Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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People for the American Way has an online petition demanding that Ashcroft name an independent investigator to look into the Plame outing. Please go sign it.
Oh, and Steve Soto has same Clinton-era quotes about the necessity of independent counsels from Orrin Hatch, Trent Lott, and Henry Hyde that just became newly relevant, in case you were wavering.
UPDATE (4:16 pm): Weird. Looks like Atrios wrote essentially this exact post a couple of hours before me.
Well, my web host has posted this site's final statistics for the month of September (they are located in Hong Kong, so September ended at noon EST today rather than midnight). The highlights:
It's all simultaneously flattering and humbling, even if those numbers remain decidedly humble by the standards of the blogland bigwigs. Anyhow, thanks so much for dropping in and reading our ramblings and agit-prop. Hope it has been as enjoyable for you to read as it has been for us to write. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress...
"...which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bush is indeed guilty of all three felony charges. I'll post the pictures as soon as they return from the PhotoMat. Pulitzer Committee members can contact me using the e-mail address listed in the sidebar."
Text of an e-mail to White House staff Tuesday from counsel Alberto R. Gonzales about the Justice Department's investigation about the leak of a CIA officer's identity:
PLEASE READ: Important Message From Counsel's Office
We were informed last evening by the Department of Justice that it has opened an investigation into possible unauthorized disclosures concerning the identity of an undercover CIA employee. The department advised us that it will be sending a letter today instructing us to preserve all materials that might be relevant to its investigation. Its letter will provide more specific instructions on the materials in which it is interested, and we will communicate those instructions directly to you. In the meantime, you must preserve all materials that might in any way be related to the department's investigation. Any questions concerning this request should be directed to Associate Counsels Ted Ullyot or Raul Yanes in the counsel to the president's office. The president has directed full cooperation with this investigation.
Does Office Depot carry paper shredders? Do we have a PO there?
UPDATE 2:00 PM:
The DNC "Kicking Ass" blog notes that:
[From AP]: The (Justice) department notified the counsel's office about 8:30 p.m. Monday that it was launching an investigation but said the White House could wait until the next morning to notify staff and direct them to preserve relevant material, (WH Press Sectretary Scott) McClellan said.
Since when does the Justice Department give people a several-hours head start to destroy evidence before an investigation begins?
Maybe this is innocent, but until we know more it shouldn't be forgotten.
Tips to KOS.
Is anything funnier than watching the apologist right wing of the press and the blog world furiously circling the wagons and twisting themselves into logical knots to excuse the Bush administration's reprehensible conduct in l'affaire Plame?
Well, actually, yes. Andrew Northrup's send up of said circling is even funnier.
Doug Thompson gets it.
In a town where every action demands a reaction, where payback is a bitch and where everyone keeps score, there is a fine line between playing hardball and being just plain dumb and stupid. Looks like Dubya’s boys crossed that line.
[...]
While the gang from Texas may think this is politics as usual, the pros at Langley did not. The CIA, pissed at having the name of one of its operatives revealed in a newspaper column, demanded an investigation from the Justice Department.
[...]
And Dubya’s ever-present Greek Chorus circled the wagons, claiming – as they always do – that is all part of some grand liberal Democratic scheme to embarrass the White House and take back the Presidency in 2004. As usual, they have it wrong... Bush and his boys are capable of doing that all by themselves.
I'll avoid the hairsplitting "Operative vs. Analyst"; Novak said one then changed his tune.
I'll avoid the apologetic "I didn't dig this up" vs "I called and asked"; Novak again demonstrates he can sing in two keys .
However, I will not avoid stating my opinion, in agreement with Mr. Thompson in the above link, that Robert Novak is, was, and ever shall be a stooge.
As in Larry, Curly, and Moe caliber stooge.
But he is a journalist and protected by the first amendment. Let's have some fun laughing at him and then get to work rooting out the cancer at 1600 Pa Ave.
Both Donald Rumsfeld and Howard Baker
When what the president knows is a known known, then what "isn't known" must be a known unknown, no?
"He wasn't involved," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said of Rove. "The president knows he wasn't involved. ... It's simply not true."
So then, who was it? The Butler in the dining room with the candlestick? Colonel Mustard in the library with the dagger? If they're so certain who the felon isn't, finding out who it is shouldn't take so long.
Unless we never know.
The on again off again telemarketing do not call list has started to come under fire from legislators and industry flacks who say it could cost two million jobs. I understand that jobs are difficult to come by these days, but color me unimpressed with the argument. I'm sure RICO has cost many jobs in the extortion industry as well. Some industries simply aren't worth preserving and this happens to be one of them.
An even weaker argument is that the list somehow violates telemarketers' First Amendment right to free speech. Please. States have long had the power to determine where and what types of advertising are acceptable - businesses do not have the right to toss up billboards willy-nilly on your lawn. A company has a right to say what they will (though even that is not absolute), but they do not have a right to push their advertising into your home, across the phone line that you pay for, when you have expressly stated that you don't want it. TV and radio advertising at least serve to finance each medium. Telemarketing just feeds parasitically.
The do-not-call list should be a do-call list instead. Anyone who wishes to be contacted by telemarketers can opt in and everybody else is protected from intrusive marketing. Would that kill the industry? One could only hope. If charities and polling firms want to push for an exemption, then fine. But with advertising now present in almost every place my eyes can focus, I spit (and a la Joe Lieberman, I want to make clear that I said "spit") in the direction of First Amendment defenses of telemarketing.
However, the good news for those of us in the Old North State is that NC Attorney General Roy Cooper announced that "North Carolina will start enforcing its own law to curb unwanted telemarketing calls starting Wednesday if legal challenges keeps a national do-not-call registry in limbo."
Cooper announced Friday he wants telemarketers to get the list of 1.63 million numbers North Carolinians have signed up on the national registry since late June. Cooper said he would run the state registry with $750,000 from a federal grant.
Go get 'em, Roy. You make that a reality and I'll gladly campaign for you for governor. I've long said that insurance industry executives will be first against the wall when the revolution comes and the American people make me their king. Telemarketing executives go second, followed closely by the RIAA. As Gil Scott Heron famously prophesized, the revolution will not be televised. It will, however, be webcast. Without advertisements. Viva l'apostropher!
Yukichi Chuganji died Sunday at the age of 114. The retired (as if there was any question) silkworm breeder from the Japanese island of Kyushu was the oldest known man on the planet. Oddly enough, the oldest known woman, 116-year-old Kamato Hongo, also lives on Kyushu, and Japan has an estimated 15,000 other citizens that have tottered passed the century mark.
He had just finished drinking some apple juice when his family noticed he wasn't looking well, Haji said.
At 114, how would one tell? I suppose the Japanese are a little more finely tuned to such things, given their extensive experience with extreme longevity. Why, Jesus Christ lived to be 106 before he died there.
In the years leading up to World War II, ancient scrolls turned up in the hands of a Shinto priest just outside of Tokyo. They pertained to two small, forgotten graves in the remote mountains of northern Honshu, the main island of Japan. The scrolls — written in a Japanese so archaic that only experts can read it — recount the unlikely tale of Christ's escape from death, and were purportedly written — or at least dictated — by Jesus himself as his last will and testament. Call it the Last Testament.
When the priest realized what he had uncovered, he summoned Banzan Toya, an artist/researcher specializing in ancient Japanese history. Together, they located two graves in a bamboo grove on the ancestral land of the Sawaguchi family, whose tradition held that the burial site remain undisturbed, but did not explain why. According to the scrolls, one tomb holds the ears of Jesus' brother, Isukiri [apostropher: who, in a Tale of Two Cities prequel, supposedly took his brother's spot on Golgotha] and a lock of the Blessed Virgin Mary's hair, while Christ himself rests in the one directly opposite.
The scrolls talk of Christ's "lost" years, during which, they say, he traveled to Japan for spiritual training. Years later, when he was condemned to die in Judea, he escaped to his adopted hometown. In Shingo, locals held him in awe as the "long-nosed goblin." Christ supposedly changed his name to Daitenku Taro Jurai, sired a biblical three daughters and lived to the ripe old age of 106.
While the locals seem both amused and skeptical about the veracity of the local Tomb of Christ (though agnostic enough when tourist yen come a-knockin'), archaeologists have determined that there is indeed some sort of crypt below the gravesite. There are more details of the odd legend spelled out in this 32-year-old Charlotte Observer story. Of course, no post on Japan would be complete without the obligatory link to engrish.com. If you have somehow missed it during your internet journeys, don't be drinking cola when you visit. That stuff burns like hell coming out of your nose.
Given this Administration's problems with leaks of late, I found this rather ironic.
Except in a few highly egregious circumstances relating to national security information (espionage and atomic secrets), the U.S. Congress has, in the past, never made it a crime to leak information to the news media. As a result, for over two hundred years, our government has operated without an "official secrets act."
[...]
Despite the free speech costs, President George W. Bush has created the equivalent of an official secrets act for America - and it is only growing stronger. Indeed, by cobbling together provisions from existing laws, Bush's Justice Department has effectively created one of the world's most encompassing, if not draconian, official secrets acts.
If Attorney General John Ashcroft has his way, we will see many more prosecutions of this ilk. Ashcroft has told Congress he wants a "comprehensive, coordinated, Government-wide, aggressive, properly resourced, and sustained effort" to deal with "the problem of unauthorized disclosures."
[...]
Attorney General John Ashcroft is making good on his word to aggressively prosecute leaks - or at least some leaks. Again, the target has been a low-level employee, a Morison for the new millenium. He is Jonathan Randal, an intelligence research specialist with a Ph.D. who had worked at the Atlanta office of the DEA.
Randal's alleged crime? Leaking negative information about one of the richest men in the U.K., Lord Michael Ashcroft (no relation).
Still by John Dean (Former Nixon Counsel) writing for FindLaw:
Lord Ashcroft, who makes his home in Florida and the former British colony of Belize had been bankrolling the Conservative Party in Britain. His business empire is also based in Belize, an offshore tax haven. The London Times reported that leaked information from the Foreign Office indicated that high officials in Belize viewed Lord Ashcroft with "deep suspicion." Then, a few days later, it reported that his name appeared in a number of DEA files relating to investigations into drug trafficking and money laundering in Belize.
The bad press forced Lord Ashcroft's resignation as the Conservative party's treasurer. Soon, the U.S. State Department issued a statement that it had no conclusive proof connecting Ashcroft to money laundering, or anything else. But the London Times said that to the contrary, it had DEA documents showing that Ashcroft was index-numbered on the DEA files, a measure that, it said, is taken only when serious suspicions exist.
Lord Ashcroft filed a libel lawsuit against the Times, and soon traced the DEA documents back to Jonathan Randal. It turned out that Randal had leaked them to a freelance British journalist who was investigating Lord Ashcroft; the journalist, in turn, had sold them to the London Times. According to Randal's attorney, Steve Sadow - who spoke to Robin McDonald of the Fulton (Georgia) Country Daily Report and Felicity Barringer of the New York Times - Randal himself received no payment for the information itself, no quid pro quo.
Lord Ashcroft settled his lawsuit with the London Times, which agreed to a front-page apology and promised never again to investigate him. In addition, according to press accounts, he hired an Atlanta lawyer to encourage DEA and the Justice Department to prosecute Jon Randal.
The Case Against Randal
Randal was indicted by Bush's new U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, William Duffey Jr.. Duffey is a former Deputy Independent Counsel who worked for Ken Starr in Little Rock, Arkansas. (Starr, with Duffey's help, built a case against then-governor Jim Guy Tucker, sending him to jail on fraud and conspiracy charges.)
In February 2002, Duffey's office confronted Randal with a twenty-count indictment. The impact of the indictment was to criminalize Randal's leak. But to do so, prosecutors didn't bother to draw from an official secrets act - since they didn't have one. Instead, they twisted the existing law to issue an indictment to the same effect.
Count One is based on the general theft statute - with information, once again, alleged to be the "thing of value" stolen. Count Two relies on a statue adopted in 1994 designed to protect information in government computers, where most government information now resides. The government charged that Randal "knowingly and with an intent to defraud" the government, exceeded his authorized use of the DEA computer by pulling information about Lord Ashcroft.
Counts Three through Eighteen are based on the mail/wire fraud statutes; there are sixteen counts because Randal allegedly accessed DEA computers to obtain information about Lord Ashcroft sixteen times.
This pair of statutes is especially prone to misuse. As Chief Justice Warren Burger noted, "When a 'new' fraud develops - as constantly happens - the mail fraud statute becomes a stopgap device to deal on a temporary basis with the new phenomenon, until particularized legislation can be developed and passed to deal directly with the evil." The same is true of the wire fraud statute, as he also noted.
Counts Nineteen and Twenty are further fraud charges. They appear to address the reimbursement that Randal received from the London Times when he agreed to meet with them after they were sued by Lord Ashcroft.
Jon Randal decided to cooperate with the government, and to plead guilty to a violation of the theft statute. That's not surprising: If he had not, he could have faced a staggering statutory maximum of penalty of 580 years - or more realistically, life - in prison.
Randal's Sentencing: The Government Seeks a Long Sentence
For sentencing purposes, the Government used expert testimony to claim the value of the information given the London Times was up to $70,000 - an absurd contention. Still, Randal was given a year in jail; he will have to serve the entire year, followed by three years of supervised probation. He will also have to pay a $2000 fine.
U.S. Attorney Duffey told the New York Times that he was pleased with the sentence - and saw the prosecution of Randal as "a warning to other government workers."
But what warning, exactly? The information was not classified. It did not compromise any investigator, investigation, or investigative method. Clearly, the warning is this: Keep your mouth shut at all costs, no matter how intensely a leak might be in the public interest, and no matter how integral leaking might be to the way a free press operates. In short, the message is: Never blow the whistle.
Meanwhile, there is still talk of prosecuting the London Times. But I'll believe that only when it happens - which would doubtless only occur after November 2004, if ever.
I suspect the "fair and balanced" Mr. Murdoch, who owns the London Times, will be able to settle up with the Bush administration before then. If not, the American media, too, will get an ugly warning - for it may be the next victim of Bush's unofficial official secrets act.
'Cause it's Independent Counsel time, fellas.
Democratic lawmakers and presidential candidates seized on the (Plame affair) investigation as a new vulnerability for Bush. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), who has been pushing the FBI to pursue the matter for two months, said that "if something this sensitive is done under the wing of any direct appointees, at the very minimum, it's not going to have the appearance of fairness and thoroughness."
From the presidential campaign trail in New Hampshire, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) called it "a natural conflict of interest" for Justice Department appointees to investigate their superiors, and said congressional committees should step in to try to determine what happened.
Former Vermont governor Howard Dean said Attorney General John D. Ashcroft should play no role in the investigation and should turn it over to the Justice Department's inspector general, who operates independently of political appointees. "President Bush came into office promising to bring honor and integrity to the White House," Dean said. "It's time for accountability."
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) said the investigation "must be conducted by an independent, nonpartisan counsel."
Although the Independent Counsel Act, created after the Watergate abuses, expired in 1999, the attorney general can appoint a special counsel to investigate the president and other top government officials. Special counsels have less independence from the attorney general, but proponents of the system said that makes them more accountable.
Blowing a WMD Spook's cover ain't no ordinary blowjob.
Holy Crap. Six leaks? In Today's WaPo:
At CIA Director George J. Tenet's request, the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist, government sources said yesterday.
The operative's identity was published in July after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly challenged President Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore from Africa for possible use in nuclear weapons. Bush later backed away from the claim.
Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account touched off a political fracas over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.
Emphasis mine.
So here are three things I'll posit:
1. Robert Novak is more concerned with serving as "White House media officer for partisan cheap shots" than he is with National Security. He is also in the 83rd percentile for "jackass" among the Washington Presscorps.
2. Wilson's behavior could be explained as backing off with the accusations because this thing has plenty of momentum on its own.
3. Whether this is a (pretty rushed and pitiful) counterattack by Congressional Republican hacks merits investigation.
Top members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which spent four months combing through 19 volumes of classified material used by the Bush administration to make its case for the war on Iraq, found "significant deficiencies" in the community's ability to collect fresh intelligence on Iraq, and said it had to rely on "past assessments" dating to when U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998 and on "some new 'piecemeal' intelligence," both of which "were not challenged as a routine matter."
"The absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programs had been destroyed was considered proof that they continued to exist," the two committee members said in a letter Thursday to CIA Director George J. Tenet. The Washington Post obtained a copy this weekend."
