Month: May 2002

Tonight on FOX: Who Wants to Marry a Terrorist?

Corner (whose permalink seems busted, but whose main page is here) points out a story in a Portuguese newspaper which describes one of the 13 Church of the Nativity exiles as “Single, with a free house and a reliable allowance, all he needs is a bride”, quoting a PA spokescritter as stating: “He is not married, he does not have a girlfriend. We are looking for a bride for him.”

David Grant, call your office! This is a reality show begging to happen. “We’ve provided this handsome gunman with twelve sexy infidel daughters of the Great Satan. Which will he choose to make his bride?”

This is totally Lair’s schtick, so I leave it to him to pick up from here…

By the way, in poking around for this piece I came across this page from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which provides detail on exactly who each of the 13 men are and what they are accused of. It’s not an objective source, of course. But it provides a convincing level of detail (even includes sources, in some cases) and frankly, I’m far more inclined to take the Israeli’s statements at face value than those of the PA. I would, however, like to see a similar document from the PA perspective (or any other opposing view) — so if it anyone has a pointer, send it my way. You don’t have to agree with it, just pass it on, I’ll post it, and intelligent people can make up their own minds. The wonders of a free market of ideas in action, baby.

More from Bennett

Everyone else getting as tired of this as I am? Good. Like bloody pulling teeth, it is.

Anyway, Mr. Bennett has deigned to provide us with an actual source of data to substantiate his arguments. He posts the following his page in response to my last assessment of his responses:

“Maybe this will help. Twenty percent of lesbians died of murder, suicide, or accident–a rate 487 times higher than that of white females aged 25-44. The age distribution of samples of homosexuals in the scientific literature from 1989 to 1992 suggests a similarly shortened life-span.”

All-righty then. We’ve now got two documents on the table available for fact-checking; and gee, I only had to ask twice.

With that, I’ve accomplished my objectives from my original challenge: first, to ensure that his reprehensible comments did not go unanswered and to make my opinion of them and his conduct clear; and second, to encourage him to put some actual facts on the table to support his statements (or, alternatively, to demonstrate that he had no facts to provide.) Now, both his readers and mine can make that judgment for themselves (and I encourage anyone interested to check the source he provided on partner abuse among lesbian couples as well. ) Justice is served.

I don’t intend to spend any further time on the matter; to be frank, I’m skeptical regarding the veracity of the sources Mr. Bennett provided, but fair is fair: he has provided them, so that’s worth something. Again, the key is that now anybody interested can check for themselves. As it happens, I’m not actually all that interested (never was): my interest was in getting Mr. Bennett to put his cards on the table; not in spending the next few weeks debating this issue.

I encourage anyone interested in further pursuing this matter to continue checking Bennett’s page; I’m sure he’ll have a nice dose of invective about my ending this conversation; probably something along the lines of declaring victory and claiming that he’s proven his case. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that bringing assertions to the table of discussion is the beginning of productive argument and debate; not the end of it.

This will be my last post on this issue barring extraordinary occurrences; in the immortal words of Ms. Rosenberg: “Bored now.”

Update (Monday): I won’t be investing any more of my time in this, but I will post any (reasonable) information readers send my way, out of courtesy to those investing their time. On that note, Jody over at NakedWriting pointed me to this page by UC Davis Professor Gregory Herek, which at first blush, appears to give a thorough Fisking to the source Bennett quoted. For the record, Bennett has now withdrawn the citation on his site after folks pointed him to the same resource. Update Redux: Alex Elliott points out this piece by Andrew Sullivan, which provides some additional debunking. Kinda figured Andrew would have something to say about this fellow.

New page header for a day or so, but I suppose that’s obvious. I believe it speaks for itself.

Evil Lesbian Update

In own comments section, Bennett has responded to my challenge as follows (I include my original questions, Bennett’s responses in quotes, and my own commentary)

1) Women who choose other women as sexual partners are more likely to inflict domestic abuse on their partners than heterosexual males.

Bennett: “See Violent Betrayal: Partner Abuse in Lesbian Relationships by Claire M. Renzetti. It reports that fully one-half of lesbian relationships are violent; the corresponding figure for straight relationships is around 1-3 percent, depending on how you define “violent.”

Okay, we have one source; it’s a start, I suppose. And it’s on Amazon, so it must be true.

