blogroll additions in process, and a treat

(note for beginners: that pile of links on the sidebar on the left is the blogroll)

The Light of Reason - Diogenes's searches may not have yielded an honest man, but mine yielded a civil libertarian who thinks for himself. (that's "civil" as in civil, as well as civil as in liberties)

City Comforts, via LA Observed. "Cities, architecture, the 'new urbanism,' real estate, historic preservation, urban design, land use law, landscape, transport etc etc from a mildly libertarian stance."

A weblog written by The Mayor (not one of ours, as far as I know)

and for those whose orientation is more visual than textile, a) how on earth did you get here? and b) check out the frozen cheesecake.

values and politics

Must-read from Orcinus on the personal and the political - long, but very much worth it:

There's one thing about growing up in a place like Idaho: If you can't make friends with conservatives, you won't have many friends.

And as my oldest friends can tell you, the truth is that I used to be fairly conservative myself. I come from a working-class family -- my mother's side of the family was in road construction, and my dad's was mostly a farming family, though his father actually was an auto mechanic.

Working-class values, and my belief in blue-collar virtues -- like integrity, decency, hard work, honesty, common sense, and fair play -- all were quite deeply ingrained...

The Attack on Citizen Participation in Civic Life - Yubanet article excerpt

From the Jan 7, 2003 Yubanet article, Property Rights Politics In Nevada County, CA:

The Attack on Citizen Participation in Civic Life

Starting in the spring of 2002, local property rights activists have come under fire in statewide media for publishing information of a private nature about private citizens in direct mail campaigns and websites, including homes addresses and photos of their properties. Citizens targeted in these mailings had endorsed Smart Growth 4th District candidate Izzy Martin.

Although this kind of intimidation can cause many citizens to drop out of civic life, others are defending themselves by filing police reports and harassment charges to protect their privacy and right to participate in community affairs without having to pay a personal price.

Other recent examples of harassment in Nevada County include: In October 2002, a Rough & Ready resident filed a police report after an eviscerated cat was left on her porch, the day after she participated in a local radio call-in show with candidates. Two weeks earlier, a candidate running in the 4th District race, filed a police report after someone had driven nails into the inside walls of his back tires while he was participating in a debate.

Intimidation tactics are hardly unique to Nevada County, as other rural communities around the country have had to deal with their own groups that engage in reckless, anti-government rhetoric that divides the community, whips people into an emotional frenzy and can encourage fragile people to go over the edge and commit acts of violence. Fortunately, citizens in Nevada County are banding together to insist on civility in public discourse while condemning acts of intimidation.

Weighing in on The Union's coverage of the Weismann "murder for hire" case

Nov. 2004 - would like to un-reiterate, if such is possible, but am leaving this text in its original condition.
(to reiterate - with the exception of the coverage of this one case, The Union has become an exceedingly good source of information, I no longer find myself ripping hanks of pelage from scalp when reading it, it's been taking a stand on issues of personal freedom and on considering the consequences of our actions and on defending civil public discourse; in short, it has become a newspaper to be proud of. Except for this one case...)

(relevant URLs: Weismann's letters to the editor of The Union,
Dreams end in desolation, `My parents never knew what hit them')

I would not want to be in the shoes of either Editor or Publisher of The Union. Covering William Weismann's attempt to get his neighbor killed is a no-win situation - when a prominent member of a group backed by a powerful faction in the county is arrested for something like this, the newspaper faces a choice between treating the alleged perp like any other arrestee and thereby antagonizing their advertising base and the county Powers That Be, or giving him more deferential treatment and thereby antagonizing those who expect the newspaper to aim for "big city" journalism quality.

It's further complicated by the fact that, while the person most responsible for The Union's financial health has political sympathies much in line with Weismann's, the person most responsible for the news reporting hails from the Columbia UniversityUniversity of Missouri School of Journalism. (That they are still working together is a marvel, and says much for interpersonal skills.)

Given The Union's status as small town paper, it probably is unrealistic to expect it to practice Big City Journalism in a case like this. If they want to treat Mr. Weismann gently, and omit mention of his inflammatory and revelatory letters (although analogous letters in the Herve "road rage" death case were published), so be it - most likely the letters - and other salient facts - will come out eventually in court, be it criminal or civil.

