Blog comment not to be missed

At Ace of Spades on Excitable Andy

Having Sullivan accuse you of being a drama queen is like Bozo the clown accusing you of having big feet and bad hair.

An interesting take on a familiar idea

From American Thinker:

The Clueless White Guy Vote

Previous thoughts here and here.

Of partners, vendors, and pirates

A post over at Ad Age sounds the familiar refrain: agencies want to be long-term partners with their clients, not just vendors who can be tossed aside easily:

Are You a Partner or a Vendor?

It's a great idea, but one of the biggest barriers sits in most agencies's creative department.

Creative types love to be iconoclastic and independent. They subscribe to Jay Chiat's idea that they should be "pirates, not the navy." That impulse is antithetical partnering with a client. A marketer building a brand or growing market share wants to work with a disciplined naval squadron not an undependable, easily bored bunch of ragtag buccaneers.

Good post with indisptable facts

TV's Contempt For Marriage

Old but timely

Dimitri K. Simes in an article i noted over two years ago:

What if Russia takes the predictable position that what is good for Kosovo should be good for other unrecognized but de facto independent states such as Nagorno-Karabakh or the transdniester Republic? What of separatist regions like South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which share borders with Russia and where local populations overwhelmingly do not want to be a part of Georgia? In the latter case, the United States would face a series of unpleasant choices. Would the United States, in the name of principle, compel a pro-American Georgian regime to abandon its desire to restore the country's territorial integrity? Or would Washington side with Tbilisi, especially if it decides to use force to recapture these regions? If the latter, the United States could find itself embroiled in a major dispute with Russia that could effectively end cooperation on other matters of vital importance to the United States.

Web tools

I've long thought that blogs and other web tools had real potenital for project management. This article has a lot of interesting details on how SAP put them to work:

How SAP Seeds Innovation

SAP's collaborative Web sites and discussion forums give its customers ways to learn from SAP business partners as well as from each other

Anthrax: Sen. Grassley has some questions

I hope he gets answers.

GRASSLEY SEEKS ANSWERS TO FBI’S AMERITHRAX INVESTIGATION

'Roid rage, paramilitary policing, and "unfortunate accidents"

That's an idea that deserves some attention when we read about a SWAT raid gone bad like the one in Prince Georges county Maryland. According to Wikipedia steroid use is associated with "high levels of aggressiveness, hostility, anxiety and paranoid ideation".

Here's a couple of posts that discuss the use of steroids by police-- especially SWAT team members.

Question: Why test Texas high school athletes for steroids but not police officers?

Cops On Steroids

Congress had time to investigate Roger Clemens and the DOJ has spent years chasing Barry Bonds. I'm much more concerned about steroid use by the guys who kick in doors while toting automatic weapons.

John Edwards, Rielle Hunter


The most interesting post i've seen is on Patterico:

The AP on John Edwards and Integrity

DRJ lays out a textbook case of press bias.

I also agree with this one from Power Line:

My last word on the Edwards affair


Piling on public figures after they are brought low by their human frailties is unseemly whatever the political affilation of the offender and whatever the ideological affiliaton of the critic.

I think Steve Sailer just called me dull

Occam's Butterknife always more popular

The unmasking of Bruce E. Ivins as a mad scientist who, with a high degree of likelihood, carried out the 2001 anthrax attacks, most likely singlehandedly, has not proven popular. People want to hear that Bush did it, Saddam Hussein did it, the cigarette-smoking man did it, whatever.

Maybe the FBI is right to conclude that Dr. Bruce Ivins mailed the anthrax letters. OTOH, after Hatfill, Jewel, and the Duke lacrosse team, a certain sketicims seems warranted when looking at law enforcement's claims.

This blog is interesting. It is written by a scientist who works in the field and knew Ivins professionally before he was named a suspect:

Anthrax Vaccine

The Raleigh News and Observer has learned nothing

I've posted a lot on the Duke lacrosse fiasco. many of those posts have focused on the News and Observer whose reporting did much to launch and prolong the hoax.

