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Wed Oct 05 15:43:24 EDT 2005 Boing Boing just pointed me to this survey, commissioned by the National Recording Preservation Board, in the Library of Congress. The conclusion from the article says it best: Evidence uncovered in this analysis suggests that a significant portion of historic recordings is not easily accessible to scholars, students, and the general public for noncommercial purposes. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one appears to be a convergence of two factors. The first is that the physical barriers created by recording technologies change often and have rendered most such recordings accessible only through obsolescent technologies usually found only in special institutions. Second, copyright law allows only rights holders to make these recordings accessible in current technologies, yet the rights holders appear to have few real-world commercial incentives to reissue many of their most significant recordings. The law has severely reduced the possibility of such recordings entering into the public domain, at least until 2067. In other words, recorded materials are deteriorating, and the repeated extensions of copyright terms mean that, because only the copyright holder is legally able to reproduce the work, many recordings will likely deteriorate beyond recovery before their copyright terms run out and they are able to enter the public domain. So, the recent copyright extensions have the effect of severely cutting off public access to historic material. That doesn't seem to me to be "[promoting] the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Michael Moore Haters [Permalink] Wed Sep 14 13:31:26 EDT 2005 I just stumbled on this blog entry about Michael Moore's letter to those who voted for George W. Bush (which, while typically inflammatory, asks some important questions that those voters should be able to answer). The blog author, Billy Hallowell, asks, "How can we continue to place blame at a time like this?" This seems like a popular viewpoint among Bush supporters, and I'd like to respond in the form of a question: How can we fail to place blame at a time like this? We have just experienced just how vulnerable our country is to national disasters, perhaps more so than we were even before 9/11/2001. How could we sit aside and cry over our losses without holding those responsible for this gross failure in preparedness accountable? Don't you think we should stop Bush from replacing competent people in our government with political cronies before it becomes completely ineffective at performing its function for our society? Bush is not just shrinking the size of government; he's diminishing its ability to work for the people by tearing away its insides for his own political gain. If you want to talk about what's not right, I can't think of a better example. The other argument Hallowell uses against Moore is that Bush has no crystal ball and couldn't predict the storm. Firstly, that's not the point. Nobody expects the president to predict the future, and the disaster itself was obviously outside anyone's control. The problem is that we weren't prepared to handle a disaster of this magnitude. Which brings us to the second point: do you think they have a crystal ball that warns of terrorist attacks? All this time we've been hearing about the danger of terrorism, yet 4 years after the last major attack it takes us days to get relief into the disaster area. Don't you feel a bit hoodwinked? I think it's not such an unreasonable expectation that a president who purports to be so concerned about terrorism would build an organization that can respond to a catastrophic event on our soil in less than two days. There is no escaping it: Bush has failed in the area that he claims to be strongest. In no uncertain terms, he has gravely failed America. [Updated: I had incorrectly attributed the blog post to Jack Myers.] United States of Shame [Permalink] Sat Sep 03 19:41:49 EDT 2005 Maureen Dowd sums up Bush pretty well (with respect to Katrina):
What Is Wrong With You People? [Permalink] Fri Sep 02 14:20:00 EDT 2005 People are desperately in need of help in New Orleans, and news channels are now reporting that the National Guard has been sent in with "shoot-to-kill" orders? We have gone miles off course in this country when killing looters comes before saving innocents. Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. Enough Is Enough [Permalink] Fri Sep 02 14:04:24 EDT 2005 Does it really come as a surprise to anyone that, in the face of another disastrous situation, the Unites States was not adequately prepared? With New Orleans under 20 ft. of water and thousands of people stranded without food or water, the troops and equipment on the ground in Louisiana are too little too late. It is abundantly clear that the impact of this disaster has been dramatically worsened by the fact that both our funds and military personnel have been diverted to a war on foreign soil that has little to do with our national security. It is beyond absurd to claim at this point that the "war on terror" has made us safer at home. Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared." Scott Shane and Eric Lipton in the Times: Some lapses may have occurred because of budget cuts. For example, Mr. Tolbert, the former FEMA official, said that "funding dried up" for follow-up to the 2004 Hurricane Pam exercise, cutting off work on plans to shelter thousands of survivors. Martha Madden, who was the Louisiana secretary of environmental quality from 1987-1988, said that the potential for disaster was always obvious and that "FEMA has known this for 20 years." More from Paul Krugman: Second question: Why wasn't more preventive action taken? After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. "The corps," an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain." In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control spending. "Seventy-two hours into this, to be openly posturing about this, to be attacking the president, is not only despicable and wrong, it's not politically smart," said one White House official who asked not to be named because he did not want to be seen as talking about the crisis in political terms. "Normal people at home understand that it's not the president who's responsible for this, it's the hurricane. This will get better, hour by hour and day by day." Seventy-two hours into this, people are stranded in New Orleans without food or water and White House officials are warning politicians not to criticize the administration. Bush is not responsible for the hurricane, but he damned well is responsible for the ineffective and slow response. Seventy two hours is far too long for relief to come. American civilians are dying now because of the incompetence of George W. Bush. It is time for our president to be impeached. Well Said [Permalink] Tue Aug 23 20:44:19 EDT 2005 Frank Rich lays out the most damning and insightful description of what's going on in Crawford I've seen. It's nice to see the press finally getting tough on the GOP's smear campaigning. Bush Remembers Parts of U.S. History [Permalink] Tue Aug 23 20:40:13 EDT 2005 Well, it's nice to see that our President remembers some parts of United States history. As the Times reports, "'We had a little trouble with our own conventions writing a constitution,' he said, an allusion to the creation, first, of the Revolutionary War-time Articles of Confederation followed years later by the turbulent Philadelphia gathering of 1787 that produced the United States Constitution." Unfortunately Bush seems to have forgotten that our country went through a bloody and divisive civil war before settling into the relatively comfortable state we're in now. Or is he really finally trying to be straight with the American people and telling us that that's where Iraq is headed? My God, the Republicans Got Something Right! [Permalink] Tue Aug 16 17:18:19 EDT 2005 In contrast to our friend Bob Dole, John Tierney displays good sense rarely found in the political world, praising Republicans for their support of keeping airline security private, while denouncing Democrats for clinging to the T.S.A. Federalized airport security has never seemed like a good idea to me, and taking cues from the likes of Israel and European countries that have been successful in preventing airline attacks has always seemed like a vastly better plan. Banning scissors and nail clippers on flights is just perverse. It's really baffling to me why common sense seems to elude the lawmakers. Isn't it obvious that a federaly monitored security program that awards contracts to private companies and pays out based on continual, stringent evaluations of performance is the right way to go? If you send out agents to try to get through security with dangerous items (bombs, maybe big knives, not grooming tools) and tie companies' paychecks to the outcome, business will find a way to make the airports secure. So why is this so complicated? I'm Bob Dole, and I'll Take the Low Road [Permalink] Tue Aug 16 16:58:37 EDT 2005 Bob Dole suggests in his opinion piece for the Times that Congress should pass a Republican-sponsored bill to create a federal privilege for reporters. While the bill sounds somewhat reasonable, Dole's decision to speak out against the jailing of Judith Miller seems suspicious at best. I am also greatly concerned about Judith Miller's situation because she has been incarcerated as a result of an investigation into possible violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, of which I was a sponsor. The law was intended to protect covert intelligence operatives whose lives would be endangered if their identities were publicly disclosed. We were particularly concerned about people like the notorious Philip Agee, a former C.I.A. officer who systematically exposed the agency's covert operatives. Yes, Bob, I'm sure you're very concerned about Ms. Miller's situation. Much more, I'm sure, than about the fate of Mr. Rove. While I do believe that reporters should be offered some protection against prosecution for witholding sources, this case is not about a whistleblower, it is about someone who may have willfully divulged the identity of a covert agent, possibly recklessly working against the aim of national security, that person using reporters as the instrument to do so. I admit, nonetheless, that I'm not sure where I come down on the issue, as it's also true that if we want more information out in the public sphere, we may have to protect a