Week of April 1, 2002
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

FACT-CHECKING: Louise Kehoe's Financial Times column on blogs isn't snotty, and it does a decent job of surveying the field. But it exhibits the kind of carelessness about facts I've come to associate (perhaps unfairly) with the British press. Andrew Sullivan didn't say he "expects to be able to draw a salary 'more than comparable' with his earnings as former editor of The New Republic." He said, "I will be able to pay myself a salary more than comparable to my salary at The New Republic. It won't make me rich, but it sure will pay the rent and then some." This is the sort of statement that a good reporter asks about. Yes, Andrew used to be editor of TNR, quite some years ago. But his most recent job there was as the TRB columnist, presumably at a significantly lower salary than the editor makes. FT readers shouldn't get the idea that blogging, even at Sullivan levels, pays executive salaries, especially since it generally doesn't pay minimum wage. Kehoe should have checked.

And, while we're on the subject of former jobs, I haven't been "editor of Reason magazine" since January 2000, and I haven't even been on the Reason payroll since the first of this year. It's all right there on my bio page. You don't even have to contact me.

On a more substantive point, I think the "there are no editors" point is overrated, for a couple of reasons. First, what bloggers do is one of the most important functions of editors: selecting interesting stories. By writing this page, instead of just my columns and books, I get to do the sort of thing I did at Reason, directing readers to writers I think have important or interesting things to say. What I don't get to do is commission articles on subjects I want explored but lack the time or expertise to do myself (although sometimes I get lucky and write something that inspires some other editor to assign a story). And, of course, bloggers can't poke at articles before they're printed, only afterwards.

Second, and this is the point I've made in numerous interviews, the experience of writing without editors is nothing new for me. I spent 10 years doing my most important writing—my Reason columns—without an editor. Yes, I had a lot of smart colleagues, but (maybe because I'm so bossy) they mostly pointed out typos and the occasional bad sentence, not fundamental errors of fact or reasoning. Yes, writing Reason columns was harder and more disciplined than blogging, but that wasn't because there was some big mean editor standing over me. It was because I had a responsibility to the magazine and its readers, not only to do a good job but, for instance, to offer new and intelligent insights on whatever the most important story of the day, regardless of my personal inclinations. (Those insights also had to stay good for at least six weeks, because of the lag between the writing and the magazine's delivery.) And over the years, I wrote many editorials through stake-through-the-eye migraines, something I simply don't do for you dear blog readers.

On the subject of editors, I do want to thank Steven Rosenfeld, who's some sort of copy or news editor at the NYT (the organizational structure is unclear to me). It's been years since an editor flagged a factual error in one of my pieces, and he caught a dumb arithmetic mistake in my last column, saving me and possibly my sources from embarrassment. In response to his questions, he and I also came up with a couple of sentence tweaks that made the column clearer. I'm generally one of those prima donna writers that editors hate, but that's only because I don't like stupid changes. I appreciate good editing. (Paul Golob, the editor on TFAIE, was great, making suggestions that made the book much better.) Steve Rosenfeld's work on my last column, which I'm sure was just one of many stories he handled that day, represent the Times system at its best. That's the sort of thing you can say in a blog, but never in print. [Posted 4/7.]

MORE SUGAR: The Christian Science Monitor is the latest paper to pick up the story on how sugar protectionism and subsidies are killing the U.S. candy-manufacturing business, a major sugar consumer. Laurent Belsie notes that:

For two decades, the US has supported its sugarcane growers in the South and sugarbeet producers in the North by sharply limiting imports. The policy is blatantly protectionist. But sugar farmers point out that most other countries subsidize growers, too.

The result is that many American and international consumers end up paying artificially high prices for sugar, while the remainder is dumped on world markets at rock-bottom prices.

Here in the US, consumers—including candymakers—pay at least twice the world-market price. That's why America's soft-drink makers long ago shifted from sugar to corn syrup to sweeten their beverages. Candymakers usually can't make that change, especially in high-sugar-content hard candy. business, a major sugar consumer.