One might expect the paper to learn their mistakes. They have not. The latest proof is this bizarre post on perp walks.*

Dan Barkin writes:

There is a good chance that the perp being walked today will never see the inside of a prison cell when all is said and done.

The feds know this, in the back of their minds, which may be one big reason for the handcuffs and the cameras. Because even if the accused win in court, they'll still have to live down the images of being perp walked being seen on CNN by everyone who went to high school with them.

The N&O still hates the presumption of innocence when it comes to politically correct defendants. Just like the "privileged white athletes" in the hoax frame, rich white businessmen can never be truly innocent to the N&O. That makes it OK to ruin their reputation before the trial and after an acquittal.

* I first wrote about perp walks long before the lacrosse case. See here.

Where have all the real men gone?

If you've ever wondered that, Lileks has the answer for you:

It’s not that they vanished; it’s just that they don’t want to hang around with you anymore.

The wheels of justice still turn

A federal judge denied the motions to dismiss the case against Nancy Grace in the lawsuit stemming from the suicide of Melinda Duckett.

Attorney Jay Paul Deratany Expects to Depose Nancy Grace in Wrongful Death Suit

As for Nancy Grace, she has said publicly that she does not believe the suit has any merit. She believes Melinda Duckett knew where the child was, and what caused her suicide, was guilt.

Although Grace and CNN asked the courts to dismiss the suit, a federal judge recently ruled that it can forward.

“The case is not really about the interview itself,” says Deratany. “It is about the deception used to get her on the show.”

“In the next six months,” Deratany says,”depositions with the show producers will demonstrate that.”

I wonder if CNN will settle now.

Discovery will lead to a host of embarrassing disclosures. Not to mention, there are more than a few ex-employees of the show who have no great love for the La Grace. I have to think that CNN will cough up some money to prevent the airing of all that dirty laundry. They don't want the public to see how Nancy concocts the rancid stew that CNN calls a news program.

Anthrax doubts

This thread over at Liestoppers is an informative analysis of what we really know. There are some sharp minds at work who honed their skills demolishing the Duke lacrosse hoax.

The lax case is a cautionary tale for journalists. It illustrates how not to cover a criminal investigation. Unfortunately, reporters and pundits are repeating those same errors with Dr. Bruce Ivins. (Hey, that might make a good post some time.

One big mistake the MSM made in Durham was to probe “deeper meanings” before they ascertained “what really happened”. Pundits are now doing this in the anthrax case.

The narrative taking shape runs something like this:

The Bush administration falsely pointed the finger at Iraq after the mailings as part of their irrational drive for war.

There are some big problems with that formulation. Perhaps the gravest error is the implication that the Bush administration ginned up the possible Iraq connection out of whole cloth. The fact is the Clinton administration was worried about Saddam’s anthrax which is why they ordered that all US troops be vaccinated against anthrax back in 1997. (See here.)

When the anthrax letters were sent in October 2001, they seemed to confirm the worst fears of the counter-terrorism community. Those fears were of pre-dated Bush. The Clinton administration had endorsed them and sounded very public warnings.

This article provides a picture of our pre-9/11 thinking:

The Phantom Menace

The anti-terrorism campaign has been led by President Clinton and Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, who warn that terrorists might unleash a doomsday weapon that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.

[snip]

Appearing on ABC's "This Week" in November 1997, Cohen plopped a five-pound bag of sugar on the table and claimed that an equivalent amount of anthrax could kill 300,000 people. Five months later, a team of four experts demonstrated in the Archives of Internal Medicine that it would take more than 100 pounds of anthrax to kill far fewer people.

Doomsday scenarios in the media have been equally sensational. Jessica Stern, a former staffer at the National Security Council, begins her book The Ultimate Terrorists by asking: "What if terrorists exploded a homemade nuclear bomb at the Empire State Building in New York City?" In graphic detail, she describes the devastation that would follow, leaving up to 200,000 people dead. Richard Falkenrath, a terrorism expert at Harvard University and co-author of America's Achilles' Heel, warns that "deadly chemical warfare agents can quite literally be manufactured in a kitchen or basement." Similar warnings have been issued in prestigious journals like Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy.

