Quibbles & Bits

2001-12-15T00:21:00.000-05:00

THE TIME WE WASTED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES
Turns out to be useful when fighting a war. "Give me a geek anytime," Mr. Rickey said, adding that young men who play a lot of video and computer games have the smarts and the keen hand-eye coordination the new Army needs.

2001-12-09T23:06:00.000-05:00

THE WAR MBAs
Advertising and marketing are weapons too.

2001-11-27T15:29:00.000-05:00

HAGAR'S FOR GENERATION X.

2001-11-27T12:02:00.000-05:00

WARREN BUFFET SPEAKS
The cyclicality of the stock market, and the long-term determinants of equity value can be found here.

2001-11-25T22:23:00.000-05:00

THE DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN NEARS ITS END.
The government has, understandably, sought to avoid the obvious consequences of revealing Iraq's role in the anthrax killings. The level of precision with which the FBI detailed the profile of the anthrax killer was itself enough to warrant suspicion. After all, the details of the anthrax letters were less than 1% of what we knew contemporaneously about the UNABOMBER, a case in which it finally took his own brother to identify him.

So while the timing, source, sophistication, motive and modus operandi all pointed to al-Qaeda and Iraqi involvement, the FBI delayed the day of reckoning long enough to see our Afghan campaign through to a more solid footing, and, apparently, likely end. Now that the time draws nigh, expect to see more articles like this one in the Post linking Iraq to the anthrax killings and building the case for a second Bush-Iraq war.

2001-11-25T21:30:00.000-05:00

WEB WAR JOURNALISM COMES OF AGE.
Wonder what it's like to have a chat with a colleague in the midst of a warzone?
"Which one was Miek again?"
"Mike was the dead one."

The web delivers the unpolished opinions of thousands to your desktop. Perhaps media companies will become less of a structured hierarchical entity and more of a branding or "seal of approval" for web reporters, mezines, etc.

2001-11-18T10:42:00.000-05:00

2001-10-22T16:44:00.000-04:00

GET YOUR WAR ON!

2001-10-10T11:33:00.000-04:00

BEAT HELL OUT OF BIN LADEN here.

2001-10-04T16:26:00.001-04:00

AN EPIDEMIC EMERGES.

2001-10-04T16:26:00.000-04:00

A PLANE SHOT DOWN.

2001-10-02T12:21:00.000-04:00

THE HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE 911 CALLS. Transcripts of calls from the wounded and dying in the World Trade Center attack.

2001-10-02T11:52:00.000-04:00

ROMULUS AND REMUS REDUX.

2001-10-02T11:32:00.000-04:00

GET DISTURBED. GET VERY DISTURBED. Reading cartoons you might not like.

2001-10-02T11:21:00.000-04:00

The worst piece of muck-raking journalism that I've seen in response ot the crisis. Of course airlines are going to continue investing in new lines of business in order to stay solvent. And chartered jets will experience greatly expanded demand post- September 11th.

2001-10-02T10:36:00.000-04:00

Salman Rushdie opines "There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains. If the West needs to understand its Unabombers and McVeighs, Islam needs to face up to its bin Ladens.)

2001-09-25T09:35:00.000-04:00

It's interesting to go back and read the "give sanctions a chance" crowd from the Persian Gulf War.

2001-09-25T09:26:00.000-04:00

Very interesting piece by Martin Amis.

We're going to have to dig into this 5% claim. I presume it relies on Iraq's self-reported # of civilian dead due to sanctions. If so, it is a skeezy number. People are not dying because of sanctions (Iraq is now the #2 world exporter of oil and has been caught exporting food) but because of Saddam.

Moral culpability for sanctions is also interesting. The two factions at the time of the Persian Gulf War were: 1) invade or 2) "no blood for oil" + sanctions. I don't know of any other credible policy to contain Saddam. Remember the Israelis blew up his nukes in 1982, and we have been monitoring his biological weapons since the War.

2001-09-24T15:35:00.000-04:00

Seeing the Unimaginable Freezes the Imagination

2001-09-24T13:30:00.000-04:00

Postcards From Hell: Afghanistan Home Page

2001-09-24T11:23:00.000-04:00

NOT TIME TO BUY YET
As long as super-bull Abby Cohen has optimism, there's still life left in the bubble.
Goldman's Cohen Urges More Stock Buying

2001-09-24T10:33:00.000-04:00

INDUSTRY FUNDAMENTALS SINK NET FIRMS
The McKinsey Quarterly: What went wrong for on-line media?

2001-09-24T10:24:00.000-04:00

SAME OL', SAME OL'. Michael Kinsley says maybe nothing has changed. This is certianly the contrarian viewpoint in the post-September 11th world.

