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Per Daily Dish and the Washington Times, someone is trying to get John Kerry condemned by the Catholic Church for heresy. The Times is a right-wing news rag and so far seems to be the only paper going with the story, so take it with a grain of salt.
I wonder whether any of the hundreds of pedophile Catholic priests were charged with heresy?
Here's a fun time-waster for the holiday weekend: a DIY portrait maker.
My portrait came out looking like this:
It's not perfect - they didn't have eye and hair shades that matched my own, and the hairstyle is a dressy one, not my day to day look - but it does give a sense of me.
One of the sections I didn't quite get about Fahrenheit 9/11 was the big deal Moore made over one name being blacked out of Bush's military records. It seemed to me that Moore was trying to go for the jugular but instead started chewing on a toenail. Fortunately, the excellent Dave Neiwert over at Orcinus helped fill in the blanks Moore left. Here's the summary:
Bush's military record should be a scandal not merely for what it contains (or rather, doesn't) but because of the extent to which it has been tampered with and lied about in the past eight years or so.
The full post is here, has links to lots of detail backing up his claims that Bush's records are a scandal, and is, like the rest of his blog, well worth reading.
Only 4 months left until Election Day!
More fun stuff going into the long weekend:
If you're on really slow dial-up you might prefer this link though.
Thanks to Sid's Fishbowl for the link!
Per the AP via Yahoo News:
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's new government is considering offering amnesty to Iraqi insurgents who fought the U.S.-led occupation, perhaps even pardoning those who killed Americans.A spokesman for Allawi said fighting with U.S. troops was "justified" as resistance to occupation.
"If he (a guerrilla) was in opposition against the Americans, that will be justified because it was an occupation force," spokesman Georges Sada said. "We will give them freedom."
No blogging for me unless something really bad happens. In the meantime, here's some thoughts for the day:
The Declaration of Independence
The United States Constitution
And in honor of the 800+ members of the US armed forces killed in Iraq. May they rest in peace, and may those still in Iraq come home soon, safely.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
I said I wasn't going to post unless something bad happened but insead I wanted to note something good happening: the laying of the cornerstone of the new Freedom Tower.
I hate the name but I'm really glad that rebuilding on the Ground Zero site has begun. It's a good way to show terrorists that in the long term they didn't win.
All eyes are on the Kerry VP choice right now. I personally feel the VP candidate should be announced at the Convention if for no other reason than to make it something other than a big waste of time and money. I seem to be a minority view, though. Opinion seems to be the choice will be announced sometime this week.
I've mentioned it once or twice over on dKos but I want to say it one final time, because it's something a lot of people seem to be losing sight of (per Josh Marshall):
If you look back over recent American history you have to go back to Ronald Reagan's choice of George Bush in 1980 to find an instance in which a favorite or even prominent contender got picked. In fact, with the possible exception of Lloyd Bentsen in 1988, I think you might even argue that not since Reagan's choice of Bush has a presidential candidate chosen a vice-presidential candidate who anyone had even considered a serious contender for the VP slot.
and
Now, like everyone else did in 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996 and 2000, I certainly figure that it'll be one of the logical choices -- Edwards or Gephardt most likely. But if it is one of those two, it'll be a break from the trend of the last quarter century.
Not that my opinion matters, but I'd be happy with Edwards as the VP. Not so much with Gephardt, but he's no Dan Quayle either. But if Marshall is right, neither will be on the ticket. I know zero about Vilsack so have no opinion about him other than it might be a good idea to get someone outside of Congress on that ticket. But my hedge bet is on Wes Clark.
So Josh Marshall was wrong and the popular choice got chosen. And a good thing too.
More later after the formal announcement.
Yahoo News is reporting that the Archdiocese of Portland has filed for bankruptcy under the weight of payouts due to accusations of sexual abuse by priests. It's the first US archdiocese to do so.
I wonder how they will structure the refinancing? The Boston archdiocese avoided bankruptcy by selling off a bunch of church-owned property, and I assume that Portland has similar assets, albeit probably not as many. At last resort the Vatican can bail them out if the local banks can't or won't.
Overall, response to Kerry's naming of Edwards is as expected. The Swing States Project gets the honors for best or at least most original line so far:
Previously, I've called New Jersey a Jack Daniel's state. North Carolina is the exact opposite: A Dom Perignon state - if you see this state go blue on election night, break out the bubbly and start celebrating.
Naming Edwards to the ticket does, I think, increase that chance.
