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Thoughts on culture, politics, music and stuff by Eric Olsen, Marty Thau and Mike Crooker, who are among other things, producers.
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Saturday, August 10, 2002
Quana: How Do You Feel About the Saudis?
"The Palestinian National Struggle Should Remain Unblemished and Pure" Charles Johnson noted in this post laced with irony the lack of "Muslim peace activists in Palestine." Well, this individual is hardly a "peace activist," but he's the best I could find (subscription required):
"There is no way that one can consider justifying the latest attack on the Hebrew University campus," wrote Hanna Nasir, president of Birzeit University, in Ramallah, in an opinion article published in the Arabic-language daily Al Ayyam, which is published in Ramallah by the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Nasir provided an English translation of the article to The Chronicle.
More excerpts from the op-ed:
The Debate Before the Debate We have quite a conversation going on here about the future of the music industry, and we haven't even launched Blogcritics.com yet. Please go here for a debate between Greg Beato and Farhad Manjoo about the qualities of Internet-based pay music services. Greg follows up again on Farhad's last comment:
doesn't have it yet, it's true, but it does have 18 other Springsteen albums (287 tracks total). Lamenting the artists/albums that these services are missing is basically like saying, "Gee, you know, I would subscribe to Salon Premium, if only they had James Wolcott's Vanity Fair columns." For $10 a month, you're probably never going to have access to every song recorded, just like you're probably never going to have access to every TV show ever recorded for $10 a month. But right now I can't really think of any other subscription service (newspapers, magazines, cable, etc.) that gives you access to so much for so little.
....Your specific question had to do with services such as Rhapsody and Pressplay. Why aren't they good enough? Because they miss the distinction between what people are saying and what people are doing. People might say that they're using downloading just like the use the radio, but that's not usually the case. For that matter, I haven't actually heard anybody say that, so I'm tempted to dismiss it as a straw man argument of your own invention, but I'll address it anyway. Like most people, I listen to the radio while I'm driving. Can I listen to Rhapsody while I'm driving? No. I listen to the radio on my home stereo. Can I listen to Rhapsody on my home stereo? No. Only on my computer, and only if I have a relatively speedy unrestricted internet connection. What do I mean by "unrestricted"? I listen to music all day at work, but if I kept a 128Kbps stream running to my computer all day, I would be chewing up two full channels of a T-1 all day long. My company uses a T1 which allows us to pay based on the amount of bandwidth we use, and just a single Rhapsody stream alone would chew up almost half of the bandwidth we are allotted at our current payment level. Because of this, my company has a pretty strict policy on things like streaming audio or file-sharing software, a policy I helped to write. At work, Rhapsody is not an option for me. In my truck, Rhapsody is not an option for me. At home, Rhapsody is only an option for me sometimes, while I'm near my computer. Fortunately, that is often enough to probably be worth $10 each month (which I currently pay to Emusic), but it doesn't solve my other problems. ....Hey, RIAA: I'm willing spend money on music. I still buy CDs, new and used but mostly used. I subscribe to EMusic. I'm open-minded and fair, and there is money to be made here. Don't serve me feces and call it filet mignon. You want to milk every last penny you can on every song, and you're not even very smart about it. If you were, you'd be listening to people like Janis Ian, who has a great idea for you to make money on stuff sitting untouched in your storage vaults. Stop worrying about the college pirates - you're never going to stop them, you can only hope that they'll grow out of it. Think about the rest of us that want to do the right thing. You're making it difficult. In your futile rush to try to stop the few percent of people who will steal music from Wal-Mart if you ever manage to make it impossible to download from the net, you're setting up obstacles for the rest of us who are honest and just want to have a little bit of say about when and where we listen to our music. Ze Ziggy The lovely and talented Emmanuelle Richard flattered me, asking for input on her piece for France's Liberation on the recording of David Bowie's classic Ziggy Stardust album, now digitally remastered for a 30th anniversary reissue. It looks really good, but being that I can't read French, I turned to a Google translation. They don't have all the bugs out of that system yet. Check this out:
I have no doubt that in French this sucker sings sweetly, and deepest thanks to Emmanuelle for including me. Vive Liberation! or something. Pep Talk 25 business-related ideas for a "changing world":
....We need new ideas on deciding just how big government should get and how intrusive it should be. What should be the trade-off between retaining our precious liberties and securing our country against foreign threats? Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and product designers are rushing out innovations that will allow smooth travel through airports, safe shipping of goods through harbors, and thorough screening of terrorists and terror threats. If these new ideas are successful, Americans may be able to protect their civil liberties and keep their economy open while making the country safer. If they fail, we may enter a darker era. One Orwellian plan proposed by the Justice Dept., called TIPS, would enlist millions of Americans to spy on their neighbors and tip off the government on potential terrorists--a disturbing concept. ....Fortunately, Americans like new ideas, and they like to innovate....We need new ideas to calm us, guide us, and restore us. We need to become comfortable taking risks again. We need to get back our optimism, even a little swagger.
In the 1990s, the gap between rich and poor widened. But poverty rates fell to record lows American culture is fundamentally egalitarian. Wide gaps between rich and poor make most people uncomfortable. So when CEOs take home huge pay packages compared with the wages for ordinary workers, the norms of fairness and social justice seem to be violated. ....But unlike other periods during the past 50 years when the gap has widened, the economy prospered, and the poor did well, too. From 1993 to 2000, the latest numbers available, the percentage of people in poor families plunged from 13.6% to 9.6%, the lowest level on record. The poverty rate for 2001, when it is released in the fall, is likely to be nearly as low, because real wage gains for low-income workers stayed strong that year. Blue-collar wages, adjusted for inflation, rose by 2.4% in 2001, their largest increase in years, with an even bigger jump for service occupations.
What will work in the developing world is a focus on inexpensive, downsized, simple-to-use products Ushaben Patel, a 37-year-old housewife from Navali village in India's Gujarat state, awakens at 5 a.m. each day to milk her cow. A half-hour later, she is at the village milk cooperative center. There, her seven liters of milk are measured and tested. She repeats the routine in the afternoon. Her daily take: $2.80. The money goes a long way. It helps pay for necessities and her two sons' schooling. In fact, the cooperative's impact is visible throughout Navali. In all, 932 of the 6,000 villagers are members, and they have earned enough to help build a new road and housing for schoolteachers. Last year, they even sent money to help earthquake victims elsewhere in Gujarat.
Wrong. The country posting the highest gross-domestic-product growth since 1966 is Botswana, a landlocked nation in southern Africa that's two-thirds desert. Its economy has expanded an average of 7% a year since it won independence from Britain that year, according to the World Bank. And it continues to expand--growth is projected at 5% this year--despite a rampant AIDS epidemic that is now the country's biggest challenge. On a continent where virtually every country is worse off than it was at independence, Botswana offers some lessons in economic management for its neighbors.
At a time when regulators are a step behind public anger and self-policing is a joke, the attorneys who make a living suing Corporate America have become one of the most powerful forces compelling executives to behave. The scandals have given them a unique chance to pose as Robin Hoods. Consider stock fraud litigator Bill Lerach--who was so widely demonized in the '90s that he all but stopped talking to the media. Lately he has been defending Enron shareholders, airing his own agenda for cleaning up executive suites, and has even been dubbed America's "top corporate crime fighter" by the left-leaning The Nation magazine. Overall, this is a pep talk for Businessweek's professional/corporate audience, but it's pretty interesting as well. Lives of Their Own I love it when comments sections take on a life of their own: Little Green Footballs has become famous for posts with THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FIVE comments. That's a good day's traffic for most sites. Dawn gets some wild gabfests over on her site. Dean took over like a champ and argued point-by-point the case for the war here - what a stud. Ross does a tremendous health policy site that is often above my head but deserves the kind of attention that other important expert sites get. In addition he's a great music fan with exquisite taste, and he should be much better known for that too. But this is great to see: his "what is the greatest rock and roll cover tune?" post now has 57 comments winding through music history with an astounding array of tastes, genres and knowledge displayed. The list isn't exhausted yet by any means. UPDATE Burningbird takes offense that Dean responded point by point to her anti-war screed on my site instead of hers. Dean had no obligation to do anything - he's just a terribly well-informed reader - and he entered into the discussion via this site so he just continued it here. Bb also takes offense that Glenn Reynolds linked the debate from this end, but didn't mention her or her allies by name. I am certain that the answer is as simple as he doesn't know them, they have not corresponded with him, and his suggestion to "scroll down and follow the links" was meant to be inclusive. In additon, Glenn specifically linked the post where I defended my position on Japan, which is my most original contribution to the discussion. She says:
By all means though, please see Bb's post for a rundown of her anti-war position. The Zoo Just got back from the zoo - it was a zoo: crowded, hot sunny, smelly. Also, it was "Ugly People Half-Price Day," so there were a lot of those. We tried to get the deal but they said, "No way - we're talking U-G-L-Y - like him," pointing to a 500 lb man with no skin. "Now that's ugly - you get in free sir." One of the big differences between Ohio and California is that everyone is a little bit uglier here: the fat people are 15 lbs heavier, the oddly pale people are a shade whiter, everyone's a little flabbier, a little less in shape, a lot less hip. People in California know in the back of their minds that they are being watched at all times so they try a little harder. You never know when they might be making a movie in your backyard or somewhere. One time when I lived in Hermosa in the early-80s, I looked under the bed to get a magazine and they were shooting an episode of Thirty-Something so I had to go in there and help them - good thing I was in shape and everything. So anyway, the zoo is fun with little kids - Lily, and Dawn's niece and nephew. They get excited about the monkeys and the lions and the snakes and lizards - even the butterflies - but I have mixed feelings about all of those big wild creatures confined to their little spaces. Those orangutans always look so sad sitting there like lumps, or hiding from the world with burlap sacks over their heads. It's just gotta be better in the wild. I know most of the little critters don't know any better and they're fine, but the big ones and the smart ones have to be pretty miserable. I hear they give them antidepressants - probably for the best. Rattling Cages We are off to the zoo with the kiddies: we are going to laugh at those below us on the evolutionary chart, throw straws and bubblegum in the cages, feed them all popcorn and cotton candy, and get sunburned. Back in a while with a victim report. Have a nice day. Friday, August 09, 2002
Fighting Fantasy Folding rather neatly into my characterizations of radical Islam, Japan's divine nationalism, and fascism as contagions of the mind is this remarkable article by Lee Harris in Policy Review:
....This power of the fantasist is entirely traceable to the fact that, for him, the other is always an object and never a subject. A subject, after all, has a will of his own, his own desires and his own agenda; he might rather play the flute instead of football. And anyone who is aware of this fact is automatically put at a disadvantage in comparison with the fantasist — the disadvantage of knowing that other people have minds of their own and are not merely props to be pushed around. ....But what happens when it is not an individual who is caught up in his fantasy world, but an entire group — a sect, or a people, or even a nation? That such a thing can happen is obvious from a glance at history. The various chiliastic movements, such as those studied in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (Harper & Row, 1961), are splendid examples of collective fantasy; and there is no doubt that for most of history such large-scale collective fantasies appear on the world stage under the guise of religion. ....symbols by themselves do not create the fantasy. There must first be a preexisting collective need for this fantasy; this need comes from a conflict between a set of collective aspirations and desires, on one hand, and the stern dictates of brutal reality, on the other — a conflict in which a lack of realism is gradually transformed into a penchant for fantasy. History is replete with groups that seem to lack the capability of seeing themselves as others see them, differing in this respect much as individuals do. A fantasy ideology is one that seizes the opportunity offered by such a lack of realism in a political group and makes the most of it. This it is able to do through symbols and rituals, all of which are designed to permit the members of the political group to indulge in a kind of fantasy role-playing. Classic examples of this are easy to find: the Jacobin fantasy of reviving the Roman Republic, Mussolini’s fantasy of reviving the Roman Empire, Hitler’s fantasy of reviving German paganism in the thousand-year Reich.
....In reviewing these fantasy ideologies, especially those associated with Nazism and Italian fascism, there is always the temptation for an outside observer to regard their promulgation as the cynical manipulation by a power-hungry leader of his gullible followers. This is a serious error, for the leader himself must be as much steeped in the fantasy as his followers: He can only make others believe because he believes so intensely himself. ....Yet even the most sensitively crafted myth requires something more in order to take root in the imagination of large populations — and this was where Mussolini made his great innovation. For the Sorelian myth to achieve its effect it had to be presented as theater. It had to grab the spectators and make them feel a part of the spectacle. The Sorelian myth, in short, had to be embodied in a fantasy — a fantasy with which the “audience” could easily and instantly identify. The willing suspension of disbelief, which Coleridge had observed in the psychology of the normal theatergoer, would be enlisted in the service of the Sorelian myth; and in the process, it would permit the myth-induced fantasy to override the obvious objections based on mundane considerations of reality. Thus twentieth century Italians became convinced that they were the successors of the Roman Empire in the same way that a member of a theater audience is convinced that Hamlet is really talking to his deceased father’s ghost. ....The terror attack of 9-11 was not designed to make us alter our policy, but was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves: It was a spectacular piece of theater. The targets were chosen by al Qaeda not through military calculation — in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized by the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: A mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan. What better proof could there possibly be that God was on the side of radical Islam and that the end of the reign of the Great Satan was at hand? ....It means, in a strange sense, that while we are at war with them, they are not at war with us — and, indeed, it would be an enormous improvement if they were. If they were at war with us, they would be compelled to start thinking realistically, in terms of objective factors such as overall strategic goals, war aims, and so forth. They would have to make a realistic, and not a fantasy-induced, assessment of the relative strength of us versus them. But because they are operating in terms of their fantasy ideology, such a realistic assessment is impossible for them. It matters not how much stronger or more powerful we are than they — what matters is that God will bring them victory. ....There is one decisive advantage to the “evildoer” metaphor, and it is this: Combat with evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not make treaties with evildoers or try to adjust your conduct to make them like you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers’ point of view. You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or reason with them. You try, on the contrary, to outwit them, to vanquish them, to kill them. You behave with them in the same manner that you would deal with a fatal epidemic — you try to wipe it out. So perhaps it is time to retire the war metaphor and to deploy one that is more fitting: the struggle to eradicate disease. The fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century, after all, spread like a virus in susceptible populations: Their propagation was not that suggested by John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas — fantasy ideologies were not debated and examined, weighed and measured, evaluated and compared. They grew and spread like a cancer in the body politic. For the people who accepted them did not accept them as tentative or provisional. They were unalterable and absolute. And finally, after driving out all other competing ideas and ideologies, they literally turned their host organism into the instrument of their own poisonous and deadly will. The same thing is happening today — and that is our true enemy. The poison of the radical Islamic fantasy ideology is being spread all over the Muslim world through schools and through the media, through mosques and through the demagoguery of the Arab street. In fact, there is no better way to grasp the full horror of the poison than to listen as a Palestinian mother offers her four-year-old son up to be yet another victim of this ghastly fantasy. ....Let there be no doubt about it. The fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century were plagues, killing millions and millions of innocent men, women, and children. The only difference was that the victims and targets of such fantasy ideologies so frequently refused to see them for what they were, interpreting them as something quite different — as normal politics, as reasonable aspirations, as merely variations on the well-known theme of realpolitik, behaving — tragically enough — no differently from Montezuma when he attempted to decipher the inexplicable enigma posed by the appearance of the Spanish conquistadors. Nor did the fact that his response was entirely human make his fate any less terrible. Naipaul Pulls No Punches The Nobel Prize for Literature for 2001 was awarded to the British writer of Indian descent, born in Trinidad, V. S. Naipaul. A complex heritage indeed. There is a new interview with Naipaul in the Times Online:
Did his travels give him any inkling of the possibility of the attacks of September 11? “I’ve been aware of madness in the Islamic world. I’ve written about it. The madness of people who have fallen behind technically, and who do not have the will to make the intellectual effort to catch up. I was aware of the religious hatred, I was aware of the indifference to life. I was aware of the anti-civilisation aspect of the new fundamentalism. But I had no idea it had gone so far — the madness. The idea of their strength is an illusion. Nothing is coming from within. The terrorists can fly a plane, but what they can’t do is build a plane. What they can’t do is build those towers. I think people have spoken much rubbish about that event. The poor revenging themselves on the rich! It’s nothing but an aspect of religious hatred. And that is so hard to deal with, or even contemplate. You can deal with the poor striking out, but you can’t deal with the threat of a universal religious war.” Shame and Nausea I don't link Victor Davis Hanson that often anymore because everyone else and their second-cousins do it anyway, and the dude - while a rock of reason and moral sense in a wishy-washy world - tends to repeat himself, repeat himself. But I don't think we can hear something like this often enough:
Palestine, in contrast, is a Potemkin democracy, with the sham facade of elections and republicanism but the dreary reality of an uninterrupted dictatorship since its inception under the Oslo accords. Arafat's initial election was rigged and the absence since then of a real opposition, parliamentary debate, and an independent judiciary proves that - along with the creation of a corrupt clique of hangers-on and often-murderous sycophants. The nature of the Palestinian Authority in and of itself lies at the heart of the entire crisis. Of course, there are sober and responsible leaders in Palestine, but they have no chance to come to the fore through a democratic and legitimate process.
Jewish children do not march in parades with plastic M-16s and helicopters strapped to their tummies; Palestinian kids have been filmed dressed up with toy explosives. Arabs are far safer walking in Israel than are Jews on the West Bank. ....Mr. Atta's crew mouthed gibberish not like Jewish extremists, but identically to Islamic fundamentalists who seek jihad, are promised virgins, and win popular acclaim in Arab countries for blowing apart Western civilians. No wonder Israelis mourned September 11, while many Palestinians cheered; the evil of the World Trade Center resonated with the Israeli public even as it was either condoned or praised by the Palestinian street.
By the way, have you noticed how much VDH looks like Charlton Heston? "I Don't Mean to Brag, I Don't Mean to Boast..." Ginger gets jiggy apropos Superman, laughed at in sophisticated intergalactic circles for "his little worm." Schmitt and Donnelly Say Baghdad Not Mogadishu - Saddam Squirms - Neighbors Scurry Writing in the Weekly Standard:
The Bush administration has threatened to use military force to oust Saddam, who has barred U.N. weapons inspectors from returning to the country. Iraq remains under tight U.N. sanctions until inspectors certify Saddam no longer has chemical, nuclear or biological weapons or the missiles to deliver them. The sanctions were imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, eventually touching off the 1991 war. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Thursday that the Iraqi government hadn't given "an inch" toward meeting U.N. demands for the return of the inspectors. "I don't see any change in attitude," he said.