Aside from hurting U.S. consumers, including manufacturers who need a protected product as an input, protectionism demoralizes free-trade supporters abroad. As Xavier Lewis, who works for the EU when he isn't visiting for the year at Harvard, writes:

The iposts on The Scene about sugar caused me some dismay. There is nothing wrong with anything that was written, quite the contrary. You'll be sad to learn, and not in the least surprised, that the European Community has a similarly protected and subsidised sugar market. The whole point of it is the protection of large beet growers in northern Europe. That protection in turn has had a deleterious effect on cane growers in less fortunate parts of the world. In the name of "development", the European Community then undertakes to purchase certain quantities of cane sugar from developing countries. The upshot is a market which is highly regulated, the prices fixed at just abut every stage of production to the great benefit of the large beet producers and industrial beet refiners.

The European Commission, having realised for a long time that the situation was untenable, recently proposed to the Member States of the EC to overhaul the system. Guess what? The Member States refused to do so—even those states often vocal in their complaints against the Common Agricultural Policy refused.

If the USA cannot get its act together on sugar, who can then?

ASCII STAR WARS: In an amazing bit of do-it-yourself cleverness, someone has used Java to create a version of Star Wars in which the scenes are animated in ASCII code (that's typewriter script for you non-techies over the age of 40). It has to be seen to be believed. (Via Dave Farber's Interesting People list.)

Addendum: Reader Patrick Nielsen Hayden writes:

It's even cleverer than you think—whoever made that animation didn't "use Java to create" it, they used the much less forgiving language of ANSI terminal escape sequences. It "plays" on a simple telnet-style terminal! Java is merely being used by that particular website as a way of displaying the animation. For a long time there was a site in the Netherlands that you could telnet to and watch this thing run.

In other words, this was entirely created with technologies that predate the Web and Java by years and years. A triumph of creativity and determination over common sense...

That will teach me to take IP postings at face value (not that I could tell the difference if I investigated). [Posted 4/7.]

BOOKS UPDATE: If you ordered a signed copy of TFAIE via PayPal by last Friday, your book is on its way. If you'd like to order a copy, click the cover to the left. Please be sure to note to whom you want it signed. (PayPal provides a space for comments; use it!) I also accept mail orders. Email me for the address. Thanks for all the interest. [Posted 4/6.]

VICTIMHOOD POLITICS: Several readers have written to object to my comment, in the post on Norah Vincent's weak LAT column, that the diversity of blogs "doesn't serve the sort of victimhood politics so beloved on the right." Some were just puzzled. Evelyn Palmeri was more vociferous:

What are you talking about? Victimhood is a wholly owned subsidiary of the left.

There are so few women on the net that your website has been taken more seriously by your fellow bloggers than it merits.

Very long-winded, very bossy, very know-it-all, very boring. Absolutely nothing new or insightful over the past several weeks of reading.

If you really think that victimhood is beloved on the right, you are nuts. Remember, you're not paranoid if they are out to get you. The media, academe, entertainment industry, publishing, organized religion, etc. are all left wing (check what members of the Nobel prize committee are saying). Only a few radio talk shows, some Fox programming, a couple of newspapers and the internet can be thought of as right wing. It's something like Israel vs. hundreds of millions of Arabs. Israel will win, but it won't be pretty.

Thanks partly to the 9/11 attacks and partly to the internet, people are getting it now.

When you've spent as many years as I have in right-of-center circles, you have heard many, many, many hours of people sitting around tables belly-aching about how they are so put upon and victimized by all the forces Ms. Palmeri invokes (except organized religion, which is doing pretty well by conservatives). After a while, the bitching and moaning get pretty tiresome—and pretty self-destructive.

Some conservatives and libertarians try to do something about this problem, starting the kinds of alternative institutions that infuriate people on the left. But a lot of them just complain. Like the environmental groups who will never admit that any environmental problem might ever get better, like civil rights leaders who act like nothing's changed since 1950, they don't acknowledge progress, and they show little interest in doing anything to make the current situation better. They like being victims. It's psychologically, politically, and financially rewarding. They use whining to build solidarity and raise money. And they reward writers who complain loudly, regardless of merit or evidence, as Norah Vincent was doing in her LAT piece.

