Arafat is a fascist, and his fascism has at its very core the hatred of Jews. And since he is unabashedly stirred by this passion, one has to suspect his admirers as well, all of them (including--if I am permitted to go local--the three Episcopal bishops of Massachusetts and their political adviser, a priest in a Cambridge church, who in their preaching and protests seem to think that innocent Jewish life is without value).Powell has landed in Morocco. I wonder if he's trying to arrange Arafat's exile.This NYT Magazine piece about a very stupid eco-terrorist is almost worth reading ... especially if you were entertained by Edward Abbey's "The Monkey Wrench Gang."That comic novel -- about four pals in the U.S. Southwest who go from bumbling eco-vandals to serious criminals -- is rarely remembered for the characters and writing. And that's sad. Abbey is one of my favorite writers. He was a true American crank, a hillbilly raised by a socialist dad and a church-going mom. He served in post-WWII Italy as a military policeman, studied philosophy in Scotland, and worked as a technical writer in Manhattan. Then he moved to New Mexico to do graduate work and ran with a crowd of cowboys, pre-hippie girls and Western writers. He spun a fantasy about a Mormon river guide, Jewish dancer from New York, Belushi-esque Vietnam vet and kinky doctor going overboard for their cause: saving the Southwest from East Coast developers. By the time he died in Arizona in 1989, he'd managed to piss off everybody from Tom Wolfe to the Sierra Club.
That novel went on to inspire the Earth First! gang, but those people never really understood Abbey's humor. And they never understood how much Abbey hated dumb hippies. He dismissed rock 'n roll as noise, loved Merle Haggard and Mahler, enjoyed guns and Cadillac convertibles, and was guilty of serial marriage and serial boozing. His semi-fictional monkey-wrench gang had one rule: attacking human beings is wrong, no matter the cause.
Anyway, this stupid hippie called "Critter" gets a few pages in the NYT magazine to explain, from prison, why he blew up an auto dealership (SUVs are evil, blah blah). And the writer, while squishy enough to call these people "activists," makes some good points. Read it, if you're bored.
And now some Ed Abbey quotes:
I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere."The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.
There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.
If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns.
Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.
Ah, filthy old Ed Abbey. Beware of such writers. They write to piss off the serious and amuse the drunks.
Nearly two years after an alleged brief experiment with Blogger, tonight I say good-bye to that fine system. If you've got a server or rent space on a server run by good people, I recommend Moveable Type.
Os Tyler helped me switch everything over, and we were both pleased by the happy MT software and its many useful features.
So, thanks Blogger! You people helped me get over my hatred of Web publishing (a result of two long, cruel years of editing a daily Web paper). Blogger is still the very best tool for quickly and easily making a Web log. Okay, no more tech talk around here ... until the Dreaded Total Redesign arrives.
Emmanuelle Richard asked Glenn Reynolds to compile a list of bloggers who say InstaPundit convinced them to join the fun. It's finally here, and it's a helluva list.
Writers actually bragging about the good work being done by other writers ... the planet keeps getting weirder.
If the past eight hours were of any use at all, you should be seeing the Moveable Type version of this site ... and you shouldn't really notice.Still a lot of work to do, like convert the July 2000-November 2001 archives. For some reason, Blogger wouldn't let me convert more than 1,000 posts. (I invented a pretty good solution, if you're having similar problems.)
Now I will reward myself by driving down to 7-11 for a fresh pack of smokes. And then I'll get back to posting a bunch of news.
Saturday, April 06, 2002Boring Technical Note: The Professor and others have asked me why I haven't switched to Blogger Pro. The reason will be visible tomorrow night or Monday morning (maybe), when this site switches to Moveable Type. It should've happened months ago, but I'm an irritable bum and abhor technical switcheroos. Anyway, Moveable Type is installed on the beloved server run by my neighbor Os and has been for months. Richard Bennett is now hosted on our friendly neighborhood server, and he's using the fancy Moveable Type. Joel and Ben have already switched L.A. Examiner to the new buddy, and Welch, Pierce, Emmanuelle and the rest may soon join us on the exciting adventure.I love Blogger and have promoted it far and wide -- and I've bought ads off blogspot sites and even tried buying some Blogger home-page text ads for L.A. Examiner. If I had any money I'd invest in Blogger -- somebody will make money off this stuff, one day.
But when you have a reliable server (I've been using it for nearly five years), it's better to have the publishing software right there. Using Blogger adds an unnecessary stop between my laptop and kenlayne.com. We'll see how it works.
Alexx Beme: stalker of L.A. bloggers? This is funny ... and slightly scary.Meanwhile, Tim Blair has overcome his computer troubles and there's a big bucket of new posts.
Peter Pribik says there's nothing wobbly about Bush's much-discussed speech.John Weidner says the "peace activists" with Arafat hate Israel for the same reasons Islamo-terrorists hate Israel.We should welcome our friend and ally Tony Blair to the United States. Prime Minister Blair and the United Kingdom -- minus some of the dumber newspapers -- have been with us since Sept. 11 without excuses. So, Mr. Blair, welcome to Texas.Friday, April 05, 2002Haunted by telemarketers? This message board has many grim stories and several good tips to fight the robots.Lots of Californians are getting calls from 954-623-4620. Read the posts about two-thirds of the way down the page for info on these weird calls.