UPDATE: Digby also does an excellent job on Edwards, digging out a year-old analysis of the man that's worth a read.
It's not quite Wag the Dog but it's close...
A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Source: The New Republic. Thanks Josh Marshall for the pointer.
Digby has a nice long post today about what happens when innocent people, like the guy whose crossword puzzle scribblings got him onto the Homeland Security watch list, get swept into the DHS's web.
His conclusion?
The stories begin to accumulate, each one a random intrusion by dumb, underqualified government authorities who seem to have watched too much television and have very little common sense.
Dumb? Not quite. What I think we're seeing is a bunch of people who do not know how to handle the situation they have been thrust into. This is not to say they're stupid. They're scared, and scared people rarely make smart choices. Just look at today's latest security alert:
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge on Thursday warned Americans that al Qaeda may try to carry out "a large-scale attack" to disrupt upcoming elections, but offered no details and had no plans to raise the terror threat level.
Bottom line, this is about fear - or terror, if you will - and how humans respond to it. You'd think that by now we'd have learned that the predictable response is usually the wrong one, and that we need some new solutions.
How are people supposed to react when they hear ongoing unspecified warnings of terrorist threats? Absent any concrete information, those of a more fearful cast of mind are going to see a potential threat at every hand. A doodle on the edge of a crossword puzzle can be seen as a threat of lethal action. (There's a Greek tragedy in there somewhere but I'm not smart enough to write it.)
Those of a more conspiracy theorist cast of mind will say that the government's true intent is to keep American citizens cowed and fearful while they move forward to bring about their own nefarious goals. I believe that about as much as I believe the wingnuts who insist that anyone who seriously opposes the Clintons ends up dead - which is to say, not at all.
I have previously commented on the similarities of our current invasion of Iraq with Vietnam. But it also occurs to me that parallels to the "Red Scares" of the 20s and 50s are also apt for the times we live in today. Apparently we have to re-learn the lessons of history all over again.
Light blogging right now - I 'discovered' the online game City of Heroes (no thanks to Scott) and have been playing it like crazy these past few days.
If you play and are on the Liberty server, look for either Shopaholic or DanielJackson & tell me "hi!".
If none of the above makes any sense to you, I should be back to normal by the end of the weekend.
The LA Times (registration required, but Yahoo! reprints it) has a good piece about the Senate Intelligence Committee's report, in specific, a section devoted to the differences between two versions of a key report on Iraq's weapons capabilities used to help justify the US's attack - the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002. Not surprisingly:
The panel laid out numerous instances in which the unclassified version omitted key dissenting opinions about Iraqi weapons capabilities, overstated U.S. knowledge about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons and, in one case, inserted threatening language into the public document that was not contained in the classified version.
The changes made a qualified, nuanced document into one which laid out the case for war.
For example, the panel cited changes made in the section of the NIE dealing with chemical weapons:"Although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile," the classified NIE read, "Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons" of such poisons.
In the unclassified version of the report, the phrase "although we have little specific information" was deleted. Instead, the public report said, "Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents."
Skipping over several other similar instances of changes made to the document, we get to the kicker: who made the changes and why. And here it gets even more infuriating.
Who made the changes:
During a briefing before the report was released, one committee aide said the Senate panel had asked Tenet and Stu Cohen — who, as acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council, oversaw production of the NIE — who was responsible for inserting those words into the unclassified document."They did not know and could not explain," said the aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Why:
According to the intelligence committee report, staffers asked intelligence officials why words like "we judge" and "we assess" were removed during the declassification process.They were told that, because officials believed the white paper would be made public as representing the view of the entire U.S. government, not simply an intelligence community product, it was more appropriate to take references to "we" out of the document. This was done, committee staffers were told, "purely for stylistic reasons."
Stylistic reasons?!?! Who are they kidding?
Two op-eds this weekend decry the decline of reading in America today: Harold Bloom and Andrew Solomon. Kevin Drum takes Bloom to task for writing off the Internet completely. Solomon, to his credit, concedes that the Internet can have some good writing, but also assigns it to the same category as TV watching - non-interactive, alienating.
I actually agree with Bloom and Solomon that Americans should read more. What I take issue with is the sweeping generalization that the Internet is part of the problem. For example, this Solomon quote:
The Nazis were right in believing that one of the most powerful weapons in a war of ideas is books. And for better or worse, the United States is now in such a war. Without books, we cannot succeed in our current struggle against absolutism and terrorism. The retreat from civic to virtual life is a retreat from engaged democracy, from the principles that we say we want to share with the rest of the world. You are what you read. If you read nothing, then your mind withers, and your ideals lose their vitality and sway.
