Category: Internet

OK, the Pistons had a good game for a change:

The defending champions summoned the spirit and spunk that had been missing in the first two games of the NBA Finals, changing the complexion of the series in a way many thought impossible.

Spunk not withstanding, Ben Wallace played way over his head last night, and he can’t maintain the pace for another three games.

But isn’t it odd that Miami star Dwayne Wade was seriously injured in the Heat’s playoff series with Detroit, and so was Spurs star Manu Ginobili? Just a coincidence, of course, nobody would accuse the Pistons of being a bunch of thugs.

This is what Detroit hopes to avoid:

The only defending NBA champions who were swept in the Finals the following season are the 1983 and 1989 Lakers.

I’d like to see a Spurs sweep because they didn’t chicken out on the Olympics like the Pistons did. Those big, strong guys were afraid of terrorists, unlike the little girls on the gymnastics team who went. Yeah, their coach was there but so was Popovich.

Go Spurs!

This is for all you muesli-eating Guardian readers:

The author of Wild Swans and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, have torn away the many masks and falsehoods with which Mao and the Communist party of China to this day have hidden the true picture of Mao the man and Mao the ruler. Mao now stands revealed as one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century alongside Hitler and Stalin. Indeed, in terms of sheer numbers of deaths for which he responsible, Mao, with some 70 million, exceeded both.

Far from being the first Chinese communist leader to stand up for the Chinese peasantry and to respond to their needs and lead them out of exploitation, Mao is exposed as a man who disdained the peasants, despite his protestations to the contrary. He is shown during his command of armed forces in the countryside in the late 1920s and early 30s to have lived off the produce of the local peasants to the extent of leaving them destitute. He consciously used terror as a means to enforce his will on the party and on the people who came under his rule. In the course of the Long March, Mao is shown to have had no qualms in sacrificing thousands of scarce fighting men in fruitless diversions to serve no other purpose than to advance his bid for leadership.

His callous disregard for the lives of comrades and fellow Chinese became more evident once he commanded the larger stage of China itself. Against the advice of his commanders on the ground, Mao persisted in prolonging the Korean war in the expectation of tying down hundreds of thousands of American troops, regardless of the disproportionate sacrifice of far greater Chinese casualties. The livelihood of China’s peasants was tightly squeezed through most of Mao’s rule, not simply to meet the needs of industry and the urban population, but also to pay the Soviet Union and the east Europeans for the development of advanced weapons – especially for the development of nuclear weapons.

More people need to know this.

What does it mean when a Brit says something is “fixed?” Mark Memmott speculates:

MARK MEMMOTT: Britain and the United States are separated by a common language, I think is the cliché. To someone in Britain, it’s possible that that phrase, fixed around, could mean attached to or bolted on, not necessarily skewed. It’s possible that that phrase, fixed around, could also mean, well they selectively take good intelligence, and that’s what they emphasize, to build their case. So that’s where the argument comes down to why it’s so important to find out exactly what the person who wrote that meant.

Like we said.

Now the interesting thing about this bad intelligence is this: we count on the CIA to tell the administration what goes on in the world, but we’ve been systematically castrating it since the Carter administration, when we feared it was too powerful and too effective (remember Allende, allegedly deposed by 200 CIA agents?)

Now that we need a serious, bad-ass intelligence service we have a bunch of boy scouts afraid to step on multicultural toes. You try running a country with intelligence agencies feeding you bullshit.

Somebody needs to take a little responsibility for that.

A stopped clock is right twice a day, and even big fat lying liar Al Franken occasionally has a guest worth taking seriously. Larry Diamond is a former CPA adviser in Iraq who’s written on the Administration’s blunders in post-liberation Iraq. Mainly these come down to: 1) Not enough troops to secure order; 2) Disbanding the Iraqi army; and 3) Massive de-Baathification. His essays and books are worth reading because he was there and he saw the screw-ups.

Diamond’s analysis highlights another of our problems in America: we don’t have a serious opposition party. They’re still carrying on about Bush’s chimpiness, the WMDs, and Abu Ghraib instead of dealing with serious issues such as the nation-building task in Iraq. As long as the Democrats are out to lunch, the Republicans get a free pass, and that’s wrong.

The call for a timetable for troop withdrawal isn’t a serious piece of work, it’s just posturing. The Congress should be pushing for achievement of the milestones that will enable us to withdraw.

The main thing we need to do now is get the job done:

Like many CPA officials, I found many Iraqis to have a deep ambition to live in a decent, democratic, and free society and found them prepared to do the hard work that building a democracy will require. Above all else, Iraqis want security: they want to be free from the terror that disfigured their lives under Saddam and that has continued, in a different form, since the war. But most favor achieving this security through democratic means, not under some “benevolent” strongman.

Because of the failures and shortcomings of the occupation-as well as the intrinsic difficulties that any occupation following Saddam’s tyranny was bound to confront-it is going to take a number of years to rebuild the Iraqi state and to construct any kind of viable democratic and constitutional order in Iraq. The post-handover transition is going to be long, and initially very bloody…

The transition in Iraq is going to need a huge amount of international assistance-political, economic, and military-for years to come. Hopefully, the U.S. performance will improve now that Iraqis are in charge of their own future. It is going to be costly and it will continue to be frustrating. Yet a large number of courageous Iraqi democrats, many with comfortable alternatives abroad, are betting their lives and their fortunes on the belief that a new and more democratic political order can be developed and sustained in Iraq. The United States owes it to them-and to itself-to continue to help them.

OK?

On the subject of Mr. Diamond, see his exchange of letters with leftist academic Tony Smith following the publication of the essay we quote above. Smith takes the standard “imperialist aggression” line and Diamond delivers a spanking.