(Link from MetaFilter. And one of the reasons I'm not really in a rush to switch to the DSL is because that will free up my phone line. A few weeks ago when the electricians were tearing apart my office, I used my wife's office. And what happened? The home line rang every 20 minutes. All telemarketers.)
It's a week old, so nobody remembers:American and Israeli intelligence officials have concluded that Yasir Arafat has forged a new alliance with Iran that involves Iranian shipments of heavy weapons and millions of dollars to Palestinian groups that are waging guerrilla war against Israel.The partnership, officials said, was arranged in a clandestine meeting in Moscow last May between two top aides to Mr. Arafat and Iranian government officials. The meeting took place while Mr. Arafat was visiting President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, according to senior Israeli security officials who declined to describe the precise nature of their information.
The new alignment is significant for several reasons, American and Israeli officials said. In recent years, Iran's support for terrorism around the world has been on the wane, with the notable exception of its ties to Hezbollah, the militant group that fought for 18 years to expel Israel from southern Lebanon.
Israeli officials say they are alarmed by Mr. Arafat's alliance with Iran because they say it gives the Palestinians a powerful and well-armed patron in the increasingly violent conflict with Israel. American officials echoed that concern and said they were also worried by intelligence reports that say Tehran is harboring Al Qaeda members, including one leader who recently tried to mount an attack against Israel from his sanctuary in Iran.
For those who know Matt Welch's Web log but not too much about his journalism, here's a quick introduction to his stuff. They're all fine pieces, although he leaves out some of my favorites.My favorite Welch stuff tends to be the raw columns, especially the ones I created from his drunken e-mails. Maybe that's why I like these blog things.
I can't find a link to the actual report, but Nic Robertson's "Inside Asia" feature on Afghanistan today was really good. He traveled the whole country, met with the warlords-turned-governors, met with many working people, and concludes that Afghanistan is on the road to peace. Maybe it will show up here.Treacher wonders if "beme" will become a word. Why not?beme: n, vt 1: intentional misspelling of a proper name for the purpose of sabotaging Web searches (ca. 2002)
The National Conference of Editorial Writers' spring publication has an inside-the-newsroom look at bloggers. Geitner Simmons, an editorial writer with the Omaha World-Herald, has done a good job explaining news-blogs to his colleagues.(Link from MicroContent News, which is quickly becoming the reference desk for all things related to Personal Publishing.)
Lebanon's Daily Star says the Arab world must change or wither away:Citizens of the European Union might look on the bloc’s nerve center, Brussels, as a bureaucratic nightmare, but at least the nomenklatura housed by that city, like those in individual European capitals, is composed of well-educated professionals who work within the confines of a functional system and under the guidance of elected officials with a semblance of competence. Its Arab League counterpart, Cairo, is likewise a reflection of individual Arab capitals: All of them are models of inefficiency in which a well-heeled coterie of cronies, minions, flunkies, and various other hangers-on exists for little purpose other than to perpetuate a moribund system under a sterile leadership based on the acquisition and retention of unearned wealth and undeserved privilege.Since the body that employs them has no discernible goal aimed at furthering the public good, its functionaries’ sole concern is the maintenance of their own power and influence. It is a recipe for disaster that has been cooked up with slight variations from one end of the Arab world to the other and whose results are on display for all to see: lopsided development, crumbling infrastructure, gaping income disparities, dilapidated industries, weak and capricious legal systems, environmental degradation, technological backwardness, economic fragility, and a glaring paucity of genuine democracy.
Arab countries are governed by systems and structures designed in another era, one that is never coming back.
There's more, and it's worth reading.
I wonder if this editorial will show up in other Arab countries ... in Arabic.
What the Arab world needs more than anything is a secular, charismatic leader with business smarts, ambition and true vision. Someone like Ataturk. Read this summary of Ataturk's vision and imagine such a leader emerging from an Arab state today.
So the old bag wasn't pleasant at all. Hey, she didn't like Churchill and she didn't like Jews! Well, that's fresh. (Hitchens' stuff, via Electrolite.)MuslimPundit.Com has many new, good posts about whatever the hell's happening. Read him.Zinni just met with Yasser Arafat. Few details. Gawd, would love to have been there with a laptop and a wireless connection to type about that meeting.Rand Simberg had a nice trip to Cambria, on the central California coast. Lovely place. Laura and I have talked about living there, although it's more expensive than a big old estate right up the street in the Los Feliz hills.That pirate Tim Blair will surely have something to say about this, but Reuters is reporting that the city and suburbs of Sydney are now full of wildlife. The shy, dumb koalas are suddenly appearing around the city. Once-filthy waterways are filling with comical fish. Evil sharks patrol the sea just off the city's beaches. Before long, we'll hear reports of NSW Aborigines who are actually black, and not just white thugs with Irish names jabbering on the teevee.Whoops. I think I get killed for that sort of remark. Australian media is much like the Berkeley campus media.
