Month: February 2005

Russia’s role in helping the Iranian nuclear program is mostly ignored

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This has largely gone without comment in the blogosphere:

MOSCOW (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin said on Friday he was convinced Iran was not trying to build a nuclear weapon and that Russia would press ahead with nuclear cooperation with the Islamic Republic.

Putin’s defense of Iran, where Russia is building a nuclear power plant, comes in the face of U.S. concerns that Tehran could be using Russian know-how to covertly build a nuclear weapon.

“The latest steps by Iran convince Russia that Iran indeed does not intend to produce nuclear weapons and we will continue to develop relations in all sectors, including peaceful atomic energy,” Putin told Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rohani.

“We hope Iran will strictly stick to all agreements with Russia or the international community,” Putin said at the start of talks with Rohani at the Kremlin.

The United States has criticized Moscow for pressing ahead with construction of a 1,000-megawatt reactor at Bushehr in southern Iran.

Russia’s top nuclear officials are due to travel to Iran next week to finalize the final technicalities of its start-up later this year.

The question of Russia’s nuclear ties with Iran is certain to figure in a summit between Putin and President Bush in the Slovak capital Bratislava on Feb. 24.

Most bloggers have so far concentrated on the negotiations France, Germany and Great Britain are conducting with Iran, in the hope of preventing the country from arming itself with nuclear weapons. The fact that Iran wouldn’t even have the capability of doing so without Russian help is rarely mentioned. I hope that this summit will change that, and also that Bush can persuade Putin to cut that crap out.

Why Video and Audio Blogging Probably Aren’t the Next Big Thing

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Ann Althouse writes:

One thing about written blogs is you can glance over them quickly and decide how much you want to read. These podcast recordings impose their time frame on you. A slow talker forces you to listen longer. A slow writer doesn’t cause you to read slowly.

This is exactly right and I think helps to explain why video blogging isn’t the boon some people think it should be. The reader controls his entire experience; the listener controls some of it; and the watcher of videos, if he is paying attention, is more controlled by the experience than in control (a fact not lost on propagandists, which may explain why the likes of Leni Riefenstahl and Michael Moore tend to produce movies rather than essays). As a blog reader, I want to read what I want, quickly — not watch TV.

Video has a place on blogs, especially in reporting about tsunamis and other events that are dramatic and not abstract. But to watch some guy talk? Nah.

UPDATE: Ann adds, among other comments:

I agree here too. And this point applies in many areas, even ones as far afield as gauges on machines, and voicemail systems. Canned-voice feedback and voice-response systems are usually poor substitutes for the written word, and even for buttons and visual signals.

(See here for an old rant on a related topic.)

Thanks to Norton, Ken & James

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This is really more a comment to Ken’s discussion below and comes from a non-economist as well as James’s discussion of blogger tasks. (Ok, I’m a parasite.)

The importance of a meme, of a take, essentially, of an analogy, is important. Looking at underlying analogies seems another useful task of bloggers.

This week I taught Fred Strebeigh’s essay, first published in Bicycling in 1991. Strebeigh had gone to China to see a bicycling society in action and happened upon the Beijing Spring of 1989. He captures the excitement of that time, but woven throughout is a tribute to what we have and they, for that brief time, realized as energy and power. For instance, he notes the privacy of speech that came in the midst of movement as the streets filled with bicyclists; he describes how bikes made possible the assembly in the Tiananmen Square. He leaves Beijing as it erupts to interview a grad student; she had biked a thousand hard miles across China to Tibet. He found Fang Hui, who had been no athlete before setting out on this challenging trek. He asked her if she had worried about giving up on the journey and she had replied that no, before, she had feared giving up on life. Bicycling across country, instead, “I felt as if I would become light” she said. She demonstrated how dead we can feel cocooned and how alive tested.

Then, he describes a bicycle repairman who, through initiative and work outside the state economy, could afford two more children. My students were excited as well – they understood the power of these ideas. Strebeigh quite beautifully reports what he sees, but what he sees is the strength of the vision that impelled these people–a vision that impels us. He argues that the crack-down had been represented on television by shot after shot of crumpled bicycles, destroyed as the army took over the square and that open life, that open marketplace of ideas and talk and challenge was destroyed.

Sadly, we will no longer use this book. Some argue it is too difficult, others that it isn’t argumentative enough. Now, we are choosing among rhetorics crammed with the less subtle arguments of op-eds; they consider balance countering Paul Krugman with John Leo. But they won’t include the best of these writers, but rather the quick statements of position where space is too limited for nuance. The writing will be competent but obvious rather than rich & subtle. This semester, I lead up to the contrarian approach of Rauch’s “Defense of Prejudice”; his is an argument for the marketplace of ideas they can, by then, appreciate. Underlying those narrower, more “timely” takes will be a simplification of the marketplaces – of ideas, of goods, of speech. They will be designed to be “relevant” – which essentially means not wresting our students from the sense all of us had at 18 that the world began at our birth and our issues are the big issues.

And in many will be different metaphors. And that is why we now return to Ken & James.

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C-SPAN 1 & 2 (times e.t.)

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This Sunday Q&A (8:00 p.m. and again 11:00) on C-SPAN 1 features Mel Watt, Chair of the Black Caucus and representative from N. Carolina.

On CSPAN 2 BookTV goes to a 3-day week-end, celebrating President’s Day. Appropriately, on After Words

Doug Wead, former special assistant to President George H.W. Bush discusses his book: The Raising of a President: The Mothers and Fathers of our Nation’s Leaders. He is interviewed by historian & author Harold Gullan.

Saturday night at midnight last week’s After Words, an interview of Natan Sharansky by Tom Gjelten will be rerun. While it does not have Buchanan providing a foil (as Jonathan pointed out in his post), this hour, too, is both interesting and inspiring. Following is Jared Diamond, who is a good deal less optimistic about the human spirit in his Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Paired last week, this time they are separated; still, Michael Crichton offers a counter argument Sunday morning (10:45) with his State of Fear.

BookTV schedule.

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