If war comes, Iraq's best option is to try to force the United States to fight it in the cities, the official said. Saddam knows that the high civilian casualties caused by urban combat is distasteful to the Americans and their European allies. Urban warfare also limits the utility of precision air strikes, as U.S. bombers try to avoid collateral damage to civilian buildings. Also Thursday, an Iraqi dissident leader said he does not foresee any need for a prolonged U.S. military effort because support for Saddam among Iraqis has evaporated. The neighbors are falling in line, according to Jim Hoagland:
These meetings follow reports on official Iranian Web sites that Tehran has recently rejected personal appeals from Saddam Hussein to return Iraqi jet fighters flown out to safety during the Gulf War and to sell Iraq arms and other materiel to repel an imminent U.S. attack. Turkey's military establishment is also content to watch the Iraqi dictator twist in the windstorm. Reports from Ankara suggest that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's July visit achieved informal understandings of Turkish-U.S. military cooperation in toppling Saddam Hussein. Turkey's politicians, wrestling their way through an economic crisis, are also positioning the nation for war next winter. They have moved up parliamentary elections to Nov. 3 and passed an ambitious legal package of human rights reforms that will improve the lot of Turkey's Kurdish minority. Ankara's relationship with the Kurds in eastern Turkey and northern Iraq was a major topic during Wolfowitz's visit. Turkey gives every sign of having taken Wolfowitz's assurances seriously and having chosen sides. Iraq's weaker neighbors above all avoid the appearance of having chosen. Jordan's King Abdullah is operating in full-panic mode, loudly proclaiming the United States will not be allowed to use bases in his country and arguing against an attack. The Saudis send the same message more subtly but with as much fear and trembling. Such posturing is prudent at this point in a war of nerves. Neither Jordan nor Saudi Arabia wants to give Iraq a pretext for new aggression before the United States is ready. But if the windstorm turns into a real storm next winter, no government near the path of destruction can afford to be unresponsive to U.S. war needs and goals. That would be choosing suicide. "Say It Loud, I'm Black and Hateful" Aaron really is a nightmare: an intelligent black man who somehow still buys into the "identify with our suppressed brethren in the Middle East via the American Black Muslim door because they are Muslim and Black Muslims are Muslim [of a sort] and I am black so when they are done with my Palestinian and Iraqi brethren they may come after me." You are an American, that's all that counts. No one else would identify you with any non-American unless the term "African-American" ties you to that continent. This race to identify with the "suppressed underdog" anywhere on earth regardless of heinousness of ideology went out with the Black Panthers. Let me guess: favorite poet - Amiri Baraka? Let us not be blind to victims but let us also not seek victimization as a shield from personal responsibility. Lastly, how dare you imply Dawn is racist when racism oozes from your every pore? So much to offer, so little to say. Were you beaten by your white keepers as a child? Fight the power, fool. UPDATE No, it isn't the site name (which I thought was funny), it's the mixture of self-pity and contempt dripping all over everything. And you can quote George Wallace and David Duke and it wouldn't mean squat. View people as people and drop the race card. Illegal Downunder Chas Rich notes that if Howard Berman's Copyright/Hacking Bill passes, those who attempt to enforce it will be criminals in Australia:
Californian Democrat congressman Howard Berman has proposed legislation to deal with the rising tide of copyrighted works illicitly traded over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as KaZaA. ... Under section 9a of the Victorian Summary Offences Act (1966), "a person must not gain access to, or enter, a computer system or part of a computer system without lawful authority to do so". The penalty if convicted is up to six months' jail. Crow Tools What does this do to the intelligence chart?
The feat, it is said, makes her the first animal other than a human that has shown a clear understanding of cause and effect, and fashioned a tool for a specific task using new materials not encountered in the wild. Not even chimpanzees, our closest cousins, have this ability. ....Professor Alex Kacelnik, who heads the research group, said: "First she tried to get the food with the straight wire, and couldn't reach it. So she pushed the tip of the wire in a crack in the tray and bent it to form a hook. She then used this to get the food. "We were somewhat surprised. To verify that what we'd observed was not a fluke, we tested the same animal again but only gave her a straight wire. Nine times out of 10 she solved the problem to perfection. "What is more, she didn't do it the same way each time. Sometimes she stood on the wire with one foot while pulling the tip with her beak. "Or she stuck the wire into a crevice and worked on it, coming from different angles. If it didn't work right at first, and she couldn't get the food, she'd take it out and fix it so that it did." ....Professor Kacelnik said just because Betty was a gifted tool-maker, it did not mean she was necessarily bright in other areas. "What we believe is that there isn't a single kind of intelligence," he told the UK's Press Association. "Different species have developed different kinds of intelligence appropriate to their particular needs." UPDATE Ken Layne was sent into an avian rhapsody by this story - you will never look at a crow the same way again. MP3's and Sympathy For the Industry Greg Beato thinks the record industry is getting a raw deal in the blogs:
I slipped into your RIAA questions round-up a few days ago with a pro-industry post about Pressplay.com and Listen.com's Rhapsody service that I hoped might provoke a little discussion re: the fact that the music industry is not nearly so static as its critics perceive it to be. I.E., people are asking why the music industry won't even consider Janis Ian's 25 cents a download proposal, when in fact they're actually offering what are arguably much better deals already via the two services I mention above. Alas, my post didn't seem to have any impact, so i went a little further and wrote a piece about these services at my site soundbitten.com. the gist: how come no one in the blogosphere is talking about these services, even if only to explain why they come up short? if you're not familiar with them, basically they offer unlimited, on-demand, CD-quality streaming of catalogs that consist of thousands of artists and songs. For $10 a month. While they certainly have shortcomings, they also represent what I consider to be a significant effort by the music industry to create digital music services that (a) offer fans real value, and (b) are built upon a business model that's more realistic than "let's give away our songs and hope we sell a lot of t-shirts!" ....if you haven't tried these services yet, I encourage you to do so. Both have free trial periods, and who knows -- maybe you can get a group rate for your blogcritics.com project. (for $10 a month, it's like Lexis-Nexis for music critics -- if you're reviewing the latest Bruce Springsteen album, you've got immediate access to over 100 of his previous songs...this doesn't work for every artist, of course, but when it does work, it's pretty great.)
Glenn Reynolds is yodeling defiantly about "record companies [that] have been assaulting music-sharing systems so vigorously" simply to maintain "their stranglehold on promotion and distribution." Janis Ian is warbling softly about the RIAA, the American Dream, and "a general strike" against the music industry: "Just one week of people refusing to play the radio, buy product, or support our industry in any way would flex muscles they have no idea are out there…" Doc Searls is singing the blues about the premature death of Internet radio and an absence of "low-friction" ways to financially support radio stations that aren't in the business of selling consumers to advertisers. As indefatigable as a super-elite squadron of boy-band members, such critics belt out their grievances with great style and enthusiasm -- and still the greedy record industry refuses to listen to them! For years now, music fans have complained that commercial radio sucks. For years now, music fans have railed against $18.98 CDs that contain one good track and 14 lousy ones. For years now, music fans have been terrorized and persecuted by RIAA henchmen who insist that previewing new music via MP3 file-sharing is the most malignant form of piracy ever devised. And how has the music industry responded? With pointless copy-protection schemes and endless litigation. Its latest affront to fans? Comprehensive, low-priced digital music services like Pressplay.com, Listen.com's Rhapsody, and the RealOne MusicPass. Janis Ian, Glenn Reynolds, and Doc Searls are apparently too smart to be taken in by the sleazy, Big Entertainment schemers behind these ventures, because they seem to be ignoring them altogether.
Some services, like Listen.com's Rhapsody service, offer "streaming," meaning that the music doesn't reside on your computer. Others, like Pressplay and MusicNet, offer downloads instead, but they limit the number you can have each month. "None of these services seems to know what the consumer demand is for," Sinnreich says. For a subscription service to work, he thinks it needs to offer four features: content from all five record labels; the capacity to play songs from as many computers as you like; CD burning, for an incremental fee; and "no limitation on the number of songs you listen to in a month -- you have to make them feel like they're getting a lot." As they're currently designed, none of the services let you feel that way. Listen's $10-per-month Rhapsody service has a fantastic interface, and, since it has content from all five labels, you can find much of what you'd like on it. The Norah Jones CD was there, and with a broadband connection it streamed over beautifully. You can listen to any song as often as you'd like -- an option that gives a taste of what a perfect subscription service would feel like. The only trouble is, Listen won't let you burn -- and, as one file trader asked, "Who wants to be stuck listening to shit at their computer?" A Listen spokesman says that the company is working on offering CD burning, but the licensing issues make it difficult right now. Pressplay, on the other hand, does let you burn a limited number of tracks, depending on how much you pay. The $15-per-month plan, for example, lets you burn 10 tracks, though you can't have more than two from the same artists per disc. (Though he didn't provide details, a representative for Pressplay said that the company would soon unveil a new version, and the company's pricing model would change "significantly.") Pressplay's catalog is lean, though, too lean to pay much for. And its many rules, like the many rules of all these systems, have a way of sticking in your craw; as you keep using the system, and it keeps telling you how much less "credit" you have, it's hard not to get annoyed and wonder why you ever left the land of the free. According to the subscription services, their limitations can be traced back to licensing deals with the record labels. There isn't any uniformity to it; different labels release different catalogs to different services, with varying restrictions and at confusing price scales. For example, subscription services must pay more to the labels to offer a download than a stream, even though, on a broadband connection, there is hardly a difference between the two -- and the stream, which can be played on many machines, may in fact be preferable if the download can only be played on one machine, which is a common restriction. Why do the labels have these restrictions? It smacks of old-style thinking -- an inability to recognize that the longer they delay these services, the bigger, and more out of control, trading will become. Glenn Reynolds questions the viability of MP3's as a long-term music storage method:
Maybe I'm wrong about that, but when I really like music, I want hardcopy, not just hard-drive copy. Perhaps there will be a technological fix. In the meantime, CDs have actually gotten pretty damned cheap -- until you factor in the markup needed to pay for record execs' cocaine and fancy cars. And the DIY, more-or-less nonprofit approach to music may be what kills big labels, one tiny bite at a time. When you look at the people willing to operate rock clubs on an effectively nonprofit basis, you have to wonder: as the population becomes richer, and has more leisure time, perhaps all sorts of activities will move from the for-profit to the not-really-for-profit sector. Sheila Lennon with the Providence Journal website (and a member of Blogcritics.com I might add) has an innovative system for bands and MP3's:
Today, it's all back. New bands can again create pages with mp3s they own the rights to, and add photos and links to their websites; bands already on the site can finally update their mp3s with new tunes. (If you don't know how to make an mp3, get your CD to me with this form and I'll rip it myself.) Readers will again be able to hear what a band sounds like before they pop for the cover at a club. We created this mp3 site for the readers, local musicians and fans (including ourselves). It's all free, there are no strings. If you know of any Southern New England bands who want to get their tunes out, please tell them to check it out. UPDATE Greg Beato replies: hey Eric, Thanks for posting some of my comments. You know, I think it that Salon article by Manjoo was actually the thing that finally got me to check out Pressplay.com and Rhapsody when it appeared about a week ago. Manjoo makes them sound pretty underwhelming, but it's also pretty clear that he's squarely in the anti-record industry camp, and determined to see the proverbial cup as half-empty. for anyone who is dead-set on demonizing the music industry as a rationale for amassing a music collection without having to pay for it, i can understand how they might say otherwise. but for someone who understands that a never-ending supply of free music is just as fanciful a notion as the notion that digital tracks should cost $1.50 a piece, these services are a huge step forward. As for MP3s vs. CDs and permanence vs. ephemeralness, well, I don't think it has to be an either/or scenario. Arnold Kling at corante.com is right that CDs will become less and less of a factor -- but just as you can still buy vinyl if you really want to, there will continue to be some kind of CD market for people who want to have a "permanent" fixed digital copy of a song. but as MP3 players and cell phones and radios become net-enabled, there will be less and less a need for this as a streamable copy of any song you want will always be one click away...(as for quality, right now, with Rhapsody's 128 kbps streams, I can't really tell any difference.) The other big thing about these services is that even if they never evolve into a viable downloading solution (i.e., something you can use to make CDs), they still answer the two major rationales for unauthorized file-trading ("I want to preview new music before buying it..." and "I use MP3s the same way I use radio -- I listen to the songs, but that doesn't mean I'd ever buy them.") In other words, if they fail to catch on, then that sends a pretty clear message to the music industry, which is basically: "You know what? That stuff about previewing tracks, and a new form of radio? We were lying! We just want free music." and who knows, maybe people really do just want music for free, and aren't willing to pay anyone -- record companies, artists, etc. -- for it. i think that will have bad consequences for music production in general (just as i think news media for free will have bad consequences for journalism...) in the meantime, it seems like music industry criticism has become such a kneejerk reaction amongst fans and commentators that it has in effect blinded them. janis ian is asking for 25 cent downloads when what's arguably a much more reasonably priced alternative actually exists already. glenn reynolds is holding up mp3.com as an alternative to "Big Entertainment" when in fact it's owned by Vivendi Universal. Farhad Manjoo apparently thinks that getting instantaneous, high-quality streams is somehow "far from fun" even when the alternative includes getting mislabeled, half-downloaded, low-fidelity MP3s via file-trading networks like Bearshare and LimeWire. Anyway, enough from me. It's time to listen to some Janis Ian. I don't know if she knows it or not, but three of her albums are available on Rhapsody...and instead of paying 25 cents a track to listen to them, i can listen to them all for 33 cents (i.e., that's what it costs per day to subscribe...) best, greg
I was underwhelmed by Pressplay, and though I think Listen.com's Rhapsody is a great service for people who mostly listen to music on their computers, I'd call it perfect if it offered either burning or MP3 device portability. Pressplay recently revamped its pricing model; I haven't tried the new service, but it sounds like a major advance. I'm not sure, though, if it allows you to take your downloads off your machine -- I think they don't, which is a shame. Also, none of the services have all the artists. I'm not sure I'd ever pay for anything without The Beatles or Radiohead. If Beato likes these services, that's fine; but I suspect he's not representative of the majority of music fans, who want a service that seems like it offers more than you could ever use. There's no question as to the kind of system people want: they want Napster and Audiogalaxy, not Pressplay. If the music industry were smart, it would have bought AudioGalaxy for $10 million, changed nothing about how it works, and gated the whole system for a $20 monthly fee. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't see why that wouldn't work. The industry blames file trading for a 10 percent drop in CD sales; I'm sure this system would have at least made up that money, and probably a lot more. Industry-defenders can kick and scream and say that such a system will never work because people would just start e-mailing each other songs, or they'll use the free traders, or something else. But perhaps one sign that the industry is so stuck in the mud on this thing is that it never even thought of doing that; what would it have cost them to try? They could have done a one-month experiment on AudioGalaxy ... but no such luck. Beato says "Farhad Manjoo apparently thinks that getting instantaneous, high-quality streams is somehow 'far from fun' even when the alternative includes getting mislabeled, half-downloaded, low-fidelity MP3s via file-trading networks like Bearshare and LimeWire." But I didn't mean that Pressplay and Rhapsody offered less fun than Limewire and Bearshare; I meant they're less fun than Audiogalaxy and Napster, they're less fun than what you want in music. Nothing in file-trading is fun anymore -- I spent an hour on Limewire yesterday getting Bruce Springsteen's new album, something that would have taken me five minutes with Audiogalaxy. But none of the pay systems have the album, so I had no choice. I wonder which part of this situation Beato would call "fun." The album's good, and when I leave work today, I'm going to buy the CD. Thursday, August 08, 2002
LAUNCH NEWS FOR BLOGCRITICS.COM I have received a wealth of excellent material from our Blogcritics contributors - this is going to really be something. We are all over the place stylistically, musically, tonally, and every other -ally you can think of. I can't wait for the launch. THE LAUNCH - we will launch the site next Tuesday, August 13, and WE HAVE CONFIRMED Cary H. Sherman, the No. 2 person at the RIAA (President and General Counsel) for a live online interview FOR TUESDAY'S LAUNCH. I have to confirm final details with Mr. Sherman tomorrow, but all looks GREAT. We will have to submit questions in advance, and there are issues still not resolved within the organization and thus not open for discussion, but this will be an amazing meeting of the minds. There is still time to submit your questions in the comment section here or on the original post here. Please spread the word about the launch and the MEETING OF THE MINDS! Basic Blogcritics.com facts here and here. Turning Japanese, I Really Think So Now, I have used canned expressions regarding the general theory of war/no war against Iraq et al because I have nothing particularly novel to add. I buy the pro-war line essentially whole. My philosophical opponents have also offered nothing new by way of anti-war theory: it's my Steyn against your Fisk, my Hanson against your Said, my National Review (and New Republic for that matter) against your Guardian. The only original content I have delivered in this matter has been in explicitly conflating the postwar experience of Japan with that which is hoped for in the Arab/Islamic world. I will revisit this area. Jonathan Delacour is dismissive:
Nothing could be further from the truth. (And one can't help noting the irony in the fact that Eric buttresses his argument with totally conventional, left-wing Japanese anti-war sentiment, which if it was uttered by Americans, would attract only his derision.) Japan was infected with a divine nationalism bug which became their religion, much as Nazism became Germany's national religion. The emperor is a direct descendant of the divine - he is a god - and it became Japan's duty to enlighten the world with this revelation, much as it is the Islamist's duty to enlighten and subjugate. Japan threw itself into this because honor demanded it, and honor is paramount in Japanese culture. In its zeal Japan committed atrocities and, puffed up with hubris, even attacked the United States. After a prolonged and bitter struggle, America finally prevailed after not one, but two atomic bombs were dropped killing hundreds of thousands. Nothing Alan Cook says here conflicts with anything I have said:
In an honor/shame society, defeat = shame, and this shame allowed the Japanese to reject the faith that had caused them the defeat. Delacour continues:
The ideals demonstrated themselves on a very objective and practical level through the Occupation reinforcing the appropriateness of the American victory. No one amongst the Japanese imagined a similar magnanimity toward losers had Japan prevailed. Yet, none of this would have been possible if Japan had not been soundly, thoroughly defeated. They started it, they gave it their all, they lost, time for a drastic change. No change without the loss, and the loss had to be total and beyond question: no "what if," no "yeah we lost but..." Total defeat clears away space in the collective brain for a total rethinking. You can explain it away all you want, but the fact that Japan lost brutally and decisively made them malleable to change. Period. The fact that the American occupation was not vindictive but constructive prevented the Japanese from transferring any guilt onto us. As to how the Japanese really feel: I overstated my original position to make a point. Though the Japanese are amazingly homogeneous, they are not monlithic. I was speaking in generalities and those generalities still hold: the Japanese accepted the fact that their ideology had led to disasterous defeat: they started it, they lost, the consequences were their own fault. My experiences in Japan were 23 and 14 years ago, so maybe the general tenor has changed and maybe a younger generation does feel sorry for themselves, but this has not been my experience. Nor has been that of Pontifex:
While I was in Japan, I had the opportunity to interview a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima. She was 5km from the blast area. She related the horrors of the bombing, very few of which I related above, to me. And the rest of it as well. Her message, she told me, was that nuclear weapons are horrible tools of destruction that should never be used. And she wanted that message to spread as far as it could. She told me that she was not angry at the Americans for what they had done. The Japanese had started the war. And the Japanese were working towards the same atomic weapons that we used -- which may suprise breathless Western journalists, but ah well. But she seemed plenty angry at her own government, for starting the war, and leaving the victims of it on their own.