If Solomon thinks that the 'virtual life' is not capable of producing an engaged democracy, then he has not only never checked out any blogs but also slept through the entire Democratic primary season. Interaction and communication are the lifeblood of the Internet. It's worth noting that long before the Web came along, most of the major functions of the Internet were interactive - email, mailing lists, and Usenet - not to mention IRC, MUDs and MOOs as well.
Of course, by posting this here instead of writing a letter to the editor, I'm well aware that I'm preaching to the choir.
Totally gratuitous side note: Andrew Solomon attended the same high school as I did, although he was a few years ahead of me. The Horace Mann School gave us a heck of an education. I grew to love Shakespeare by having to read several of the plays aloud in various English classes. The first time we did it, in 8th grade, I thought it was a little weird. But by 10th grade it was one of my favorite things to do in class.
This is exactly the kind of action that makes people have no respect for what corporations say: Friendster, which has made much of its 'no fake profiles' policy, is now allowing fake profiles as long as they're sponsored by a paying advertiser.
From its earliest days, many Friendster members introduced fake profiles -- known variously as fakesters, or pretendsters -- into their networks of friends. Often, members posted profiles of their pets and linked to friends' pets. But the service quickly demonstrated it didn't see the humor when it began purging the network of the fakesters.Yet now, the company sees little irony in cooperating with Anchorman developer DreamWorks in introducing the movie's characters into the Friendster network. In fact, it says the move is indicative of a larger cross-promotional plan the company has undertaken.
"What Friendster is doing with these movie-character profiles is actually a brand-new paradigm in media promotion," Friendster spokeswoman Lisa Kopp said. "We are working directly with a number of production houses and movie studio partners to create film-character profiles, or 'fan' profiles, that allow our users to share their enthusiasm about the film with their friends."
The message I get is that Friendster is tone-deaf to how this looks to their customers. Why is it not OK to put up a profile for a (real) pet bird but OK to have a profile of a fake anchorman for a not very funny summer movie? Oh right, money.
It's been widely reported that all of the 'social networking' companies are having an issue trying to figure out how to make them profitable. This is one way of generating income that doesn't require a full-out pay for content model, and in that sense it's not a bad idea. But the hypocrisy inherent in the process does leave a bad taste in my mouth.
I'm probably not their target customer anyway. I signed onto Friendster a year or so ago. I was familiar with the "fakesters" on Friendster, even linked as a friend to the Howard Dean profile. As the Wired article mentions, it was a way of establishing community and saying something about myself by my choice of association. But ultimately, I gave up on Friendster and stopped visiting. The site was too static, didn't really allow for much interaction - in short, I found it boring.
I prefer Orkut, which has user-formed community groups and message boards - much more interactive, much more interesting. It's not a major part of my online activities, but unlike Friendster, Orkut is interesting enough for me to keep visiting & contributing to the site. Orkut is also invite-only, which helps keep the trolls out.
Matt Yglesias gives a bunch of reasons why Nader voters should think again. Only thing it's missing is some links to back up his claims, but that's what Google is for.
Speaking of other bloggers who are better and/or funnier writers than I am, check out this great bit in fafblog:
In the meantime because I was tricked into believin in Joe Wilson, I also believed that Saddam Hussein's nuclear program didnt exist when in fact it must have because Joe Wilson got his job from his wife! Even now I am trembling in fear in the knowledge that somewhere out there Saddam Hussein is sittin on a giant pile of Nigerien yellowcake uranium. "Ho ho ho," laughs Saddam Hussein as he takes a bite of rich, creamy uranium. "Soon I will grow ten thousand times my current size, spewing radioactive fire breath across Mesopotamia, until as Nuculo-Saddam I shall control the Middle East!" "Oh no Saddam don't do that!" I say. "It is too late!" he laughs. "And I owe it all to you, Fafnir - to you and all the other hapless peaceniks deceived by the nepotism of Joseph and Valerie Plame-Wilson!"
I'm sure I'll get a bunch of smarmy comments from the Mac contingent over this, but I'm currently in the middle of a PC upgrade fiasco, and I need to get it off my chest.
