The Truth About the Middle East - The only Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that might last is one that swaps "rights of return": The Palestinians give up insisting that the refugees of 1948 and their descendents be allowed to resettle in Israel proper, and the Israelis give up not only all existing settlements but the assertion that Jews have a right to live under Israeli authority in Judea and Samaria (and Gaza). In place of blood and soil for either side's refuguees - the arab ones now and the West Bank Jews to come - money: financial compensation for dispossessed property to make the medicine go down. Does anyone think either side is ready to accept such a deal? That is, to give up what they must give up for peace? Didn't think so.
Split-Screen Republicanism Watch
We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave-us-alone stuff at home.The steel tariff decision. I'd say, 'Nuff said, but someone will probably point out that Sullivan wrote an item opposing the steel decision. Let's be clear: Unqualified Offerings did not start Split-Screen Republican Watch to decry the iniquity of Andrew Sullivan; it started it to decry the dysfunctionality of empire-abroad-and-liberty-at-home politics. The question is not, do split-screen pundits like Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds really believe what they believe, the question is, will the Republican Party in power make any genuine commitment to small-government, small-r republicanism while it attempts to remake the world. The answer remains: no.
- Andrew Sullivan
The Poverty of the Literary Conscience - Sandra Martin used to be President of PEN Canada and now is senior arts writer for the Toronto Globe and Mail. Today she writes on behalf of Arundhati Roy, who got savaged by America's defenders last fall for some things she wrote about the Don't Tread on Me War, but who has been truly jobbed by the Indian supreme court, who jailed her for a "contempt" charge laughable on its face.
Good for Martin for wanting to stick up for a fellow writer. But, gaaah - get a load of this ringing endorsement of free speech:
Peaceful dissent is both a privilege and a duty of citizens living in a democracy; it should not be cause for criminal charges.Privilege?? Sandra, we call them rights where I come from. But these tax rates I'm seeing up here are starting to make sense to me.
Rootin' Tootin' Salutin - Rick Salutin is a columnist for the Globe and Mail, which you get free with your trip on Air Canada. He's a "root cause" guy when it comes to terrorism. Okay. He even has a non-negligible point:
For 35 years, Israel has relentlessly counterattacked terror and is now more insecure than ever. Only in periods when "root causes" and grievances were addressed with some hope of resolution was there a letup.Fair enough, if arguable. He pooh-poohs poverty's merits in the root cause sweepstakes, which comports with the findings of many analysts.
But that's about the end of anything resembling cogency in the column. His root-cause horse - hobby-horse perhaps - is "a sense of injustice." He is even smart enough to implicitly distinguish perceived injustice from the thing itself. But what he considers to be supporting evidence for his theory is...odd. He adduces the fact that in the famous recent Gallup poll of the muslim world, the highest "Arabs didn't do it" claim re 9/11 percent came from "oil-rich Kuwait." That's a pretty good counterfactual re the "poverty" argument, but how, precisely, does it prove the "sense of injustice" alternative? What "SOI" aggrieves Kuwaitis about the US or Israel more than any other muslim nation? Salutin saith not. He goes on to say that the highest percentage of unfavorable views of the US are in Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In each of those cases, I can construct a causal "sense of injustice" explanation of the result - but surely I could do as well for Egypt, Libya and Lebanon if they had topped the list.
It gets even more tediously beside the point: "Consider one main source of US attitudes toward Arabs: Hollywood films..." [My emphasis] He goes on to cite Black Sunday, True Lies and Black Hawk Down. This last is an especially odd reference. In Salutin's account, Somalis are "crazed Arabs." That such non-film extravaganzas as the Munich Olympics, the Vienna Airport massacre, Entebbe, the assassination of the US ambassador in Khartoum, the Achille Lauro, the bombing of the disco in Berlin, Lockerbie and Khobar Towers, to restrict oneself to only the pre-9/11 blockbusters, might be more of a "root cause" of US attitudes than a handful of movies - indeed, might have been a "root cause" of the movies - must be something Salutin is saving for another column.
Globetrotting With Unqualified Offerings - One reason Unqualified Offerings didn't lie on its customs form about its coming to Canada on business is that UO was brought up not to lie. But the other is that its destination was Moncton, New Brunswick, and who would believe it if it claimed to be coming here for fun?