What she meant was not that the Japanese had no belief system but rather that beliefs are something you put on and take off like a set of clothes. They realized that militarism had led to a catastrophic defeat at the hands of democratic America and so they thought, "Let's try democracy instead (particularly since the Americans are insisting that we do)." Or, more exactly, let's run American-style democracy through the Japanese blender and see what comes out. Exactly as they had done during the Meiji Restoration when, within a couple of decades, they replaced over three hundred years of Tokugawa autocracy with a complete social system based on British, French, and German models. The Japanese film director Tadashi Imai—whose career straddled the wartime years—provides a classic example of this peculiarly Japanese pragmatism. Imai made pro-Communist films before and after the war and pro-militarist films during it. The guilt and remorse the Japanese felt may have been totally directed inward - "Look what we did to ourselves! How could we have been so stupid?" - but it is guilt and remorse nonetheless. How else to explain the lack of resentment toward the U.S.? How would you feel toward the perpetrators if your country had been ruined and two of your cities vaporized if you still thought your cause was right? Massive resentment, which is not to be found. The only possible explanation is that the Japanese blame themselves, or at least their government and the system that led to this destruction, and not the messengers - us. How does this transfer to the Arab/Islamic world? Not perfectly - no real world analogies are perfect, and those who say the Arab/islamic world is divided and diverse are correct. BUT, the problem - Islamist militancy - is exactly what binds these diverse elements together and is exactly what needs to be utterly defeated and discredited so that an ideological transformation, similar but not identical, to that of the Japanese, can be effected. Only calamity can cause the needle to jump out of the groove, and we must cause that calamity and cause it soon. Dean Jumps In Burningbird senses a weariness on my part to engage in a point by point debate. This is so because I sense we have no common ground whatsoever. That is why I have presented detailed overviews on the various issues: they indicate where I am coming from. As Dean has said: "We are talking past each other." But Dean - bless him - has entered the fray:
Your most important basis is the absence of international law supporting an invasion. This point, alone, is easily worth an entire blog, but let me suggest the following: Most importantly, Saddam Hussein's previous intransigence regarding inspections has left him in violation of at least some of the UNSC resolutions passed at the time of the Gulf War. Zunes and company would disagree, but DoState and DoD would agree w/ me. So, at some level, there IS an international law-based argument for war. But, one could also argue that international law does not exist, in the manner domestic law does. Law is rooted upon a common polity's understanding of the rules under which all of its members will live. In that regard, there is no common global polity. There are statements that many claim to live by, but the reality is that those "commonly accepted principles" are far more often observed in the breach. Take, for example, the presumed human right of freedom of speech, properly limited (i.e., no shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater). Is freedom of speech a universal right? The UN Declaration of Human Rights would make it appear so. Yet, realistically, how many nations abide by this? I'm not even going to claim that we do, necessarily. The point is, if "international law" is to mean anything, it has to have some modicum of universal acceptance. I would therefore submit that your "no international law basis" is, in fact, insufficient to bar US action, or even inaccurate, insofar as the US actually DOES have a legal basis for its intervention. (Would it change your mind if the UNSC approved a war?) ----------------------------------------- Another problem is your claim that we would be conducting an invasion/operation with no allied support at all. Or, as you put it, "At this point we would, literally, be an invading army surrounded by enemies, in a land that we don't know, separated by great distances from a base of support. All of this without the support of most of the world, including many strong allies." Let me first caution you that public pronouncements and actual reality are often at odds. Analysis by pundits (including yours truly) are even less trustworthy(!!). That being said, It is hardly clear we'd be doing so w/o allies. Looking at a map of the region, one can conclude that Bahrain and Turkey are almost certainly on-board. Based on public reports, Qatar is on-board. Kuwait is likely on-board. Jordan may well be on-board. Even Syria may well be on-board. Access to just SOME of these states would provide us w/ significant infrastructure. Think about Kurdish territories, about US facilities in Central Asia, and the possibilities become even more numerous. Your reference to Afghanistan is notable, since prior to the beginning of operations, similar claims were made: Iran would oppose us, Pakistan would be closed to us, the Russians would never sanction the use of Central Asian states' facilities, etc., etc. What actually happened? Iran de facto cooperated w/ the US in its operations in Afghanistan (not least because they hated the Taliban more, just as they rather dislike Saddam), and are today divided on whether to become friendlier w/ us, rather than united against us. Certainly, they did not actually oppose us, whatever the more religious mullahs declared (another example of the difference between what is SAID and what is DONE). Pakistan, today, is LESS of a hotbed of Wahhabi-ist schemings than it was in, say, August 2001, if only because Musharraf has felt compelled (and enabled) to crack down on the ISI. The Central Asian states opened their borders to us, and the Russians, far from opposing, are more closely aligned w/ us. Criticisms of the US from the Duma, which were somewhat louder last year, are far more muted today. ------------------ Your comment on not winning provides an indication of your view of this debate. As far as I can tell, you have NO definition of winning. Killing Hussein is not winning, reordering Iraq's political situation is not winning. If I were to agree w/ your strategic calculus, I'd agree that there was no point in fighting a war either. But I don't, and therefore, at a fundamental level, we are talking past each other. But let me point out a simple reality: IF Saddam Hussein had been toppled, be it in 1991 at the end of the Gulf War, or sometime during President Clinton's administration, then maybe 9-11 wouldn't have happened, at least according to Osama bin Laden. Why do I say that? Think about bin Laden's purported three reasons for 9-11: 1. Sanctions on Iraq. If Saddam had been eliminated, it is hard to imagine that the resulting government, in all likelihood in chaos, and probably under US domination/guidance, would have denied inspectors access to Presidential palaces (built for Saddam) or had the wherewithal to continue any WMD program. And the US/UN would hardly have kept sanctions in place, as a result. 2. US troops in Saudi. Why are they there? To keep Saddam out. No Saddam, no troops in Saudi. I mean, think about it. There were NO US troops in Saudi prior to 1990. And that was w/ a Soviet AND an Iranian threat at the time. Why'd they be there now, if there were no Saddam. 3. Israeli-Palestinian fighting. While this would have been underway regardless, let me suggest that the absence of $25K bounties to families of "martyrs" from Saddam's agents would represent a significant decrease in incentives for martyring yourself. And it would represent fewer funds for training suicide bombers, manufacturing them, etc. All three of these considerations are still in play. So, at a minimum, eliminating Saddam (and hierarchy) would represent, for me, one heckuva win. "It Starts in Baghdad" Now, back to Iraq. Shelley very carefully, logically, and not without eloquence presents a case against war with Iraq, etc., that is so diametrically opposed to my own as to be breathtaking. Our perspective on what nominally could be called the same set of "facts" are so alien as to proceed from different dimensons. The bulk of Shelley's argument is this:
I could continue with other reasons why we can't legally invade Iraq. However, there's an FPIF report that lists these, so I'll submit this now as part of my argument, open to rebuttal of course. As a personal summation, though, I did want to add that no matter how much we believe that Saddam Hussein is planning heinous actions, and no matter how sure we are that he's financing terrorism, if we act in violation of international law (law that we have relied on in the past), then we have become, in efft, the world's worst nightmare -- a US no longer bound and constrained by law. If we have no legal basis for an invasion, we have no strategic basis either. If we invade Iraq, we will do so without the support of any ally in that area (except Israel). This means that the invasion must be managed without the support of many of our current military installations in the region. In addition, the bonds between the differing Arab countries, loose bonds at the best of times, will strengthen and we will, most likely, see other countries in the region 'side' with Iraq, even though traditionally they may not agree with Hussein. At this point we would, literally, be an invading army surrounded by enemies, in a land that we don't know, separated by great distances from a base of support. All of this without the support of most of the world, including many strong allies. As an example of our experience with invasion into a country in the Middle East, let's examine our intervention in Afghanistan. Though our intervention there was in conjunction with an ongoing struggle, with nominal approval of the people in the region, it has been less than successful. In fact, we are still rooting out Al-Queda members, and the political situation in the country runs from fragile to fragile, week after week. And this despite the facts that the invasion of Afghanistan occurred with help and support from surrounding countries, and with at least tepid approval from most of our allies. Now we're more or less permanently committed to the region because if we leave in the forseeable future, chances are the country will destablize -- as happened to give the Taliban power in Afghanistan in the first place. Eric, there's a reason why the military has been against the invasion of Iraq. From a purely dispassionate viewpoint, there is no advantage to the US or to Israel to invade Irag now. Strategically, we won't win. We might bomb the hell out of the country, but we won't win. We might kill Saddam Hussein, or capture him, but we won't win. All we'll do is kill a whole lot of people, massively damage the country, destablize the region, create a whole group of new enemies, force more people into the underground as terrorists, and build yet more reason to fight a new battle, this one taken to the streets and the buildings and the churches and the schools of the US. Ultimately, when you seek to defeat and humiliate a foe using superior force, he will use any means -- any means -- to fight back. He does not become malleable. Strategically, there is no short-term or long-term advantage to the US or to Israel to invading Iraq in violation of international law, and without support of allies. As much as many of you despise the UN, our best approach, at this time and with our current knowledge of the situation in the Middle East, is to work with the UN security council.
There are three possible ways we can go about protecting ourselves. The first is to individually protect targets and citizens here at home. We would call this the defensive reaction. It would involve more careful screening of whom we let into the country, stronger security at our borders, more stringent security measures in our everyday lives, (identity cards, mass fingerprinting/DNA recording, more) no private encryption, frequent check points, and so on. It would involve physical barriers with guarded gates around important potential targets, probably a ban on large gatherings of people, and other security practices that would most likely involve a large surrender of many civil rights we currently enjoy. And even so, we would still be pathetically open to attack. Terrorists - we called them "freedom fighters" - carried out successful missions in Nazi and Communist controlled countries where the nature of the police state was even more repressive than what I've just described. In other words, the defensive solution is no solution. Very well, what of the alternatives? A second possibility is to do nothing, and hope the threat goes away by itself. This is the European approach. It was also the US approach, until it became apparent the threat would not go away by itself, and that the threat was directed at us. Which leaves a third possibility that can best be summed up in the old chestnut: "The best defense is a good offense." In other words, fight the battle against terror on the territory of the terrorists as much as possible. But what, you say, is that territory? Don't terrorists, by their very nature, avoid the problems of territorial vulnerability that states suffer from? Yes and no. Yes, in that rarely do terrorist take over states, and if they do, at that point they cease being traditional terrorists and become state terrorists, another, and more easily attacked, kettle of fish. But even terrorists don't exist in limbo. They must have money, communications, weapons, places to train, places to hide, places to store up supplies and otherwise create the infrastructure that even a non-territorial organization needs to maintain effectiveness. And that is where real states come in. For various reasons, (usually of deniability or unpredictability), certain states find the ability to make use of terrorist organizations not directly controlled by themselves to be highly useful. And in order to make use of such groups, they offer to trade the things the terrorists need in return for the right to task the terrorists with missions favorable to their own goals and interests. Saddam Hussein's Iraq is such a nation. The documented connections between Hussein's regime and innumerable terror groups are legion. Even today, it is Iraqi and Saudi money that principally bankrolled the various Palestinian Arab terror groups - even to subsidizing the families of the suicide bombers. We also know that Saddam Hussein has no way to reach the US mainland short of making use of terror cells. Yet without the ability to threaten the US mainland, he has no leverage whatsoever against the US, should it decide to attack him. Therefore, as a quasi-rational actor, he would be insane not to attempt to make an alliance with anti-US terror groups, and use them as a means to threaten the US with the projection of his own power. If there is such a thing as a "root cause" of terror, it is not poverty or desperation, it is states that sponsor, succor, support, fund, and protect terrorists. Iraq is such a state, and its tyrant ruler, Saddam Hussein, is faced with an intolerable choice. If he cedes enough power to pacify the United States and her worries about him, then he will at the same time become too weak to maintain his own grip on the Iraqi tyranny he now controls absolutely. But if he doesn't cede this power, then the US will crush him. Either way, he loses. He is effectively in what Steven Den Beste and others have pointed out is the endgame of a war game scenario called tit-for-tat: If the US attacks Iraq, the game is over for him, and he might as well use everything in his arsenal, including his terror assets. Yet he has no way to dissuade the US from attacking him, short of ceding so much power he will be toppled anyway. For him, it is a lose-lose situation. He has only two options: Wait, and hope that some other force turns the US away from him (and do everything he can to help any such force develop, hence his support of Arafat and the others as a distraction), or launch his assets in what is sometimes called The Samson Option. From our point of view, it is inevitable that Saddam, if he remains in power, will eventually back terror attacks against the US mainland. He has probably already done so. Since our primary goal is to defend the US against such attacks, the best way to do so is to attack Saddam as soon as possible. Why as soon as possible? Because game theory tells us he will attack us us when we attack him, and he will do so with everything he has, even if the bid is suicidal. Obviously, the less he has, the better for us. If he doesn't have nukes yet, then that is one less threat he can try to deliver against us. What about ignoring him? I touched on this before. The big problem with that is that, aside from the probability he has already attacked us, we can never be certain he won't supply some terror group with the means to damage us badly on its own. Here's why: Just as we regard our ICBMs, nuclear submarines, and B-52 as strategic threats, able to project US power world-wide, so does Saddam regard access to terror cells as his own version of a strategic threat, with similar projection capabilities. Yet in order to maintain control of this threat, he must succor it. That's the trade they agree on - Saddam gives them money, supplies, shelter, equipment, and so forth, and they do his bidding. If he doesn't, they'll find somebody else who will. The end result of this is that it's inevitable something really nasty from Saddam's armories will wind up in terrorist hands, because they will demand it of him as the price of working for him. We can't allow that, because our primary goal is the defense of the United States. But the only way to prevent it is to cut the tree at its roots. Those roots are buried deep in the soil of Baghdad. Which is why we'll be going there soon, and the fires of hell will be going with us.