It's one thing to go easy on Bill Weismann; it's another thing to cause harm to reputations, both of the man he wanted dead and of the man who alerted authorities, neither of whom is (presumably) free to respond until the case is settled; and it is worse yet, to defend these actions - and the detrimental effects of the reporting on the justice system - as though they were ethically above reproach.

Here's what I (in role of Monday morning quarterback) would have done differently:

I would not have published derogatory information about the man Mr. Weismann sought to have murdered, particularly information provided by Weismann or his family, friends, associates or attorney.

I would not defend the publishing of such information by saying "we tried to get the would-be-victim's side of the story, but he wouldn't talk to us".* This excuse is either naive or disingenuous; until a case is settled, the District Attorney will instruct witnesses for the prosecution not to talk to the press, lest they jeopardize the upcoming trial. (if I'm wrong on this, please correct me.) So he couldn't speak to the press, he was not free to do so. This doesn't mean the press gets carte blanche to cast aspersions on his character.

I would not have published a statement from one of Mr. Weismann's family members deliberately exposing negative information about the whistleblower's** distant past, information that the court did not feel was germane to the case. This man too has presumably been told not to speak to the press until the case is settled, thus he too is currently not free to defend himself. Plus, for The Union to publish the info - even in the form of a quote from Weismann's daughter - shows disrespect for the legal system that sought to protect the whistleblower's privacy.

Regarding detrimental effects of the reporting on the justice system***: readers were concerned that the coverage would taint the jury pool by giving potential jurors information (irrespective of bias and accuracy) about the case. The editor responded: "I doubt there will be a problem finding a jury for this case, if it goes to trial (and it's doubtful it will). There are plenty of news-averse people in Nevada County who have no clue who the president of the United States is, let alone Bill Weismann." OK. Granted, coverage or no coverage, those seats in the courtroom will be occupied by warm bodies. But will justice be served if the jurors must now be chosen from the most news-averse and clueless people in the county?

One more question for editor and publisher of The Union: if the whole truth does come out, and it shows Weismann's target and whistleblower to be the decent human beings that I suspect they are (and yes, i could be wrong) - will you pledge to apologize publicly to these two men?

The Union is a mighty fine paper these days. Here's hoping the coverage of the Weismann case is - and remains - an aberration. And that the truth does come out.

* re one-sided story: true, it was also defended by saying (more or less) "we tried as hard as we could to get Wess's side of the story from court documents and statements of friends etc"; but this is weak, it's still not fair until Wess is free to speak in his own defense.

** There is probably a much better term to use here. What I mean is, the guy that Weismann approached about killing Wess.

*** There are detrimental effects of news coverage before a trial. There are also positive effects of news coverage before a trial. It's the denial that the former exist, that seems troublesome.

Local: Weissman "murder for hire" coverage

commentary to follow in future post; here are facts, links and some minor innuendo and digression. I think this covers all the salient articles; if not, please send email...

(For non-local readers, William Weismann is a prominent local property-rights advocate who was arrested last spring for trying to hire a hit man to kill his neighbor. There is some question (in my mind at least) as to whether the county newspaper has treated the story fairly.)

from April 2003 ncfocus archives,

• Articles/commentary/background info from the time of Weismann's arrest
  
• Excerpts from his rather extreme letters to the editor of The Union

Sept 5 2003, Murder-for-hire case back in court
September 2003, normally wise fair and thoughtful Union editor drinks bad Labor Day hootch, is possessed by a demon of a hangover*:

• Sept 5, 2003, Dreams end in desolation for Mr. Weismann, an extraordinarily sympathetic recounting -

  A year ago, William Weismann - a Bay Area businessman who had retired to his dream home on the shores of Lake of the Pines - was a community leader, one of those leading a fight for property rights and for the election defeat of two county supervisors whom he felt threatened those rights...

  
  
• Sept 5, 2003, `My parents never knew what hit them' - interview with the daughter:

  She feels her father, in taking such a drastic action [trying to get his neighbor killed], was crying out for help..."My father was never a violent man, and isn't today."..."The district attorney's attempt to obscure [the man Weismann wanted to hire]'s [long-ago] criminal background through a series of court orders is puzzling, too," she said. "Aren't they supposed to be the ones interested in getting the truth out, not hiding it?"**

  
  
• Sept 6, 2003, Editor defends The Union's coverage against claims that it was unfair and that it has tainted the jury pool:

  ...some people who say we're being "used" by the defense.
  