I only refrain from calling it so already because one Democrat also signed the letter criticizing the CIA. This is not the findings of the Committee, mind you. It's just a letter that goes to CIA director Tenet and all the Media Outlets. And JUST HAD to go out now. Or at least just HAD TO go to the media this weekend after the Plame story broke big Friday night. Kinda helps it get lost in the news - noise, doesn't it.
Sorry, guys, this Plame story has WAY more staying power than a letter that says nothing we didn't know already.
This will get very interesting indeed.
As Joseph Wilson said, in the Q&A session at Rep. Inslee's forum in August regarding Karl Rove being behind - or linked to - the outing (to columnist Robert Novak) of his wife, supposed CIA Agent Valerie Plame:
First, the CIA would perform an internal investigation. The results of that would be passed on to the Justice Department for professional investigation. I don't think this will be dropped. "At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words."
Well, apparently that investigation has been completed and passed on to Ashcroft's Justice Department. Inference being that CIA has determined that laws were broken. We'll see how far it goes on its own merits there, how much pressure is applied to forward the DOJ investigation, and how much stonewalling resistance is presented to that pressure. This should get very interesting.
Last week when talking to Joshua Micah Marshall at TPM, Wilson said:
Yeah, and Karl Rove, when I said that, is sort of a metaphor for the White House political operation.
At which I was rather disappointed with Ambassador Wilson.
I think that, at most, Wilson thinks (or knows) that Rove knows who Novak's sources are. Wilson has done nothing to directly accuse Rove of being the source and his "metaphor for the White House" comment makes that very clear. But now the ball is in John Ashcroft's, ahem, able hands.
Stay tuned.
Frog Marched. Heh heh. Karl Rove. I still find that very, very funny.
Remember the North Carolina farmer who shut down the main mall in Washington, DC back in March by driving his tractor into a pond, apparently loaded with explosives? At the time, I wrote about it here. Well, he just had his trial, and to nobody's surprise was convicted, but some of his testimony was just priceless.
Watson blamed the standoff, the evacuations and the gridlock near the Mall on a colossal misunderstanding and said he was armed with nothing more than Raid Roach and Flea Fogger. When he told police he had "organophosphate bombs" on his tractor, Watson explained to the jury, he meant the "bug bombs" he bought at a Wal-Mart store in North Carolina.
His comment that police would "see the smoke" if they tried to force him out? That, Watson said, was a reference to the exhaust that would trail from his tractor if he put it into gear and drove. "I never mentioned the word 'explosives' or 'detonate,' " said the man who kept sharpshooters, SWAT units and scores of other police at bay. "I didn't come up here to hurt nobody. . . . Civil disobedience is basically what I was doing."
[...]
Watson, 50, insisted that he wanted only to call attention to the dangers of toxic pesticides and the government mistreatment of tobacco farmers and Persian Gulf War military troops.
[...]
In court yesterday, Watson said he surrendered earlier than he had planned because of the skills of one of the two female negotiators, Park Police Sgt. Kathleen Harasek. "Her being a woman and all, she just naturally took over," he said.
[...]
"I tried to do the right thing, like we were raised as kids, you know, go up and talk to your congressmen. . . . Everybody just blew me off," Watson told Harasek. "I said, 'Damn, these people up here in Washington, D.C., need a damn wake-up call.' And I tell you what, everybody will remember my damn name before it's over," he told her. "I'm military police, and I'm taught to stand up when I see something wrong."
It's like a deleted scene from Run Ronnie Run. Kinda makes me proud.
Phil Carter debunks Rush Limbaugh's hatchet job on Wesley Clark in the Wall Street Journal.
A BeliefNet interview with Al Franken, who suspects Bush's religiosity is phony.
A look at how the Earth would be different without the moon (for starters, a day would be 8 hours long and winds would be much, much stronger).
Eric Alterman remembers Edward Said in a eulogy that should remind everybody that friends can disagree about deeply held beliefs and remain friends.
(first three links via TAPPED, I Protest, and a commenter in this dKos thread.)
Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged hits the nail on the head regarding the overturning of the death-by-stoning sentence of a Nigerian woman convicted of adultery.
The rest of the world saved Amina Lawal by paying attention. Imagine if we did it all the time.
There seems to be a theme developing here over the past few days. Both Froz and I have withstood accusations of being space cadets before, and now we just fuel the fire.
Look, I know it's puerile, but I can't help it. This headline cracks me up: Hubble Uncovers Smallest Moons Yet Seen Around Uranus. Guess all those steak and egg biscuits aren't doing too much damage yet. But sophomoric double entendres aside, take a moment to marvel at the fact that a telescope in orbit around Earth can spot two 8-10 mile wide rocks, 40 million times fainter than the planet they orbit, from a distance of 1.7 billion miles. That is to say: damn!
Uranus' moon system is unlike any other, and astronomers are unsure just how it all functions. 18 small inner moons - the highest of any planet so far - travel in tight circular orbits, while six larger ones have wider elliptical orbits. The 24 moons place it third in the overall standings behind Jupiter (38) and Saturn (30). Gravitationally, it should be an unstable mess, yet is somehow holding together. Break out the slide rules, fellas. [Aside: I actually had to learn to use a slide rule in Miss Shoffner's 9th grade science class; wonder if that's still in the curriculum.]
Also, Europe's first moon mission (much more detail here and especially here) launches on Sunday, a one cubic meter box with solar panels that will unfurl to power an experimental new ion propulsion system based on exciting xenon gas. Exciting as a verb, that is; as gasses go, xenon is decidely less exciting than, say, nitrous oxide. As with the solar sails Froz mentions below, this is a molasses-slow flight at first. It will take sixteen months to get to la luna, following an incredibly circuitous spiral path upwards.
Up, up, and away! Is it too much to hope that commercial space flight will become a reality before I get too old to take advantage of it? 'Cause I want in on some of that action. Yes, yes, the Love Boat in space! I am so there.
Yeah; far, far away.
High above, in the vast seas of space, a reversal of history is about to take place. Since the advent of the Space Age with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, virtually every vessel sent into the heavens has been propelled by engines that had to take their own fuel with them, be it chemical, electric, or nuclear. While this was both required and desired in those early years, a small but growing number of pioneers in the field have dedicated themselves to exploring the universe with a power source more reliable and free than the winds of Earth: sunlight.
Soon a craft named Cosmos 1 will become known as the first vessel in human history to move through the skies powered only by the pressure of the light from the Sun. This space event will be "equivalent to the Wright Brothers flight" of the first heavier-than-air powered craft nearly a century ago this December 17, says Ann Druyan. She is program director for Cosmos 1 and CEO of Cosmos Studios, a science education company based in Los Angeles and managed from Ithaca.
[...]
The Cosmos 1 spacecraft is a seeming contradiction in terms of the varying sizes of its parts: Its eight fanlike sails, when fully opened in Earth orbit, are almost 100 feet across and encompass a total acreage of 6,415 square feet. Yet the main bus of the satellite, its "brains" and "heart," is only one yard in diameter, weighs just 88 pounds, and receives its power from two solar panels.
[...]
Solar sails are quite slow in the initial phases of their flights: It would take Cosmos 1 over one year to reach the moon, while the manned Apollo missions using conventional rockets made it to Earth's natural satellite in just three days. (But if) Cosmos 1 were aimed to leave our planetary system, using sunlight alone it would eventually obtain a velocity of 62 miles per second, passing the orbit of Pluto in just five years. Cosmos 1 would quickly overtake the probe Voyager 1, which has taken 26 years to reach its current record distance of 8.3 billion miles from Earth. The solar sail would "leave Voyager in the dust," says Druyan.
And the cool thing is they'll use an old Soviet submarine-launched ICBM to boost it into orbit for the test. This may just be the way to cover REALLY big distances in space; interstellar big. How beautifully simple.
For info on the mission click here.
For an interview with a physicist working on it click here.
Note to self: when stealing somebody else's identity, remember to choose somebody who isn't a convicted sex offender.
Perry stole the identity of Robert Kowalski in order to obtain a drivers license, police said. Perry was living in Florida at the time and Kowalski was his neighbor. Perry had four drunken driving arrests which he believed would make it difficult to get a license legally in Connecticut, police said. Perry moved to Connecticut about a year ago and things went well until Perry was arrested for disorderly conduct. A routine computer check found that "Kowalski" was a convicted sex offender in Michigan and not registered as required with the state of Connecticut.
"No, no, officer. I'm not a child molester, I'm just a drunk. Honest!"
Parading around the Matterhorn, no less.
Some folks have Waaaaay too much time on their hands.
Update: As my boss just confirmed for me: Yes, some people do.
Apparently "Pot Plant" means something a little bit, let's say, older and more innocent across the pond. While the story was a bit of a let down from the tantalizing headline, it's interesting enough to warrant sharing.
Sagittarius is being eaten by the Milky Way. The dwarf galaxy, 10,000 times less massive than the Milky Way, is being ripped apart as its orbit passes through our galaxy, which slurps stars right out of it. Coincidentally, it is currently passing through our part of the Milky Way; in the picture below, the location of the Sun is the yellow dot and Sagittarius is the long red spray. This cool little 1.6 MB mpeg shows the process from 2 billion years ago to half a billion years in the future.
"If people had infrared-sensitive eyes, the entrails of Sagittarius would be a prominent fixture sweeping across our sky," Majewski said. "But at human, visual wavelengths, they become buried among countless intervening stars and obscuring dust. The great expanse of the Sagittarius system has been hidden from view."
Not any more. By using infrared maps, the astronomers filtered away millions of foreground stars to focus on a type of star called an M giant. These large, infrared-bright stars are populous in the Sagittarius galaxy but uncommon in the outer Milky Way. The 2MASS infrared map of M giant stars analyzed by Majewski and collaborators is the first to give a complete view of our galaxy's meal of Sagittarius stars, now wrapping like a spaghetti noodle around the Milky Way. Prior to this work, astronomers had detected only a few scattered pieces of the disrupted Sagittarius dwarf. Even the existence of Sagittarius was unknown until the heart of this nearest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way was discovered by a British team of astronomers in 1994.
[...]
The study's map of M giants depicts 2 billion years of Sagittarius stripping by the Milky Way, and suggests that Sagittarius has reached a critical phase in what had been a slow dance of death.
"After slow, continuous gnawing by the Milky Way, Sagittarius has been whittled down to the point that it cannot hold itself together much longer," said 2MASS Science Team member and study co-author Martin Weinberg of the University of Massachusetts. "We are seeing Sagittarius at the very end of its life as an intact system."
Munch munch munch. Mmmm, soylent green...
Project Censored has posted Censored 2004: The Top 25 Censored Media Stories of 2002-2003. Read through the list, then try to say "liberal media bias" with a straight face. While each of these are important stories in their own right, the one that really gets my goat (and, in my opinion, was the most fastidiously ignored of the list) is #12: Bush Administration Behind Failed Military Coup in Venezuela.
We are all understandably focused on the Middle East right now, but it should be noted that the Bush administration has resuscitated some very shameful methods and policies in Latin America while everybody's attention is diverted. Not that anybody should be surprised - look who is running the show down there (since that was written, Otto Reich has been kicked upstairs to be Special Envoy to Latin America, while the Deputy Sec'y position has gone to Jesse Helms protege Roger Noriega). Chavez is the legally, democratically elected president of Venezuela. I don't want to hear one %&$#@* word from George W. Bush about "democracy." Not. One. Word.
At MSNBC, the story reporting yet another poll showing Bush with sub-50% approval ratings (this one an NBC/WallStreet Journal poll) ran the following photograph of a very unhappy-looking Bush alongside it:
As DanD noted in the comments of this Whiskey Bar post, that picture looks awfully familiar:
I'll be damned. The missing lunk.
Harold Meyerson has an interesting look at the parallels between (what increasingly appears to be) the Clark-Dean race and the 1968 McCarthy-RFK race. Wandering through the comments of some of the more well-travelled blogs over the past few days, the level of venom being exchanged between partisans of each candidate caught me by surprise. I suspect that a not inconsiderable amount of that is actually being generated by undercover GOP-backers, trying to sow seeds of animosity to divide the party.
A lot of it, however, is clearly genuine. My unscientific, small-sample-size analysis registered most of that coming from the Dean supporters, many of whom seem convinced that Clark is either a DLC conspiracy to rob their candidate of the nomination or a Trojan Horse Republican. That sounds more than a little paranoid to me, but more than that it makes me wonder whether the Dean camp is familiar with the former governor's record in Vermont.
Howard Dean's tenure as governor was the epitome of DLC centrist politics. Here's the odd twist: just like Bill Clinton, Dean is decidedly on the conservative end of the party, but still manages to get labelled a lefty. He's well to the right of Joe Lieberman on nearly every issue aside from Iraq, but it's Lieberman who invariably gets attacked as Republican-lite. Go figure. Maybe it's the grating moralism. It is for me, anyhow.
Given the steady plunge in Bush's poll numbers, you can rest assured that the Rove machine is nervous about every candidate in the field (well, not Sharpton, Braun, or Kucinich, but you get my drift), but I suspect they are terrified of Clark. Why? Because Clark could bring white males back to the Democratic Party and if that happens, Bush is in trouble in almost every state in the country. Deep trouble. Remember, Gore only got 36% of the white male vote and still outpolled Bush by half a million votes overall. A Democrat who could raise that to 45% (or, hope against hope, 50) is going to walk away with an Electoral College landslide.
I like Dean and think he is doing great things for the party, but I have severe doubts about his ability to swing southern states, simply because he is from New England. I know that sounds absurd at first, but the only New Englander in decades to carry the south from either party was Bush Sr., and he was a sorta-Texan running against another New Englander. This is in no way an indictment of Dean, just a sober appraisal of southern politics from a lifelong southerner. A candidate can win without the south, but it is immensely more difficult than if we can flip a couple or more of those states.
Also, while military families seem increasingly disillusioned with Bush, it may take a military man to get them to stop reflexively voting Republican, which brings me to one of Clark's main selling points as the next commander-in-chief. Whoever ends up holding the White House in 2004 will have to manage the drawdown of American troops in Iraq, and needless to say, Clark has some unique qualifications in that area. I think he also presents the opportunity to dramatically change the blue/red equation and move the Democrats closer to a permanent governing majority. His entry into the field makes all of the Democratic candidates look more serious; it's good for the Party regardless of whether he ends up capturing the nomination. Would he have a coattail effect down the ticket? Perhaps so, perhaps not, but something makes me suspect that Dean likely will not.
So, for the bickering partisans from each side: can it with the personal attacks. You are doing Karl Rove's bidding. If you want to talk about electability or relative policy positions (once Clark's become clearer), then fine. Either man would make a good president, and you may end up having to swallow your own venom if they end up on a ticket together. My personal goal is not to stop Howard Dean, it's to put forth the nominee that can assemble a coalition big enough that extralegal shenanigans like Florida 2000 can't make a difference. I don't want a nailbiter, I want a blowout. I want Bush to be humiliated.
Clark's legions include Democrats more accustomed to attacking one another than joining in common cause. Satirist and anti-Iraqi war activist Michael Moore has written a testimonial to Clark; so has Iraqi war proponent Jonathan Chait of the New Republic. Naderites of '00 have told me they're going Clark in '04; so have some Democrats who want to save the party from the specter of Howard Dean. [...] But if Clark ends up positioned as the anti-Dean candidate, the consequences could prove more severe.
We are all in this together, folks. Clark was clearly pondering a run before Dean assumed front-runner status. He is not a Clintonite conspiracy to take out this or that nominee. By all means, support Dean if he's your first pick; he is capable of winning and should in no way be viewed as a "specter." We will get to watch them all in debates shortly and the rest of the American public (keep in mind that "Don't know" is still the real frontrunner and blog readers are a tiny minority within the body politic) will start firming up their decisions. When a nominee is picked - no matter who it is - then close ranks behind him. Bush is the enemy, not Howard Dean or Wesley Clark or Joe Lieberman. Fragging our own helps nobody except the Republicans.
Let's all keep our eyes on the ball, okay?
I have long been intrigued by films that experiment with non-linear narrative structures. Examples include Memento, where the film begins at the end of the story and moves steadily backwards through time until the end, and Slacker, where the camera follows one character until they encounter another, so that the "plot" (such as it is) bounces around through Austin like a communicable virus. Especially in the latter film, what is being attempted is a subversion of the very concept of storytelling.
Along the same lines, I'm interested when artists look to expand the definition of what constitutes the exchange between artist, medium, and audience. I've written previously about the Interventionists, who are generally more interesting in concept than in execution, but today I happened across a couple of articles where the roles of artist, audience, and the art itself are rather more blurry than the traditional model.