Okay, that's not fair. But when was the last time you saw a "Win a trip to Atlantic Canada in late winter" contest? UO has not had a chance to get the full flavor of the place yet, but here are the preliminaries.
Accent (English): sort of nice. It sounds halfway to Irish, which makes sense. Akin to a Maine, not Massachusetts, accent with more North Atlantic in it.
Bilingualism: Don't these people get tired of hearing every official announcement twice? Unqualified Offerings has a nightmare vision of comedy clubs where federal regulations require that each joke be told once in english and once in french. Puns that only work in one language are permitted, but you must still translate. Content laws mandate that an equal number of failed puns be essayed in each language.
Cuisine: Only one meal so far. Unqualified Offerings is proud to report that we (Americans) do fake Aussie steakhouses better than they (Canadians) do. UO ate at Boomerang's in downtown Moncton. The center-cut sirloin was about as well-cooked as Outback's, but not as appealingly seasoned. The Boomerang's fries were soggy, while Outback's are light and crisp; and the side-dish of mushrooms! This was worst of all - utterly bland. Outback's wine sauce for its own mushrooms is a tad strong, but it is nevertheless (along with the onion bits) flavor, a quality that had no role in the Boomerang dish.
International Readers, if it's pretend Aussie steak you want, the USA is your destination of choice! US Readers, stay where you are! For pretend-Aussie steak, there's no need for an expensive Canadian trip. Canadian Readers (If this site has any - had now, I suppose), Come on down!
Lodging: Unqualified Offerings is in the Delta Beausejour, literally "the change in beautiful trips." It is not prepared to recommend this hotel for business travelers, especially those with weblogs. For $119CDN/night, you get a queen-sized bed, a small TV, and no high-speed dataport in the room. There is a "business center" off the lobby where internet connections cost $5CDN per half hour.
UPDATE: And that "internet connection" is a single desktop PC with a dial-up winmodem. You can't even plug a laptop into network port. UO tried copying its offline entries to a floppy and posting from the hotel PC, but the connection dropped.
Unqualified Offerings needs a new hotel.
Comfort Level - In Washington, Unqualified Offerings was asked merely to point to the power button on its laptop. It's a loaner from work that UO had not had occasion to fire up yet, so it's a good darn thing these Dell Latitudes make the power switch obvious. UO knows of laptops that would have guaranteed it quality time in a detention room in similar circumstances. In Toronto, it was directed to actually turn the laptop on. This familiar security directive predates the September massacres - it was a post-Lockerbie innovation. And a fiendishly clever one, since no suicide bomber would decide that detonating a laptop full of plastic explosives in a crowded airport screening area would rack up an impressive kill total. Right?
Notes From the Republic of Vos Papiers Monsieur - Unqualified Offerings writes this item from Toronto International Airport, which appears to bear the name "Pearson." It wrote not yesterday: This site spent much of the day on the road to and from its birthplace on the borderlands of Blogistan Donkey territory, Woodbury, New Jersey. Unqualified Offerings has not, to the best of its knowledge, been to Woodbury since turning four. From its perspective, the last significant event in Woodbury history was UO eating cheddar cheese with a neighbor girl under her front porch. In Woodbury, this site obtained a birth certificate copy from women so helpful and pleasant that E.J. Dionne might have dreamed them into existence to fulfill his visions of benign bureaucracy.
For Unqualified Offerings and officialdom, it has been downhill from there.
There is something about UO that alarms people. It was pulled out of the boarding line at the gate for a repeat of the armpit-scanning, pocket-emptying, laptop-sniffing routine it had been through minutes before at security. And it was shunted aside at Canadian Customs in Toronto, to the special window, where Unqualified Offerings explained the concepts of "business trip" and "telecommunications industry" to a polite young woman who suggested that if UO made a habit of this kind of behavior - entering Canada - it may have to apply for a work permit. There was no way Unqualified Offerings was going to tell her about the stick pony.
The Sad Part - Preparing for my rush trip to Canada I learn that you can no longer get into the country without either a US passport or a certified birth certificate. It used to be a US citizen crossed over at will.
"Are you bringing anything into the country?" a border guard asked once.
"A stick pony."
Pause to boggle.
"Is it a gift?"
"For my niece."
"She lives in Canada?"
"No. But we bought it at Fort Niagara and it's along for the ride."
"I see. Enjoy your stay."
I understand why things aren't that way. In the scale of losses since last September, heightened security along the world's most peaceful border is hardly the greatest. But it's still a loss.
