Month: July 2002

Thanks to for pointing me at a most interesting proposal from Oliver Letwin in the U.K. Telegraph, in which he proposes that a “liberty test” be applied to any new law being proposed:
My suggestion is that each piece of legislation should have to be accompanied by an explicit, detailed and reasoned statement from the sponsoring minister, explaining how that piece of legislation will affect the liberties of the individual. The idea for such a test for legislation came out of the Free Country conference in London in May, which was sponsored by The Daily Telegraph.
A requirement for such a statement would have two principal effects. First, it would compel civil servants, when preparing legislation, to consider the effects on our liberty and would thereby prompt discussion of those effects between civil servants and ministers before the legislation was introduced to a wider audience.
It should come as no surprise to TTLB readers that I think this is a splendid idea, particularly given my recent rantings on how freedom is an excellent basis for a consistent and workable moral code.
Letwin also notes how (in his view, at least) the Tory’s have historically been the party to defend the liberty of the individual in the U.K. I find it a shame that their American counterparts in the Republican party have failed in recent times to similiarly recapture their historic grounding as defenders of freedom. (Party of Lincoln and all that, let’s recall… )

It’s Independence Day for us here in the United States of America, of course.
And to celebrate, TTLB is — for the moment — enforcing a policy of pursuing only frivolous matters this morning. No deep thought from this bear on his holiday!
But one brief exception, to sum up my sentiments of the day. I shant quote the Declaration of Independence, nor the words of our Founding Fathers: take a quick tour around the Blogosphere; you’ll find many fine bloggers have already beaten me to that.
I wish and hope simply this: that on this day, Americans all recognize and remember that we are the inheritors of the greatest experiment in freedom and liberty ever to grace this planet. The torch was lit 226 years ago, fed by sparks that burned dimly and sometimes brightly for hundreds and thousands of years before that. And it has been passed down from generation to generation, coming to reside — but not rest — in our grasp. What we do with it is up to us.
We are not the sole keepers of this flame; and that is part of its beauty. The American ideal, at its purest and most honest, is not about nation; it is not about country or land or borders. It is about ensuring that, as Lincoln said, no man need be a slave; and no man need be a master. It is about freedom.
And so, to my visitors today from Belgium, from Brazil and Japan and Finland; from Israel and New Zealand and Canada and Norwary; from Germany and Yugoslavia and Demark and Australia and the Netherlands and Greece, from every nation across the globe and yes, even from Great Britain itself, I pose to you the reverse of the declaration John Kennedy made so famously in Berlin:
“All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ ”
On this day, I say to you that all free men everywhere are indeed citizens of America. And I ask you to join us in celebrating our Independence Day.

OK, to all those kind folks who have been on the opposite side of the ‘Pledge’ argument as this bear, here’s your big chance to sweep right past that little issue and win the bigtime: convince me that there is, indeed, a God.
If there is a kind and benevolent deity watching over us all, then rumor from Ain’t-It-Cool-News will prove true, and become reality:
News hit these green shores this morning which seems to solves the problems of the world – or at least a few sci-fi franchises.
On one hand, The BBC want to continue ‘Doctor Who’ but up the budgets, which isn’t feesable without an American audience.
On the other hand, Anthony Stewart Head wants to spend time in the U.K with his family, but loves the cult audience that ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ brings him. With t Whedon and the BBC STILL to announce a date for ‘Watcher’ ‘Giles’ or ‘Ripper’ – he may have found the perfect answer…
in a feat of impreccable casting, someone decided to put those hands together and consider something that makes this fanboy sign in post-orgasmic fullfillment: Giles taking on The Daleks!!!
Giles and Doctor Who?
Yes, please!
(PS – Yes, I am a ranting fanbear; get over it… what, I’m only allowed to post about horrible diseases and deep arguments on the nature of our society? Phlpht! to that…)

From
The Bear Necessities? It’s “silly season” in the mainstream press at the moment, and Bibendum is no exception. Apparently villagers in Dobratic in Bosnia have had a young bear living in the meadow close to the village since hunters killed his mother. The villagers have fed him and according to locals he is so tame that you can sit down and enjoy a beer with him without fear that he will turn aggressive. However, the bear, named Mrki, has been tricked into going on the wagon when people grew tired of his drunken ‘singing’ after finding half-drunk cans left over by the locals.
According to village coffee shop owner Tadija Sugic “It got to the stage of him drinking up to 20 cans of beer a day and getting drunk. We tried to give him soft drinks like cola and orange, but he just didn’t like them so we decided to trick him with non-alcoholic beer – and it’s worked a treat. He loves it.”
It’s a damned shame this is happening in Bosnia, not Germany. ‘Cause what with the Germans’ new laws on animal rights, I think there’d be a fine lawsuit here.
Non-alchoholic beer for a bear! It’s … unnatural.
Update: Jeff at Protein Wisdom points us to information showing us why this will be a very healthy bear!

