From the Google Blog, Google’s infrastructure was just attacked from China:

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

That’s not news. Their reaction is:

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

[emphasis added]

Damn, that feels good.
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So, like everyone else, I’ve been reading the excerpts from ‘Game Change‘ with a mixture of amusement, schadenfreude, and deep concern for the Republic. The political insiders it depicts are as far removed from any notion of ‘better government’ and ‘public service’ as Pluto (which I still hold to be a planet, dammit!!) is from the Sun.

Something nagged at me, and finally I realized that they reminded me of the boardroom scene in Putney Swope (one of my favorite movies from that era) where the avaricious board votes in Putney – because he’s black and they assume no one else will vote for him.

Yes, I get it that the entire text in the film is about race (it’s actually a very good film about race that unmasks a bunch of interesting altitudes by a bunch of different people); and I almost didn’t post this because some people will seize on that and make this post about Obama and race. It isn’t.

I’ll repeat again that it isn’t about race (although that’s the core of the film); it’s about the corruption and process by which Putney becomes chairman and how appallingly close that is to our politics today.
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Rezeroing the long guns for the New Year, I went to the rifle range. My friend Bill is handy, and for the last few months has been building a cannon (from scratch – he didn’t make the wheels or the striker, but the rest is all him). Today he brought it out for the first firing.

(I filmed the second one – for some reason I decided to stand further away the first time):

…I’ve never seen quite such a blatant example as the op-ed by attorney Mark Greenbaum in today’s LA Times which suggests that we need to throttle back law school accreditation to keep the revenues of those in profession high.

…the problem can be traced to the American Bar Assn., which continues to allow unneeded new schools to open and refuses to properly regulate the schools, many of which release numbers that paint an overly rosy picture of employment prospects for their recent graduates. There is a finite number of jobs for lawyers, and this continual flood of graduates only suppresses wages. Because the ABA has repeatedly signaled its unwillingness to adapt to this changing reality, the federal government should consider taking steps to stop the rapid flow of attorneys into a marketplace that cannot sustain them.

Ah, the attitudes of the Ottoman Empire. Where every pasha and wali could know that the office they had dearly bought would be profitable.

In case you ever wonder why the legal system seems to do such a bad job of defending markets…ask no further.
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Sullivan approvingly quotes a correspondent:

A reader asks a very interesting question about the undie-bomber – why did he get back into his seat to detonate a bomb that had a ramshackle detonator and where he could be overcome by fellow travelers? Read the whole email:

I keep hearing this even described as a failed terrorist attack on an airplane. But was it really? I keep hearing about how the system failed, but did it really? Think about it. First, what is the major goal of terrorism? It is not to bring down airplanes. It is not to destroy the West. It is, pure and simple, to create terror in people. Why? Because when people are afraid they overreact. And this includes most of us, yourself included.

If the intent of al Qaeda in this latest instance was to bring down an airplane, then it failed. But if its intent was to create fear and overreaction, then it succeeded Personally, I think it was the latter. It is quite possible (in fact I think probable) that the people who planned this event, and used the young man from Nigeria as a tool, were aware that due to security measures in place, there was no way they could actually get a bomb through that would actually work. The detonation equipment needed would have been detected. The same applies, by the way, to the shoe bomber.

Again, think about it. If you wanted to blow up a plane, would you attempt it from your seat, where somebody could quite possibly stop you? No, you would go to the washroom where you could set off the bomb without disruption.

If either of them had been paying attention, they would have noted that he had specifically requested and been seated in an overwing window seat – over the fuel tanks and the most important structural part of the plane.

It’s not clear that he had enough explosive to breach either, even if it had successfully detonated. But he was clearly sitting in the best place if his intention was to blow the plane up or crash it.

If he’d blown himself up in the bathroom? Ask the passengers on Aloha flight 243 in 1988…you can because they all survived.

Sullivan and his commentator are lining up with many others in the liberal commentariat to note that “terrorism really isn’t that big a deal.” That’s a disastrous premise electorally, and it’s deeply wrong. I’ve written about that in the past and will try and do so again soon.
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Redstate points to an official Israeli announcement that it pulled all it’s senior diplomats (heads of mission and ambassadors) home for a conference from Dec 27 to Dec 31.

