Quotulatiousness

November 9, 2011

Penn State’s problem

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Football, Law — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:55

Russ from Winterset loses his temper over the truly disturbing way Penn State is handling their child rape issues allegations:

So Joe Paterno is going to retire at the end of the season?

Whiskey? Tango? Foxtrot? Does Joe think he is going to be carried off the MISS PIGGY field to the BEAKER cheers of the DR. BUNSEN HONEYDEW crowd after leading Penn STADLER State to another GONZO bowl game? FOZZIE BEAR that noise. He should have the common DR. TEETH & THE ELECTRIC MAYHEM decency to slink out the back door of the coaching offices in shame like John SAM THE EAGLE Edwards leaving a session of a Federal RIZZO THE RAT Grand Jury.

That moderation expressed in my first update? KERMIT that. If Joe JANIS THE BASS PLAYER Paterno is allowed to coach another ANIMAL football game at Penn RALPH THE DOG State University, every WALDORF fan in the stadium who so much as smiles when their BERT team scores their first ERNIE touchdown can go Suck The Barbed Cock of Satan as far as I’m concerned.

BIG BIRD! Now I’m pissed.

And when you come back with the “look at all he’s done for the community” card, tell me this. How many other kids have been raped since 2002 because JoePa and the other jackasses at Penn State didn’t think it was necessary to get the police involved in this situation? Ten? Five? Even one? Is that a fair trade for all that Joe Paterno has done for his community?

If it’s not quite clear from context, he “replace[d] all but one of my f-bombs in the original draft of the post with the names of Muppet Characters”

May 5, 2011

Confused about the details of the Bin Laden raid? So’s the White House

Filed under: Government, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:34

Jon sent me this link which is a systematic attempt to draw together all the information/misinformation/disinformation about the Abbotabad raid:

Usually when governments use misinformation, they use it to make themselves look good. The Obama Administration gets points for originality, insofar as it’s been using disinformation and misinformation to make itself look arbitrary, unlawful, helpless and stupid. Here’s jj’s great summary:

Okay, what do we have here:

1) There was a firefight.
2) There was no firefight.
3) Bin Laden was “resisting.”
4) Bin Laden wasn’t armed. (Makes the concept of “resisting” interesting.)
[4.a) And the newest one: the SEALS thought bin Laden was reaching for a weapon.]
5) He used his wife as a shield.
6) His wife was killed too.
7) He didn’t use his wife as a shield. She ran at a SEAL who shot her in the leg, but she’s fine.
8 ) Some other woman — the maid? — was used as a shield. By somebody. Downstairs.
9) That other woman — downstairs — was killed.
10) Maybe not. She was killed unless she wasn’t — and who was she, anyway?

That’s less than half the list.

Stay on message? They’d have to have agreed on what the actual message is first.

Back to the original post, which has been updated a few times:

When people say “something is wrong here,” they’re sort of right. The “here” in which the wrongness resides isn’t this specific news story. Instead, it’s an overarching pathology that we’re talking about.

That is, the SEALS did what they did. What’s driving everyone bonkers is that this administration is incapable of being straightforward. Serpentine deceit is its MO, regardless of the topic, whether birth certificates, health care debates, or sanctioned assassinations. Everything is wrapped in a web of lies and confusion because of the paranoia, personality disorders, narcissism, and sociopathy that walk the White House halls.

April 15, 2011

RAF proves Eurofighter can take out stationary, unmanned, abandoned enemy tanks

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

In a triumph of military daring and precision bombing public relations, the Royal Air Force has demonstrated the ground-attack capability of their Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft:

The RAF has blown up two apparently abandoned Libyan tanks using a Eurofighter Typhoon jet in a move which appears to have been motivated more by Whitehall infighting than by any attempt to battle the forces of dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

[. . .]

The video appears to show a T-72 tank neatly parked, stationary and unmanned: the target was plainly not in use. The Telegraph reports that the location struck was “an abandoned tank park”. Many Libyan armoured vehicles are old and not serviceable due to lack of parts and servicing. RAF sources admitted to the paper that the jets making the strike had had to spend “a long time” searching before they could find a valid target to hit, and that the timing of the strike was “no coincidence”.