The U.N. released their report on worldwide HIV/AIDS infection yesterday, to little fanfare. After all, a man had just completed circumnavigating the globe in a balloon — the world had far more important matters on its mind.
A few statistics from the report:
– In Zimbabwe, the size of an average primary school class will be down by nearly 25% in 2010 due to HIV
– The expected lifespan for a person born in South Africa was 60 years in 1990. It is now 47 years.
– In seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa, infant mortality has increased between 20% and 40% due to HIV
– In Botswana, life expectancy is 37 years, down from 60 just five years ago.
– Between 2000 and 2020, the U.N. estimates that 68 million people will die as a result of HIV.
It has struck me for some time that the HIV crisis has become a horrifying example of the journalistic mantra “if it happens every day, it can’t be news.”. We’ve heard so much about HIV over the past years that we’ve become mentally saturated; the warnings and predictions simply slide off of us, unnoticed. When they are given any media play at all, that is.
Or is it the simple truth that people have a difficult time truly grasping suffering and death which occurs thousands of miles from their homes? If so, I think we need to keep in mind that if simple human decency doesn’t move us to act, enlightened self-interest should. Ross over at the Bloviator revisits an issue that I and others have discussed previously — the simple truth that if you have states which are, effectively, collapsing due to the HIV/AIDs epidemic, you inevitably end up with regions which are ripe for political unrest, terrorism, and even genocide.
I throw out the question to you, then: why is the prediction that millions of people will die every year, and the potential prospect for widespread state failures on an entire contintent, being met with such indifference?
To put matters in perspective, I added the U.N.’s prediction to data on some more familiar tragedies of the 20th century and created the chart to the right; I used numbers from The History Place. I’d add a clever or pithy comment here to describe the chart, but frankly, it leaves me without very much at all to say.
There is, of course, always the possibility or argument that the U.N.’s data is simply wrong; or deliberately inflated. I’d welcome data to advance that thesis — because frankly, I’d feel a whole lot better if it were proven true.
Clarification: The six million deaths quoted for the Nazi Holocaust is of course the number of Jews who were killed. I am well aware that many non-Jewish people were killed; however, in my haste this morning I was unable to find a source to cite for an accurate count of the non-Jewish total. Anyone who can provide one, please post in the comments.
Update: Ross found a source — at the Red Cross of all places — stating the total number of Holocaust dead at 11 million, which sounds about right to me. (Don’t expect a chart update anytime soon — it’s a pain).
Back on Topic Update: Den Beste makes a grim but compelling case that we need to consider drastic measures when dealing with — or not dealing with — the epidemic.

OK, OK. I give. No more Pledge emails! I surrender.
After putting it off for too long, I have finally gotten around to doing a roundup of all the mails and links that y’all sent me regarding the Plege decision. Despite my dread of the task, it turned out to be even worse than I thought — you people sure do go on!
I hopefully got all of them; but if I missed yours, please post it as a comment.
Here goes — enjoy!

Damn. Hesitate, and you are lost.
Driving home from work last night, listening to Marketplace, it occured to me to wonder why, given that Worldcom’s stock was at $0.10 , nobody was attempting a takeover of the company.
After all, Worldcom basically owns 50 % of the Internet. Surely that’s worth something.
So, snug in my cleverness, I figured I had an easy win: pop open News.com, find the # of shares outstanding, multiply by the share price, and wallah! Clever post describing exactly how much it would cost to buy half the Internet. (There’s the little matter of their $30 billion in outstanding debt, but that’s why I’m a blogger and not a financial analyst). I could’ve even thrown in a clever line about putting it up on eBay.
Well, seems to have beaten me to the punch.. IDT, a small telcom company, has offered to buy certain Worldcom units for five billion dollars.
Examining the deal closely, though, it seems they are only interested in some of the voice communications assets — News.com describes the purchase as being for units which provide “local phone services to businesses, and the MCI consumer and small-business long-distance operations.”
So what about the Internet? Doesn’t anybody want to buy that? As of this morning, Worldcom’s market capitalization is a measly $740 million. Given the huge level of their debt ($30B, in case you forgot), the actual price of their shares has essentially become a rounding error for anybody thinking of purchasing the company outright.
Anybody care to set up the eBay auction?

