (using Apple Computer's Rendezvous), so people can browse their colleagues' or fellow students' collections, just as Apple's iTunes exposes other users' playlists.

The current version already has a checkout manager for keeping track of loans.

As well as running personal lending libraries, the software can set up social connections: What better barometer of someone's personality than their taste in books and film?

"If you look at my movie collection, you can learn a ton about me," said Matas. "It's like a personal profile on Friendster listing interests and hobbies, but it’s much more natural. It's not done consciously. It's a natural profile of yourself."

The software also includes a recommendation engine built on Amazon.com's recommendation system.

Matas said the company talked to Amazon about a partnership, but the retailer didn’t like the lending feature. Why would people buy when they could borrow?

Matas said he convinced Amazon that people buy movies expressly to lend them out. They watch a movie two or three times, but want to own it so they can lend it to family or friends...


Monster Fueled by Caffeine

Time: Threat of Limo Bombs during Inauguration



Click here for AmazonAs Washington gears up for the first Inaugural of the post-9/11 era, one potential security threat has emerged as a particular focus of concern: vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, or VBIEDS, possibly disguised as limousines. The fears were prompted in part, say U.S. intelligence sources, by a 39-page document seized from al-Qaeda last year, titled "Rough Presentation for Gas Limo Project." It lays out a scenario for using limousines to deliver bombs equipped with cylinders of a flammable gas. Though the Inauguration is not specifically mentioned, parts of the document began circulating among senior U.S. intelligence authorities on Jan. 5. In response, barriers have been set up to block any vehicle bent on destruction.

The document is believed to have been written by Issa al-Hindi, an al-Qaeda operative captured in Britain last year. It recommends concealing bombs in limos because the vehicles "blend in" and "can transport larger payloads than sedans ... and do not require special driving skills." The limos can "access underground parking structures that do not accommodate trucks" and "have tinted windows that can hide an improvised explosive device from outside." The document calls for the deployment of three limos, each carrying 12 or more compressed-gas cylinders to create a "full fuel-air explosion by venting flammable gas into a confined space and then igniting it." It suggests painting the cylinders yellow to falsely "signify toxic gases to spread terror and chaos when emergency and haz-mat teams arrive." ...


Fears of automotive mayhem as the Presidential inauguration nears

Prager on Self-Hatred



Click here for AmazonDid you ever notice that there are no Germans going around the world saying, or making movies about, how awful Germany is or has been? Given that Germany unleashed two world wars and invented industrialized genocide, why has there been no German Michael Moore?

Are there any Japanese making films about the absence of Japanese soul-searching or expressions of sorrow over their country's enslavement, torture and murder of Asians in World War II? Has anyone ever encountered any Japanese self-hate?

...The answer, of course, is no. In fact, among all the world's peoples, only two produce large numbers of individuals who have greater sympathy for those who hate their country or national/ethnic group than for those who love it...

Many on the American Left loathe America (they love the Constitution and their vision of what America could be) and have contempt for the average American. That is why most of the Left has such admiration for Michael Moore, who has said, among so much more, the following:

* Americans "are possibly the dumbest people on the planet . . . in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug p----s" (London Daily Mirror).
* "Should such an ignorant people lead the world?" (open letter to the German People in Die Zeit).

Elsewhere, he speaks of America as bringing immeasurable misery and sadness to the world and as essentially deserving attacks on it...


Prager on Self-Hatred

Saturday, January 15, 2005

Saudi Terror Conference



Click here for AmazonFrontpage magazine calls attention to a Saudi Terror Conference. Disturbingly, the participants are not the opponents of the monarchy... they include the monarchy (hat tip: JihadWatch).

Are the Saudis our allies? Read on...

“This perverse ideology [Wahhabi Islam] has spread all over Saudi Arabia, in the schools, the mosques … [and] satellite channels… There’s a videotape now circulating in Saudi Arabia of a boy age 10 or less [in a Saudi orphanage]. He is asked, 'who is your role model?' And he answers, 'Osama Bin Laden.'” This damaging statement was not spoken by an opponent of the Saudi regime, but by Saudi Prince Khaled Al-Faysal on Al-Arabiyya TV on July 14th.

As part of MEMRI’s TV Monitoring Project (www.memritv.org), Saudi government-controlled television channels are continually monitored. These channels include shows with leading Saudi religious figures, professors, members of the royal family, government leaders, and intellectuals. Constant themes include calls for the annihilation of Christian and Jews, rampant anti-Americanism and antisemitism, and support for jihad.

