Dubya, draft-dodging and the so-called ‘liberal’ media

Picture: BushForDummies.com

The fearless Prez dodged the Vietnam draft using a wheeze which got him into the Texas Air National Guard. From this he then went AWOL for a year. So much for his patriotism. This story was originally broken by the Chicago Tribune and generated a few good spoof websites, but has been largely ignored by the supposedly ‘liberal’ US media ever since.

This week, Dubya staged a major photo-opportunity by landing in a fighter-jet on a US aircraft carrier. The irony of a draft-dodger using an audience of ‘real’ military people was not lost on Tribune columnist Eric Zorn who writes:

“The ‘Bush AWOL?’ story appeared in this newspaper and was based on good reporting and still-unanswered questions. It faded away–a scant 14 mentions in the database for all of 2001 and 2002 due to the age of the allegations, the lack of any new developments and the urgency of current events.

Last week, though, the president all but wore a ‘Kick Me!’ sticker on the back of his flight suit when he decided to land on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in the co-pilot’s seat of an S-3B Viking jet.

Imagine the derisive merriment in the columns and on the chat shows if former President Bill Clinton revived the skirt-chasing issue by touring a sorority house or if Gore delivered a lecture to the engineers at Netscape Communications Corp. Think of the snickering and the sardonic rehash of history.

But for Bush in flyboy attire, a discreet silence. The only voices I encountered raising this issue were David Corn in the Nation; Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, who asked, ‘Tell me if you ever heard of anybody with as powerful a resistance to shame as Bush’; and talk station WLS-AM’s token progressives Nancy Skinner and Ski Anderson, who spent a full hour Sunday afternoon savoring the irony of it all.

There was no relentless examination of the damning timeline on cable news outlets, no interviewing the commanders who swear Bush didn’t show up where he was supposed to, no sit-downs with the veterans who have offered still-unclaimed cash rewards to anyone who can prove that Bush did anything at all in the Guard during his last months before discharge.

So much for the cynical distortion that has become conventional wisdom in many circles. So much for the myth of the ‘liberal media’.”

Christopher Caldwell on the spam problem

Financial Times article. Interesting piece. He doesn’t think much of Larry Lessig’s ‘bounty hunter’ idea, but focusses on the key issue — which is how to stop spamming being a cost-free activity.

Aside: given that the FT has moved away from keeping its archive of web-pieces free, I’m not sure how long the link will continue to work.

Spam stats

I spent a week on holiday recently away from broadband access and with only one or two opportunities to dial up every day. That’s when I really began to be alarmed by the amount of spam I was receiving — one doesn’t notice it so much on broadband because it’s relatively quick to dispose of. But with a slow and irregular connection it really begins to bite. So it’s interesting to see how other people perceive it. Here is an interesting finding from Jonathan Peterson who started seriously analysing his spam count recently. Of the 1,595 emails he received in the first logged month, 1,047 were spam. Yikes!

OpenOffice 1.0 is one today. Happy Birthday!

A year ago today, 2002-05-01, OpenOffice.org 1.0 was released. Since then, around 10 million people have downloaded the application from the volunteer mirror network.

Apple Music Store sold 275,000 songs in its first 18 hours

Well, according to this source it did.

So airlines do have a rational reason for banning cell-phones in flight

I’ve often wondered about this but according to this report, the U.K.’s air safety regulator has released research about cell phone use on planes, warning of the serious effects that it can have on a plane’s navigational equipment.

” The Civil Aviation Authority research found that standard cell phone use can cause a compass to freeze or to overshoot its actual magnetic bearing. Also, flight deck and navigation equipment indicators can be rendered unstable and inaccurate, and transmissions can interfere with critical audio outputs.”

Reassessing the Saudi connection

I’ve always thought that Saudi Arabia, not Iraq, should have been the main focus of US anti-terrorism activity. So it’s nice to see an article in The Atlantic taking much the same view. Former Middle East CIA operative Robert Baer argues in the May issue that the US’s longstanding ally in the Middle East now deserves a critical look.

Baer points to the facts that fifteen out of the nineteen September 11 hijackers were Saudis, that four out of every five hits on a secret al Qaeda Web site have been shown to come from within Saudi borders, and that, according to a recent U.N. Security Council report, Saudi Arabia has transferred $500 million to al Qaeda over the past decade. Furthermore, Baer notes, popular Saudi preachers call openly for jihad against the West and “[t]he kindom’s mosque schools,” he writes, “have become a breeding ground for militant Islam.”

In spite of such evidence of Saudi complicity in anti-American terrorism, however, the U.S. has not chosen to treat Saudi Arabia any differently than it did before 9/11?namely, as an important ally and business partner. Baer suggests that this is at least in part because “almost every Washington figure worth mentioning has been involved with companies doing major deals with Saudi Arabia.? Spending a lot of money was a tacit part of the U.S.-Saudi relationship practically from the very beginning.”

Spam: the fightback begins?

1. NYT piece.

“The leading providers of e-mail accounts said yesterday that they had started to work together to develop ways to reduce the unwanted commercial messages, commonly known as spam, that are increasingly clogging their customers’ mailboxes.

The companies — America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo — are calling for technical changes in the way e-mail is passed around cyberspace to make it easier to determine who really sent it and what it is about.

Each company has developed its own technologies to identify and discard spam, and they boast of these in their advertising. But even though these systems sidetrack several billion pieces a day, they miss so much more that spam has become a leading source of complaints from users. Many studies show that the quantities of spam have at least doubled in the last year so the companies have agreed to cooperate with rivals.”

2. Meanwhile Scott Rosenberg reports that “America Online says the amount of spam aimed at its 35 million customers has doubled since the beginning of this year and now approaches two billion messages a day, more than 70 percent of the total its users receive.”

Anti-spam tools emerge, the spammers figure out a way around them, better tools come along, the spammers adapt — it’s a perfect example of what my friend and colleague, Andrew Leonard, described as “the technodialectic” in his fine book, “Bots.”

3. Larry Lessig has entered the fray too. A few months ago, he made an unusual wager: If Congress enacts an antispam law that offers bounties for the reporting of spammers, and the law fails to “substantially reduce the level of spam,” he will resign from his job at Stanford law school.

4. I’ve just found an interesting (if depressing) essay arguing that Span has just celebrated its 25th anniversary.

5. The US Federal Trade Commission has been running a three-day symposium on the spam problem.

Back!

Just back from a week’s holiday with my kids in Ireland. Weather beautiful. And not a wireless network in sight!

This is the road to Dingle over the Connor Pass.

Apple’s new iMusic strategy

Good report of Steve Jobs’s presentation in San Francisco. Karen Lillington has a credit card with a US billing address (lucky gal) and has been testing the Apple music store’s offerings. One of her commentators points out, though, that at 99 cents a song it would cost over $7,000 to fill the new iPod! Sigh.

Update: A very thorough review of the Apple Music Store by David Pogue of the NYT — including a comparison with the brain-dead downloading sites offered by the music industry at present. Sometimes you have to hand it to Apple — complex stuff made easy and elegant.