This from Politics in the Zeros:

Perot Systems caught with hands in two cookie jars
As with many political scandals, the Enron trail leads to some unusual places. This time to Perot Systems, who simultaneously designed the California power system then sold software to trading companies teaching them how to game the system. That “giant sucking sound”? Why boy howdy, that was just Texas energy companies vacuuming money from California by whatever barely legal or outright illegal ways they could devise. And lest we forget, Perot Systems is headed by the very same Ross Perot who, when he ran for President, lectured us all about the virtues of being upright and moral. What a bunch of sleazy hypocritical weasels.

Why doesn’t anyone ban these guys from California contracts for a couple of years??
Oh…sorry…they are probably contributors to Governor SkyBox.

Check this out:
jeffbridges.com’s clock
He’s also one of the best actors of this generation. Hmmm…movie casts you would like to see together…there is a fun dinner party game!!
I’ll open:
Jeff Bridges
Laura Dern
Lawrence Fishburne
Gene Hackman
Phillip Baker Hall
Ethan Hawke
Isabelle Huppert
Julianne Moore
Uma Thurman
Almost wouldn’t matter what they were doing, they’d just be a lot of fun to watch…

Chris Bertram worries that there is a lack of balance in the Blogoverse’s coverage of the Middle East:

The blogosphere is very US-based and almost uncritically pro-Israeli and even bloggers who I link to and respect like Armed Liberal and Dave Trowbridge have a perspective that I see as unbalanced. (“Balance!, this guy wants balance! How can you talk of balance when anti-semitism is on the march and suicide bombers target civilians!” I hear you say. Quite right too, those acts are disgusting and morally repellent.)

This represents a pretty good opportunity for me to give a basic explanation about my stance on the Middle East, and the basis for a lot of what I believe about the appropriate US role there.

Let me start by explaining what I’m afraid of. Because, in a sense, Mike Golby is right – one of the roots of my political stance is fear. Here’s what I’m afraid of – you know you all got these jokes in your email last year:

The Saudi Ambassador to the U.N. has just finished giving a speech and walks out into the lobby where he meets his American counterpart. They shake hands and as they walk the Saudi asks, “You know, I have just one question about what I have seen in America.”

The American replies, “Well your Excellency, anything I can do to help you I will do.”

The Saudi whispers, “My son watches this show ‘Star Trek’ and in it there are Russians and Blacks and Asians, but never any Arabs. He is very upset. He doesn’t understand why there are never any Arabs in Star Trek.”

The American laughs, leans over and says, “That’s because it takes place in the future.”

*******
A father is walking with his son around the year 2032 in lower Manhattan. As they explore the area the father explains to his son about the grandeur of the buildings and take on the sites. Suddenly they come to a beautiful park and plaza.

The son is so excited at the beautiful park and monuments and asks his Dad: “What are these monuments for?”

The father replies: “This park is dedicated to honour the Twin Towers and the memory of the people of New York.”

“What are the Twin Towers?” asks the son.

Dad replies: “They were two very large 110 story buildings which stood here nearly 30 years until Arab Terrorists destroyed them.”

The son look puzzled, and says: “Dad, what is an arab?”

*******

Admit it, you all got them, and most of you laughed.

And here’s my fear. I don’t want to be a part of a society that eradicated another culture; I don’t want to commit genocide.

I don’t want to be put in a position where genocide is either a reasonable option, or where my fellow citizens are so enraged that they are willing to commit it, and my opposition will be washed away in a tide of rage.

I want a calm, prosperous Middle East, and believe that the Palestinian Arabs who have been royally screwed by everyone – by the Europeans and Americans who established Israel without planning or compensation; by their leaders who have led them into several suicidal wars; by the leaders of the other Arab states who use them as cheap labor, exploit them economically, and exploit them politically – deserve decent lives.

They won’t get them following the path they are on.

They won’t get it by practicing terrorism, as opposed to guerrilla warfare. There is a difference between warfare, even guerrilla warfare, and terrorism. Guerrilla warfare targets the military and strategic targets of the opponent, using deceptive techniques. The Viet Cong were very effective at this, as my countrymen learned to their dismay. Terrorism simply acts out blind rage by striking your opponent at their most vulnerable points – schools, restaurants, houses of worship.