  That's called "spin," and everybody does it. Lawyers and business people have seminars on the technique. Journalists counter it by being open to everyone. We'll listen to anything anyone wants to tell us...
  ...
  Wess[the intended victim] has not talked to The Union or any other news organization since the day Weismann was arrested, despite repeated attempts by us to contact him as recently as Thursday...
  ...
  I doubt there will be a problem finding a jury for this case, if it goes to trial (and it's doubtful it will). There are plenty of news-averse people in Nevada County who have no clue who the president of the United States is, let alone Bill Weismann.

October 2003 coverage:

• Oct 11 2003, civil case dropped for now
  
• Oct 20 2003, plea bargain in process:

  William Weismann, the Lake of the Pines man accused of trying to have his neighbor killed by a hit man, has pleaded no contest to two counts of soliciting a murder...

  
  
• Oct 21 2003, update:

  [defense attorney James Roberts says Weismann ]could be released from jail in as little as two years.
  ...
  "I can't comment, but this is more complex than just the Wesses and the Weismanns," [Wess] said. ...
  Roberts said his client never wanted Wess killed, only harmed.

"not a violent man"...yeah, I always breathe a sigh of relief when I find that my neighbors only want to harm me.

* Regarding this unfortunate lapse: the hootch is pure fabrication, libel, whatever, but the evidence for possession by malign spirits is incontrovertible. Normally he shows excellent judgment.

** Re ferreting out and publicizing long-ago misdeeds of whistleblowers - Sure, a fine idea, so let's name rape victims who report the crime, and publish their photos and sexual histories at every supermarket checkout line! (including, alas, SPD's, which was disillusioning, I had thought they might have stronger principles.)

pop (and poink) sociology, best not critically examined

A recurrent theme in the blogging community, most recently cresting a month or so ago (summary), is why it should be that the A-List (ie most-read, most-linked) bloggers are almost exclusively male. The answer was revealed to your fortunate correspondent last weekend: many parts of the blogosphere resemble a lek:

[the male blogger] makes quite a scene with its theatrical mating displays. In the spring, before daybreak and sometimes by moonlight, on breeding grounds known as leks where the birds return year after year, the male[s] fan their tails peacock-fashion, puff out their chests, which swell like heaving white bellows, and fill the bright yellow air sacs on their throats, emitting acoustically impressive popping and poinking sounds as they strut amidst the low sage. Hoping to attract the apparently aloof and elusive hens, the males face off with each other like dancers engaged in a ceremonial karate match.

i could provide urls to buttress this observation but that would be skating on very thin ice...

update (not buttressing, but related) - Matt Groening (via) -

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

Also Dating Design Patterns

warfare and politics

Prometheus quotes David Broder :

Today, only 121 veterans of the armed services are in the House -- barely more than one-quarter of the membership. A generation ago, in 1975, 318 of the 435 representatives had worn their country's uniform, and a good many of them had seen combat in World War II or Korea. Comradeship came more easily to them, and so did the kind of mutual respect that makes possible compromise and, ultimately, agreement.

None of the top leaders of either party today has been in the service. Most of those who aspire to be their successors also lack that experience.

It is not just politicians and legislators who would benefit from undergoing the discipline and experiencing the rewards of giving a period of their lives to tasks assigned by their country -- either military or civilian. That is the surest way we know to restore the sense of shared commitment so lacking today.

We need more veterans -- and we desperately need more people who know the difference between warfare and politics.

Sokrates (channeled by BDL):

As long as you divide the world into clan members to be helped, clan enemies to be killed, strangers to be robbed, or heretics to be burned, the chances for world peace are low.

For variety (and equal validity) you can substitute "country" or "county" for "world".

misc

Found via The Right Christians, a Calpundit-hosted thread on libertarianism - the beginning of which has some very good stuff, sparking off of this comment -

Libertarianism has two virtues for its adherents, folks who tend to have a high degree of spacial, analytical intelligence and an extremely low degree of empathetic, emotional intelligence:..

BDL (quoted out of context from here):

...illiberal and destructive patterns of thought: a belief that quantitative measurements are not the base on which one's interpretation should be built but rhetorical weapons to be used for advantage, a belief that anecdotes are persuasive without inquiring into whether they are representative, an assumption that all elements of the current situation one likes are part of the natural order of things, and a belief that anyone else's use of economic or social power is profoundly illegitimate...