In seriousness, though, I have not read Ms. Renzetti’s work so I can’t comment on it positively or negatively. I’d welcome feedback from any readers with additional information or opinions, certainly. But let the record show that Mr. Bennett has honorably provided us a source to investigate for this claim.

(Note: I replaced Bennett’s link to the $83.95 hardcover edition with a link to the nice cheap $29.95 paperback edition. Oh, and if you use my link you won’t be kicking back cash to Mr. Bennett, either, which I believe the original link would have).

2) Women who choose other women as sexual partners are more likely to suffer from the following potentially fatal diseases: X, Y, and Z. (I leave Bennett to fill in the blanks).

Bennett: “Life-span data is easy to come by, and it supports my other claims, which didn’t come out of thin air.”

Trust me, Richard, thin air isn’t where I thought they came out of. But I’m sorry, you get zero points for this answer: vague hand-waving that data is “easy to come by” doesn’t cut it.

BearPower Revealed!

Following TTLB exclusive regarding Mr. Bennett’s hypocrisy with regard to matters linky, it appears that Bennett has quietly redesigned his right navbar to no longer separate out ‘pro’ journalists from bloggers (the very offense for which he castigated Virginia Postrel).

Coincidence? We think not; particularly since TTLB sent Mr. Bennett an email referring to the aforementioned post which he acknowledged receipt of.

Let the record also show that said navbar changes occurred without any public acknowledgement of TTLB’s comments (or links to the post on the matter), which, if I understand Bennett’s own standards correctly, makes him a bloghole.

TTLB is now flush with triumph, and we see near-endless possible uses for this newfound power to inflict site redesigns at will (which, we promise, will be used only for Good, not Evil). The dilemma is simply which to affect first. Should we convince CNN that five characters is too goddamned small to make a search dialog? Dissuade Ain’t It Cool News from vomiting up pop-up ads like a drunken sailor? Or simply convene an intervention with Jacob Weisberg to assure him that no, those slide-out ads that cover the whole page are not the coolest thing since Microsoft Bob ?

Possibilities, possibilities.

PS – I promise to leave Mr. Bennett alone for at least a little while (‘cept maybe responding to any follow-ups he might lob my way re: evil lesbians). I’m starting to go all Sullivan-Krugman-y on him, I know…

Mr. Roboto vs. The Lesbians

“Mr. Roboto” Bennett is trolling for hits, and has decided to beat up some lesbians to get ’em.

Ok, I’ll bite, although I should probably know better (Bennett’s comments are arguably of the “best left just ignored” variety).

Bennett picks up on a question raised by Eugene Volokh and followed up by Charles Oliver: why don’t more fathers want their daughters to be lesbians? Bennett enlightens us as follows:

Charles has the answer, but allow me to summarize, as a father of three young women and one who’s had the experience of doing battle with lesbians for several years in the California legislature as they relentlessly stick their noses into the corpus of family law even where it doesn’t remotely concern them: lesbians are gross.

They don’t look like normal women and they don’t act like normal women. They beat up their partners more often than men do, they suffer from a myriad of life-shortening diseases, and they believe an entire universe of things that aren’t true, even abstractly true. They’re bitter, twisted, and miserable, and they want others to share their pain. I’d rather my girls be prostitutes, heroin addicts, or Mormons than lesbians.

I don’t particularly care for the term “homophobe”, so if you are waiting for that word to pop up here, sorry. My preferred label for folks who fling broad insults towards large groups of individuals is simply “asshole”, and I think it sums up my assessment of Mr. Bennett’s rude behavior more precisely.

Bennett is fond of statistics and nice graphs when they suit his purpose, so I challenge him here to back up the following claims with scientific research or other cold hard facts:

1) Women who choose other women as sexual partners are more likely to inflict domestic abuse on their partners than heterosexual males.

2) Women who choose other women as sexual partners are more likely to suffer from the following potentially fatal diseases: X, Y, and Z. (I leave Bennett to fill in the blanks).

And by the way, even if we take Bennett’s claims at face value and accept, for an intellectually painful moment, his assertions that lesbians “beat up their partners more often than men do, they suffer from a myriad of life-shortening diseases, and they believe an entire universe of things that aren’t true” — does Bennett really mean to say he’d rather have his daughters become heroin addicts (which to my understanding has a high probability of wrecking your life entirely) than suffer an increased risk of spousal abuse and disease, and/or — even worse! — believe things Bennett disagrees with? Sheesh, to think he was criticizing Glenn Reynolds for poor fatherhood.