First up, via Paul Goyette's excellent locus solus, is an article about JSG Boggs, who draws humorous, fake (though at first glance fairly official looking) currency notes. He convinces some cashier to accept it as legal tender, then sells the receipt to art collectors, who can purchase the "bill" at a good-sized markup.
Via the receipt, the collector can track down the owner of the Boggs bill and negotiate a deal "so as to complete the work." What, then, is Boggs' artwork? The drawing itself? Boggs' encounters that either do or do not result in a transaction? The transaction? The evidence of the transaction which the collector buys? The collector's trek and negotiations?
You got me, but I'm sold all the same. Unsurprisingly, government authorities in several countries have missed the point entirely. You can read about some of the legal battles that have ensued at his website.
The second article was an interview with last year's Turner Award winner Keith Tyson in New Scientist. Tyson's Art Machine is a computer program that generates random proposals for works of art, which he then creates. While his works are "overwhelmingly inspired by science, he says they are not vehicles for scientific theories, [but] a way of navigating through the mass of scientific data that risks overwhelming us."
I was interested in the idea of putting something out in the world that didn't have an autobiographical residue. So you couldn't ask, "What was Keith Tyson trying to say?" You just had a cold reactor base doing the creating. I wasn't interested in what the machine was thinking. The experiment for me was how the viewer would react to something that wasn't made by the artist in the traditional sense. People tend to look at a piece of art as an object. I am more interested in the process, the things that go into making the object, setting certain rules, and letting it happen.
Some photographs of Tyson pieces are here and his Replicator project is here.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Inside territory of Great Britain, second-leading member of the brave Coalition of the Willing to oust Saddam Hussein's brutal regime in Iraq.
The remains date to a time before the collapse of the Elite Republican Guard.
An expert close to the discovery described evidence the Britons were subject to extremely harsh conditions, being forced to eat raw meat in order to stay alive, but in the end it was to no avail for them.
No evidence of the use of weapons of mass destruction have been found yet, although they can not be ruled out.
Why do all the rookies run funny?
State police and the grand jury are investigating whether members of the Mepham High School football team in Bellmore, N.Y., sodomized younger players with a broomstick, pine cones and golf balls during a five-day trip to the Camp Wayne for Girls in Preston Park, Pa., said the Wayne County, Pa., District Attorney, Mark R. Zimmer.
Add this to the disgusting pig feces and fish guts incident involving Illinois high school girls and you have to wonder just what the hell is going on with our youth today. Did I really just say that? How did I get this old?
I was in high school not so long ago - well okay, it was twenty years ago. But still, the worst hazing I ever saw happen was spiking someone's drink with Wesson Oil (and let me tell you from unfortunate experience how hard it is to get that crap off the roof of your mouth). If this was Central Prison, I could understand, but suburban high schools? Who are these kids' parents and what sort of parenting philosophy results in this kind of aberrant, antisocial behavior?
And what football coach takes his team for a five-day trip to Camp Wayne for Girls? How many rhetorical questions can I cram into one post?
And a particularly disappointing one, at that. From Joshua Michael Marshall's interview with Ambassador Joseph Wilson in yesterday's Talking Points Memo:
TPM: OK, well you mentioned the name of Karl Rove.
WILSON: Yeah, and Karl Rove, when I said that, is sort of a metaphor for the White House political operation. And I--what I was saying in that was that I would do everything I could not to impede the investigation and try and help advance the investigation. Because after all, if there was somebody to--that was guilty of violation of a crime--it would be better to have them--and then I quoted Rove's name as a kind of a metaphor for the White House--"frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs"
"Metaphor for the White House political operation?" Bullshit. What about measuring your words, Ambassador?
If you have no clue what I'm talking about click here.
A slightly expanded chunk of the interview is available if you click below to
TPM: OK. Now, go forward a few weeks from when this all broke out, and another incident comes up. And, I'll sort of work from published accounts since I know that your ability to talk about this other controversy is circumscribed by--well, I'll just get into it. According to--Robert Novak published a column, where he said that two senior administration officials had told him that your wife works for the CIA, works under non-official cover--which basically, in sort of colloquial terms, means that she's an undercover agent--and that her relationship with you was, in some sense, what got you the job to go to Niger.
Now, there's a couple issues here. One is whether that had anything to do with why you went to Niger. The other question--to many, the more significant one--is that it is illegal for government officials to out, as it were, people working undercover for the CIA. And according to just the black-letter words of what Novak published, two senior administration officials did just that. Now, for people who work in Washington, that phrase "senior Administration official" isn't a vague term. That's a pretty small population of people. Now, this got a lot of attention. It sort of swirled around in the press. Now, I know that precisely because who works undercover for the CIA and who doesn't can't be talked about by people who know who people are, you can't--you have to sort of couch these things in hypotheticals. But, you have discussed publicly contacts that you have had with, I guess, the CIA and FBI about their potentially looking into how Novak came to have this information. What can you--do you know, is there an investigation ongoing? What do you know about that?
WilSON: First of all, the Novak allegation is very interesting. If I recall the article correctly, he flatly asserts my wife is a CIA operative. And then he quotes senior administration officials as saying that she was somehow responsible for sending me out there. Now, I think I mentioned to you earlier the context in which my trip was initially discussed, and I will tell you that at the meetings it was discussed, and at the meeting where it was proposed that I go out there, there was nobody at that meeting that I knew. There were a couple of people who came up and introduced themselves and said to me that they had been at other briefings I had given in the past on other issues, but I could not name any of them. I couldn't tell you who they are today--would pass them on the streets without recognizing them. So that's really--the decision-making process involved nobody that I knew.
The idea that--first of all, irrespective of whether my wife is or is not what Novak alleged, therefore, there was no personal involvement. I think it's important to understand about this allegation, a couple of things. One: when they're talking about "senior administration officials", they're talking about the White House. The CIA does not "out" its own. It just doesn't do that. Secondly, I think that it's important to understand that if, in fact, she is what was alleged, then it is a violation of the Intelligence Agents Identification Act of 1982, which is a felony, and the process of investigating it goes through, I believe, the CIA and then to Justice and to the FBI, and that's if she is, in fact, what they said.
If she's not, it's a real inconvenience for her to have to answer all these questions. For the purposes of the trip out there--irrespective of whether she is or she isn't--the decisions on the trip were made by people I didn't know, as I told you earlier. For those who would assert that somehow she was involved in this, it just defies logic. At the time, she was the mother of two-year-old twins. Therefore, sort of sending her husband off on an eight-day trip leaves her with full responsibility for taking care of two screaming two-year-olds without help, and anybody who is a parent would understand what that means. Anybody who is a mother would understand it even far better. Secondly, I mean, the notion somehow that this was some nepotism, that I was being sent on an eight-day, all-expense-paid--no salary, mind you--trip to the Sahara Desert. This is not Nassau we're talking about. This is not the Bahamas. It wasn't Maui. This was the Sahara Desert. And then, the only other thing that I can think of is the assertion that she wanted me out of the way for eight days because she, you know, had a lover or something, which is, you don't take lovers when you have two-year-old kids at home. So, there's no logic in it.
The Novak article itself, it does nothing to advance the story. The Novak article, I thought, was kind of a wash anyway. It just didn't make a lot of sense. But I would say this about it to those who sort of leaked this. And, I suspect that it was people who just didn't really understand how the process works. But, notwithstanding that, the fact is that this is an administration that came to office on a--
TPM: Now, when you say that, you mean the people who talked to Novak didn't understand sort of the legal seriousness of disclosing this information?
WILSON: Yeah. If the information is true. It could have been just a complete canard. Assuming for the sake of this that it's true, that they just simply didn't perhaps understand--I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they just didn't understand the seriousness with which this sort of thing is viewed. I say that because, at the end of the day, after it was pointed out to them, you've heard nothing more from them on it.
Now, irrespective, it's certainly for an administration that came to office promising to restore honor and dignity to the White House. The idea of involving my wife in this little spat that they're having with me because I was the bearer of bad tidings was neither honorable or dignified, quite apart from whether it was legal or illegal. It was really a low-life, slimeball thing to do. And again, as I say, it added nothing to the story.
TPM: Now let me ask you--because in a number of press reports this has been discussed--that I guess it's a month ago now. Jay Inslee, who's a congressman from Seattle or thereabouts, had a town hall forum with constituents. And he invited you out there and there was a big turnout and obviously the discussion were about all the questions related to Iraq--the uranium, the WMD, how it happened, all this kind of stuff. And this question of the Novak article came up. Now there's been sort of chatter in this town about "seems to be the White House" and that people can hypothesize who might be involved there. Now in one of the questions you were asked about this let me--I'll just read the quote, when you're talking about the potential investigations--
WILSON: Actually Amy Goodman cited the quote on Democracy Now--what I--so I don't need to hear the answer--
TPM: OK, well you mentioned the name of Karl Rove.
WILSON: Yeah, and Karl Rove, when I said that, is sort of a metaphor for the White House political operation. And I--what I was saying in that was that I would do everything I could not to impede the investigation and try and help advance the investigation. Because after all, if there was somebody to--that was guilty of violation of a crime--it would be better to have them--and then I quoted Rove's name as a kind of a metaphor for the White House--"frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs" rather than just a sort of sterile exchange of he-said she-said newspaper articles and attacks.
But I've had a number of respected journalists tell me that White House sources were the ones who were telling them that the real story here is not the 16 words, it's Wilson and his wife. Now this was after the Novak article, which was a good two weeks after the White House acknowledged that the 16 words didn't rise to the stature of being included in the State of the Union Address. So I don't understand the White House backfire that they tried to light on this. They acknowledged it--it took them a while to come to grips with it, but they did acknowledge that it didn't rise to the stature of the State of the Union. But they should have moved on rather than try and drag my family into this unfairly. [Crosstalk] But I do think that the reason they did--and I've said this quite publicly--is that they thought that by coming after me they would discourage others from coming forward. The point that they tried to make is that there are consequences if you dare to step forward. And there were any number of analysts who were speaking to the press about the pressure they felt when Cheney went over there. Now I have no way of judging whether that was real or imagined pressure, but you know if they were prepared to say it to the press anonymously they might well have been prepared to come up and say it to their congressman more publicly. Congress was saying, "We welcome people coming up." Not just Democrats, but also Republicans. John Warner said on a number of occasions--this was clearly a shot across the bow at these guys. This was a message to them, "Should you decide to come forward, you too could be looking at this."
TPM: And your comments at that meeting were based on things you've heard from journalists who've come to you and said, "We were hearing this from people at the White House."
WILSON: Right, sure. A journalist will call me and they will seek a comment on something. And in order to seek a comment or a reaction, they have to tell me what they're basing it on. So I can't react to something unless I know what the initial act was, so there have been attempts to elicit comments from me by saying, "White House sources have told me that..."
TPM: And some of these said White House sources were the ones who mentioned--who made this accusation that your wife was ...
WILSON: Yeah, the one quote is, "White House sources insist the real story here is not the 16 words, it's Wilson and his wife." The real question here is how did such a whopper get in the president's State of the Union Address. And you can--the vice president the other day went back to the British white paper--"technically accurate because we cited the British white paper." We spend billions of dollars on intelligence. Intelligence is not a matter of accepting blindly what a third country tells you. Intelligence is a matter of taking pieces of information and testing them against other pieces of information you have in the hopes that you come up with something resembling facts on the ground.
The British have said "We had specific intelligence we could not share with the White House because it came from a third-party source and we were prohibited from doing so by protocols of our agreement with the third country." So we were then taking on faith a third-party piece of intelligence--and we didn't know the contents of it, the substance of it that was relayed to us by the British. And yet we spend billions of dollars on intelligence every year. And so technically accurate or not, are we going to subcontract our intelligence function to the British? I don't think so.
TPM: Before we move on to the lead-up--the positions you took in the lead-up to the war--just to sew this last point up. What you know about this is based on what journalists have told you in conversations asking comment from you and point to White House sources. But that's as far as you know in terms of how this whole thing got started.
WILSON: Yeah. The Novak piece, which sort of cites senior administration sources. Actually, I actually, after I--and these are highly respectable journalists, these are guys who are at the top of their profession. This is not Hedda Hopper, these are serious political journalists--but I did take advantage of a conversation with another journalist on another subject to sort of go over with him what ethical grounding of respectable journalists and the extent to which they would dissemble or not dissemble in order to get a reaction--whether or not they would bait you by lying about who the sources was. And I understand that it is strictly against the journalistic practice--ethics practice. And so I have no reason to doubt that. But I'll tell you quite frankly that the political office of the White House has not called me up to tell me that they were going to smear me or they were going to attack my family. In fact, I've not had a call from the White House in a couple years.
The ANWR battle is back.
Republican authors of the emerging energy bill will formally propose opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling as they begin to reveal the more contentious elements of the legislation this week, Congressional officials say.
[...]
The proposal is part of a new set of agreements between Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico and Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, the two Republicans who are leading the energy negotiations. It is being released for review by others involved in the energy talks and for eventual consideration by the conference committee.
The two lawmakers have made clear they support drilling in the refuge, but their decision to try to add it to the legislation at this stage of the negotiations is certain to reignite strong resistance to the drilling plan from Senate opponents and conservation groups.
I suppose this is just more babble coming from "the bureaucracy", specifically that hotbed of ecofanaticism, the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
At prices less than $16 per barrel, there is reportedly no economically recoverable oil in the 1002 Area. (Present oil prices are ranging between $20 to $25 per barrel.) Nearly 1 million barrels of oil a day are produced from the existing oil fields in areas west of the Arctic Refuge, and new wells are brought into production each year. Americans use 19 million barrels of oil each day, or 7 billion barrels of oil per year. There is, therefore, a 50% chance of finding a 9 month's supply of oil in the 1002 Area, at $24 per barrel.
The 1002 Area is critically important to the ecological integrity of the whole Arctic Refuge, providing essential habitats for numerous internationally important species such as the Porcupine Caribou herd and polar bears. The compactness and proximity of a number of arctic and subarctic ecological zones in the Arctic Refuge provides for greater plant and animal diversity than in any other similar sized land area on Alaska's North Slope.
The 100-mile wide 1002 Area is located more than 30 miles from the end of the nearest pipeline and more than 50 miles from the nearest gravel road and oil support facilities. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, possible oil reserves may be located in many small accumulations in complex geological formations, rather than in one giant field as was discovered at Prudhoe Bay. Consequently, development in the 1002 Area could likely require a large number of small production sites spread across the Refuge landscape, connected by an infrastructure of roads, pipelines, power plants, processing facilities, loading docks, dormitories, airstrips, gravel pits, utility lines and landfills.
The report then details the impact of development on several key species in the tundra ecosystem. Spend some time reading it.
All this is really an effort to keep conservationists on the ropes. Oil industry execs know, Congressional Republicans know, and Bush knows (well, let's not give him too much credit... Bush might understand) that area 1002 contains very little petroleum. What is there is tough to extract, geologically speaking. While Exxon/Mobil, BP/Amoco and Chevron/Texaco would love to have it (and all the taxpayer cash associated with developing it) ANWR is a distraction. Keeping the environmentalists on the defensive for this most critical of ecosystems means less attention paid to the messes they make elsewhere. Scant resources are available to mount legal fights against expanded drilling and other corporate irresponsibility in the 95+% of the North Slope and offshore shelves that are or can be made available for exploration and extraction when extraordinarily taxing grassroots efforts need to be repeatedly geared up and sustained to keep them at bay from ANWR.
It's a crafty tactic; and it has been quite successful.
From the US Constitution, Amendment #1:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
But our puppets in Iraq can, and it seems to be the only thing the CPA will "let" them do by themselves:
The decision to temporarily suspend al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya came after a week of criticism by Iraqi supporters of the U.S.-appointed council who said the channels incited both anti-occupation violence and ethnic and sectarian tensions.
It is unclear how long the suspensions will last, or even if the council has the authority to bar news organizations from Iraq without permission from the Coalition Provisional Authority. As Iraq has yet to ratify a new constitution, it stands to reason the council would need permission from the CPA to bar any organization from operating in the country. The CPA did not respond to inquires about the announcement, which was made by a spokesman for Ahmed Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi National Congress and currently serves as the council's president.
Yes, Iraqis, welcome to Democracy.
Via Juan Cole (who you should be reading every morning), comes a link to this Sydney Morning Herald article.
A television report by Pilger aired on British screens last night said US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice confirmed in early 2001 that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been disarmed and was no threat. [...] Pilger uncovered video footage of Powell in Cairo on February 24, 2001 saying, "He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."