From metafilter, what it's like to live with prosopagnosia ("face blindness", aka poor to no facial recognition ability). Take it from me, this is not a good disorder to have - even just a mild case - when you live in a small town.

fluff, no meat - go read something useful.

alas no time - such are the perils of employment - also no desire to see weblog lapse into another coma, so i'll just throw stuff into its maw for now. And hope that blogger doesn't just swallow it and refuse to regurgitate upon command like it did with my last post.

via TNH, confirmation that we are living in the future

via thestraightdope.com -
There are 2 types of people in this world, those that finish what they start

via bdl discussion here:

Collectivists are the nutcases who believe nothing should be private property, libertarians the nutcases who believe everything should be. (If it isn't obvious why this leaves a vast expanse of options in between, my apologies for calling you a nutcase)

photo of Salam Pax

some spy links

spy shortage:

...That lack of informants is a major handicap for U.S. intelligence, something unlikely to be helped by a range of new technology being sent to Iraq to help track anti-coalition groups.

"Maybe some of these gizmos can tell where people are hiding, but so far as I know, none of them can tell the difference between a civilian with a water bucket and a guy in civilian clothes with an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade)," said an official in Washington. "And none of them can tell what target they're going to try to hit next. To do that, you need to recruit spies, and that's messy and hard and it takes time."

bush, cia, and credibility:

"The intelligence process is a bit like virginity," says Ray McGovern, who worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years. "Once you prostitute it, it's never the same..."
...Mr McGovern worked near the very top of his profession, giving direct advice to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon era and preparing the President's daily security brief for Ronald Reagan...

Krugman on Plame, the Plame chronology

a view of the future

"A luxury once sampled becomes a necessity." - we need news to be reported like this. Paul Andrews ("I've noted in recent blogs how print media could better serve their readerships by annotating online stories with hyperlinks...") provides a good contrast between the old way and the new.

Philosophical investigation leads to hot Nevada County Schwarzenegger-Ackerman expose'!

be patient, the truth will be revealed...

for fellow philosphical illiterates, i discovered why Crooked Timber is so named - (in A&L daily)

Darwinian Politics in its way exemplifies Kant's famous remark that "from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made." It is not, to play on Kant's metaphor, that no beautiful carving or piece of furniture can be produced from twisted wood; it is rather that whatever is finally created will only endure if it takes into account the grain, texture, natural joints, knotholes, strengths and weaknesses of the original material. Social constructionism in politics treats human nature as indefinitely plastic, a kind of fiberboard building material for utopian political theorists. Evolutionary psychology advises that political architects consider the intrinsic qualities of the wood before they build.

and, speaking of philosophy (and via a Crooked Timber discussion -thanks kes), Mark Lawson (presenter, 'Front Row', BBC Radio 4) recounts his Greatest Mistake. you didn't hear it from me.

and, in a not unrelated vein, via Neil Gaiman, Playboy centerfold science - "the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture." (Warning: safe for work.)

to go further yet (but is it "too far"?), Dan Weintraub on the recent Schwarzenegger-Lockyer dustup -

"Unbelievable," said Democratic campaign consultant Richie Ross. "How ironic that California's strangest political bedfellows would find themselves in an argument about groping."

too far: via the memory hole, the infamous oui interview

why the allegations didn't hit a lot sooner - they usually sprout from the tabloids, which (due to business connections) were starry-eyed for Schwarzenegger

re Schwarzenegger-Republican culture shock-

...Or Schwarzenegger could take a pass, and the Republican Party could stay its current course, alternating between Old Testament morality and new age [???! - ed.] sexuality in accord with the demographics of the district. Call it a big-tent party, or a boundless well of cynicism.

on the other hand, last week's AP news article suggesting that he may try to terminate Stupid Growth in CA was encouraging-

[he seems to have] a bent toward "smart growth" which favors transit, rebuilding existing cities and slowing development on vacant farmland. His Web site has pledged wholesale restoration of declining urban environments, criticized "fiscally unsustainable sprawl" and promised new incentives to build homes on blighted, bypassed land in older cities.
...
"I have every reason to think the basic principles are understood by Arnold and are going to be acted upon," said former San Jose Mayor Tom McEnery, a Schwarzenegger transition team member who launched one of California's most striking downtown rejuvenations.