...it is important to review the content of the Saudi media, particularly TV, as it relates to terrorism and hatred toward non-Muslims.

A recent example of hatred for Christians and Westerners is Saudi TV’s coverage of the tsunami disaster... Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Munajjid, Imam of the ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Mosque in Khobar, claimed first to Al-Majd on January 1 that Allah’s took revenge on the "criminals'" celebration - the Christmas holidays - and elaborated on January 6th that “perversions” during the Christmas holidays were to blame.

Sermons from Saudi mosques frequently contain calls to fight non-Muslims. In a sermon from Medina broadcast on Saudi TV channel 2, Sheikh Saleh Bdeir said on June 25: “The enemies of Islam, the Jews, Christians, atheists, and those from among the infidel Westernized who are enslaved by them within the Muslim community, never cease attacking the Islamic nation.”...

In the early summer, Saudi Sheikh Dr. Ahmad bin Abd Al-Latif, a professor at Um Al-Qura University, was asked on Saudi TV if it is permitted under Islamic law to pray for the annihilation of Christians and Jews. He answered, "… Cursing the oppressing Jews and the oppressing and plundering Christians and the prayer that Allah will annihilate them is permitted.”

Saudi cleric ‘Aed Al-Qarni spoke on Saudi Iqra TV channel on December 12 about why Jews and Christians will burn in Hell: “The Jews take pride in something they lie about; the Jews and the Christians… They say: 'Oh people, we, the Jews and Christians, are the sons of Allah…' They are lying, [may] Allah's wrath [be] upon them… If you are truthful, will Allah burn you in hell for your sins?… You will be punished for your lies.”

Calling for the throats of Christians and Jews to be slit and their skulls shattered, Al-Qarni told Iqra TV on December 26: "We Muslims should be rebuked. One billion two hundred million … are incapable of taking action … of harming the Jews… I pray to Allah that He will make the enemies fall … and that He will destroy the Jews and their helpers from among the Christians… We curse them … and pray that Allah will annihilate them, tear them apart, and grant us victory over them… Throats must be slit and skulls must be shattered. This is the path to victory, to shahada...” Citing a hadith. In a lecture on January 9th that aired on Iqra TV, Al-Qarni explained that Jews, “the brothers of apes and pigs,” and Christians should not be slaughtered only if they convert to Islam.


Saudi Terror Conference

Hugh Hewitt on the Home-town Refs



Click here for AmazonHugh Hewitt pounds Howard Kurtz flatter than a penny on a railroad track after the 5PM express. Kurtz, of course, had busily refuted the Fineman proposition that the mainstream media is truly another political party. Hewitt's salvos are among the loudest and most powerful blows to land on Kurtz, but by no means the only ones.

[Kurtz said:] ...the stereotype-they're liberal, and therefore they work overtime to stick it to Republicans--doesn't hold up. Some journalists clearly liked Clinton during the '92 campaign, but anyone who thinks the Clinton administration got good coverage from the press--remember that Whitewater, Travelgate, illegal fundraising, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky and the marc rich pardon were all press-driven stories--is seriously misguided. relations between the Clinton team and the Fourth Estate were incredibly tense in '98 and '99. and kerry was often depicted by the press as a cold and bumbling candidate, at least until the debates...


To combat this, Kurtz cites a string of Clinton scandals, which is not responsive. It isn't that major media refuses to cover news --though the studied indifference to big stories like Kerry's repeated and vehement claims to have been on an illegal mission to Cambodia on Christmas Eve in 1969 or his fabled "magic hat," or the claim of having met with every member of the U.N. Security Council etc etc went almost completely uncovered by the Kerry cheering section in MSM-- it is that they act like the home town referee in the big game with the cross state rival. The refs will call most of the flagrant fouls committed by the home team, but they'll miss the close calls, or they will see the out-of-towners holding whenever they really need to.

Dems get the home-field advantage --all the time, in every game, and even on some flagrant calls. Notice that Howard's list doesn't include Juanita Broaddrick? I love to remind people that editors at the Los Angeles Times deleted a reference to Broaddrick from a January 2001 George Will column about Bill Clinton. Such is the power of the home-town ref. And does Kurtz really want to argue that the MSM has followed up on the Rich pardon? Sure, the MSM covered the Clinton travails, and Keith Olberman compared Ken Starr's looks to those of Himmler's...