I really like the new City of Heroes game, but unfortunately the PC I use, a homebuilt box, does a lousy job of running the game. The graphics card I have (a Radeon All In One) isn't quite powerful enough, but due to the age of the motherboard, I can't upgrade to a better graphics card without also upgrading the motherboard. Which means buying a new case and power supply, because the 4-year-old case won't hold newer motherboards. And at that point you might as well go to 512MB of memory and upgrade the processor. Now you're up to $500 worth of new hardware to run a $50 game.
Scott suggested new hard drive(s) as well but I drew the line there. And I decided that since I have so much free time right now, I was going to be the primary builder of the new box. I'm about 4 times as slow as Scott when it comes to hardware installation, but with him working and me not, it seems unfair to make him do it all.
That all leads us to the point of this post, which is a list of the 10 things I most hate about building your own PC:
Not that I've ever used the stuff, but if you do use SlimFast, you should know:
Slim-Fast has dropped Whoopi Goldberg from its advertising after the comedian made a sexual joke about George Bush.
Per Atrios. He has contact info if you want to give the SlimFast folks a piece of your mind.
You can not make stuff like this up even if you tried:
The US navy spokesman put up to answer journalists’ questions about the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is one Lieutenant Mike Kafka.
Tip of the hat to Discourse.net.
Kristof has a column today worth reading in its entirety. He's talking about "Glorious Appearing," the latest work in the "Left Behind" series. If you've had your head under a rock, these books are best-selling novels, widely available - I even saw the most recent one for sale in the downtown SF Costco. In "Glorious Appearing" Jesus finally does return, and not only does he send nonbelievers into a chasm with a wave of his hand, but also the bodies of others are ripped apart and left strewn around the Earth, presumably as a warning to the remaining believers what could happen to them if their faith wavers.
Kristof:
It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of "Glorious Appearing" and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture.
I'm with Kristof 100% on this. Why do Christians get a pass for this kind of language when Muslims don't?
Here in America, we're free to believe what we want and to read what we want. I completely support the right of evangelical Christians to read "Glorious Appearing" and believe that God will cast their friends, neighbors, and even their relatives into a pit of fire (not to mention billions of Hindus, Muslims, Jews and even Mormons). But that doesn't mean that other people shouldn't ask hard questions about what kinds of paths those beliefs can take a believer down, and whether actions generated by those beliefs are truly right.
It's also well-known that the current Presidential administration is a deeply Christian one. We need to ask whether this attitude of "they're all going to Hell anyway" (aka the James Baker 'Fuck The Jews' point of view) has had a real impact on their foreign and domestic policies. This President, after all, has not been shy about saying Jesus is his favorite philosopher and a more important guide to him than his own father.
Kristof also says:
As my Times colleague David Kirkpatrick noted in an article, this portrayal of a bloody Second Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle Mister Rogers figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood. Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.
It leaves me uncomfortably wondering where Jews fit into the picture.
Going off on a quick tangent - I sometimes wonder - how, if you're a deeply devout evangelical, do you live with the sincere belief that most of your fellows on this planet are going to burn in hell? Do you worry about it, pray for them, and hope they see the light? Or do you just pretend to be nice to them and in the privacy of your home, laugh at them all for being doomed to Hell?
I doubt many Christians of that persuasion read this blog, but I would really like to know.
I lost most of this weekend to the ongoing drama of my computer upgrade. On Saturday FedEx delivered not one, but two replacement motherboards. The vendor screwed up again. Now I have to pay to ship yet another piece of hardware I didn't need.
At any rate, I shut down the old PC and started putting the new PC together. After assembling the old and new parts into the new PC case and powering it up, we experienced exactly the same problem with the secondary IDE controller.
Thinking that one busted mobo was bad luck, but two was not likely, Scott did a little more research and found on person reporting that unplugging the cable that powered the two USB ports on the front of their PC case solved the secondary IDE problem. We tried it and poof! Problem gone. It's a little annoying to have plugs that can't be used, but it's not a deal breaker at this point because I only have 3 USB devices, one of which is rarely used, and there are 4 other working USB plugs on the back of the case. And right now I just want a working PC.
That leaves the next problem -- the boot device BSOD we keep getting even though the system is seeing the CD just fine now. Scott fiddles and announces that it must be something relating to the CD drivers. I had trouble following his explanation, frankly. Whatever the problem is, it's way beyond my level of ability to solve. He thinks that we might be able to fix it if we reinstall Windows 2000. Fine by me. Except when we did so, we discovered that my lovely HDs (the ones with about 40GB of programs and data) were the problem, not the CD. For reasons as yet unknown, the new system does not think they're bootable, and Windows 2000 wants to reformat them before it will reinstall. This makes no sense to me because they were working perfectly well on the old setup and if you boot to a floppy, you can then CD to the drives and read them just fine. But they cannot be booted to now.
