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The government has approved a new kidnapping policy that actually clears the government to get involved when US citizens are kidnapped overseas. Before, it only got involved if the kidnapped person was out of the country on government business, or was employed by the government. I think this policy is still too weak. I think that the government ought to make it clear that the US will respond with force to kidnappings of Americans overseas. One of the favorite fund-raising activities of insurgents around the world is kidnapping Americans and holding them for ransom. If the government responded to these kidnappings by sending in the special forces, then kidnapping for dollars would cease to be profitable and worthwhile for these groups. Can we stop terrorism? I doubt it. Can we stop (or at least slow down) the kidnapping and ransoming of American citizens? Probably. ...

From Germany with love: Die Bush Krieger. Looks like the mass media is about to become more massive. A federal appeals court has struck down some of the few remaining rules that “protected” diversity in media ownership. The rules preventing broadcast networks from owning large numbers of broadcast stations, and that prevented cable operators from owning television stations are now history. I don’t see our current “market” loving FCC doing anything to change that, either. ...

There are plans afoot to create a Pentagon agency the Office of Strategic Influence that will seek to influence foreign audiences through the media and other channels. One tactic proposed is astroturfing the foreign media with pro-US/anti-“Axis of evil” du jour correspondence from addresses other than the US government. Think of it as a mix of public relations and Spy vs. Spy. Is anyone else getting the feeling that all of the Reagan era fossils that Bush has dug up felt at a loss without the Cold War and are getting pretty damned excited at the idea of a protracted, low level conflict with anyone willing to take us on? ...

When President Bush speaks … people listen. Even when he doesn’t use the word he actually intends to use. President Bush called for devaluation of the yen, and the markets complied, only to learn that what he was really talking about deflation. (This AP article indicates more clearly than the BBC article how Bush misspoke.) The Guardian has a cynical article about last week’s warning of an imminent terrorist threat and John Poindexter’s new job – spying on Americans. ...

The New York Times has a scary story about President Bush’s obsession with the ‘axis of evil’. It seems that the ‘axis of evil’ comprises countries that might supply weapons of mass destruction of terrorists, at least that’s how the Bush administration seems to define it. There are two criteria for being on this list then: the possession of weapons of mass destruction, and the willingness to supply them to terrorists. ...

Ars Technica has an overview of .Net by DrPizza that’s said to be excellent. I haven’t plowed through it yet. I know Peter Wright is a smart, independent minded fellow, but in his pro-.Net article in Salon today, he comes across as a paid shill for Microsoft. He presents the best case scenario for .Net as an inevitability, and says lots of crap about Microsoft’s amazing innovation even as he talks about the ideas that Microsoft directly built on. According to Wright’s article, there are two amazing features of .Net, web services and the CIL, which lets you write your applications in any language and use them all together in a happy little soup, let’s look at both of them. ...

The quote of the day comes courtesy of Colin Powell in a New York Times story about our efforts to unseat Saddam Hussein: With respect to Iran and with respect to North Korea, there is no plan to start a war with these nations. E. J. Dionne: Hastert Confirms It: Money Rules Wired News has an article about NBC’s Simulcam technology, which is used to superimpose two competitors into one video feed. It’s been used to compare jumps between figure skaters, and has been used to compare the runs by downhill skiers. The Simulcam stuff completely revolutionizes coverage of skiing, without it, it’s difficult to tell why one skier finishes a bit slower than another. With the Simulcam, it becomes perfectly clear. It’s so useful that the ski teams themselves are using it as a training aid. ...

So it’s looking like Global Crossing is the next Enron. They’re even an Arthur Andersen client. Salon has hired the guys behind Spinsanity to write a column for them of the same name. Is Lotfi Raissi another Wen Ho Lee? Raissi is an Algerian pilot who lives in Britain, and who was accused by the US of training the 9/11 hijackers. The British government held hm on those grounds for the past five months, but he was released on bail after the terrorism charges against him were dropped. The US is still charging him lying on an application for a US pilot’s license because he failed to disclose a tennis injury on the application (in the Wen Ho Lee case, Lee plead guilty to some insignificant charge in return for all the real charges being dropped as well). Maybe Raissi really did train the terrorists, but the Brits seemed perfectly willing to hold him as long as we maintained that he was a terrorist, so I have to believe that the FBI knows he’s innocent. ...

A Swiss paper is going to start fining its writers for simple mistakes, including spelling, grammar, and poor sentence construction. That’s harsh. Salon has a nice exclusive today. They’ve got the list of people who received “retention bonuses” totalling $55 million right before Enron filed for bankruptcy. The bonuses also came right before Enron announced that those employees who wouldn’t need “retention bonuses” because they weren’t being retained at all were to have their severance packages eliminated. I’m beginning to think that the appropriate punishment for Enron’s excutives (current and former) would be one free kick in the crotch from every employee and shareholder who got burned, all to be administered by surprise. ...

The Washington Post is starting a new series on America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. It characterizes the relationship in these two paragraphs: Not really hearing each other has long helped both countries sustain the idea that they are close allies, and not an odd couple. In fact, they could hardly be more different. Saudi Arabia is an Islamic monarchy ruled secretively by one family, the huge Saud clan, in collaboration with Islamic fundamentalists; it has neither free media nor transparent legal institutions, nor any guarantees of human or civil rights. ...