Suitcase bombs and anthrax-laced water supplies have become staple fare in Hollywood screenplays and best-selling fiction. A bioterrorist took center stage in Mission: Impossible 2, and fictional descriptions of chemical attacks on New York City in Richard Preston's The Cobra Event helped galvanize President Clinton into demanding action on terrorism. In an interview with the New York Times last year, Clinton called the novel "pretty credible to me," adding that he considered a terrorist attack using chemical or biological weapons "a near certainty" in the next few years.

There is an irony in the attacks on the FBI for speculating about an Iraq connection. On one hand, the Bureau was lambasted for “not connecting the dots” pre-9/11. Now they are castigated for investigating if there was a connection between Iraq and a terror attack.

Deep Throat’s Felony

Mark Felt’s conviction for authorizing illegal FBI break-ins is usually treated as an ironic footnote to his role in Watergate. It is glossed over and few reporter or historians are interested in using it to draw any inferences about the personality, character, or motives of the most famous secret source in history.

Amy Goodman did an interview with one of the targets of the FBI harassment who described what Felt’s men did to her:

JENNIFER DOHRN: I was aware of a lot of it. I was certainly aware of being followed a lot. I wasassumed that perhaps my phones were tapped, and I had no idea of the level of extent under which I was being surveilled. I had no idea that break-ins were repeatedly happening into my apartments. I remember when I was pregnant with my first born feeling extremely vulnerable because I was being followed a great deal of the time, and then it was revealed when I received my Freedom of Information Act papers, over 200,000 documents, that there actually had been developed by Felt a plan to kidnap my son after I birthed in hopes of getting my sister to surrender. So, my imagination
AMY GOODMAN: The F.B.I. plans?
JENNIFER DOHRN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: To kidnap your son?
JENNIFER DOHRN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: How did it say that in the documents?
JENNIFER DOHRN: It said that this was a plan that had been developed and ultimately was not implemented.

The operation went way beyond over-zealous police work. G. Gordon Liddy might have had second thoughts about some of Deep Throat’s tactics. Did the fevered, paranoid Nixon White House ever ponder kidnapping a new born infant? No wonder Bon Woodward skipped over the facts in The Secret Man.

That Deep Throat was presented with a pair of panties as a trophy from the illegal operation is another critical bit of information. It suggests that some parts of the Bureau thought and acted like a bunch of thuggish frat boys who reveled in their invulnerability.

If Dohrn is telling the truth, it is hard to picture Felt as a tortured patriot who only broke the rules when his sense of duty allowed him no other choice.

What we do see is the product of Hoover’s FBI: a man who answered to no authority beyond J.E. Hoover himself.

This Time magazine piece gives a good picture of how the FBI stonewalled the investigation into Felt’s operation. The Nixon White House never came close to pulling off this kind of determined and unified cover-up.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, RIP

One of the great men of our time is dead.

From the Telegraph:

“Gulag Archipelago” was a three-volume denunciation of Stalin’s system and the ideology that powered it. It was a masterpiece of literary endeavour, language and polemic. Once read, it destroyed any argument for accommodation with the Soviet Union beyond that of realpolitik. That was all that remained until Mikhail Gorbachev ended the need for even that by presiding over the country’s collapse.

Achievements like this would be enough for most lives. (And Solzhenitsyn lived one of the greatest lives of the last century: war service, imprisonment and survival in the Gulag, literary renown, expulsion, exile and then an extraordinary return home to a totally different country.)

The New Scientist on the anthrax suspect

Was Ivins the anthrax killer?

Every reporter who covered the US anthrax attacks of 2001 has been over the list of possible suspects in their heads hundreds of times. It would probably be an anthrax scientist who'd worked in US military labs, and before the attacks, there weren't that many. So it was probably someone we'd met.