They won’t get it by duplicitously saying one reasonable thing in English and another inflammatory one in Arabic. I spend too much time reading Arab News and MEMRI to have comfort that the Arab world gets it, and that the path they say they are headed down leads anywhere but annihilation.

Part of this is a clash of cultural models, a clash of languages, as Deborah Tannen explains in other contexts.

But words and images are one thing. Semtex, car bombs, and WMD warfare are another.

And to the extent that the Arab extremists are successful both in exporting their political rhetoric couched in blood to the U.S. and Europe, and to the extent they are able to silence or murder the moderate voices – the voices that counsel negotiation, economic warfare, peaceful confrontation – then they are speaking a language that my fellow citizens will demand a reply to, and the reply will be so horrific that I want to cry.

Is indirectly commented upon in this post in the Bellona Times.
Social mobility. It is the magic glue that holds us together; it is the sense of possibility that each of us holds in our hearts, if not for ourselves, than for our children.
And one of the consequences of SkyBox Liberalism is not only the ossification of class…you in your courtside chair, Mr. Nicholson, and then the neat hierarchy of wealth and fame leading upward to the corporate SkyBoxes that make this all possible, and above them, the proles in the nosebleed seats, kept in their place by the minimum-wage guards who keep everyone in their appropriate section…but the obvious “flaunt it, baby” statement of your gracious wave to the fans sitting in the rafters.

Mike Golby attempts a takedown of the SFSU Blogburst.
His quotes, with my comments interspersed.

As far as I know, you either call it a Google bomb or a bunch of good ol’ boys acting like ‘eedjits’. I believe these people are seeking publicity and an outlet for their frustration, impotence, and anger. They are doing so inappropriately and are fostering discord rather than harmony.

Well, there are some people with whom I do not want to be harmonious. They do things that I dislike, such as crash airplanes into the WTC. I do not want to play with them, and I want them to stop what they are doing. If I can help get publicity to generate consensus about stopping them, that’s called politics. The nice thing about it in the U.S., like in the AYSO, is that everyone gets to play.

This is not the stuff of dancing in the park or singing folk and freedom songs. Having looked at the material Blog Burst has collated, I think we’d do well to remember that disillusioned, ill-informed, and misguided people have been ‘organizing’ for millennia. Today, this applies as much to fear-filled Israeli ‘supporters’ as it does to Palestinian extremists. When frightened out of our wits, it’s what we do best. We project, act out, drive ourselves into a frenzy and, sometimes, sow chaos and destruction – no matter how smart we think we are.

Darn those “fear-filled” Israeli activists…they are such wimps…

And that’s why we put governments into place. Our forefathers saw the need to control our base impulses and our drive to surrender to mob rule. Government and its law enforcement agencies are there to protect us from ourselves more than from any external attack.

No, Mike, the government of the U.S. was put into place equally to guard against mob rule and to guard against the tyranny with which the forefathers were so familiar. I know you’re South African, take a U.S. history class, maybe?

Generally, it’s not necessary to take action against loudmouths, bullies, and cowards. They are their own worst enemies. I don’t think recent Israeli / Palestinian protests across the United States have resulted in a single major incident. Nor would I categorize the writings of our war bloggers as ‘hate speech’. Hatred and fear certainly seem to be there, but there is no sustained attempt to verbally coerce those of like mind into killing or injuring others because of race or creed. These people are rank amateurs. Usually, such groups overstate their causes and their rhetoric is self-defeating. They will drift further and further from reality and they will attract only those they deserve. Sooner, rather than later, they will die out.

It’s not clear here whether he is talking about the warblogger bullies or about the Palestinian bullies. I don’t make it a habit of hanging around Palestinian pro-peace rallies (haven’t found any!!), throwing rotten eggs, and yelling that President Asaad needed to “finish the job”. And from his prose, it appears that when he talks about the warbloggers, he believes that we are full of hatred and fear. I can only speak for myself, but it feels a lot more like sad determination. I’m sorry that I don’t meet his standard of professionalism in inciting hatred and violent action. May I suggest something from Palestinian Authority TV?