Wilderness of Mirrors, Again - Reuters cites a LeMonde story corroborating the Lost FoxNews series about the quiet breakup last fall of a large Israeli intelligence operation in the United States. Some blogger or other called Justin Raimondo's citation of the Cameron story an "anti-semitic conspiracy theory" during the First Raimondo Blog Wars, which is pretty stupid. The Cameron series and the LeMonde piece are at least as well-sourced as any other intelligence reporting I've seen in the last couple of decades. What sets people off is the suggestion in the various spy ring stories that the Israelis may have been keeping tabs on some of the al Qaeda operatives involved in the 9/11 massacres and not tipped off the US. But that part seems plausible on its face and far from uniquely "diabolical" on the part of Israeli intelligence.
Read Veil, by Bob Woodward, if you haven't already. In it, Woodward makes much of then-CIA Director William Casey's dictum that, while it's important to spy on your enemies, it's far more important to spy on your friends. Here is how we caught those Achille Lauro hijackers Egypt tried to slip past us: The CIA and NSA provided all of Hosni Mubarak's presidential security detail with its electronic communications. The CIA and NSA put bugs in and logged the frequencies of and tapped the clear-channel transmissions of every one of those devices. So when Mubarak directed his people to fly the hijackers out of the country, the US knew as soon as his people did.
Israel, for better or for worse, has staked its survival almost entirely on its continued support by the US. US policy, secret and open, being of outsize importance to Israel, of course it is going to spy on the United States. It would be crazy not to, given the strategic posture it has chosen. You can be sure the US spies on Israel too, as well as its other allies. Am I saying this is good, bad, justifiable, heinous? I'm saying it's what governments do. I am a lot more sympathetic to Israel than Justin Raimondo is, but friends of Israel do it no favors when they hysterically pretend that it is somehow different than other countries. It is not.
Now for the inflammatory part: Might the Israelis have been tracking al Qaeda members and had some degree of foreknowledge about their September plans? Of course they might have. And not told us, their close allies? How could Unqualified Offerings suggest such a thing? Return with me now to a previously-recommended book here, David Ignatius's fact-based novel, Agents of Innocence. During the 1970s, the CIA had a back-channel source in Arafat's Fatah organization, known to the White House itself. This fellow believed that it would be the US that would free the Palestinian people from the yoke of the Israelis and their "brother" Arabs alike. He almost certainly planned the most despicable act of the 1970s, the kidnap/murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich. (Ignatius put the nonfiction version of events in several of his early columns.)
He tipped the CIA off to numerous PLO operations in advance, so that the US could minimize American casualties. What did we say to Israel about all this? Not one fricking word. (The Palestinian and his American handler died in separate car bomb attacks in early-80s Beirut. )
Sources and methods. Two rings to bind them all. The twin preciouses every intelligence agency in the world guards, and disgorges only with bestial hissing. For the sake of protecting sources and methods, the US forewent useful anti-Japanese measures during World War II, and the British took shots from the Germans they might have prevented. Are there levels of foreknowledge of 9/11 that Israel would have decided to withhold from the US government, to protect their own sources and methods? Sure. In wartime, and Israel is at war, countries are willing to risk a certain level of damage to themselves to protect their intelligence assets. And Israel and the United States are different countries. In a risk calculus, Israel will give US dangers less weight than Israeli ones. Does the 70s Fatah Connection excuse Jonathan Pollard and does the Liberty sinking exuse the Fatah Connection and does the Suez Crisis excuse the Liberty sinking? I don't know.
(Note: I don't agree with Raimondo's more recent suggestion that Israeli intelligence was plausibly behind the autumn anthrax attacks, and may get to why later in the week.)
Wilderness of Amazing Blog Coincidences - So Brian Linse made it to Budapest and has managed only a single post to AintNoBadDude since arriving. Well, busy, right? Gosh, "Stephanie Dupont" has only managed a single post since Brian made it to Budapest too. Well. Busy. Right?
Blame Canada - Belay that party, helmsman! Unqualified Offerings has won the unlooked-for boon of a late-winter business trip to - Sunny New Brunswick. DC Blogfest Maestro Thomas "Newsrack" Nephew graciously asked if UO wanted to postpone. This site fought with its conscience for a moment - how could it disrupt the plans of others for its own convenience? and had a revelation. IT DID! IT ONLY CARED ABOUT ITSELF! THERE MUST BE A LITTLE AYN RAND IN UNQUALIFIED OFFERINGS AFTER ALL because it couldn't bear the thought of the party happening without it.