A deterrent fails either if your opponent doesn't care about it, or if he doesn't think you'll use it. There can be many reasons why he might think that, and he might be wrong. But if he misjudges the situation, attacks you and you do then use your deterrent, it may be satisfying but it didn't accomplish its mission of preventing the initial attack against you. It's something of a truism among those who serve on missile subs that they must at all times be ready to launch, but if they ever do then it means that their mission has failed. Their mission isn't to destroy an enemy, but to prevent an enemy from attacking us. Any time a deterrent can't reasonably be expected to work, then you must be willing to use other means and sometimes a preemptive attack is the most effective. Sometimes it's the only answer. Saddam is not suicidal. But he is arrogant, cruel, crafty, and totally contemptuous of us. He has underestimated us again and again. The policies of his government, and the way his government has tried to deal with us over the last 10 years have demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of what we are and what we're willing to do. The current negotiations about the inspectors demonstrates this clearly. Last September, in the wake of the attack against us, Bush made the Taliban what I referred to then as an "offer they can't accept". He demanded that the Taliban arrest bin Laden and turn him over to us unconditionally, and kick all traces of al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. As we all now know, this wasn't possible because by that point al Qaeda owned the Taliban and bin Laden was effectively the ruler of the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan. al Qaeda troops made up the core of the army which was fighting against the Northern Alliance. bin Laden's money helped keep things going. We out here in the rest of the world didn't know these things, but I suspect that our government did. The Taliban were not able to comply with that demand. They tried making alternative offers, all of which were rejected. No, it's not acceptable for us to give our evidence to the Taliban for trial in an Afghan court. No, we won't accept a court in a neutral Muslim country, either. And so on. I believe that Bush knew full well that this was something the Taliban could not do, but it was politically important to make it look on the surface as if there had been a way out short of war for the Taliban prior to an American attack. By the same token, the current demand by the US and indirectly by the UN for the return of the weapons inspectors with unlimited and unfettered rights to search for and destroy WMDs and the equipment which produces them is a demand that I believe Iraq can't actually comply with. I cannot prove what follows but I'm willing to bet money on it: since the inspectors were ejected, Iraq has been going full-bore on development of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. I believe that they have substantial stocks of nerve gas, probably have weaponized anthrax but I do not believe they have yet produced a nuclear weapon. Their excuse for ejecting the inspectors was that the WMDs had all been found, there were none left, and that it was time to end the process and remove the economic sanctions. The reality is that the entire several-year process of weapons inspection was one big cat-and-mouse game with the Iraqis doing their best to hide what they had, but with the inspectors actually making some progress and finding things. Since the inspectors were ejected, the Iraqi line has been that they have none any more. I believe they are lying, and I believe that if true effective inspections were to begin again it would quickly become evident. What's been going on in the political maneuvering is that the Iraqis are trying to arrange a situation where the sanctions against them are partially or fully lifted before inspections begin again, and that the inspections will take place under circumstances which make it possible for the Iraqi government to again play cat-and-mouse. Among other things that they tried to insist on was the idea of a limited period, more or less "If you can't find where we've hidden them in three years, you have to give up and pretend they don't exist." Oh, and they also want a promise ahead of time that the US will not attack if they let the inspectors back. (To which Powell responded that the point wasn't inspection, it was disarmament. I understood what he meant: there's a difference between ineffectual inspections and ones which really find and destroy Iraq's WMDs, and there's been no indication yet that Iraq was willing to actually cooperate with the inspectors.) I do not think that this is the struggling of a desperate man, looking for some sort of compromise as was the case with the Taliban offers of various ways of having a meaningless show trial for bin Laden at which he'd be acquitted by a fixed court. I think that these proposals by the Iraqis are genuine, because I think they think we're stupid or gullible enough to agree to them. I think they actually believe that they can manipulate the situation so that the sanctions can be lifted and the threat of war removed without their actually having to give up their WMDs. Their recent proposal for members of the US Congress to come, and to bring with them any experts they wish, and to have three weeks to look around, was an example of that. It's ludicrous on its face; no-one can find anything in three weeks. But that was the point; Iraq was willing to risk that because it would look as if they were open to inspections without actually being so. The problem is two-fold: Saddam has some weapons of mass destruction and I believe he is actively working to acquire more of them, and also to acquire working nukes. Other nations have weapons like that but no intention of using them against us, which makes them at least tolerable (if uncomfortable). But I also believe he has the will to use them against us. He would not do so directly, as a formal act of the Iraqi government. If nerve gas is released in NYC or if Miami is nuked, then any nation formally taking credit for it will unquestionably regret it, and Saddam is realistic enough to know it. But if he thinks he can fool us, and deliver those weapons indirectly in such a way as to preserve plausible deniability, then I think he believes he can escape our response. In that case we have no deterrent. The way he'd do it is by leaking those weapons to a group like Hamas, or Hezbollah, or al Qaeda, or Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Berkeley, and let them take care of delivery, since they'd be quite happy to die during the process. With respect to a nuke, let's be clear that there is no direct defense. There are ways that such a weapon can be delivered to an American city which are virtually certain of succeeding, and almost impossible to detect. (No, I'm not going to say what they are.) If someone out there has a bomb and truly decides to use it against us, one of our cities will go away. The idea that we'd be able to stop the attack is not credible; we cannot rely on defense to save ourselves. We'd try, but we would probably fail. The best way to stop such an atttaqck is earlier in the chain. Once such weapons are in the hands of groups willing to make suicide attacks, our deterrent doesn't work against them. We have to stop the source of supply, and by far the most probable source of supply is Iraq. These things are not certainties. There's no proof available to me. What I have is a strong suspicion that Saddam may think he can get away with giving weapons like that to other groups to use against us, if he can manage to do so in a fashion sufficiently surreptitious and indirect so that we can't directly prove that they came from him, even though we'd have a strong suspicion of it. In that case, he would think we'd be paralyzed and wouldn't respond. If an enemy knows you have a deterrent but doesn't think you'll use it, you have no deterrent. That is the situation I think we have to preempt. And containment doesn't stop this, because smuggling is much too easy. Iraq has been smuggling thousands of tons of oil over the last few years; 500 kilos of nerve gas would be trivial. (The most likely smuggling route would be through Syria, and it's difficult to see how we could prevent it.) If we contain him, then he's free to continue to work to develop more and better weapons (including, eventually, nukes), and he's free to give them to others to use against us. He might not, and if he tries he might not succeed, but the stakes are too high in my opinion to take the chance. The risk and consequences of inaction, of letting him have that opportunity, are higher than the risks associated with attacking. I do not believe he can be assassinated, and I do not believe we can foment revolution or induce a coup. I think our only choices are containment and invasion, and I think containment is too risky, and only postpones the invasion. Because even if he is not willing to give those weapons to al Qaeda, what about Uday when he takes power? That man is supposed to be a raving maniac; no-one knows what he'll do. Those weapons are also dangerous against us in a direct war, but the longer we wait to attack, the more and better weapons he'll have. It's already too late to take Saddam out without any risk of their use, but though there is a substantial risk of them being used against us now if we attack, the risk rises if we wait. There's no question that an attack would be expensive (in both blood and money) and dangerous and that the results could be very chaotic. It's a lousy choice. It's just that all the others are worse. Now, returning to the "humiliation" issue, again my work has been done for me, this time by wise reader Dean:
....this war is not based on equalling the numbers of dead from 9-11, but in achieving a larger goal, one of (hopefully) knocking out the underpinnings that support not only a terrorist infrastructure, but a group whose worldview holds the US (and, yes, Israel) as the ultimate target for destruction. The "humiliation" which sparked the Japan discussion is aimed, not at humiliation for its own sake, but in persuading those who adhere to this worldview that they are WRONG, that "the course of history" does not run in their favor, by providing concrete, hard reality as evidence. And if they nonetheless refuse to change their minds (and, yes, it is incredibly difficult to change some people's minds), to at least make it incredibly difficult for them to achieve that end. And, please note, there are ADDITIONAL means towards these ends. Education, re-education, providing a moral example (such as was evidenced in post-war Japan and Europe by US aid), all are part and parcel. They CAN work, but only in an environment where their message is not constantly under threat (such as from folks who would ban or kill ALL Christians, Jews, Hindus, etc., from their land), just as de-Nazification could only work in a conquered Germany. As to the concept that Iraq, led by the irreligious despot Saddam, will not serve as the "example" we seek to demonstrate the futility of the Islamist worldview, there is some merit to this concern. Regime change in Iraq, no matter how decisive, may not convince Islamists that their fundamental beliefs must be abandoned. However, it might. Though Saddam himself is irreligious, he has cloaked himself in the language of Islamism in order to draw support from other Islamic countries, he has identified his country with those other countries, and supported the movement elsewhere when it has served his own ends. Regarding instability in the region, let us turn to Mark Steyn:
So if you want to destabilise the entire region, where’s the best place to start? Answer: the regime that represents the height of the stability junkies’ folly. It was the fetishisation of stability that led to Bush Sr, Colin Powell and co. leaving the Saddamites in power 11 years ago. ....it’s late summer 2002 and we’re still ineffectually bombing Iraq every week while somehow managing to get blamed for systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids — or two million or whatever it’s up to by now — through UN sanctions, though funnily enough UN sanctions don’t seem to have so tightened Saddam’s purse strings that he can’t find 25,000 bucks to give to the family of each Palestinian suicide bomber. More than that, he’s still here. And, simply by being still here, he’s what passes for a success story in the Arab world. He’s living proof to the boneheads on the ‘Arab street’ that you can be violently anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-everything, and get away with it. Today, French flights are once again landing at Saddam Hussein International Airport in Baghdad. With every year he survives, the will to constrain him diminishes and his legend throughout the region increases. ....it’s not strictly necessary for a new regime in Iraq to be better than its predecessor, only different. That sends the important message that whose fingernails you rip out in the dungeon of the presidential palace is your affair, but start monkeying with us and you’ve written your last romantic novel, moustache boy. That’s the immediate and critical US aim. Nonetheless, whoever succeeds Saddam will almost certainly be an improvement. That’s to say, he will, at worst, be a post-11 September General Musharraf — a non-deranged dictator who’ll stick the anthrax programme on the back burner, attend to more pressing economic matters, and thereby set in motion a chain of events, state by state. Just to run through a few: Saudi Arabia: I don’t believe those stories in the British press about the Kingdom being on the verge of collapse. In fact, I’d say they most likely came from Crown Prince Abdullah himself, desperate to stave off the invasion of Iraq. His ludicrous ‘Palestinian peace plan’ served as a grand diversion this spring and he’s hoping this latest wheeze will see him through to New Year. One reason why the House of Saud wants Saddam to stick around is because the first thing a new Iraqi regime will do, liberated from UN constraints on oil exports, is start pumping an extra couple million gallons a day. It’s a small point but one worth noting that, by keeping Saddam in power but restricting his ability to sell oil, the West to a certain extent punishes itself. A new regime in Baghdad, whether democratic or not, means more oil, which means cheaper prices at the pump, which means more pressure on the House of Saud, whose underpants get tightened a notch with every per barrel dollar drop. Thus, Saddam’s removal could be seriously crushing. ....Iran: as I write this, the original Islamist nutters are firing on their hapless citizens in Tehran, Esfahan, Ghazvin and other Iranian cities. The popular demonstrations are to mark the 96th anniversary of the constitutional monarchy and, so far as one can tell from the patchy reports, it sounds more like Hungary 1956 than Czechoslovakia 1989. But there are some interesting details. Protesters report that the regime’s riot police are speaking Arabic. That confirms rumours that the mullahs have hired Saudis, Iraqis and others to do the heavy work of shooting civilians. The likelihood that a young pro-Western population will be cowed by Arab outsiders decreases significantly after Saddam’s gone: they’ll no longer be the crack troops of the regional superpower but only the despised remnants of a loser regime. The Palestinian Authority: the Palestinian people are perhaps the best testament to the defects of stability. They’ve been kept in an artificially stable environment for half a century: the faux ‘refugee camps’ of Jenin and the like, which are effectively UN-supervised terrorist-training facilities now populated by three generations of ‘refugees’ who’ve never lived in the places they’re supposed to be refugees from. The millions of displaced persons in postwar Europe or India at partition should thank God they never caught the eye of the UN. All-out war to the death would be preferable, regardless of who won. Either the Arabs would get their way and push the Jews into the sea or the Arabs would be decisively beaten once and for all. But neither scenario would have led to the remorseless descent into depravity that the Palestinians have accomplished in their UN-mandated limbo. The death-cult psychosis doesn’t exist in isolation: it’s armed by Iran, bankrolled by Iraq, and philosophically sustained by Saudi Islamism. It will not survive the liquidation of its state patrons. This is good news for any Palestinians interested in actual life. None of the above will happen without a massive humiliating military defeat of the Arab world’s Number One loonitoon. Shortly thereafter, the Ayatollahs and ol’ man Yasser will be gone, and the House of Saud, Junior Assad and Mubarak will follow. Think I’m crazy? Look at the map the last time we went to war with Saddam. In 1991, Afghanistan was still communist, as were the Central Asian republics; Pakistan was under the corrupt Sharif regime; and the newly united Yemen was on its way to civil war. Eleven years later, General Musharraf is trying his hardest to be Washington’s new best friend, and American forces are in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and even Georgia. The Middle East’s eastern and northern borders have quietly become an American sphere of influence. The regimes on the ground are of varying degrees of unattractiveness, but none of ’em is causing the West any trouble. That’s the way Araby will look in a couple of years. It starts in Baghdad, and soon. Tutorial For those of us unclear about the differences between fees imposed upon broadcast radio and the Sisyphean burden being heaped upon Internet radio, please see Doc's tutorial as found in the comment section of Patrick Nielsen Hayden:
There is little or no copyright burden on ordinary radio. You pay nothing for what you hear on your city's KISS-FM station, and that station pays nothing except to composers. Generally they get the records for free ("for promotional puposes only" it says on the CD) from the record companies, or for a fee from some other service. There is no equivalent between the burden placed on regular radio by current regulations and that placed on Internet radio by the CARP/LOC regulations. The burden on Internet radio -- in fees, in reporting, in every other respect, is stuff NEVER experienced by ordinary radio. If somebody ever even thought of bringing them up in Congress, the NAB and its legislative tools would squash it like a bug. But Internet radio got lined up for execution because the DMCA, under pressure from a paranoid entertainment industry, characterized webcasting -- then still very young -- as something other than radio: as a "performance" delivery system, kind of like a digital venue -- a virtual club. This characterization was born of the fear that eventually digital copies would in fact be "perfect" copies of a performance, and that therefore the artist should be compensated on a per-listen basis...... Anger Oliver Willis calls himself an "angry black man." Dawn calls into question the precepts of a REALLY angry black man. Another Perspective on Japan As I have mentioned many a time, one of the great pleasures of blogging is finding someone new (to me) and being able to point a finger in his/her direction. I'm no InstaGlenn, but I try to spread it around. In response to the Japanese mentality discussion paralleling the "humiliation" debate, blogger Pontifex (with the smallest blogroll I've ever seen, the dude is picky) has this amazing post:
But still, try. Imagine your skin burned off, and maggots breeding in your exposed flesh. Imagine never being to close your eyes, because your eyelids have been burned off. Imagine day upon day of radiation sickness. Imagine awaking in a pile of burned rubble, surrounded by the corpses of what where your friends. And now imagine, after all that, that your government turns a blind eye to you and your plight. That's the dirty little secret of the Japanese outrage over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While Mayor Akiba may preen and affect moral outrage over the bombing, ask him what he's done for the survivors. Ask him what he has done for them. Because they're still out there. And he hasn't done a damned. They, in their old age, have to continue to show up to work day after day in order to survive. The city government turns a blind eye to many of their requests. It's long been this way. The Japanese government, which was using school children in working parties to aid the war effort, was not much help to the survivors of those twin horrors that helped to end one of the most horrible wars of all time. Any last resource Japan had was canibalized for the war effort; there was nothing left for them to use for the suffering. And, now that America has helped them to gain prosperity, those that still live can still expect no help from their government. Contrast that to America. After the war, American missionaries went to Japan to aid the survivors. Soldiers stationed at the then-Iwakuni Air Base provided milk and oil to those in need. As the years went on, basic medical care and food aid gave way to paying for plastic surgery to repair the scars that the survivors had. While I was in Japan, I had the opportunity to interview a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima. She was 5km from the blast area. She related the horrors of the bombing, very few of which I related above, to me. And the rest of it as well. Her message, she told me, was that nuclear weapons are horrible tools of destruction that should never be used. And she wanted that message to spread as far as it could. She told me that she was not angry at the Americans for what they had done. The Japanese had started the war. And the Japanese were working towards the same atomic weapons that we used -- which may suprise breathless Western journalists, but ah well. But she seemed plenty angry at her own government, for starting the war, and leaving the victims of it on their own. Now, the Iraquis are working towards developing nuclear weapons of their own. Current reports indicate that they are on track to have The Bomb by 2005. Then, the atomic bomb will be in the hands of a madman who has no compunction, no hesitation, to use these kinds of weapons as a tool to maintain his evil regime. America, alone, stands ready to prevent Saddam from obtaining these weapons, even at a high cost to us. That's the Pax Americana that Mayor Akiba rails against. And while he may be standing at ground zero of a nuclear detonation, America is standing prepared to prevent anyone from standing at ground zero of the next one. Somehow I doubt he understands this, but I think the lady I talked to might. UPDATE I explicitly connected the example of Japan as a case study in utter defeat leading to ideological malleability here. Alan Cook doesn't think the analogy holds:
Second, all of the Japanese were united in a single hierarchical society, and the Occupation left that hierarchical structure almost entirely intact. (That's the big reason MacArthur left the emperor alone.) Third, Japanese society had been molded for 50 years by a propaganda machine that had assured them of their racial superiority and invincibility, so when they were defeated, by God, they were were willing to admit that they really were defeated. Moreover, the machinery of propaganda was still in place and could now serve the purposes of the new occupiers. (I've talked to Japanese folks who were school kids at the time about how odd it was to have the same teachers who a couple of years earlier were telling them how bad demokurashii was now telling them about how great it was.) Fourth, the ready Japanese acceptance of the surrender and the Allied occupation was brought about at least as much by near-starvation conditions under which they had been living for several years as it was by a dramatic military defeat. One Year It is truly astonishing what Glenn Reynolds has accomplished in one year with InstaPundit. Whether you agree with any individual position he takes doesn't much matter: what does is his generosity, civility, intelligence, and care for this little world that has come to be called the blogosphere. A year ago, even six months ago, there was no question who the most prominent political blogger was - that position is now Glenn's by popular acclaim, and for good reason. He is the best respresentative of what we do, or try to do. Happy Anniversary Glenn. Stripped Late start today because my dad, son and I went to the Indians game last night. With the rebuild in full swing, I haven't been thinking as much about the Indians or baseball in general as I normally do, which is probably okay too. But the game last night was notable. C.C. Sabathia has had an absolutely stereotype sophomore slump season so far after an astonishing rookie year in which he went 17-5 with a 4.39 ERA. He is at 7-9 with a 5.31 ERA after last night's win. Sabathia was very sharp, giving up only 2 runs over 7 innings and the game was over in an astonishing 2 hours and 8 minutes. It was just like the old days, literally. The game moved very swiftly like a game from the 70s and the atmosphere was like a '70s game at the old stadium where expectations were low and anything positive was cause for celebration. Since Jacobs Field opened in '94 there has been an intensity in the air there, caused by high expectations and high achievement. The intensity was felt as excitement for the first years - a constant playoff atmosphere - but came to be a negative shadow image of itself as expectations were never actually met. With no championship in the bag, people came to see not the thrill of terrific teams loaded with stars playing at the highest (almost) level, but the opportunites missed, the miracles not delivered. A jaded "what have you done for me lately" atmosphere came to pervade the stadium. But last night people weren't there because they wanted to associate with a winner, to see a team that might finally come through THIS year: they were there last night because it's a lot of fun to go to a major league baseball game - even between the rebuilding Indians and the always-lame Devil Rays - and when the team you root for plays well and it all comes together, it's even more fun. I remember Bill James writing about following the always-awful Kansas City teams of his youth, and that it was actually fun following a bad team because you never expected anything so when they actually accomplished SOMETHING, he really appreciated it and savored the particular flavor of that accomplishment, rather than focusing on "DID MY TEAM WIN, AND IF THEY DIDN'T WHY THE HELL NOT?" That's what it was like last night and it was very refreshing, even sweet. It was like 8 years worth of varnish had been stripped away, and the beauty of the bare wood was allowed to reveal itself once again. It's a beautiful game, and an entire stadium seemed to apprehend that beauty last night. But they better be good by 2004 or there will be hell to pay, Larry. Check Out the Covers Ross's cover tunes idea was great! Go check out some of the responses in his comments section and check out ours here. We want more more more. Eric H. flipped it around and asked what song has been covered the most, or has the most good versions out there. There are jazz standards that have been covered thousands of times, but we are focusing on R&R. UPDATE There is discussion on the original post and on Ross's site about whether "Because the Night" counts as a cover because Patti Smith was the first to release it. I think it does and here's why, from my interview with Jimmy Iovine:
Iovine met Patti Smith when she was recording Radio Ethiopia at the Record Plant in ‘76. They got along well, hung out together, and Smith asked Iovine to produce her next album - which turned out to be her commercial breakthrough - Easter. A solid, more rock-oriented affair than her punky first two albums, Easter rode to victory on the back of Smith’s first hit single, “Because the Night” (No. 13). The rousing anthem started as a demo written, recorded and rejected by Springsteen for his Darkness On the Edge of Town album, which Iovine was engineering. Once Springsteen nixed the song from Darkness, Iovine asked Bruce if he could record it with Smith because he needed a single for her album, and he had “always found a woman singing from a man’s point of view to be interesting,” he says. Iovine’s instinct was correct as Smith’s ballsy reading shot her into the mainstream, and became the highest charting Springsteen-penned single to that point. Wednesday, August 07, 2002
Salon Stings TIPS Salon is on something of a roll: the Boehlert story I just mentioned, Scott Rosenberg is rounding into a fine blogger, and Dave Lindorff's story on TIPS that broke yesterday is nothing short of bizarre (premium content)
But instead of getting a hardened G-person when I called, a mellifluous receptionist's voice answered, "America's Most Wanted." A little flummoxed, I said I was expecting to reach the FBI. "Aren't you familiar with the TV program 'America's Most Wanted'?" she asked patiently. "We've been asked to take the FBI's TIPS calls for them."