2001-09-24T10:23:00.000-04:00

EULOGY OF A HERO. Senator John McCain eulogizes a hero.

2001-09-24T09:35:00.000-04:00

IT WAS LIKE A FAIRY TALE. What did people compare once-in-a-lifetime disasters to before Hollywood? While well-intentioned, these analyses miss the mark. They are accurate in pointing out the a-historicity of comments that find in every major event, a dawn of history anew, but they overstate the case when they assert that we have been divorced from an idyllic or pure past.

But did people formerly exist in some pure event-contemplating state? It was as in a dream, or a fairy tale, or a song? People do not experience major events on a daily basis (by definition, none of us do) and so how they process, come to grips, "understand" (in modern terms) or commemorate, acknowledge, or remember (historically utilized terms) will of necessity be different from how they experience daily events.

2001-09-23T18:11:00.000-04:00

THE NEW WAR
Consequence and ramification spread like kudzu. A fast-moving, low-tech, suicide cult with apocalyptic visions of martyrdom, eviscerates our security, which, at $300 billion per year, we had thought we had ensured.

Even though we can see right into the terrorist's camps (click to see satellite photos) using technology that boggles and transforms our conceptions of warfare and intelligence, and as happenstance experiences in Afghanistan by accidental moles assure us that the Taliban aren't so tough, we would do well to worry long and long over fighting in any Third World country. As the Philadelphia Enquirer outlined four years ago in this excellent recap of the disaster in Somalia in October 1993 that left 18 Americans dead and virtual marinotte puppets in an ugly form of street theater, the rules of engagement and definitons of success in Third World warfare couldn't be more different. For one, using two women and four children to create a mobile pillbox, while sick, is effective against American troops. More broadly, the incident reveals the quick resentment that an occupying force of Americans will likely generate anywhere in hostile territories. And that resentment, combined with a much lower value to life, will lead our enemies to use forms of combat horrifying in their cruelty to themselves, devastating in their ability to make us mimic the monsters. The Post sees these effects of war as temporary, citing Hiroshima and Dresden, but those took place in a far different democracy and media millieu.

DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS TRIUMPHANT?
While newly popular buzzwords -- dominant effects, asymmetric warfare, network-centric warfare proliferate, the present battle further illuminates the dominant metaphor of our age: the move from centralized to distributed systems.
One of the original goals of the Internet was to compartmentalize a communications system in such a manner that it would survive the attack or destruction of many of its nodes. In that regard, the Internet performed excellently last week. Many New Yorkers found that phone lines were useless, clogged, or intermittent, but that e-mail and the Net worked smoothly enough. lick here for cool historicla maps of ARPANET.
But the effectiveness of distribution enables evil too. The creation of self-contained cells ensures the survival of sister cells should one be compromised, and leaves trails cold and unbearing for authorities seeking clues. "They are so good at compartmentalizing" notes this expert. And as the global scope of distributed terrorism, with its borderless existence, becomes apparent, the inadequacy of our prior security systems also comes to light. None of the safety rules in place would have stopped the 19 hijackers, even if followed to the letter, according to the Los Angeles Times. In fact, as long as access to the cockpit remains, no system can prevent 20 determined hijackers from commandeering any plane.

THE NEW DIPLOMACY
This war will be slow, deliberate, and unlike any other in its use of talk and tech as weapons. We have already had our first Media War in the Persian Gulf, but this may be the first War by Media. Image, word, persuasion and diplomacy will count so much more than tanks and troops. As an example, the Financial Times follow Tony Blair about the world.

THE APOLOGENTSIA SICKENS
And finally, for those who would claim this is a war about Israel, or American misdeeds, or other assorted claims of our professional apologentsia -- who will find in any horror a reason to hate the American government more, click here to read Michael Moore's hatred of his country, or see Chomsky's piece cited below -- bin Laden's campaign, and his soon-to-be-more-vocal supporters among the Appeasatariat in the US, is a war to make Muslimdom safe for Muslims, and ethnically and religiously cleansed of non-Muslims.
One would have more sympathy for the likesof Moore and Chomsky were their attacks not livened with such self-promoting glee.

2001-09-23T16:47:00.000-04:00

THE LOYAL LEFT
Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the anti-patriotism of the Loathing Left should not save them from the approbation and disgust their views demand. Thankfully, and it should be recognized more widely, the opposition has risen to the occasion. Partisanship typically ends at our shores, and in the midst of this calamity, it has not even extended that far. The New Republic is typical of this loyal outlook and joins in castigating the Apologentsia. Kudos!