Gordon Brown has leaked a sequel to the Downing St. memo questioning post-war planning:

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a “protracted and costly” postwar occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.

In its introduction, the memo “Iraq: Conditions for Military Action” notes that U.S. “military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace,” but adds that “little thought” has been given to, among other things, “the aftermath and how to shape it.”

Fair enough, the post-war planning sucked, and it sucked big-time. All in all, however, things will probably work out well in Iraq, and things are already improving in the neighborhood.

But you have to wonder whether Bush would have committed to the invasion if he had any idea who hard the nation-building was going to be, and why Blair went along with a plan with so many obvious warts. Is it just his compassionate nature?

Incidentally, this memo contradicts the Downing St. memo I on the question of the decision to invade. This one said it hadn’t been made yet:

WASHINGTON, June 12 – A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made “no political decisions” to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced. The memo also said American planning, in the eyes of Mr. Blair’s aides, was “virtually silent” on the problems of a postwar occupation.

Oops.

H/T John Cole

The economic battle of the 21st century is between India and China, with the US and Europe on the sidelines and South America and Africa outside the stadium. Mark Steyn, among others, thinks India will win because China is still too embroiled in the fascist/communist mindset:

Mao, though he gets a better press than Hitler and Stalin, was the biggest mass murderer of all time, with a body count ten times’ higher than the Nazis (as Jung Chang’s new biography reminds us). The standard line of Sinologists is that, while still perfunctorily genuflecting to his embalmed corpse in Tiananmen Square, his successors have moved on – just as, in Austin Powers, while Dr Evil is in suspended animation, his Number Two diversifies the consortium’s core business away from evildoing and reorients it toward a portfolio of investments including a chain of premium coffee stores. But Maoists with stock options are still Maoists – especially when they owe their robust portfolios to a privileged position within the state apparatus.

The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end, scupper the present arrangements in Beijing. China manufactures the products for some of the biggest brands in the world, but it’s also the biggest thief of copyrights and patents of those same brands. It makes almost all Disney’s official merchandising, yet it’s also the country that defrauds Disney and pirates its movies. The new China’s contempt for the concept of intellectual property arises from the old China’s contempt for the concept of all private property: because most big Chinese businesses are (in one form or another) government-controlled, they’ve failed to understand the link between property rights and economic development.

China hasn’t invented or discovered anything of significance in half a millennium, but the careless assumption that intellectual property is something to be stolen rather than protected shows why. If you’re a resource-poor nation (as China is), long-term prosperity comes from liberating the creative energies of your people – and Beijing still has no interest in that. If a blogger attempts to use the words “freedom” or “democracy” or “Taiwan independence” on Microsoft’s new Chinese internet portal, he gets the message: “This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech.” How pathetic is that? Not just for the Microsoft-spined Corporation, which should be ashamed of itself, but for the Chinese government, which pretends to be a world power but is terrified of words.

Does “Commie wimps” count as forbidden speech, too? And what is the likelihood of China advancing to a functioning modern stand-alone business culture if it’s unable to discuss anything except within its feudal political straitjackets? Its speech code is a sign not of control but of weakness; its internet protective blocks are not the armour but the, er, chink.

India, by contrast, with much less ballyhoo, is advancing faster than China toward a fully-developed economy – one that creates its own ideas. Small example: there are low-fare airlines that sell £40 one-way cross-country air tickets from computer screens at Indian petrol stations. No one would develop such a system for China, where internal travel is still tightly controlled by the state. But, because they respect their own people as a market, Indian businesses are already proving nimbler at serving other markets. The return on investment capital is already much better in India than in China.

Roger Simon, who’s been brilliant lately, takes Microsoft to task for playing along with China’s new speech code, forbidding the use of such terms as “democracy” and “demonstration” on blogs:

How pathetic is Bill Gates – what a moral weakling. I didn’t realize he was such a coward.

BTW, I can’t imagine any self-respecting blogger would even consider using MSN Spaces while this policy continues. That would be cooperating with totalitarianism, obviously the antithesis of what we are trying to do. (hat tip: Wichita Boy)

Here’s your Financial Times account of the censorship:

Microsoft’s new Chinese internet portal has banned the words “democracy” and “freedom” from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing’s political censors.

Users of the joint-venture portal, formally launched last month, have been blocked from using a range of potentially sensitive words to label personal websites they create using its free online blog service, MSN Spaces.

Attempts to input words in Chinese such as “democracy” prompted an error message from the site: “This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech from this item.” Other phrases banned included the Chinese for “demonstration”, “democratic movement” and “Taiwan independence”.

China: unrepentant worship of the world’s worst mass-murderer; perpetrator of genocide in Tibet and mass murder of protesters at Tiananmen Square; thief of intellectual property and suppressor of political speech.

Who can defend this mess?

Game 1 of the NBA championships was about what was expected. The Pistons started stronger, since the Spurs had a longer lay-about period and got rusty. But by the time the second quarter started, the Spurs were back on top of their game and never looked back. Rasheed is the key to Piston victories in the playoffs. When he does well, the team wins, and when he doesn’t they struggle. He played well tonight but Brown inexplicably sat him down way too early.

I think Pop generally out-coached Brown, keeping him off-balance with mass substitutions and a lot of timeouts to reconfigure the team. The real narrative of this series is the coaching battle between these two men, best friends who talk every day and who coached the Olympic team together last summer. Their teams are well-matched talentwise, so watching the game was like watching them play chess.

Here’s a question to test your knowledge of public affairs. What member of the United States Senate is the only person to vote against the confirmation of Justices Thurgood Marshall, Clarence Thomas, and Janice Rogers Brown? Is this senator a racist or just stupid?

Answer after the jump.
Continue reading “Quiz”