Roscoe's Blog

Martin Peretz on George Bush

Martin Peretz of The New Republic notes the unwillingness of his fellow liberals to give George Bush his props for having the vision and courage to attempt what everyone else, on both the left and right (including me) thought was impossible; bringing real change to the culture of the Middle East:

If George W. Bush were to discover a cure for cancer, his critics would denounce him for having done it unilaterally, without adequate consultation, with a crude disregard for the sensibilities of others. He pursued his goal obstinately, they would say, without filtering his thoughts through the medical research establishment. And he didn't share his research with competing labs and thus caused resentment among other scientists who didn't have the resources or the bold--perhaps even somewhat reckless--instincts to pursue the task as he did. And he completely ignored the World Health Organization, showing his contempt for international institutions. Anyway, a cure for cancer is all fine and nice, but what about aids?

Read the whole thing.  (By the way, what does "props" mean? And why am I talking like I'm a teenager?)

Apparently Everything we Know is Wrong

According to the LA Times, the bipartisan presidential commission has issued a report on the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq was.  It turns out that nearly everything the Intel boys were saying was wrong.  This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone; our intelligence agencies have  historically been almost always wrong about almost everything.

One point the commission's report makes is  that there is going to be a lot of resistance to real change, as various agencies fight to protect their turf.   As someone who has sat in on turf battles between the FBI and DEA (and talk about a failure to share information, you have no idea) I would expect nothing less.

If we are going to have any hope of fixing the problem, we are going to have to send in someone willing to kick ass, and Negroponte looks likely to be the guy we need.  We will know  he is doing his job when various unnamed people complain to tame reporters at the Washington Post about how divisive and destructive to moral he is.

Protecting the Public from Harmful Cheeseburgers, 24/7

Supposedly, a woman here in California called 911 because she ordered a cheeseburger and the folks at the local Burger King refused to make it her way.  The call, which you can listen to here, is really funny.  An excerpt:

Dispatcher: Ma'am, then I suggest you get your money back and go somewhere     else. This is not a criminal issue. We can't go out there and make them make you a cheeseburger the way you want it.

Caller: Well, that is, that--you're supposed to be here to protect me.

Dispatcher: Well, what are we protecting you from, a wrong cheeseburger?

Caller: No. It's--

Dispatcher: Is this like, is this a harmful cheeseburger or something?     I don't understand what you want us to do.

Caller: Well, just come down here! I'm not leaving!

(Hat tip to Best of the Web).

Catching Up

Been on vacation in Kauai with the family all week, boy do I have some catching up to do:

Powerline has a summary of the fake GOP Talking Points Memo story, about which they have been beating on ABC for a while.

David Shaw had a remarkably stupid editorial in the LA Times, arguing that bloggers don't deserve the same protections as "real journalists".    Over at Slate  Jack Shafer beats Shaw soundly about the head and shoulders. 

Volokh links to Howard Kurtz  in the Washington Post.  Apparently they needed a survey to show that the vast majority of  college professors are leftists. 

And in the big news of the week, Bill Kristol was stuck in the face with a pie when delivering a lecture at a college campus (one known for its "Peace Studies" department).  Kristol carried on with class and humor.

Some Thoughts on File Sharing

Ted Olson, had an editorial a couple of days ago (hey give me a break, I'm on vacation) in the Wall Street Journal (sorry, I can't find it anyplace on line, you will have to take my word for what he says), explaining how file sharing is bad because it allows people to trade bootleg copies of music and movies.  The editorial is up-front that Olson is representing the recording and movie industries, but you have to wonder what the Journal thinking when it commissioned the piece.  As an attorney Olson is ethically bound to make even bad arguments if he thinks it will advance his clients' interest.   That's what he was doing here, making bad arguments.

First, Olson writes that downloading copyrighted songs is stealing, and it's wrong to steal.  It's just, he claims, as if someone was taking over our homes, bank accounts or our cars.

But, of course, file sharing is not "stealing" and its not "just like stealing", and Olson knows it.  If somebody takes my car, they would have it and I would not.   In other words, they would be with car, and I would be without.  They would be driving and I would be walking.

But if someone buys a copy of Britney's latest (whatever the hell that is) and copies a song and sends it to me, I have a copy of the song without paying for it, but nobody is short a copy.  You could argue that Britney and her record company are out the price of the song, but what if there isn't a chance in the world (in fact, there isn't) that I would ever have purchased such a thing?  In that case, as I see it, there is an extra copy of the song in the world and it hasn't cost Britney anything.

Of course Olson knows darn well there is a big difference between making a copy of a song and emptying someone's bank account.  But he is a good lawyer trying to help out his client, so he wants to fudge the difference.  Why?  Because we all learned at our momma's knee that it was wrong to steal, but momma didn't say anything about copyright violations (which is really what we are talking about here).

And, of course, whether something is a copyright violation depends a bit on the current state of the law, and I have a problem with the entertainment industry playing the morality card here.  This is the industry which just used political influence (i.e. lots and lots of campaign contributions)  to push through a significant extension of the copyright term.  So this industry uses raw political muscle to give themselves additional property rights at our expense, and then pays expensive lawyers to cry "thief" when people don't respect these rights?  Give me a break.

Moreover, the notion that a Britney fan is stealing when, after he buys the latest CD he makes a zillion copies of a song and sends them off to friends is based on the notion that he didn't really buy the song.  Rather, when he purchased the CD all he was doing was purchasing a "license" to listen to the music under certain carefully controlled and non-commercial circumstances.  Of course, Britney fan didn't sign any license, and he probably was unaware that this was all he was buying.  So this is a legal fiction, which the law allows because it wants to protect the rights of artists to profit from their work. 

