Month: February 2006

Weekend Cat and Camera Blogging

Ah, the mixed emotions of being a cat owner. This morning I woke up to find that somebody, probably Tommy, had pried open my underwear drawer, dug into the contents, and dumped pretty much everything onto the floor. I’d post a photo but Scott’s still asleep and I don’t want to wake him.

Instead, here’s a photo of one of Gimi’s favorite places to be:

Gimi and My Monitor

It’s cute and all, but kind of hard to get stuff done when he’s up there.

On a side note, I think I’m going to be getting a new digicam for my birthday this year. Got any suggestions for a good 5 megapixel model in the $300 price range? My current camera is a Sony DSC-P30 and it’s held up very well over time; I wouldn’t be thinking about replacing it at all except that it’s only 1.3 megapixels and I’d really like to be able to take print-quality photos with the digital.

At any rate, I’m looking hard at some newer Sony models but Scott thinks I should look at some other as well.

Between Barbed Wire and Tinfoil

As William Gibson pointed out, paranoia is often narcissism. Dave Neiwert makes an excellent point today about the fine line between healthy concern and paranoia:

I recall that the right also used to claim that Clinton was not just building concentration camps, but he was also secretly wiretapping American citizens. That he was assassinating political enemies in secret. That he was remaking the presidency into a virtual dictatorship with limitless powers. All without a smidgen of anything approaching factual evidence.

And now we have a president who really is not just preparing to building mass detention centers, but who has been conducting illegal domestic surveillance, who has claimed the power to order assassinations on American soil, who does appear to be claiming limitless powers as a “wartime” executive. Is it any wonder, really, that people’s paranoia meters are running at full blast?

I remember reading some of the Y2K websites back in 1999, and was vaguely amused to find how often they would wander into “New World Order” tinfoil hat rhetoric. Just because we’re seeing similar rhetoric on the other side of the spectrum doesn’t make it more true. As always, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

All of which is not to sat that there’s no potential for abuse here. There definitely is, and we need to be aware of it. But jumping to the exact same conclusions that proved to be groundless in 2000 is probably not the way to go.

Back to the 80s

My initial response on seeing this story was that it had to be some sort of bad joke. Apparently not.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by Cheney and other White House “superiors” in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein’s purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

The article goes on to note that this is essentially the Oliver North defense, and that it more or less worked for North.

In the North case, the Iran-Contra independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, was forced to dismiss many of the central charges against North, including the most serious ones-that North defrauded taxpayers by diverting proceeds from arms sales to Iran to finance the Nicaraguan Contras-because intelligence agencies and the Reagan administration refused to declassify documents necessary for a trial on those charges.

Given this administration’s penchane for secrecy, I would not at all be surprised if it worked again.

UPDATE: Shakes is POed too, but also feeling apathetic:

Every day, there are new stories emerging about which I should feel outraged, and yet five years of no accountability is making me weary. How many hundreds incidents of unethical or flatly illegal behavior am I meant to read without having the slightest bloody ability to do a damn thing about it?

Indeed. I feel the same way.

CraigsList Getting Sued

This crossed my path today:

A civil rights group is suing classifieds website Craigslist for publishing what it calls discriminatory housing ads. Lawyers say some of the offending listings called for “no minorities,” or “no children.”

Other listings were more specific, “African Americans and Arabs…won’t work out,” or, “requirements: Clean Godly Christian male.”

Newspapers clearly cannot publish ads that discriminate. But Craiglist says while it asks people to read and understand the law, it cannot be responsible for ads that break that law.

Ultimately the question seems to be whether Craigslist is a publisher or a service provider. One’s protected, the other isn’t. I’d be surprised if CL doesn’t end up having to make some changes in how housing ads get posted to the site, but time will tell.

Side note — We’ve never found the Craiglist housing ads particularly helpful. All three of the places we’ve ended up renting in the Bay Area have come from other sources — the first was via a paid service, the second from the SF Chronicle ads, the third from the San Mateo Chamber of Commerce.