Isn't that interesting? Especially since two years later, in his speech to the UN, Powell said something a little different.
We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction; he's determined to make more. [...] Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world.
Hmm, something doesn't quite match up there. I have said this before, but I have no respect left for Colin Powell. His willing compliance in this charade has evaporated every last drop of credibility he once had, and he had a considerable amount. Yet another American institution defiled by Bush and his band of Rasputins...
The largest ice shelf in the northern hemisphere just broke in two.
Maybe the result of burning fossil fuels, maybe just augmented or accelerated by it.
But let's not do anything drastic like strengthen CAFE, subsidize public transportation, or invest in renewable energy sources.
The Planetary Society has a good summary of the Galileo mission, culminating with a lovely account of its last minutes this past Sunday as it descended into Jupiter's atmosphere. Some of the niftier facts:
Next up, Cassini will fly by Saturn's furthest moon, Phoebe, in mid-June, before settling into orbit around Saturn on July 1st. If all goes according to plan, it will land a probe on the surface of Titan, a moon nearly the size of Mars, in January 2005. Already, Cassini turned upside down one longstanding assumption about Jupiter during its flyby in the spring, as well as sending back some beautiful pictures. We are about to be swimming in new information about the saturnian system.
Seven spacecraft will be poking at Mars next year once the four currently in transit arrive, and NASA plans to return to Jupiter's moons with the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO), which aims to launch in 2011 toward Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede. Space.com has an interesting discussion about the propulsion systems being designed to get them there.
Heady times to have an interest in this stuff.
Sure, it's unseemly to criticize an Alzheimer's-stricken nonagenarian who is likely a blink away from the grave, but it's far worse to paper over ugly history in the name of good manners. Ronald Reagan has given strong confirmation of his much-remarked physical strength and vitality by lasting this long, when it was apparent to many that he had already begun exhibiting signs of dementia by the mid-1980's. But as is expected of a 92-year-old man, especially one with an advanced degenerative neurological disease, Reagan will soon exit the ranks of the living ex-presidents and the pleas to the Vatican for sainthood will begin in earnest. Hopefully, our reluctance to speak ill of the dead will not allow traction for the forces who would rename every street in America Reagan Avenue, for he was and remains a manifestly unworthy object of national praise.
Ergo, I recommend Eric Alterman's latest entry at Altercation, Deconstructing Reagan.
Ronald Reagan was many things, but most undeniably he was a pathological liar. True, he also gave every impression of being an unbelievable moron (which is why Saturday Night Live could once parody his pathetic excuses for the Iran/contra scandal with a skit that depicted Reagan as—get this!—brilliant and competent). His worshipful, if fanciful, biographer Edmund Morris even called him an "apparent airhead." The President’s famous cluelessness was so obvious during his years in office that his defenders would attempt to deploy it as a defense of his actions, as if he were a small child or a beloved but retarded uncle. The President tended to "build these little worlds and live in them," noted a senior adviser. "He makes things up and believes them," explained one of his kids.
Alterman goes on to describe some of the, well, odder claims that regularly dropped from Reagan's lips - his presence at the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, imaginary messages from the Vatican, etc. But all of that by itself would have indicated nothing more than the onset of senility, a sin in nobody's book. Where I turn implacably convinced of Reagan's pure and unvarnished evil is any time I look at our behavior in Latin America during the 80's. And apparently, the same goes for Alterman, who spends a few paragraphs discussing Reagan's "fondness for genocidal murderers," focusing on Guatemala's Efraín Ríos Montt (who may well be returning to Guatemala's presidency) and the horrific Salvadoran death squads.
Of course, Reagan's mentoring and support of determinedly homicidal maniacs wasn't restricted to our hemisphere (e.g., Jonas Savimbi in Angola), that's just where he recorded most of his greatest hits. Alterman similarly doesn't touch on the explosion of the federal debt, the empowerment of our own Talibanic Falwell, Robertson, and company, or the black hole for cash and civil liberties known as the War on Drugs. Or any of the dozens of other reasons to label him an inexplicably popular disaster.
No matter how you slice this historical apple, it is rotten at the core. His tenure should be an embarrassment to Americans, not an occasion for misty-eyed reminiscing. Reagan was a joke of a president, though not a particularly funny one. I suppose, though, credit where credit is due: without Reagan, punk rock would have fizzled out years before it finally did. Unfortunately, by the end of the '80's, punk was as addled, irrelevant, edentulous, and revered for the wrong reasons as Reagan is today.
I suppose we've come full circle. Not only is the mantle of the Reagan Revolution being carried forward by a man who is, against all odds, even more of a pretty vacant than Reagan himself was, but the Dead Kennedys are on tour with a singer other than Jello Biafra. Clearly, there is no god.
The U.S.-led occupation authority here has ordered the overhaul of fundamental elements of Iraq's socialist economy and instituted wide-ranging free-market reforms that will allow full foreign ownership in every sector except oil, U.S. and Iraqi officials said today.
Okay, I can understand the need to get some serious capital into Iraq, but this has a throat-clenching odor rising from it. In effect, we are stating that prior to the formation of a representative Iraqi government to decide such matters, we are just going to sell off the entire country. Never mind that it isn't ours to sell.
[Iraqi Finance Minister Kamil] Gailani said Iraq would "allow up to 100 percent foreign ownership in all sectors except natural resources." He said Iraq's oil reserves -- the world's second largest after Saudi Arabia's -- would remain in government hands for now. Other Iraqi officials have said decisions on privatizing the oil industry, which is forecast to generate $14 billion in revenue next year, would be decided after a democratically elected government is seated.
The cynic in me says that all oil industry decisions were already made some time ago, and this is simply to postpone criticism while completing the fencing of lesser sectors of the Iraqi economic infrastructure. While I recognize this is cynicism unsupported by real evidence, I should note that assuming a jaundiced view of American intentions has proven a consistently sound stance recently.
However fetid this policy may be, though, I'll believe its viability when I see it demonstrated. Investors aren't much enamored of political/civil unrest, the one commodity that Iraq has had no problem producing since the invasion. Any giant conglomerate considering placing their eBay bid on the Iraqi banking system has to be extremely nervous about the warranty being honored if and when the Americans pull out. Betting on the stability of third-world governments (especially ones installed by invading powers) is not for the risk-averse.
Granted, Uncle Sam has a long history of "disappearing" governments that threaten to nationalize industries that have been stolen heavily invested in by American firms. But let's be frank: Iraq is a much stickier situation than the Latin American banana republics with which we have so much experience. Many pundits have been pounding the mantra that wide swaths of Iraq are free of unrest. True enough, as long as nobody mentions the fact that wide swaths of Iraq are barely populated desert and therefore not terribly difficult to pacify.
I suspect that most potential buyers won't be slapping money on the barrel without major security guarantees from the US military, which implies years, if not decades, of GIs patrolling Baghdad. Like so much else of the neo-con fairy tale that Bush has been reading aloud to us, this subplot relies on some extremely optimistic assumptions coming true. The most optimistic of these assumptions: Iraqis will be fine and dandy with the idea of Americans owning their industries and extracting the profits.
Sure they will. And it isn't as though they will be given the opportunity to debate it amongst themselves. In this Wired article, an unnamed "senior U.S. official involved in Iraq's reconstruction" says:
"This isn't just a proposal -- this is the law, this is done. This was all signed yesterday."
Then again, the same official is quoted as saying, "Iraq needs jobs, it needs to have growth." While undeniably true, the record shows quite plainly that the folks currently in charge have one piss-poor history of addressing those specific needs either here in the United States or in the last place we said we would. Skepticism should be in order.
UPDATE (10:40 pm): Bonus points awarded to Frank at I Protest for noting the appropriate literary allegory. Too true, too true...
The hurricane was pretty anti-climactic in this part of the state. The only damage in my yard was one big tree limb that broke, but luckily, it was one that I had planned to cut anyhow, as it was hanging quite low over the driveway, making it feel like I was entering an automatic carwash every time I arrived home. Thank you for the assistance, Mother Nature. I suspect the monster ice storm this winter took out nearly all of the weak, diseased, or dead branches, so that most of what came down in this storm was stuff that had broken previously, but not been shaken out of the other branches.
Between the day-and-a-half with no electricity and a busy spate in both my work and personal lives, I haven't been able to write much here over the past few days. Thanks to Froz for not just letting this space lay fallow. Busy day again today after missing work on Thursday and Friday, so light posting will be the soup du jour again until tonight. If that makes you sad, you may want to try this.
From Sify news in India - Calcutta as best I can tell.
Former US president Bill Clinton on Friday urged Kosovo Albanians to seek reconciliation with Serbs, during a stop in the UN-run province on a tour of the Balkans that will also take him to Bosnia-Hercegovina.
[...]
Clinton said he was "honoured to have been part of ridding Kosovo of the scourge of oppression" but called on the province's majority ethnic-Albanian population not to seek to level the score.
[...]
Kosovo Albanians consider Clinton a hero for the 1999 war, and Pristina has renamed one of its main streets "Bill Clinton Boulevard."
I'm trying not to view everything through the prism of the Democratic Primary, but it's not lost on me that a deteriorating situation in Kosovo is bad for Bubba's buddy from Arkansas, and that building peace and prosperity there is good for both Wesley's campaign and Bill's legacy.
I don't think anything is more important to Clinton than his legacy. Any bets on whether we see a George Bush Plaza in Baghdad?
Watched the storm from the neighbor’s front porch yesterday evening, drinking some of the finest North Carolina corn liquor stilled since prohibition. It’s an old family recipe, but ask the host if he made it himself and he’ll tell you “No, Sir; that’d be illegal. Here, have another.”
I have a suggestion for the gaggle of local news reporters “on the scene” giving us hourly updates and dramatic visuals: Find a friggin’ porch! I don’t see what value a drenched reporter and lousy audio add to the coverage. We lost power 200 miles inland about the time of landfall, so fortunately I missed most of that silliness. Admittedly I probably would’ve watched anyway.
A Mother Nature hissyfit can be pretty in its fury. More so when you’re not in the woods where threat of falling trees keeps you on edge. The neighbor’s house is in the middle of a 30-acre hayfield so the 60-foot Pines and Oaks bending over like tall blades of grass were at a safe distance.
Initial clean up efforts are noting some significant damage, but mostly to the East and North of here. In our neck of the woods it’s back to business as usual.
Update even before I even hit save:
Several reporters are whining about the HYPE that preceded this hurricane. They even sound disappointed. Might I inform them that 72 hours before landfall, Isabel was borderline Category 4 / Category 5. The hype seemed so bad because it went on so long. If Isabel had not – counter to almost all predictions – inexplicably weakened Tuesday night and Wednesday, eastern North Carolina, Virginia, and DC would look frighteningly a lot like South Florida did after Andrew.
Just as Apostropher offered thanks to the guys at NASA who are watching Galileo take its final plunge into Jupiter, tonight please join me in a toast to the folks at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, specifically the ones at the National Weather Service, and the National Hurricane Center for keeping us informed and safe. Thanks guys; and here’s another for my tax dollars at work.
Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber discovers that there are indeed stupid questions.
I have an answer: because we have cerebral cortices.
At night I focused enough to watch "For Females Only", a weekly program on Al-Jazeera. It left me feeling enraged and depressed. The subject was, as usual, Iraq. The program was hosting three Iraqi females: Dr. Shatha Jaffar, Yanar Mohammed and Iman Abdul Jabar.
Yanar claimed that women's equality couldn't be achieved except through a secular government ... I don't necessarily agree with that...
Iman Abdul Jabar was taking Rumsfeld's attitude to the situation- see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil...
Shatha was full of self-righteous blabbering. She instantly lost any point she was trying to make by claiming that girls in Iraq were largely ignorant and illiterate due to the last 30 years...
Strangely enough, I wasn't a Ba'athist and I got accepted into one of the best colleges in the country based solely on my grades ... None of my friends were Ba'athists and they ended up pharmacists, doctors, dentists, translators and lawyers… I must have been living somewhere else.
Something you probably don't know about Iraq: We have 18 public universities and over 10 private universities …Arab students come from all over … because they are the best.
In 12th grade, Iraqi students are made to take a standardized test known as the Bakaloriah (Froz – does that word sound familiar?) ... As soon as we get our averages, we fill out forms (where) you list the colleges and universities you would like to end up in ... I recall nothing on the form asking me if I was a Ba'athist or loyalist, but maybe I filled out the wrong form…
What Shatha doesn't mention is that in engineering, science and medical colleges over half of the students in various departments are females- literate females, by the way.
More and more females are being made to quit work or school or college. I (tried) to talk a neighbor's mother into letting her 19-year-old daughter take her retests in a leading pharmaceutical college. Her mother was adamant and demanded to know what she was supposed to do with her daughter's college degree if anything happened to her daughter, "Hang it on her tombstone with the consolation that my daughter died for a pharmaceutical degree??? She can sit this year out."
A rather long post, but a good read.
...but might ought to be medicated.
Oh, the therapy bills this kid is going to amass. No, really. Unless he's the Tiger Woods of crosswalking and will turn out to be the wunderkind who breaks the unbreakable record.
Before the first crosswalk began December 25, 1969, I had no idea how far and fast I could walk with the cross in a day. Several weeks before the crosswalk was to begin I went out in the desert in California and walked with the cross. It was during this test walk that we realized the wood at the end of the cross would wear away at about the rate of an inch a day! Wood against pavement and rock will lose every time! That is the reason for the wheel.
For my money, that is one awfully unfortunate profession to have chosen. On the other hand, he did get to bring George W. Bush to Jesus. What a strange story.
(found at cruel.com)
RADAR DATA FROM MOREHEAD CITY SHOWS WHAT LOOKS LIKE A CLASSIC CONCENTRIC EYEWALL FORMATION...WITH A POORLY-DEFINED RING OF CONVECTION NEAR THE CENTER AND A STRONGER RING 40-50 NM OUT.
Concentric Eyewalls. Cool.
LITTLE CHANGE IN STRENGTH... BEFORE LANDFALL... AFTER LANDFALL ISABEL SHOULD WEAKEN AND GRADUALLY BECOME EXTRATROPICAL.
Rain has started here in Orange County. I'd characterize outside as breezy. I think it's going to be an ugly day, but not a disasterous one. At least not this far inland. Our local stations are calling for max sustained winds of only 45-60 mph, but possible flooding. We are extremely lucky that Isabel made the unpredicted drop from borderline catgory 5 to category 2 in the course of 48 hours early this week.
Monkeys, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
Since I am not a subscriber, I can only get to the abstract of this paper published in Nature ("Monkeys reject unequal pay"), so here it is:
During the evolution of cooperation it may have become critical for individuals to compare their own efforts and pay-offs with those of others. Negative reactions may occur when expectations are violated. One theory proposes that aversion to inequity can explain human cooperation within the bounds of the rational choice model, and may in fact be more inclusive than previous explanations. Although there exists substantial cultural variation in its particulars, this 'sense of fairness' is probably a human universal that has been shown to prevail in a wide variety of circumstances. However, we are not the only cooperative animals, hence inequity aversion may not be uniquely human. Many highly cooperative nonhuman species seem guided by a set of expectations about the outcome of cooperation and the division of resources. Here we demonstrate that a nonhuman primate, the brown capuchin monkey (Cebus apella), responds negatively to unequal reward distribution in exchanges with a human experimenter. Monkeys refused to participate if they witnessed a conspecific obtain a more attractive reward for equal effort, an effect amplified if the partner received such a reward without any effort at all. These reactions support an early evolutionary origin of inequity aversion.
Kinda dry and decidedly short on the monkeys' strategies for labor stoppages. So I looked around a bit and did manage to find one brief news article:
In an unusual two-year experiment, animal behaviourists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, taught brown capuchin monkeys to receive tokens as a reward, and to barter them for food. The monkeys were usually quite content to swap the tokens for cucumber, but if the researchers gave one of the monkeys a grape, a more eagerly-sought food, the other animals would become jealous. Some of them refused to hand over their tokens. Others would still exchange their token for the cucumber, but scornfully decline to eat it. If the monkey which got the grape had received the coveted fruit for not doing anything, its colleagues often became incensed.
Interesting. Put them in cubes with swivel chairs and it would be indistinguishable from any of my working environments over the past decade.
Damn commie monkeys.
So he’s finally announcing today.
And he’s already getting hit from both sides.
