Decius wrote:

The media is a megaphone. Input goes in and is amplified. Its interest is in the dramatic, not the true. Its agents create drama where none exists. Those who are skilled at manipulating the media know how to point it toward favored drama. Those who are unskilled risk being the drama pointed at. The media's focus can bring wealth or recrimination, depending on how it comes. Mastering this is the key to mastering the broadcast society.

Who has displayed their mastery?

"The last topic in this message of mine has to do with the controversy that began a few days ago about the weapons of the resistance."

[...]

"We were surprised that some ministers leaked this topic [of the weapons]- the discussion and the difference of opinions - to several local and Arab TV channels, and thus the dispute and discussion on this began to grow more and more. What should have been a discussion behind closed doors became a public debate, and this, in my opinion, does not serve the national interest, and is totally inappropriate. In any event, I reiterate my call to restore this debate to its natural channels, which are well known."

[...]

"I would like to point out to some of those gentlemen and political groups that shifted the debate to the media and the public domain... I would like to point out some of their mistakes in this matter. First of all, there was a mistake in their timing, both psychologically and morally. In other words, today... Especially since this debate began before the ceasefire, or the so-called 'cessation of hostilities'... Lebanon was being bombed, its infrastructure was destroyed, all the Lebanese areas were hit, all the Lebanese were hit, but most of all the people of South Lebanon, of the Beqa' Valley, and of the southern suburb of Beirut."

[...]

"Do these people have no feelings, no emotions? Can these people possibly be viewed as political leaders with a high level of awareness, devoid of any feelings or emotions? What are they supposed to say and do?

Nasrallah upset about media leaks

HASSAN NASRALLAH and Ehud Olmert both say they won. But in asymmetrical warfare, the test of victory is asymmetrical too.

Nasrallah wins the war | Economist

New England gets a taste of what the Southeast deals with every year.

Three New England governors declared states of emergency as torrential rains flooded parts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine yesterday, washing out roads, flooding basements, and forcing emergency evacuations.

In Massachusetts, members of the National Guard and Red Cross and emergency workers from 20 state and local agencies worked to evacuate people in Peabody and Melrose after sewage backed up into apartment buildings. Five feet of water sloshed over downtown Peabody yesterday afternoon, rendering useless the sandbags laid out on Saturday. In Melrose, local officials requested boats in case they needed them to help rescue stranded residents, emergency officials said.

With river levels rising throughout the region, and rain expected to continue, emergency management officials predicted more flooding over the next several days, especially in Middlesex and Essex counties, the areas already hardest hit.

"This is going to get worse before it gets better," said Peter Judge, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. "We're having a hard time anticipating how extensive the damage will be."

"It's a very serious situation," said New Hampshire governor John Lynch, adding that forecasters were predicting 12 to 15 inches of rain by the end of the storm in parts of southern New Hampshire.

A deluge of woes for region

Decius wrote:

"The question of how economics is taught in France, both at the bottom and at the top of the educational pyramid, is at the heart of the current crisis," said Jean-Pierre Boisivon, director of the Enterprise Institute, a company-financed institute that sponsors the internship program for economics teachers that Scache took part in.

This is the most intelligent analysis of the protests in France that I've seen thus far. The students are doing exactly what they have been taught to do.

If you found this interesting:

Durrleman, a former adviser to Chirac, said he aims to make future leaders studying at ENA more aware of how companies work. He has overhauled both the entry exam and the program to include topics related to applied economics and business administration. Since 2003, all students at ENA must go on a one-month internship in a company; 20 percent of the 100 students do a six-month corporate internship. From next year, everyone will have to spend at least three months in the private sector.

"I believe we need more cross-fertilization in France," Durrleman said. "Companies create wealth, they finance the state. The state must understand companies."