Walking around the lovely neighborhood of ... ah, I can't remember -- Queen's Park? Close to Bondi Beach, and a very ugly mall-type street -- anyway, Tim and Nadia were jabbering about the possums in the trees. Fine. I have possums in my yard here in Los Angeles. But Tim made the filthy marsupials sound absolutely dangerous. That's his job: making stupid pouch-rats sound deadly.
Also, the NYT "Dining Out" section mentioned Yabbies the other day. (Scroll down to item four). Yabbies are mysterious lobster-like monsters, found only in Australia. They thrive in bush ponds, and can be lured from the murky waters with bits of rabbit meat on a string. The NYT food section says:
Yabbies can be cooked just like lobsters. I like to sauté them briefly in garlic and olive oil, then steam them in white wine until they turn red. They can then be served hot or cold.That might work. But in my experience, you drink the white wine while Blair talks about fishing for yabbies with his grandma. And then you eat a steak.
I take it all back. A British journalist who knew the Queen Mum just said on FoxNews, "Very generous Gin and Tonics ..... She liked to drink, and she liked other people to drink."And there's a possibly true story about the Queen Mum catching a German spy ... it seemed to involve drinking or card-playing or something.
But come on, people, give us a little news in the morning. She was alive during WWI. She was alive when the British ruled Palestine. Connected to current events? Worthy of at least some quick updates on the Israel news?
Look, I love England. I'm glad the UK is there for the United States just as we're there for the UK. But jeebus ... FoxNews, CNN, everybody ... people in red coats screaming, those Beefeater guys, gates, horses, Scots ... good god put the news on at least one channel.History, blah blah, very old queen lady, blah blah, pomp, blah blah. It's interesting to watch for a few moments, but every news channel? Oh, she spoke French. Swell, my wife speaks Spanish, but she's just asleep, not clogging up the five news channels on DirecTV.
War in the Middle East? Who would know? The freakin' CNN is showing live coverage of ... some people walking around what may or may not be the box with the Queen Mum inside it.I'm sure she was nice and all, but this is CNN, an American network (sorry, but it's true). And it's not like one of those dramatic British Royalty deals, with Arab playboys and crashed cars and all that. She lived to be 137 or something. That's what she did. She lived a long time. Great. Put on the freakin' news.
IGNORED BY WORLD MEDIA, ANGOLA QUITS CIVIL WARLUANDA, Angola (April 5, 2002) -- After 26 years of pointless civil war, the Unita rebels and Angola's president, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, today decided to end the conflict due to a total lack of interest by CNN and other global media.
"We tried," Unita leader Gen. Paulo Lukamo "Gato" told KenLayne.com. "We killed people, did those communist things, the whole deal. We had help from Cuba and those other communist countries. Who cared? Seen me on 'Larry King Live' lately? I don't f**ckin' think so."
President Dos Santos was also disturbed by the long war's lack of coverage.
"You see that jackhole anti-McDonald's French 'farmer' trying to save Arafat's ass? What about me? Where are my white European saviors, eh? These psychos have been killing us for 26 years," Dos Santos screamed. "Sure, we've been killing them, too, but how's that different from the Middle East? Where's the best-selling book about the motherf**ckin' Angola war, eh? Powell headed down here anytime soon?"
Lukamo added, "Where's the movie, huh? Where's Ridley Scott? Where's that Bono guy? Do we not matter at all?"
Thursday, April 04, 2002In modern-day Texas, they don't think much of racist murderers. It took a jury less than four hours to give the death penalty to Mark Anthony Stroman. Virginia Postrel writes:First, he shot and killed the Pakistani-born owner of a convenience store. Next, he shot and blinded the Bangladeshi-born attendant at a gas station. A couple weeks later, he shot and killed the Indian-born employee of another gas station, which he also robbed. He confessed to the killings but claimed patriotic motives as a defense.Yes, we still have idiot racist murderers in this country. But we don't make heroes of such cowardly, racist morons. They pay the price. There are no martyr posters. Killers are killers. Stroman's family will get no reward for his idiot crime.
Tony Pierce reports that Paul Westerberg will be playing some songs at Ameoba Records down the street on Sunset Boulevard. April 25.I don't listen to the Replacements too much these days, but I don't need to. I know every word, every note, every song. I even love "All Shook Down," which is the saddest, prettiest, "I just can't drink no more" record I've ever heard.
Tony then links to this Billboard interview with Westerberg, where he suddenly sounds like his Minneapolis colleague James Lileks:
It wasn't like I wanted to stop and become a dad -- I just wanted to stop, and I became a dad at the same time. And, oddly enough, my rock'n'roll education certainly helped being a father in the beginning, so that staying up all night and not sleeping was no big deal for me. It wasn't like I was used to having to look good in the morning ....I'll go to a mall or something. But I do avoid record stores, and the ones I go to -- I haven't, like, gone to the hip record store, ya know, in 20 years. I'll, like, go to Target or something and be befuddled that I can't get the greatest hits of Foghat or something.
With some rock guys, you don't want 'em dead or ruined. You want 'em happy and 42 and still making rock records, going to Target, raising a kid. Or making records while running blogs.
