digamma.net - notes

From Jehane Noujaim, best known for her work on the tech boom documentary Startup.com comes Control Room, an absolutely riveting look inside the al-Jazeera network from the beginning of the Iraq War to the toppling of Saddam’s statue. As well as providing a great view behind the scenes of wartime news coverage, Control Room tackles how the United States manages its image in the Arab world, and even more complicated questions of how news media have the power to shape public perceptions.

All of that sounds like a recipe for a very boring film, but there isn’t a dull moment in Control Room, thanks mainly to the individuals it follows around the media headquarters in Qatar. Nouhaim has said that she sought “surprising, engaging, charismatic, complex people” and indeed, even if they weren’t real people involved in a real war, the “characters” in this film would still be compelling.
(more…)

Over at Dohiyi Mir, I was complaining that the much-celebrated foliage season in New England is only at its most spectacular for a period of about ten days, and that this period coincides with the Major League Baseball playoffs, where the Red Sox are usually capturing the region’s attention in preparation for their annual collapse. In 2003, the end of foliage season coincided almost perfectly with the shocking demise of the Sox. And then we didn’t see the sun until March.

The Red Sox are currently leading the wildcard race, so here’s the big question: in 2004, can New England handle the end of foliage, seasonal affective disorder, postseason baseball, AND John Kerry’s presidential bid, all in a month-long period? Or are there going to be riots in the streets?

(Control Room is coming, I swear.)

Retardo writes in the comments to this post:

Leftists dont want to stiffle free speech; this is the classic miscontrual of the traditional leftist position.

Well, in 2004, that’s pretty much true; it was, after all, the point of my post.

We want laws that ban perennial campaigning;

What do you mean by “perennial campaigning"? Is that speaking out on any issue in an effort to influence public opinion? You want that banned? Wouldn’t that ban both elementropy.blogspot.com and digamma.net?

we want free air time for candidates of all parties.

Well, I’d favor a fairly radical overhaul of spectrum policy that would get rid of the current artificial scarcity. Within the current spectrum allocation method, I guess “free air time” makes some sense, but have you ever watched public access TV? How many people would watch it, and of that small set of people, how many could have their minds changed?

I never have understood why you sneer so much at the leftist position. Do you *like* legalised bribery, which is what political donations by PACS actually are?

This post has nothing to do with donations to candidates. I am talking about independent groups of people who spend money to express their opinions.

Do you *want* Nike to lie, call the lie “free speech", and then with its massive funding, outspend the grassroots people who tell the truth? That’s the “free market” position, after all.

No. But I don’t want government to do that either. 98% of Congressional incumbents get reelected every time. They will always have a microphone, and they’ll always be looking for ways to take our microphones away. And given a choice between you and Nike, they’re more likely to side with Nike.

But let’s talk about this “outspending". Your weblog gives you more of a voice than at least, I’d say, 75% of the people living on Earth. Blogger lets you write it for free, but the computer you’re posting with cost money. Your technical knowledge of how to do it and your mastery of America’s language are unequally distributed commodities too. Should it be legal for you to leverage this overwhelming advantage?

I spend about $100 a year running this site, and it’d be a lot more if it weren’t for the massive generosity of the project that makes it possible. Do you want this to be illegal? If not, where do you draw the line? How big does digamma.net have to be before I have to provide “equal time” to Bush, Nader, Badnarik, and every other jackass running for office?

The two major parties, having already switched sides on trade, have apparently decided to switch sides on campaign finance restrictions too. Writes Kevin Drum:

I’m a little wishy washy on campaign finance reform myself. There are serious First Amendment issues involved, but at the same time trying to regulate the flood of money in the electoral process is a legitimate concern. But Bush’s statement is completely out of left field. Just ban all political advertising? Does he even understand that the First Amendment has something to say about that?

Probably not. Like I said before, he’s like a guy in bar. We should just ban all the advertising, that’s what I say! And his understanding of the issue never goes any further.