You may be interested in the review of new books on globalization in the New York Review of Books:

Berger is clear that acting on their own, companies cannot make all the needed adjustments. Governments have a major part in creating an environment in which businesses can plan for the future, but how governments do this will depend on the type of capitalism they must deal with. As she acknowledges in a lucid discussion, capitalism comes in several varieties reflecting different cultural traditions and political systems. Within this wide variety two different kinds of market economy can be distinguished:

liberal market economies, like Britain's and the United States', in which allocation and coordination of resources takes place mainly through markets; and coordinated market economies, like Germany's and Japan's, in which negotiation, long-term relationships, and other nonmarket mechanisms are used to resolve the major issues.

These divergent capitalisms are competing and they learn from one another but the result is cross-fertilization, not evolution toward a single model. What works well varies not only from company to company but also from country to country. There is no one set of policies or institutions that can yield prosperity in all societies—or for all companies. The belief that globalization means the triumph of one way of doing business is not only historically false. It is a dangerously mistaken basis for corporate strategy. As Berger puts it, summarizing the results of the years of research conducted by her team:

Succeeding in a world of global competition is a matter of choices, not a matter of searching for the one best way -- we discovered no misconception about globalization more dangerous than this illusion of certainty.

Economics, French-style | IHT

Decius wrote:

Yeah, this is a partisan source, but I think ABC is likely to be reasonable.... We'll see what they say...

The information seems to be that: Iraq had dealings with Al'Q back in 1992/1993. They bought a limited amount of chemical and biological stuff back in 2000.

What are "dealings"? Anyway, it was likely opportunistic on both sides and not a strategic arrangement. If Saddam had rebuffed them, Al Qaeda could have gone elsewhere -- to Pakistan, for example, where they might have been offered nuclear materials or technology. So perhaps the US owes thanks to Saddam for sating their appetite with World War I-era technology.

As for as the "dealings" -- the US had substantial dealings with Islamist jihadists as late as 1989, funneling huge sums of money, weapons, and technical and operational support through Pakistan over a sustained period of several years. Our "ties" to the mujahideen were much stronger than Saddam's ever were, but no one ever seriously suggested this relationship as a basis for toppling the US government.

Peter Bergen -- a journalist who has worked for/with CNN, ABC, NYT, LA Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and more -- met extensively with Osama bin Laden, conducted formal interviews of him, etc. Yet he won awards for his previous book, and he has a new book just now in stores.

'Dealings' between Iraq and Al Qaeda

It turns out that looking at the aggregation of billions of search queries people type into Google reveals something about our curiosity, our thirst for news, and perhaps even our desires. Considering all that has occurred in 2005, we thought it would be interesting to study just a few of the significant events, and names that make this a memorable year. (We’ll leave it to the historians to determine which ones are lasting and which ephemeral.) We hope you enjoy this selective view of our collective year.

Google Press Center: Zeitgeist

The Wall Street Journal Online is free this week.

Free This Week Only: WSJ.com

NEW ORLEANS is battered and submerged today. But it will rise again because it is — and always has been — the single most important cog in the nation's economy.

What does historical social geography have in common with open-source intelligence? Read on ...

George Friedman, on New Orleans' raison d'être

A lot of really good pictures in this series from someone who stayed in the French Quarter through the disaster.

Kodakgallery.com: NOLA Slideshow

Acidus gives Elonka a run for the money. Way to go Acidus!

How scary. And how refreshing.

Make, a new quarterly put out by O'Reilly Media, is a throwback to an earlier time, before personal computers, to the prehistory of geekiness - the age of how-to manuals for clever boys, from the 1920's to the 50's.

The technology has changed, but not the creative impulse. Make's first issue, out in February, explained how to take aerial photographs with a kite, a disposable camera and a rig of Popsicle sticks, rubber bands and Silly Putty. It also showed how to build a video-camera stabilizer - a Steadicam, basically - with $14 worth of steel pipes, bolts and washers; how to boost a laptop computer's Wi-Fi signal with foil from an Indian take-out restaurant; and how to read credit card magnetic stripes with a device made with mail-order parts and a glue gun.

Congratulations to Acidus on being the first MemeStreams user to make the New York Times op-ed page. And on a Sunday, no less! (14:59, 14:58, 14:57, ...)

A New Magazine's Rebellious Credo: Void the Warranty!