Robert Crawford out further Congressional efforts to defend life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — for record companies. Observe:

One Congressman wants to legalize cracking — so long as it’s a big corporation breaking into your computer.
While content owners now can try to block access to intellectual
property pirates, they cannot use the range of technological options
that they want, chiefly because some tactics are illegal under state and
federal law. Berman’s bill would legalize some techniques over the
protests of file-sharing advocates.
This brought a question to my mind. Given that (I believe) we’ve already got laws on the books against unauthorized entry into computers owned by somebody else, has any consumer ever actually tried to get a company prosecuted under criminal law for spyware or other intrusive programs?
These cases always seem to be discussed in terms of consumer privacy and consumer protection statutes — but in actual spyware cases where a program is transmitting data back to a company without the users consent, why wouldn’t there also be a violation of anti-cracking statues?
Anybody with any case references and/or legal opinions, please chime in…

And I thought California had budget problems. Seems Tennessee is suffering from unpassed budgetitis, which means they’ve shut down all non-essential state government services until the state legislature can stop squabbling and actually pass a budget.
Media outlets covering the story have noted one particularly intriguing impact of the shutdown, including Tennessean:
As one of the first orders of business when the House convened at 10 a.m. yesterday, Naifeh noted one impact of the partial shutdown in the government — the cleaning contract expired at 12:01 a.m.
So, Naifeh said, members will responsible for keeping their desks and offices clean. Throughout the day, lawmakers, lobbyists and even the assistant clerk of the Senate emptied trash cans overflowing from garbage that accumulated during the marathon weekend of meetings on the budget.
So, quite literally, the legislators are forced to stew in an ever-growing pile of their own filth until they can play nicely enough together to fix the mess they’ve created.
I find this a most promising motivational technique for lawmakers, which bears further exploration at the Federal level…

Dean Peters has appears to be a scoop: seems the WayBack Machine has been hacked:
PORN WARNING – it may just be my leg of the network, but any time I enter a web site to view on the The Internet Archive: WayBack Machine – I’m getting re-directed to a PORN site. Especially disturbing when I wanted to see the 1998 version of RedlandBaptist.org.
Now that’s just not right. Bad hackers! No treats.
Others have confirmed; I’m not going to try, as I’m at my place of business now, and well, there’s just no reason to tempt fate, now is there?

KCRW radio’s The Point focused on illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexican border yesterday; RealAudio is here.
At the center of the show was the statistic that since 1994, nearly 2000 immigrants have died attempting to cross the desert, despite the U.S. border patrols’ efforts to a) stop them from trying at all and b) capture/rescue them if they do try.
So the question is, what to do? One fellow on the show wanted 20,000 U.S. troops (real military, not border patrol) to take up station down south and truly seal the border. Another took the opposite view, pointing out that many U.S. businesses actually depend on the illegal workers coming into the country; that the U.S. economy is inextricably linked with Mexico’s; and that the rational thing to do is to legalize much of the immigration occuring now.
For me, either of these solutions seem better than the current reality. The 20,000 troop option, obviously, is the simplest conceptually, which always has appeal to some. Build a wall, and all that. And in the days of wholesale terrorism, having truly controlled borders doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.
But I keep thinking about the second fellow, and the points he made about the American economy depending on immigrant labor — legal and illegal. And that made even more sense to me.
It seems to me that illegal immigrants serve — and have served for a long time — to fill a gap in the U.S. economy. They take the lowest-rung jobs; that’s obvious. But those jobs also have one other very significant characteristic — they’re being paid under the legal minimum wage.
And so it seems to me that to face the question of illegal immigration in a truly open and rational way, you have to also look at the minimum wage. On the one hand, if you put those 20,000 troops down there, who’s going to do the jobs currently being done by illegal immigrants? Can the employers afford to just start hiring legal workers at full legal wages? Or do they just go bust?
And on the other hand, what if you do legalize immigration? Doesn’t the same thing happen? If you let all the immigrants coming in illegally enter legally; well then, they’ll have the full protection of the law which they lack today. And presumably, the employers who are hiring them today will be under much more scrutiny and pressure to pay them the legal minimum. So again: can they afford it or do they go bust?
I don’t know the answers here, and so at this point, I’ll give a big shoutout to Jane Galt and Prof. DeLong — either of you two care to pick up the ball from here and help me out with the hardcore economics side of this equation? What’s the economic impact, in theory, to the U.S. economy of suddenly turning all the undocmented immigrant jobs currently being paid under minimum wage into fully legal minimum-wage jobs?
Supplemental Linkage:
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) – One group supporting broader legal immigration.
National Border Patrol Council – Labor union for Border Patrol officers. Hear from the people on the front line.
Operation Gatekeeper – Department of Justice doc on one of the recent attempts to crackdown on immigration.