Ahem. The party will begin at Taliano's in Takoma Park, boyhood home of John Walker "Don't call me Suleyman, I'm on trial right now" Lindh, at 6pm on Saturday, March 16.
There remains the fact that this means the initial plan has failed to achieve its goals and met with delay. But history has taught us what to do in such cases. In the tradition of Plan Colombia aka the Andean Initiative, Unqualified Offerings hereby rechristens "DC Blogfest" Mid-Atlantic Blogfest. Since there is at least a possibility that there'll be "trouble bussin' in from outta state," and since we plan to let the DA get no relief, this seems fair.
I'll Have What She's Having - Diana Moon of "Letter From Gotham" seems a lot more conservative than I am. But she rocks. And, in this post about Andrew Sullivan and Tom Daschle, she's a great labor-saving device - I don't have to write it now.
Now if only she'd do something about those permalinks...
Department of Amplifications - Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Electrolite writes to point out two things:
On the first point, the party is Saturday night, at Taliano's in Takoma Park. I mist consult on the exact time with Thomas Nephew, the driving force behind the event, a gentleman, a scholar, and a fine blogger..
Fishing With Unqualified Offerings - This site finally makes good on a promise implicit since its founding - a fishing item. Unqualified Offerings had been fishing quite a lot through the summer and early fall. In fact, dragging itself out to the water the weekend after the massacres in New York and Washington was a key step in fulfilling the President's "get back to normal" injunction. But by the time it began blogging, the creeks were low as cellos and clear as tap water, and the fish had gone wherever fish go in those circumstances. Sunday it hit the low sixties around here and was March besides. Maryland does not have "closed seasons" to the extent that other states (esp. Pennsylvania) do, so once you think the water is warm enough for fish to think about eating, you're at liberty. (Imagine! A walk of life in which Maryland is less regulated than someplace else!)
Unqualified Offerings went to the (trout) catch-and-release section of the Patuxent "River." (UO grew up near the Susquehanna. I'm sorry; any body of moving water where you can reach the opposite shore with a single cast, with ultralight tackle yet, is a creek.) It caught three small brown trout on Vibrax Blue Fox Minnow Spins, beloved of spring trout, underwater rocks and overhanging branches alike - that is, UO lost a bunch of lures. Blue Fox Minnow Spins are just gorgeous. Unqualified Offerings would almost eat them itself. But they are heavy; they cast farther than you think and sink faster than you expect; they've got treble hooks and they snag like crazy.
UO was also thinking what a convenient time of year it was to fish, despite the fact that the water was painfully cold during the occasional wading parts. The truth is, Unqualified Offerings loves fishing, and loves fishing in streams, but it does not love...yucky things. Chiefly spiders and snakes, all of whom sleep snugly still. So what does Unqualified Offerings see on the drive home, as it grips the steering wheel? Not one, but two ticks crawling across the back of its hand. Once home, it deputed Mrs. Offering and Offering Boy to check it thoroughly. (It assigned to the Littlest Offering the key job of laughing triumphantly at the sheer happiness of the scene.) Mrs. Offering scooped the last tick off UO's ear shell.
Round-Robin Tournament - According to sports media and radio callers, every major US professional sport has a screwed-up fiscal system that ruins interest in the sport. Which is pretty cool, since each of the major sports has a distinctly different financial system. The official version: Baseball has no salary cap and no revenue sharing, so a handful of major-market teams can simply buy the best players. With only about six teams bidding for the best players every offseason, it ruins interest in the sport. Football has a hard salary cap and revenue sharing. The hard cap encourages the signing of younger, less-well known and cheaper players, and compels teams to turn over 25-50% of their starting lineups every year. Fans have no chance to get attached to players any more, which ruins interest in the sport. Not so in basketball! which has a soft cap and the "Larry Bird rule," which gives teams an accounting advantage for re-signing their own players. Basketball's cap is complex that no one even tries to explain it - you find any number of football articles explaining, at least on summary level, the effect of this player's bonus acceleration or that player's roster incentive on the team's cap number. No basketball article says more than "salary cap restrictions prevent/require Team X from [blank]." The soft cap and Larry Bird Rule are so effective and rococo that teams can't even trade players, let alone sign the stars of other teams. That means your team has no hope of fresh blood, which ruins interest in the sport. Like baseball, hockey has no cap and no revenue-sharing. It is also hockey, which ruins interest in the sport.