Rand Simberg's new FoxNews column is about two historic space flights. And Rand tops my Israel-to-Baja proposal.The League of United Latin American Citizens has asked Cartoon Network to bring Speedy Gonzales back to teevee.The goofy WB mouse cartoons haven't been broadcast in the United States since 1999. Why? Somebody decided the character was offensive to Mexicans.
But there is a place where Speedy can still be found regularly zipping across TV screens -- and, presumably, where the crude stereotypes he embodies don't touch a cultural nerve.That place: The Cartoon Network Latin America, where, ironically enough, Speedy Gonzales is "hugely popular," Goldberg said.
Priceless.
InstaPundit's right: P.J. O'Rourke is pretty much using the news-blogging format. It's got links (just three, but still), blockquoted sections from another source, point-by-point arguments, and smart-ass comments.The dumb Boston Globe blog-attack has dropped to No. 155 in the BlogDex ratings. Lileks' response is way above it. Hell, my Israel to Mexico thing is above it. Ah, the joy of spending one day on BlogDex. That must warm the sad little heart of an old creep who hates people writing on the Internet.Reuters goes with the story of the Church of the Nativity being hit:Israeli troops have destroyed a door into Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity and have battled with Palestinians holed up in the building, one of the priests trapped in the complex said on Thursday.Was that the guy on CNN? Who knows. CNN just had a reporter saying he can't get close enough to see what's going down.
The Reuters dispatch repeats the 200 militants line.
Dalal Saoud of UPI has a good story with background on the Israel/Lebanon/Syria mess.Brian Linse asks:Is it me, or is Euro CNN a f**king nightmare of anti-Israel bias? I've been making notes of some rather disturbing observations while in Europe regarding the U.S. and Israel which I will try to put into some bloggage when I return. Two months outside of the U.S. has been an eye-opening experience with regard to international politics. I hope the rhetoric of the Bush Administration has been clear and strong in support of Israel during these last couple of weeks, but the clips I've managed to see here on CNN-Palestine have not been reassuring.Nope, Brian, it's not just you. CNN International has been rabidly anti-American for years. If you can get SkyNews in your hotel, you'll see a slightly more balanced version of the news.
CNN International has many good reporters, and it's a fine thing to watch if the United States isn't involved. But anything involving Israel or Washington is going to be deeply biased. Weird, because U.S. business and leisure travelers are the main audience for CNN International.
Axis of Whatever:North Korea said on Thursday that the United States was its "most wicked sworn enemy" in a series of diatribes issued less than 24 hours after Pyongyang dropped hints it might restart frozen dialogue with Washington.ArabNews.com publishes a lot of racist, hateful crap -- but sometimes it publishes an article like this, about the need for Middle Eastern countries to get on that Internet bandwagon.No mention of censorship or dirty Jews in this piece. It's all about e-commerce and networking and the need for more universities in Saudi Arabia and more real-world business training.
"U.S. Congress Continues Its Blind Support For Israel," says the Arab News:Congress reconvenes next week after a two-week recess, but lawmakers are already speaking out in defense of Israel. Hill staffers tell Arab News that the Congressmen will undoubtedly establish a new bill — as a first order priority — to condemn and impose new sanctions on the Palestinians.Pro-Israeli support has always run strong on Capitol Hill because of strong Jewish lobbies, prolific Jewish money to support campaign financing, and influential Jewish voters in domestic politics.
Damn! The Jews run Congress, too? Well, I hope they run it better than the U.S. media, which likes to call murdering Palestinian terrorists "activists." Also, in Arab-News World, there are no women in Congress. Nope, they're all men.
For the last hour or so, CNN has been reporting that the Israeli Army blew the doors off of the Church of the Nativity. Just now, at 4:05 a.m. Pacific time, reporter Bill Hemmer has come on the air to say there's no evidence of this. (CNN's earlier source was a Palestinian on a cell phone, far as I could tell.) Hemmer says some 200 Palestinian gunmen have been hiding in the church and many have now escaped into Central Jerusalem.The BBC will never let you down:The BBC's Caroline Hawley, in Jerusalem, says that mounting international criticism is falling on deaf Israeli ears and officials seem determined to press on with what they call a "war on terror."In other news, the BBC says the "attack" on "the United States" on "Sept. 11" was "possibly not good."
I got a note yesterday from G.L. Marshall, and that reminded me that he wrote a nice thing about early Web journalism that sort of applies today.Blair offers a quick hit against an English journalist who just doesn't like Australia.Hey, the whores and convicts you English sent to Australia probably didn't think too much of you, either. I won't even bring up Ned Kelly.
It had to happen ... the Cajun Taliban is at Camp X-Ray:Officials said Mr. Hamdi might be American principally in name. He says he was born in Baton Rouge to Saudi parents who took him to Saudi Arabia when he was a toddler, the officials said. The officials said they did not know whether he ever returned to the United States or whether he spoke English.Great. Hamas is reading my columns:Hamas wants Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank and Gaza, the dismantling of all Israeli settlements and full right of return for the four million Palestinians who live in other states. After that, the Jews could remain, living "in an Islamic state with Islamic law," Dr. Zahar said. "From our ideological point of view, it is not allowed to recognize that Israel controls one square meter of historic Palestine."Mr. Shenab insisted that he was not joking when he said, "There are a lot of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews."