Hmmmm. Somewhere along the line, swapped me into a new category on his blogroll. I’m now under “A Few Good Men”, with such notables as Sgt. Stryker.
Maybe it’s because I complained about the transvestite implication of his previous category for me, “Some Like It Hot”.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Update: If you are suffering from InstaWithdrawal, go check out Martin… he’s got the goods on what all your favorite bloggers are up to…

I’m not a huge modern-era Disney fan. Little Mermaid was fun; everything else since I could pretty much take or leave. Didn’t even bother with Mulan and Atlantis; although Emperor’s New Groove was a blast.
But and Stich… this one’s a classic.
I first encountered Stitch in one of the many mini-preview “inter-Stitch-als” that Disney released on the Web in the leadup to the release — starting way back about six months ago. It was a takeoff on Beauty and the Beast, which Stitch crawls out on a chandelier to observe Beauty and her Beast dancing gracefully through the ballroom — and then proceeds to come crashing down in the middle of the dance floor, nearly squashing the pair.
Beauty dusts herself off, raises her nose and sniffs, “I’ll be in my room — Get your own movie,” walking off stage — and Stitch, muttering something incompressible in his own odd language, then gives an unmistakable wolf-whistle as the fair lady passes out of sight.
I was hooked. I liked this little guy’s style.
And it only got better. Watching the Interstitchals that followed, and the full length preview that eventually came after them, gave tantalizing glimpses of a film that combined beautiful handpainted animation with a central character who embodied fun in a way that I hadn’t seen in a Disney flick — or any other — in ages; if ever.
So when I finally saw the film last weekend, I expected to have a good time. I expected to laugh; I expected to revel in Stitch’s blithe disregard for all civilized norms of behavior and his sheer perverse joy in wreaking havoc on the world around him.
What I didn’t expect was to be touched. The goddamn thing actually brought tears to my eyes.
Because in Lilo and Stich, writer/directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois have created characters and story that mines deep veins of human emotion and need — for belonging, for family, for a sense of self and of place in the world.
These are not new or original themes to find in an animated feature by any means. But Lilo and Stich does something few ‘kids’ films attempt: it tackles deep and intense emotional issues headon, without sugarcoating them with the now-common postmodern wink-and-a-nudge that excuses the audience from any actual need to feel for the characters. And so it delivers the fun and mischief that the trailers promised — but it demands that you come along on a rocky ride through dark emotional territory along the way.
And in doing so, it ascends to the level of animated masterpiece the likes of which hasn’t been seen since — well, since Bambi.
I saw one review of the film which said that criticized it for being too derivative of ‘E.T.” I don’t recall the reviewer’s name, but this totally misses the boat. Stitch is not E.T. —- he’s Frankenstein for kids.
But he’s more than just the pathos and loneliness of the Frankenstein monster shrunk down into an odd-looking six-armed blue doglike package. Stitch lights up the screen with his utter delight in destruction and mischief. He is in this way, a direct descendent of that classic of ‘toons, Bugs Bunny. But part of Stitch’s charm is that unlike Bugs — who causes trouble in a generally honorable way, but does so with full moral knowledge of his actions — Stitch is a true innocent. He truly has no concept of right and wrong; he just knows that smashing stuff and wreaking havoc is fun.
And that combination — the abandoned loneliness and monsterous innocence of Frankenstein blended with the joyful mischief of Bugs — is what makes Stitch the most compelling animated character I’ve seen in years. Maybe ever.
Go see the movie, and let the little fellow introduce himself.
You might cry — but you won’t regret it.

Yet another fellow is doing the ole’ move thing (also to a new host; also to MT). Make sure to update your bookmarks for Wisdom.