Brog2! A threat to China! and the... USAF? [Ben]

Apparently Brog2's trenchant analysis of political and military issues poses a threat to the people of China as well as our own Air Force. As you may recall from a previously linked article, behind the Great Firewall, all sites on the Blogger network are inaccessible.

Apparently the USAF was just as impressed as Brog2 by the Chinese government's erection of subtle barriers to potentially seditious information as they've instituted some of Beijing's policies without alteration:

AFNOC has imposed bans on all sites with "blog" in their URLs, thus cutting off any sites hosted by Blogspot. Other blogs, and sites in general, are blocked based on content reviews performed at the base, command and AFNOC level ...

The idea isn't to keep airmen in the dark -- they can still access news sources that are "primary, official-use sources," said Maj. Henry Schott, A5 for Air Force Network Operations. "Basically ... if it's a place like The New York Times, an established, reputable media outlet, then it's fairly cut and dry that that's a good source, an authorized source," he said ...

There's a chance that since Brog2.com is self-hosted, and we've subtly avoided the "Blog" label in our URL, we may have side-stepped the wizards at the Air Force's censorship command for now. I've been talking to Liam about a redesign, but now I think it might be best to stick with the current theme and its vaguely Asian pastiche. With the USAF's newly acquired Chinese sensibilities and all, we might be able to continue slipping under the radar and retain our wide following among airmen.

Garfield minus Garfield [Ben]

This is some straight genius. Scroll through to the older ones, they start getting more poignant.

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?
Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

h/t Daring Fireball

The Subtler Big Brother [Ben]

It's difficult for writers to keep George Orwell's name out of their political commentary. His quotes come shrink-wrapped with relevance and a sort of staid responsibility. Need something about early resistance to or the dangers of underestimating a totalitarian (or even better, Fascist!) regime? DONE. Unadorned, yet perfectly formed prose that you can enlist in your fight against an alarmingly resurgent surveillance state? See how smoothly "Big Brother" rolls off the tongue?

Witness Bill Kristol recently dusting off an Orwell essay about Rudyard Kipling on the NYT's editorial page in an attempt to exonerate the Republican party for the ongoing debacle in Iraq. Honestly. This, a piece where Orwell clearly states that Kipling's overt imperialist sympathies obviously taint his entire body of work. Clearly it's time to erect some boundaries.

Bill Kristol, Orwell does not have your back. Name-dropping him is not earning you street cred with NYT readers. Plus, it's dishonest and stupid. I have more sympathy for writers using Orwell who aren't totally perverting his intentions with selective quotation--it's difficult not to trot him out as an ally when he dropped knowledge on so many subjects.

Leave it to James Fallows to show everyone how it's done. Taking time out of his busy biological myth-debunking schedule to write about Internet censorship in China--"The Great Firewall", heh--he avoids the enticing allusions to 1984 that would have undoubtedly snared a lesser writer.

And the piece is much more enlightening because of it. Because the boogyman of Big Brother looms over any discussion of governmental manipulation of information, the tendency of rational people is to overlook the pernicious nature of the more subtle forms of propaganda and censorship when the comparison is explicitly made. Yes, recent amendments to FISA are frightening and reprehensible. Yes the fact our craven legislative branch will likely grant retroactive immunity to telecom companies that illegally cooperated and continue to cooperate with intelligence agencies disturbs me exceedingly. Yes, fuck you Diane Feinstein. But, it's still unlikely that I'll ever suffer parallel indignities to the citizens of Oceania by enduring GWB constantly smirking at me, unbidden, from my television screen. And I won't lie, my eyes glaze over a little when the comparison gets made.

Fallows's description of the filtering techniques employed by the Chinese government are all the more chilling because they show an understanding of the limits of technology as well as the limitations of human nature. Rather than a totally controlling the state of information, a la 1984 and North Korea, the Chinese government realizes that knowledge is impossible to keep from people if they're in persistent pursuit of the truth. They also realize that most people are busy, easily distracted, and not technologically inclined. Therefore:

As a practical matter, anyone in China who wants to get around the firewall can choose between two well-known and dependable alternatives: the proxy server and the VPN...

...What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother. Most Chinese people, like most Americans, are interested mainly in their own country. All around them is more information about China and things Chinese than they could possibly take in. The newsstands are bulging with papers and countless glossy magazines. The bookstores are big, well stocked, and full of patrons, and so are the public libraries. Video stores, with pirated versions of anything. Lots of TV channels. And of course the Internet, where sites in Chinese and about China constantly proliferate. When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside?