BBC: Bringing you the best (and worst) in online journalism. All at once!

Check out this Flash presentation entitled “US Missile Defence: How it could work” over at BBC News.

It strikes me that the BBC has presented us with something really good, and really shoddy at the same time.

The good part is the quality of the polished animation. Despite now having been at it for years, Big Media still doesn’t quite get the fact that they can use their web presence to actually present information in new and different forms that aren’t possible in print, pure audio or video. This graphic is a good example of just such a use: it isn’t earthshattering, but it is a good use of a common web technology (Flash) to present information in a clear, interesting and dynamic manner.

The bad part, though, is that the information which it does present — the hypothetical technical operation of a missile defense shield — is floating in an absolute context-free void. (If you want to see where it is on the BBC’s site, check here, it’s on the right about halfway down). Given how controversial missile defense has been on practically every level — political implications, economic cost, technical feasability — you’d think the Beeb might have provided some of that information with the graphic.

But for some unfathomable reason, none of that is there — it’s just a cool slideshow with some missiles getting zapped.

For the record, I’d class myself as a skeptical agnostic on missile defence — I haven’t studied the issues closely enough to have formed a hard judgement, but what I have heard about the technology makes it sound pretty squirrelly, and the political implications are complicated, to say the least. On the other hand, with every rogue state on the map popping up longer and longer range missiles each year, it certainly would make a West-coaster like me sleep better to know that even when Pyonyang gets that super-duper-long-range-missile working, we have some line of defence to ensure I don’t end up glowing in the dark.

But anyway, I don’t think you have to be a full-blown disbeliever to agree that providing a teesy bit of context (any context ! ) might have made this a more helpful piece.

Update: Aha. I knew the BBC couldn’t be that silly. Turns out there is a story with context — but to reach it, you have to select the non-Flash version of the presentation and go through ’till the very end. Still demerits for the Beeb, but we’ll raise their grade a bit…

Update II (Sunday 8am): The link is now no longer on the main news front page, although it is similarly placed on the Americas front page (not sure if it was there before).

PS – Full disclosure: I never have completely forgiven the BBC for cancelling Dr. Who, so maybe I’m biased…

PS II – Light blogging this weekend; like everyone else in the blogsphere, I’m enjoying family time…

Okay, as promised, read the transcript of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the National Commission on Terrorism in June 2000 . It isn’t that interesting.

But what is interesting is that I managed to find the Commission’s full report online.

I’m reading it full through now, but at first blush, I’d say that it did indeed make many of the recommendations that we’re seeing discussed now back in 2000. I’ll have a more detailed analysis up later this weekend, but until now, you can check out the report itself (it is quite readable, with a nice executive summary and clearly bullet-pointed recommendations. Makes sense; it was written to be understood by Congresscritters, after all. )

Update: I found another, presumably ‘official’ copy of the report here on a .gov server. This version is broken up with a table of contents that routes to PDF files, so I’m leaving the other link up too as it is in more straightforward HTML. I have not attempted any serious verification to check if they are word-for-word identical.

Also: My more detailed followup ain’t going to be ready this weekend; it is turning into a more involved piece. Sorry, but hopefully the end result will be worth the wait.

Bloggers: The Musical

For no apparent reason, I hearby open nominations for the Bloggers: The Musical. Pick a blogger, find that perfect theme song that just sums ’em all up, and it my way. Yet another running list. Here’s a few to start:

Glenn “InstaMan” Reynolds – I Have The Touch (Peter Gabriel)

Asparagirl – I’m Just a Girl ( No Doubt )

Amish Tech Support – I’m Going Slightly Mad (Queen)

Richard Bennett – Mr. Roboto (Styx)

The Corner – Bloody Well Right ( Supertramp ) Runner Up: Everybody Wants to Rule the World
(Tears for Fears)

Tapped – Left of Center (Suzanne Vega)

Kausfiles (independent)- Mickey (Toni Basil)
Kausfiles (Slate absorbed) – Welcome to the Machine (Pink Floyd) Runner up: Take the Money and Run (Steve Miller Band)

Ken Layne – Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pink Floyd)

Andrew Sullivan – I’m Too Sexy (Right Said Fred)

Okay, despite the risk of furthering the linkin’ love fest between myself and the infamous Amish Tech Support today, you really should go read his ” Herrings, A Play in No Acts“, because it is really damned funny…

Tossed off line of the day from Sullivan’s Non-Permalinkable-But-He’ll-Have-His-People-Fix-That-Real-Soon May 24th Entry:

THE RAINES DOCTRINE: “We respect our readers’ right to express their opinion.” – Howell Raines, New York Times. Just not his writers’.