- so here's hoping he surprises us. (but then that's what i was hoping bush would do - and in terms of magnitude he did indeed, just got the sign wrong)

OK, at last, we reach the shocking news - yes, there is indeed a Schwarzenegger - Ackerman connection, and it goes way back! (for you out-of-towners, Jeff Ackerman is the publisher of The Union, Nevada County's one and only newspaper.) not only that, but we come full circle...:

SCHWARZENEGGER - What does it mean?:

Schwarzenegger seems like a pretty typical type of name, describing a person by colour (his coloration, hair colour) and job. The name "Egger" would be pretty close to the English name "Tiller." "Egge" is a big metal square with "teeth" drawn by horses or a tractor. It rakes the field, breaking up the big lumps after the field has been plowed (by the tillerman= Ackermann). Another name of this type is Heidegger (the philospher Martin Heidegger), tiller of the heath.

yes I know, words are failing you too.

(btw, more on the Union when I have more time - time that is not being wasted on trivia - you guys have been doing an excellent job lately.)
p.s. and not just the editorials.

shorts

John Maynard Keynes was famously quoted as saying: 'When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?'

From Healing Iraq:

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into." - Jonathan Swift

seen somewhere in blogland, attributed to Sinclair Lewis: "It is difficult to convince a man of something if his paycheck depends on his not understanding it."

seen on Metafilter:

There's something to be said for finding a group of people who share your basic principles: it lets you get past arguing about the basic principles.

Friendship is almost always a union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots." -- George Santayana

via Andrew Tobias:

Spending tens of thousands of dollars on a person's last few months of life is compassionate -- but spending tens of thousands of dollars to improve a person's first few years of life is investment.

Also this one:

"The American ideal is not that we will all agree with each other, or even like each other, every minute of the day. It is rather that we will respect each other's rights, especially the right to be different, and that, at the end of the day, we will understand that we are one people, one country, and one community, and that our well-being is inextricably bound up with the well-being of each and every one of our fellow citizens."
- Arthur J. Kropp

Teresa Nielsen Hayden's archive of web classics, including the "tugboat meets bridge" series

speaking of tugboats, on Crooked Timber the Tugboat Potemkin asks "Never mind the evolutionary explanations for why 'frequent masturbation may protect men against prostate cancer', what's the creation scientist's explanation?"

At Poynter Online, Newspaper Nicknames: The Good, the Bad and the Scatological is kinda cute, but the real gems are in the reader responses.

D-Squared Digest with this:

Schopenhauer correctly pointed out that "Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents".

and these:

(That's the Blairite Third Way, btw, not the fascist movement of the same name, and astute readers will perceive here a man battling for his life against the forces of digression)
....
I happened to grow up in one of the small idealised in-and-out-of-each-others'-doors "communities" that the communitarian theorists went on about, and thus knew that it was bloody horrible.

(but do not visit mr. digest's dastardly doggerel on the deceased. at least not while drinking milk.)

yet another complaint about the media

Sadly, The Onion just doesn't get it - some things hit too close to home to be funny.

compare and contrast

The truth about Jessica Lynch:

In the end, only one hero remains. She's the one we started with, Jessica Lynch. But she's a different kind of hero than we were led to expect. A bigger, braver hero, actually.

She did something every bit as brave as confronting those Iraqis. She came back home and told the truth.

Former POW from Kansas recounts capture in Iraq:

After he and his fellow soldiers were set free, there were stories of [Pfc. Patrick] Miller pestering the Iraqi guards by constantly singing a pro-American song, and by giving them chewing tobacco that he said was candy in hopes of making them sick.

"It's small victories that keep your hope up," Miller said. "You got to have small victories when you're in a situation like that."

making the rounds, and deservedly so:
via TPM, Slate articles by Jacob Weisberg, examining the evidence on Do Dim Bulbs Make Better Presidents? and on Occupational Hazards - How the Pentagon forgot about running Iraq -

The difficulties we have faced...were largely to be expected from a devastated post-totalitarian society in a part of the world overwhelmingly hostile to the United States and its interests. What is surprising-amazing, in fact-is how unprepared we were for these problems...How did the world's greatest military power plan the invasion of a country without also planning its occupation?

Also Seymour Hersh on Niger:

When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study's exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. "Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads," the official told me. "You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails."

TPM - "Hope is not a plan"