Don't get me wrong: The left has definitely perfected the rhetoric and politics of victimhood. But victimhood is not, unfortunately, "a wholly owned subsidary of the left." It is the explanation for every conservative or libertarian failure to persuade. Yes, media bias exists. But so does racism. Neither is unsurmountable, and neither is anywhere close to as bad as it was 30 years ago. Conservatives and libertarians, like various racial minorities, should stop whining, take advantage of the many opportunities they already have, and use their brains and entrepreneurial spirit to create more.

But maybe it's just bossy of me to say so. [Posted 4/5.]

PENTAGON ATTACK: In response to the crank French best-seller claiming the Pentagon attack didn't happen, a reader who works for Boeing and asks that I withhold his name and department writes:

When I got the reports of 9/11 across my desk, I was stunned. Of course, I had heard the reports on the radio while driving into work. I even had to explain a little of what it all meant to my 8 year old son, who I was taking to school at the time.

Sitting at my desk, though, the cold hard reality really set in. Terrorists had used our products that I had worked on for years...to kill innocent people.

There are no words to describe the multitude of feelings that I had. Anger, sadness, and more- the whole gamut of negative emotions ran through me.

The point of all this? It would be different if the attack(s) of 9/11 were a hoax—but they weren't. Especially the attack on the Pentagon. There, a 757, with passengers and crew on board, didn't disappear into thin air—it ended up buried into the grounds of the Pentagon, killing as it went, and that's a fact. 3 other Boeing airplanes were used as murder weapons as well on that day, obviously. I'm focusing on the Pentagon attack only here.

Now, a few loonies with their own agendas want to trivialize all of this by proclaiming it a "hoax". They have no facts or data, just conjecture and an astounding lack of understanding of physics. How does that make me feel? "Pissed off" would be a good start.

I've reviewed the photos on the "hoax" website, and basically all that it proves is that the authors don't know the first thing about aircraft crash dynamics....

Anyway, I just thought I'd share a little outrage towards these "hoax theorists"—they hurt, not help. The truth is out there, all right—it's right here in front of us!

And my friend Xavier Lewis, late of Brussels and currently spending the year in Boston, writes:

This Meyssan business intrigues me. Naturally, I have not read the book. I do not want to purchase it because I do not want my money to end up in the author's pocket. So, on the substance of the author's thesis I cannot opine.

The Boston Globe reported that the author worked for "le Réseau Voltaire", characterised as a leading left wing "think tank". I had never heard of it. A search on the internet revealed that the organisation does have a web site. It purports to be an organisation devoted to "the freedom of expression". Even a cursory glance at the contents of the site makes clear that it is as devoted to the principle of "freedom of expression" as Larry Flynt is or was.

The same internet search revealed that a web site affiliated to Lyndon LaRouche states in a matter of fact way that "réseau Voltaire" is linked to the French secret services. [Of course, the LaRouchies think pretty much everything is linked to everything else.—vp]

Res ipsa loquitur !

So, the French secret services are promoting "freedom of expression" ? Perhaps they should, but it does not seem an obvious thing for any secret service to do.

It should be pointed out that the daily paper "Libération" which is left wing (but has critical faculties) "slammed the book as ''a tissue of wild allegations,'' marvelling at its quick rise from Internet chatrooms, via television talk shows, to bestseller." (according to the Boston Globe).

Why then are folks spending their salaries on such a book? And don't forget that France is a high tax country so disposable income is less there than in the US!

Contrary to the thesis of the Boston Globe according to which conspiracy theories are rare in France, I contend that they are extremely popular there. France is as fertile a country for them as anywhere else. When I was a kid, all sorts of stories were going around: De Gaulle was up to this, Pompidou, his wife and her bodyguard were up to something else (I remember weird stories involving the actor Alain Delon), that Giscard d'Estaing too was conspiring left, right and centre and as for Mitterrand, well, the list of rumoured goings-on is really, really long.

In short, the "Conspiracy Museum" in Dallas (have you been there ?) could open a branch in France—in Lyons or Nice, for example—and do well. Now there's a business opportunity! I suspect though that Meyssan and his Cabaret Voltaire have tapped that seam first.

[Posted 4/5.]

