From the NY Times today (12/20):

Amplifying an assertion by Mr. Blix about the existence of an anthrax stockpile, Mr. Powell said that records dating from the 1990's inspections showed that Iraq could have produced 27,500 quarts of anthrax. The Iraqi declaration, he pointed out, is "silent on this stockpile, which alone would be enough to kill several million people."

Mr. Powell also said that although Iraq had earlier admitted manufacturing about 20,000 quarts of botulinum toxin, a biological agent, its declaration showed these and other potential supplies to be missing. Also missing from the declaration were known stockpiles of precursors of poison gas.

Now, I'm a bit skeptical of phrasing like "Iraq could have produced...", but the administration sounds pretty comfortable with the botulism claim. So it must be embarassing for Iraq to have lost 5,000 gallons of a biological weapon. I'm sure if they get a little more time to look around in the basement and the back shed, it'll turn up. You know how buried things you don't use often can get...

Here is the www.senate.gov link to the Constitutional and historical background for expulsion and censure in the U.S. Senate. Since McCarthy was censured in 1954, only 3 men have received the punishment, and all of them basically for bribery in one form or another.

In this context, censure for racist comments seems extreme. Especially considering any Mississippi voter who cared would have noticed by now. But dubiously ethical money grabs seem to have been accepted practice by 1979 when the Senate censured Talmadge (D-GA) for taking undeserved reimbursements, and in 1990, when the Senate censured Dunberger (R-MN) for taking gifts from all comers. So the fact that the Senate that hosted racists like Helms and Thurmond until retirement shouldn't deter them from censuring Lott.

Another strike against existing news...

I finally got around to catching up on Clay Shirky's columns today. Of course, he addressed the "blogs taking over the news" issue months ago. In a similar vein to his P2P columns, he analyzed the issue in economic terms. In this article he talks about the abundance of blogs lowering the value of news to nearly zero. Specifically, he was responding to some bloggers' quest to profit from their work. Essentially, he said forget it.

In general, I agree with the sentiment. However, his argument that Google and Blogdex can replace publishers as proxies for quality seems unproven at best and misguided at worst. We have seen no sign so far that any electronic format will replace books. eBook tablets do not come within an order of magnitude of the cost, portability, durability and legibility of regular books. Books, for their part are attractive to publishers because they present little risk of piracy.

Neither does the possibility of distributing books electronically for printing locally work in terms of cost or speed of obtention. A readily available home or office printer can perhaps reach 1 cent per page, per side total printing cost, so $2 for 100 pages, but who wants to wait for 100 pages to print and read an unbound book on letter-sized paper?

I agree completely with Shirky's belief that weblogs can destroy any short, written format, but remain unconvinced this will extend to books until a radically better electronic book form appears. A real book costs $10, weighs maybe 250g, has infinite battery life and handily reaches 1000 DPI. An eBook won't need to match those numbers, but it will need to get much closer than 2002, and present some other advantage to get many people to care. And just being able to read under the covers without a flashlight doesn't seem like enough, sorry.

Jesse Jackson news network

Big Al Gore
Says no more
to 2004

What's he got in store?
To say this before
GOP raids the budget store?