It's a good question. And if our own country and its free press can serve as any sort of example, most people in China are likely to content themselves with the information they have access to and not think about it too much.

Another Point for Barack [Ben]

One of the first things that made me optimistic about the candidacy of Barack Obama was his choice of Samantha Power as the senior foreign policy adviser for his campaign. I'd just finished reading Power's Genocide: A Problem from Hell--widely considered to be the best treatment of 20th century genocide and America's (very muted) reaction to it--and was hugely impressed. You could call it a "scathing critique", but the style is really just good journalism, and the events chronicled provide their own damning commentary, with no need for excess editorial scaffolding.

One could ask many interesting questions of a campaign with Power in the leading foreign policy role; particularly, what do you do about an occupation of Iraq that is clearly draining America's military and diplomatic resources but whose presence may be the only thing preventing a full-scale civil war? For those not familiar with her work, there's significant tension here for someone who's clearly in favor of increased domestic and international military presence where deployment could prevent a possible genocide--conditions most agree Iraq satisfies.

Power discusses some of these issues in this Salon interview. However, one of the more interesting quotes describes how she became involved with the Obama campaign:

His office called me when he began serving in the U.S. Senate in early 2005. He had just read "A Problem From Hell" and wanted to meet to discuss fixing American foreign policy. I thought, "Well that's interesting -- clearly he's in some other league." I mean, who spends Christmas reading a dark book on genocide? No other politician had ever contacted me to discuss it.

Just to be clear, you can write the defining treatise on one of the most important issues of the past century, intimately concerned with the deployment of the US military to prevent mass murder (forgive me for feeling this to be topical), and expect to be contacted by no one--save a junior senator--interested in what you might have to say.

You'd Better Be Rich, BIATCH! [Ben]

Matt Yglesias:

It is fascinating that the Republican Party would rather allow what they believe to be a critical national security law lapse than allow it to be extended without the extension containing a rider immunizing large telecommunications firms from the consequences of prior illegal activity. It's almost as if the Republican Party exists to serve the interests of large business enterprises and very wealthy individuals, and tends to use national security and cultural anxieties as a kind of political theater aimed at securing votes so that they can better pursue their real agenda of enriching the wealthy and powerful.

Word.

Maybe we're thinking about this the wrong way... [Ben]

Glenn Greenwald on a new Washington Post/ABC News poll:

The results: only 34% believe it was worth fighting, a record low. A resounding 65% believe it was not worth fighting, and 53% believe that "strongly" -- both one point away from the record high. It simply doesn't matter how well things are going in Iraq: the vast (and still increasing) preponderance of Americans have concluded that the war was a stupid, wasteful thing to do and they will not change their minds, no matter how much happy news springs forth. GOP propaganda and Terrorism-exploitation now affect nothing.

...

The approval rating for Democrats in Congress has plummeted steadily since the American electorate gave them control of Congress in early 2007. Early on, ratings for Congressional Democrats were consistently near 50% as Americans had high hopes for their willingness to change the course of the country and place real limits on the deeply unpopular Republican policies. But as Congressional Democrats became more and more characterized by capitulation and an unwillingness to stand up to Republicans, their approval numbers steadily dropped to its current mark, just one point away from their lowest approval rating of the last 14 months.

The more willing Democrats are to stand up to Republicans and oppose their defining policies, the more popular they become. The less willing they are to do so, the more eager they are to erase distinctions and accommodate this deeply unpopular party, the more unpopular Democrats become. The empirical evidence for those propositions is close to indisputable. The profound rejection by the country of the Republican Party permits only one lesson: the country wants a party that opposes them, not resembles or fears them.

Actually, there might be another lesson: Nothing could be less important to Congress than public opinion. Don't forget to vote! :-/

For the first time since the first time I ever voted, I'm really excited about voting tomorrow! Woo hoo! I'm actually downright optimistic about November's election this year. We'll see how long that lasts.

And in (international!) news:

is it PUDDLES or PANCHITO????


(photo from Alice Echo-News)

GO UTAH! [Ben]

(CBS) A Utah retailer of family-friendly tapes and DVDs - Hollywood films with the "dirty parts" cut out of them - has been arrested for trading sex with two 14-year-old girls.

Orem police say Flix Club owner Daniel Dean Thompson, 31, and Issac Lifferth, 24, were booked into the Utah County jail on charges of sexual abuse and unlawful sexual activity with a 14-year-old.

It's getting to the point where if you told me you were a Republican, I'd really have to assume you're spending your Friday nights doing drugs off the chests of under aged hookers while getting your asshole licked by a gay dog.

In an airport bathroom.

Praise Jesus.