Oh, the democratic state of Israel will be gone, but the remaining Jews could live under "Islamic law." Wow, that's sweet. Hell, that sounds like a deal!
Here's a Nov. 9, 2001, story about King Abdullah of Jordan, my favorite leader in the Middle East.Ed Murray says an Allax Beem-style stunt shouldn't bother anybody, and that "thin-skinned online journo[s]" are just falling for the traffic-generating stunt.Sure, the guy will get some Web traffic for a day, but so what? It's not like he won over a new batch of readers who will give up Dave Barry to read Beame's dreck.
Besides, I didn't see much in the way of Thin Skin -- just a big, funny, rambling conversation about the dumb guy who tried to be cool and tough and ended up falling for an April Fools' joke so obvious you could get it from the goofy graphics.
A tiny one-day traffic spike for a big-ass U.S. newspaper just isn't really a factor. It's not like the editors are walking around the Boston Globe offices saying, "What we need are columns that will be discussed by bloggers!"
A newspaper columnist with a big online audience is a good thing. Barry, Lileks, Dan Gillmor, Thomas Friedman ... these are people with a solid, constant audience that might be worth a few dollars from the remaining online advertisers. But a quick dumb hit on journalists doing blogs just doesn't add up to anything. Ask that Justin guy from Pravda, or that Online Journalism Review. Sure, they can print up the Beloved Day's stats and feel nostalgic for those few hours of attention, but what does it matter in the long run?
There are important things going down, after all.
Sgt. Stryker's buddy Sgt. Schultz is going crazy with the posts while Stryker's on the road. There are other multi-person blogs, but this is the first multi-Sarge blog. As my friend Barney Greinke always says, "More is Better."Why is al Qaeda bigshot Abu Subaydah's connection to the USS Cole bombing being ignored?"Hundreds of people linked to a hard-line Islamic group have been arrested in Kabul in the past week in connection with a plot to destabilize the government of interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, Afghan officials said Thursday."Wednesday, April 03, 2002Here's a terrific column by a former Denver Post journalist, "Why are American Newspapers anti-Israel?"I just discovered the site, The Idler. It's worth bookmarking.
I realized today that I've lifted a bunch of links from Damian Penny in the last week or so. I blame it on Browser Fatigue: with 10 browser windows littering the computer screen, I can't keep track of what came from where.I'm waiting for Steven Den Beste's take on this report of a missile-factory explosion in Syria. I don't know enough about missile factories -- are accidental explosions a common problem?This factory reportedly made Scud C and D missiles, as well as "nonconventional weapons." Iran helps Syria build solid-fuel missiles, the article says.
This is the top international story on Yahoo News right now: "Iraq Boosts Suicide Bomber Payment."Saddam Hussein has increased money for the relatives of suicide bombers from $10,000 to $25,000, drawing sharp criticism from Washington.On March 25, I posted a couple of things on this subject. On March 26, I wrote a FoxNews piece about this very subject. It wasn't a secret -- it had just been reported in a big Australian paper. Yesterday, Rumsfeld discussed it during a press conference. I guess it's finally a big story.
Reason's Charles Paul Freund says the reported porno clips shown on Palestinian teevee stations is psychological warfare:Pornography is virtually unavailable in most Muslim societies, except on the Internet. With the rise of Islamist values, even belly dancers in such officially secular places as Egypt have been wearing their once-revealing costumes over full dresses ....Replacing Palestinian news and other programming with such material also increases the stress and frustration of the populace. Remember, Ramallah's residents were unable to leave their homes, even to buy groceries. Their need for information was intense. Israeli forces had the option of taking the TV stations off the air entirely. Instead, they left them operating, but broadcasting "replacement" imagery. The pornography may well have been even more demoralizing than no programming at all.
Hitchens sure can write:After all, in the National Cathedral after Sept. 11 he was allowed in the presence of our country's elite to assert that all the murder victims were in paradise and happy to be there -- a wild outburst of evil and stupidity that implicitly copies the fantasies of bin Laden. So there you have it: The country's senior Protestant is a gaping and mendacious anti-Jewish peasant; the leaders of official Jewry are cringingly yoked with him for the purpose of a disastrous crusade and meanwhile the cardinals are running a rape fiesta for twitchy "celibates." All official attention turns, meanwhile, upon the weird beliefs to be found in the Koran, which may be partly because the Attorney General himself is a tuneless, clueless, evangelical Confederate dunce.And he sure is right.
Who's yer favorite French Bloggueur? It's Emmanuelle Richard, that's who. Vote for her "Naughty Bytes" blog in the "Meilleur Blog" and "Meilleur Blog Européen" categories.Vote early and often!
Andrew Sullivan is making a "few grand" in profit from his site:[W]e went into a clear debt-free profit in January and that the profit has now risen steadily each month. It's only a few grand -- but hey, it's something! All because of the book club and your generosity. Another way of looking at this is that this form of Internet journalism went into profit within 18 months. If we stay completely still, and don't grow at all, I will be able to pay myself a salary more than comparable to my salary at The New Republic. It won't make me rich, but it sure will pay the rent and then some. This is your achievement, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it's a small milestone in e-journalism. We may not have made much yet - but this site has now made more profit than Slate and Salon combined. Thanks again -- and please keep this success growing. You've proved the nay-sayers wrong. Which is why the anti-blog backlash from the established media is now underway.Henry Copeland says "measuring the blog against the newspaper is a waste of time."Henry knows a little bit about newspaper work and online publishing.