Clearly, someone in the Justice Department decided to enlist the show in processing TIPS calls, and civil libertarians aren't sure whether the Fox-TIPS synergy is funny or scary or both. "On a certain level, it's laughable -- a Keystone Kops kind of thing," says Bill Goodman, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. "But the frightening thing about it is, what if someone actually did find evidence of a real terrorist ring, and they brought it to a TV station instead of the FBI?"
After she had filled out all of the appropriate paperwork, she was given an appointment for the final, crucial phone interview to determine whether or not she would be accepted. She took the day off from school. They never called. She finally got someone the NEXT day who said, "Uh, he must have been busy." No apology. They rescheduled for after school another day: didn't call that day either. Finally, when she was ready to give up, I got involved, tracked down management, bitched with increasing vehemence until I was basically assured that she was already in, that the call was a formality, and please don't publicize this. Ooops. My daughter is still waiting for the package she was supposed to get at the end of June telling her where she is going to be living, what she is going to be doing, and other similar trivialities - all just a formality I guess. I'm sure the program will be fine once it gets started, but, ah, the entrance process does not inspire confidence. Back to TIPS:
Even if the TIPS-Fox connection is just a stopgap measure while the Justice Department tries to figure out what to do with a program nobody but the president and the attorney general seems to support, the solution shows Ashcroft's tin ear when it comes to privacy rights. The idea of privatizing a citizen spy operation is alarming to many civil libertarians, not reassuring. UPDATE How's this for prescient? On JULY 17 Lynxx Pherrett made the TIPS/America's Most Wanted connection:
Middlemen vs. Middlemen Digging deeper into industry sleaze. How's this for a daisy chain? Labels make records, they then pay independent promotions companies to place those records on radio, which the independent promotions companies pay to be their exclusive agents with the labels. Salon's Eric Boehlert digs deeper:
For artists, it's virtually impossible to land significant FM commercial radio airplay today without paying indies. Each single shipped to radio can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote.
The indie system has been entrenched for decades, and the labels helped create it in hopes of dancing around existing payola laws. But now, thanks to an unprecedented consolidation in the radio industry and the creation of a broadcasting behemoth like Clear Channel, a handful of large broadcast groups and their exclusive indies wield unprecedented power. That makes the slumping record companies nervous.
In the early 1980s, Warner Bros. and Columbia, upset about the influence amassed by a group of powerful indies known as The Network, launched an outright boycott. That was the last time major labels tried to stand up to the indies -- before CBS sold Columbia to Sony. According to Fredric Dannen's 1990 music industry exposé, "Hit Men," the boycott collapsed after the labels' marquee artists -- Loverboy (a platinum act at the time) and the Who among them -- revolted after having trouble getting songs on the radio. Today, labels are attempting a more nuanced offensive against the indies, such as introducing airplay guidelines, as RCA and Atlantic have done. They're also looking to Washington for help. In March, Salon reported that the major labels, under the auspices of the Recording Industry Association of America, were joining forces to draft proposed new rules governing indie promotion and present them to the Federal Communications Commission. Last month, senior executives from the five majors met with an RIAA representative to discuss the FCC proposal. Recently, Senator Russell Feingold, D-Wis., introduced the Competition in Radio and Concert Industries Act, which also calls for a crackdown on indie promotion.
If labels cut the rates they're willing to pay indies for adds, the middlemen, locked into expensive deals with radio-station owners, could lose millions. What is More Humane? I am so grateful to Doc for tackling fundamental war issues: issues I would guess he is not by nature inclined to address in such depth. But he is a journalist, a man of great intellectual curiosity, intelligence and good will. As a result of his measured consideration of the issues, an entire community that wouldn't otherwise even consider the views of "warbloggers," are now doing so. The shock appears to be great:
What changed my opinion was when Doc joined the fray with a gentle admonishment to the warbies. If the Armies of Allah are defeated, humiliated, crushed, scattered upon the four winds, then the whole philosophical house of cards collapses and you have a beaten, malleable people willing to accept a new way of life, such as Japan after WWII. We can't look at the puzzle piecemeal any longer: we can't look at al Qaeda, Hamas, Saddam, wahabbism, Afghanistan, or militant Islam anywhere as separate entities. We must see the whole puzzle for what it is, and end the threat behind them all once and for all; this is exactly "inflicting a lesser misery to end a greater one."
What will finally sate the US and Israeli? It seems as that I'm finally getting an answer, and this time without the pretty varnish of "selective warfare" and "purely defensive combat". The answer is: bomb them all and let God sort them out. (God, of course, being the God of the Jews and the God of the Christians.) And what's truly scary is not knowing if Eric or Martin are examples of extremist warbloggers, or are representative of a people of a country I no longer recognize. The question then becomes: How best to root it out? Piecemeal over time dealing in measured increments with modular units such as al Qaeda one at a time? This is the State Department's preferred method. Put out the fires as they arise and nothing more, to switch metaphors. Or do we strike a massive, definitive blow that defeats the enemy at hand, but also disabuses all similarly inclined enemies of the notion that their struggle has any possible positive outcome? This view says take away their matches, don't just put out the fires. What is more humane, a protracted struggle or a quick, decisive one? That is the question, the answer to which more and more political bloggers are saying "get it done now and be over with it for the sake of all involved, including those led to believe that their struggle can somehow, someway be won." This cruel hope is what needs to be crushed, to be rooted out for the sake of the West (including Israel), and for the sake of a billion Muslims worldwide. Right There Dawn is actually very innocent. I'm serious. She lives and thinks very close to the surface and takes life at face value: outrage, joy and all. She is remarkably unjaded and this is refreshing and sometimes profound - hence the popularity of her blog. Well, that and the sex. I just found another young woman who shares some of the same guilelessness - she deserves to be read as well. And Happy Birthday Jolene:
By the time I was seventeen, I was flying alone to spend weeks with my relatives in Seattle. By eighteen, I'd taken to spending much of my free time in Portland, often alone. Later I worked in coffee bars, I went to school. I had a boyfriend, I had a life. Every moment of every day was ripe with opportunity, which I would seize at every turn. Purple hair and glittery eyes, Doc Martens and Sub-Pop T shirts, life was mine for the taking, and was so utterly sweet. ....Years later, it's like I still can't get in touch with the self-confident girl I used to be. Today, I know I'm too old to don the glitter first thing in the morning, too mature to bring on a new piercing. But I've seen and done too much to be considered sweet and innocent as well. While I am (perhaps) a country girl at heart, I've done a lot, seen a lot, experienced a lot. None of which I regret. But my level of piety certainly won't get me an instant ticket to heaven. I feel like I'm standing on the edge of maturity, and at 1:32 in the afternoon today, I reach the birthday that signifies nothing. No newfound ability to drink legally, no reduced rates in the car insurance category. The only monumental birthdays ahead will be opportunities for people to joke about how little time I have left. And that makes me feel ill. I don't like those jokes. I don't think I ever have. So now, I'm faced with difficult questions DIY DSL We have a cable modem at my office, but no broadband available at home. The people in this story were not to be dissuaded:
....With only 40 homes here and no sizable city within an hour's drive, Qwest (Q) and AT&T (T) Broadband, the two telecoms operating in Ruby Ranch, had for years balked at fronting the steep costs of delivering broadband to such a remote locale. In fact, thanks to poorly configured phone lines, Ruby Ranch until recently was saddled with one of the slowest dial-up connections in the country. Not anymore. Inside a neighborhood horse barn hangs a 12-inch-wide metal box that's securing a brighter technological future for the locals. Known as a DSLAM, it's the hub of a new broadband service that began in May. The box isn't owned by Qwest, AT&T, or any other big telecom. Oppedahl and about a dozen of his neighbors bought it last year for approximately $5,000. Then they scooped up cable modems, routers, and other equipment (usually for pennies on the dollar on eBay (EBAY)) and spent the past 10 months setting up the first subscriber-owned DSL co-op in America. While it all might seem unremarkable to outsiders -- it serves 12 homes at average DSL data speeds -- it does offer a compelling script for rural towns that don't want to wait until the next ice age to join the 21st century.
....Qwest reports that several towns have inquired about launching similar co-ops, but that's no guarantee that the Ruby Ranch model will cross state lines. Terms of service differ between states and telecom providers, and up-front costs tend to favor other forms of broadband, such as satellite or wireless, over DSL. Regardless, Oppedahl can take pride in having disproved Qwest's initial claim about the prohibitive startup costs. The co-op spent a grand total of $12,000 to get the network launched -- legal fees included. UPDATE It's a small freaking bloggy world: Dan Rosenbaum at Over the Edge used to know Oppendahl and adds this:
Bob Metcalfe, one of the people who can be fairly said to have invented Ethernet, did much the same thing up in Maine, though his route was to buy and run the local phone company. Rocked It, But Didn't Write It Ross wants to know your thoughts on the greatest rock and roll cover tune of all time. I vote for Elvis Costello's version of Nick Lowe's "What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?" Don't Be Lame If you wish a Relationship with JenRaj, please eschew the following:
Having bad hygene Wearing two shades of green at once Bad music taste Eating Fast Food and thinking it is good Having bad sneakers Driving a girly car For myself, I would also add to the list of disqualifiers: Being a fuckwad Being a pedophile Being Anna Nicole Smith UPDATE To please the Jen, after the style of the ineffable Tony Pierce, Blow Hard creates a photo essay and interview with "sneakers he has known." Talk and Money The hometown Fayetteville Observer reports on action taken in response to the Fort Bragg murders:
....The amendment allocates $10 million to put victim advocates at every military installation. The advocates would provide confidential assistance to victims. Under current policy, some victims may avoid seeking help because counselors and chaplains are required to report information involving possible crimes. The amendment was part of the Senate version of the Defense Appropriations Bill, which was passed Thursday and is the spending bill for the fiscal year 2003. It will now go to a conference committee with the House version of the bill. The final version could go before Congress this fall. According to a 2001 Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence report, since 1995 there have been 131 domestic homicides in the Army, 54 in the Navy and Marines, and 32 in the Air Force. Christine Hansen, executive director of the Miles Foundation, said 95 percent of the domestic violence cases in the military are handled administratively. ‘‘They don’t recognize the criminality of it,’’ she said. The Miles Foundation studies domestic violence in the military and offers help to families. Only 5 percent to 6 percent of domestic violence cases in the military are prosecuted in military courts, Hansen said. Officials of the Department of Defense declined requests for interviews. A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. James Cassella, said it was too early to speculate while the Fort Bragg cases are still under investigation.
‘‘It is a matter that is serious enough that at a minimum the House Armed Services committee should at least preliminary start with an inquiry or an investigation into the matter,’’ U.S. Rep. Bob Etheridge, a Democrat from Lillington, said Tuesday. ‘‘That is the appropriate place first.’’ He added: ‘‘I think we have to better understand what is happening, why it’s happening, and to do whatever we can to help the families. ‘‘We have to find a way to ease the stigma if a soldier or family member needs help that they can go get help without the fear of it having significant severe impacts on their ability to stay in and be promoted.’’ Etheridge, who visited with family-support groups a few weeks ago at Fort Bragg, said families talked of the stress that comes with overseas deployments, especially war deployments. ....U.S. Rep. Robin Hayes, a Republican from Concord, said he will ask Fort Bragg officials to hold a series of meetings and panels to discuss problems with families. ‘‘We want to assist Fort Bragg and we will make those kinds of efforts available from my office on a moment’s notice,’’ said Hayes, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee. Hayes also talked about the stigma of seeking help in the military and the perceived repercussions it could have on promotions. ‘‘I want to do everything that I can personally as a congressman, also as a husband and father, to help with this problem to make sure that if there are some artificial, actual or perceived barriers that we do what we can to take down those barriers,’’ Hayes said. He said Fayetteville’s churches have always helped military families and he encourages them to become even more involved. ....Hansen, the executive director of the Miles Foundation, said she continues to get calls from battered military wives. ‘‘The problem is, everyone needs to realize it’s larger than Fort Bragg,’’ Hansen said. ‘‘I believe we need to be hearing from Secretary Rumsfeld.’’ That's Why the Tolls Are So High In this new-fangled era of the Internet, therapeutic cloning, and proudly Uppity Negroes, it's good to see that some things never change: good old-fashioned official corruption.
....Inspector General Tom Charles said in the report that the practice of accepting gifts from contractors was so pervasive at the Berea-based commission that neither he nor Ethics Commission Executive Director David Freel "have ever seen the level of gratuities accepted by other agencies that we encountered" at the Turnpike Commission.
The primary recipient was Executive Director Gino Zomparelli. ....Most of the report is devoted to Zomparelli. It accuses him of routinely accepting freebies, allowing a commission executive to work for a pension board on Turnpike time, failing to report gifts on his financial disclosure statements and assisting in a surreptitious plan to engineer his appointment as executive director eight months before Plain planned to leave. ....Zomparelli, who became executive director in December 1998 and is paid $150,230 a year, did not return phone calls. His Columbus attorney, Victor Goodman, would not comment. Charles said the "unusual chain of events" that culminated in Zomparelli being promoted from general counsel to executive director included a financially irresponsible decision to approve a $6.7 million, three-year buyout window for commission employees just three years after the commission had approved a three-year buyout plan. ....Charles' report accuses Zomparelli of larding the payroll with friends by creating a "community liaison" job for Reggie Williams, the son of former commission Vice Chairman Earl Williams, and of giving jobs to a neighbor and to the son of the president of the Strongsville bank through which Zomparelli financed several rental homes. Another beneficiary of Zomparelli's largesse, according to the report, was Patrick Patton, the commission's $83,514-a-year legislative liaison. Patton also is a trustee of the Ohio Police and Fire Pension Fund Board, and Zomparelli allowed Patton to be paid for 155 days that Patton actually was conducting business for the Columbus-based pension fund. Zomparelli told investigators he considered the arrangement "good community relations and public service." Anti-Competitive Glenn Reynolds creates one big question for the music industry with his new Tech Central Station column:
....I believe that the goal here - and, implicitly, the goal behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and Fritz Hollings' sponsorship of various bills for Hollywood interests who give him a lot of money - isn't protection against pirating. And it's not entirely even about blocking consumer copying that, though legal under copyright law, might cost the record companies or Hollywood a few sales. It's really about protecting these old-technology dinosaurs from the competition that new technologies make possible. The music industry is already suffering from this. Though the record industry tries to blame Napster, AudioGalaxy, or some other flavor-of-the-month file-trading system for its CD-sales woes, the real problem is that it releases a lot of crap. There are too many management types working for record companies who make too much money for doing, well, not much of value. Meanwhile, artists are being cheated out of royalties (according to the New York Times, 99.99 percent of audits show artists to have been underpaid by record companies) and even their pensions while regulators and politicians who claim to be for the little guy look the other way - or, as with Biden, Hollings, and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Cal) carry water for the industry. People in the record industry know that they face a problem. But rather than trying to deal with it, they've responded the way Mel Brooks, playing the Governor in the movie Blazing Saddles, did: by calling together their henchmen and saying "Gentlemen, we've got to protect our phony-baloney jobs." ....That's why the record companies have been assaulting music-sharing systems so vigorously. It's not the copying they mind, so much as a system that breaks their stranglehold on promotion and distribution, in which bands rise or fall based purely on the quality of their songs. The technology for motion-picture distribution hasn't come as far yet, but the movie industry has felt the cold breath of competition on the back of its neck, and it doesn't like it. What they're trying to do is to create a system that's not so much proof against copying - a mostly impossible task anyway - as a system that's very unfriendly to content that comes from anyone other than Big Media suppliers. It's not about copying. It's about competition. Calm Before the Storm Have you been wondering why the Israeli response to the latest onslaught of Palestinian terrorist attacks has been rather restrained? So has David Warren:
....Even Israeli "liberals" are demanding -- in newspaper commentaries -- for Mr. Sharon to "stop daydreaming and act like a man." What has got into him? Why don't we see a massive new Israeli operation forming -- on a scale beyond Operation Defensive Shield -- as proportional response to several dozen strikes, either successful or attempted, involving not only Hamas, but every one of the Palestinian terror brigades? Instead, by all reports, Mr. Sharon is counselling his own party members and coalition allies to keep their cool. As Sherlock Holmes explained in The Sign of Four -- "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Mr. Sharon is holding his fire because something is happening on the horizon that is bigger than the fire at his feet. That something is almost certainly Iraq, where initial preparations for a U.S. strike at the regime of Saddam Hussein are now, for practical purposes, complete. As I wrote several weeks ago, I believe U.S. special forces are already in place, within the country. Mr. Bush must still give the order, but what is new is that he is now in a position to give it, to go in on a fairly large scale at 24-hours' notice, instead of in weeks or months. And, moreover, Saddam Hussein is now in a position to know that the gun is cocked at his head. Israel can expect six hours' notice from the U.S., when the time comes. This is not as good as the 24 hours' notice it can derive, from its own satellite early warning system, of either Iraqi or U.S. manoeuvres that would portend the main event. And the moment that comes, all Israel's resources must be focused on the threat to Israel from the skies. ....the Palestinian terrorists are, in effect, trying their damnedest to provoke an Israeli reprisal, huge enough to justify sudden Scud and Katyusha attacks from Iraq and Lebanon, in the eyes of the Arab world. (This tactic -- start more fires than the Americans can put out -- being in turn Saddam Hussein's last military gambit. It is the thinking he showed in setting the oil well fires in Kuwait.) The Palestinian masses are themselves playing a role, half instinctive, and half calculated, in a grand apocalyptic drama. And as in 1991, they seem indifferent to the fact that the missiles will land not only on the Jews, but as often when they miss on their own heads. Hence: "Total intifada."
There is, of course, nothing new about Palestinians applauding terror. During the Gulf War in 1991, they danced on rooftops in praise of Iraqi Scud missiles raining on Israeli neighborhoods.