...To hell with metaphors, MSM is a party, using Webster's third definition: "a group of persons who support one side of a dispute, question etc."

...[Admitting] deep and significant bias in the news gathering and production operations of MSM would require a remedy. It would require a remedy because it contradicts the central claim of MSM to be objective. Nobody wants "objective" news that is really "partisan." The remedy would be the hiring of counter-partisans, which would really rebalance the very unbalanced MSM. But there are only so many jobs. Start hiring center-right journalists, and center-left journalists are going to go looking for work.

...Power is not often surrendered. But is often involuntarily ceded, and that is what happening as we sit here, with the blogosphere draining media credibility day by day. To stop the hemorrhaging, MSM is going to have to repopulate their ranks with voices and bylines credible to the center-right...


Hugh Hewitt: Ideological Affirmative Action

Friday, January 14, 2005

CBS: And the Hits Just Keep on Comin'



Click here for AmazonIf CBS thought its unfinished report would close the door on Rathergate, they were sadly mistaken.

As was pointed out today by a surprisingly eloquent Pat Buchanan on the Imus show, the forgery of military documents (even without the intent to overthrow a sitting President) is a Felony Offense.

Before it's all said and done, odds are someone will be serving time over this and related activities. The Captain sums up the recent fallout and reports that the fired CBS employees may file a wrongful termination lawsuit. That's good news, according to Cappie Ed, because... well, just read it. In short, when you shine a flashlight into a dirty pantry, the cockroaches are gonna go scurrying:

...Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, calls out CBS for its inaction:

Rather absented himself from the newscast Monday evening, the day the independent investigators' report and Moonves' response were made public. Then on Tuesday he was back in his usual role, after issuing a statement to CBS News colleagues that concluded: "I have seen us overcome adversity before. I am convinced we can do it again."

No apology. No acknowledgement that the buck stopped with him.

Rather has had many high points in a distinguished career since he succeeded Walter Cronkite on March 9, 1981. But this low point likely will haunt him forever, unless ...

Unless he quits the anchor's chair now, gives up any thought of continuing on 60 Minutes and helps his former co-workers who took the fall for his fumbling the ball find new jobs.


Interestingly and somewhat ironically, the paid advertisement for Neuharth's screed promotes NBC's Nightly News with new anchorman Brian Williams. Williams strikes a skeptical look for the camera, a hilarious counterpoint to Neuharth's scolding. He gazes out from the page as if thinking, "That's all you got?" ...

...Neuharth isn't the only one taking CBS to the woodshed today. Charles Krauthammer at the Washington Post also considers their response completely unaccpetable and says so in much stronger terms than Neuharth:

First comes the crime: Dan Rather's late hit on President Bush's Air National Guard service, featuring what were almost immediately revealed to be forged documents.

Then comes the coverup: 12 days of CBS stonewalling, with Dan Rather using his evening news platform to (a) call his critics "partisan political operatives," (b) claim falsely that the documents were authenticated by experts, and (c) claim that he had "solid sources," which turned out to be a rabid anti-Bush partisan with a history of, shall we say, prolific storytelling.

Now comes the twist: The independent investigation -- clueless, uncomprehending and in its own innocent way disgraceful -- pretends that this fiasco was in no way politically motivated.


If Les Moonves hoped to bury this scandal by using a supposedly independent panel, he finds himself very much in error...

...The four fired employees reportedly will fire wrongful-termination lawsuits against Viacom and CBS, a development we should all support. Not that the four didn't deserve to get fired, or even that their terminations were unfair in light of the escapes of Heyward and Rather; they all clearly deserved termination for incompetence at the least, and Mapes for a breathtaking record of lies and misleading statements connected to the story which should destroy her credibility for all time. No, the depositions and testimony of the lawsuit will finally force CBS and its executives -- including Dan Rather -- to come completely clean about the collapse of the once-dominant broadcast news outlet, and the mainstream media in general.


CQ: CBS: the Fallout Continues

Conservatives begin to infiltrate the left's last redoubt



Click here for AmazonThe inevitable slide of today's left continues...

...What accounts for the growing conservatism of college students? After 9/11, many collegians came to distrust the U.N.-loving left to defend the nation with vigor. As of late 2003, college students backed the war more strongly than the overall American population. Notes Edward Morrissey, "Captain Ed" of the popular conservative blog Captain's Quarters, these kids "grew up on . . . moral relativism and internationalism, constantly fed the line that there was no such thing as evil in the world, only misunderstandings." Suddenly, on 9/11, this generation discovered that "there are enemies and they wanted to kill Americans in large numbers, and that a good portion of what they'd been taught was drizzly pap."

