Blog drought

As many of you have noticed (and some have commented on through email), my blogging has slowed down considerably lately. And, while some of that had to do with a computer problem that was beyond my control at the time, much of it is a product of my increased level of work from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. As long as they're keeping me writing at the pace they're beginning to, I have to level my focus toward them instead of my blogging hobby. In addition to that, I'm about to begin putting a decent bit of my efforts into work with another startup newspaper that I'm trying to help get off the ground in my home state of Tennessee. Therefore, I'm going to be taking some time off from blogging but have every intention of coming back to this when/if the real journalism work dries up before I get a job back with a paper somewhere. The whole point of this blog has been for me to keep writing and thinking, but that opportunity is coming from elsewhere at the moment. Thanks for reading, and I'll be sure to let you know when I return from hiatus.

Amazing

The New York Times continues to not actually cover the U.N. Oil for Food scandal that is going to become one of the biggest corruptions of authority in our lifetimes if it ever gets the MSM coverage it deserves. Oh, but the Times isn't slacking off of writing unfathomable editorials somehow defending U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan after all this mess. This is fascinating, if inept, reading.

Mr. Annan, who drew the wrath of Republican Washington for opposing President Bush's war in Iraq, will have to face the judgment of United Nations members on how much responsibility he bears. But before the call for his scalp gains more political momentum, it is important to disentangle the mélange of charges swirling around. The United Nations bureaucracy does not bear the primary responsibility for letting Saddam Hussein amass a secret treasury estimated by official investigators at $10 billion to $21 billion.

That IS NOT the issue, and it's hard to believe the Times editors don't know this. The scandal here is that Saddam was buying the contrition of countries such as France, Russia and Germany through oil-for-food vouchers that had the ability to make officials from those countries rich. He lined their pockets for influence over their votes, in the hopes of having the U.N. sanctions lifted and keeping the U.S. out of his country. It was close to working, but that's the most persuasive argument I can think of for Bush taking us into Iraq when he did. Saddam making money off the system is irrelevant, troubling as it may be.

As far as I can tell, many members of the MSM, such as the Times, are afraid to attack the U.N. too harshly because they've defended the organization so staunchly in the past. It would undercut their own credibility to now say the U.N. is corrupt because they so strongly implored Bush and the Republicans to go through the U.N. and let its inspections work in Iraq before going to war. Now it's entirely possible the inspections themselves were influenced by these bribes and would never have found evidence of weapons. They would have let Saddam continue to stall and get off the hook. But the Times would have you ignore that.

UPDATE: A great fisking of the Times editorial by TigerHawk.

What if ...

... you replaced all water in your life with beer? One brave, brave soul set out to find that answer.

Bubblewrapping

I know at least one person who I'm sure will get a kick out of this. Try Manic Mode.

Spacey Spaces

I mentioned the new MSN blogging program, MSN spaces, a couple of days ago. Reports now are, oddly, that word-filtering software has been used in the process to prevent potential bloggers from using certain words, at least in the titles of their blogs. BoingBoing details the issue.

Uh-oh. My attempt to create an MSN Spaces blog called "Pornography and The Law" is met with rude red text advising me to can the profanity. So, if I were a law student who wanted to start a blog about the history of obscenity law in the United States, I'd be s*** out of luck.

I've always found most forms of censorship to be silly at best, as the free market tends to filter out language and behavior it doesn't like. But why would MSN be censoring people's blogs, which are supposed to be unfiltered by nature? I can't think of a reason why they'd care, though I also can't figure out why anyone would want a Constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage either. If I want to title my blog "Bullshit Theatre," what stake does MSN have in this, even if I'm using their program to do it? Surely no religious zealots would start boycotting MSN for allowing me to title my blog with dirty words. And, of course, in the end, there are plenty of potentially offensive words that don't get filtered out for no particular reason and words that do get filtered out for no particular reason. That's what pretty much all censorship programs run into. You'd think they'd learn.

An open Cabinet

Well, I can't be right all the time.

News snooze

So I'm reading my usual sites this morning, and nothing's really striking me as particularly interesting. As far as I can tell, we have a new director of homeland security, the BBC has been duped, Annan really has to leave the U.N., college campuses are extraordinarily liberal and baseball players are druggies. So, all in all, pretty much same old, same old.

