…sez Mickey Kaus, are those that are “willing to lose millions overpaying journalists for the right to distribute their prose on glossy paper.”

That’s fairly uncharitable. No, I don’t think the Atlantic has a good business model right now, but I similarly don’t think that Slate, with its classic print advertising model transposed to the web, is going to be the foundation of any media mogul’s empire.

No one’s cracked it yet, but for what it’s worth (not much), I think the future of media lies with micropayments for content, coupled with some kind of agglomeration of content like cable companies provide. We’re not there yet because the industry has not felt enough pain as a whole in order to start charging for content and holding the line mercilessly, against both the readership and the writers who complain about being behind firewalls. But we’ll get there, I’m sure, before too long.

The New York Times has a decent summary of what’s known about the Eduardo Rozsa Flores story in Bolivia. The one new detail in the story is an insurance report which casts some doubt on the government’s version of what happened.

Mr. García Linera, the vice president, at first said the three were killed in a 30-minute gunfight, but an insurance report filed for the hotel and obtained by La Razón, a newspaper, apparently found no signs of an exchange of gunfire. Two men taken captive at the hotel, Elod Toazo, a Hungarian, and Mario Tadik, a Bolivian, seem to have surrendered without a fight.

“What happened was the killing of three people who were sleeping, which means murder,” said Óscar Ortiz, president of Bolivia’s Senate and a top opponent of Mr. Morales.

Alfredo Rada, a senior minister, made things worse when he went on television with images of men in Santa Cruz clasping weapons, claiming they were linked to those killed. But the men in the photos, lifted from a Facebook page, debunked the claim by explaining that they practiced “airsoft,” a game in which participants fire at one another with pellet guns.

A related quibble: Josh Marshall calls it “one of the Stories You Need the Times For”. Not so! The Wall Street Journal has been doing good work on this story all last week, whereas the Times only ran a brief blurb two weeks ago and is now merely playing catch-up. Coincidentally, it seems as if almost all newspapers outside of the Journal have lost circulation in the last six months.

For the first summer-like weekend, Wire for the kiddies:

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I wonder if Philip Klein feels dirty when he writes sentences like these:

When I think of all of the lives that were shattered on 9/11, all of the fathers and sons and brothers and sisters who perished because of a deranged ideology that celebrates death, there’s no way in good conscience I could say that it’s worth suffering a repeat of that attack in order to protect a terrorist from waterboarding, sleep deprivation, or some of the other techniques that were employed.

He should. This is an irredeemably sentimental, emotionally manipulative and unhelpful argument. If this is Klein’s actual thinking on the issue, and not the finely-honed agitprop designed to enflame passions that I take it to be, he ought to take a big step back and go think about things in solitude for a while.

Put aside the ethical concerns if those don’t move you. Put aside the arguments (very convincing to me) that torture confessions are unreliable by their very nature. Why should we not allow our government to legally torture? Remember this? Remember domestic wiretapping? Yes, Malkin’s concerns of being persecuted are self-important and paranoid, but the lesson is clear: don’t give the government powers you’d never want turned against you. You’d think conservatives would have internalized this sentiment by now.

The sad fact of the matter is that even if torture was 100% reliable and ethically unproblematic, people would still die at the hands of terrorists. The world is too big and complex, the blindspots too many to count, and human ingenuity too great for any regime to prevent gruesome attacks on its populace. So in a world where the government cannot protect its citizens reliably, we have to ask ourselves whether we want to grant legal amnesty to an all too human, fallible and fickle institution to torture people.

I, for one, do not.

Via Reihan, I’ve watched this almost 20 times now.

Fascinating story unraveling in the pages of the Wall Street Journal about one Eduardo Rózsa Flores, a Hungarian national who was killed last week by police in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. According to the Bolivian authorities, he was plotting to overthrow Evo Morales’ government and assassinate Morales himself. According to an interview Flores gave to a Hungarian TV show a few months ago, he was going to go organize a legal militia within Santa Cruz in order to defend the province against Morales’ attempts to found a communist state.

Flores seems to have been a colorful character. An author, an actor, and a professional revolutionary, he starred in a semi-fictionalized movie of his own life (now added to my Netflix queue). From watching the first few minutes of the film on Google Video, it seems like he grew up with impeccable leftist revolutionary credentials, with an idealist Jewish playwright father who got kicked out of the Bolivian Communist Party for his clandestine work with Che Guevara in the jungles.

What changed him from a fiery revolutionary to a establishmentarian counter-revolutionary, one wonders. Could it be that totalitarian communists are taking the place of fascists in those fevered minds looking to pick up arms and fight for a cause? More to come as I find it.

I suspect Matt’s always thought that Pakistan is the more important half of the Af-Pak clusterfuck, and today he comes out and says it. I’ve been beating around that bush for a while now too. Recently, however, I’ve been pondering the possibility that too much involvement in Pakistan might be a mistake as well.

I just finished carefully re-reading John Lukacs’ sketch of George Kennan last night and was struck anew by Kennan’s prescient calls to prudence in international relations, his conviction that most problems in the world are by their very nature too complicated to be “solved” in any meaningful way, and his counsel, therefore, that America be extremely selective in its engagements.

Remaking Afghanistan certainly doesn’t reach Kennan’s threshold for American involvement. One is tempted to wonder whether Pakistan does either. It’s not that the stakes aren’t high—nuclear weapons in a failed state are about as high as they can get. It’s that the paucity of our policy options and leverage is matched with a frightful lack of insight as to what’s happening on the ground, which makes the further improvement of our options seem unlikely. Indeed, the situation is so fluid and murky that even Pakistani journalists close to the events seem to be baffled by each new turn. It’s not that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with Pakistan, Kennan might say, but that we should be very hesitant about just “doing something” lest we muck it up more.

…it has to be good, right Chris?

That elements of the Left are rediscovering their taste for state-building should come as a surprise to no one. That the Left shares this taste with the neo-neocons¹ should also not be very surprising. That the rest of us should, as a result, be all the more skeptical of the entire venture is therefore just natural.

Some of CAP’s intermediate policy goals for Afghanistan seem especially foolhardy:

• Promote a viable Afghan economy that offers realistic opportunities for the Afghan people
• Sharply curb the poppy trade in Afghanistan and the region
• Promote democracy, the rule of law, and human rights in Afghanistan and the region

The second one in particular is a big loser. The other two, at least, are stated fairly limply and aspirationally. Of course, as Christian notes, the devil will be in the details, and we’ll all be able to hash out our differences at length once the Af-Pak review is released for public consumption.