Which segues nicely into Olson's other argument, which is that we benefit from all the dollars flowing to artists, because otherwise they would stop doing all the swell creative  work on our behalf.  But a hundred years ago artists were limited to selling tickets to however many folks could be crammed into a hall, and some people think that the quality of music was okay back then.  And I don't think Olson believes for a second that the quality of music we are getting these days, with the huge amounts of dollars flowing in and with rock and rap stars living like princes, is any better.

Vacation

The wife is making me go to Kauai.  Maybe I will blog, maybe I won't.

In the meantime, I thought the photo shopped romance novel covers at this site were a scream.

Here is one of them.

Foreign Courts are Swell in the Abstract, I Guess

Wealthy foreigners who are unhappy with what American journalists write about them have taken up suing for libel in foreign courts.   The journalists are all unhappy about it, because the foreign courts don't protect their right to free expression the same way the American courts do.  The folks over at Editor and Publisher are complaining about it here.

I guess I agree, if an author doesn't publish something in a particular country, he or she shouldn't have to defend the publication under that country's libel laws.

But here's the point.  Recently I wrote  about the International Criminal Court, and the dangers and uncertainty involved in allowing our military people to be criminally tried in foreign courts.   I wonder how many journalists who have their underwear in a bunch about the possibility of being sued for libel in a foreign court think it would be just peachy to subject our Marines, soldiers and airmen to the same sort of thing. 

And I also wrote about, here and here, my unhappiness with the Supreme Court's use of foreign law in its decisions.   So how many journalists would think I was just being a provincial hick about the issue?

I guess it depends on whose ox is getting gored.  Foreign courts are fine, as long as they are only used to tell the burgers, rubes and snuffies what to do.    But for the princes of journalism, nothing but the finest will do.

Some Thoughts on Terri Schiavo

I am trying to finish Jeff Shaara's "Gods and Generals", the prequel to his dad,  Michael Shaara's "The Killer Angels".   It is a struggle, "The Killer Angels" might have been the best book I have ever read, and Jeff, for all his good intentions and knowledge of history, just hasn't got the same stuff.

Anyway, as told in The Killer Angels, General Buford commands the first Union  forces to meet the Confederates at Gettysburg.    Buford, we are told, has an eye for good ground to fight from.  He is particularly pleased with the ground he selected for his forces to meet Lee's advance guard.

So what does this have to do with Terri Schiavo?  A lot, I think.   The folks out there who think it's okay to kill the sick or unwanted always face the problem of concealing the unvarnished truth.  So it is with "ethicist" Pete Singer, who in a Los Angeles Times Editorial in favor of killing sick babies, never uses the word kill (or murder).  Instead he talks in terms of using "active means" to  "end an infant's life". 

So they don't talk about "killing" the old or the sick, they use words like euthanasia.  And even the word "abortion" is a euphemism designed to hide the fact that we are talking about killing a baby (or a fetus, have it your way).   Of course, by now the word "abortion" has picked up so much baggage that the people who think you can whack your baby right up to when it is born for any reason (or no reason at all) have to come up with new words for it, like "pro-choice".

But right now there is no place for people to hide.  We are all going to get our faces rubbed in the horrors that come with killing an innocent human life, when they starve and dehydrate Terri to death.  Yes, I know, some people like  Dr. Sean Morrison, a professor of medicine, try to tell us that it won't be so bad:

He also said it was wrong to characterize Schiavo's death as starvation.

"What happens is she loses fluid from her body, she enters a peaceful coma and she gradually passes away, very gently and very peacefully," he said.

But how does Dr. Morrision know, has he ever tried it out on himself?  And  does anyone think that Dr. Morrison advocates using this "gentle" and "peaceful" method on--say--condemned murders instead of the usual lethal injection?   I'll bet a lot of people would think this is "cruel and unusual".

And it is, and if something isn't done what happens to Terri over the next week is going to be pretty bad.   And all of us, including the people who normally don't pay a lot of attention to these things, are going to have to share the horror with Terri's family as society slowly kills this innocent woman.

So, what does this have to do with General Buford?  I think that this is terrible ground for the "pro-death" crowd on which to fight this issue.  And I think that if they kill Terri in this fashion--slowly, and with everyone paying attention--they are going to take a terrible licking.  Hopefully some people on that side of the aisle are smart enough to figure this out, and maybe the politicians can hammer out some sort of agreement that spares her life.

Hero

The highest award for valor in the British military is the Victoria Cross.    Until 2005 the last one given was in 1982, during the Falklands campaign.  And that was posthumous, the last time the medal was given to a man who managed to live through his exploits was in 1965.

Which is a measure of the accomplishments of  Private Johnson Beharry, of the 1st Battalion the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment.    He was driving the lead vehicle in an armored column which was ambushed, with his own vehicle badly damaged and set on fire.   Private Beharry drove the burning vehicle out of the ambush zone, leading the rest of the column out.  And in spite of being wounded, and still under fire, he dragged his mates out of the burning vehicle one by one.  There is more, the full story is  here.

Congratulations to Private Beharry.  And don't you just love the Brits?  (Thanks to Silent Running for the story).

I Had No Idea the Guy Was So Dangerous

Thanks to Grouchy Old Cripple