UPDATE Middle East eagle Charles Johnson also notes an increased fervency in Islamic hate rhetoric:
BREAKING
With nervous Iraqis sensing an attack is becoming ever more inevitable and loyal officials voicing angry defiance, Saddam was to make a "comprehensive national speech" on television on Thursday morning, the Iraqi News Agency (INA) said. While marking the anniversary of the end of the 1980-88 war with Iran, he may well seek to prepare Iraqis for a new war. This time it would be against the superpower to which he led them once before to defeat, in the Gulf War of 1990. That the Americans will come appeared even more likely following the latest media leak in the United States in the battle to influence policy on Iraq. The Washington Times said on Wednesday that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had overcome their differences and had reached a consensus on using military force. UPDATE After much deliberation on the matter, Kevin Holtsberry is cautious but ready to go:
Into the Air Both travelers and the industry have been adjusting to post-9/11 flying according to Rudy Maxa on Marketplace:
Since late last September, I've flown exactly 91 flights, and I argue that the inconvenience factor of new security rules has been grossly exaggerated, especially in the last 9 months. By one important measure, flying is easier now: the cutback in the number of flights has improved the on-time performance of all airlines. Let's run a checklist: Is security better than it was a year ago? Yes, carry-on luggage screeners are paying more attention to what's on their screen. But as investigators have found, obvious stuff, like knives and guns, still slips through. Some of the restrictions on carry-on items are silly -- a bad guy can do as much damage with a sturdy, sharp pen as with a corkscrew. There are sky marshals aboard less than 3 percent of the nation's flights, and not much checked luggage is screened due to lack of equipment. Passengers, however, are more attuned to security issues, as evidenced by the thwarting of the shoe bomber on that American Airlines trans-Atlantic flight. Is a "trusted flyer" card the answer for speeding some passengers through security? Not if it can be as easily duplicated as a driver's license...Biometrics or fingerprint matching would be better, but we're a long way away from that. What if your airplane is idling on a tarmac and you're suddenly seized with a panic attack, and want to disembark? There's no rule saying a plane must return to the gate, but if you're really a wreck, the captain may authorize it. Keep in mind, though: you may be met by police when you get off the plane. What can you do to put your mind at ease if you're wary of flying, but find it's unavoidable? Even considering the deaths on the four planes commandeered by hijackers last September, commercial flying is statistically safer than it has ever been. There hasn't been a single accident involving the latest generation of Boeing jets: the 757, 767, 777, or Airbus' latest 319, 20 and 21. And, I always keep this in mind: I'm statistically more likely to perish by slipping in a bathtub, getting struck by lightning, or by getting kicked in the head by a donkey than by flying aboard a commercial plane. Regarding such fears, Maxa also offers links to courses that deal with fear of flying: Flight to Freedom, Fearless Flying, and the SOAR course. Tuesday, August 06, 2002
Bill Against Saddam Bill Quick puts together a superb case for why we must supplant Saddam with extreme prejudice:
There are three possible ways we can go about protecting ourselves. The first is to individually protect targets and citizens here at home. We would call this the defensive reaction. It would involve more careful screening of whom we let into the country, stronger security at our borders, more stringent security measures in our everyday lives, (identity cards, mass fingerprinting/DNA recording, more) no private encryption, frequent check points, and so on. It would involve physical barriers with guarded gates around important potential targets, probably a ban on large gatherings of people, and other security practices that would most likely involve a large surrender of many civil rights we currently enjoy. And even so, we would still be pathetically open to attack. Terrorists - we called them "freedom fighters" - carried out successful missions in Nazi and Communist controlled countries where the nature of the police state was even more repressive than what I've just described..... Rambling Michael King returned home to Gary, Indiana (home of Professor Harold Hill and the Jacksons):
Well, I went home last week - and I understand where that statement comes from now. As many know, I was born and raised in Gary, IN. In the eyes of quite a few, Gary is a hellhole, as evidenced by the pictures of blight that the history books and newsmedia has shown us over many years. We all have talked to someone who "drove through" on their way to or from Chicago, and described the scenes of decay and the industrial smell of the steel mills along Lake Michigan's southern shore. Of course, some point to the national crime statistics that indicate that Gary is near the top of the annual lists of number of murders per capita. And finally, if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me about Michael Jackson being from Gary, I would be a very rich man indeed.
Of Hiroshima, Humiliation and Millenial Fantasies Paul Musgrave has a fine analysis of the anniversary ceremony of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, in which the mayor of the city criticized the U.S. for carrying a big stick and imposing a "Pax Americana" on the world:
The United States dropped a second atomic bomb on the southern city of Nagasaki on August 9. Six days later, Japan surrendered. Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba lamented the world's growing tendency to forget the horrors of the atomic bomb and warned his audience that the dangers of nuclear war were rising. "For the victims of the atomic bomb...once again, a hot and bitter summer has returned," Akiba said. "With the return of the heat, the memories of that misery also return. "What is even more bitter is that those memories are fading from the world," he said. He added that the possibility of history's repeating itself had grown since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Akiba invited Bush to Hiroshima "to confirm with his own eyes what nuclear weapons can do to human beings" and lashed out at Washington's go-it-alone stance. "America has not been given the right to impose a 'Pax Americana' and to decide the fate of the world," Akiba said. "Rather, we, the people of the world, have the right to insist that we have not given you the authority to destroy the world."
In other words, who are they to lecture us? Mayor Akiba accuses President Bush and the United States of wishing to impose a Pax Americana on the rest of the world. This does not sound threatening to me in the same way that a Pax Sovietica or a Pax Sinica would. The United States really isn't that bad in its international relations, and we're a lot better than the rest of the world would be. Any Pax Americana would probably be accented toward the Pax, not the Americana.
It was a wide-ranging overview of Japan from history to art, language, literature, economics, lifestyle, and on and on. We toured the country over six weeks, had lectures and class everyday, visited everything from the largest advertising firm in the nation to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, dedicated to the atomic bomb attack. The museum, the city, and the country emphasize peace and conflict resolution not because they don't feel historical guilt for WWII, but because they do. The town and the museum almost revels in the details of the destruction wrought by the bomb, not out of self-pity, but out of a fundamental sense of sorrow and guilt FOR HAVING BROUGHT THIS DESTRUCTION UPON THEMSELVES. Look carefully at the "message" of the museum:
Hiroshima is a city with many memorials for the lives lost. Hiroshima is a city which continually seeks peace. Everyone, look at Hiroshima's path over the last century. Distant memories, bitter remorse and alarm at an age past. Everyone, please, look at what the atomic bomb brought. Suffering pain, anger, and apprehension toward an uncertain future..... Hiroshima in this nuclear age, will continue holding high the flame of hope. Immediately after the war, MacArthur and the American occupying force found remarkably little resentment in a decimated populace that had only weeks before fought with suicidal zeal for the honor of the emperor. As Bill Quick has noted, Japan being an honor/shame culture in utter defeat, accepted the appropriateness of their defeat and internalized the shame that was the other side of the kamikaze coin. Their national humility sank to an almost absurd level commensurate with their previously absurd pride. After all, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, not the other way around. Everything we did from then on was self-defense, including Hiroshima. "We are defeated - do with us what you will." And since we didn't enslave their entire population, or ship their women off to "comfort camps," or plunder whatever treasure remained in the country, but in fact helped them to rebuild on every front, no opportunity was afforded to transfer any of this guilt onto America:
The position of the mayor comes from an atavistic memory of pre-defeat visions of a "Pax Iapanes," in Musgrave's clever phrasing, which came from a will to power. The mayor assumes that a "Pax Americana" must also come from a will to power, when it in fact comes primarily from a will to prevent other's will to power. Here and Now All of this is very pertinent to the world right now. An interesting debate is circulating focusing on the best method for defusing the militant Islamic threat. Victor Davis Hanson, Glenn Reynolds, Steven Den Beste, Bill Quick, myself, and most other "warbloggers" have been suggesting humiliating defeat, a la the Japanese in WWII, is the only way to snap the Islamists out of their, as convert to the cause Nick Denton puts it, "millenial fantasy":
One could point at the examples of Japan and Germany after the Second World War. But the Muslim world provides its own case study. Ottoman Turkey only began to pay attention to Western science and organization after its first serious military defeats at the hands of Austria and Russia in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Saddam must be defeated because of the direct and immediate danger that he is, BUT, as Nick says, he must also be defeated utterly, abjectly, to discredit once and for all - like fascism and Japan's "divine" nationalism were discredited - the way of thinking that ultimately led to 9/11: Islam is the only true religion, all nonbelievers are inferior and to be subjugated by any means necessary, theocracy is the only legitimate form of government, Allah will do whatever it takes to assert the truth of #s 1, 2 and 3. If the Armies of Allah are defeated, humiliated, crushed, scattered upon the four winds, then the whole philosophical house of cards collapses and you have a beaten, malleable people willing to accept a new way of life, such as Japan after WWII. We can't look at the puzzle piecemeal any longer: we can't look at al Qaeda, Hamas, Saddam, wahabbism, Afghanistan, or militant Islam anywhere as separate entities. We must see the whole puzzle for what it is, and end the threat behind them all once and for all; this is exactly "inflicting a lesser misery to end a greater one." UPDATE Doc responds to Glenn and I:
That last point is rougly the same as mine. Characterization of the enemy as "the Arab world" is a close kin to name-calling. And making an enemy of a whole ethnic world is an agenda more characteristic of Slobodan Milosevic than of George W. Bush. We need to face the fact that one reason Islamic militarism and anti-Americanism exists is that we've lost a lot of propaganda battles. The truth about who we are and what we're about is not familiar to much of The Arab World. Telling them their world needs to be humiliated isn't going to win the next propaganda battle, either. And with that I've said my peace. Carry on. UPDATE Via Glenn ("needed now so much more than then"), the Purple Ranter takes umbrage with the notion that "pro-war" types are mindless bloodthirsty zealots:
UPDATE Alan Cook - who lived in Japan for three years in the 80s thinks my assessment of the Japanese mentality is pretty much nuts, and he wrote this, shall we say, provocative post:
It seems evident to me that the question of the morality of the War in the Pacific against Japan turns on this: was it worth the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives to destroy Japanese imperialism, liberate the peoples and nations of east Asia, and install a somewhat democratic regime in Japan? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. I frankly have not made up my mind on the question, and I may never do so. But that's the essential question. Pearl Harbor is irrelevant. And if that don't draw 'em in, then I don't know Blogasaw. (Or else I have no readers at all.) Love Letters In the Sand Matt Moore, who appears to have returned from time off to see what condition his condition was in ("yeah, yeah.....ohh yeah"), points us to a film proposal from blogger/filmmaker Marie-Charlotte Pezé:
Politically, it aims at taking the first risky step against feminist dogma by admitting that women need and love men. Extremely controversial, the film will raise issues protected by taboos and established stereotypes, and hopefully start a polemic that could change many people’s vision on gender relations, and very simply on manhood. Angular and Icky I am somewhat leery of animal people if you know what I mean: some seem to have their priorities a bit askew. But not Greg Hlatky, he's like a regular people person:
If anyone tried playing Celine Dion at my funeral, I'd come straight out of the coffin to kill them. PC Purge or Obno Ouster? With discussions of race in the air (see this and this), David Hogberg does a very thorough examination of a knotty racial issue at Iowa State University. I am convinced that the professor is a bigoted PC queen, I am not convinced the student tossed from class isn't a racist himself. If the student was tossed for being "disruptive" and "intimidating" toward other students, he probably had to go; if he was tossed for challenging the prof's post-colonial worldview, his ouster is an outrage. One or more people are lying here. David does a fine job with a complex story. Note to David: make sure you are equally thorough in all avenues of your investigations regardless of upon which ideological camps they may trod. We Are B-Day Neighbors! The happiest to Paul "Sgt. Stryker" Palubicki, who is wise far beyond his tender years. The Running of the Bull 20th century American political history in seven paragraphs or less from Bob Hovorka:
I laugh my ass off every time someone points at [name a Conversative or Republican] and says he's never worked a day in his life, can't possibly understand the needs of "the working man," etc. etc. etc. As if any Liberal/Democrat is any different! Red-Letter Day Speaking of the Beam, big thanks to the indignant cyclist for B-day wishes and for noting the karmic significance of my birthday and Adam Curry's wedding anniversary falling on the same calendar page. Kismet, indeed. The story on Curry is, the 80s contracted a nasty case of dysentery and expelled Adam so hard he ended up in Europe, where he hobbles around on wooden shoes and tries to remember what language is is trying to speak, poorly. Thanks A! "Beam My Ass, Scotty" Via Treacher, 60s original Star Trek babes: free love and free mind-melds. "Is that a tribble in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" All Hail the Linse Brian Linse doesn't get enough appreciation: he is the Platonic ideal of a host, his Ain't No Bad Dude site is consistently pithy and sensibly left-middle, his Left Directory is a terrific idea and currently features a fine interview with Tony Adragna, and he is also the proprietor of the eye-popping.....oops, can't mention that one. One caveat Brian, Dawn and I are as spasmodically "left" as Layne and Welch. We deserve our props there, yo? Of course we are equally as spasmodically "right" - but that's another story. Kicked in the Torts "I'm stupider than you are" "'Stupider' isn't a word." "Then I am the stupidest." "Are not - I will sue you to prove it." Joanne Jacobs follows the absurdity:
"She told him he could not write that letter because Jesus wasn't a real person -- that he didn't exist," Phillip’s mother, Peggy Koehler, said. The school district's lawyer says the teacher meant Jesus wasn't likely to write back. You'd think teachers would give specific assignments -- write to a living person who might write back -- or let the kid write to Jesus. What's the harm?
Just a crumb of common sense would put a lot of lawyers out of business. Just before I moved back to Ohio in 1990, I was the ninth car in a ten-car pileup in Redondo Beach. I was sued by the craven sack-of-shit bitch who caused the accident in the first place!! The suit was laughable drivel and was eventually thrown out, but it greatly inconvenienced me with paperwork, lost time, and needless worry. I don't know what the legal answer is, but a little common sense sure wouldn't hurt. "I Love the Nightlife..." NPR has a fascinating new series on "Chinese Lives" running Tuesday mornings on All Things Considered. The series debuted this morning with a look at entrepreneur/nightlifer Henry Li:
As Gifford describes it: "Throbbing music, vodka martinis, designer furniture. This isn't the Communist China of old. But after decades of being convulsed by Marxism, Leninism and Maoism, many young people in China's cities are discovering a new ism -- hedonism. And people like Henry Li are providing the clubs and bars for China's new wealthy urbanites to come out and play." Li says he wants to "introduce the good lifestyle" to China, and its people deserve "a better life." But he has no sympathy for the student movement that's tried to overthrow the government. Economic development must precede political reform, Li says.
Hamburger Anna Nicole Smith is an appalling, gold digging, raisin-humping cow. She has her own reality show now. There are few products of the modern world that I despise more than reality shows in general, but combine that loathsome concept with this overstuffed bitch and previously unattainable levels of insult to good taste are perhaps within reach:
On "Anna Nicole" (the first episode will be repeated tonight), cameras follow this former Playmate of the Year who is now what is euphemistically called a plus-size model, notorious for her long court battle to get money from the estate of the rich old millionaire she married. While the sharply edited promos for the series promised something lively and tongue in cheek — inspired by the Osbournes, who always seem in on the joke — the tawdriness of the program ended that illusion fast. Appealing to the car-wreck mentality that draws viewers to watch other peoples' lives in shambles, "The Anna Nicole Show" is in the forefront of the latest wave of reality programs, freak shows that are a step below celebrity boxing.
I read the bullshit copy forced upon me by the station by way of introducing the grotesque whore; then, suddenly I couldn't help myself, I mooed. And once I mooed, I couldn't stop mooing. I'd say something to her then moo to punctuate the sentence. She was so fucking stupid she never did catch on, but the store manager sure did, and he complained vociferously to station management. I was let off rather easily with a warning because the program director thought it was funny - he hated the bloated skank more than I did. I fear that her regular appearance on TV might cause an outbreak of Mad Cow Disease - this cannot be tolerated. Ashes While I have sports on my mind: I have been avoiding discussing the particulars of the Indians' self-immolation, implosion, and nascent "rebuilding" process because this is a subject that makes me very emotional, and I haven't really decided how I feel about the whole thing either. Rebuild? Okay. Trade away the foundation of your pitching staff in the process? Pretty fucking stupid. If you are going to make me choose between Colon and Thome, I'll take Colon every time, and there is no guarantee they'll keep Thome either. PD Indians beat writer Paul Hoynes - who hasn't been handling this like a homer - has a nice overview of the rebuild today:
That little trade started an earthquake that eventually cracked the foundation of Jacobs Field when Bartolo Colon and Tim Drew were traded to Montreal on June 27 for Brandon Phillips, Cliff Lee, Grady Sizemore and Lee Stevens. In the aftershocks, Shapiro traded Chuck Finley, Jolbert Cabrera, Paul Shuey and Ricardo Rincon. The Tribe has gotten players of all shapes and sizes in return. The last of which is believed to be outfielder Covelli Crisp, who is expected to join the Indians today as the player to be named from St. Louis in the Finley trade. Not only is there safety in numbers, there is hope. To rebuild you need five, maybe 10, of everything. Shapiro hasn't reached that point yet, but he's working on it. "You have to have an abundance of prospects because it's impossible to predict who's going to do what because you're dealing with human beings," said Shapiro. "Some of the players we've brought in are going to reach star status. Others will be solid everyday players. Others will be role players. Some will be derailed along the way." Jim Thome is listed at first base in the blueprint. Thome is a free agent this winter and his future in Cleveland is uncertain. "Philosophically he figures into this strategy," said Shapiro. "But we have two scenarios. One with Jimmy and one without him." The major influx of talent has been in starting pitching and the outfield. Going into 2004 and 2005, when Shapiro feels the Indians will be able to contend again in the American League Central, newcomers Lee, Ricardo Rodriguez, Billy Traber, Francisco Cruceta and Lance Caraccioli will increase a talent pool of starters that already includes C.C. Sabathia, Danys Baez, Ryan Drese, Brian Tallet, Jake Westbrook and Jason Stanford. Also, check out the team's projected roster for the '04 and '05 seasons, when they are next hoped to contend with real major league teams. Who are these guys? Hollywood Moxie Maddie has been living the L.A. high life of late and has the photos to prove it. That butt looks familiar but I am sure it is just a coincidence. Chick Love Now I do feel old: Chick Hearn has died and very long era is over. I grew up in LA in the 60s and early-70s and I didn't love Chick and Vin Scully because I loved the Lakers and Dodgers: I loved the Lakers and Dodgers because I loved Chick and Vin. We moved to Cleveland in '72; I was back in LA between '80 and '90 and it felt like home again at least partly because I had those two to reconnect with after my eight-year absence. Their love and respect for their respective games made the Laker and Dodger championship teams of the 80s pure joy. Their love of words and story-telling made the games mythic. Some people are loved for the wrong reasons: not Chick and Vin. Matt Welch has a stirring remembrance:
Caller: Hi Chick! [Woman, maybe 40] I’m a long-time listener, first-time caller, and I just wanted to thank you for being there for us all these years, and brightening up our lives. It’s an honor just to talk to you, and I wanted to let you know that. Seriously. People were grateful -- it wasn’t about getting on the radio with the famous guy, it was about saying thank you to a guy who helped teach you the game of basketball, made you laugh out loud with the crazy stuff he’d come up with, and communicated real joy and enthusiasm in every freaking broadcast. He rooted for the Lakers, and owned part of the franchise, but he was no homer. Some of his best work came when the Lakers played badly. I meet up with my Dad every couple of weeks, usually over a baseball game, and conversations often start out with: “Did you hear Chick last night?” “Ohhhh, Chickie babie wasn’t too thrilled with the old effort, no sirree!” UPDATE Much more on the great Chick from Ken:
Chick was more than a talented and entertaining announcer. He could make a room full of nail-biting, cursing, Lakers fanatics laugh out loud during painfully tense moments. (I know; I witnessed it during the last season's Western Conference finals between the Lakers and the Kings.) And he could make even the most stubborn fan concede that some player from an opposing team had made a nice shot. But more than all of that -- Chick got into your heart and soul. He brought the magic of the Lakers home to you and made you feel a part of it. I will miss him terribly.