As of Monday, I figured he’d try to beat the upcoming hurricane, which should suck all the air out of news coverage of anything else and (ironically for John Edwards) blow it back out all over my home state of North Carolina Thursday at speeds up to 100 mph. Waiting until his speech in Iowa on Friday would mean second page news. He’s not the kind of character that settles for ‘second’ anything, including an almost sure-fire VP invitation from any presidential candidate he asked, at least not yet.
Clark has shiny nuggets of National Security credentials pinned to his uniform, but his reliance on Kosovo as his calling card begs bringing up the debate from 4 years ago and if you’ll remember, the country wasn’t quite as gung-ho as we were earlier this year in Iraq, much less Afghanistan. In 1999 Americans had little understanding and little interest in this war. President Clinton scored virtually no domestic political points from it. Clark’s success there was hardly without embedded embarrassments (Hugh Shelton, Joint Chiefs Chairman, saying “Get your fucking face off TV”) as well as some potentially catastrophic miscalulations. Ultimately the General got nothing from it save his walking papers. Clark will get volleys from both sides on the Kosovo issue.
As for his left flank, he’ll have to make the case that this campaign was a noble war. That it was fought and won with a broad coalition – coordinated with the two preeminent international organizations, NATO and the UN - for no other purpose than because it needed to be done and we and our allies were the only ones in a position to do it; failing to act meant watching some of the oldest civilizations in the nexus between east and west continue their downward spiral into chaos, giving a racist, ruthless dictator - with a clear advantage in the technology of violence - license to ethnically cleanse a subjugated people. It is quite true that in this fight there were no hidden corporate interests, no creepy evangelical undertones, no domino-effect delusions.
On his right, think back: Perhaps it was because we were protecting Muslims from Christians. Maybe it was because we had little vested corporate interests. Probably it was because the President was Bill Clinton, extramarital sodomizer that he was. But our normally pornographically patriotic rightwing nuts sure didn’t like this war. They publicly decried the war effort while our men and women in uniform were in harm’s way. I don’t necessarily fault them for that, but I make note of the hypocrisy. That may pause some of his Republican detractors from engaging with this argument, but given the boldness of this administration’s Office of Fabrication I wouldn’t count it out.
Then there’s the bigger issue of success of the campaign. Militarily, the point was to get Milosovic to “Say Uncle” and withdraw. He did. He later became the only head of state ever brought to trial before an international tribunal for war crimes. (Got my man, Dubya; you get yours??) But detractors like Karl Rove -pestilent menace that he is – will not pass up the opportunity to highlight the lack of a clear happy ending:
The Serbs recently declared sovereignty over Kosovo. And they’re pretty united about it. But Kosovar Nationalists reject that claim.
And some Albanians have even bigger plans.
We’re now on our fifth UNMIK Governor. Violent incidents flare ethnic tensions and the situation is still very dangerous for UN personnel. US forces, stretched thin, are still being sent to the Balkans.
A pessimist can find lots of half-empty glasses when looking at Kosovo.
Here are one and two brief timelines events leading up to NATO action in Kosovo:
The BBC has an excellent (albeit two-year-old) special sectionon the war in Kosovo.
The fact that negotiations, under what are almost universally recognized as legitimate UN auspices, are still the method of discourse as opposed to military conquest, ethnic cleansing, and guerrilla warfare is no doubt testament that Kosovo and the entire region could be in dramatically worse shape. I think of the immediately previous example of inaction in Bosnia followed by 3 seconds of pondering how painfully long, bloody, and expensive the job of cleaning up Bush’s mess in Iraq is going to be for future generations. Make that 2 seconds.
American lack of confidence in clearly explainable US strategic interests and reasons for why we’re still there is another point from which I expect Clark will be targeted. Even though he was the General executing the war, not the Politician ordering it, he can’t duck. He will have to defend the decision to go against Milosevic. This was a war to stop chaos, not induce it. It was also on NATO’s doorstep. What has Bush done to strengthen our alliance with Europe?
Notions that he’s reckless – evidenced by the Pristina airport fiasco – would simultaneously be a bit more difficult for him AND for anyone trying to discredit him. I’d like to hear the General’s own account of this episode, but think recklessness as an attack strategy from the NeoCons should be pretty funny if it happens. Fellow Democrats may find it more effective.
A la Al Gore, expect lots of “trouble with the truth” attacks. Ironic.
While still making my mind up about this guy with whom I’m for some reason so fascinated, I have to say I like this kickoff to his "100 year plan.” How many other politicians even talk about 100 year plans? Much less unveil them on opening day?
Looking ahead 100 years, the United States will be defined by our environment, both our physical environment and our legal, Constitutional environment. America needs to remain the most desirable country in the world, attracting talent and investment with the best physical and institutional environment in the world. But achieving our goals in these areas means we need to begin now. Environmentally, it means that we must do more to protect our natural resources, enabling us to extend their economic value indefinitely in through wise policies of extracting natural resources that protect the beauty and diversity of our American ecosystems – our seacoasts, mountains, wetlands, rain forests, alpine meadows, original timberlands and open prairies. We will have to balance carefully the short term needs for commercial exploitation with longer term value of the natural gifts our country has received. We may also have to assist market-driven adjustments in urban and rural populations, as we did in the 19th Century with the Homestead Act.
Exactly what does it mean when you declare an event?
Progress Energy Inc... declared an unusual event at its Brunswick nuclear power plant in North Carolina, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in its event notification report on Wednesday. An unusual event is the lowest of four of the NRC's emergency classifications at U.S. nuclear power plants.
I mean, I fed my dog this morning and that was an event, but it obviously didn't need declaration. And the receptionist at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would've given me at least a few seconds of dumbfounded silence if I had called an alert in to them.
Nothing on Progress Energy's website yet.
Nothing at NRC, either.
Oh, no need to worry I guess; they wouldn't build those things if they weren't safe...
Map.
ISABEL HAS CHANGED LITTLE IN STRENGTH OR ORGANIZATION DURING THE PAST 6 HR... THERE IS NO CHANGE IN THE FORECAST TRACK PHILOSOPHY FROM THE PREVIOUS ADVISORY... THE DYNAMICAL MODELS ARE VERY TIGHTLY CLUSTERED AROUND A LANDFALL IN EASTERN NORTH CAROLINA IN ABOUT 36 HR... THIS A HIGH CONFIDENCE FORECAST... BUT THOSE AWAY FROM THE FORECAST TRACK SHOULD NOT LET DOWN THEIR GUARD JUST IN CASE THE GUIDANCE PROVES TO BE UNANIMOUSLY WRONG.
What's that? a little self-deprecating humor?
VERTICAL SHEAR AND POSSIBLY DRY AIR STILL SEEM TO BE AFFECTING THE SYSTEM... (There are) OBSERVATIONS IN THE HURRICANE WARNING AREA OF COOL AIR... THAT... WOULD LIKELY INHIBIT STRENGTHENING. THE LARGE AND SPRAWLING VORTEX WILL BE SLOW TO RESPOND TO CHANGES IN THE ENVIRONMENT
I just like saying that: "The large and sprawling vortex."
And now in a Walter Cronkite voice: "The large and sprawling vortex."
Ooh! James Earl Jones!: "The large and sprawling vortex."
"This... is CNN."
How can The Onion possibly compete with this?
But the anarchists vs. the communists soccer match veered off pretty quickly from there.
The Brass Liberation Orchestra, a patchwork band of musicians, played everything from saxophones to drums and a tuba, getting the crowd going with a lively rendition of "Internationale," an anthem of communists and socialists, while players jumped up and down and raised their fists in the air.
[...]
The anarchist team, Kronstadt FC, was named for the 1921 revolt of workers of the Kronstadt army base against the Communist government in Russia. The players wore black T-shirts with the insignia of an A with a circle around it, a black star and a soccer ball. The communist team, Left Wing, sported shiny jerseys in Communist red, of course, with a fist holding a flag with a red star.
Seems this was the second of a three-match series, with the anarchists taking the day 4-2. The earlier match "tied 2-2 after it was shut down by local officials because the teams were playing on the field without permission."
And the anarchists let them get away with that?
I'll be the 21st blog to link to Kevin Drum's interview with Paul Krugman, Princeton economics professor and NYTimes columnist. Krugman, who knows of what he speaks, is worried about an Argentina-style meltdown of the US economy. Don't miss it.
Foreign Policy has a review of a book by French historian and sociologist Emmanuel Todd, wherein Todd predicts the fall of the American empire and the rise of a united Europe. Sure, it would be easy to dismiss as trendy European Yank-bashing, except that in 1976, "while still in his 20s, Todd predicted nearly to the year the fall of the Soviet empire in a book called The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere." You may remember that nobody - but nobody - else called that one.
Josh Marshall had a couple of fascinating, if anger-inducing, posts this weekend: one about Vice President Cheney's blatant and shameless lying on Meet the Press Sunday morning and another on the much ballyhooed Kay Report on Iraq's WMD (wherein were promised many "surprises") that now appears unlikely to ever see the light of day. Quelle surprise.
The end is near.
The Galileo spacecraft, launched by NASA in 1989 to explore Jupiter and its moons, is preparing for its final maneuver, as it completes its 35th orbit around the gas giant. After arriving at its destination nearly eight years ago, the spacecraft has discovered mountains of information about our system's largest planet, that its moon Io is the most active volcanic body in the solar system, and has shown strong evidence of the possibility of subsurface saltwater oceans on the moons Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede. It was also the first craft to fly by an asteroid, the first to discover a moon of an asteroid, the first to measure Jupiter's atmosphere with a probe, and the only observer of the Shoemaker-Levy comet's collision with Jupiter. Not to mention beaming some staggeringly beautiful photographs back to Earth.
But now Galileo is running out of propellant, and so to avoid any inadvertent collisions with the moons that may have oceans and therefore could possibly harbor life, NASA will be plunging the 2.5 ton orbiter into Jupiter's atmosphere this Sunday, where it will be crushed down into a tiny metal speck. NASA is webcasting the end of the mission Sunday at 2 pm EST, along with a Space Science Update webcast tomorrow on the mission's legacy.
Despite the recent bad press from the Shuttle disaster, what NASA does is truly amazing, day in and day out. That they should have to beg and scrape for funds ought to be a matter of shame for every American - particularly those on Capitol Hill that approve their budgets. The agency stands as one of America's greatest achievements in our short history, and this mission, in turn, one of NASA's greatest achievements. Congratulations to all involved.
UPDATE (12:55 pm): The month-long countdown to China's first manned spaceflight began yesterday. When the Chinese taikonaut enters orbit, China will become only the third nation to send a human being into space, joining Russia and the United States in that exclusive club. Also, I suspect this story is apocryphal, but it's good for a laugh all the same.
Throwing my Libertarian buddies a bone: some tasks are simply better performed by private entrepreneurs than by government.
Some of the first patients to smoke Canada's government-approved marijuana say it is "disgusting" and they want their money back. Health Canada, the federal health department, started selling marijuana in July to bring relief to patients suffering from AIDS, cancer and other diseases. The move followed a court order that patients should not be forced to get their marijuana from drug dealers on the streets. But some of the first to buy the government's marijuana say it is no good.
"It's totally unsuitable for human consumption," said Jim Wakeford, 58, an AIDS patient in Gibsons, British Columbia. Wakeford and Barrie Dalley, a 52-year-old Toronto man who uses marijuana to combat the nausea associated with AIDS, are returning their 1-ounce (30-gram) bags, and Dalley is demanding his money back -- about C$150 ($110) plus taxes. Wakeford is returning his unpaid bill for two bags with a written complaint.
The marijuana is being grown for Health Canada deep underground in a vacant mine section in Flin Flon, Manitoba.
There's always a catch, isn't there? Never get a bureaucrat to do a hippie's job.
Map.
"SATELLITE IMAGERY AND AIR FORCE RESERVE HURRICANE HUNTER DATA INDICATE THAT ISABEL HAS BECOME QUITE DISORGANIZED DURING THE PAST 6-12 HR...WESTERLY SHEAR IS AFFECTING THE SYSTEM.
IT SHOULD BE NOTED THAT WHILE THE FORECAST CURRENTLY CALLS FOR LANDFALL IN NORTH CAROLINA IN ABOUT 60 HR...IT WOULD ONLY TAKE A 10 DEGREE CHANGE TO THE RIGHT FOR ISABEL TO MAKE LANDFALL ON THE DELMARVA PENINSULA
THERE ARE THREE POSSIBLE SCENARIOS. FIRST...CONTINUED WEAKENING DUE TO SHEAR AS FORECAST BY THE SHIPS MODEL. SECOND...CONTINUED SHORT-TERM WEAKENING FOLLWED BY RE-INTENSIFICATION AS ISABEL APPROACHES THE COAST. THIRD...A RELATIVELY STEADY-STATE HURRICANE UNTIL LANDFALL. HELL, WE DON'T KNOW; QUIT ASKING EVERY 5 MINUTES!."
OK, I added the last bit.
Yes, smoking is an expensive, dirty, smelly, unhealthy habit encouraged by corporate ne'er-do-wells that kids and adults should avoid with extreme prejudice. And I am living (for now) proof that once hooked, quitting can be exquisitely difficult. Regardless, this article is bullshit.
The first puff on a cigarette could be enough to hook a young teenager into addiction, according to new Canadian research. The extraordinary findings upend the prevailing view about nicotine addiction being a slowly acquired process that occurs only after several years of heavy smoking, suggesting instead that some young people show the first signs of addiction almost immediately after taking a drag on a cigarette.
Alarming, no? Except that's not at all what the study indicates. Wanting a cigarette is not the same thing as being addicted to cigarettes. Sometimes I really want a drink - say, when I'm shooting pool or have had a particularly crappy day at work - but that doesn't equal an addiction to alcohol. And the study expressly changes what constitutes addictive behavior when they move from studying adults to minors.
"Kids don't smoke the same way as adults do, nor do they experience nicotine dependence in the same way," says Dr. O'Loughlin, referring to adult measures that gauge whether someone lights up first thing in the morning, for example, when most teenagers sneak around to smoke. This study asks teens to describe how difficult it is for them to be in a movie theatre and not able to smoke, for example.
But then this really gets me:
The young smokers were categorized as triers, who had only smoked once or twice in their lifetime; sporadic smokers, who smoked more than three times in their lifetime, but not monthly, weekly or daily; those who smoked at least once a month; weekly smokers, who smoked more than once a week but not daily; and those who smoked daily. The study found that despite low cigarette exposure, 16 per cent of those who had smoked in the past three months were tobacco dependent, according to the responses given to the questionnaires.
Although none of the triers demonstrated signs of dependence, three per cent of the sporadic smokers and 4.6 per cent of the monthly smokers indicated dependence symptoms. About two-thirds of the daily smokers, and almost 20 per cent of weekly smokers, were dependent.
So even after drastically defining down what dependent behavior is, none of the "triers" exhibited symptoms, only three in a hundred sporadic smokers did, and fewer than 1 in 20 monthly smokers showed any. Moreover, fully one in three daily smokers show no signs of tobacco dependence? Doesn't a daily smoking habit count as a pretty solid sign? That last one alone renders the entire set of conclusions surpassingly inane.
This is a quote from the study's lead author: "Nicotine dependence symptoms appear in many young tobacco users between the first exposure to nicotine and the onset of daily smoking ... countering current conceptualizations that the development of nicotine dependent smoking necessitates years of heavy regular smoking." Well, no kidding. By the time you're smoking daily, you clearly have already started exhibiting signs of dependent behavior. But that's a far cry from establishing that one puff will enslave you to RJR's smooth, filtered grand designs.
I'll say it over and over: don't smoke. But don't engage in crappy science, either. I remember all the horror stories from high school health class - one snort of cocaine can hook you for life, LSD will make you have flipper babies, marijuana will lead you straight to shooting black tar heroin into your neck, drinking alcohol will ruin your judgment and leave you pregnant and riddled with syphillis, etc. The dangers and pitfalls of drugs - and cigarettes in particular - are real enough, but continually crying wolf only makes everybody ignore the true risks.
A lot of talk about death here this last week, above and beyond the human-inflicted stuff that’s so prevalent in the daily news.
From the passing of the Man In Black to that of Three’s Company cast (on whom the Apostropher may or may not have used his dark Juju), let’s just say it’s been a bit of a theme. Upon that backdrop, I was a little startled when I read this headline as my first coffee-hasn’t-been-brewed-yet exposure to the world at large.