2001-09-21T16:11:00.000-04:00

NEW GUIDE TO CARING AND FEEDING YOUR HIJACKER
As mentioned below, the monsters of September 11 have forever changed the expected behavior of future hijackees. Reader One, Jay Haynes, forwarded this Peter Hannaford explanation in the Washington Times, of the new rules of air rage.

2001-09-21T16:01:00.000-04:00

LIQUID INVESTMENTS?
Got this from a colleague. To all of my beer drinking buddies, just a point of interest:

If you bought $1,000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would
now be worth $49. If you bought $1,000 worth of Budweiser (the
beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, and traded in
the cans for the nickel deposit, you would have $79.

My advice to you is to start drinking heavily and recycle.

2001-09-21T14:47:00.000-04:00

WAS THIS ACT GENOCIDE?
Osama bin Laden's fatwa asserts that "to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."

United Nations Resolution 260A (III) defines genocide as:
"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

The Attack of September 11th clearly meets both (a) and (b) as the acts are targeted "with the intent to destory" a "national" group, and were therefore, acts of genocide.

2001-09-21T14:10:00.000-04:00

Louisiana Prisoners Raise $11,000 for Relief Efforts.

2001-09-21T13:43:00.000-04:00

A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH
The terrorists involved in last week's tragedy have the interesting distinction of inventing a fate worse than death. Before last week, you would've thought that hurtling earthward in a doomed passenger jet would be the worst thing that could happen to you. No more. This crew of ghouls and their suicide-genocide crimes are much, much worse than simply dying alongside your fellow passengers. As a result, it seems that they have permanently ruined hi-jacking as a means of political expression for other, merely socio-pathic, terrorist groups.

2001-09-21T13:42:00.000-04:00

UNLIKELY SAVIOR OF THOUSANDS
In retrospect, all of the elements of the 911 Plot were there for us to see: from Ramzi Yousef's 1995 plot to blow up airlines in a coordinated attack, to the simultaneous bombings of the US' African embassies in 1998. It is the tiniest of tiny comforts that the WTC bombing in 1993, ironically, led to a much much lower death count in the September 11th incidents.

2001-09-21T12:11:00.000-04:00

WE TURN TO THE OLD WORDS in times of great tumult. And these weeks, and especially after the president's speech last night, I have been returning to Shakespeare's Henry V. Prince Hal, the party animal and boozer, becomes King Henry V, forswears his former life of good times, and leads his nation into a remarkable victory at Agincourt.

When one of his camp bemoan the fact that many men are lying idle back in England on the eve of victory, King Henry insists that it is all for the better -- more glory for each of "we few, we happy few, we band of brothers."

And then he leads them into battle with the famous "Once more unto the breach" passage:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there ’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.

2001-09-21T09:46:00.000-04:00

Slate, as ever, thinks through the implications to come up with boggling questions such as Could the Taliban Collect the $5 Million Bin Laden Bounty?

2001-09-20T17:31:00.000-04:00

MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES, and need a flag to show for it. One sector of the Chinese economy is booming as a result of Black September.

2001-09-20T17:00:00.000-04:00

J.P. MORGAN, the financier, when asked what stock prices would do, responded: "They will fluctuate."
This week's fluctuations include huge nominal amounts, as always, at Berkshire Hathaway. This graph is always an interesting one to look at, with bid-ask spreads in the thousands and volume measured in single share lots.

2001-09-20T16:01:00.000-04:00

CHOMSKY FIBS.
I should probably be embarassed to include any statements by the infamously facile truth flexer, Noam Chomsky, but here are his typically evasive passive aggressive attacks on the US.

As usual, Chomsky says things that are either tautalogically true but arranged so as to be misleading ("I wasn't lying, I was being economical with the truth" is perhaps the term of art here), or so high-handedly arrogant as to be entire useless to his presumed cause. Substitute Hitler and Germany for bin Laden and Afghanistan and you have Neville Chamberlain leading us into the maws of our last most horrific war...

Chomsky is a guy who apologized for the Khmer Rouge for years after their atrocities had come to light, so for him to take to his moral hobby-horse against the current population of America by citing 100 year old history is especially and creatively offensive.

Nonetheless, it is true that we are going to succeed only by turning the MidEast into a suburb, not a parking lot. And this is exactly what is most deliciously ironic about Chomsky's puffed-up self-regard. The final victory comes when our friends in the Mideast are just the same type of fat, happy, prosperous, peace-loving democrats that he despises here in the United States.

2001-09-20T15:15:00.000-04:00

LIGHT A CANDLE for the fallen.

2001-09-20T12:16:00.000-04:00

THE KILLERS WERE:
a) Cowardly
b) Terrorists
c) Brave
d) Soldiers

There is this exchange from Politically Incorrect:

Dinesh: Bill, there's another piece of political correctness I want to mention.
And, although I think Bush has been doing a great job, one of the themes we hear constantly is that the people who did this are cowards.