Should they cause material or bodily damage, they would face both the wrath of their state security apparatus and their equals on ‘the other side’. Should the state support them, they then become but an adjunct to a greater battle between two or more movements or countries. In such situations, controlling interests use or exploit them to add to or exacerbate the problem, or to further political agendas. In other words, these vociferous minorities are forever minor players, used by forces greater than their blinkered views allow them to comprehend.

As opposed to those who sit on Olympian heights, objective, foresightful, oblivious.

Most Americans therefore feel that the danger posed by loose groupings of malcontents turning into organized bodies intent on disrupting social stability is real and deserves attention. The police, FBI, CIA, NSA, and other institutions are able to monitor such organizations before they cause real and lasting damage. The question is, do they have the will to do so or not? My guess is that they do. Had the U.S. security apparatus done its job last year (listened to its operatives and taken action when and where necessary) instead of engaging in political brinkmanship, Blog Burst might have no reason to exist. How much has the Federal Government learnt? The future, unfortunately, will tell. Until then, 9-11 will represent a tactical, defensive, political, and operational failure for those supposedly protecting the United States. And it will make Americans jump every time a bunch of crackpots with mush for brains threatens to bring on the Apocalypse.

Here is the political meat of his argument: The State exists to take care of this, just go on about your business, citizen. I’m amused, in part because he just doesn’t get what America is all about. Listen Mike, what the American political experience is about is that we are the government, and they are us.

For myself, I heap scorn on our war bloggers and their ‘Palestinian’ equivalents. They are baby ‘disillusionaries’. Their ‘static’ renders them useless to anybody, especially the causes or governments they supposedly serve. They are worthy only of derision; nothing else. The going will get tough but they will not stay the pace. Trust me on this. I know these things.

Well, you may know some things; right now you know how to sound like John Cleese. And Mike, I’d love to find my Palestinian equivalent. He would talk about the need for the Palestinian people to learn to become a nation, a nation defined by something other than an irrational an zealous hatred of their Jewish and secular neighbors. Once they do that, they can then work to become a state. Where is the Palestinian Nelson Mandela? Their Martin Luther King? What would the history of race and conflict in America been had it been created and written by Idi Amin or Yassir Arafat?
I know something about the American people, and I can tell you that a Palestinian leader like that would be buried in support from a broad spectrum of us. Sadly, it is more likely that in Palestine, as it is constituted now, they would just simply be buried after being murdered by the current Palestinian leadership you so seem to love and legitimize.
Lots of luck, fella. I hear it’s challenging in South Africa right now, and I’m sorry for that, and remain hopeful that there is a light at the end of the tunnel for you and yours.

Junius has another great article (it seems somehow dismissive to call it a post) on property, in a dialog with Tom Palmer, who I believe comes off the loser in this exchange.
Junius’ key point:

Nevertheless, property is a complex set of relationships, and I don’t see that the fact that people can and do establish such conventions settles either the extent of what people may justly hold or whether they have full liberal property rights in their holdings.
…
Though I accept that there are limits on what states may justly do, when we have a state that functions as a proper constitutional democracy it seems right that it may properly modify and adjust the property regime in place in order to achieve desirable goals. So, for example, in the United Kingdom, buildings of great historic or achitectural interest are ‘listed’ and may not be modified or demolished by the owner without the consent of local government. Similarly people are required to maintain their motor vehicles to a certain standard if they are to be used on the public roads. All such measures constitute encroachments on full liberal rights of ownership: it would strike me as an extreme view that no such measures are ever justified. Further, more serious encroachments occur when the state uses its legislative power to compel owners of land to sell in order to facilitate a major scheme of public works. If the British Parliament had required the railway companies to negotiate individually with every single landowner, the railways would never have been built.

This in reply to Palmer:

Junius, along with such other estimable thinkers as Cass Sunstein and Stephen Holmes and Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy (and many, many other college professors who have, it seems, pledged their lives to undermining private property), has gone from acknowledging that property is an institution of social cooperation to asserting that it is the creation of a particular organization, and further, that that organization, as the alleged creator of property, is the rightful owner of all the property and empowered accordingly to distribute its benefits as its principals see fit. It is, according to Junius, “open to us to design the property regime (and the accompanying legal system, etc., etc.) with a view to the social outcomes we might expect it to yield.” That is, it is open to “us” acting in our capacity as citizens of a democratic state, to design the property regime as we see fit, or to regard all rights as “socially negotiable.” But, A) the institution of property and its enforcement should not be confused with the state, and B) even if the state were the sole creator and protector of property rights, it would not follow from that that it would be entitled to all of the benefits accruing to property.