Immediately I knew one of two things had happened:
1. I had awakened in the great beyond and need to check out the local club scene, or
2. Overnight there had been amazing advances in the technology of digital recording.
On a related note, the Apostropher prime has a moving account – go down two entries - of the Great Cycle of Life ™ that you should read even if you are “(averse to)… lengthy, self-indulgent, navel-gazing posts.” It is not the typical poorly-written diary entry so commonly published in this new medium, it is a thought- and emotion-provoking piece by the writer of some of the finest prose on the web. Go read the whole thing.
Named Isabel.
From the National Hurricane Center:
THE LATEST GFDL RUN HAS CONTINUED ITS WESTWARD SHIFT IN THE FORECAST TRACK ...THIS OBSERVATION SUGGESTS THAT THE (High Pressure) RIDGE TO THE NORTH OF BERMUDA AND ISABEL EXTENDS ... FARTHER. ISABEL SHOULD MOVE FARTHER WEST ... A LARGE AND VERY STRONG NORTH-SOUTH ORIENTED RIDGE IS FORECAST TO REMAIN ... AND PREVENT THE HURRICANE FROM RECURVING NORTHEASTWARD.
Northeastward; as in away from us.
ONLY MINOR FLUCTUATIONS IN INTENSITY ARE EXPECTED FOR THE NEXT
COUPLE OF DAYS (gulp) ... THIS WOULD TEND TO KEEP ISABEL STRONGER THAN WHAT THE SHIPS INTENSITY MODEL HAS BEEN INDICATING...ESPECIALLY SINCE ISABEL WILL BE MOVING OVER THE WARM GULFSTREAM OFFSHORE NORTH CAROLINA JUST PRIOR TO LANDFALL.
While some unlucky zipcode will bear the hardest brunt, shelves in grocery stores in hundreds of Counties nearby will be reminiscent of Moscow circa 1991. Procrastinators will be snatching up the last milk (so it can go foul in powerless refrigerators - go figure) and other necessities with hours to go before landfall. A recent American Red Cross survey found that 3 of 5 American households have done virtually no disaster planning; this even after 9-11. If you haven't already, go put together one of these today. If the storm passes you by, consider yourself prepared for the next one, whatever form it may take.
Make it four days' worth of some vitals instead of three, however, because a lot of the corps of first responders and National Guard Folk are a little busy right now with other, more pressing concerns.
Warning: lengthy, self-indulgent, navel-gazing post follows. If you're averse to such, skip on by.
Richard Cohen writes a moving eulogy to his father, who died on the 7th of this month at the age of 94. September 7th happens to be the same date that my father died, though that was 16 years ago and he was but 40. I was eighteen then, taking a year off from college after a train wreck of a freshman year that was caused partially by the shock of his being diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer, but more by being seventeen with no adult supervision and ready access to alcohol. The intersection of those two catalysts, however, probably forms quite a large set indeed.
In the next couple of years, I will pass the point where he has been dead for more of my life than he was alive. Three years beyond that, I will be older than he ever was, and will be sailing mapless through my own uncharted waters of manhood.
My father was one of the brightest men I have ever met, with ready knowledge about a larger range of topics than most people ever aspire to attain. He also had the uncanny ability to sound knowledgeable on subjects about which he was not. I inherited a bit of that, though I have google to aid in fostering that perception. But that breadth of knowledge was reflected in his education - a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Auburn University, a master's degree in music from Southern Seminary in Louisville, KY, and a doctorate in medicine from Duke University in Durham.
That's a lot of schooling, and the non-sequitur progression of those degrees entailed a fair bit of remedial coursework in between. As a result, he was often not around as I grew up, and tended toward fatigue, irritability, and impatience when he was. Calling our relationship stormy would be a grand understatement - it was rather more like rams clashing horns. Compounding that was the fact that I was a, shall we say, challenging child to raise - prone to tantrums, tirelessly looking for an authority or limit to challenge, dismissive of anybody's advice, and utterly incapable of learning life lessons in any way save the very hardest. My sole saving grace was that school came easily to me and good grades were a given. Amazing what you can get away with when you keep bringing home As.
Freud believed that the most important event in any man's life was the death of his father. I've not found that to be the case. While it certainly was important - and has shaped my worldview in ways helpful and not - as single events go, I'd have to rank it third behind the birth of my son and the dissolution of my marriage as watershed psychological moments. And perhaps tied for third with being expelled from North Carolina's most prestigious high school after one short semester. Turns out they had options for dealing with rule-breaking teens that parents mostly don't, one of which involved advising me not to let the door hit me in the ass on my way out. Out of pure cussedness, I let it anyhow. Twice.
So flash forward to today and I'm a couple months shy of 35, with a redheaded, six-year-old child of my own. To be sure, he is in no way the child I earned karmically through my own childhood. Dazzlingly intelligent, as well as polite and well-behaved almost to a fault, I haven't even had to use timeout since he was three. I am steadfastly opposed to striking children under any circumstances, having taken some excruciating (though often not unasked for) beatings myself. Of course, it's easier to be steadfast in that belief when your child behaves like mine rather than like the childhood me. All the same, nothing has illuminated my relationship with my father quite like having a son of my own.
Freud was wrong. The most important event in a man's life is not the day his father dies, it's each of the days he spends with his father while he's alive. For better and for worse. So, take this to heart those of you who are either fathers or sons or both: we don't know how long any of us have on this ride. Although "live each day as if it were your last" may be a sagging, weary cliche, it remains damned fine advice. But be sure to remember the corollary: live each day as if it were your children's last. Sometimes they beat you to the exit.
Show your sons by example what it means to be a man, as opposed to just male - honesty, reliability, kindness, generosity, patience, laughter, inner strength, gentleness, and most of all the ability to give and receive love. Don't make them figure it out on their own. They will lose a lot of years trying. Show your fathers what they taught you and bury whatever hatchets you each have.
The entire time I knew him, my father was on his way to somewhere else - another degree, another career, another life. And then, in nine short months during his fortieth year, he went from healthy as a horse to dead as a doornail. He had missed both of his sons' childhoods and while he never said those words aloud - at least not to me - it was clear enough in his eyes. We all knew he was dying, he knew he was dying, and it was too late to make up so many lost years.
When the cancer finally spread to the point that his heart and lungs quit working, he was exactly one week shy of his 41st birthday. As my mother, my brother, and I went through his belongings several weeks later, we came across a book an acquaintance had given him a year earlier. Inside the front cover, the woman who had given it to him had written, "Happy Birthday, Steve! Remember: life begins at 40."
You know, you spend your life arguing that your home state isn't actually full of halfwits, and then you read a story like this one from Roanoke Rapids, NC.
Police are searching for a man who paid for $150 in groceries at a Food Lion grocery store with a $200 bill. The man walked out of the store with his groceries and $50 in change before the fake bill was discovered Sept. 6.
The bogus bill -- the U.S. Mint does not print a $200 bill -- bore the image of President George W. Bush on the front and had the White House on the back. It also included signs on the front lawn of the front lawn of the White House with slogans such as "We like broccoli" and "USA deserves a tax cut," Roanoke Rapids police said.
Instead of being labeled a Federal Reserve note, the fake bill was marked as a "Moral Reserve Note." The bill bore the signatures of Ronald Reagan, political mentor, and George H.W. Bush, campaign adviser and mentor.
Wouldn't you just love to be a fly on the wall at that cashier's next performance review? Poor thing...
(hat tip: fiend)
Thank you, Johnny Cash. How anybody puts out that much great music in just 71 years will always be a mystery.
Also, I mention Bush almost every single day on this site, and he's in fine health. But I mention Three's Company one time, and John Ritter collapses on the set and dies that night. My powers clearly need some fine-tuning.
Meanwhile, the killing of 8 Iraqi policemen by US soldiers is very, very bad news for our efforts to pacify the Sunni triangle. It was only a matter of time before this happened. It remains only a matter of time before it happens again.
The users of personal computers around the globe are being asked to help predict the world’s climate over the next 50 years.
The climateprediction.net project, which is being launched today by British scientists, will harness the combined power of thousands of personal computers to generate the world’s most comprehensive forecast of 21st century climate.
The project will allow climate researchers to assess the probability of different patterns of climate change in the next half-century - a complex process that would otherwise require long and expensive simulations on supercomputers.
Here's where you can sign up.
The climateprediction.net system has already been tested by more than 1,500 people across the world, in locations that include the United States, Argentina, India and Zimbabwe. Participants will be able to view the climatic patterns being simulated on their computers, and are being encouraged to comment on the results in an online forum. At the end of each simulation, the results will be sent to researchers via the Internet.
So within a week all they need to do is run enough simulations, get the data they need, then design and build the Hurricane Eradication Unit.
Boy, this is bound to help the RIAA's PR campaign.
The settlement was reached with the mother of 12-year-old Brianna Lahara, a user of the Kazaa file-sharing service. Lahara was featured on the cover of Tuesday's New York Post, which described the girl as being scared and on the verge of tears when she discovered she was being sued.
Sylvia Torres (Brianna's single mom) has agreed to pay the RIAA $2000 to settle the case, according to RIAA spokesperson Amy Weiss, who declines to explain how the figure was reached.
At least someone's come to Brianna's defense.
P2P United, a newly formed industry trade association, says it will pay the $2000 fine imposed on 12-year-old Brianna LaHara by the recording industry for illegally downloading music from the Internet. The fine was the result of a settlement reached Tuesday between the Recording Industry Association of America and the girl's single mother.
[...]
But the executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based P2P United, Adam Eisgrau, says the RIAA should pick on someone its own size, not a little girl who downloaded songs like "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands."
[...]
"We don't condone copyright infringement, but it's time for the RIAA's winged monkeys to fly back to the castle and leave the munchkins alone," Eisgrau says in a statement. P2P United consists of six of the largest file-sharing Web sites, including Grokster, StreamCast Networks (which owns Kazaa), and BearShare.
Does this look like desperation to you? If the RIAA's members can't figure out a way to make money off Brianna's music preferences any other way than suing her, I can't say their stocks are looking too attractive long-term. This is basic 'adapt to new technological realities' stuff, guys; you can either fight it or flow with it.
This monkey's gone to heaven. Or it sure feels like it, anyhow. Eep eep.
Earlier this week, MTV quoted an unnamed spokesman for the band who confirmed that the Pixies are to reform for a series of live dates in April 2004. The source added that a subsequent album was also a distinct possibility.
(via t-melt)
Hurricane Isabel is barrelling through the Atlantic Ocean with 150 mph winds. Forecasters can't say when, where, or even if it will make landfall. It's currently packing winds only 6 mph short of a Category 5 storm. In case you don't live in hurricane land, that translates to catastrophic destruction unless it turns back out to sea or weakens before it lumbers ashore.
As a 32-year North Carolina resident (years 0-3 were spent in Kentucky), I have more than a passing familiarity with hurricanes. Folks around here largely don't view them with much trepidation. For most of us, it's just another reason to go sit on your roof in your underwear with a six-pack. Okay, maybe not most of us, but suffice it to say those of us who grew up here are pretty jaded about hurricanes. Particularly since NC juts out from the coast like a big chin begging to get whacked, so consequently often does. We're plenty used to it.
All the same, the final paragraph of this Florida Sun-Sentinel article, published a few hours earlier than the one linked above, kinda pissed me off.
Low-pressure troughs have saved the U.S. coast many times from devastating hurricanes. For instance, in September 1999, Hurricane Floyd, packing 155-mph winds and posing a major threat to South Florida, was deflected north and went on to hit North Carolina.
Saved the U.S. coast, but went on to hit North Carolina? What, we aren't part of the U.S.? Jiminy christmas, it was the worst flooding North Carolina had ever seen. Princeville, NC practically disappeared under water. For weeks, you could only get around most of the eastern half of the state by helicopter. I know Florida often rivals Texas and California in terms of statewide self-absorption, but really...
Edward Teller, one of the main architects and defenders of the atomic bomb, died Tuesday at the age of 95. Nothing strange about a 95-year-old man passing away, or the nation's flagship newspaper noting the passing of a man of his historical import. However, the tagline for the man who wrote his New York Times obituary is a little odd:
Walter Sullivan, a science writer and editor for The New York Times, died in 1996.
Now that's planning ahead.
"Not tonight, honey. The house is on fire."
A man who tried to set fire to his home to avoid having sex with his wife has been jailed for two years. Svetin Gulisija, 26, from Seget in Croatia admitted starting a fire in woods just behind his house because he was too tired for sex with his wife.
Two years in prison and 15,000 pounds worth of damage. It would have been a lot less hassle to just get one of these.
Indian scientists claim to have invented a new robot which has the ability to improve couple's sex lives. Dr CRJP Naidu, of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence & Robotics, says the robot can simulate body movements and he boasts of its "sexual prowess." [...] Dr Prasada Raju of Department of Science and Technology, GOI, says ASINO was initially designed "to perform unusual tasks beyond normal human capability."
What, like staying awake longer than fifteen minutes once it's finished? Oh, and all you youngsters who have no idea what the title of this post references, catch an old rerun of Three's Company.
Is apparently what is expected by oil interests of the Nation's chief of environmental protection. The parting of Christine Todd Whitman (hardly an ardent environmental champion, but granted, a marginally adequate administrator who thinks that scientific consensus should at least be entertained) was smugly noted by Myron Ebell of the Competetive Enterprise Institute thusly:
"She wasn't our choice. One thing we liked, though, is that she spent a lot of time on foreign travel, and wasn't as active an administrator as she might have been."
Mr Ebell of CEI, which is overwhelmingly funded by Exxon/Mobil and Chevron, in this chummy memo to Phil Cooney, a senior official at the White House Council for Environmental Quality, states the need to "drive a wedge between the President and those in the Administration who think that they are serving the president's interests by publishing this rubbish" when talking about the administration's pending (albeit gagged) acknowledgement of global climate change. He goes on to write "we can only hope the fall guy (or gal) would be as high up as possible" and "perhaps tomorrow we will call for Ms Whitman to be fired."
We can also only hope that Mr. Leavitt will do as he is told.
Tips to a former employer.
Most online quizzes are pretty silly. The Christian Science Monitor has an "Are you a neoconservative" test at which I scoffed at first. But hey, this is CSM - not CNN, so I checked it out.
The multiple-choice answers are very detailed and differ very subtly, so much so that for only 2 out of 10 was the selection easy. I suggest taking it primarily because of the exercise of debating those last 2 possible answers to each question. I wish the test could be conducted rating the 4 possibilties from "most like your opinion" to "least like your opinion."
I generally hate labels for general political opinions because I generally hate generalizations. But no surprise, I was "liberal" after taking the quiz. So I went back and changed answers (to 6 of the 8 on which I hesitated) to my second choice. Still "liberal".
Damn! This thing's broken; I want my quarter back!
No, not Bush - and would everybody please retire that bit of nasty hyperbole? Aside from being stupid and inaccurate, it also pretty much invalidates any worthwhile points that might follow it. No, I'm referring to myself. Not the goose-stepping, mass-murdering Nazi type, mind you - I'm referring to the Grammar Nazi variety.
You've probably ascertained that I spend a pathetically large amount of my free time reading on the internet. The advent of web publishing is a beautiful thing, a true democratization of information. Unfortunately, however, since any monkey with a keyboard can slap up a website (hang on, let me finish this banana . . . ok, sorry 'bout that), there has been a stunningly steep and sudden slide in standards with regard to the proper use of the English language. I'd just like to list a few of my pet peeves, if you don't mind.
On second thought, I don't care if you mind. It's my damn website.
1. Top of the list (for obvious reasons) is improper apostrophe usage. Bob the Angry Flower gives a gruff rundown of the rules. A more polite guide is available from the Apostrophe Protection Society.
1a. Please take care with it's and its. If you can't substitute "it is" or "it has" in the place of your "it's," then you are looking for "its." Possessive for "it" does not use an apostrophe. It's likely that this rule deserves its own number.
Aside: after writing apostropher for nine months, I am now completely incapable of typing the word apostrophe without having to go back and delete the letter r at the end of it. The one time on this page that I did not type an r at the end, I reflexively backspaced over the e.
2. They're going to put their shoes over there.
3. You're going to put your shoes beside the ewer.
4. When somebody says one thing while doing its opposite, they're engaging in "hypocrisy." There is no such word as "hypocracy." By its Greek roots, however, if such a word did exist it would mean something along the lines of either "governmental rule from underneath" or "a shortage of governmental authority." Libertarians believe in hypocracy; Republicans believe in hypocrisy.
5. You lose (pronounced luze) something when you misplace it. You loose (pronounced luce) something when you set it free or relax it. Loose can be used as an adjective, lose cannot. This actually irks me more than gratuitous apostrophes. Once again, the word that is pronounced luze does not contain a second o.