So why is the RAF not only conducting unnecessary air attacks on useless hunks of metal? The answer is not so much military as it is political:

This hasty effort by the RAF to get Typhoons into ground-attack action took place just ahead of the scheduled release by the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee of a damning report on the Eurofighter, titled Management of the Typhoon project. This report had been expected to be highly critical of the Typhoon, and indeed it is. It says:

In 2004, the Department decided to retire the ground attack Jaguar aircraft early and to spend £119 million to install ground attack upgrades on early Typhoons to cover the resulting capability gap. These upgrades were ready for use by 2008. A year later, the Department decided to retire the air defence Tornado F3 aircraft early to save money and therefore re-prioritised Typhoon away from ground attack missions to air defence tasks. It is now not using Typhoon’s ground attack capability.

So, absent some secret plan of the Libyan army to somehow put their abandoned equipment back into immediate use, this was a PR strike to rally public opinion against parliamentary interference.

April 14, 2011

Scott Feschuk is one of those “ethnic voters” for the Harper photo-op

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

Scott Feschuk is delighted to have the opportunity to have his photo taken with the prime minister. He’s overjoyed:

What a moment.

I never thought that I — a regular, ordinary Canadian — would get the chance to have my photo taken with the Prime Minister of Canada.

But as luck and crass political calculation would have it, he’s eager to be seen with me! All I have to do is attire myself in such a manner as to flamboyantly display my heritage, thereby rendering me a subhuman prop that Stephen Harper can exploit to woo more of my kind.

Needless to say, I’m in.

As is true of much national folklore garb, it can take quite a while to get into my ethnic costume. Each item has been carefully selected to represent a historic and sacred element relating to my suitably exotic but non-threatening culture.

Join me, won’t you, as I get dressed.

I think I can speak for all of us about our deep gratitude that this blog post is not illustrated.

It’s also nice to see that the Conservatives have not yet figured out how to avoid handing their opponents such wonderful opportunities for mockery.

Original tempest-in-an-ethnic-teapot here. 680News reported yesterday that the staffer who wrote the letter is no longer working for the candidate.

March 30, 2011

The author’s guide to dealing with criticism

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

In short, watch how author Jacqueline Howett responds to a review with (pretty mild) critical comments, then don’t do this:

Jacqueline Howett said…

You obviously didn’t read the second clean copy I requested you download that was also reformatted, so this is a very unfair review. My Amazon readers/reviewers give it 5 stars and 4 stars and they say they really enjoyed The Greek Seaman and thought it was well written. Maybe its just my style and being English is what you don’t get. Sorry it wasn’t your cup of tea, but I think I will stick to my five star and four star reviews thanks.

She then reposts three Amazon reviews in the comment thread.

BooksAndPals said…

In response to the many comments from Ms Howett:

I received the email on 2/7 asking that I download the a new copy of the book, which I did. I verified in my library software (Calibre) that this was the version I had and read. However her note above as well as the email mentioned formatting. At least when I talk about formatting I’m referring to issues of conversion from the source (a Word .doc file or whatever) into an eBook so the text flows correctly on the Kindle and so on. I say no issues I would attribute to formatting.

I have doubts that Ms. Howett being English is the reason for my reaction to her writing although I can’t discount it entirely. I can say that in the last year I’ve read and in many cases reviewed on this blog books by natives of England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and multiple European countries where English is not the primary language. Some have been full of country specific slang. In none of these cases has this been an issue for me. I do mention these things in the FYI section of my reviews because it is an issue for some people.

I’ll also point out that in the first two chapters alone I found in excess of twenty errors that ideally would have been caught in editing and proofing. Some were minor, but all have the potential of disrupting an enjoyable reading experience, depending on the specific reader and their sensitivity to such things.

Here are a couple sample sentences from the first two chapters that gave me pause and are representative of what I found difficult while reading.

“She carried her stocky build carefully back down the stairs.”

“Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance.”

I understand what both are probably saying. I do question the sentence construction.

However, I should point out that the review does say the story, which is the most important part of a book, is good. The effort of extracting the story through the errors and, at least to me, sometimes convoluted sounding language, made doing so much too difficult, IMO.

I would encourage anyone who thinks the story sounds interesting to sample the book. Read the first few chapters and decide for yourself.

Jacqueline Howett said…

My writing is just fine!

You did not download the fresh copy…. you did not. No way!

As to annoymous

Al was given the option of a free copy from smashwords the following day to download in any format he preffered.

Look AL, I’m not in the mood for playing snake with you, what I read above has no flaws. My writing is fine. You were told to download a new copy for format problems the very next day while they were free at Smashwords, so you could choose any format you wanted to read it in and if their were any spelling mistakes they were corrected. Simply remove this review as it is in error with you not downloading the fresh copy i insisted. Why review my book after being told to do this, and more annoying why have you never ever responded to any of my e-mails?

And please follow up now from e-mail.

This is not only discusting and unprofessional on your part, but you really don’t fool me AL.

Who are you any way? Really who are you?

What do we know about you?

You never downloaded another copy you liar!

You never ever returned to me an e-mail

Besides if you want to throw crap at authors you should first ask their permission if they want it stuck up on the internet via e-mail. That debate is high among authors.

Your the target not me!

Now get this review off here!

And it gets much, much worse . . .

March 29, 2011

Green technology breakthroughs

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

Dilbert.com

March 14, 2011

Analysis of the Fukushima reactor situation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Lewis Page sees the triple-whammy disaster that hit the Fukushima nuclear plant as proof of the design:

Let’s recap on what’s happened so far. The earthquake which hit on Friday was terrifically powerful, shaking the entire planet on its axis and jolting the whole of Japan several feet sideways. At 8.9 on the Richter scale, it was some five times stronger than the older Fukushima plants had been designed to cope with.

If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then. As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued — probably resulting in the worst thing that can happen to a properly designed nuclear reactor: a core meltdown in which the superhot fuel rods actually melt and slag down the whole core into a blob of molten metal. In this case the only thing to do is seal up the containment and wait: no radiation disaster will take place, but the reactor is a total writeoff and cooling the core off will be difficult and take a long time. Eventual cleanup will be protracted and expensive.

In fact, though the quake was far beyond design limits, all the reactors went into automatic shutdown perfectly: triumph number one. Control rods slammed into the cores, absorbing the neutrons spitting from the fuel rods and pinching off the uranium-fission chain reactions powering the plant.

[. . .]

For a few hours all was well. Then the tsunami — again, bigger than the plant had been built to cope with — struck, knocking out the diesel backups and the backup diesel backups.

Needless to say, this being a nuclear powerplant, there was another backup and this one worked despite having been through a beyond-spec quake and the tsunami. Battery power cut in and the cores continued to be cooled, giving the plant operators some hours of leeway to bring in mobile generators: triumph number three.

Unfortunately it appears that the devastation from the quake and tsunami was sufficient that mobile power wasn’t online at all the sites before the temperatures inside the cores began to climb seriously.

On the flip side, Colby Cosh finds the information sharing from the Japanese authorities to be less than helpful:

It’s a frustrating sequence of events to behold, and it has been made more so by the poor crisis management of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) and the Japanese government. A serious nuclear incident is the whole world’s concern, and TEPCO and Japan have an obligation to explain to the world just what has happened. But English-language reports from the state broadcaster, NHK, have been shockingly feeble and confused. TEPCO’s press releases, meanwhile, are masterpieces of indecipherable technical and even legal jargon. (“As the reactor pressure suppression function was lost, at 5:22am, Mar 12th, it was determined that a specific incident stipulated in article 15, clause 1 has occurred.”)

The global public has been left to figure out for itself what to make of hazy videos of nuclear power facilities exploding. What little context we can assemble, as we try to interpret such a mortifying sight, arrives mostly in shreds provided by Western oracles — ones who, in their turn, seem to mostly be working from supposition and indirect evidence, and who may not be particularly independent from the nuclear industry.