journalist's right to secret sources even when it's not in our best interest. In this case, I'd have to venture that someone should be able to make a judgement, based on an assumption that everything alleged about Rove et al. were true, whether or not it would be a crime, sort of like summary judgement. If it would be a crime, Miller should be forced to reveal the source, if not, there's no point, and her source should be allowed to remain secret. This may be a judgement the special prosecutor has already made, but it seems that it should be a more formal process, at least. Anyway, I digress. Dole tries to argue that because he was there when the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 was drafted and because it was drafted with specific intentions to "criminalize only those disclosures that clearly represented a conscious and pernicious effort to identify and expose agents with the intent to impair America's foreign intelligence activities," it is unlikely that this act applies to Rove. Is our bar really so low in this country that we need to find a conscious and pernicious effort to impair America's intelligence efforts in one of members of the highest office of the country in order to demand any sort of responsibility? It seems more than a bit disingenuous to be speaking out about protecting journalists when the issue at hand is a possible willful outing of a covert agent for political revenge. I say come on, Republicans, get some backbone. The more you refuse to clean house and demand some responsibility from the members of your party, the more difficult it becomes to take you seriously as representing any semblance of moral dignity and as being capable of doing anything but running our country into the ground. No Chinese Food for You [Permalink] Wed Aug 10 18:21:43 EDT 2005 This Times article relates the situation of a Chinese businessman living in Baghdad. While trying to run Chinese restaurants and goods stores, he has been attacked by groups of armed men, been stolen from, and had a car bomb explode in front of his restaurant, raining pieces of flesh all over the inside. Now he doesn't leave the house without a cadre of armed Iraqi guards, he always has guns nearby, and he has been forced to close his restaurants. Sounds like we're doing a great job at improving the everyday life of the Iraqi citizen. Meth Mouth [Permalink] Wed Aug 10 09:56:26 EDT 2005 On the heels of the last post about methamphetamine and the drug war/Prohibition comes this story from NPR about the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of "meth mouth." Apparently when the drug is smoked, the hydrochloric acid in meth erodes addicts' teeth, which subsequently need to be fixed while the addicts spend time in jail. The costs of dental work in prison are rising, straining prison budgets. Meanwhile, Newsweek is running an alarmist story (conservatively titled, "Americas Most Dangerous Drug") that starts out with a six-figure salaried Volvo-driving soccer mom who met a guy in a bar and turned her suburban home into a meth lab. Clearly, you should be watching your wife more carefully. Unfortunately, David Jefferson, the author of the article, doesn't make the connection Tierney did. While he does point out by way of quoting former meth dealer Dominic Ippolito that the government is failing to have any negative effect on the drug's growth, Jefferson ends the article with an ironic quote about the futility of the drug war, followed by what amounts to a call for more of the same. Making the Same Mistakes Over Again [Permalink] Tue Aug 09 19:00:58 EDT 2005 "America has a serious drug problem," writes John Tierney in his New York Times op-ed piece, Debunking The Drug War. Tierney points out that the problem afflicting America is that pointed out by former drug czar William Bennett, but turned on its head. "Using drugs is wrong not simply because drugs create medical problems; it is wrong because drugs destroy one's moral sense. People addicted to drugs neglect their duties," wrote Bennett. In this case, argues Tierney, it is the law enforcement community whose duties are being neglected. By prosecuting seemingly innocent bystanders in the game of creating more of the drug, the soldiers of the war on drugs create more problems than they eliminate. Tierney compares the war against meth to Prohibition, noting that deaths from alcohol poisoning and illegal stills went up as a result of alcohol's illegality, just as the illegal nature of methamphetamine makes the circumstances of its creation dangerous, not the drug itself. Noting that meth has serious benefits (it is routinely given to Air-Force pilots), Tierney makes the case that the war against this drug is a practical failure. In addition to its futility, it is creating unnecessary "collateral damage." The reality ignored by proponents of the drug war that's responsible for its futility lies in a quote from Jacob Sullum, author of Saying Yes: "Like most drugs, their benefits outweigh the costs for most people. I'd rather be driving next to a truck driver on speed than a truck driver who's falling sleep." It seems obvious, then, that squelching meth is a losing proposition. My question is, why do we insist on fighting wars we can't win? |
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