It’s nice to see some on the left finally waking up and understanding why restrictions like this are not a good idea. Back in college I used to argue with socialist professors who insisted that all expenditures on political speech needed to be centrally distributed - in other words, you could only buy advertising saying what the government would let you say about the government. And if you google the phrase “money is speech”, you find a whole mess of Democrats and other leftists ridiculing the notion that Americans should have the right to express their political views in ways that cost money.

Welcome to my side.

Tomorrow, I hope to post my review of Control Room. My two-word review: friggin’ brilliant.

Wow, that was close.

My registration of the domain digamma.net was due to expire at 15:57 tomorrow. But if you’re one of the thousands of people hoping to capture this domain, read all my email, and divert all my readers to a Bernie Sanders fansite, you have been foiled - I renewed it. For two years.

Today’s New York Times cites “Pakistani intelligence sources” as having given them Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan’s name. So there’s a pretty good chance that the strong words I wrote here were outrageously premature. Sucks to be me.

This Slate article led me to update Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan’s Wikipedia entry. The important bits:

However, two days later, another Reuters article allowed that maybe the leak wasn’t the tremendous screw-up the wire service had previously reported. “Terrorism experts,” the piece noted, “said the reasons for the release of Khan’s name could range from a judgment error to a sophisticated ploy designed to put al Qaeda on edge about the extent to which the network has been infiltrated by moles.”
George Friedman, chairman of Stratfor, a private global intelligence company, learned that it was the latter. “There was a decision in the U.S. intelligence community to roll up the al-Qaida networks we know about now and push them out of a pre-election attack,” he told me.

That is to say, the most important information that came from Khan was not about the five potential financial-sector targets in New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., that al-Qaida had chosen as far back as four years ago to attack. What U.S. intelligence learned is that there was an extremely serious, imminent operation in the advanced-planning stages. The information placed in the Times, Friedman explains, “was part of a systematic series of leaks, designed to confuse al-Qaida. They don’t know what we know and what we don’t know. Since their operational principle is never attack into a highly secure environment, the assumption is that they’d abort this operation.”

As of right now, Google News shows no other stories containing both the terms “Khan” and “George Friedman", so this is totally unconfirmed. Another search for “George Friedman” and his company Stratfor, shows that he gets quoted a lot on intelligence matters, but he doesn’t seem to be a consistently pro- or anti-Bush shill. So I take it with a grain of salt, but the source is more credible than, say, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

What got me interested in Pieces of April was the Oscar nomination for Patricia Clarkson, whose performance in The Station Agent SHOULD have been Oscar-nominated (as should a lot of that film’s other features, but down the Oscar-bitching road lies madness.) And Clarkson’s performance was definitely the best thing about this very hit-or-miss film.
(more…)

I started my first Wikipedia page this morning, on Muhammad Naeem Moor Khan. If this story has wings, the entry will, I hope, be a useful resource. Go start hacking on it!

UPDATE (Aug 12, 6 PM): Arg, I was misled by a misspelling in the original link from “List of Alleged Al-Qaida members"! The correct link is Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. It’s Noor, not Moor. One is a terrorist who hates America, and the other is a filmmaker who, er, nevermind.

OK, enough shilling for the Democrats. On the front page of today’s New York Times, I found an article that woke up my inner right-winger:

These supporters - some of whom have raised $200,000 or more for President Bush or the party - are being charged a “convention fee'’ this year of up to $4,500 per person for themselves and each guest, according to a Web page run by LogiCom Project Management, the company handling the events and travel arrangements….
“A lot of us looked at that thing and said, whoa!'’ said Bruce Bialosky of California, who raised $100,000 to become a Pioneer fund-raiser. He estimates that the convention will cost him and his family $15,000. “A lot of people just can’t afford that.'’
Republican officials say the fees have risen this year - they topped out at $1,750 in 2000 - because of the new McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which eliminated the unlimited so-called soft money contributions that used to make up a large part of the party’s finances and were traditionally used to pay for convention events. Now operating on a leaner budget, the Republican Party chose to pass the costs on to those attending the convention rather than spend cash that could be used to support President Bush in the election.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten, but this is the same McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that was going to “bring our government back to the people” and “shut down the machine that brings so much money to politicians” (both quotes from Common Cause) but has been most effective at keeping sketch comedy off the air.