No one should forget, while trying to make sense of what’s happening in Japan, that something like 300 people died in major coal mining accidents around the world in 2010 alone. None of those accidents involved natural disasters, and probably not all of them even involved culpable human error. We just accept a certain quantum of mortality as the cost of keeping the lights on — when it comes to every means of power generation, that is, except nukes. A death toll in the single digits from the Fukushima troubles would represent an amazing triumph of design robustness. (Especially if we judge the quality of Japanese engineers and regulators by their competence at communications.)

February 8, 2011

Royal Navy to withdraw patrol from Caribbean

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The funding crisis for Britain’s Royal Navy is reported to be the reason for the cancellation of patrols in and around British dependencies in the West Indies:

Britain is to abandon its warship patrols of the Caribbean for the first time since the second world war because of the navy’s funding crisis, the Guardian has learned.

The withdrawal means the navy will no longer provide a warship for anti-narcotic operations in the region, and will have to reduce its role in disaster relief work.

The decision to stop the patrols, which is expected to be confirmed on Tuesday, comes at an embarrassing time for the Ministry of Defence — a documentary series on operations undertaken by the destroyer HMS Manchester in the Caribbean is due to start tonight. The programme on Channel Five follows the ship and crew throughout its seven month deployment last year.

September 2, 2010

If not the founder, at least a notable contributor

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

John Pilger pays “tribute” to one of the more persuasive contributors to both militarism and commercialism of the 20th century:

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the first world war, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the “intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses was an important element in democratic society” and that the manipulators “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country.” Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism “public relations.”

The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s liberation, he made cigarettes “torches of freedom.” In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically-elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit company’s monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a “liberation.”

Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that “engineering public consent” was for the greater good. This was achieved by the creation of “false realities” which then became “news events.”

Propaganda definitely existed before Bernays, but he may have been the one who codified and systematized the “science”.

August 9, 2010

I’ll have to remember to use this in future

Filed under: Cancon, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:50

As reported by Chris Taylor, Paul Jané coined exactly the right moniker to hang around Air Canada’s scrawny corporate neck:

Mapleflot

(more…)

July 19, 2010

QotD: “Happy now, whiners?”

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

On Thursday, I hoped that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would admit there’s a problem with the new iPhone’s antenna and apologize for pretending there wasn’t. I didn’t get that apology. Not even close. Instead, in a defensive press conference at Apple’s headquarters on Friday, Jobs argued that the new iPhone offers terrific, out-of-this-world reception. He blamed the media for whipping up a frenzy out of a “fact of life” that affects every phone on the market. As Jobs sees it, the only problems with the iPhone 4 are the pesky “laws of physics,” which pretty much ensure that anyone who holds a mobile phone in her hands is asking for trouble. The only reason people have been focusing on the iPhone is that blogs keep singling Apple out, perhaps because “when you’re doing well, people want to tear you down.”

Still, if you want to be a total jerk about it and keep insisting there’s a problem with your magical iPhone, Jobs has an offer for you. “OK, great, let’s give everybody a case,” he said. Happy now, whiners?

Farhad Manjoo, “Here’s Your Free Case, Jerk: Apple’s condescending iPhone 4 press conference”, Slate, 2010-07-16

July 18, 2010

Has the Reality-Distortion Field failed?

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Eric S. Raymond does a happy dance over the discomfiture of Steve Jobs in the (ongoing) iPhone 4 antenna debacle:

The stench of desperation must be getting pretty thick on the Infinite Loop. Can it be that the generator for Steve Jobs’s notorious Reality Distortion Field has finally broken down?

Two days ago, we learned that Jobs knew of the iPhone 4’s antenna problem before launch. They had warnings both from an in-house antenna engineer and “carrier partner”, presumably AT&T. Yes, this means all the Apple fanboys who had hissy fits at me when I said fifteen days ago that Apple was lying about the problem now get to go sit in the stupid corner.

[. . .]