Bill: Not true.

Dinesh: Not true.
Look at what they did.
First of all, you have a whole bunch of guys who are willing to give their life.
None of 'em backed out.
All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete.

Bill: Exactly.

Dinesh: These are warriors.
And we have to realize that the principles of our way of life are in conflict with people in the world.
And so --
I mean, I'm all for understanding the sociological causes of this, but we should not blame the victim.
Americans shouldn't blame themselves because other people want to bomb them.

Bill: But also, we should --
we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.
That's cowardly.
Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly.
You're right.

And Timothy Noah at Slate also aks: "In What Sense Are Terrorists Cowards?

2001-09-20T11:37:00.000-04:00

LOSING BY RELIGION.

Is God mad at us? And did He give us "what we deserve?" Jerry Falwell thinks so.

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen,' " Falwell said.

The non-apology apology does little to buff up a deservedly tarnished image.

Richard Dawkins makes the evolutionary sociologist's point that entities will not willingly die unless the reward to the entity or group is substantially greater than the cost. And only relgion can provide that greater reward.

A Washington Post correspondent carried this point as well, "Falwell and Robertson would do well to reflect on the fact that this tragedy was begat by men who bear a remarkable resemblance to themselves: that is, religious zealots who are motivated by deep hatreds."

As a side note, outrageous acts of horror inflicted on the populace *do* seem an effective means to long-lasting infamy. Centuries after hippies have toked their last and are a forgotten band of peaceful fun-lovers, these groups of committed nutcases and/or sociopaths will live on in our language: Zealots, Assassins and Vandals.

2001-09-19T20:29:00.000-04:00

FUTILE FIGHT? The discussion today centers on whether or not we can defeat an irregular force in Afghanistan, a remarkably inhospitable country that has swallowed whole imperial armies. David Greenberg's piece in Slate recounts some of the catastrophes that have befallen superppowers in prior Afghan wars. Tom Carew, "a former British Special Air Services officer who helped train Afghanistan's mujahadeen," gives the evil, depressing details of the fight that lay ahead of us.

2001-09-19T18:04:00.000-04:00

A READER sent in this comprehensive gallery of Day After front pages.

AND AN ODD, PARTLY DISTURBING face in the smoke.

2001-09-19T17:50:00.000-04:00

OTHER WORTHY TARGETS, and perhaps the responsible targets, are begining to emerge. In addition to this lengthy disquisition on Saddam, there is a menagerie of unsavory beasts, of which this gentleman appears to be the filthiest.

2001-09-19T17:38:00.000-04:00

ECONOMIC BOON OR BANE? Priceline, whose shares have been doing a "wave" of their own, took a big hit thise week due to the terorist attacks. The interesting question is, does the tragedy help or hurt Priceline. It will hurt overall to the extent that air travel is down, but with all major carriers flying at significantly below equipment capacity, won't that give Priceline more and cheaper inventory which to vend?

2001-09-19T17:19:00.000-04:00

WE THOUGHT OUR SPIN DOCTORS WERE SHAMELESS ??? The Palenstinians, after threatening to kill an AP cameraman, may be denying that even the footage that got out is phony. CNN of course rejects those claims.

Elsewhere, Arafat has already shown that he knows the gig is up, by donating blood for the American cause. Clever clever, and hopefully the sign of recognition that the environment for peace -- and war -- has truly changed.

2001-09-19T16:25:00.000-04:00

IT TAKES SOME TRAINING to destroy 1,000+ foot buildings, James Fallows explains for Slate.com.

2001-09-19T15:23:00.000-04:00

STUNNING GRAPHICS of the attack and aftermath at New York Times mark the best single source. While Nixlog provides the most comprehensive tally of resources available.

2001-09-19T15:16:00.000-04:00

Nostradamus is finally losing ground on the Yahoo! buzz index, after being debunked.

2001-09-19T15:07:00.000-04:00

Bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age -- not that far to go, says Afghani-American. War entails human casualties, and if we are at war those casualties will occur both here *and* there. We need to decide just exactly how far we will go in ending the lives of several thousands (tens of thousands) of Afghanis in our pursuit of the evil malefactors behind the events of last week.

While Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld discusses at length the nuances of the coalition being assembled today, in fact, there are few targets either military or governmental, worth missle-ing in the country. That is, unless we occupy for a long, long time, a country that handed Victorian England "the greatest military disaster in the history of British India."

2001-09-19T12:30:00.000-04:00

This is the opening post on the Quibbles & Bits Blog, thanks very much to Blogger.