Richie Rich

Anybody remember Marc Rich? Yes, the tax cheat for whom Clinton did a hit-and-run pardon on his last day in office. The guy's a low-life scoundrel, and I don't think you'll get much argument against that statement from those who know him. And so is Rich.

Clinton's Rich pardon should have gotten more attention for the sheer filthiness of the whole affair but, lo and behold, here it comes toward the front pages now, perhaps. It seems that Rich allegedly joined the veritable throngs of people who had their dirty little hands in this money-saturated Oil-For-Food scandal, according to ABC News.

Former American fugitive Marc Rich was a middleman for several of Iraq's suspect oil deals in February 2001, just one month after his pardon from President Clinton, according to oil industry shipping records obtained by ABC News.

And a U.S. criminal investigation is looking into whether Rich, as well as several other prominent oil traders, made illegal payments to Iraq in order to obtain the lucrative oil contracts.

Forget Monica Lewinsky, TravelGate, WhiteWater, Paula Jones, etc., etc., etc. ... I'd like to see the Rich pardon turn out to be the biggest scandal of the Clinton presidency rather than the barely-a-footnote it's become. If this story is the impetus toward that being the case, it might be worth the whole thing.

Listing your life away

This should be a fun page to watch, as it tracks all the myriad Top Whatever Lists for 2004 as they begin to pour in during the course of this month and next. Take all the lists with a fat grain of salt, but they're interesting to read, nonetheless.

For those Yuletide music freaks

This has got to be the ultimate collection.

Bloggy options

MSN is now introducing its own blog format with MSN Spaces. For those of you interested in joining your humble correspondent in the blogosphere, check it out.

The question of torture

We've all seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were humiliated and made to suffer by the guards at that prison. But TownHall's Linda Chavez brings up a good point in her column today, asking where the line is drawn that separates torture from forced discomfort and how much of each we as a society might be willing to tolerate.

The ICRC report itself hasn't been made public, but a memorandum summarizing its contents describes far less egregious behavior. Among the tactics the ICRC portrayed as "tantamount to torture" were solitary confinement, temperature extremes, and using "forced positions" to obtain information from some of the approximately 500 men held at Guantanamo.

"The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture," the Times quotes the ICRC report as alleging. But is it? And if such methods are "torture," is the United States justified in using them anyway? Where do we draw the line between what are admittedly unpleasant, coercive methods used to elicit information that might save lives -- thousands, even millions of them -- and actions that are so repugnant they may never be used?

I think there's an issue here that should be addressed. Should these prisoners who may have information that could save lives around the world be coddled and treated with kid gloves? Shouldn't we do what we can, short of purposefully causing the prisoner pain? I think another point has to be derived from this also, which is that terrorists, despite what many liberals will tell you, should not be protected by Geneva Convention rules. They do not belong to a nation's army, they don't wear uniforms and they fight with the intention of inflicting civilian casualties. These facts should disqualify them from Geneva Convention protections, so that's another factor to take into consideration when judging the messes at Abu Ghraib and in Guantanamo.

If you can't beat 'em ...

... and you can't join 'em, you better find another way to beat 'em. Hopefully, for the Democrats, this is it.

De-evolution

As the Supreme Court wrestles with somewhat morality-based rulings on medicinal marijuana and gay marriage, some U.S. schools are starting to make their own morality plays against evolution, beginning to teach curriculums that include the ideas of Creationism and Intelligent Design. It seems the Morality Police are out in full force right now, and I don't think anybody benefits from this type of thinking. To say evolution is anything other than a scientific theory is wrong; it's not a fact, and we cannot say much of anything in science with 100 percent certainty. However, a scientific theory is not the same thing as a drunken theory. There is no such thing as scientific fact. That's one of the things scientists pride themselves on, that they are always willing to test their theories and have them questioned, debated and tested.

Evolution is a theory that has been heavily questioned, debated and tested, and it has largely held up to said scrutiny. Creationism is merely a belief that cannot be questioned, debated or tested, because the people who believe it refuse to accept any evidence that counters that belief. Intelligent design is actually even less viable, from what I can tell, because it's not even a belief so much as it is a sort of inference that something as complicated as a human being couldn't come about through mere natural order; it must have been handcrafted. Schools that teach these ideas at all should have children pulled from their science classes. Oh, and their books need these.