Kesher Talk ... a blog by writer and analyst Howard Fienberg. It's good, good, good.Every day, I find a new blog that's good, good, good. I look for good magazines and books and movies and teevee and newspapers all the time, but those things are rare.
Sure, a lot of blogs are crap, but a lot of blogs are freakin' excellent. I get two daily papers and read dozens of blogs every day. Yesterday, I didn't even open the L.A. Times. But I read all the blogs.
Jim Treacher writes:Sometimes I get scared when Layne and Welch start to go at it. "Why are Daddy and other Daddy fighting?" But then I figure it's like being able to spy on John and Paul bickering in the studio. I can't think of who George and Ringo would be in this scenario, but go for it, blogosphere.Welch is Paul.
Har Har!
No, wait, Welch is Ringo. Or Arafat.
Matt's the father of my children, but I reserve the right to call him a jackass all the time. I also reserve the right to link to his excellent writing all the time. Blogs are a recent development. Matt and I getting drunk and yelling at each other is a 12-year tradition. We also share a very bad sense of humor, which Welch manages to hide a little better.
Gareth Parker of Perth, Australia, says:IT IS TIME for me to reconsider my career goals. According to John Hiler (via Glenn Reynolds) blogs have killed journalism. Well, maybe not yet. But they might. That's no bloody good to a journalism student. How ironic that I spend more time blogging than studying.It's not ironic at all, Gareth. J-schools full of bloggers would produce good bloggers who also practice journalism. And don't worry about studying. As a UC Berkeley graduate journalism student told me last month, you only go to j-school to meet people who might hire you in the future.
Matt Welch has a long, sad tale about his neighborhood buddy who died on Flight 77, the one that was crashed into the Pentagon.I don't have anything to add, except that I'll always take good, hard-working sports-loving Americans from Long Beach over life-hating gruesome suicide bombers.
Tuesday, April 02, 2002Okay, the prize goes to Tim Blair for his perfect mix of the Boston Globe columnist and the Onion's Jackie Harvey.In 1998, I wrote a few columns about the Boston Globe's trouble with columnists. That was the Summer of Shame, when the Globe's Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith were both fired for inventing people and stories:
Meanwhile, the blame for such old-school fraud is being placed upon -- where else? -- the Internet.Here's some more:"Everyone is competing. The fast pace of it all is taking away the analytical and thoughtful approach, and that is what I worry about," said American Society of Magazine Editors President Jacqueline Leo, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune last week. "With all the junk out there, from the Internet to other publications that look better than they really are, the trust factor will be more and more important to future generations."
Slowly, print reporters are abandoning the tired, focus-grouped newspapers for the online market. Hell, even Hamill's work is occasionally seen at Digital City New York. And former Los Angeles Herald-Examiner editor Joe Farah has a huge audience for his World Net Daily site. Hamill and Farah are at polar opposites of the political spectrum, but they've both had their hearts broken by print newspapers, and they are both men of personal integrity.The online world offers most of its column opportunities to younger journalists who could never get a Breslin gig at papers like the Los Angeles Daily News or the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Drudge is the obvious example -- so obvious that he's now the target of a delightfully mean-spirited satire site known as the Drudge Retort. There's also fun to be had at Capitol Hill Blue, which features a vicious and sometimes thoughtful daily rant by editor Doug Thompson. The folks at Intrepid Net Reporter offer several good news columns each week, and the news fanatics at OnlinePress have provided me with better analysis of the online news business than their bigger-budgeted brethren. And John Mahoney, a truly talented writer and journalist, has created an ideal rural newspaper for "Quebec's Eastern Townships and Vermont's Northeast Kingdom" with his Log Cabin Chronicles.
What's sick is the brutal hostility shown to these online news pioneers by the Venture Capital crowd and the online advertising agencies. The best "content" on the Web is coming from small operations with loyal audiences, not the bland money-hemorrhaging outfits like MSNBC and C-Net. The nation's best columnists are primarily online in these last days of the century.
Will the sickly Newspaper Industry embrace these pioneers? Give them money and awards and business expertise? Will a brave technology company grab these little publishers while the price is low? Or will these sites die off, to be replaced by more wire copy, more teevee-style programming, more gutless crap?
Virginia Postrel sent a long, thoughtful reply to help the Boston Globe guy write his column. He ignored it -- but at least he found that Stalinist site Virginia loves so much. Ah, libertarian Stalinists ... my favorite kind of Texan.Jeff Jarvis stands up for newspapers. And blogging. And everything else.It seems obvious, but it's worth saying again: those who run news-blog sites love media in all its many forms. Many of those who run news-blog sites work in the media. They write books and columns and articles. They appear on radio and teevee. They make records and publishing software and fantastic robots and other media tools.
