http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/ This is a discussion forum about Nigerian affairs en Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:49:14 GMT vBulletin 60 http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/styles/webpoint/misc/rss.jpg http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/best-summary-2009-wimbledon-mens-final-1043/ Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:04:01 GMT From Steve Tignore at tennis.com http://tennisworld.typepad.com/thewrap/2009/07/w-the-lucky-few/ ____________________ Roddick had been beaten... From Steve Tignore at tennis.com

http://tennisworld.typepad.com/thewr...the-lucky-few/
____________________
Roddick had been beaten three straight times by Murray and 18 times by Federer, but he approached both of this weekend's matches as if they were contested on even terms. He had been written off at Slams for years, but he set about remaking himself with a new coach for at least the fourth time. The upshot is that he just played the two best matches of his life at age 26: He pushed Murray back without trying to blast through him and controlled the rallies against Federer off both sides.

He's been known in some parts as the American who couldn’t keep his country’s tradition of great tennis champions alive. A win over Federer yesterday would have banished that criticism forever. Instead Roddick played beautiful tennis for 4 hours on Sunday only to run up against a brick wall and end the day in tears, a lifelong dream and career vindication thwarted by his more gifted nemesis again. Then he was forced to describe how he felt to the world. Asked by Sue Barker if he felt the sport could be cruel, Roddick said to the crowd, who had supported him as they always do at Wimbledon, “No, I’m one of the lucky few who gets cheered for, so thank you for that.”

Roddick may not be a champion on the order of Sampras or McEnroe or Connors, but none of those guys could match the breadth of his personality, or his unpretentious humanity. His performance on Sunday, first in his actions and then in his astoundingly stoical, winning words before a worldwide audience, was inspiring. It really did make me proud to be an American. A+
________________________________________

No, I'm not American, so Roddick did not make me proud to be an American. What I liked was how after such a tough match which many who watched thought he should have won after having 4 points for a 2 set lead in the second set tiebreaker, that he could put his loss and his status in the game in proper perspective. ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/best-summary-2009-wimbledon-mens-final-1043/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/awesome-williams-sisters-1031/ Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:16:26 GMT As a fan of Dementieva (I always love stories about people who are held back by a personal flaw - her service in Dementieva's case - and fix that flaw and reemerge in full force), I was a bit ambivalent about the result of the Williams match. Serena can be a bit of a sourpuss and a sore loser, so I don' support her as uneqiuvocally as I once did. I was happy to see a Williams sister pushed to the limit for once during this tournament and congrats to Serena for a well earned victory. I'm also hoping that Dementieva can take something from this and win a hard court major, whether in Australia or the US before she retires. She has had an excellent career and deserves the cherry on top before she retires.

However, when Venus played Safina, I knew the game would hardly be worth watching unless one wanted to watch Safina switch between soliloquy and those annoying conversations with her coach. And since Safina isn't that pretty to look at anyway, why should I watch that nonsense? Even when it seemed like Safina, down 1-6, 0-4 might win a game in the second set, I was predicting a bagel. For some reason I nailed that one easily.

Even though Dementieva slightly reduced the mystique associated with the Williams sisters during this Wimbledon, congrats to the Williamses for a fantastic tournament. Of course, I'm supporting Venus all the way. But in the end, Wimbledon will be remembered in this decade for the greatest player of her time and the greatest grasscourt player of her time - it's just amazing that they're not the same person but they share the same parents and last name.

It's only right that the last Wimbledon of this decade has a final between the Williams sisters. ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/awesome-williams-sisters-1031/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/affirmative-action-ricci-case-1029/ Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:06:15 GMT Unsurprisingly, the Ricci Case has gotten very little discussion on the NVS. But I think the nature of the case and the glaring injustice speaks for... Unsurprisingly, the Ricci Case has gotten very little discussion on the NVS. But I think the nature of the case and the glaring injustice speaks for itself. The only way you can justify what the original ruling in favor of the City of New Haven is by saying that different races being held to different standards for being good firemen is the right thing to do.

I actually often sympathize with liberals when they argue that tests are biased. After all, we are taught that all men are equal, so the conclusion must be that if men perform unequally, the cause is that some men are unfairly advantaged with resources. But all men are not equally gifted, then some of this nonsense can be put to rest. Unfortunately, the racial overtones of genetic diversity don't make putting this to bed as easy as one would want.