Thanks to easily-predicted consequences of McCain-Feingold, it’s harder for average people to attend political conventions. Will General Electric and Disney have any trouble attending the conventions? No, they will not. Thanks John! Thanks Russ!

I’ve previously written about McCain-Feingold here, here, and here.

Via Eschaton, I see that Dr. Rice is admitting that the Bush administration revealed the name of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, an al-Qaeda double agent, to the press.

Blitzer then revealed that he had discussed the Khan case with US National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice on background. He reported that she had admitted that the Bush administration had in fact revealed Khan’s name to the press. She said she did not know if Khan was a double agent working for the Pakistani government. (!!!)

Jesus H. Cordero. No wonder these people freaked out on John Kerry for calling the fight against terrorism “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation". No wonder they need to go to war against nation-states all the time: the kind of spycraft you read about in any Tom Clancy page-turner is more than their feeble brains can handle.
By the way, in case you’ve lost your scorecard, the guy running this show is the first-born son of a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
And why the hell am I turning into Paul Krugman?!

I don’t know why I ever watch Meet the Press. Condoleeza Rice appeared with Punkinhead this morning, and, well….

The primary reason for going to war against Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was a threat.

And in exactly what ways, Dr. Rice, was he a threat?

He was a–he represented a regime against which we had gone to war in 1991, which we had gone to war again in 1998 because we were concerned about his having thrown out weapons inspectors and that he was continuing his weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. He was an avowed enemy of the United States who had attacked his neighbors, who had used weapons of mass destruction. He was tying down our forces in Saudi Arabia. He was a threat to change in the Middle East, which is at the core of how we change the security environment in which terrorism is taking place.

Wow. Saddam was a threat…. to change in the Middle East. In other words, if there is any context in which you can truthfully use the phrase “is a threat” in a sentence to describe someone, that’s cause for war. This is called lowering the bar.
Netflix is a threat (to Blockbuster). WAR! Lysol is a threat (to soap scum). Bombs away! This blog is a threat (to my spare time). Scramble the fighters!
Skipping ahead,

Because Saddam Hussein had been a threat for 12 years, ever since he invaded Kuwait and set the Middle East on a course of instability.

Those were the days. How fondly I remember the peace in the Middle East that came to an end when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991.

Somebody had to take care of Saddam Hussein and set the Middle East on a different course.

No one will deny that you’ve done the first part (unless his trial goes Milosevic). As for the latter, the game’s not over, but you’re not exactly winning.
This next part is really rich:

MR. RUSSERT: But there’s no linkage between September 11 and Iraq?
DR. RICE: There is no linkage between the plot of September 11 and Saddam Hussein’s regime that we see.

The sad part is that I was actually happy to hear that grain of truth.

But I think it would be wrong to say that there is no linkage between what happened to us on September 11 and the instability and lack of hope and lack of freedom in the Middle East. And Saddam Hussein’s regime was one of the prime elements in that kind of Middle East.

Instability, lack of hope, and lack of freedom certainly characterize the countries where the 9/11 hijackers originated. What exactly has your administration done to alleviate those conditions in THOSE countries?
I’ll skip all the stuff about the Intelligence Director (but my $0.02 is that it’s yet another attempt to make government not act like government), and briefly point out this gem:

Three years ago, Pakistan was not a fighter in the war on terrorism.

Three years ago, on August 8, 2001, I’m not sure exactly which countries were fighters in the war on terrorism. We common folk never heard of any such war until two months later.
Where I live, MTP is on at 9 AM. Next week, I’ll stay in bed until 10.

In London earlier this week, I went in search of quality Indian cuisine. I found it, but here’s how I knew for sure I wasn’t in a tourist trap:

One of the authors of Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry is apparently a prolific poster on the conservative news/discussion site Free Republic.

To my fellow Catholics who think Bush’s policies are more in line with your beliefs - here’s what this obvious ally of Bush has to say about your faith:

boy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is okay with the Pope as long as it isn’t reported by the liberal press.

God bless Free Republic for making it easy to find out what right-wing assholes are really thinking.