Welch is getting all NPR on us with this posting, in which he mistakes the gleeful online replies to a hostile journalist with self-importance ... and then he says, bizarrely, that gleefully tearing apart a crappy and factually wrong newspaper column might lead to "becoming one of them."
Huh? Like I just said, plenty of us are "them." The main targets of that snotty little newspaper column are successful newspaper columnists, for god's sake. But that's not even being discussed, because who cares? The fun is using a relatively new medium in a way that takes advantage of its speed, low cost and direct connection with readers and other writers. If anything might carry the scary danger of self-importance, it's getting a big online audience. Does anyone get a bunch of readers from a column in a Boston paper with no links? Of course not.
I've been interviewed hundreds and hundreds of times, for print, teevee, radio and online publications -- for all kinds of things. Hell, I did 45 interviews in 10 days last summer (on my exciting first book tour) and don't recall any loss of my sense of humor. (Also, I was drunk every night with Blair.) Tabloid.net, which Welch worked for as managing editor, got written up by a mag or paper almost every week for two years. So what? Media coverage isn't a problem. But when bad journalism is practiced by paid professionals against people with the ability to publish themselves, prepare for bloodshed.
Tony Pierce did a great photo essay last summer about these Internet cam girls. Salon published a snotty article about the girls. The girls fought back ... by publishing the complete e-mail interviews on their own sites. I praised it at the time as a new era in journalism -- a sloppy reporter could no longer abuse interview subjects without the risk of those interview subjects running to the Internet to publish the real story.
It's great. And when I'm interviewing somebody for an article these days, I'm a helluva lot more careful. I used to just make up quotes. Especially for that newspaper in Prague.
Den Beste notes the new kissy-kissy between Iraq and Iran.Saddam Hussein did the same thing in August 1990, just after he invaded Kuwait. His only real prize in the eight-year war against Iran was the Shatt al-Arab waterway -- which was his only access to the Persian Gulf before taking Kuwait. When it seemed like Iran would join the anti-Iraq embargo, he gave the waterway back to Tehran.
From Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie's "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf":
Tehran seemed to appreciate Saddam's gesture. On Sept. 12, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme religious leader, called in a broadcast for a "holy war" against the United States to force American troops to leave the Gulf.I figured the MetaFilter gang would jump in on today's "Stop the Bloggers!" feature, and I figured right. Ed from EdRants.com had this to say:Alex Beam fears for his job. So does every overedited windbag suddenly aware of his own deficiencies, realizing that some of the astute rapid-fire takes of news on the Web are a good deal better than the columns that guys like Beam spend the whole day writing.What the Web really means is independent content and faster turnaround time, which is a daunting prospect for those writers used to the old days of tremendous time to write a column. A highly skilled blogger can turn out an articulate 2,000 word report of an event in just under two hours. The hasty speed comes from bypassing the endless edits made when a posting is handed from copy editor to section editor to EIC to writer (if he has any say at all in the machine; for the most part, s/he does not) to EIC. And so on. And so on. Until the writer is, in the more gargantuan papers, fully drained of any passion for the piece and largely exhausted.
Meanwhile, the web writer jumps from stone to stone in this giddy lake, with his/her own feverish promptitude being the singular millstone.
Glenn Reynolds has a round-up of blogger responses to what's-his-name at the Boston Globe.I find it pretty easy to ignore the constant, dumb-ass articles about this new-fangled bloggin' craze, but this one really pisses me off. The column itself is so bad that it's hardly worth thinking about, but the fact that this jackass wrote such a hateful, stupid e-mail to Lileks (who posted it before the column appeared) just makes me want to drive down to the L.A. Times and punch out a few random newspaper employees.
But I won't. I'm a man of peace. Besides, this thing wasn't about Web logs. It was about some no-name columnist at the Boston Globe attacking another columnist for being popular and prolific. Next up: a clever attack on the late Mike Royko, who wrote columns every day!
Chris Kerstiens said I had a bad link to the Boston Globe thing. All fixed now. If you've posted something about Mr. Jackass, you might want to check the link, too. (It needs a "+" sign before the .shmtl; for some reason, it vanished from my original Blogger post ... a post that appeared a half-dozen times on this site, unedited, while I slept.)Sick of suicide bombings? Me too. That's why I've asked Israel to move to Mexico.What a stupid, petty little ass.Of course, Lileks warned everybody about this column hours before it reached the Boston Globe's Web site or print edition.
Lileks also describes the perfect newspaper (for me, at least). Lileks and Welch love newspapers, as I love newspapers, even if newspapers are slow and old-fashioned. Will we ever launch such a thing?
Maybe. Dorks like that Globe columnist give me hope.
Or, as the Professor says, "But when you parachute in and try to do a story about something you don't understand overnight, you're going to look stupid."
Monday, April 01, 2002"U.S. Man Linked to Hezbollah," says the Associated Press:Federal prosecutors said Monday that a man has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and agreed to testify about a cigarette smuggling ring that allegedly funneled money, weapons and supplies to the Hezbollah terrorist group.Said Mohamad Harb, 31, pleaded guilty Feb. 25 and a charge of providing material support to a known terrorist organization was dropped in exchange, U.S. Attorney Robert Conrad said ....