I'm a fan of reading the rulings of the Supreme Court first hand and in doing so, I've gained far more respect for Clarence Thomas than I would have had based on his being a SCOTUS justice. When you read an 8-1 opinion with Thomas being the only dissenter, you learn a lot about how one traditionalist thinks.

For this Ruling, I would recommend that anyone with an interest in the case read Justice Alito's concurring opinion. It describes the machinations of New Haven politics in great detail and how the mayor of New Haven decided to invalidate the test results because of political pressure and not because the test, which had been prepared in such a way as to make it immune to criticism of being racially biased, was shown to be so.

Anyone who reads that and thinks that corruption in America is less than corruption in Nigeria is living in lalaland. The real problem in Nigeria, as I've repeatedly argued, is the lack of sufficient talent to fulfill obligations across diverse industries. Most people flock to the most profitable industries, leaving less profitable and less attractive industries unable to thrive on their own.

Here is the letters page in response to the NY times editorial on the case, an editorial so silly that the letters in response were almost uniformly critical.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/op...otus.html?_r=1 ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/affirmative-action-ricci-case-1029/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/article-roberts-misleading-obama-presidential-oath-804/ Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:22:58 GMT http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/opinion/22pinker.html It was a grammar thing... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/opinion/22pinker.html

It was a grammar thing... ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/article-roberts-misleading-obama-presidential-oath-804/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/bush-zero-down-payments-part-2-445/ Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:33:13 GMT The NY Times Finally has an Article on Bush's role in the Subprime Meltdown through his encouraging minority housing, which ultimately led to many people buying houses they couldn't really afford.

White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/bush-zero-down-payments-part-2-445/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/phcn-cold-weather-good-thinking-380/ Sun, 07 Dec 2008 12:13:10 GMT It's hard to think when the weather is hot all the time. In fact, many things are impossible to run properly when the weather is hot all the time. In other words, heat encourages leisure.
One of the underestimated reasons why slavery was more popular in the South than in the North (in America) was that it was much warmer in the South thereby giving Africans an edge climate wise, as well as encouraging less productive thinking and more leisure.

I usually can't work without cool weather and electricity. Not ice cold weather, but cool weather. But to get cool weather in ice cold weather, you can burn fires and wear more rugs. To get cool weather in hot weather, the options are far fewer.

The lack of electricity in Nigeria is enslaving the minds of many of our people. ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/phcn-cold-weather-good-thinking-380/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/bush-zero-down-payments-320/ Sun, 23 Nov 2008 15:15:02 GMT On a blog I usually frequent, mention was made that the press is avoiding the fact that it was Bush's desire to increase housing for minorities by campaigning strongly for lending with zero down payments that in part gave people houses that they didn't have the earning power to maintain.

Why hasn't the press trumpeted this error on the part of Bush? The obvious reason is that the conservative press is trying to protect a bad president, while the liberal press, who are supposed to be the defenders of minorities, do not want to show that Bush had any compassion for minorities, despite his obvious desire for more illegal immigration, his support for Affirmative Action, and his aid to Africa in support of HIV.

Here is an article on Bush's assault on down payments:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/bovard/bovard8.html

Do you believe that this article was written in 2005???

It is shame that being right doesn't measure up to being politically correct! ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/bush-zero-down-payments-320/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/never-expect-power-always-317/ Sun, 23 Nov 2008 07:49:59 GMT I'm currently in a situation that prevents me from finishing my Obama series - the finishing parts are ready, but are on my home PC, and they will need some edits to incorporate the new information provided by Obama's cabinet selections. The next 4-8 years will be interesting times for Obama indeed. Please check out the series when it is completed.

Secondly, I'm going to institute a campaign for more analysis, objective information and attention to be bought to the Nigerian Electric Power Problem. I am willing to pay $1,000 of my own money for serious analysis of the problem - maybe I will split that up over several articles etc. It's about time we got consciousness raised about what is really up with this problem. Ghana, I believe, has celebrated about 3 years of uninterrupted power supply. If they are any tangible reasons, why this cannot be the case in Nigeria, let us know them now so that with information, we can understand the solutions if they are viable, not viable, or are indeterminate. ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/never-expect-power-always-317/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/obama-s-presidency-race-inequality-contemporary-america-pt-3-275/ Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:54:06 GMT *The Economics of President Obama* In a democracy, politicians that try to be popular or to remain in office need to track public sentiment to... The Economics of President Obama

In a democracy, politicians that try to be popular or to remain in office need to track public sentiment to some degree. Obama was to some degree rewarded by the current economic atmosphere, a point I will return to later in this piece. Obama has already announced that he supports a redistributive government with the goal of supporting the poor. The benefits, demerits and limits of redistributing income are all well known to economists.

