BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

May 25, 2003

Changing the world
: With a paragraph's worth of clarity (next to a picture of a smart and pretty young women who has a weblog) Tony Pierce says it all:

this is the first time in mankind that people from all over the world, completely different people, can tell each other what its like to live where they live and do the things that they do.
why hold back?

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Dateline
: NEW YORK -- Well, actually, New Jersey, but who'll notice? You can't fire me! It's only a blog. Only I can fire me.
Anyway, following up on the latest NY Times scandal, the dateline caper, in which a prize-winning reporter gets sent to detention for not staying long enough at the place from which he dateslines his story...
I know of at least one big newspaper in this country where datelines are meaningless: Rewritemen took the wires and whatever else was handy and wrote stories under datelines as well as their bylines without ever leaving the desk. I was a bit surprised when I first saw this, but it was SOP.

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Curves
: Gail Armstrong's verse on the seven ages of breasts.

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My avatar can beat up your avatar
: From MTV Europe comes a wonderfully stupid bit of Flash: Digital Protest, in which you can launch a stupid protest and people's avatars will join you on the picket line with their stupid signs. Among the causes: Bring back the 80s... Bush sux... Burn the SUVs... Computers is bad... Hate McDonalds... No more frozen pizza!... Smash capitalism!...

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Homeland security comes home
: Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin on the aftermath of the law-school bombing:

...a group of agents from the FBI and ATF came to my house Thursday evening. This was my second interview of the day. They were utterly professional and polite. They did their jobs incredibly well. But the first words out of their mouths threw me for a loop.
"Professor, we'd like to ask you about some of your writings....."
For a second, just for a second, I thought: "Oh my God, John Ashcroft has finally sent them to round me up for all those anti-Bush op-eds I've written."
And sure enough, one of the agents put a folder on the table in front of me containing a copy of all my recent op-eds, downloaded from the Internet and neatly printed out.
It quickly became clear what was going on. They wanted to know if anything I had written might have enraged someone enough that the person might consider taking his or her frustrations out on the Law School. They asked me which of my recent op-eds had gotten the most virulent responses. They didn't seem to know about my blog, or indeed, about blogs in general (although perhaps they were just playing possum). I explained what a blog is and how it changes the audience for political writing, how the Internet changes the group of people who can react to what you are saying. They asked for an example, and I mentioned how one of my op-eds criticizing Bush had been picked up by the conservative site NewsMax and distributed to their readers by e-mail and on the Web as part of a special "Insider's Report." The idea, apparently, was to stoke up some resentment at what NewsMax called the "most demonic form" of the liberal academy, an "Elitist Yale Law Professor."

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Losers
: A former adviser to former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl -- getting ready for the next campaign, clearly -- says Germany blew it:

Despite the announcement of plans to create a European army along with France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, Germany is less relevant in both European and world politics than it was before the Iraq war. Repairing the damage will not be easy. Every part of Germany's international position has been wounded by the Iraq war.

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Now here's a punchline waiting for a joke
: From ArabNews:

PR Drive Planned to Counter Smear Campaign
RIYADH, 25 May 2003 — The Saudi Committee for the Development of International Trade (CIT) plans to invite delegations from Europe, the Far East and North America as part of a drive to counter negative reporting on Saudi Arabia and provide first-hand experience of life in the Kingdom to opinion-makers abroad....
Addressing concerns among the delegates about girls’ education, Dr. Fahad said that 52 percent of students enrolled for public education are girls.
Mr. Bahlaiwa said the delegates visited the Shoura Council, a hospital, a school and the industrial township to enable them to correct their perceptions about the Kingdom. During their visit, the Saudis were able to address their concerns relating to women’s education, living in an Islamic environment, and overcoming obstacles in the development of Saudi-British relations.

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Yes, God is
: The best single gag in Bruce, Almighty: God's hat with a familiar logo: Yes, He is a Yankees fan.

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On the road again...
: So the Israeli Parliament approves the road map, becoming the first Israeli government to utter the secret words Palestinian right to statehood.
This is good news, right? Even though we've been on this road before, via Oslo and Camp David. Sometime, there has to be good news. The world is due.

: Israpundit says...

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Soloist needs choir
: Salam Pax has a new post up and I have one thing to say about it: We need more weblogs -- that is, more voices, more viewpoints -- coming from Iraq.

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Strap it on, Yasser
: The way I read this: Yasser Arafat both endorses suicide bombers (or as al-Jazeera and I prefer to call them, human bombs) and supervises them.
He issues a statement telling them to try not to kill women and children.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has urged would-be suicide bombers not to kill Israeli civilians, saying it was "inadmissible to kill a child or a woman in a restaurant", an Arabic newspaper reported on Sunday....
In what he described as a message to "young people ready to blow themselves up", Arafat was quoted as repeating his longheld stand that "we oppose violence against Palestinian and Israeli civilians".
He then specified what he meant by civilians.
"The struggle against occupation is legitimate and I mean 'soldiers of the occupation'. It is inadmissible to kill a child or a woman in a restaurant or a cafe," he added.

Show us how it's done, Yasser: Blow yourself up.

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