The plea was kept secret because Harb agreed to testify against other defendants only if some of his relatives were brought from Lebanon to the United States, Conrad said. They arrived Monday.
A lawyer for Harb declined to comment. If the agreement is approved by a judge, Harb faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
The case began in 2000, when 18 people were arrested ....
That's a helluva plea bargain: "I'm a terrorist and I'm guilty. Can my family please come to America?"
Damian Penny is pissed off:Really, it's all part of a common, though unspoken, assumption -- that the Israelis, and their Jewish bretheren outside of Israel, somehow deserve everything that happens to them. People look at the conflict in the Middle East, see a well-financed Israeli army with considerably more powerful weaponry than their poorer Palestinian opponents, and conclude that the Israelis must be the oppressors. Hence, the idiots who have been rushing to Ramallah to serve as human shields for the beseiged Yasser Arafat. (Will they be sending anyone to protect Ariel Sharon?)My question is, what the hell are the Israelis supposed to do?
Think about it. You're a tiny country of less than 6 million people, surrounded by hundreds of millions of Muslims who believe your nation's existence is an abomination. You're the only nation in the region with a functioning democracy, a free press and a comprehensive welfare state - while your neighbours' wealthy rulers have blown their oil money on palaces and weapons. Your people are constantly protrayed as evil by mainstream media outlets in the Arab world, who think nothing of repeating the most disgusting (and ludicrous) anti-Semitic myths as fact. You were invaded within hours of your country's founding, and several other times since then. You're constantly compared to the Nazis by people who believe the Holocaust was a hoax.
There's a lot more worth reading.
Oh, and those jackasses "protecting" Arafat yesterday? Led by French hamburgler Jose Bove, who has moved from anti-McDonalds to the traditional anti-Semite.
Eric Olsen on the Israeli weakness:The bizarre pretzel logic continues to twist around itself, further choking off air to the brain. Thomas Friedman noted yesterday:As Ismail Haniya, a Hamas leader, said in the Washington Post, Palestinians have Israelis on the run now because they have found their weak spot. Jews, he said, "love life more than any other people, and they prefer not to die." So Palestinian suicide bombers are ideal for dealing with them.This strikes me as profoundly important, both in its utterance and in its meaning. Could an enemy have paid a deeper compliment to a people than to have "accused" them of loving life “more than any other people”? What does this mean, exactly? That the Jews feel life is more worth living than do the Palestinians? That the Jews value individual life more than Palestinians? That they value their collective life more than the Palestinians? That they value their loved ones more? The answer to all of these questions is apparently "yes," which is the clearest explanation of all why we in America, who hold the same values that Haniya ascribes to the Jews, instinctively support Israel, where every loss of life is mourned, not perversely celebrated in some kind of grotesque inversion of all we hold dear.
Please don’t mistake our own or the Israeli’s "love of life" as a sign of weakness. Our love of life reflects that fact that we place equal and irreducible value on each individual life, that our culture and government are assembled from the ground up, to best serve our needs as individuals rather than from the top down, with individuals expected to serve the needs of the collective. We will sacrifice our lives to preserve the freedom to remain cherished individuals, but each life lost will be mourned as a grievous loss and collectively act as a brake against unnecessary military action. It is a supreme irony that Americans and Israelis, once aroused, fight in highly-disciplined, efficient, collective units, and the Palestinians -- in common with Islamist terrorists like al Qaeda -- send out lone "martyrs" who think they have (what could be more selfish?) found an easy path to paradise.
From the mailbag:From: "ahmad atwa" (maksoud_78@hotmail.com)
To: layne@tabloid.net
Subject: u better tell facts
Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 00:03:16once i saw your site i knew u r nazi ..i mean jewish ...i hope u see the attachment i sent to u and see the actions of your new nazi and see who is the real terrorist . ..."Welcome to April Fool's Day"?????
let me tell u about the april fool's day ...it's what your neoron says that he can desrtoy palastinians and achieve security to israel.Yep, that's me: the world-famous Jewish Nazi.
Ahmad, buddy, the sad thing for you is that I'm exactly the kind of liberal American who tended to side with the Palestinian cause, as did many liberal American Jews I know. (Sometimes they even shared their Muslim-Blood Cupcakes with me.) But you people made a very serious mistake: you thought Americans (and Israeli doves) would be charmed by your suicide bombers.
Well, buddy, not only were we not charmed, we're still digging up bodies from the suicide-bomber attacks against our nation. And we remember the happy Palestinians dancing in the streets on Sept. 11.
PS - Glad you're enjoying those wonderful U.S./Zionist inventions: Hotmail and the Internet.
Tal G.'s excellent new Jerusalem blog reprints a company e-mail regarding guns-in-the-office policy. Employees are asked to see the company security officer "to clarify a few details about the policy of carrying weapon[s] at work."Administration cites Iran, Iraq, Syria for fomenting terror against Israel:Rumsfeld specifically accused Iran and Syria of funneling arms to Lebanon for use by terrorists and criticized Iraq for offering payments of up to $25,000 to families of Palestinian suicide bombers.Finally.
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Monday, April 08, 2002
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