A day ago, we got to watch Jobs tap-dance his way around the problem. This was a first; I cannot recall any previous instance in which the Turtlenecked One, rather than effectively controlling the agenda, has had to operate in full damage-control mode. He could have manned up and said “OK, we messed up on the antenna design, we’re recalling,” but no. Instead it’s bumper cases for all and a truly smarmy attempt to claim that everyone else in the industry is just as bad.

Way to recover your damaged reputation, Stevie boy! Time was when the wunderkind’s reality-distortion field would have somehow soothed everyone into glaze-eyed insensibility, but that’s not the way it’s going down today. Instead, there’s public pushback from both RIM and Nokia, and neither company is being shy about specifying just how far his Jobness has rammed his head up his own ass.

And there is absolutely no one else to blame for this; it’s obviously Job’s fetishism about cool industrial design, the aesthetic of the minimalistically slick-looking surface above all else, that compromised the antenna design and led him to ignore the warnings. The exact quality that Apple fanboys have been telling us would ultimately win the game for Jobs turns out to be the tragic flaw instead. And now he’s reduced to telling everyone to wrap a big ugly rubber on, it, sparky! Hubris and nemesis; this epic fail could be right out of Aeschylus.

Apple will survive this, but they need to rally the damage control teams and be pro-active, or their reputation will take years to recover . . . and it’s the reputation that allows Apple to charge more than the competition for broadly comparable goods.

June 17, 2010

The RCMP: determined to shed that do-good reputation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

Matt Gurney looks at the explicitly non-apologetic “apology” offered by the RCMP to the mother of Robert Dziekanski, and points out that the RCMP is its own worst enemy:

So, let’s get this straight. Four Mounties jump a confused, helpless man, who could have almost certainly been dealt with by a Polish-speaking translator and a few kind words, and they Taser him repeatedly, and he dies screaming and kicking. Then they confiscate the tape of the event, and an inquiry into the incident reveals appalling attempts by officers to provide false statements and generally whitewash the whole debacle. And the best the RCMP can muster up is to say, “Gee, that’s a shame. But we’re not really sorry.”

As soon as the tape of four Mounties repeatedly shocking a defenceless man became public, the Mounties should have realized they’d dug themselves an enormous hole and swiftly apologized for this tragedy. Instead, they circled the wagons and did their best to deny what was blindingly obvious — that their officers acted too fast, too violently and then refused to allow the medics who arrived soon after to properly treat a man who was dying before their eyes. It was callous and horrible and has badly shaken the faith millions of Canadians have in their police force, a force now known for corruption and institutional arrogance as much as they are for their iconic red uniforms.

That a high-ranked official such as Deputy Commissioner Bass would sit before a press conference and mouth words of sympathy and apology to the mother of a dead man whilst simultaneously assuring his colleagues that he doesn’t mean a word of it is disgusting and will only add to the calls for a total overhaul of the RCMP. It is a bitter irony that his make-believe apology was given, of all days, on April Fool’s Day. What will the next revelation in this unfolding farce be? Were his fingers crossed, too?

Update, 18 June: The report on this incident has been released, and while it stops short of calling the RCMP officers murderers, it does call the Tasering “unjustified”.

June 1, 2010

The flotilla incident

Filed under: Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:25

I’ve seen lots of posts about yesterday’s boarding of the Mavi Marmara from both pro- and anti-Israeli viewpoints. Adrian McNair has one of the most even-handed summaries:

When I first got wind of the news that Israeli Defense Forces had attacked a Turkish flotilla headed for the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean Sea, it was accompanied by the words “massacre”, describing the death of 10 pro-Palestinian demonstrators aboard one of the ships. But as Jonathan Kay wrote about the incident in the National Post, if Israel truly had wanted to “massacre” the Hamas sympathizers aboard the flotilla, they could have simply sunk them to the bottom of the Sea with torpedos.

The “massacres” and “genocide” on Gaza continues to go very poorly indeed, given the available firepower of the Israeli military. In fact, like all international incidents involving the IDF, once the fury dies down and the seas calm a little bit, we usually learn the true story of what really happened.