America’s increasing inequality gap, especially along racial lines, is creating a class of voters that are increasing unsatisfied with this turn of events, both on the poor end and the rich end, and want the government to do something about it. I sympathize to some degree with this view, but the bigger problem is whether this redistribution constitutes a legitimate solution to the inequality problem.

Moreover, there is also a race component to wealth and inequality in America. About 10% of Whites live in poverty, but the number is over 20% for Blacks and Hispanics. Minorities are also underrepresented in various parts of American society. Given America’s history with slavery, this inequality is believed to be its legacy. Therefore, attempts to reverse the inequality that America has inherited from its racist era are still ongoing in America.

So From Where Wealth Cometh?

Many people in the world who have never carefully thought about the structure and source of wealth believe (or at least, act as if they believe) in what economist Walter Williams calls “The Pile of Money Theory”: some pile of money existed somewhere that some greedy people got to first, took more they needed, and left little for the poor.

Another theory of wealth is the production theory of money: people who are richer manage or own more productive labor, capital and land, and it is the productivity of these factors that creates wealth, and there are limits on how these factors can be transferred while maintaining the structure of wealth in a society.

Both theories, believe it or not, have some merit, but people who are capitalists oversubscribe to the latter theory, while people who are socialists oversubscribe to the pile of money theory, the truth being somewhere in between.

Making things more complicated is that whenever the government controls the monetary supply, as it does today, or banks are allied with the government, as they are in America today, the government and the banking system are always of sources of wealth that can destabilize the stability of the economy.

So America’s capitalism is an uneasy mix of a growing government which rewards the bankers, acerbating some of the crony effects of capitalism, and a government that continually appeals to a voting class because democracy creates an incentive to do so.

Any forcible transfer of wealth from those better able to create wealth with it to those less able to create wealth with it reduces the wealth of the economy over time. If the goal of this transfer of wealth is done simply with the goal of making those less well off feel better and is capped at a certain amount, this is not such a bad thing. The problem is that this is not what usually happens. Redistributionist policies have never solved the problem of inequality and have often made them worse because they rarely address the talent disparities that drive inequality.

People mock the “trickle down theory” despite its inordinate success in America. Winter is in all honesty the biggest problem that most people face in America and modern homelessness is primarily driven by substance abuse and mental disorders. Most people who have the talent to excel in America’s information driven economy, a God-given talent that is not equitably distributed to all, tend to do well. The problem is how best to handle the lives of those that do not.

I discussed my view of economics briefly so that people will see where I’m coming from. I think that the source of wealth is human resources and how productive they are, in line with the second theory I presented, making me a capitalist. While wealth can be to some degree transferred, such transfer cannot create a sustainable economy.

People that focus (as some Nigerians do) on the existence of mineral resources miss the source of Nigeria’s poverty. America will only be wealthy for as long as its people are productive. This wealth status of America might not last long given the uneasy relationship between the banking system and the government that has led to inflation and deficit spending that has led to America living prosperously off debt. Whether America can survive much longer will depend on what kinds of economic policies the next President institutes.

This economic viewpoint will form the basis of my predictive analysis of Obama’s presidency. ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/obama-s-presidency-race-inequality-contemporary-america-pt-3-275/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/obama-s-presidency-race-inequality-contemporary-america-pt-2-274/ Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:27:06 GMT *Obama as a Moderate Liberal?* Obama is a liberal - no one doubts or denies this. In fact, when I first studied Obama, this was my major concern... Obama as a Moderate Liberal?

Obama is a liberal - no one doubts or denies this. In fact, when I first studied Obama, this was my major concern – I felt that his liberalism was of the religious variety because I could not see how it had been tempered by the failures of his political acts to effect radical change. What lasting tangible effects, negative or positive, had Obama’s acts had on improving the welfare of Black people in his communities? And was he trying to implement those effects on a national scale or did he believe that he couldn’t do enough without a national platform? Or, if I may be cynical for a moment, was he simply another power-hungry, opportunistic politician?