The issue which Palmer misses is that there are social organizations – call them ‘nations’ which predate the modern conception of the law-driven ‘state’, and that the state typically is a rationalized, formalized version which evolved from a social organism which was a nation. There was a France before there was a Republic, and while the Republic attempted to graft new ideas and social structures on the old social characteristics of the Ancien Regime and the Frankish nation which became it.
Where most social theorists fail is in misunderstanding and mistrusting history, and the accretive nature of social change. They believe – and I believe this core belief is closely tied to the Romantic ideal – that they can will new social orders into existence. In this model, the institution of property does not emerge gradually, become rationalized as society moves to a formal structure of laws, and then represent the interaction of ancient social conventions and modern formal/legalistic ones. It is an either/or; granted by God as a precondition to human existence, or an arbitrary construct designed as a part of a conceptual political and legal regime (c.f. Rawls).
The obvious answer is that it is neither; property is, like all aspects of human politics and society, a dynamic, evolving, historical event. By that I mean that it is historical, in that it has specific meanings at a specific point in space and time; it is evolving, which means that what property is today is related to and probably not too far from what property was a moment ago; and it is dynamic, in that what we consider property to be today is different than it was a month ago (hardly at all), a year ago (slightly), a hundred years ago (somewhat).

From What Are They Saying, an excellent blog by Mary Madigan:

Jak King* has decided that the Australian petition to have the United Nations declare suicide bombings a crime against humanity is badly drafted. But the alternative he offers is also poorly considered. His petition would make a crime of the death of any civilian by any military action.
The death of any civilian? There’s a big difference between accidental deaths and deaths caused by malicious intent. The former is not a crime. The latter is.
When civilians are not targeted in a military action, their deaths are unfortunate and accidental. When civilians are deliberately targeted, it’s a crime. The deaths of the villagers at My Lai was a crime. When a suicide bomber bypasses military targets to blow up the patrons of an ice cream store, that is also a crime.
Military action is inherently risky. If every death that resulted from military action were considered to be a crime, it would effectively make all military action illegal. Since these actions are often used to defend civilians against attacks by terrorists the result of this proposal would be more civilian deaths. This proposal is not only ill considered, it’s potentially dangerous.

I couldn’t say it any better than that…

Here’s a blog – ‘Politics in the Zeros’ – from Bob Morris, an interesting liberal here in L.A. (on the blogroll to the left). He talks about state politics:

Green Party candidate for Calif. governor pulling unusual interest
In what could be a major development, a coalition of nine business groups of people of color are considering backing Green Party candidate Peter Miguel Camejo, for Governor rather than Democrat incumbent Gray Davis. The coalition sent Camejo a letter saying they thought 20-30% of the minority vote could go to a strong Green candidate, as neither major party is effectively addressing issues.

And he talks about the environment, with an emphasis on water (which I think will be one of the major shapers of international politics in the next twenty years):

Water news
Israel. A continuing drought and increased friction with Jordan and Lebanon has caused Israel to put all water matters under direct control of the Prime Minister. And how sad it is to continually read about depleted aquifers not replenishing – something that is happening worldwide.
India / Pakistan. India says it will continue with a disputed water project in Kashmir, regardless of what Pakistan says, and may scrap the treaty entirely if they go to war.

Interesting stuff…

Read this about a partial solar eclipse at sunset on June 10.
We’ll be down the street at the beach, watching.