Well, it's like rock-paper-scissors, eh? What people claim to want from Major League Baseball is what they claim they don't like about pro football. And what they claim to want from the NFL is what they dislike about the NBA. It's very hard to find the coherent principle here.
Unless sports fans and pundits just like to bitch without thinking things through. But what are the odds?
The Present Is Prologue - Am seriously entertaining the possibility of inaugurating Reynolds-Raimondo Festival Week tomorrow, with posts devoted almost exclusively to these two inexhaustible sources of material, each of which has been storing up their characteristic mix of admirable and appalling pieces lately. Too tired to start tonight though.
Pub II - Patrick Nielsen Hayden says almost embarrassingly complimentary things about Unqualified Offerings over the weekend. Frex, "a consistently good writer." Maybe a consistently good writer of first drafts. Sometimes I look at older pieces and the clunkers in the prose just won't stop clunking. Patrick's own blog is a must-read, because of his humor, style and skepticism certainly, but above all for joining with Flit in alerting an unsuspecting world to the looming global menace of Australia.
Speaking of Samuel R. Delaney - Unqualified Offerings has been frank about its indulgence in roleplaying games. It notes that there is a PBEM RPG campaign (that's play-by-e-mail) based on Dhalgren. More than this it knows not. Given that, while it talks a good game, UO's lifestyle is strictly from Squaresville, it is just as glad that there does not appear to be a Dhalgren LARP.
Pub - Just when Unqualified Offerings was ready to print up those promotional "I Got Dropped by BlogWatch III" t-shirts, Eve Tushnet creates BlogWatch IV for it. Unqualified Offerings checks Eve's site several times a day, which makes it feel like a chump sometimes, since she doesn't update several times a day, but when she does, UO is ready! Even when UO disagrees with her, it enjoys doing so. Her blog combines empathy with rigor. The organizers can not yet confirm her attendance at DC Blogfest ths Saturday at Taliano's in Silver Spring, but Unqualified Offerings looks forward to comparing favorite Samuel R. Delaney novels with her if she makes it.
What's New, Copycat? - DC Blogfest, that's what! Thomas "Newsrack" Nephew and Unqualified Offerings announce that the event will take place this Saturday, because it's better to set a date certain than to dither, at Taliano's in Takoma Park, because it's better to set a specific place than to dither. If you're a blogger remotely near the Nation's Capital, join us!
The Way Links Work - Thomas "Newsrack" Nephew writes how Charles Dodgson's site manages to produce useful permalinks when most blogspot blogs don't, in an e-mail modestly heded "blogspot mystery considered and solved in newsrack back in January." Thomas points me to a comment by Phil Ringnalda to a Newsrack post. Says Thomas: "[The blogspot blogger] just has to put a /?/ in front of the permalink in his template --; Dodgson worked out how to do it."
Here's my question: If you run a blogspot blog, why wouldn't you make the minor effort necessary to produce links that others can use with the least amount of fuss?
How Does He Do That? - Among the many fine things about Charles Dodgson's blog (notwithstanding the previous post), one curious attribute stands out: It's the only blogspot-hosted blog I've found where the full link, with anchor-number, appears in the address bar when you click it. That is, if you click the link for "http://thelookingglass.blogspot.com/?/2002_02_24_thelookingglass_archive.html#10276235" you get "http://thelookingglass.blogspot.com/?/2002_02_24_thelookingglass_archive.html#10276235" in the address bar. If you try that with other blogspot sites, you don't get the "#nnnnnnnn" part. Frex, click the Instapundit item "http://instapundit.blogspot.com/?/2002_03_03_instapundit_archive.html#10328813" and all that appears in the address bar is "http://instapundit.blogspot.com/?/2002_03_03_instapundit_archive.html."
How does Dodgson do it? It's not a liberal thing - I mean, it's not like it works for Brian Linse.
Closer to Find - Charles Dodgson of Through the Looking Glass ended the week depressed, he tells us. That makes perfect sense. A smart and principled man, Charles put a great deal of energy into arguing that corporate threats to privacy prove the virtues of government, most especially government as envisioned by the Democratic Party in which he has invested his hopes - it is there to protect us from such rapacity. He has a tidy sideline in an ongoing storyline (Enron) that is supposed to show that the Republican Party he scorns is the pliant tool of corporate fatcats.