But I don't know anyone who suspected Bruce Ivins of mailing anthrax spores to US media outlets and senators, killing five people. He committed suicide this week, apparently because he was about to be accused of precisely that.

Why we read newspapers

What's Really Killing Newspapers

People this brave deserve to be remembered




On 1 August 1944 the Polish Home Army launched a uprising in Warsaw against the German occupiers. They had few weapons but possessed an abundance of courage. The time was right: the Red Army was at the gates of Warsaw and Allied armies were advancing against the Germans in France. Wehrmacht officers had nearly killed Hitler on 20 July. It seemed that end of the Nazi state was at hand,

Moscow radio had even broadcast a call to arms to the Poles on 29 July.

In the first days, the uprising had success. The Home Army gained control of central Warsaw. Then they were betrayed by their allies and their allies ally.

The Red Army took no steps to aid the Poles. They even refused to allow British and American planes to use Soviet airfields in airlift and bombing operations. Churchill and Roosevelt had no military options and only a few diplomatic ones. Churchill wanted to put pressure on Stalin but FDR refused. The Warsaw Uprising was a potential embarrassment to a man running for his fourth term. He had already acquiesced to Stalin’s plans for Poland but dared not admit it for fear of losing the votes of Polish-Americans and other Catholics. The Uprising threatened to make Poland an issue in his last campaign.

Many in the West believed the Uprising was hopeless and tragic from the very beginning. The Home Army disagreed. They sent this message to London on 24 August:

Hello.. here is the heart of Poland! Hear Warsaw speaking!
Throw the dirges out of your broadcasts;
Our spirit is strong it will support even you!
We don’t need your applause!
We demand ammunition!!!

They did not get their ammunition but still the Poles fought on. They held out for 63 days-- fighting house to house and hand to hand against tanks and professional soldiers while under continuous bombardment from artillery and the Luftwaffe. Over 200,000 Poles died. It was the equivalent of a 9/11 a day for over two months.

Just before the end, Warsaw radio broadcast a searing message:

This is the stark truth. We were treated worse than Hitler’s satellites, worse than Italy, Rumania, Finland. May God Who is just, pass judgment on the terrible injustice suffered by the Polish nation, and may He punish accordingly all those who are guilty.

Your heroes are the soldiers whose only weapons against tanks, planes, and guns were their revolvers and bottles filled with petrol. Your heroes are the women who tended the wounded and carried messages under fire, who cooked in bombed and ruined cellars to feed children and adults, and who soothed and comforted the dying. Your heroes are the children who went on quietly playing among the smoldering ruins. These are the people of Warsaw.

Immortal is the nation that can muster such universal heroism. For those who have died have conquered, and those who live on will fight on, will conquer and again bear witness that Poland lives when the Poles live.

It is a sad fact that the only party to behave honorably toward the Home Army was the Wehrmacht. After 63 days the Poles were still fighting though they had no hope of success. They agreed to surrender to the regular army on the condition that they be treated as POWs. Those terms were granted and, amazingly, the Germans upheld their end of the bargain.

I don't know what to make of this

Apparent suicide in anthrax case

Previous posts here.


UPDATE: Between naivete and conspiracy-mania lies skeptical realism. That's my mindset as i read this story. Maybe the evidence against Ivins is stronger than the case against Hatfill. But i am troubled by the fact that a dead man cannot mount a vigorous defense. Unless the FBI makes its evidence public, we cannot know if Ivins was the perpetrator or a convenient scapegoat.

The information cited in the news story is skimpy. I don't see the connection between his rule-breaking in the lab and the anthrax mailings. That he lived three and a half hours from the mailbox in Princeton is true of everyone at Fort Detrick (and tens of millions other people).

His suicide may be evidence of guilt. It could also be the act of an innocent man driven to despair by wrongful persecution.

But most of all, i hate it when the first rough draft of history is written by officials who are afraid to put their name behind it.

UPDATE 2: This American Thinker piece is very good on these issues.