All along, I've made life more difficult on this upgrade because I did not want to reinstall my system. But now it seems that the one thing I most did not want to do is what I have to do.
To avoid having to reformat the HDs and totally lose my stuff, Scott pulls out a 70 GB hard drive that's currently not in use, puts it into the new case, and starts installing Windows XP onto it. I then spend most of the rest of the weekend bit by bit reinstalling and reconfiguring some 30+ applications and deciding whether to reinstall another 20 or so. Some of them I haven't used in a while but I like to have them just in case.
The only thing that kept me from screaming and throwing things is that I did not lose any data. Between the old HDs, my iPod, the backup CD I burned before starting all this, and my Tungsten C, I have a good copy, if not two copies, of all documents, files, MP3s, photos, fonts, bookmarks, etc.
I'm not quite done yet but the worst is over this Monday morning. My system is more or less looking how I like it and is running noticeably faster; and when I finally reinstalled the game that started this whole mess - City of Heroes - it ran smoothly and looks great. So in that sense I suppose it was all worthwhile. But still, I am not a very happy camper about the whole thing.
Here's the new configuration, if you're curious:
Antec case
Asus P4S800 motherboard
Intel P4 2.8 GHz CPU
2 512MB DIMMs
ATI Radeon 9600SE video
Creative SB sound card (old)
FireWire card
70GB Maxtor drive
Windows XP SP2
Hopefully I won't have to go through this for another couple of years.
Per Atrios, a reminder of how good The West Wing used to be:
We all need some therapy, because somebody came along and said "liberal" means soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on Communism, soft on defense, and we're gonna tax you back to the Stone Age because people shouldn't have to go to work if they don't want to. And instead of saying "Well, excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-eductaion, anti-choice, pro-gun, 'Leave it to Beaver' trip back to the fifties," we cowered in the corner and said "Please, don't hurt me." No more. —The West Wing
I wish I were half the writer Billmon is. Whiskey Bar puts the smack down on Ralph Nader. Go read it. It's even better than the smacking Matt Yglesias laid down on Nader not too long ago.
A sample:
If the robber baron economics, constitutional obscenity and foreign policy lunacies of the past four years haven't convinced progressives of the need for a united front against Bush and the authoritarian right, then nothing I can say now will, either.But up until the past few weeks, I've never questioned Nader's motives or his sincerity. As destructive as I think his actions have been, and as much as I detest his stubborness and his increasingly bizarre egoism, I've taken it for granted that Ralph's objectives were exactly what he said they were: to give the voters a progressive alternative to the Republicrat political duopoly.
I may have thought he was wrong - disastrously wrong - but I always assumed Nader was basically an honest person, and a man of the left. And as high as I know the stakes are in this election, it still made me uncomfortable to see the Dems using hardball tactics to try to keep him off the ballot in as many of the key states as they could. In my book, the Democratic Party was (and still is) just an instrument, a tool - a weak one, but the only one we've got - for fighting the movement conservatives. Ralph, on the other hand, was more like a crazy uncle - a real pain in the ass, but still, when it comes right down to it, family.
But Nader's increasingly open and shameless alliance with the GOP - as demonstrated so flagrantly in Michigan - leaves me with the sinking feeling that I've misjudged him.
So Linda Ronstadt got in trouble with the casino who hired her for dedicating a song to Michael Moore. I think that's pretty lame, frankly. I also think it's lame that nothing was done about the audience members who reportedly
tore down concert posters and tossed cocktails into the air.
Michael Moore has weighed in on the issue here - offering a personal appearance and a free screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 as a way for the Aladdin casino to make it up to the American public. Think what you want of Moore, but he is an excellent publicist.
I'm kind of annoyed by the whole thing and decided to make a gesture. I went over to iTunes and bought a copy of the song 'Desperado' that was at the core of the whole mess. I know it's a somewhat meaningless gesture, but it was fun picking which version of the song to buy - there's at least a dozen of them aside from the Eagles' original version and Ronstadt's cover of it.
I know the 9/11 report is out today but I am not going to deal with it. The process has become too politicized to even remotely hope for good advice to come out of it; the best we can hope for is some tidbits of useful information.