Yet a deeper reason for the rightward shift, which began well before 9/11, is the left's broader intellectual and political failure. American college kids grew up in an era that witnessed both communism's fall and the unchained U.S. economy's breathtaking productivity surge. They've seen that anyone willing to work hard--regardless of race or sex--can thrive in such an opportunity-rich system. "I'm only 20, so I don't remember segregation or the oppression of women--in fact, my mother had a very successful career since I was a kid," one student observed in an online discussion. "I look around and don't see any discrimination against minorities or women." Left-wing charges of U.S. economic injustice sound like so much BS to many kids today...


WSJ: Conservatives begin to infiltrate the left's last redoubt.

Free Iran!



Click here for AmazonShortly after the reelection of George W. Bush a website was established showing photos of young Americans holding signs apologizing to the world for, among many things, our country having spearheaded the toppling of one of the world’s most brutal regimes. A corollary could be post WWII Americans apologizing to the world for having helped end Nazi Germany’s genocidal tyranny.

But those morally misguided Americans are not the only ones embarrassed and ashamed of their country. In fact, in the Middle East there is a nation whose behavior has compelled some of its sons and daughters to refer to themselves as “Persians” instead of “Iranians,” often because of the embarrassing associations connected with "Iran"...

...But unlike many Arab and other Islamic countries, the vast majority of Iranians are fed up with Islam dominating their lives. The 1979 Islamic Revolution that ushered in Islamic government has been an abject failure. It has turned Iran into an impoverished pariah state on a dangerous collision course with the West.

The ruling clerics viciously oppress the entire Iranian population, especially religious minorities and secular Iranians. Perhaps most oppressed are two of Iran’s indigenous religions, Bahaism and Zoroastrianism The former is a harmless faith that teaches the unity and betterment of humankind. The latter is the ancient pre-Islamic religion of Iran whose motto is “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” The term “discrimination” does not do justice to describe the treatment meted out to Bahais and Zoroastrians; “decimation” is perhaps more apt.

And then there are Persian Jews- the oldest Jewish community outside of the land of Israel. At one time a thriving community, since 1979 the majority fled the rabid anti-Semitism of the Islamic revolution. The remaining Jews are unable to visit or communicate with their relatives in Israel and live under constant intimidation by Iranian security services.

But life in Iran is not much better for the majority Muslim population either. Shariah, or Islamic law, is the law of the land. Apostasy or leaving Islam are punishable by death. For women or young girls who have been convicted of extra or premarital sex, death by stoning is sometimes the preferred mode of execution. Unlike a hanging, death by stoning is an intentionally long and agonizing death. On numerous occasions Iran has executed children as young as fifteen.

Iran is also a huge state sponsor of terrorism. The Lebanese-based Hezbullah, the “Party of God,” has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans since the 1980’s. Financed and trained by Iran, Hezbullah is the first Islamist group to perfect suicide bombings. Iran also supports Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas- two terrorist groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel and responsible for the deaths of nearly a thousand innocent Israelis. Belying the oft-heard mantra that “We only hate “Zionists, not Jews,” Hezbullah and Iran are widely believed responsible for the July 18, 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center that killed 85 people and wounded more than 200. This would be the equivalent of blowing up the Jewish Community Center in your own community. To this day it remains the most deadly anti-Semitic incident anywhere since World War II.

Iran is also meddling in Iraq. According Iyad Allawi, Prime Minister of the Iraqi interim government, Iran has been attempting to destabilize Iraq by supporting radical Shiite groups; and according to Secretary of State Colin Powel, Iran has also lent support to arch-terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

And if all that weren’t enough, Iran is dangerously close to obtaining nuclear weapons capability.

The danger of a country like Iran having nuclear weapons cannot be overstated. MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, was the policy that prevented the US and the Soviet Union from all out nuclear war. The logic behind MAD being that the Soviets did not want to die, nor did we, and so a certain détente was reached.

But how could MAD work with an adversary that worships death?

On December 14, 2001 former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani declared that “the use of a nuclear bomb on Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.” In other words, tiny Israel would be destroyed by a single Islamic nuclear bomb, but the one billion-strong Islamic world would be able to withstand any Israeli counter-strike, despite the loss of millions of Muslim lives residing in the country that attacked Israel.