6. Please re-read Rule 5.
7. The word "grammar" does not contain the letter e.
8. "Kewl" and "LOL" are not English words, no matter how often you may see them online.
9. Sentences begin with capital letters unless you really, really know what you are doing and are employing non-standard capitalization for effect.
10. Sentences do not end in prepositions unless you are writing dialogue.
Sorry, I just had to vent and now I feel better. Feel free to go back to mangling the mother tongue now.
Last Friday I picked up Al Franken's latest book, Lies and the Lying Liars that Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. It's very funny, as you'd expect, and a haymaker takedown of the disinformation barrage from the Mighty Wurlitzer. The six-year-old junior apostropher was looking at the cover and asked me what "the Right" meant, so I gave him a quick thumbnail sketch of American politics and the relative positions of right-wingers, left-wingers, and centrists. That seemed to satisfy him and we moved on to other topics, like Sponge Bob Squarepants.
Then two days ago, he was sitting on the couch and out of the blue announced, "I hope I grow up to be a left-winger." Heh heh. That's an achievable goal, little buddy. And a worthwhile one if you'd like to stay in the will. Anyhow, I noticed that this week's New York Times non-fiction best-seller list has five overtly political books in the Top Ten. Ann Coulter's Treason (which, by all rights, should be on the fiction list) is at #5, while Franken takes the #1 spot, Hillary Clinton's Living History takes the #4 spot, Joe Conason's Big Lies comes in at #8, and Jim Hightower's Thieves in High Places rounds out the list at #9.
I guess either the country isn't as conservative as the conservatives like to claim, or liberals are wildly overrepresented in the subpopulation of Americans who can read.
Looks like they've been searching for the crux of the biscuit in Nepal, too. Which is not to say that I can make any real sense of it in their context.
To the casual observer, it may seem that this country has come to a complete standstill. In fact, it hasn't. If you look carefully, there are still signs of normalcy in the nation's nooks and crannies. For example, despite successive Nepal bandhs our corner momo shop is still dumping unused body parts of deceased water buffaloes on the neighbourhood garbage pile. As long as Nepal's average per capita consumption of momos stays above the national benchmark for Middle-Income Developing Nations, we know that we're not yet a failed state.
Clearly.
Saudi Arabia's religious police have declared Barbie dolls a threat to morality, complaining that the revealing clothes of the "Jewish" toy - already banned in the kingdom - were offensive to Islam. The Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, as the religious police are officially known, lists the dolls on a section of its website devoted to items deemed offensive to the conservative Saudi interpretation of Islam.
"Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West. Let us beware of her dangers and be careful," said a poster on the site.
Guess I should have known (seventh one down).
Does somebody need to go sit in time out?
It is rare these days when even one of the four Democratic senators running for president is seen in the Senate. But yesterday all four were on hand to vote on a proposal aimed at overturning a Bush administration initiative to change the rules governing overtime pay, and it took all day for the Senate to cope with the complications.
Throughout the day, Republicans blocked a vote on the proposal, angrily accusing Democrats of trying to schedule it to fit with the travel plans of their presidential contenders. But, by day's end, they agreed on a vote for this morning, when Democrats said at least three of the four would still be on hand.
"How DARE you try to conduct Senate business when your senators are here. It's NOT FAIR NOT FAIR NOT FAIR! Waaaaah!"
The administration has said the proposal could result in denial of overtime benefits for 644,000 workers. Democrats, citing other estimates, say 8 million workers, including nurses, public safety personnel and others in critical, high-pressure jobs, could be adversely affected.
The Democrats, with a few GOP defectors, prevailed 54-45. Go team.
UPDATE (11:23): The defectors from each side:
D: Zell "not sure why I call myself a Democrat" Miller (GA)
R: Campbell (CO), Chafee (RI), Murkowski (AK), Snowe (ME), Specter (PA), and Stevens (AK)
On Monday, construction workers discovered nine pieces of human remains "on the 20th floor scaffolding of a building right on the edge of Ground Zero." This is the third such find, the last one happening in June, bringing the total number of remains collected from the site to 19,902.
For of the all the human remains collected, stored, cataloged and tested, only 7,526 have been identified — meaning they have been linked to one of the 1,521 persons who have been positively identified as among the total 2,792 victims of the attack. Some of those have been claimed by families for burial or cremation. The rest wait with the unidentified bones for eventual inclusion in a Ground Zero Memorial, from which they could later be removed for additional identity testing.
Yeesh, how creepy. But I found this little bit, tucked away at the very end of the article, interesting:
Immediately after the attacks, it was believed that as many as 6,500 people died in the World Trade Center. Due to the gradual discovery and identification of human remains, the number has dropped since then to its current 2,792. However, officials also have adjusted the estimates because they have discovered that some of the people listed as missing or dead had tried to commit fraud by attempting to have their families collect death benefits or tried to remain "deceased" so they could escape debts and family responsibilities. New York police officials say they have made more than three dozen arrests related to these kind of Sept. 11 fraud cases.
I'm not going to spend much time pontificating on the terrorist attacks as the anniversary nears. You won't be able to throw a rock without hitting somebody's thoughts on it two years later, and that will include a lot of writers who will say anything I could with greater eloquence. But now is as good a time as any to note that September 11th is also the anniversary for another tragic event that cost thousands of lives. On that date, thirty years ago in Chile, General Augusto Pinochet violently overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende, ushering in an era of fierce state-run terror, torture, and disappearances that claimed the lives of over 3,000 people.
Here's a sampling of what it was like to have been targeted during Pinochet's rule.
Here's what the CIA admits to regarding our involvement. Here's a little more, um, comprehensive version.
Here's a similar story in Guatemala. And Iran. And the Philippines. And Haiti. And El Salvador. And Nicaragua. And I could continue, but you get the picture.
So maybe we could cut the rest of the world a little slack about questioning our newfound concern with Iraqi human rights and our ability/desire to install democracy there. Our track record isn't so hot.
In reference to Froz's preceding post about the sound of a black hole:
It's the music of the spheres, baby. From the smallest to the largest and back again. That big B flat is first position on the cosmic trombone, so grab some popcorn and catch the movie.
Among the many meanings of Om is the notion that it is the sound of light (which can't escape from a black hole - or can it?), the background noise of the universe, the sound made by the gods at creation. So to bring it full circle, since it is the music of the spheres that started this spinning, this info comes straight from NASA: "The background count rate in the OM is dominated by the zodiacal light in the optical. In the far UV the intrinsic detector background becomes important."
You're damn straight it does, cowboy.
UPDATE (Sept. 10, 10:10 am): Speaking of the music of the spheres, turn on your sound and hit the Boohbah Zone and just start clicking. Perfection.
(8:14 pm): Oops. The Boohbah link was from Mark Morford's email newsletter, where the text was simply "Oh My God Oh My God Oh My God." Which is exactly what I thought.
Humming a heavenly tune:
For the first time, sound waves have been detected from a supermassive black hole by using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The "note" is the deepest ever detected from an object in the Universe. The tremendous amounts of energy carried by these sound waves may solve a longstanding problem in astrophysics.
[...]
For years astronomers have tried to understand why there is so much hot gas in galaxy clusters and so little cool gas. Hot gas glowing with X-rays should cool, and the dense central gas should cool the fastest. The pressure in this cool central gas should then fall, causing gas further out to sink in towards the galaxy, forming trillions of stars along the way. Scant evidence has been found for such a flow of cool gas or star formation. This forced astronomers to invent several different ways to explain why the gas contained in clusters remained hot, and, until now, none of was them satisfactory.
Heating caused by a central black hole has long been considered a good way to prevent cluster gas from cooling. Although jets have been observed at radio wavelengths, their effect on cluster gas was unclear since this gas is only detectable in X-rays, and early X-ray observations did not have Chandra's ability to find detailed structure.
Previous Chandra observations of the Perseus cluster showed two vast, bubble-shaped cavities in the cluster gas extending away from the central black hole. These X-ray cavities, which are bright sources of radio waves, have been formed by jets of material pushing back the cluster gas. They have long been suspected of heating the surrounding gas, but the mechanism was unknown. The sound waves, seen spreading out from the cavities in the recent Chandra observation, could provide this heating mechanism.
And yes, they figured this out, too:
In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note of B flat. But, a human would have no chance of hearing this cosmic performance because the note is 57 octaves lower than middle-C (by comparison a typical piano contains only about seven octaves). At a frequency over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, this is the deepest note ever detected from an object in the Universe.
I think I'll go outside and listen.
...right after I shoot it with this gun.
Y'know, I don't believe that Gray Davis is actually anti-immigrant. I believe him when he says it was meant as humor in exactly the same way that Trent Lott's quip about Strom Thurmond wasn't meant as a paean to segregation. All the same, as with Lott, it was a really [bleep]ing stupid thing to say. Not just bag o' rocks stupid, but truly world class stupid.
Even if you believe it, you should know better than to say it. And good grief, when you're governor of California at a campaign event where the media are present and you don't have the presence of mind not to make a crack like that, well... You probably shouldn't be allowed to use fireworks without an adult present because sure as hell you're going to end up thumbless.
Regardless, Gray Davis does owe Schwarzenegger - and a whole lot of other Californians - an enormous apology. I don't think it's fair to tar Davis with the remark by Sukhee Kang - it was made an hour before he arrived - but he really ought to say that he disagrees. Watching it all, though, I do start to wonder whether this is calculated. And if it is, Davis deserves to get canned and become persona non grata in the Democratic Party.
I was reading Sullivan’s “A Strategy Unfolds” piece and began thinking I might be underestimating the military and logistic value in this approach. He says “articulating the flytrap strategy just might help”. Maybe I can do that. Put your “Military Strategist” hat on for a moment and just imagine who might be saying something like this while huddling with his generals:
“Look, we took a serious hit in late 2001. Our primary military and economic command and control centers were attacked quite successfully, exposing our weakness. Like it or not, we have been struggling economically and strategically. Our operations are disrupted.
Our home front is not secure the way we need it to be. We are vulnerable here. Fortunately, the enemy has miscalculated badly. This strategy distracts him into a foreign country. His forces are dispersed and stretched to the point of unsustainability. We can fight them, weakened, in Iraq on our terms and under conditions of our choosing. It is far better to fight them here than in the US.
As a natural consequence of the toppling of Saddam's regime, not only is Iraq a more fertile land for sowing the seeds of the kind of political development we’ve advocated for years, but nearby countries with despicable governments will be shaken and the voices with revolutionary agendas can emerge. This makes the political conditions throughout the Middle East perfect for increasing the attractiveness of our model. Our own brand of ideas about governance can finally begin to blossom.
It is a true challenge, no doubt, but an opportunity as well; one that should not be passed up.
The situation in Israel is hopelessly stuck, we must admit. Fortunately, those sympathetic to us there are keeping focused on their immediate tasks and not getting too involved with the battle being waged on this new front. Developments to the contrary will cause unpredictable results. Resolving that conflict will have to wait for another day, but a secured Iraq can not help but further that cause.
If we prevail here in Iraq, she will stand as a beacon of hope for millions of Arabs and Muslims for standing up to tyranny. And after all, we have God on our side.”
[A long, long pause.]
I think you have the map upside-down, pal. We're the fly.
So the Palestinian Parliament speaker, Ahmed Qureia, will be replacing Mahmoud Abbas as Prime Minister. Unless he isn't. I know nothing of the man, so have nothing of importance to say about it. I am, however, suspicious that I have never seen Speaker Qureia and Jerry Tarkanian in the same room.
I know, I know, if I wanted more sophisticated political reasoning I could just read the backs of shampoo bottles. Still, for some reason, I keep returning to National Review Online to read the regular paroxysms of nonsense from Rich Lowry. The latest batch of faulty reasoning is here, wherein Lowry celebrates Bush's "clear, forceful" and "long overdue" turning away from the WMD rationale for invading Iraq. Long overdue, indeed, since it's honking obvious there aren't any to be found. Lowry "heralds" the replacement of that threadbare rationale with three shiny, not quite new ones.
1. Politics: "But if you want just a hint of how U.S. success there could have a subversive effect, consider the way other dictatorial Arab governments — dishonestly, but tellingly — have had to pay lip service to democracy in Iraq."
Jeez Rich, everybody already paid lip service to democracy. Hence the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Saddam Hussein paid lip service to Iraqi democracy. Good thing we have made all those dictatorial governments continue to do so "dishonestly." Now if we can just get them to line up behind the "all babies should eat" platform, we'll have changed the world irrevocably.
2. Prestige: "If the U.S. can see this through, it may have vanquished its image as a paper tiger once and for all."
Pivotal words there: "if," "can," and "may." Nobody thinks the Israeli Army is afraid to take casualties, and damn but that has cowed those uppity Palestinians, hasn't it? Yeah, we'll show 'em, alright. And once we've eliminated terrorism in the same way we eliminated drugs and poverty in our previous wars on societal conditions that have always existed, we shall stride like Colossus upon the Earth while those little brown people quake before us.
3. Preemption: "Iraq has also, unexpectedly, created an opportunity to kill terrorists in one place not seen since Afghanistan."
Ah, the flypaper theory raises its head yet again. Sure, sure, now we can fight them our terms, right? We've got them now, right where we want them - blending into an already angry and impatient occupied people. This argument has been exposed as empty logic so many times that it hardly merits refutation at this late date.
Small wonder Lowry turned down Al Franken's challenge to fight him in a parking garage (and I love the faux-macho chest puffing Lowry engages in while refusing). If Lowry fights as well as he reasons, the 50-year-old Franken, bad back and all, would have left him a greasy smear on the pavement.
I haven't seen anybody do this yet so...
All together now:
Darling you gotta let me know
Should I stay or should I go?
If you say that you are mine
I'll be here 'til the end of time
So you got to let know
Should I stay or should I go?
Always tease tease tease
You're happy when I'm on my knees
One day is fine, next is black
So if you want me off your back
Well come on and let me know
Should I Stay or should I go?
Should I stay or should I go now?
Should I stay or should I go now?
If I go there will be trouble
An' if I stay it will be double
So come on and let me know
This indecision's bugging me
If you don't want me, set me free
Exactly who'm I'm supposed to be
Don't you know which clothes even fit me?
Come on and let me know
Should I cool it or should I blow?
Should I stay or should I go now?
If I go there will be trouble
And if I stay it will be double
So you gotta let me know
Should I stay or should I go?
Copyright yada yada, the Clash wrote this and some record company owns it now.
New Scientist reports on newly published research by David Grinspoon of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas suggesting that Venus (this Venus, not that one) may well have had pleasant, Earth-like conditions for at least two billion years following its birth, which would be plenty of time for life to develop. Then again, until the European Space Agency's Venus Express program arrives there in early 2006, we still can't rule out the more-likely-than-you-think possibility that microbial life is doing just fine in the acidic clouds that now cloak the planet.
Inventory Errors? Experts: Iraq's Weapons Ledgers Askew
No weapons of mass destruction have turned up in Iraq, nor has any solid new evidence for them turned up in Washington or London. But what about Baghdad's patchy bookkeeping - the gaps that led United Nations inspectors to list Iraqi nerve agents and bioweapons material as unaccounted for? Former inspectors now say the "unaccountables" may have been no more than paperwork glitches left behind when Iraq destroyed banned chemical and biological weapons years ago.
Some may represent miscounts, they say, and some may stem from Iraqi underlings' efforts to satisfy the boss by exaggerating reports on arms output in the 1980s. "Under that sort of regime, you don't admit you got it wrong," said Ron G. Manley of Britain, a former chief UN adviser on chemical weapons.
[...]
U.S. defense analyst Carl Conetta said it was always a "fragile assumption" to expect Iraq to provide a highly detailed, fully consistent and well documented account of all its weapons work. No military can do that, he wrote in a report on the Iraq inspections. A U.S. audit last year, for example, found the Pentagon had lost track of more than 1 million chemical-biological protective suits, said Conetta, of Mass.-based Project on Defense Alternatives, a private think tank. In perhaps the most striking example, U.S. government auditors found in 1994 that almost 3 tons of plutonium, enough for hundreds of nuclear bombs, had "vanished" from U.S. stocks because of discrepancies between "book inventory" and "physical inventory."
Sure, nobody's surprised at revelations like these about Iraq any longer. That the banned weapons charges were based on feverish fantasy and deliberate deception has for months been blindingly obvious to anybody with a limbic system. The British government (except, of course, for Tony Blair) has gone ahead and admitted that they have given up hopes of finding any banned weapons, according to the BBC's Andrew Marr:
"Senior government sources are telling me they no longer believe physical weapons of mass destruction are going to be found in Iraq. They don't think there were weapons programmes. [...] The people I am talking to were not cynics, they are not people who made the evidence up or who believed it wasn't there in first place, they are genuinely bemused."