Most people disn't even know he was still running, but in time for the convention, Kucinich has formally pulled out of the race for president. He had no chance, but he ran a classy race - as a Pandagon commenter suggests, the race Nader should have been running.
It would be nice if Kucinich can now be utilized to try to get some of the Nader supporters to come to their senses - but somehow I doubt they'll listen.
You can't (yet) outsource the person who actually hands the order to the customer, but you can outsource at least some fast-food jobs. The latest application of technology:
Pull off U.S. Interstate Highway 55 near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and into the drive-through lane of a McDonald's next to the highway and you'll get fast, friendly service, even though the person taking your order is not in the restaurant - or even in Missouri.The order taker is in a call center in Colorado Springs, more than 900 miles away, connected to the customer and to the workers preparing the food by high-speed data lines.
At least the call center is is Colorado, not Hyderabad.
Tip of the hat to The Left Coaster for the link.
Switching to geek mode for a moment:
After years of debate and delay, an IPv6 nameserver is finally live. For years, IPv6 had been held up as the replacement IP space for when the current supply of IP addresses runs out. That was always deemed an impractical solution because of the technical difficulty of adapting existing Internet infrastructure to handle both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses simultaneously. So IPv6 languished.
By repurposing IPv6 for next-generation Internet uses (such as putting IP addresses in appliances and cars), the question has been neatly sidestepped. It's telling that ICANN implemented IPv6 support only for Japan's (.JP) and Korea's (.KR) country codes at first.
I'm looking forward to seeing what new devices or applications come out of this move.
Orcinus has a lengthy comparison of attitudes today towards Arabs with attitudes towards Japanese in the 1940s - worth a look. If you replace the word "Arab" with the word "Jap" in the materials he presents, it's hard to tell what was written when.
Bottom line?
The reality, just as it was in 1942, is that focusing on a single race as "the enemy" is not only wrong-headed and grotesquely unjust, it's amazingly ineffective. The United States wasted a large portion of its wartime food production by incarcerating Japanese farmers, devoted millions of taxpayer dollars to rounding them up and incarcerating them, and eventually paid billions more in reparations for having done so.More to the point, the reality is this: It's extremely, extremely unlikely that you will witness real terrorists in action, whether merely "warming up" or actually carrying out a plot. Suspecting someone merely because they are a different color or are acting in a way you think is unusual is almost certainly a leap of logic based in prejudice and false stereotypes.
In a not unexpected move, an internal Army investigation has resulted in a whole lot of nothing - except for 94 reported cases of abuse and "at least" three dozen deaths.
Maybe I'm naive - I admit I know nothing about how jails are run - but I have a very hard time understanding how 36 people can die in custody and it can all be attributed to "unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals, and in some cases coupled with the failure of a few leaders to provide adequate supervision and leadership."
Other points that seem to indicate that this report is a bunch of hogwash - Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek, the Army's inspector general, seems to have decided to ignore some critical areas, such as the so-called 'ghost prisons'.
Mikolashek said he found "no evidence" of so-called ghost detainees, prisoners kept off the books by U.S. forces and hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross.But he said he was not disputing either Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib that exposed and criticized the practice, or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said he ordered the secret detention of an Iraqi prisoner held for more than seven months without notifying the ICRC.
"We did not go back and do a post mortem on that particular issue," Mikolashek said.
As I said, none of this is unexpected. And given the proximity of the 9/11 commission's report, this one is going to be buried.
Good op-ed from Richard Clarke about the 9/11 commission report (yes I know I said I wasn't going to talk about it) and how to make its recommendations even better. Key points below:
First, we need not only a more powerful person at the top of the intelligence community, but also more capable people throughout the agencies - especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. In other branches of the government, employees can and do join on as mid- and senior-level managers after beginning their careers and gaining experience elsewhere. But at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., the key posts are held almost exclusively by those who joined young and worked their way up. This has created uniformity, insularity, risk-aversion, torpidity and often mediocrity.The only way to infuse these key agencies with creative new blood is to overhaul their hiring and promotion practices to attract workers who don't suffer the "failures of imagination" that the 9/11 commissioners repeatedly blame for past failures.
Second, in addition to separating the job of C.I.A. director from the overall head of American intelligence, we must also place the C.I.A.'s analysts in an agency that is independent from the one that collects the intelligence. This is the only way to avoid the "groupthink" that hampered the agency's ability to report accurately on Iraq. It is no accident that the only intelligence agency that got it right on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department - a small, elite group of analysts encouraged to be independent thinkers rather than spies or policy makers.