And what is his reward for this loyalty, energy and stylistic verve? Key figures in that Democratic Party demonstrate that they are the bought-and-paid-for lackeys of the fattest corporate cats of all; and what they want to do to your privacy is - well, they're thinking of allowing the word to survive, possibly with some new definition, if Jack Valenti approves.
Charles once wrote:
So, that's what confuses me about libertarians. They seem to combine a pathological fear of government power --- any use of government power --- with a willful blindness towards abuses of corporate power, and towards flaws in private sector "solutions", even when those flaws stem from ineluctable conflicts of interest.Time to unconfuse: What the RIAA, the MPAA and the publishing industry want is bad. Very very bad. They for sure represent corporate interests. (It's worth noting that when Unqualified Offerings took that internet political quiz awhile ago, its top match was "left-libertarian," with "libertarian" at number 2, "right-libertarian" at 3 and paleoconservative in the 5 slot. It forgets what 4 was. UO suspects things worked out this way because it hates corporate welfare and the War on Drugs a lot more than it hates the existence of an income tax as such.) But other corporations have different interests. So you get Rio, iPod, AudioGalaxy and CDRWs. The only way that the totalitarian corporate dreams of Hollywood can come to fruition is if - one more time - the government police power preempts the contest. With guns. You heard it here first.
Wilderness of Stephanies, Continued - The thinking of Unqualified Offerings has evolved on the matter of the identity of the alleged Stephanie Dupont of Ain't No Bad Dude. As UO wrote to Ginger Stampley just this evening:
"Stephanie" has been blogging for a week or so. Brian hung out with Perry for NINE DAYS, he says. Perry has a computer. Perry reads more blogs than Justin Raimondo does. Several different blogs that Perry would certainly notice broached the identity issue. If nothing else, I know Perry reads mine, and I pointed readers to the investigations."Stephanie Dupont" is Brian Linse using the name of a Kinky Friedman character, as he twice alerted us.Perry, Brian, "Stephanie." That's up to three people in a position to know that wild speculation is occurring about Brian's blog. If nothing else, it should form the basis of a "Look what these idiots are saying!" post in the classic Stephanie manner.
Nobody's saying nothing.
Means and opportunity for Brian to pose as "Stephanie Dupont" come courtesy of Perry's PC, which is as suitable for reaching Blogger.com as whatever Brian usually uses. Motive seems pretty straightforward: it's fun; and, there may be hits in it.
That about settles it for me. I now endorse Ken Goldstein's theory: "You're all in on it, aren't you? Linse, Samizdata, Solent, Dodge..."
Ask a Libertarian Neo-Isolationist - Instapundit and Diana Moon of Letter From Gotham have been all over the "aid-worker sex scandals." To recap:
But it doesn't stop there. I used to work in the fundraising department for one of the biggest aid agencies (bigger than Save the Children) and I know a dirty little secret about them:That was the second-most important point. Here's the biggie:90% of their funding is provided by government agencies and...the UNHCR!
(I don't know about British or European aid agencies; I am referring here strictly to US agencies.)
For example, in the agency I worked for, one of their biggest projects, a housing initiative in Bosnia, was funded by USAID and...The Defense Department!
The fundraising department raised only 9 to 10 percent of the agency's budget. Fundraising, in effect, became an activity whose purpose was to preserve the fiction that we were private. So in this case, the UNHCR is investigating organizations in which it has a direct interest in preserving.
BTW these aid agencies play a big part in advancing certain policies in selected areas of the world. The reason why they were so active in Bosnia, and not say, East Timor (where there was arguably a much bigger humanitarian crisis) is because the US government and the UNHCR, which funds the big aid agencies, wouldn't fund refugee aid activities in East Timor.Some more things are worth saying about the whole issue:
Another Non-Stupid Texas Blog - Recovery from the Great Texas Blog Outage continues apace. Fitfully-blogging Michael Croft of Ones and Zeros is in mid fit, and is fit indeed. The man who knows What She Really Thinks before the rest of us do laments - well okay, not laments - the lack of a Fritz Hollings, pro-RIAA blog, provides a useful map of the Hollow Earth and, yes, offers some thoughts on blogging.