Is Obama a really a moderate liberal with a slightly left leaning, or a more radical Pro-Black liberal? With Obama, no one really knows, though his past pointed to the latter, his campaign points to the former. He sounds like he sincerely believes in his leftist ideas, but has grown into a more vocally moderate candidate, especially on issues like national defense. But do not toss aside the rhetoric of change, because Obama’s platform does represent a change from the status quo.

Some might argue that Obama is obviously a slightly liberal centrist/moderate. This argument doesn’t hold much water if based on his past record. Obama managed to vote to the left of an avowed socialist during his short tenure on the Senate, compiling what was described as the most liberal voting record in the US Senate. Claims about reaching across party lines is meaningless. All a politician need to do to reach across party lines is institute legislation that everyone agrees with, or to find people (usually moderates with some leanings similar to yours) from the other party that agree with his ideas. It does not necessarily show any ability to compromise unless the specific legislation is controversial. And Obama has not touched any controversial legislation or made any obvious concessions to a strong conviction since entering the US Senate.

So how did Obama become the public’s favorite moderate liberal even if his autobiography reveals him to be a pro-Black egalitarian? And which is the real Obama?

So Why is Obama Loved So?

Let us look very briefly at a couple of Obama’s gifts, which have enabled his public appeal.

Obama’s intelligence is not in doubt and is more than sufficient to handle the American presidency. You don’t graduate within the top quarter of your Harvard Law School class without some measure of giftedness for parsing logic and a capacity for hard work. Moreover, Obama was also able to hold the prestigious position of editor of the Harvard Law Review, showing that he was able and willing to out-compete peers for positions of prestige. After the Dubya years, America definitely seeks a man whose appearance gives the White House some grace.

Another dimension of Obama’s appeal is his biracial appeal. He garners all the Black voters and there are many people who do not treat the fact that Obama is White in the same manner that Obama did in his first book, and think that they are really voting into the White House a biracial candidate that will transform racial relations in America. Just as important (or it might be a part of the reason) is that some Americans fervently believe in him. Therefore, if he makes a decision, he will be able to motivate people to support him. The office of the Presidency has lost a lot of credibility with the last years of Clinton and the two Bush terms leading Americans towards an unhealthy cynicism.

However, what explains Obama’s surge in support in the last month is the crumbling American economy. No one wants to reward the Republican party for having done badly in the White House. As an individual who argues for critical evaluation of any government, I support this view, but more importantly, I want people to have information that they might no be privy to given the single conservative or liberal news source that they are usually biased towards getting their information from.

While my predictions on the Village Square poll prediction website have Obama winning by a narrow margin, I now expect Obama to win by a significant margin, probably in the mid 300s. The Democrats have caught up to the Republicans in using hard data to drive the decision making of their campaign strategies, tools utilized to great effect by Karl Rove in the last election. The increased voter turnouts for Obama should also help Democrats in the Congressional elections, so Obama will have a Senate and a House of Representatives willing to push through legislature he desires.

Therefore, Obama will have a very strong political platform and his margin of victory is likely to imply a strong electoral mandate. So what kinds of policies will Obama push for? ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/obama-s-presidency-race-inequality-contemporary-america-pt-2-274/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/obama-s-presidency-race-inequality-contemporary-america-pt-1-273/ Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:23:09 GMT Obama’s presidency will be the apogee of a career that has seen him try to help Black people through the government to solve problems that the... Obama’s presidency will be the apogee of a career that has seen him try to help Black people through the government to solve problems that the government will never be able to solve. For people who like pro-Black politics, I think that most of what I write about Obama’s intentions will be good news. However, for reasons I will delineate, I have problems with the potential results of such an agenda. Nothing I will write will be factually controversial. However, it will all be politically incorrect.

Obama is an Ideologically Black Man

There are many people of mixed race who embrace the various parts of their heritage. I think of Tiger Woods in particular. There are also people of mixed race who embrace one part of their racial heritage – Halle Berry comes to mind as someone who actively identifies as Black, and Anatole Broyard, whose life story might have inspired Philip Roth’s book The Human Stain (also a movie), went out of his way to make sure that he passed as White/Jewish and few knew about the African American part of his heritage.

Many people, especially Whites, who rhapsodize positively about Obama have never read his first book, Dreams From My Father, whose ideas place Obama clearly in a camp similar to Halle Berry, accepting the Black part of his heritage and rejecting the White part. Obama has dedicated most of his life to understanding his African heritage and becoming a leader of his (African/African American) people. A careful reading of his first book will reveal this to anyone who can swim through the dense prose and avoid getting drowned by the generally uninteresting story, which has only gained greater significance with the political success of Obama.

