DanKohn.com

The chief judge of the very conservative fourth circuit in Virginia appeared “incredulous today at Mr. Hamdi’s lawyer’s assertion that his client — captured during battle and designated an enemy combatant — had any constitutional rights.” It is a sad day for our country when a federal circuit judge is willing to sacrifice an American citizen’s 6th amendment right to counsel for the “government’s intelligence-gathering operation”. Pathetic.

What always stuck with me about Shylock’s soliloquy in Merchant of Venice is how he opens with some of the grandest language ever written on the commonality of all humankind, and then seamlessly descends into the basest hatreds (which are also, unfortunately, just as universal):

To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.

David Remnick writes a (predictably) brilliant piece titled “The Moralist” on the Lewis-Tyson fight in this week’s New Yorker. With a group of invited reporters, the boxer was conducting “a vintage Tyson performance, full of contempt at his visitors and fury at the world”:

I’m just a dark guy from the den of iniquity. You guys would rather be with someone else who’s equal to your status in life. Tiger Woods, or somebody. I come across as crass, a Neanderthal, a babbling idiot sometimes. I like to show you that person. He makes you want to come and listen to me.

You guys have written so much bad stuff about me I can’t remember the last time I fucked a decent woman. I have to go with strippers and ho’s and bitches because you put that image on me…. I wish that you guys had children, so I could kick them in the fucking head or stomp on their testicles so you could feel my pain.

If only loathing, self-loathing, and rage were not quite so intrinsic to the human experience, the world might be a much nicer place.

The man accused of being the 20th suicide bomber, Zacarias Moussaoui, was told by the judge that he is “so unsophisticated in the law that he came close today to inadvertently pleading guilty and ending his trial”. In his defense, I will admit to always finding the definition of Nolo Contendere confusing.

Martha Stewart seems humble:

Asked what effect the stock sale had had on her, Ms. Stewart said: “When I was a model– and I was all during high school and college — you always wanted to be on the cover of a magazine. That’s how your success was judged. The more cover, the better. Well, I am the C.E.O. of a New York Stock Exchange-listed company and I don’t want to be on any covers of any newspapers for a long, long time. That’s the story. Thank you very much.”

In related news, hell froze over today.

The prime minister of Malaysia is stepping down.

If Dr. Mahathir, 76, was leaving because he was at the top of his game, which was another theory heard here today, “wouldn’t he have coordinated it better and confided in his colleagues?” asked another diplomat. “Can you think of another semi-dictator who has said, `O.K., I’m through?’ ” the diplomat continued.

Now if Saddam Hussein would just follow suit.

Fortune magazine has a huge article on my former boss, Craig McCaw, and the companies I used to work with, XO, Nextel, Teledesic, and ICO.

Going Gas by Fred Kaplan in Slate explains that it’s not quite time yet to buy:

Has there ever been a more alluring gizmo than the plasma TV? The first time you see one, you really do gasp. The screen is so big and wide, the image is so bright, the set is so amazingly flat, just a few inches deep — you could hang it on the wall.

Besides, real aficinados currently prefer DLP and LCD projectors for equal brightness, better resolution, and no motion artifacts.

It’s been a nightmare trying to get a) high definition source material and b) a hi-def projection system capable of showing it off for Pixonics. I’m proud of the system we’ve hobbled together out of a Pentium 4 with a dual-DVI video card hooked up to 2 HP DLP projectors. The box can display a 32 Mbps MPEG2 stream across 2048×768, with complete pixel for pixel accuracy (i.e., no stretching). And, we assembled it for less than $10 K, as opposed to $100+ K for comparable demo systems.

William Saletan writes on the bathos of Bush’s Palestinian statehood non-proposal:

That’s what the offer of a “state” with no defined borders, powers, or timetable (and no right to be represented by its present leadership) is. It isn’t even a bone thrown to the Palestinians. It’s a picture of a bone. Bush’s father was notorious for confusing the photo op of a thing (”Message: I care”) with the thing itself. The son, too, seems to think that his words are equal to deeds.

Until you see 100,000 NATO troops occupy the occupied territories, don’t expect much to change.

In his NYT opinion column, Nicholas Kristof suggests a new banner for clothing: “Proudly Made in a Third World Sweatshop!” I would buy it. Seriously! This brings to mind two of Krugman’s best ever pieces, In Praise of Cheap Labor and Enemies of the WTO:

Critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for [globalization] is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad. But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development this past century — every case of a poor nation that worked its way up to a more or less decent, or at least dramatically better, standard of living — has taken place via globalization; that is, by producing for the world market rather than trying for self-sufficiency. Many of the workers who do that production for the global market are very badly paid by First World standards. But to claim that they have been impoverished by globalization, you have to carefully ignore comparisons across time and space — namely, you have to forget that those workers were even poorer before the new exporting jobs became available and ignore the fact that those who do not have access to the global market are far worse off than those who do.

If you seriously think that “fair wages” or the banning of sweatshops will help those in the third world, you owe it to yourself to read these two pieces.

The WSJ quotes a new Pew Internet life survey:

Roughly 24 million Americans, or 21% of all Web users, now have high-speed connections at home…. The dominant mode of high-speed access was still through cable TV modems at 71%, followed by DSL telephone lines at 27%, while 2% were using satellite or wireless broadband services.

There are 278 M Americans according to the CIA World Factbook.