Intriguing, Captain, as the guy with the pointy ears was fond of saying. After a week or so of relative quiet in the Sullivan – Raines grudgematch, Sullivan just happens ( randomly, you see, just had to fill the mandatory space for the column (whoops I mean blog) for the day) — to toss in an offhand reference.

I still think he’s running a little new media experiment on Mr. Raines, personally.

But then again, I’m also becoming more open to the idea that maybe he really is just out to make Raines look like a jackass.

From the print edition of Week (typed in with my own hands, because those Luddites don’t have their content on the web):

Pierced teens take more risks

Body piercing is more than a superficial fad. Research conducted at the University of Rochester Medical Center, in upstate New York, found that girls who are pierced are more than twice as likely as nonpierced girls to smoke, have sex, and skip school. They are more than three times as likely to be involved in shoplifting and scrawling graffiti, and to have friends who use drugs and alcohol. “Piercing is one way that teenagers paint a picture of how they choose to present themselves to the world,” says pediatrician Timothy Roberts. He recommends that doctors use this information to spend more time talking with pierced patients about smoking and sexual behavior.

TTLB recommends that high school boys use this information in determining who to ask out tonight.

With regard to my blatant plea for continued linkage, Tech Support castigates me (rightly) for

“…insipid, narcissistic whining and an abject disregard for the fundamental principles of Bloggerly decency. N.Z. Bear (what the hell is up with that name, anyway?) is demonstrating clearly his status as a bottom-feeding ingrate whose overwrought prose would cause Daniel Steele to choke, and whose pathetic flash-in-the-plan weblog will soon suffer the inevitable decline which it so richly deserves. ‘TTLB’, as ‘The Bear’ so cloyingly refers to his site, will soon be remembered as one in a piece with Kozmo, Webvan, and that dog food store with the sock puppet as Internet ventures doomed to failure by their inherent mediocrity, without which the world is an infinitely better place. Phooey on him!”

I paraphrase, a bit. Actually, he didn’t say that. But he probably should have. And I’ll bet he was thinking it.

Check out what he really said here.

PS – What’s this “singles stretched to doubles and triples” shit? Whadaya trying to say there Larry? You want a piece of me???

am now in posession of both Vanilla Sky and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on DVD.

And I haven’t even watched my tape of the Buffy finale yet.

I am a very happy geek.

PS – Anyone caught e-mailing me Buffy spoilers will be strapped to a chair with eyes propped open Clockwork Orange style and forced to watch all 100 episodes of 7th Heaven straight through with breaks allowed only for bathroom trips, during which time Celine Dion’s A New Day Has Come will be played at full, chirpy volume as you conduct your required business. (I’ve got potentially infinite copies of Celine, now, remember…)

Getting no linkin’ love today. I definitely got a little punchdrunk on the hits of Instapower and Kauspower over the past week. But now, alas, traffic has dropped down to more sane levels. But I note many folks dropping by with no referrals — does that mean, heavens to Betsy, that people are actually coming back after having been here once?

Geez, you’d think you would learn.

So what does a guy have to do around here to get some linkage, man? We’ve got it all here at TTLB. We’ve got a serious project to improve the security of our nation. We’ve got pretentious, pseudo-literary musings on the BBS society of the ’80s. We’ve got concise, to the point referrals to pretty pictures, and historical comparisons between World War II and the War On Terror.

Heck, now I’m even throwing in the obligatory snarky comments about Richard Bennett and Andrew Sullivan, and I can’t even get them to throw a “this guy’s an asshole” link my way.

My fianc

The Truth Laid Bear: Violating Federal Law for Fun and … well, for Fun.

article from Newsforge (found via Metafilter) points out a little fact that everybody should have noticed earlier (including me): that anyone who ran the story about how to defeat Sony’s CD copy protection may be in violation of the dreaded Digital Millennium Copyright Act (cue ominous organ music).