Obama’s quest to help the poor is in great part motivated by the fact that this is the class that most Black people fall into in America. When one looks at his past from this perspective, it is easier to make sense of his politics and his decisions – most Black politics working as a community organizer, his associations with Reverend Wright (whose oratory skills and Black liberation theology probably influenced Obama’s mode of speechmaking and thought more than people realize) and Bill Ayers (who was actively pushing issues that benefited Obama’s agenda for Black people), and even many of the other dubious alliances that have been unable to stick to his Teflon character as a post-racial candidate.

However, Dreams From My Father was written in 1995. Has anything changed between now and then that would lead us to believe that Obama is truly the post-racial candidate that he campaigned as? ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/obama-s-presidency-race-inequality-contemporary-america-pt-1-273/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/election-season-obama-vs-mccain-189/ Sat, 13 Sep 2008 23:44:45 GMT It's been ahelluvan election year. I expect this to be one of the most interesting election years we have seen and will ever see. The debate heats up in the main square where an overwhelmingly pro-Obama crowd deals with a one clear pro-McCain/Palin individual (Meticulous) and one independent without a vote (myself).

I'm happy I don't have a vote. In politics generally, I'm a cynic. When I arrived in America, I was an immigrant sympathetic to the Democratic party because of its recent history with Blacks. This was during the era of Bill Clinton.

However, as I became exposed to more political philosophy, I was initially attracted to the rationalist brands of economics espoused by libertarian thinkers like Ayn Rand. They seemed to combine the liberal views of the left with a right-wing view of economics.

My escape from that view of the world was enabled by two aspects of my personality - a love for studying human nature and a modest dedication to empirical knowledge. Rationalists tend to insulate themselves completely from evidence. I on the other hand, have no fear of knowledge that doesn't fit into my world view and find it deserving of explanation. Therefore, I can study issues without taking sides and then try to discuss what I find compelling or disconcerting about what someone is saying. Of course, there is no man without angles and agendas, but I can honestly say that mine arise more out of who I am (a high IQ Black man in America) more than ideological beliefs about what the government will achieve.

As a high IQ Black man in America, as long as the American economy doesn't get ruined by some cataclysmic event, I will always be protected by Affirmative Action (which neither the Republicans or Democrats will do away with any time soon) and even if such policies were done away with, I have bested many of the Oyibo boys repeatedly on their own turf. If the worst comes to America, then I have a home to go to and the kind of education that makes me internationally mobile.

The main reason I would like Obama to win the election is that I feel that in many ways, he is an intelligent idealist. He does what he believes and he cares about the people under him. However, I think that he is too far left for the mainstream. On the other hand, I expect his foreign policy to spend a little less on war mongering. And since that is currently the largest drain on the American economy, that is why I would vote for him.

However, my fear is that a Democratic President with a Democratic Congress will lead to the same concentration of power that led the Republicans to ruin this country. The American government works best when there is some opposition that creates checks on political power. As human beings, we are as emotional as we are rational. But one thing that we cannot not abuse is power. And one of the enablers of the abuses of Bush was his party's control of Congress.

However, I have no love for McCain. He is a politician. His choice of Palin put his political interests ahead of those of the country. In the event that he actually wins, does he really believe that she is competent enough to do the job should he become ill? Maybe her curiosity about the world was in part framed by her life in Alaska, but she is what she is, and no amount of revisionism will change who she is. Her interview with Gibson gave no evidence that she had a policy view on which she differed from McCain based on her personal experiences, or that she complimented McCain's understanding of the world in some way.

Anyways, I'm waiting for the debates now. I think that Obama should push McCain's buttons. It's legend that McCain has a really hot temper, but he has remained cool when under the cameras so far. An explosion in front of the camera could hurt McCain to end. I expect one of the candidates to lose it on camera before the end of October. The race is that tight.

Time to move on to swing state analysis until the debates come... ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/election-season-obama-vs-mccain-189/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/anarchy-internet-thomas-sowell-163/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:16:55 GMT Thomas Sowell discusses a fake column attributed to him and widely disseminated all over the Internet. ------------------------------ Anarchy on... Thomas Sowell discusses a fake column attributed to him and widely disseminated all over the Internet.
------------------------------

Anarchy on the Internet
By Thomas Sowell

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The Internet provides vast amounts of information but it can also spread vast amounts of misinformation, or even deliberately misleading disinformation.

