Last week, Jacob Weisberg made a pretty powerful argument in favor of going to war with Iraq in a Slate dialogue. As you guys know, I’m all over the map on the Iraq issue. Perhaps I should make a list of pros and cons that I update weekly or something.
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was denied a visa to enter the United States after being invited to attend the New York Film Festival, presumably due to the new harsher restrictions on visas being granted to people from Muslim countries.
I’m pretty frustrated with the runaround that federal judicial nominee Miguel Estrada is getting from the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. I believe that judges who put their ideology ahead of interpreting the law as it is written (like Justice Scalia) should not be confirmed to the bench, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with Estrada. The two knocks against him seem to be that memos he prepared when he worked in the Solicitor General’s office (during Clinton’s presidency, for what it’s worth), and that he has been anonymously accused of blocking applicants to clerk for Justice Kennedy for being too liberal. Surely Democrats can do better than this. Anonymous accusations have no place in the process, and no living former Solicitor General thinks it’s acceptable to request Estrada’s memos. The Democrats need to save their ammo for more pernicious candidates. The bottom line here is that the 5th Circuit Court is split 4-4 between Republican and Democratic nominees, and the Republicans were pretty savage in preventing Clinton’s nominees from getting onto the court. Now the Democrats don’t want to let Bush’s nominee give the Republicans a majority on that court. While being equally petty may work from a game theory perspective, I wish the Democrats wouldn’t go that route. ...
Somebody paid $44,000 for the so-called “crooked E” sign from Enron at an auction yesterday.
Fareed Zakaria: The Lonesome Doves of Europe. Another interesting piece, this one criticizing the European response to a potential war in Iraq. I confess to being amazed at the European reaction to the war plans, because they seem so reflexive. Just as I’m offended at the insistence that we must go to war with Iraq as soon as possible, I’m equally offended at the insistence that there’s no reason to stand up to Iraq at all. ...
Somehow I just find it funny that someone whose music is too bad to steal would be fronting an anti-piracy campaign.
John Gruber’s interview with shareware author Maarten Hekkelman is interesting for many reasons. I was going to pull some specific quotes, but it’s probably worth reading end to end.
I just wanted to congratulate Brent Simmons on NetNewsWire Lite 1.0. I don’t use it because I don’t have a Mac, but judging from my log files, plenty of other people are. It was just released recently, and it has leapt to the top of the list of RSS aggregators that people are using to access the site.
Nick Denton makes a good point about the algorithm that generates the Google News home page: it discriminates against exclusives. In other words, it’s not yet perfect. Think about this, though, how can a human being keep up with exclusives anyway? I mean, I generally hit Today’s Papers at Slate every day, which points out the big stories (and exclusives) in five major US papers, but if the Times of London, or the South China Morning Post, or Times of India has an exclusive, chances are I miss it until it’s covered in the US papers anyway. Google does a great job of showing which stories are getting a lot of coverage, and even better, how coverage differs based on locality. For example, yesterday one of the top entertainment stories was about the finalists for the Booker Prize (a big book award in the UK). The UK papers talked about an Irish novelist being the likely winner. Canadian papers tended to talk about some Canadian authors being on the short list. US papers failed to cover it at all. Iran’s president is trying to gain passage of a new law that would let him crack down on members of other branches of the government that violate the constitution – thus letting him get rid of members of the judiciary that are Islamic hardliners. Checking out Google’s list of stories on the topic, you can see how papers around the world are handling the story. It’s not that this is the first time we’ve seen news story aggregation, it’s that it’s so efficient. Google can programatically aggregate stories from many more sources and on many more topics than a service driven by humans could. ...
Researchers in Montana have trained bees to find land mines. The article fails to mention one of the key benefits of using bees instead of dogs or people to find mines – bees don’t weigh enough to set off the mines if they make a mistake.