But wait! Looks like TTLB may get off the hook, ’cause Newsforge is kind enough to include the following text of the bill:

“Any person who violates section 1201 or 1202 willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain … shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both, for the first offense …”

Aha! I can safely say that their ain’t no “commercial advantage” or “financial gain” going down here at TTLB. I’m still waiting for Mickey to give me a ride on the Boeing, let alone raking in any of the mega-shekels Andy might be seeing.

But I’ll keep you posted — I may just have to throw up one of those Amazon donation widgets for my legal defense fund…

A few days back, The Connection, a public radio program out of WBUR in Boston, had a good discussion on preventing terrorism and the many actual and potential investigations going on post-9/11. It’s in streaming RealAudio from their website.

There was the obligatory idiot or two calling in to explain calmly that everything would be Just Fine if Americans would stop being such nasty hegemonic bastards, enlightening us with such gems as “typical American behavior is rabidly anti-anybody who’s not American.” But if you can tune out those interludes host Dick Gordon and guests Elaine Shannon (Washington correspondent for Time Magazine) and Juliette Kayyem (Executive Director of the Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness at Harvard JFK School of Government) provide some interesting background and info on the Congressional investigations going on into 9/11 and the overall problem of preventing future attacks.

Kayyem, who served on the National Commission on Terrorism in 2000, in particular had a few interesting things to say, notably regarding the reaction that commmission’s report (also known as the Bremer report) met with when it was released in June 2000:

It was worse than being ignored, what happened to us. We recommended in that commission — bypartisan, independent, ten member — we recommended a lot of the structural fixes you’re hearing about now. We recommended more focus by the CIA on human intelligence, more analysis by the FBI, other things.

To say we got reamed in the press would be an understatement. We were villified in that summer when the report came out as being paranoid… all these cold warriors (which a lot of the guys on the commission were) trying to get money from the cold war focused, now, to the Defense Department for terrorism. So I think that there was just a basic unwillingness to accept the reality that most people within counterterrorism knew… which was the terrorists were getting smarter, better, and bigger. And I think we all are to blame for that in some way — the media, the government, everything.”

Is Kayyem exaggerating the reaction to the commission’s report? My (brief) research turned up one example that suggests not: This piece by Salon’s Bruce Shapiro, circa June 2000, which has the wince-inducing subhead of “Why a new report on the threat of international terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is a con job.”

Was the Bremer commission prophetic? Don’t know yet, as I haven’t been able to find a copy of the report (if it is publicly available). But I can point you to this transcript of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing on the matter from June 15, 2000. (I was annoyingly unable to find this on an official .gov site; so strangely, it’s from “indiatogether.org”. Hopefully it’s accurate).

More to come on this later, after I actually slog through the transcript…

Incidentally, The Connection is generally a good spot to get general roundups on the issues of the day, if you are, like me, addicted to streaming audio programs over the ‘net. (I find I can’t clean the house without them anymore, particularly now that I’ve got my little wireless speaker that I can bring all around with me). Other favorites of mine are Forum, from KQED in San Francisco, To The Point, from KCRW in Southern California, and of course national programs like Talk of the Nation. (And yes, Fresh Air with Terry Gross can be fascinating as well, depending on the guest & topic).

All of these programs have RealAudio streaming setup via the web, which works beautifully if you’ve got DSL / Cable, and even was listenable for me back when I was at 56K. Give them a whirl.

Did you know that the use of mercenaries is by a U.N. convention? I didn’t.

And apparently a group of wizened old folks (meeting in Geneva, natch) is recommending further restrictions. Although I must admit, the UN release provides next to zero information about what they’re actually recommending.

But the more I look into this, the more confused I get. Does the UN think mercenaries are good or bad? Are they “legal” or “illegal” under international law? And if they are “illegal’, how come Sandline and Executive Outcomes have such spiffy web sites? (You can even make the clock on EO’s site count in military time. Cool!)

Little help, anyone?

Update: I take back the “spiffy” comment about EO’s website; lots of it don’t seem to work.

Should I be worried about ?

Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I’m getting flashbacks to 1945. Isn’t it a little odd that the conference is being “convened jointly by Tahmasb Mazaheri, Economy and Finance Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown”? Given that the reconstruction of Afghanistan is the objective, wouldn’t one expect to see an Afghan official at the head table?

Mussharif: Mohammad, my good friend, I insist that you take Farah.