More sweet Chickie thoughts from Chris Daley:
It seems fitting to let Chick have the last word. When asked what he wanted on his tombstone Chick didn't hesitate: "No harm, no foul," he said. Monday, August 05, 2002
Maybe You've Heard of Him? I am extremely proud to announce that Glenn Reynolds is now an official member of the Blogcritics.com consortium. We are honored. UPDATE We are also thrilled to announce that veteran editor/journalist and new blogger Henry Copeland has joined our cabal of popular culture analysts. Henry has some very interesting things brewing we will be talking about shortly. More Alive Than Dead As I mentioned here, the Garcia-less Dead are basically back together as the Other Ones, having successfully performed for 35,000+ at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre. In that spirit, check out Uncle John's Blog here, and our own discussion of the Dead and the lyrics to "Uncle John's Band" here. Time for an acid dance. No Longer Hypothetical Okay, based upon another brilliant brain bolt from Matt Welch, we are working with a very open-minded representative of the RIAA to set up a live online interview with an official of the organization to coincide with the launch of Blogcritics.com. There are many issues to resolve, not the least of which is that the RIAA has several crucial policies for which the organization hasn't come to a collective decision. There are matters of time, availability, and logistics to be resolved, and it is possible we won't be able to work these out in time for the launch. BUT, our contact is very enthusiastic about the idea of meeting a collective of passionate music consumer/thinkers head on in an effort for each to understand the other a little better: an understanding that is cloudy at best right now. In an effort to facilitate this online event, we are going to provide the RIAA representative with a list of questions on our collective mind. NOW IS YOUR CHANCE TO QUERY THE RIAA. As begun below, PLEASE FORMULATE YOUR QUESTIONS FOR THE RIAA, AS SPECIFICALLY AS POSSIBLE, and write them in the comments section here, make a post on your site as Jim Schwab has done here, or send to me in an email. Please help spread the word about this - we would like the entire blogosphere represented in these questions. Thanks. If you are new to Blogcritics.com, please see this post for basic information. Accidents Here I was just joking around about weird coincidences. A very frightening set of bizarre circumstances hit Ross and his family recently:
The emergency response team looked her over, took down our information, called for the tow truck. One of the officers discovered the piece of rubble on the footboard of the driver's side. It's half the size of my wife's head. It came through the driver's side of the windshield at what must have been nearly 100 mph. It landed at her feet. And yet, miraculously, my wife was untouched. At the time, we had no idea how that could be.
Dawn also has accidents on her mind: a recent tragedy and an event from her teens where tragedy was somehow averted.
I just had a long conversation with my daughter Kristen yesterday about her impending departure into the big bad world. She is joining Americorps for a year before college. She is very excited about being a young adult on her own, but she is also apprehensive and has even been having some trouble sleeping lately. We talked about making decisions: no one is perfect, do your best but don't be too hard on yourself if you make the wrong decision. Most decisions aren't irrevocable, but some are. I told her the one thing I would caution her most against is impaired judgment. Don't make decisions when your judgment is impaired: don't drink and drive, don't get yourself into situations where people are under the influence of whatever without backup. Go to parties with friends, not alone. Don't drink in the presence of only males, etc. People do really stupid things when they are fucked up: know it and be prepared for it. Regarding drinking and driving, I said don't do it at all because if you drink a little and drive okay, then you will be tempted to step out onto the proverbial slippery slope, and the potential consequences are just too severe to mess with. I also told her that to this day I can't believe I never hurt myself or anyone else given the HUNDREDS of times I drove under the influence over a period of about 15 years. The amount of bad karma stored up over all those wasted miles dogs me to this day. The extent of my fortune, and the severity of consequences should my forcefield of luck finally falter, hit home the night of my second DUI in 1989. For several years I had been telling myself that I was a better DJ when I drank: I got into it more, I relaxed, I got wild. I also got sloppy, ruined equipment and records, flirted with women I had no interest in, and said stupid things. But in my mind these consequences were easy to ignore in the face of the bounteous benefits gleaned from the glass. In the early 16th century Copernicus postulated that the earth revolved around the sun, thereby shattering the geocentric view of the universe. In late-summer 1989 my wife left with the two children, thereby shattering my E.O.-centric view of the universe. I had based my self-regard on this premise: "No matter what happens, at least my wife can't live without me." Turned out she could. I wound my way south through the misty twists and turns of Pacific Coast Highway at 3:00 AM as it snaked down from Malibu toward Sunset with my brain buried under the sweet, humming insulation of way too much alcohol. My friend, the manager of the Screaming Clam dance club was going away to law school and I had a wife to forget, so we had raised many a glass together throughout the evening as I had entertained a gathering of tourists and locals while waves danced against the breakwater and splashed upon the club's windows. With the drinking finally finished, I had brushed my teeth and scooped up a finger-full of peanut butter out of the jar I kept in the truck to mask the odor of alcohol. I had chuckled at my own cleverness. I took another hairpin turn at a reasonable but exhilarating speed and spied traffic cones ahead moving me toward the center of the road. This took my truck out of its routine and forced me to take over driving again. Oh bother. I came to a near-stop behind several other cars just before the Sunset intersection. The cones ambiguously either wanted us to turn left onto Sunset or to continue ahead across the median into the far left lane. Some cars turned, some went on ahead. Since I wanted to continue south on PCH, I followed the cars that continued south. Around another bend, frantic activity and grim faces in uniforms confirmed that we had made a mistake. At least I wasn't alone in my error. The night was lit hallucinogenically with ambulances and police cars flashing and revolving their garish lights. A few cars ahead, a figure waved emphatically for the line of cars to turn around. As I slowly backed to turn around, a blinding light shone in through the driver's window and a gruff knock followed. Startled, I stopped and rolled down my window. "What the hell are you doing? Can't you follow directions? Don't back that way, you fool." An unexpected note of panic, or fear cut through the officer's voice. I mumbled apologies and things about following other cars and this and that. The cop smiled and held his hand up for me to be silent. "Have you been drinking peanut butter cocktails all night? I'd be willing to bet my left nut that you will be spending the evening with us, buddy." The cop sounded strangely calm and almost kind. "Straighten this thing out and get out of the car." I turned the truck so that it again faced forward, to the south. My headlights shone on the ambulance in front of me and a long white covered object on the ground between my truck and the ambulance. A sudden wet wind blew the white covering off of the object, over the ambulance, and out over the dark sea. Immediately before me was a red, blue and white object that, in a sickening jolt, I realized was a dead, male body. It, he, was broken impossibly and naked except for socks and shoes. The officer and I stared into each other's faces and said nothing. I was busted and knew it: my second DUI in 16 months. The state of California frowned on this kind of behaviour. The officer told me that the body was an 18 year-old kid who had been playing a perverse form of chicken with a buddy by mooning passing cars from the side of the road. The competition had led each increasingly onto the road itself. A Porsche had come around the bend at 85mph and turned the kid into puree. The driver and the mooners had all been drinking. Just like me: only I was alive and hadn't killed anyone. I felt very lucky sitting there in police custody. In that moment of horror, a calm certainty came over me that I would not drink again for some time, maybe ever. I knew that I would have to go through trials and tribulations and shell out all kinds of dough, but that these problems were the consequences of a voice that I no longer had to obey. I don't take any particular credit for this decision: it didn't even feel like my decision to make. It felt like unavoidable received wisdom. Not that there aren't people who make the other choice, or who refuse to choose, which is the same thing. There are entire schools of gloomy romantics who see nobility in the latter decision: a consistency of action, a purity of purpose, an enaction of the nihilist credo, etc, but it all reeks of suicide to me. To the addict, the bottle in the mouth, the needle in the arm, or the razor on the wrist are all the same thing. I stopped completely for about eight years, and have found over the last several years that I can drink in moderation and not be a fucking idiot. But I needed all of that time off for my body, brain and soul to recalibrate themselves into something resembling normal, and to get out of a habit that would have killed me. So don't drink and drive. Birthday Present I have a healthy ego and all - no shrinking violet am I. But this birthday wish from Tony Pierce leaves me humbled and quiet. Thanks Tony for being there from before the beginning, and slamming home the truth that the best way to be successful is to be yourself. And I really do love those photo essays. Your friend, Eric Unhinged Sting and I notice synchronicities. Check out the similarities between these two posts. First, Shell guesting on Dawn's site during the Blogathon:
My jaw had popped before, but never more than a second before it popped back into place. This time, it wouldn't move. We tried everything we could think of. Massaging the jaw muscles, applying ice, applying heat. It was the middle of the night. I couldn't reach my chiropractor or my dentist. So he had to take me to the emergency room. It's very hard to answer the questions of the admitting nurse when you can't move your jaw. I also had a drooling problem--had to keep wiping my mouth. I was very thirsty, and the only way to drink was to tilt my head back and have him pour a tiny--tiny! don't want to choke!--bit of water into the back of my throat. Did I mention it also hurt? Meanwhile my lover thought it was funny to tell me that they'd have to break my jaw and then wire it shut for 8 weeks. He also kept telling jokes, knowing that I couldn't laugh without choking myself.
UPDATE Another freakish confluence of time, space and the foldout bed. Creepy indeed. Do you possess knowledge of any incidents of befuddling happenstance? Blogcritics.com Roster Update New additions to the burgeoning Blogcritics.com roster of ass-kicking writers are: Matt Welch - MattWelch.com (books) Doc Searls - Doc Searls Weblog Tom Carr - TomCarr.com Tim Hall - Kalyr.com Ann Salisbury - Two Tears In a Bucket Oliver Willis - OliverWillis.com (books) Jay Caruso - The Daily Rant John Fogde - Fauxhemian - There Is Nothing To Not Be Amazed At Jason Meltzer - Get Your Online Jargon Mac Frazier - GlennFrazier.com Chuck Pearson - Dr. Chuck's Journal Kevin Holtsberry - Ideas, Etc Paul Musgrave - PaulMusgrave.net (books) Howard Owens - Global News Watch Stephen Silver - Stephen Silver Eric Lindholm - Smarter Harper's Index Steve Rhodes - Steve Rhodes Mark Mavroudis - Intricate Plot Craig Jensen - BookNotes We have almost reached our goal of 100 bloggers participating in the project - last spots filling up quickly. Don't be left out. Hypothetical Let's just say, hypothetically speaking, you were in a postion to interview a top official with the RIAA - the record labels' trade group. What specific questions would you ask? Please reply via the comments section or email. Forty-Four It's my birthday today. Yeay. As a result, I will take this opportunity to invite all of you in the general vicinity of Ohio to join us for our 44/33 (our ages - it's Dawn's birthday next week) party August 24 here in the Cleveland area. Details here - many out of town guests already confirmed. Don't be left out. The Midwest gets down with its bad self as well. Please RSVP via email. We look forward to meeting you! Race: Hearts and Heads Many people wish the subject of race would go away. But wishing doesn't make it so. We have been told for some time now that race is a "biologically meaningless" concept. A report last week in the NY Times asserts that isn't so:
The geneticist, Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford University, says that genetic differences have arisen among people living on different continents and that race, referring to geographically based ancestry, is a valid way of categorizing these differences. ....Dr. Risch's assertion, in a paper in the online journal Genome Biology, comes as researchers and physicians are trying to interpret the DNA data streaming from the Human Genome Project and to make sense of the fact that the pattern of data differs among ethnic groups. All humans have the bulk of their genetic heritage in common and possess the same set of genes. But because of mutations, or changes in DNA, each gene comes in several slightly different versions, and some of them are more common in one ethnic group than another. These genetic differences often have medical significance, since some occur among genes that affect susceptibility to disease and the response to drugs.
Lactose intolerance, the loss of the ability to digest lactose after weaning, is the default condition of humankind but among Northern Europeans the ability is often retained into adulthood. The reason is a mutation that may have been favored among early cattle farmers. ....Meanwhile a proposal for avoiding racial labels, at least for drug trials, has recently been made by Dr. David Goldstein, a population geneticist at University College, London. He has suggested that patients be assigned to different genetic groups by analyzing their DNA. The process gives much the same result as asking people to identify their ethnicity, but yields a more accurate division in terms of how people respond to drugs, Dr. Goldstein says. He adds that the expense of the genetic testing will be affordable in drug trials. In asserting that race is a valid concept for medical research, Dr. Risch has plunged into an arena where many fear to tread. He also takes issue with Dr. Goldstein's race-sidestepping proposal, saying it will lead to confusing results.
"That doesn't mean they are insincere," Dr. O'Brien said. "It's just that they haven't really looked at it. What is happening here is that Neil and his colleagues have decided the pendulum of political correctness has taken the field in a direction that will hurt epidemiological assessment of disease in the very minorities the defenders of political correctness wish to protect." So race exists at the genetic level: it is a real biological concept. What does this mean for human relations? Kwame Anthony Appiah reviews a new book, Racism: A Short History, by George M. Fredrickson, also in yesterday's NY Times. If there is disagreement in the scientific community over whether race is even a legitimate concept, of course there is disagreement in the social sphere about racism:
Fredrickson proposes that racism combines ''an attitude or set of beliefs'' with a set of ''practices, institutions and structures.'' The attitude in question involves treating what are in fact mutable ethnic or cultural differences ''as innate, indelible and unchangeable.'' And the practices range from ''unofficial but pervasive social discrimination at one end of the spectrum to genocide at the other, with government-sanctioned segregation, colonial subjugation, exclusion, forced deportation (or 'ethnic cleansing') and enslavement among the other variations on the theme.'' Racism, as he puts it, is difference plus power.
Similarly, when the Atlantic slave trade in Africans began, it largely involved the capture and exploitation of heathens. Even as slaves in the New World came increasingly to be baptized, there was no need to justify their enslavement -- until it was challenged, in the Enlightenment. At that point slavery's defenders needed an ideology. It is something of an irony that the tools with which they addressed this task came increasingly from another side of the Enlightenment, the rationalizing, scientific side that was beginning to treat human beings not (or at least, not only) as God's special creation but as natural creatures whose history could be studied along with that of other organisms. It is in the Enlightenment that the first modern attempts at racial classification, based not on religious ideas but on purportedly scientific ones, were developed. And these naturalistic accounts of the supposed inferiority of blacks and Jews eventually overtook the religious ones that dominated the debates of the early 19th century about slavery.
Frederickson insists that racism comes from a position of power - Appiah questions this:
There is a deeper difficulty here, that the attitudes Fredrickson stresses are, as he says, ''sets of beliefs'' about the immutable awfulness of other races, rather than hostile feelings toward them. But while racist ideology -- formal, articulated, theoretical racism -- is indeed a characteristic and distinctive feature of the forms of hostility to blacks and Jews that provide the central paradigms of racism, at least as important in the everyday life of racism are the deep feelings of revulsion, hostility, contempt or just plain hatred that many racists feel. As the philosopher Jorge L. A. Garcia has put it, racism lives more in the heart than in the head. ....certainly the greatest wrongs have occurred when racial hostility or contempt has been combined with power. But hate-filled or contemptuous thoughts and feelings about other races can be found too, alas, among the powerless. Surely the ideology expressed by Islamofascists and Palestinian terrorists is hopelessly anti-Semitic and racist, and these people are not in power relative to the objects of their hatred. In additon, the Islamist view is analagous to white supremicism, viewing all non-Islamics as inferior and worthy only of subjugation. The Islamist view, and some would contend even the Islamic view, is hierarchical with the implicit view that Islam "should" be on top. It is my guess that this kind of thinking has infected the Palestinian cause of late as well, leading to the current quixotic all-or-nothing campaign of mutual destruction with the Israelis: one which even a remotely rational assessment would tell them they can't win. But racism, or "religionism," is not a rational undertaking, residing, as Appiah quotes Garcia, "more in the heart than in the head" - an area notoriously difficult to examine. The key would appear to accept objective differences between groups without yielding to the temptation to stigmatize "difference" as inherently inferior - a tall order for hearts and heads alike. UPDATE Jeff Goldstein objects to Risch's categorization by race, rather than narrower DNA groupings:
When a geneticist would rather conflate two clearly distinct ideas than use the more exact idea of genetic groupings peculiar to his own area of expertise, one has every right to question that geneticist's motives. So consider this post just that.