WHO NEEDS HATE CRIME LAWS? On September 15 and October 4, a Dallas-area man went on a post-9/11 "patriotic" killing spree. First, he shot and killed the Pakistani-born owner of a convenience store. Next, he shot and blinded the Bangladeshi-born attendant at a gas station. A couple weeks later, he shot and killed the Indian-born employee of another gas station, which he also robbed. He confessed to the killings but claimed patriotic motives as a defense.

Thursday, a Dallas County jury took less than four hours to hand down a death sentence in the third shooting, the first to go to trial. The Dallas Morning News report is here. If you're going to murder innocent people for "patriotic" motives, don't do it in Texas. Try some place in Europe. [Posted 4/5.]

MORE ON LIBERTARIAN ISOLATION: Jay Manifold, a veteran of Libertarian Party activism, offers what he promises is the first of a couple of posts on the problems with treating national defense as something "unnecessary or merely passive." I suspect that the quasi-official libertarian policy of eschewing defense beyond national borders (if that) is starting to crack. There are just too many libertarians who think it doesn't make any sense.

One thing libertarians of all stripes—and non-libertarians with a modicum of common sense—can agree on is that it would be insane to send American troops to try to keep the Israelis and Palestinians from fighting with each other. But a troubling number of respectable commentators seem to think that's a good idea. [Posted 4/4.]

PET PEEVE: Why can't reporters get the idea that Taliban is plural? Do they think all plurals end in -s? [Posted 4/4.]

BLOG BULL: Norah Vincent is a talented, iconoclastic writer. I was pleased to publish her when I was editing Reason. Unfortunately, she's also a writer who by dint of ambition and demographics has found herself writing strident pieces that sometimes are, to put it politely, a bit underresearched and for which she is praised and attacked in ways that are more predictable than accurate. Take today's LAT column on blog critics. Here's the thesis:

Why are Web logs so infuriating to their shrewish detractors? Is it really the narcissism? Or is it the political opinions being expressed? Ask yourself this question: If Palestinian intellectual Edward W. Said were blogging, would Alterman and Beam be calling him a navel gazer? Or would they praise his brave alternative point of view and complain that the mainstream press is too conservative?

My friend Glenn Reynolds and my occasional email pal Andrew Sullivan have used their mighty sites to plug this column, which tells bloggers and their fans what they want to hear. But the column isn't any good. The thesis is simply wrong.

First of all, Alex Beam is not some kind of totalitarian lefty. He's a conventional center-left, if not center-center, journalist. He just suffers from the big-newspaper convention of assuming there's "one best way" to do all journalism, a single genre with a single purpose and a single standard of quality. But he doesn't even hate blogs per se. He wrote a nice piece about Kausfiles back in 1999. It's not online, but here are a few passages via Nexis:

It is the journalistic equivalent of the naked bootleg, the football play in which the quarterback deserts his blockers and runs alone against the opposing team. In this example, a seasoned journalist abandons the comforting context (and the paycheck) of a newspaper or magazine, and hangs out a shingle, saying to readers, in effect: Forget the others! Read only me!

Now rolling out on the naked bootleg is policy scribe Mickey Kaus, formerly of the New Republic, Newsweek, and the on-line magazine Slate. Sometime last spring, Kaus decided he had had enough of working for other people. So he has become the owner-occupier of one of the more interesting single-family dwellings on the Web: kausfiles.com....

Kaus is churning out Pretty Serious Journalism. The author of a well-reviewed book on welfare, he writes punchy and informative copy on a subject that puts normal people to sleep. He can be very funny, and he's good in attack mode, especially when tilting against the mediacracy....

It's highly unlikely that someone with a taste for Kaus would go soft on Edward Said, and before a journalist says so she ought to do some basic research. How many of Beam's columns did Norah Vincent read before making wild charges that he had a political agenda? Her column offers no evidence whatsoever of that motive. (Eric Alterman is another matter, but he writes for The Nation, which is as marginal as any blog.) There are many more likely explanations, from taste (obviously a factor) to establishment fear to the rewards of snide rhetoric.

In its own way, Vincent's column is as ignorant of the medium as the articles she attacks. There are tens of thousands of blogs, and most—including some of the most famous—aren't about politics. Even among the political blogs that are well known to readers of Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds, there are liberal writers. Indeed a leftward tilt one reason some bloggers seem so obsessed with marginal figures like Michael Moore and Ted Rall; they don't like having those guys discrediting their political camp.