I saw the report in a bookstore on Friday night but I can't bring myself to buy it. It's like books about the Holocaust - too painful for me to want to read them.
Seems like good news to me at least:
Israel's Defense Ministry has mapped out a new route for the separation barrier in the West Bank that heeds a Supreme Court order to reduce hardships for Palestinians and runs closer to the Israel's 1967 border
As with all things in Israel, the Devil is in the details. But at least it's a step in the right direction.
I had set TiVo to record 4 hours of CSPAN convention coverage ... but the channel didn't change correctly and I got 4 hours of crap instead. I'm annoyed. I have little interest in the convention other than to hear some of the better Democrats doing their thing in front of a microphone, and missing those speeches ticked me off. Particularly Clinton's, as he's arguably one of the best political speakers of this generation.
Plus my cat Tina knocked a cup of coffee all over my desk while trying to climb onto my lap. I sacrified my t-shirt to save my digital camera from getting soaked. What a mess.
Bleh. I hope the rest of the week is better.
The DNC allowed bloggers into the convention and it made waves - some good, some bad. Much of the convention blogging hasn't been terribly interesting so far, but Tom Tomorrow has a good account of his day's activities, mostly trailing around with Michael Moore. Worth a read.
Sometimes I wonder whether one morning I woke up in some alternate universe, because reading this sort of thing, I wonder whether the world has gone nuts, or just me to think this is a really BAD IDEA:
Cash has become the US military's first line of defense in some parts of Iraq, where US soldiers are distributing money to encourage goodwill and to counter their enemies' offers of money to unemployed Iraqis willing to attack Americans, according to officers here.Even patrol leaders now carry envelopes of cash to spend in their areas. The money comes from brigade commanders, who get as much as $50,000 to $100,000 a month to distribute for local rehabilitation and emergency welfare projects through the Commanders Emergency Response Program.
There are few restrictions on the expenditures, and officers acknowledge they consider the money another weapon. The targets at which it is aimed are the restless legions of unemployed Iraqi men, many of them former soldiers, policemen, and low-level members of the Ba'ath Party of ousted president Saddam Hussein. They were put out of work when the US administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, ordered a de-Ba'athification of Iraq. US soldiers say those men are vulnerable to entreaties to carry out an attack on the Americans for pay.
So instead of using that money to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure or as small business startup funding, they just hand it out to people on the street? No tracking, no checking, no way to determine whether the money isn't going to buy more guns, more explosives? Obviously they're aware of that potential for abuse, so the article goes on to quote a couple of officers who have been giving their cash out to rebuild swimming pools and buy soccer uniforms. But still....
Even FDR didn't hand out cash to Americans to fight the Great Depression; he created jobs programs instead. Huge public works projects. Why aren't we doing that in Iraq? Is it because all the projects involving real jobs have been contracted to Halliburton?
This kind of thing literally makes my stomach hurt.
I know it's not exactly a suspensful event, watching the roll call vote at the convention, but still, I really got a kick out of watching each state delegation cast their votes for the Kerry ticket tonight (excpt for the 40-some odd Kuchinich delegates who refused to switch to Kerry). It really makes you feel that there are people across the country who care about this election as much as you yourself do.
To be honest I felt better about it than I did about Edward's speech, which was pretty boring until the last third, when Edwards finally caught some fire and started getting the crowd genuinely enthused.
Let's say you built a building, got it inspected and a certificate of occupancy issued, and then the roof caved in. You sue your builder. Then the twist - the local government files an amicus brief on behalf of the builder. Their claim? The building was issued a certificate of occupancy, so suing the builder undermines the credibility of the government.
It would be funny except that the feds are doing the same thing right now with the FDA. And in at least one case they've won. By way of the NY Times:
The Bush administration has been going to court to block lawsuits by consumers who say they have been injured by prescription drugs and medical devices.The administration contends that consumers cannot recover damages for such injuries if the products have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In court papers, the Justice Department acknowledges that this position reflects a "change in governmental policy," and it has persuaded some judges to accept its arguments, most recently scoring a victory in the federal appeals court in Philadelphia.
Allowing consumers to sue manufacturers would "undermine public health" and interfere with federal regulation of drugs and devices, by encouraging "lay judges and juries to second-guess" experts at the F.D.A.
As if no product has ever been FDA approved and then later been found to have serious problems and been pulled off the market (the FDA's own website even has a page about this issue). But even more than that, it's the idea that the government is right and people are wrong that bugs me.