This blatant call for genocide should be a wake up call for the world because by all accounts Iran is frighteningly close to having nuclear weapons capability, as well as the capacity to deliver such weapons as far as Europe.

But the silver lining in all of this is that the clerics in Iran are intensely unpopular with most Iranians. The US and every peace-loving nation should do everything in their power to encourage Iranian democrats to topple the nightmare rule of the clerics once and for all. A democratic Iran would have far-reaching, positive implications for the region, not to mention the people of Iran.

The world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism would be out of business. Iraq and Afghanistan would have a peaceful democratic neighbor. Terror-supporting Syria would lose its closest ally. Perhaps most importantly, the wider Middle East would take note that the first country to usher in Islamic revolution finally repudiated that ideology in favor of democracy, freedom and human rights.


Discarded Lies: Free Iran

Thursday, January 13, 2005

John Kerry reprises his 1970 meetings in Paris



Click here for AmazonCharles at LGF provides the following take on John Kerry's visit to the Middle East. The short version? I don't know if he violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice by meeting with Madame Binh in 1970 and '71. But I do know such an act didn't smell right then... and his recent actions smell worse today. Check it:

Fresh from his whirlwind tour of Arab dictatorships in Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Egypt, John Kerry wants us to know that they are very frustrated with US policies.

CAIRO (Reuters) - Middle East countries are frustrated by U.S. policy in Iraq and feel too little is being done to end violence there, U.S. Senator John Kerry said on Wednesday on a visit to the region.

Kerry repeatedly criticized the Bush administration’s Iraq policy during his failed bid to win the U.S. presidency from George W. Bush, who led the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.

“All of the countries of the region have a significant stake in the outcome and yet they are frustrated,” Kerry said in Cairo, where he met Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

“They are frustrated because they don’t feel that the steps necessary to be able to advance the stability of Iraq are really being taken,” he said.


ArabicNews.com says Kerry “admitted the US committed terrible mistakes,” in a meeting with the Grand Imam of Al Azhar University: Kerry to Al Azhar Grand Imam: Washington commited terrible mistakes in Iraq.

Meantime, Kerry admitted that the US committed terrible mistakes in Iraq. During a meeting on Wednesday with grand Imam of Al Azhar Mohamad Sayed Tantawi, Kerry regretted the difficult conditions in Iraq.

The Grand Imam urged all Iraqis to take part in the coming elections to be held on January 30. On his part, Kerry appreciated Al Azhar’s prestigious position all over the world, pointing out that there was a common ground between Islam and Christianity.


The Grand Imam of Al Azhar is on record supporting suicide bombing as a legitimate form of “resistance” against “occupiers.”

He has also said that suicide attacks against coalition forces in Iraq are permitted under Islamic law.

Are these some of “the steps necessary to be able to advance the stability of Iraq?”

I am now feeling an immense sense of relief that John Kerry is not President of the United States.


LGF: Kerry Kowtows to Despots and Islamists

Ignoring the Obvious




An Editorial Cartoon by Cox & Forkum

John Lott checks the NAS... before it wrecks itself



Click here for AmazonLast month, the National Academy of Sciences issued a 328-page report on gun control laws. The big news that has been ignored on all the blog sites is that the academy's panel couldn't identify any benefits of the decades-long effort to reduce crime and injury by restricting gun ownership. The only conclusion it could draw was: Let's study the question some more.

The panel has left us with two choices: Either academia and the government have wasted tens of millions of dollars and countless man-hours on useless research (and the panel would like us to spend more in the same worthless pursuit), or the National Academy is so completely unable to separate politics from its analyses that it simply can't accept the results for what they are.

Based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some of its own empirical work, the panel couldn't identify a single gun control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide or accidents.

From the assault weapons ban to the Brady Act to one-gun-a-month restrictions to gun locks, nothing worked. (Something that I have been the first person to investigate empirically for many of these laws, and I also had been unable to find evidence that they reduced violent crime.)

The study was not the work of gun-control opponents. The panel was set up during the Clinton administration, and of its members whose views on guns were publicly known before their appointments all but one had favored gun control...

...It is hard to look through the NAS panel's tables on right-to-carry laws and not find overwhelming evidence that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime... Overall, the panel's own evidence from the latest data up through 2000 shows significant benefits and no costs from these laws...