I’ve actually gotten a fair number of emails asking me this; they presuppose that the only valid position for a liberal is to be disarmed, and the only valid position for a gun owner is to be a conservative. I’m neither. I own guns, and have spent a fair amount of time, energy and money becoming at least moderately competent with them. And let me state bluntly that while the politic thing for shooters to say in public is “I just shoot [trap and skeet] [a few targets] [to hunt birds].”, that I do all those things, and in addition have trained hard to become competent in defending myself by, if necessary, shooting people.
I’m also a liberal, who believes that the government has the obligation, not just the right, to work to make our society, nation and world a better place. Which better place ought to be one in which fewer people are physically threatened seriously enough to need to resort to shooting people.
The intersection of those two beliefs – which on their face seem to be incompatible, but which I believe are not – defines a lot of what I believe about politics and the nature of good government.
Let’s talk a little bit about the armed side of it. Why be armed in today’s society?
Well, I’ll suggest four reasons:
1) It’s fun. Shooting is a pleasurable sport, things go “bang!!” loudly; well-hit clay pigeons gratifyingly disintegrate into a cloud of dust.
2) It is moral. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people who eat meat and have never killed anything are morally suspect. Some creature gave its life for the chicken Andouille sausages in the pasta sauce I made tonight. Pork chops and salmon don’t start out wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf. I have hunted deer, wild pigs, and birds, and I can say with certainty (and I imagine anyone else who hunts can say) that it fundamentally changed the way I look both at my food and at animals in the world. I respect the death that made my dinner possible in a way I never would have had an animal not died at my own hand.
When I have a gun in my possession, I am suddenly both more aware of my environment, and more careful and responsible for my actions in it. People who I know who carry guns daily talk about how well-behaved they are how polite they suddenly become. Heinlein wrote that “an armed society is a polite society”, and while in truth I cannot make a causal connection, when you look at societies where the codes of manners were complex and strong, from medieval Europe or Japan to Edwardian England, there was a wide distribution of weapons.
I know several people who are either highly skilled martial artists or highly skilled firearms trainers, and in both groups there is an interesting correlation between competence (hence dangerousness) and a kind of calm civility – the opposite of the “armed brute” image that some would attempt to use to portray a dangerous man or woman.
3) It is useful. The sad reality is that we live in an imperfect world, one in which some people prey on others. They may do it because it is a kind of crude redistribution (you have a BMW, he would like one); because they are desperate, or because they are deranged. They may have been damaged in some way by their genetic makeup or their upbringing. Or they may just be evil.
Bluntly, at the moment I am under threat, I don’t care why they do it. My response is not very different from my response to my friends who said that “America had it coming” on 9/11. “Maybe. So what?” People who attack me or mine need to be stopped. If the only way I have to effectively stop them is to kill them, so be it. Once I am out of danger, I am happy to consider what it will take to improve education and job opportunities in the central cities, or to talk thoughtfully about helping the Palestinians figure out how to become a nation and a state.
There are bad people out there, folks. Some of them are tormented by what they do, some don’t care, some may revel in it. Someday, you may be confronted by one. What will you do?
4) It is the politically correct thing to do. I say this with all appropriate irony, but I am also a believer that an armed citizenry does two important things to the American polity:
a) it fundamentally changes the nature of the relationship between the individual and the State. I am pretty dubious about the apocalyptic fantasies of those who believe that a cadre of deer hunters could stand up against the armed forces of the U.S. or some invading army. In reality, I think that the arms possessed by the citizens of the U.S. are primarily symbolic in value, much like the daggers carried by Sikhs. But, having lived in Europe, I think that the symbolic value carries a political and social weight;
b) it makes it clear that we as citizens have some measure of responsibility for ourselves. The tension I talk about above is one between self-reliance and mutual reliance. In England today, a subject (I am careful not to say citizen) faces increasing limitations on the right of self-defense; the State is moving toward an absolute monopoly on the use of force. It should not be hard to imagine that the character of both the relationship of the individual to the state and of the individual’s relationship to society is vastly different under those circumstances. By being armed, I am taking responsibility – literally, the responsibility of life and death – on myself. When the state cannot entrust individuals to act with some significant responsibility, except as an adjunct of the state, we will have truly lost something that is a key part of what makes our politics work (note that I think that the same thing is happening in the EU today, with the same effect).
There’s more, which can be put simply that people will sometimes do stupid or evil things with their freedom. But without their freedom, they will seldom do great things. So by protecting society against one, you also deprive it of the other.
Sometime soon: how to be a liberal in a society that values freedom, and why freedom is critical to building an effective and durable liberal society.