It's true that the blogosphere opens commentary to outsiders. But political orientation is the least important source of exclusion. Many op-ed pages, including the LAT's, are eager to prove they're diverse, publishing conservatives, libertarians, hard leftists, gays, women, blacks, Latinos, and especially people who can combine some of this diversity into a single package. (News pages are less diverse—for complex reasons of history, culture, and self-selection—but blogs aren't substitutes for news.)

What's great about blogs is that they open the national debate to people in places outside the Bos-Wash corridor, to people whose credentials are unusual, to nonjournalists with specialized knowledge, to people who aren't graduates of the Harvard Crimson, to people who've never worked for Marty Peretz, Irving Kristol, or Bill Buckley. That diversity has nothing to do with Norah Vincent's column. It doesn't serve the sort of victimhood politics so beloved on the right. And it's too complicated for conventional commentary. [Posted 4/4.]

PETITION RETRACTION: You know those famous petitions in which prominent lefties signed onto the campaign to make cloning cells a criminal act? Chris Mooney of The American Prospect breaks the news that a lot of famous people had no idea what they were signing:

Though Rifkin's 68-name list does include some true-believing environmentalists and feminists who continue to make common cause with Brownback, a number of its more influential signatories have begun to back frantically away from the statement. Many are stunned to discover they had put their name put to a petition arguing for the criminalization of medical research. City University of New York sociologist Stanley Aronowitz can't remember signing the petition but says that if he did, it was because "I get 100 e-mails a day and I acted too hastily." Tikkun editor Michael Lerner, who has since switched petitions along with Norsigian and Gitlin, admits that "I made an error in endorsing beyond what I actually believed." Quentin Young, former president of the American Public Health Association, has now signed a petition to defend research cloning. (The Rifkin statement, he says, "was kind of subtle and I misread it.") And then there's Howard Zinn. In a phone interview, the famously left-wing author of A People's History of the United States asked to have the difference between stem cells and cloned embryos explained to him. Then he admitted, "I think you should be responsible for what you sign, and that's why I regret signing [the Rifkin petition]. Because I didn't really know the issues."

Even Our Bodies, Ourselves co-author Judy Norsigian, who co-sponsored the first petition circulated by Jeremy Rifkin and who milked the petition drive for lots of publicity, is now having second thoughts. (Maybe the next edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves will back off from the anti-technology stance on birth control pills.)

Interestingly, when I was asking for contributions to this symposium of opposing views, lots of people turned me down because they hadn't had a chance to study the issue. I don't know whether it's just easier to sign a petition than to write something or whether I was asking a more respectable group of intellectuals. But the contrast is striking. [Posted 4/4.]

COSMETIC DENTISTRY: "The dental profession's traditional domain, centered around the eradication of disease, now finds itself on the threshold of uncharted territory: the enhancement of appearance," declared a 1999 cover article in The Journal of the American Dental Association. That's in chapter one of my book-in-progress. It may be joined, on revision, by a quote from this recent Slate article, which opens: "Tooth whiteners are primed to be the next deodorant: a once-optional form of personal hygiene that's now simply an obligation. It's only a matter of time because the more of us who get whitened, the grungier your unwhitened teeth will appear in contrast."

The boom in cosmetic dentistry, which erases the line between medical treatment and biological enhancement, would make Leon Kass shudder if he knew about it. But, fear not, there are still a few patients with really screwed up teeth and gums. Dentists wouldn't need cosmetic practices if every patient had a mouth like my morning dental appointment discovered mine to be. What a mess. On the other hand, if every patient waited three or four or five (or was it six?) years between checkups, dentists wouldn't have any business to start with. Let this be a lesson to you, dear readers. If you can't answer the question, "When was your last cleaning?" you've probably waited too long. [Posted 4/4.]

LIBERTARIAN ISOLATIONISTS: Brink Lindsey has a long, important post on the "antiwar" libertarians who are fast becoming anti-American, even anti-market, cozying up to people like Gore Vidal and Pat Buchanan. ("Fast becoming" makes this seem like a newer phenomenon than it is. Actually, it's decades-old.) Brink explains the phenomenon and its flaws well.