Volokh: John Lott responds

Ann Coulter goes OFF on CBS



Click here for AmazonI'll admit that Ann Coulter often comes off a shade too vitriolic for my personal tastes. Nonetheless, she's always interesting to listen to -- even when she's the proverbial bull in a china shop. In her latest column, she rips CBS a new bodily orifice and -- for good measure -- holds their head in the toilet and then flushes - repeatedly.

Read the whole thing: Liar, Liar - now you're fired

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Top Ten Proposed Changes at CBS



Click here for AmazonHugh Hewitt reports that he received an email that claimed to capture last night's Top 10 list from Letterman. As Hugh says, even if it wasn't... it shoulda been:

Top Ten Proposed Changes At CBS News


10. Stories must be corroborated by at least two really strong hunches.

9. "Evening News" pre-show staff cocktail hour is cancelled until further notice.

8. Reduce "60 Minutes" to more manageable 15-20 minutes.

7. Change division name from "CBS News" to "CBS News-ish"

6. If anchor says anything inaccurate, earpiece delivers an electric shock.

5. Conclude each story with comical "Boing" sound effect.

4. Instead of boring Middle East reports, more powerball drawings.

3. To play it safe, every "exclusive" story will be about how tasty pecan pie is.

2. Not sure how, but make CBS News more like "C.S.I."

1. Use beer, cash and hookers to lure Tom Brokaw out of retirement.


Hugh Hewitt

I guess they just forgot to run this story



Click here for AmazonThe "non-biased" folks at CBS -- and the vast majority of other mainstream media all-stars -- somehow didn't report upon this interesting and -- one would think -- quite important news. I guess they just forgot. Yowzer, Dan, it's hotter in this studio than the July Fourth Chili cook-off in Austin, TX!

WASHINGTON, Jan 7 (Reuters) - The U.S. government ran a $1 billion budget surplus in December, helped by a rise in corporate tax payments, the Congressional Budget Office said in its latest budget report released on Friday. The surplus, which compared with an $18 billion deficit in the previous December, helped create a smaller fiscal deficit for the first three months of the 2005 fiscal year, than in the same quarter of the prior year.


Reuters: US Ran Budget Surplus in December

Update

PoliPundit reader CJ points out this little adjunct to the story:

"CBO is projecting that the deficit will narrow slightly to $348 billion in 2005″

Hows that for liberal media bias? In only a far left extremist mind could a whopping 16.7% reduction in the deficit in a single year as "narrowing slightly."

Now a little math lesson for the mathmatically challenged donks. Bush has said his goal is to cut the deficit in half by 2009. Now we know that would be impossible with that paltry 16.7% reduction yearly cause Reuters said its just such a slight reduction. Get your calculators out, if you extrapolate that paltry 16.7% for each year until 2009 what number do you come up with? The answer is 168. As in the deficit will be at 168 billion in 2009. Well well well, even you donks can figure out thats a 60% reduction in the deficit from last year.


Oh, yeah, there was a 16.7% reduction in the deficit, too, that CBS (and the rest of the MSM) 'forgot' about.

The Party's Over



Click here for AmazonOver on MSNBC.com, Newsweek's Howard Fineman weighs in on the CBS scandal with a provocative piece arguing that for decades the "mainstream" media have in effect been a political party--the AMMP, or American Mainstream Media Party, as he infelicitously dubs it. "The notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press," he argues, is "pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things." And it's been a long time in going:

The seeds of its demise were sown with the best of intentions in the late 1960s, when the AMMP was founded in good measure (and ironically enough) by CBS. Old folks may remember the moment: Walter Cronkite stepped from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam. Later, he and CBS's star White House reporter, Dan Rather, went to painstaking lengths to make Watergate understandable to viewers, which helped seal Richard Nixon's fate as the first president to resign.

The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans. The problem was that, once the AMMP declared its existence by taking sides, there was no going back. A party was born.


The broadcast in which Cronkite declared America "mired in stalemate" and urged withdrawal from Vietnam aired on Feb. 27, 1968. In November of that year, Democrats began an almost unbroken string of electoral losses, including seven of the past 10 presidential elections.

If you accept Fineman's thesis, then the 2004 election was also a repudiation of the AMMP. As an erstwhile antiwar activist who never renounced his "war crimes" calumnies, Kerry was the perfect candidate of the partisan media. No wonder CBS and others tried to puff up Kerry as a "war hero" while obsessing over supposed deficiencies in President Bush's National Guard record.