For more than two weeks, scarcely a day has gone by without e-mails pouring in to me, asking about columns that someone has written and brazenly spread around the Internet with my name on them.

Most of these e-mails have come from regular readers who are savvy enough to recognize columns that have a different style and substance from my own columns.

We usually think of "identity theft" as involving using someone else's name for economic fraud. But identity theft can be used for political fraud as well— as in this case.

Creators Syndicate, the authorized distributor of my column, is investigating this situation, and it has been like trying to unravel a mystery in a detective story.

First of all, they discovered that there was a blogger on the Internet making unauthorized distributions of not only my column, but also of columns from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Universal Press Syndicate and the Washington Post. But there was no way to contact that blogger directly.

Since the blogger who posted the recent phony column uses the facilities of Google, an e-mail was sent to Google, which brought a response from people identified only as "The Blogger Team," who declared: "We strongly believe in freedom of expression, even if a blog contains unappealing or distasteful content or presents unpopular viewpoints."

We are all against censorship but the right of free speech does not cover libel, threats or identity theft.

Creators Syndicate's attorney— Charles Adamek of Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell LLP in Los Angeles— pointed out in a formal reply that Google has itself created rules for people who set up blogs, and that not enforcing those rules means accepting "this blogger's activity in misappropriating Dr. Sowell's identity and passing off writings as if they were Dr. Sowell's when they are not."

That message brought another e-mail reply from the same anonymous Blogger Team, essentially repeating what had been said before: "We strongly believe in freedom of expression, even if a blog contains unappealing or distasteful content or presents unpopular viewpoints."

Finally, this situation came to the attention of Editor & Publisher magazine, the leading trade publication of the newspaper industry.

On August 15th Dave Astor of Editor & Publisher posted an account of what had happened under the title, "Blogger's 'Impersonation' of Columnist Leads to Creators-Google Tussle."

This account also said, "Aug. 13 and Aug. 14 e-mails from 'The Blogger Team' at Google indicated that the company may finally be looking into the problem. But the piece attributed to Sowell remains on the blog as of this afternoon— Aug. 15th."

This was more than two weeks after the phony column was posted and more than ten days after Google was notified by the attorney for Creators Syndicate.

Finally, on August 18th, Dave Astor of Editor & Publisher posted another account with the headline, "Blog No Longer Posting Wrongly Attributed Sowell Piece."

What is surprising to me is that the bogus column sent out with my name on it has been spread around the Internet in a chain letter, which means that people are passing on something to others when they have no way of knowing whether it is for real or a hoax, much less whether they might get drawn into a lawsuit.

The implications of this episode reach well beyond the newspaper industry. Everyone should be concerned about Internet anarchy in which anybody can pretend to be anybody else, unless something is done to stop it.

If hoaxes like this go unchecked, who can believe anything they see on the Internet? What good would the Internet be then?

If the people who control Internet web sites do not do anything, is that not an open invitation for government to step in? And does anybody want politicians to control what can go on the Internet? ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/anarchy-internet-thomas-sowell-163/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/wow-146/ Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:38:29 GMT Remember this?

Well, I passed!!!!

And I wasn't hallucinating because I failed every section I thought I was going to fail! ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/wow-146/ http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/history-revisionism-143/ Sat, 16 Aug 2008 23:13:10 GMT History is an interesting and confusing subject. Usually, I've avoided historical debates because I've discovered that historical accounts are often biased to suit an agenda. Accounts of the Civil War in both the Nigerian and American historical tradition, have many versions built around core facts, with some events told with motivations that suit different cultural agendas.

Generally, making history a science requires some epistemic standards to be applied to beliefs, and very often, people believe what is in line with their epistemic standards. These epistemic standards may be affected by cultural attitudes - how do you determine whether White exploitation of Africans or the ineptitude of African leaders plays a greater role in the economic circumstances of that African countries face today? And are you omitting other factors?

However, I have concluded that history is sufficiently important to study despite the limitations of the subject for rendering a full view of the past. At the very least, even if one knows the limitations of history in arriving at objective accounts of the past, one should not cede the ground completely to single accounts that might skew the public perception about what the possible explanations for the past are. In this sense, I do support the idea of historical revisionism.

However, the ideological perspectives from which revisionism is written should be made explicit when possible. That's my current position. ]]> NextLevel http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/blogs/nextlevel/history-revisionism-143/