Fundamentally, these libertarians are less interested in creating, maintaining, and defending free societies than they are in destroying states, any states, never mind what replaces them. Hence, Murray Rothbard, the intellectual source of much of this worldview, notoriously rejoiced at the fall of Saigon, because it represented the end of a state—as if anarchist utopia followed. (In a nice publishing irony, his article appeared in the same issue of Reason as the Ronald Reagan interview.) Such anti-state libertarians often slip very quickly into alliances with the anti-trade, anti-immigration, anti-cosmopolitan reactionaries of the left and right. They imagine that at some golden age in the past, their perfect world existed until it was ruined by foreigners, industry, abolitionists, or some other force of change.

In his excellent posting, Brink does miss a crucial point at this particular moment: Libertarians aren't just important because of issues like school choice and Social Security reform (which he mentions). We're important because we raise essential, long-term objections—both pragmatic and principled (a dichotomy I don't entirely accept)—to giving the cause of "security" a free pass to do whatever happens to be on someone's state-expanding wish list.

As a wise libertarian said on September 11, while most of the rest of us were still reeling:

It's Not Just Terrorists Who Take Advantage: Someone will propose new "Antiterrorism" legislation. It will be full of things off of bureaucrats' wish lists. They will be things that wouldn't have prevented these attacks even if they had been in place yesterday. Many of them will be civil-liberties disasters. Some of them will actually promote the kind of ill-feeling that breeds terrorism. That's what happened in 1996. Let's not let it happen again.

Libertarians are valuable, even if you don't agree with us, because our minds don't turn to pliable mush when someone suggests that our lives will be safer if only we'll just expand the police power. We ask whether it's worth giving up liberties for safety, whether the liberties involved are "essential" and not to be forfeited, and whether we'll even get any safety in the exchange. We think about whether we want those powers to be in place when the emergency has passed and the inevitable petty corruption of bureaucratic interests has set in. We think about whether we'd want those powers in the hands of those who might use them against domestic political enemies, for petty purposes of their own. (Think, for instance, about the convenience of making green-card holders "disappear" to a president embroiled in a fund-raising scandal involving foreign money.) In other words, we ask unpopular but important questions.

Those questions are a lot harder to take seriously from people who hate America —or encourage those who do—and who dream of a static, stateless utopia. [Posted 4/4.]

LOCAL BOONDOOGLE: If you're ever in Dallas, take a ride on the McKinney Avenue Trolley. After all, your tax dollars are paying for it. My latest D Magazine column looks at how a once-modest project to add olde time charm to a neighborhood has become a high-priced (and damned annoying) transit boondoggle. The Dallas establishment genuinely does not seem to know the difference between public and private funds, especially if the tax money comes from afar. [Posted 4/3.]

GOOD STUFF: Lots of good science posts on Charles Murtaugh's blog, including a lucid and interesting discussion of recent papers on embryonic stem cell research. And Joanne Jacobs has her usual good education stuff, including good news on a Chicago charter school—it has to close because it's failing—and bad news on California college students—they can't do seventh-grade math and the Cal State system apparently thinks it's because black and Latino students are stupid. [Posted 4/3.]

WASHINGTON, 9/11: Incensed by the wacko French bestseller that claims the Pentagon attack didn't happen, The Last Page offers a moving, horrifying account of coping with that attack from what appears to be USA Today's headquarters. Here's just a snippet of an item that should be read in its entirety, especially since the full effects of the DC attacks got lost in the drama of the World Trade Center's collapse:

Forgive me, Mr. Meyssan, I really need to know because on that day, not unlike the rest of America, I was wholly and irrevocably changed.

So what was happening, sir, when I heard a coworker scream, "JESUS H. CHRIST!" and turned my head to the window next to me to see the Pentagon, the center of our country's defense, explode, EXPLODE, I say, into a vicious, vile and evil fury of the likes I have never seen nor ever want to again, but do, in my nightmares. I have never seen orange that vivid, that intense, smoke that black.