The New York Sun's Seth Lipsky calls the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "the flip side of the tarnished coin of CBS":

One was the vaunted network that flubbed the story of a generation. The other was a true band of brothers, professional newsmen not, who had a story that none of the big institutions wanted. They put it on the air themselves with the contributions of more than 150,000 ordinary Americans and discovered that it resonated powerfully with an electorate that had grown tired of being treated with cynicism.


If the downfall of CBS and the voters' rejection of Kerry are the denouement of the Vietnam War, it couldn't have come a moment too soon. For many in the media have been working feverishly to discredit another war--a war that, unlike Vietnam, America cannot afford to lose.

CBS, though, still seems to be in denial about the whole thing. Here's an astonishing quote from the Baltimore Sun:

Executives at the network--long a target of critics who detect a political agenda in its news division--are clinging to the panel's finding on political bias.

"That for us was the big headline: That there was no political agenda, because that would have been terrible," said Linda Mason, CBS News' senior vice president for standards and special projects, whose position was created Monday in response to the report. "We were all greatly relieved to see that the panel did extensive work and gave us a clean bill of health in terms of it not being politically motivated."


Lipsky writes that he is not "terribly troubled by the prospect of bias at one, or even several, of the big networks or newspapers":

The First Amendment doesn't require that one must check his or her biases to enter journalism. On the contrary, to protect the airing of bias is precisely one of the purposes of the Founders in crafting the First Amendment.


We're not sure we agree with Fineman's conclusion that the idea of a nonpartisan press is "pretty much dead." But if CBS won't acknowledge its bias even in such a clear-cut case, it's hard to see how that network can ever restore its credibility as a neutral source of news--or why anyone should bother to watch, especially with so many alternatives available. We wouldn't be surprised if sometime in the next decade the network decides to put its news division out of business altogether.


James Taranto: The Party's Over

Software Layering Principles



Click here for AmazonMartin Fowler recently solicited input from participants in an enterprise software workshop. The topic? Preferred software layering principles (hat tip: John Lim). Participants were free to suggest principles and vote on any with which they agreed or disagreed.

They didn't appear in any particular order in Martin's blog, but I thought I'd reorder them from agree-to-disagree ratio (first number-to-last number) so that we can easily see consensus.

I was especially interested to see how many folks preferred to throw exceptions between layers (highlighted). I couldn't agree more.


* Business layer only uses abstractions of technological services. 14/0
* Layers should be testable individual. 12/0
* Separation of concerns. 11/0
* Layers are a logical artifact that does not imply distribution between layers. 11/0
* Low coupling between layers, high cohesion within them. 10/0
* Inbound external interface modules (eg web service handlers) should not contain business logic. 10/0
* User interface modules should contain no business logic. 10/0
* Business logic layers contain no user interface and don't refer to user interface modules. 8/0
* No circular references between layers. 8/0
* Layers may share infrastructural aspects (eg security) 7/0

* Layers should be shy about their internals. 8/0
* Lower layers should not depend on upper layers. 6/0
* Adaptability: be able to change. 2/0
* Layers should be substitutable. 2/0
* Layers should be independently maintainable and versioned. 2/0
* A layer should be wary of exposing lower layers to upper layers. 1/0
* Layers can have multiple adjacent upper layers. 2/1
* Every layer should have a secret. 3/2
* Layers should be agnostic of consumers (a layer shouldn't know who's on top of it.) 4/4
* Prefer layers to interact only with adjacent layers. 4/4

* Always wrap domain logic with a service layer. 4/5
* Layers should only interact with adjacent layers. 2/3
* The domain layer should not talk to external systems - the service layer should do that. 2/3
* Changing a lower level layer interface should not change upper layer interfaces. 2/5
* There are at least three main layer types: presentation, domain, and data source. 3/9
* Separate development teams by layer. 1/22
* Layers should have separate deployment units (eg separate jars or assemblies for each layer). 0/7
* Rethrow exceptions at layer boundaries. 0/15
* Distribute at layer boundaries 0/18


Martin Fowler: Layering Principles

And the Dead shall Walk the Earth (and Vote)



Click here for AmazonI wonder if Barbara Boxer will break down and cry, while standing on the Senate floor, as a protest against the outrageous cheating in the Washington Gubernatorial election?