As a humanitarian effort, the flotilla was a waste of resources. As a propaganda tool, however, the flotilla was quite successful: most media reports will concentrate on the casualties and ignore the fact that Israeli forces clearly tried to avoid causing those casualties.

Several different videos seem to corroborate statements by the IDF that troops came under attack by the passengers, who were clearly enraged at having been boarded by the Israelis. To further avoid violence, the soldiers had been armed with paintball guns. If that sounds like something a military command would order with the intent to “massacre” civilians, it could not have been less effective.

After coming under attack, the commandos requested permission for the deployment of lethal force, which they were granted. Up to 10 activists are believed to have been killed in the ensuing melee, with some reports stating that the activists had got a hold of weapons from the soldiers and were firing at them.

Update: Kathy Shaidle advises the “this is terrible PR for Israel” conservatives to back off:

The raw anti-Semitism making the rounds yesterday certainly disturbed me.

However, more sinister (all the more so because it was well intentioned) was the tsking and moaning about how the flotilla incident was “bad PR” for Israel — five minutes after the news broke, no less.

“Who cares about the facts?! Think of how this looks!“

You sound like the leftists on the boat.

So-called pro-Israel “conservatives” who’ve read a couple of books and articles — and certainly have never been commandos, or even been on a boat that wasn’t shaped like a swan — really have no business debating the finer points of hand to hand combat at sea.

And they simply polluted the conversation yesterday with their tiresome, showoffy “tsk tsk” tweets and posts about “PR” and “optics.”

May 3, 2010

“Remember when reporters had guts?”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:16

Frequent commenter “Lickmuffin” sent this interesting link, suggesting:

This is sort of related to your “White House threatens to yank the ovaries out of those who would criticize The One” post [. . .] same tactics, really. And considering how reporters have become such wusses — perhaps they’ve all been hit with the German girlification spray — I believe it is accurate to say that all of them, especially the “males”, fear for their ovaries.

The White House post is here and the “girlification” post is here, in case you didn’t see them before.

Michael Malone is wondering where all the real reporters went, and remembers what it was like when he started in the field:

Remember when reporters had guts?

In the late Seventies, when I was just out of college, and even before I began my career as a journalist, I worked in public relations at Hewlett-Packard Co.

[. . .]

Simon broke insider stories, published internal strategy memos and pre-introduced secret projects, all with seeming abandon . . . leaving corporate PR departments, like us at HP, scrambling to do damage control and plug the leaks.

As the kid in HP corporate PR department, I both feared Simon for the damage he could do with his breaking stories — my turf was a hugely successful calculator business — and was in awe of his reporting skills. I also wasn’t allowed to talk much with him when he came into our offices for fear I would slip up and accidentally give my counterpart another news hook.It wasn’t until years later, when I was a reporter myself (and talked with Mark) that I came to realize that all Simon was doing was just good hard reporting.

So, what does this trip down memory lane have to do with modern reporters?

This week, Chen’s house was raided by officers from California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT), a special task force of police officers and federal agents created to combat computer-related crimes — and which just happens to have Apple on its steering committee. The cops took all of Chen’s computer equipment. Meanwhile, the San Mateo County District Attorney is considering whether to bring charges against Chen. It all hinges around whether California’s journalist shield law covers bloggers. Well, speaking as someone who was an investigative reporter for one of the nation’s top ten newspapers: of course it does.

This is appalling. As Instapundit uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds has rightly noted, this is basically “gangland politics” with one side getting to use to the police as its muscle. He’s also correct in noting that neither the police nor Apple would never have tried this against, say, the San Jose Mercury-News (I know because I worked there).

I’m still not clear if Apple played the role of Mafia don and ordered up a hit on Chen (to be performed by their soldiers in the REACT mob), or if someone with authority over REACT used them to attempt to curry favour with “Don” Jobs. Either way, it’s a very disturbing development.

Either way, it will function to continue and even accellerate the subservience of the media to (certain) corporate and political interests, which is not good for the public, the media, or even the temporarily favoured entities.

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