And tell me why, sir, I have lain awake at night trying to remember that horrific sound that everyone says I heard. I think if I can just hear it, remember it, the whole picture will fall into place again and I will finally forget.

But I wouldn't know what that picture is, Mr. Meyssan, because the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon didn't happen.

(Via AsparaGirl.) [Posted 4/3.]

YAY! I can see the site via my Megapath connection. Maybe it was my email to tech support, or maybe this DNS change really is propagating through the Internet. Sorry for any difficulty people may have have had hitting the page. The good news is that readers tell me it loads faster with the new host. I'll also be able to get better statistics. Thanks for all the emailed tech support. If you're just reading the item below, you can ignore the plea for help. [Posted 4/3.]

MORE TECH MYSTERIES: When Alex Beam has a technical problem, he has a whole Boston Globe tech support department to help him. I have you. Fortunately, that means I have access to a pool of technical talent the Globe could never afford even if we we weren't having an advertising depression. And you donate your time. What great readers. Helping me is like Linux, only less mentally taxing.

So in the further adventures of Dynamist.com's move to a new server, here's the problem: If you're reading this—and from your emails, I know many of you are—you're seeing the site on the new server. But some readers, including yours truly, can only see the old Megapath site (which starts with the New Coke/WSJ item below) even though Register.com says that it's no longer pointing the domain name to Megapath's nameservers.

What gives? Do I just wait another 24 hours? (It's been the advertised two days already.) I've refreshed my browser, trashed my caches, and rebooted my computer a few times, so I don't think the problem is on my laptop. If we can solve this problem, I'll be ready to take all the great advice I've gotten about that pesky AvantGo spider infestation.* Thanks!

*And I can tell you my secret plan for Middle East peace. Except I don't have one. Sorry. [Posted 4/2.]

ON BEAM AND BLOGS: I've been out all day, learning all about megachurch design for a future D Magazine column. So I haven't joined the piling on party in response to Alex Beam's snarky Boston Globe column about blogs, with its incredibly embarrassing line about Bjorn Staerk's "Stalinist" site. (Hint to Alex: When a well-known libertarian links to a site, noting rather strongly that the date is April 1, and when that site appears to be Stalinist, something just might be up.) Rather than elaborate at this point—I've got to cook dinner (more meat and potatoes, in honor of the Jewish Spring Potato Festival) and watch Buffy—I'll post some useful background correspondence with my insights on blogs. My basic take on Beam: It's dynamism vs. stasis, once again. (If that doesn't mean anything to you, read my book, or at least the introduction)

Virginia, I am thinking of writing, uncharitably, about Blogistan in general, although I have followed your work for some time and would pick a nit, much less a quarrel, with you only against my better judgment.

But really—what is the signal-to-noise ratio here? You, Kaus, keep the coherence level high day by day, but ... after that, le blog-uge.

Any comments? Does working on the web site each day keep you sharp, alert you to various journalistic possibilities? Do you have several thousand followers? Several hundred? Millions? Do some books get sold?

Liked the C-SPAN clip

Best wishes, Alex Beam/Boston Globe

Here's my reply (links added), which, beyond the first sentence, had no apparent effect on the resulting article:

I don't post every day. I post when it's convenient—not when I'm traveling or on deadline, for instance—and when I have something to say. The "something" may be a mini-argument, a reference to somewthing I've written elsewhere, a reader's letter, or a reference to another piece (although I rarely to pure "read this" posts with no comments). When I post, I usually post a lot. But I am not a daily poster.

Blogs—by which we really mean a few dozen political-commentary blogs, since there are tens of thousands of other kinds—serve different sorts of purposes.

Some are primarily referrals to articles or arguments (usually on other blogs) of interest. Much of the material on Glenn Reynolds' site falls into this category, although he also posts arguments on subjects he knows and cares a lot about. I doubt that anyone much reads every such linked article, but the referrals are valuable since there's so much to sift through on the web.

Others are a more civilized version of online discussion groups. Because each person has his or her own site, the reader who wants to follow the discussion does not have to read stupid flamers or irrelevant comments. You can read the blogs you know to be interesting and ignore the rest. Or if there's a discussion of a topic you find uninteresting, you can ignore it. I don't know if you subscribe to any listserve discussion groups, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much lower than with blogs—for the simple reason that it's easy to tune out blogs you don't find valuable.