Democrat Christine Gregoire will be sworn in as Washington’s Governor today, possibly thanks to voters such as Mary Coffey, James Courneya and Rosalie Simpson. Why do we mention them in particular? Because, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently reported, they’re all dead–and have been since well before the first absentee ballots were even mailed out.

Revelations of the formerly living casting ballots in elections isn’t new to American politics, although it’s something most of us thought was a relic of the late Richard Daley’s Chicago. But this isn’t the only jaw-dropper to have come out of Washington’s gubernatorial race, which Ms. Gregoire claims to have won–on a third recount, by 129 votes–over Republican Dino Rossi. Now Mr. Rossi is contesting the result in state court, hoping a judge will find enough evidence of fraud or incompetence to order a revote, a prospect Ms. Gregoire calls “absolutely ludicrous.”

Mr. Rossi certainly has a mountain of evidence on his side. In December, officials in King County, which includes Seattle, discovered 573 “erroneously rejected” absentee ballots, plus another 150 uncounted ones that showed up in a South Seattle warehouse. There were reports that hundreds of voters were registered in storage rental facilities and private mailboxes, that felons had voted, and that military ballots were sent out too late to be counted. Then we learned that several hundred provisional ballots had simply been fed into voting machines, making it impossible to authenticate their legality. Now it turns out the number of votes cast in King County exceeds the total number of voters by about 1,800...


And the Dead shall Walk the Earth (and Vote)

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Open-source Convergence News



Click here for AmazonThe always-useful News.com reports that the promise of enterprise acceptance of open-source technologies is helping to reshape the IT services market. A host of new companies are jumping on the OSS bandwagon, hoping to deliver design, development, and support services.

The new companies include SpikeSource (co-founded by Kim Polese of Marimba fame), SourceLabs, and Optaros... among many others. Support and maintenance (e.g., simplified upgrades) appear to be the low-hanging fruit for several of these companies. The primary products for which services are offered are enterprise application serving platforms, i.e., LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP), Tomcat, and other wildly popular technologies.

Let's put this into context. Zend, the maker of PHP's engine and a variety of open- and closed-source support tools for PHP just yesterday announced a new offering called Platform. Platform is a suite of tools; personally, however, the most interesting (and strategic) component is the following:

PHP/Java Interoperability - Bridges the gap between PHP and Java by providing a practical, efficient means of leveraging existing Java/J2EE applications. Rather than launching a separate Java Virtual Machine (JVM) instance for each Java call, Zend Platform uses a single JVM, requiring minimal server resources and making composite PHP/Java applications a reality. PHP/Java Interoperability makes interoperability between your applications practical.


In other words, Zend has gotten a lot smarter about tying the power of J2EE back-end objects (i.e., persistence, fault-tolerance and transactional integrity) to the ease-of-use that has always been a hallmark of PHP.

The convergence of improved service offerings around LAMP and the introduction of dramatically superior PHP/J2EE integration are big wins for the PHP community at large, Zend, and enterprise developers in general.

Zend Platform

Sandy Berger Update: Destroying Classified Documents



Click here for AmazonGee, I wonder why Berger was, by his own admission, pilfering and destroying documents? If you want your blood pressure to stay within its normal systolic/diastolic range, please don't read the last line of the following article from the Post.

The criminal probe into why former Bill Clinton aide Sandy Berger illegally sneaked top-secret documents out of the National Archives — possibly in his socks — has heated up and is now before a federal grand jury...

...Berger admits removing 40 to 50 top-secret documents from the archives, but claims it was an "honest mistake" made while he vetted documents for the 9/11 commission's probe into the Twin Towers attacks.

Berger has also acknowledged that he destroyed some documents — he says by accident...

...The documents include multiple drafts of a review of the 2000 millennium threat said to conclude that only luck prevented a 2000 attack.

That story conflicts with Berger's own testimony to the commission, in which he claimed that "we thwarted" millennium attacks by being vigilant — rather than by sheer luck, as the review reportedly suggests.

The probe was touched off last spring when stunned archives staffers reported seeing Berger sneak classified documents out of a top-secret reading room in his pants and socks while vetting Clinton-era items for the commission.

They then ran a sting operation in which they coded some documents and confirmed they were missing when Berger left.

The documents were classified Code Word, the highest security classification, above Top Secret.

The commission report makes clear that Berger had a habit of writing candid notes in the margin of memos, sometimes flatly rejecting plans for action.

He nixed a plan to capture Osama bin Laden with one word: "No."


NY Post: Sandy Berger Update: Destroying Classified Documents