They think it’s a precursor to opening a can of whoopass on someone; I’m less sure.

But it sure means something. A conference call would be far less intrusive; they obviously want something said that won’t possibly be overheard.
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Browsing the LA Weekly, I was scanning for a movie to go to this weekend, and saw this review of ‘The Blind Side’:

Another poor, massive, uneducated African-American teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, The Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile, and ever-grateful to the white folks who took him in.

Based on a true story recounted in Michael Lewis’s 2006 book of the same name, Blind Side the movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them. Steel magnolia Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock, frosted and thickly accented) welcomes the homeless Big Mike into her family’s Memphis McMansion, later explaining to him how to play left tackle. In every scene, Oher is instructed, lectured, comforted, or petted like a big puppy; he is merely a cipher (Aaron has, at most, two pages of dialogue), the vehicle through which the kind-hearted but imperfect whites surrounding him are made saintlier. “Am I a good person?” Leigh Anne asks her husband non-rhetorically – as if every second in this film weren’t devoted to canonizing her. – Melissa Anderson

And I was kinda annoyed at this.

Why? Well, for starters because the story is – as the reviewer notes – true. A white family did take in an essentially homeless black child, raise him, and see him succeed.

And so for Ms. Anderson, it’s a story that can’t be told. Or if it is told, it must be told through the lens of oppression and blind rage – or something.

Now, there are so many problem here that I’ll freely admit that we won’t address them all. But I want to focus on one, small issue.

And that is that the concept of ‘truth’ as enjoyed by someone like Ms. Anderson is a kind of cartoon; an Isaiah Berlin hedgehog, Hollywood ‘high concept‘ kind of a thing where the essential truths are few and huge and relatively uncomplex. The story of race in her world in America is the story of oppression by whites of blacks and other people of color; repression that is physical, economic, cultural, and goes to the heart of the character of every non-white American.

The problem is that there are millions – maybe even billions by this time – of true – meaning factually correct – stories that don’t fit that neat ‘high concept’ model of truth. Because reality is a fox’s world, where many messy small stories have to accumulated into a larger vision.

The story of Mike Ober and the Tuohy family is a truth about race in America. As is the larger story about slavery (itself made up of a million lesser stories, some heinous, some humane). As is the Civil War. As is Reconstruction, Jim Crow and Civil Rights – or the cashier who was rude to a customer of a different race at the liquor store where I bought champagne this New Years’ Eve (the cashier was black, the customer Asian).

And so it’s frustrating to me to hear from someone so invested in The Big Story that she can’t embrace or even acknowledge a small truth that contradicts it.

We’re seeing a bit of it that play out in Patterico’s debate with Charles Johnson over a lame Photoshop of Sarah Palin and President Obama.

The small truth – that the picture’s provenance began with a woman who is a registered Democrat – can’t be allowed to stand in the way of a Big Truth – that the picture is a right-wing assault on Obama. I’ve got to compliment Patterico as embracing the ambiguity here while for some reason Charles seems to reject it (…in the last collision with Charles here, I think we may have been trying to make the same point).

The reality there is doubtless as complex as the reality of the story behind Blind Side. And it only fits the Big Story if you chop off it’s legs, or better still ignore it.

I don’t like Big Story thinking. It suggests that people who are uncomfortable with the ambiguity of reality. I like thinking that can take a position and embrace the facts that challenge it.

I wish Melissa Anderson and Charles Johnson showed more of that kind of thinking….in fact, I wish a lot of people on many sides of many arguments could.
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h/t The Jawa report

…not bad for Marines!!
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To everyone!!

Sorry for the hiatus…family matters (i.e. family is more important). But here’s to a closing out 2009 and opening a great 2010 for all of us.

And a special thought for Biggest Guy and his mates…may 2010 be smooth for them as well.
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Finally got a good picture of Biggest Guy in Afghanistan…

Just back from a road trip…more tomorrow.
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