As a reader, I tend to be less interested in the blog-to-blog discussions, although I'll follow one if the particular topic is of interest. The sense of community created by reading blogs is, however, a key to their vitality and success. That's why reader tips and letters are important and why blogs refer to each other. Blogs create a participatory feeling while preserving some of the filtering advantages of gatekeepers.

That participatory feeling is, I think, the major reason the phenomenon expanded so rapidly after September 11. After the attacks, people wanted very much to know what other Americans—and people around the world—were thinking and feeling, and blogs provided a vehicle for hearing from people you felt some connection to. If you go back to my archives for that period, you'll find that the content of the site is quite different from the norm before 9/11 or today—lots and lots of postings from readers, reflecting an enormous amount of email.

As a writer, blogs provide a vehicle for quick commentary. That's valuable to me, since I'm a) constrained by other writing obligations b) easily forgotten here in Texas. Joanne Jacobs, who was well known, at least in my circles, when she was writing for the San Jose Mercury News, is in a similar position now that she's mostly writing a book. James Lileks, who has many big fans including me, is a local columnist in a paper no one outside the local area reads. I don't know him at all, but I assume he does the site for similar reasons.

A blog even more valuable to people who aren't well known. Some, like Brink Lindsey

, have access to op-ed pages, but their writing can be more varied and more frequent on a website. Some, like

Ken Layne and Matt Welch, are old-fashioned reporter types who know a lot but have taken weird career paths and would be unknown except for their blogs. Others, like Charles Murtaugh*, who's primarily a biologist, or Patrick Ruffini, who's just a year or two out of college, are building reputations as commentators. Others, like the guy who writes More than Zero, are precluded by professional obligations from normal sorts of opinion writing. (He's afraid op-ed writing with his name and professional credit might be incorrectly construed as solicitation for business, in violation of some sort of securities industry rule.)

[*Since Charlie's local to you and an amateur blogger with a high signal-to-noise ratio, I'd suggest you contact him.]

I think all of these functions are valuable additions to the media universe. So is the international nature of blogging and, of course, the much-hyped function of fact- and argument-checking. Blogs are not going to replace the existing media, on which they depend in many ways, but they're definitely a net plus for both readers and writers. The signal-to-noise problem solves itself, as people select which sites to read and which to ignore.

My readers number in the thousands, although I can't be more specific than that because I'm too cheap to get fancy tracking software and I don't use Blogger. The first time I sold my book directly on my site, I sold 100 copies. I've sold another 7 since I got more (at a slightly higher price) and posted the offer on Monday; three people have asked for the address to send checks. Since the beginning of the year, I've also sold 25 copies of TFAIE via Amazon; the site's Amazon bestseller is Brink Lindsey's Against the Dead Hand, with 31 copies this year. As someone recently noted on some blog—I believe Glenn Reynolds had a link, but I didn't actually read the story—book sales may very well be the financial payoff for blogging. Since I originally started my website to supplement my book, that would certainly be appropriate for me.

I also get lots of tips, mostly URLs to news stories, for my book-in-progress. There's no question that the blog has increased readers' interest in that project.

And I get more publicity from the blog than I got in 10 years of editing Reason. Journalists are obsessed with the phenomenon.

[Posted 4/2.]

STEVE'S OFFERING: Unqualified Offerings features a longish email from the Postrel family's resident strategy expert, taking issue with Jim Henley's views of what Israel should do. [Posted 4/1.]

TESTING: I apologize for any difficulties readers may have had accessing this page as I've moved it to a new web hosting service. If you're reading this at http://www.dynamist.com/scene.html (or vpostrel.com), send me an email to let me know the move worked. Thanks for your patience. [Posted 4/1.]

NEW COKE: The Wall Street Journal is giving up its distinctive look. I think they're betting on the design equivalent of New Coke, missing the emotional resonance of the old look, which may lose in "taste tests" but means something important in the marketplace. This NYT report contains a quote that denies the Coke comparison a little too strenuously—and, especially for a business publication, with a bit too much garbling. The New WSJ will appear next week. [Posted 4/1.]