Determinism is the greatest danger now if "race" is once again accepted as scientifically legit. We must emphasize that characteristics of the individual can never be interpolated from those of an aggregate. But this doesn't mean it is meaningless to extrapolate from individuals to collective entities. If, in fact as Risch asserts, there are broad genetic similarities within meta-groupings that meaningfully separate them from other meta-groupings, then this is legitimate knowledge and should be admitted as such. If we need a new, more porous word than "race" to take these meanings into account, then let us coin one. But to deny knowledge in the name of past linguistic sins is little different from saying my mother is as likely to be a terrorist as a young Middle Eastern male. Blogcritics.com Things are moving very quickly on the Blogcritics.com project. We have a VERY SPECIAL launch presentation we are working on right now - more details very shortly. We have another batch of contributors who have signed up since I last published the roster. I will update the roster later today. Our status at the moment is that we will be a MUSIC and BOOK review site from the beginning: for our launch, which is now targeted for Monday, Auguest 12, one week from today, I need as much material from you as possible. PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR FIRST WRITING TO ME BY FRIDAY FOR INCLUSION IN THE LAUNCH. While we will be covering the width and breadth of the music and publishing world, we are going to put special emphasis on independent and lesser-known labels/sub-labels/artists/publishers/authors because where else are they going to go? They can really use our help. IF YOU KNOW ANY LABELS, SUB-LABELS, ARITSTS, PUBLISHERS, AUTHORS who would like to have their work reviewed by Blogcritics, please put them in touch with me. SIMPLY PUTTING OUT THE WORD ABOUT OUR GOALS AND INTENTIONS on your sites would be of great help. More very soon. Please see here for basic info on the project, and see here for Mac Frazier's tremendous suggestions for the layout and operation of the site itself. This is an area where I will really need help. UPDATE Many writers have been asking in what form their reviews should be turned in. Please send them to me via email in text format with HTML tags already in place. We also need artist, title and label for CDs; and author, title and publisher for books. By Friday if possible. Thanks! Sunday, August 04, 2002
Cool Tunes Feature - Isaac Hayes Isaac Hayes was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this past March. He is on tour now and coming through Cleveland this week. Universal's reissue label Hip-O put out an excellent overview of his solo work in 2000, Isaac Hayes Ultimate Collection. His outstanding keyboard work can be heard on the new reissue of William Bell's classic Stax album, The Soul of a Bell. Another man with Isaac Hayes’ credentials - musician, singer, songwriter, producer, actor, humanitarian, radio personality - would be called a chameleon, but Hayes has always been resolutely, undeniably himself. As a sideman at Stax, then co-producer and co-writer (with David Porter) of the great Sam & Dave hits ("Hold On I'm Comin'" - No. 21, "Soul Man" - No. 2, “I Thank You" - No. 9, "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby") and others for Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, William Bell, Judy Clay and the Bar-Kays, Hayes helped define soul music in the ‘60s. Then, as a solo artist Hayes stretched the boundaries of soul adding strings and social themes; with Sly Stone, Gamble and Huff, Curtis Mayfield and Norman Whitfield, he helped move black music from a singles to an album format. On albums like Hot Buttered Soul (No. 8), The Isaac Hayes Movement (No. 8), To Be Continued (No. 11), Black Moses (No. 10), and especially the Oscar and Grammy-winning Shaft (No.1), Hayes took his brand of elegant but funky soul to a huge new audience. Isaac Hayes was born August 20, 1942 in Covington, Tennessee. He lived on a farm until he was 7, then moved with his maternal grandparents (who raised him) to Memphis. The family was musical and active in the church, school and community. Hayes’ first public performance was a duet with his sister at church when he was 3. Already the musical perfectionist, Hayes halted his sister mid-performance when she made a mistake. In high school Hayes won a singing contest, noted the attention his performance generated, and said “Hmm, this is what I want to do.” He took a year of band (tuba then sax) and began singing with a variety of combos: rock’n’roll, doo wop, blues, gospel, jazz. “I loved it all - this adventure into music - I was sucking up everything like a sponge,” he says. “With the blues band we played the juke joints of Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas. We didn’t make much money: it was all the corn liquor you could drink and enough money to get back home. If the owner didn’t feel like paying you, he didn’t pay you and you didn’t argue because he had a .38 pistol on his hip,” he laughs darkly. “With gospel it was all the food you could eat, and then maybe a collection was taken up for expenses.” Eventually he “learned enough piano to get along,” and wound up on the staff at Memphis’ Stax Records by around ‘63, having been turned down three times by the label as an artist. An old friend from his doo wop days, David Porter, was already with the label and said to Hayes, “You play music and I write lyrics, let’s team up and start writing and producing like Holland-Dozier-Holland up at Motown.“ “When we started writing,” Hayes remembers, “guys around the city would tease us: ‘Hey hit men, how many hits did you write today?’ But we kept our noses to the grindstone and we finally clicked with Carla Thomas’ ‘How Do You Quit’ in ‘65. Then they chose David and I to write and produce for Sam and Dave, and after we had a big hit with them, more people around town wanted to write songs. We organized a writer’s workshop and everything,” recalls Hayes. Their writing for Sam & Dave was typical of their approach. “We would come up with a good subject or a good hook. For the meat of the song you have to ask yourselves some questions: If you want this girl, why do you want her? If you get her, what would you do? People have to able to get what you’re trying to get across. As far as music is concerned, you’ve got to come up with a groove with changes and things that keep the emotional content in it. “Usually our songs came from personal experiences,” he continues. “For instance, with ‘When Something’s Wrong With My Baby,’ David and I were working and working and working, and we just couldn’t come up with anything. So we gave up and each went home. After about 30 minutes, he called me: ‘I got it, I got it, I got it.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He had just written it on toilet paper or something, and said, ‘When something’s wrong with my baby, something’s wrong with me.’ “He came over and we started going over the lyrics. I sat down at the piano and started playing something slow. We got the changes and the melody and put it with the first verse, and the rest was easy. Sam & Dave were in town - we would usually work on their songs when they were around - sometimes we’d have them sitting there while we wrote to get a good feel for them. “‘You Don’t Know Like I Know’ was originally a gospel song: ‘You don’t know like I know what the Lord has done for me.’ Well, a woman can do some good things for you too. We just switched it around,” Hayes says with a chuckle. “‘Soul Man’ came about during one of the riots. I was watching TV and they said something about businesses being bypassed when ‘soul’ was written on the door. That reminded me of Passover in the Bible. So I thought about this ‘soul’ thing: there’s a lot of pride in it. I didn’t look at the rioting as destroying. I looked at it as frustrated people taking out their frustrations on whatever got in their way. I told David about it and we started working on it. Everything just clicked.” Hayes recalls the Stax studio. “We only had a one-track recorder at first. [Label-owner] Jim Stewart was considered the king of one-track. If anybody screwed up, we had to start all over again and [trumpet player] Wayne Jackson’s lips would fall off. Eventually we got two-track when Tom Dowd came in and installed it for us. “Regarding arrangements, we did them in out heads, where Motown may have had them written out. We went on feel. I continue to do that. Otis [Redding] would come in sometimes with just an idea. He would get behind the microphone and say ‘work up a groove’ and start doing lyrics spontaneously - [singing] ‘I can’t turn you loose.’” Though deeply in the groove, Hayes was always a thinking man with a conscience as well. “I was active even in high school in marches and things. I was afraid but I thought it was the right thing to do. When Dr. King was killed [in ‘68] I went through a period when I couldn’t write, couldn’t create. I just went blank. I was so hurt by that and I had so much bitterness and hatred for racist attitudes. Then one day after about a year I cognized: ‘Hey man, the only way you can make a change is to do what you do.’ So I got busy again.” Hayes had recorded a very casual album in ‘67 that received a fair amount of critical praise and was given the opportunity to record again in ‘69. This time he took the affair more seriously, but still felt no particular pressure to succeed as an artist. That album became Hot Buttered Soul, and it established the recording career of Isaac Hayes. Hayes was shocked by his solo success. “I couldn’t believe it because I had been behind the scenes so long. When David and wrote together, we wrote for other people so we had to match their personalities. I had a background in blues, jazz, pop, even classical and I wanted to get it all out. I had a funky groove underneath, but those strings on top. I was happy with it for myself, but a few million other people got into it too,” he laughs. For Shaft, Hayes had the powerful image of a tough but vulnerable black screen detective to inspire him; he found his all-time resonant grooves for the title track and long instrumental passages that achieved a perfect balance between the funk and the sweet. Hayes has released almost two-dozen (mostly) successful albums since. He remains humble. “I never took myself too seriously. Each time I cut a hit record I would say ‘Whew, I made it again.’ I was honest with my music and said ‘if I hurt, I cry.’ A lot of men liked it because it said what they wanted to say but didn’t know how to. Women liked it because it showed sensitivity in a man, and that’s what they were looking for.” Hayes could get away with sensitivity because of his tough, forbidding image in the way that Nixon could go to China. Some TV stations wouldn’t let him on because they thought he was militant. “The image was my security blanket, especially the shades (tough on the outside, sensitive on the inside),” he confides. That image - shaved head, chains draped over muscles - led to an acting career. Hayes has appeared in over a dozen films and in recurring roles on TV. His favorite role so far is that of Gandolf Finch in James Garner’s Rockford Files TV series from the ‘80s. Hayes’ most recent album is the notable Raw and Refined from ‘95. He also did a Shaft parody for the Beavis and Butthead Do America soundtrack; and is the star of the Isaac Hayes and Friends radio show on “KISS-FM” (WRKS) in New York, playing “classic soul and today’s R&B” weekday mornings. He is also the voice of “Chef” on the Comedy Central hit animated series South Park. But most of all, he is Isaac Hayes. Cool Tunes - Playlist Cool Tunes is a radio show in a magazine format Saturday nights at 10pm on WAPS, "The Summit," in Akron, Ohio. I play new music, reissues, and preview shows coming to town each week. Musically it is among the widest-ranging 2 hours in the country: modern rock, punk, electronica, jazz, reggae and ska, roots rock, Americana, blues, world, funk, hip hop, avant garde, etc. - if it's cool I play it. Cool Tunes has been proudly serving humanity since 1990. Our audio streaming is better than ever - check us out from anywhere in the world. Cool Tunes 8/10/02 artist "song" album, label Sunday's Best "The Try" The Californian, Polyvinyl; Pixies "Here Comes Your Man" (demo) Pixies, SpinArt; The Agenda "I Want the Panic!" Start the Panic, Kindercore; The Flipsides "The Best of Times" Clever One, Pink & Black; Generation X "100 Punks" Perfect Hits 1975-81, Chrysalis; Dynamite Boy "Catching On" Somewhere In America, Fearless; Ben Weasel "Patience" Fidatevi, Panic Button; Anti-Flag "Ever Fallen In Love?" Split Series 4, BYO; Brad "La La La" Welcome to Discovery Park, Redline; Dag Nasty "Ghosts" Minority of One, Revelation; The Standard "The Five-Factor Model" August, Touch and Go; The High Fidelity "Scream If You Want to Go Faster" Demonstration, Plastique; Twinemen "Spinner" Twinemen, Hi-N-Dry; Bruce Springsteen "Born to Run" Live In New York, Columbia; Carla Thomas "Dance With Me" Gee Whiz, Stax; Lil' Ed and the Blues Imperials "Never Miss Your Water" Heads Up!, Alligator; B.B. King "Every Day I Have the Blues" (live) Anthology, MCA; The Holmes Brothers "There's a Train" Righteous!, Rounder; Bonnie Raitt "Give It Up or Let Me Go" Collection, Warner Brothers; Bonnie Raitt "Wherever You May Be" Silver Lining, Capitol; Lyle Lovett "Creeps Like Me" I Love Everybody, Curb/MCA; Flying Burrito Brothers "Cody Cody" Sin City, A&M; Spoon "Stay Don't Go" Kill the Moonlight, Merge; Faultline w Michael Stipe "Greenfields" Our Little Secret 3, First Floor; The Residents "Life Would Be Wonderful" Demons Dance Alone, East Side Digital; Doug Martsch "Heart" Now You Know, Warner Brothers; The Visible Men "Dial Tone" In Socks Mode, Leisure King; Iffy "Sweet Stuff" single, Foodchain; Morcheeba "Otherwise" Charango, Reprise; Charlie Hunter "More Than This" Jazz Chill Out, Blue Note; Ron Carter "Stardust" Stardust, Blue Note; Santana "Samba de Sausalito" The Very Best of Latin Jazz, Legacy/Columbia; Al Di Meola "Innamorata" Flesh On Flesh, Telarc; The Little Paper That Could The Fayetteville Observer is one fine little paper. It would have been much easier to go along with the company - Fort Bragg - in this company town, but this paper connected the five inconvenient dots in the first place - in essence "creating" the spouse murder story. They're at it again today:
In January, Jennifer Wright told her parents she was “tired of being a military wife” and wanted a divorce. Investigators said her husband, Master Sgt. William Wright, killed her at the end of June. They said he confessed three weeks later and led authorities to her body. Marilyn Griffin separated from her husband of eight years in May. Two months later, she was stabbed to death and set on fire in her home. Sgt. Cedric Griffin was charged. Investigators and family believe Teresa Nieves and Andrea Floyd told their husbands they wanted to separate in June. Lawmen said Sgt. 1st Class Rigoberto Nieves shot his wife in the head and himself June 11. Sgt. 1st Class Brandon Floyd killed Andrea on July 19, then turned the gun on himself. ....Andrea Floyd’s mother, Penny Flitcraft, said she believes her daughter’s desire to leave undercut Brandon Floyd’s sense of control. “They’ve been trained to be so in control,” Flitcraft said. “How dare that person walk out on them.” That need for control is a common trigger for men who kill their wives, said people who work with victims of domestic abuse. “We do know that the most dangerous time for a woman who is in an abusive relationship is when she leaves,” said Bill Duke, former director of the CARE Center, a shelter and advocacy group for battered women in Fayetteville. ....civilian investigators discount a direct connection to wartime service. They say that the deaths were the culmination of major domestic problems rather than a symptom of any kind post-combat stress. Rigoberto Nieves, who was assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group, had requested to leave Afghanistan in June to resolve personal problems. But Brandon Floyd, a member of the secretive counterterrorism unit Delta Force, and William Wright, who served in the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion, had been back from combat for some time. Cedric Griffin had never been to Afghanistan. He worked in the commissary. ....Fort Bragg officials have said they will conduct a review of how troops and their families were handled as they returned from Afghanistan. They want to find out if they missed warning signals. Post officials also said they will look at how the military deals with marital problems in general, especially where there are indications of domestic abuse. The military has programs to help troubled families, but since reports of the killings appeared in the Observer, dozens of military spouses have contacted the newspaper to complain that those programs are ineffective. Those wives, most of whom asked to remain anonymous, have said that the military winks at infidelity, that seeking help is seen as a sign of weakness in a soldier and is potentially career-threatening, and that lack of confidentiality in the counseling programs keeps some women from speaking out. Dylan Returns to Newport! No One Cares Sheila Lennon - one of our Blogcritics - who blogs for the Providence Journal like a real writer or something, saw Bob Dylan's legendary performance at Newport in 1965!! She danced. She witnessed his return yesterday. She didn't dance:
(Did I really write that? Yes. Was it true? Yes.) ....And so it went. Down in the Flood to an unrecognizable tune. (Since Dylan smeared the words, only the single snatch of a lyric, "You're gonna have to find yourself Another best friend, somehow" was a clue to what song this was.) A sweet, sweet intro led into the poisonous Positively 4th Street ("You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend...") Subterranean Homesick Blues without passion. A quiet, reflective Girl from the North Country with a lovely harmonica intro. Tangled up in Blue without the pain, nasal sometimes, all styling, no beat. It was all cowboy feel, rockabilly without the rock, an apparently deliberate attempt to keep us from dancing, like a recital at... Carnegie Hall. We had been warned. ....Snaking our way through Newport traffic, we slipped some Dylan CDs into the Focus ZX3's super sound system, and had our own concert with a more passionate, more authentic Bob Dylan. AP reports that Al Gore was in the wings, and that makes perfect sense. There was no magic in the music. We had never danced, not once. '65 was better. Waves: Air and Otherwise You should be reading Doc pretty much everyday if you have any interest whatsoever in the direction of mass media - and who doesn't beside monks and hermits? He's back on radio again today:
It's a good story. But like all the rest of its type, it places some blame on deregulation — specifically the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The blame is deserved, but it misses the real dereg story. That Act did two big things in respect to radio: 1) it finished releasing commercial broadcasters from any sense that they held their licenses at the grace of the public, or had any obligation to perform a public service other than whatever derived from pursuing their own corporate interests; and 2) it raised the limit on the number of stations any one owner could hold in a any region. What the Act did not do was change the nature of the commercial radio business, which has always had a split between its customers and its consumers — one that was deep and profound, yet easy to ignore. Commercial radio's customers are its advertisers. It's consumers are its listeners. Its business is selling air time to advertisers. It raises the value of that air time by attracting the largest possible number of listeners, in the most desirable demographics. How it does that is irrelevant to the business itself. Commercial radio programming is not a service. It's bait.
Unfortunately, public radio is largely operated by lefties who don't realize they have a terrific business story to tell — and that their business model is one that could port very well to the Net. Instead, they give us these pathetic beg-a-thons every few months.
What commercial and public radio have both needed, desperately, is competition from other, unregulated broadcast media. Internet radio was getting ready to give them a run for their money. Maybe it still will, from signals originating outside the U.S. But Internet radio can't take off in a big (i.e. mass appeal) way until the demand side gets equipped with radios that aren't computers. Given the cartelization of the radio receiver business (the chipsets in nearly all car radios and home stereos are pretty much the same) and the disappearance of VC funding for hardware start-ups (like the late Kerbango, which never got to finish the radio pictured at the top of this post because 3Com bought and killed them) we're still a long way off on that one. Satchmo Day Today is Louis Armstrong's birthday. Were he alive, he'd be 101. Armstrong was arguably the most important popular musician of the 20th century: he essentially invented swing, scat singing, and jazz soloing. Happy birthday Pops. Below is a little essay on where Armstrong fits into the history of recording.
The first essential recording of the “electrical era” was also one of jazz’s greatest recordings, Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” (Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man 1923-34, Legacy/Columbia) recorded for Okeh in 1928. Armstrong (1901-71) took up the cornet at the New Orleans Colored Waif’s Home, where he had been sent after firing a gun into the air at age 11. He eventually came under the tutelage of cornetist King Oliver, whom he followed to Chicago in ‘19. After leaving Oliver’s band, Armstrong recorded in New York with Fletcher Henderson, Bessie Smith, and a host of others. In ‘25, Armstrong was performing with his wife Lil’s band in Chicago when he began a series of recordings with studio-only bands, the Hot Fives, and Hot Sevens. Within these recordings Armstrong turned away from the New Orleans group style of improvisation and became the first, and many still say greatest, jazz soloist. Armstrong soloed as if he had something effervescing inside of him that couldn’t be contained. The polychromy of human emotion from raucous joy to tender sorrow danced from his horn, borne upon dazzling technique, buttery tone and a subversive sense of timing that wound in and around the main melody line, swinging it and commenting upon it at the same time. His scat singing derived from the same wellspring as his playing, adding another virtuoso (if already gravelly) instrument to the mix. On “West End Blues” and many other Hot tunes (“Cornet Chop Suey,” “Heebie Jeebies,” “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue”), Armstrong showed the world the peaks musical self-expression could attain, and established a jazz soloists’ vocabulary for decades to come. Armstrong’s impact was all the more powerful and pervasive because his work was recorded with (then) startling electrical clarity by Richard M. Jones (1889-1945). Jones is an extremely significant figure: in addition to being a pianist and composer (“Trouble In Mind,” “Riverside Blues”) of note, he was most likely only the second significant black producer (after Paramount’s great blues producer J. Mayo Williams) in recording history. |
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