Cheney said terrorists are as determined to destroy America as the "Axis powers" of Germany, Italy and Japan during World War II. Borrowing a quote from the 9-11 Commission's report on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 2001, the vice president said the terrorists are "sophisticated, patient, disciplined and lethal.""This enemy is perfectly prepared to slaughter anyone man, woman and child to achieve its ends," Cheney said. "This is not an enemy we can reason with. This is an enemy we must vanquish."
Although it may be true that al-Qaeda is as determined to destroy the US as the Axis Powers were in World War II, this observation is a Himalayan exaggeration if it is meant to suggest a parallel. Al-Qaeda is a few thousand fanatics mainly distributed in a handful of countries. If Zacharias Moussaoui and Richard Reid are any indication, a lot of them are one step away from from collecting old soda cans on the street in their grocery carts while mumbling about the radios the government implanted in their asses.
So while their determination may be impressive (or just creepy), they are not comparable to the might of three industrialized dictatorships with populations in the tens of millions. Some 13 million men served in the German army (Heer) alone between 1935 and 1945. (And WW II killed 55 million persons, not 3 thousand).
Juan Cole has a lot to say about Dick Cheney and this administration's approach to fighting terrorism. He is not a supporter of Israel, and I am, but other than that he has some very good points.
Reading around this morning, it seems the Kerry speech was well received just about everywhere (except for the Whiskey Bar and Matt Yglesias). It certainly was at the bar in downtown SF where I watched it with about 60 other SFers at a Kerry fundraiser.
Kerry's opening line, "I'm John Kerry, reporting for duty" was a risk but I think it went over well. In fact, Kerry did about the best job he possibly could have done last night. Not that I needed convincing who to vote for, but I did walk away with a shift in my feelings about Kerry. Before the speech, I was voting for Kerry because I had to. Now I actually want to vote for the man.
O, and per Kos, may Saxby Chambliss rot in hell for what he did to Max Cleland. He gave a great introduction speech and I hope we see more of Cleland in a Kerry administration.
Trent Lott calling John Kerry “a French-speaking socialist from Boston, Massachusetts" would be funny except that unfortunately, in some parts of America, implying someone does something different like *gasp* speaking a language other than English (let alone the language of those cheese-eating surrender monkeys) is not a positive.
What Trent Lott told a crowd of people at one fair in Nebraska is ultimately immaterial to the overall election. It's just another stroke on the canvas of Us versus Them that's being painted in America these days. But it's also about the isolation of America from the greater world.
It's a human trait to fear that which is different. And if you only speak English, everyone you know only speaks English, and you like it that way, then hearing that a political candidate is not like you creates a sense of difference. And that sense of difference, that subtle feeling that the candidate is not a part of your world, makes a difference when you're in the voting booth on election day.
I know of a guy who was contacted by some business types about starting a new venture. They were based in England and he lived in Middle America. He decided to commit to the project and jumped through all kinds of paperwork hoops, getting his visa in place so he could move to Scotland to start a new business. When he got there, there were some issues with the investors and it was a hectic few weeks straightening out some of the wrinkles with his colleagues (not surprising when you're trying to start a new company at a distance). Once he'd gotten everything set how he wanted it, he cancelled the sale of his house and came right back to America.
I was amazed. I couldn't believe after all the work he'd put in getting the right to work legally abroad, that after a couple of weeks he would turn around and run for home, but he did. And he's happy about it. To be honest, I think he's a bit of an idiot for running home so fast. But as I think about it more, living in such a large and homogenous society does that to you. It's hard to handle differences when so much of America is the same. And some politicians have made a lot of political hay on this fact.
I don't know what if anything can be done about this state of things. The only way to become comfortable with difference is to experience it on a regular basis. When you live in a city like New York or San Francisco, that's pretty easy to do. It’s not so easy living in Nebraska.
I finally read Ron Reagan's piece in Esquire on why not to vote for Bush. It's a nice piece of writing, very lyrical in its outrage - RR definitely has gifts in that regard. But one small quibble I wanted to call out. Reagan says towards the end
I write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is plenty angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current administration.
If honesty is at the core of what Reagan does not like about Bush, then he needs to be honest about this too. The fact is, no matter how well-written his article, it's being published in Esquire and not some obscure blog because Ron Reagan is the son of a two-term US President. He should acknowledge that point.
This page contains all entries posted to Fiat Lux in July 2004. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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