"Bemused?" I'd think they'd be a bit past bemusement at this point. I find our own misplaced inventory rather more astounding, since we haven't had our weapons facilities being bombed for over a decade or had any wars fought on our territory since before any of us were born. Binder clips, Sharpie pens, dry erase board cleaner - I can see those getting lost in the back of a warehouse somewhere. But christ on a crutch, people - we can't find three tons of our own plutonium? Three tons? And over a million big, bulky suits? Didja check behind the Xerox machine at Los Alamos?
About three weeks ago, I wrote about Adrienne Samen, the 18-year bride who flew into a berserker rage at her wedding and spent the night in the pokey. The story was intriguing to me because drunken melees seem like such an incongruous element of a wedding. But it appears that they are downright trendy these days.
The Smoking Gun reports on two Michigan weddings a mere eight days apart, neither of which appear destined for cherished memory status. Repressed memory status, perhaps. First up, the drunken date from Hell:
On the heels of the Connecticut-bride-goes-bonkers episode comes word that a Michigan construction worker/convicted felon was arrested early Saturday morning for a drunken rampage at a catering hall near Flint. According to this Corunna Police Department report, Michael VanStrate, 31, got plastered and was "picking fights the entire evening," including one with a nine-year-old boy, whose face VanStrate smeared with cake. When the child's father interceded, VanStrate--who came to the reception as the date of an invited guest--bit off the man's right index finger. As the brawl escalated, VanStrate bit the groom's thumb and elbowed the man's mother in the head, knocking the woman to the floor (witnesses said she may have blacked out at some point). VanStrate, on probation for malicious destruction of property, was arraigned yesterday on a variety of assault charges.
Charming. I'll bet the woman who brought him as a date was very impressed. What could be worse than a drunk, raving, violent lunatic at your wedding? Four drunk, raving, violent lunatics that are now your in-laws.
[A] quartet of Michigan brothers was arrested early Sunday morning for triggering a melee at their 27-year-old sister's wedding reception. According to the below Ogemaw County Sheriff's Office report, the Evers brothers (Erik, Aaron, Ryan, and Randall) got ornery after the bar shut near the close of the festivities. A bartender got kicked and bit on the nose. The female DJ, who stopped spinning when three separate brawls erupted, was called a "whore" by Randall Evers, who then allegedly slammed the woman into a wall, knocking her unconscious. Randall, 38, then punched a female friend of the DJ's, whose front teeth were "broke." One fight apparently stemmed from a contentious arm wrestling match between the groom and 29-year-old Aaron Evers, who was soundly defeated by his new brother-in-law, who taunted his opponent as he drank from a pitcher of beer. Here's our favorite lines from the sheriff's report: "Ryan was arrested for assaulting his brother, Erik. Erik was arrested for assaulting his brother, Ryan. Randy was arrested for assaulting the bartender and the DJ's of the wedding reception."
Those are just the highlights - once the police arrive, the wackiness just gets bumped up a notch. Amazing. I'd like to point out that not one of these three incidents happened in the South. We're losing our edge, comrades, so let's get busy, OK? They're stealing our thunder and we can only ride Roy Moore for so long.
Speaking of Moore, could any one person have a more poorly developed sense of irony?
Suspended Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore told an Atlanta congregation Sunday that the concept of separation of church and state appeared first in the Bible, and that a federal judge’s use of that idea to order the removal of a Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building constituted tyranny. "A distinction must be made between the existence of religion as an institution and a belief in the sovereignty of God," Moore told about 3,000 worshippers at the Church of the Apostles in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood. "When judges take law into their own hands, they commit tyranny." (emphasis added)
Hmm, maybe we can ride Roy Moore indefinitely.
I went to see a Paper Hand Puppet Intervention show, The Dream and the Lie last night at the Forest Theater on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. My kid was a little spooked by the volume of the music – we originally sat on the front row – but the percussionist, bless him, got out of his seat momentarily to give us a heads-up before the looming crescendo and we relocated to about three-fourths of the way back. Despite adult themes, the show was playful enough and inspiring enough to be appropriate for small children.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t leave the show perturbed.
I knew the story about Hitler’s ‘Condor Legion’ bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. And I knew that Pablo Picasso had created a marvelously disturbing masterpiece about the atrocity. However, I did not know that New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller had a 12' by 25' tapestry replica made for his State Capital in 1970 and that in 1985 it was placed on indefinite loan to the United Nations Headquarters Building where it hung just outside the Security Council chamber as a reminder to world leaders of the horrors of war. Learning these things did not make me angry.
What infuriated me was to learn that night (last night), and confirm the next day (to-day) that this tapestry was covered with a "more telegenic" dark blue drapery and UN flags for Colin Powell’s February 2003 speech to the Security Council where he tried, and failed, to convince the world body to let his administration borrow the UN’s legitimacy for its illegitimate invasion of Iraq.
Whether this was incredible contempt on the part of, or merely cynical convenience to the hawks’ and their agenda is irrelevant. The symbolism is too poignant and whoever has the housekeeping contract for this body’s headquarters exercised pathetic judgment.
When the cameras roll for his next Q&A after he goes back, tail tucked between thighs, to the UN Café and orders an all-you-can-eat plate of crow with a side of french fries, I’d like to see him made to stand - wide angle - in front of that tapestry. Better yet would be a full-blown picture of Baghdad in flames.
Judging by the enormous number of stories I found looking for confirmation, I may be almost the last human to know about this episode. Sorry if this new news for me is old olds for you. But as someone who values art more than warfare, it struck a particularly sore spot with me.
And take your lunch money as payment for my efforts.
Bush, in an interview with CNBC, said he would ''look at'' one congressional proposal under which Washington would be paid back with future Iraqi oil revenues.
If I throw grenades at my neighbor's house because I think his dog has nuclear weapons, should the carpenters and plumbers and his orphans' and widow's hotel bill AS WELL AS the grenade retailer get paid with any money that can be made at the farmers' market off his beanplants?
''Now it's just a matter of making sure they're secure and continuing to modernize the delivery system so that the relatively good-sized fields in Iraq are able to produce money on behalf of the Iraqi citizens,'' Bush added.
"On their behalf?" I don't like the sound of that. Something about this just strikes me as wrong. Very wrong.
Biden says we must win the war. This is precisely wrong. The United States must learn to lose this war – a harder task, in many ways, than winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time (well, of the next few years, anyway).
The cost of leaving will certainly be high, just not anywhere near as high as trying to "stay the course," which can only magnify and postpone the disaster. And yet – regrettable to say – even if this difficult step is taken, no one should imagine that democracy will be achieved by this means. The great likelihood is something else – something worse: perhaps a recrudescence of dictatorship or civil war, or both. An interim period – probably very brief – of international trusteeship is the best solution, yet it is unlikely to be a good solution. It is merely better than any other recourse. [emphasis added]
The good options have probably passed us by. They may never have existed. If the people of Iraq are given back their country, there isn't the slightest guarantee that they will use the privilege to create a liberal democracy. The creation of democracy is an organic process that must proceed from the will of the local people. Sometimes that will is present, more often it is not. Vietnam provides an example. Vietnam today enjoys the self-determination it battled to achieve for so long; but it has not become a democracy.
On the other hand, just because Iraq's future remains to be decided by its talented people, it would also be wrong to categorically rule out the possibility that they will escape tyranny and create democratic government for themselves. The United States and other countries might even find ways of offering modest assistance in the project. It's just that it is beyond the power of the United States to create democracy for them.
The matter is not in our hands. It never was.
Be sure to read Tom Englehardt's words on the editorial as well.
is the urine running down Karl Rove's leg.
And he has to be sweating the latest Ipsos-Reid/Cook Political Report Poll on the question: "Generally speaking, would you say things in this country are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track?" In the 10 polls since April 15-17, when the right track was leading with a 60%-35% advantage, the numbers have steadily slid in the opposite direction. The last one, conducted September 2-4, has 39% right track and 56% wrong track. It also shows Bush's approval rating dropping to a barely afloat 52%.
The economy continues to shed jobs, with another 93,000 slashed during August. And then, from Joe Conason's Journal:
The Vietnam parallel was invoked again yesterday by retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, the president's former Mideast envoy, in a tough speech to members of the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps Association. "My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice," said the former general, who suffered serious wounds as a young officer there. "I ask you, is it happening again?"
Saying that the administration's Iraq policy was in "danger of failing," he added: "We certainly blew past the U.N. Why, I don't know. Now we're going back hat in hand."
Zinni's comments were met with sustained applause from the veteran officers in attendance. Here's a prediction based on many such anecdotes and my own e-mail from active-duty and retired military officers: There will be a shift away from the Republicans by Americans in uniform next year.
The election is over a year away, so any forecasts now are just so much peeing in the wind, and you can never overestimate the Democrats' ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As a rule, they only stop forming circular firing squads long enough to eat their young. All the same, it's getting difficult to see just what Bush has left to run on - foreign policy is a disaster, economic policy is a disaster, environmental record is not quite a disaster but lousy all the same. I guess that pretty much leaves him with abortion and gay marriage, and hell, I'd love to see the campaign come down to the pet issues of the religious right, so we could drive an electoral stake through the hearts of Phyllis Schlafly and John Ashcroft once and for all.
Bring 'em on.
Found it! You can see the entire run of Lunardelli historical wine labels (and order the wines if you wish) at their website. They also make a line of artistic labels, featuring works by Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Monet, Toulouse-Latrec, Klimt, Gauguin, Munch, and Picasso.
If not downright disgusting.
A little chastizing here.
Mark Morford's column in today's San Francisco Chronicle about Pvt Jessica Lynch brings my blood to a simmer. I know it's tongue-in-cheek, but it is exactly the kind of thing that provides ample ammunition for those who will quote it only somewhat out-of-context and make war opponents look like the obnoxious, knuckle-dragging australopithecines on the right with whom we're supposed to be struggling.
Mr. Morford is a gifted writer and humor is one of his strengths, but I have to wince when, in the frenzy of generalized disgust at BushCo, writers (of articles, blogs, whatever) rather sloppily veer over to denigrating the personalities behind their pawns. For example: the insulting "kindergarten-teacher wanna-be", the condescending "our precious Jessica" and the outright abhorrent "just a few broken bones".
And these are just over the top.
I'll leave aside my own nausea from the staging of this whole affair - and others - for a moment and say that this soldier had a terrifying ordeal - no doubt being threatened by her armed captors - and suffered serious wounds. The entire time she was there, regardless of the apparently extraordinary hospitality shown by the hospital staff, she was in pain and fear. She was grieving for her comrades she had just watched die. She was miles away from her home in an unfathomably traumatic situation and didn't know if she would live to see her family or West Virginia ever again. The question should not be: "How really difficult was it?" It should be "Why in the hell did these neocon bastards put her there?"
When the staging of the rescue is discussed, how does having to battle against this kind of work help?
During the first five days of this month, I've seen over 200 hits roll in to this site from a private web design discussion board called kopykatz.org (making it neck and neck with google, for cryin' out loud). Being a private discussion board, I can't see what the link is, so if you happened to land here from there, could you leave me a note in the comments and clue me in? I'd appreciate it.
Sure, it holds 30 gigabytes of music and fits in your shirt pocket, and that's all fine and good. But those of us who actually go out in public require a portable stereo system that looks stylish, too.
Umm, sort of. I think.
Last week, they started production on a carbonated milk-based drink called Refreshing Power Milk -- RPM -- and they already have orders coming in from school districts. Mary Ann Clark, a registered nurse, said she was pained to see children drinking cola and shunning milk when she worked in schools so she decided to do something about it.
[...]
She and her biochemist husband started work on a carbonated milk drink in 1996 and founded Mac Farms Inc. in 1998. The company already sells eMoo, another carbonated milk drink. On Wednesday, in a factory with a barn-red roof and purple-and-yellow cow out front, the first batch of RPM was bottled. The Clarks combined water and powdered milk to create a slightly fizzy, mildly milky-tasting drink with the nutritional value of skim milk and 40 percent of the recommended daily amount of calcium.
Hey mom, what the hell is this stuff? It made my Fruit Loops taste like crap.
The drink was "designed to attract people who like soda," so understandably, RPM comes in three familar soft drink flavors: vanilla cappuccino, Brazilian chocolate and chocolate raspberry.
(link via Demosthenes)
...when your name is Paul Wolfowitz.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Thursday the Bush administration has been pushing for months for a new U.N. resolution to internationalize the force in Iraq, but it took the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad to change the "atmosphere in New York."
See, it's the United Nations that has come around to see things our way. Riiiiight. I guess they finally saw the wisdom in what Wolfowitz's neo-con fellow traveller Richard Perle was saying back in March:
Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony, he will take the UN down with him. Well, not the whole UN. The "good works" part will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. [...] We are left with coalitions of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a threat to a new world order, we should recognise that they are, by default, the best hope for that order, and the true alternative to the anarchy of the abject failure of the UN.
How does anybody take these clowns seriously? Of course, it was Wolfowitz himself who tried to get the CIA to investigate and undermine Hans Blix, in order that the US could get their invasion started.
But, according to the Washington Post's April 15, 2002 story, the CIA report said Blix "had conducted inspections of Iraq's declared nuclear power plants fully within the parameters he could operate as chief of the Vienna-based agency between 1981 and 1997." Wolfowitz, according to the Post, quoting a former State Department official familiar with the report, "hit the ceiling" because it failed to provide sufficient ammunition to undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons inspection program.
"The request for a CIA investigation underscored the degree of concern by Wolfowitz and his civilian colleagues in the Pentagon that new inspections – or protracted negotiations over them – could torpedo their plans for military action to remove Hussein from power," the Post reported.
Yes, the United Nations has certainly come around to see Wolfowitz's point of view.
The article stressed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who normally report only through the secretary of defense, have established an independent line to Powell in recent weeks to circumvent the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Long skeptical of the hawks' optimism about the plans for postwar Iraq, the uniformed military appears to have moved toward open revolt against Rumsfeld and chief deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary for Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. [...] It is not clear what bargaining chips the hawks have as negotiations begin over the terms of a new resolution. It appears that the world body - so disregarded and disdained by Bush and the hawks just three months ago - can name its price.
All hail the new "atmosphere" at the UN. What a dipstick.
UPDATE (10:52 am): Now that those cheese-eating chocolate makers have come around to support the unquestionable logic of American policy ("The US is facing stiff opposition at the UN Security Council to its plans for a multinational force in Iraq."), the Bush administration will probably be shelving their proposed new map of Europe, too.
The Dark Alien Overlords have driven the prolific and very funny Jeremy Puma (one of the Open Source Politics posse) to move and rename Frog 'n Blog to Fantastic Planet. You know the drill.
Over the past two days, there has been a weird rush tidal wave of search engine hits - mostly from Europe - coming into this post about the Italian winemaker Alessandro Lunardelli's line of wines bearing the likenesses of such happy campers as Hitler, Rommel, Goering, Mussolini, Tito, Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Castro, Che Guevara, and (one of these things is not like the other ones) Bob Marley.
Seemed odd, so I googlenewsed it, and it turns out that Germany is formally protesting the wine to Italy and is "seeking a change to European Union law in order to ban sale of the Hitler Wine by forbidding dissemination of racist and anti-foreigner material in all of the bloc's 15 member states." B'nai Brith isn't happy about it either.
The display of Nazi figures and symbols is illegal in Germany; in fact, in a deeply and darkly ironic side note, even sales of Mein Kampf are banned. Not so in Italy, though Lunardelli did end up in Italian court over his Mussolini wine. He escaped any sanction, though, "because the authorities said they were unconvinced he was genuinely promoting fascism."
Well, duh. Not any more than Marilyn Manson is genuinely promoting devil worship or Arnold Schwarzenegger is genuinely promoting super-robots from the future. This all strikes me as a huge clash over an utterly trivial issue, but it will be interesting to watch how the European Union handles this. As an American, I hardly get a vote in the matter, but it makes me very uncomfortable when people start trying to stamp out traces of history. And, perhaps unfairly, a little more so when it's the Germans.
UPDATE (Sept. 5, 4:20 pm): There are two more posts on this site about this story: one from July 21st when I first noticed the story, and another one from September 5th that contains a link to the Lunardelli website, where you can view all of the wine labels.
Hope that helps you find what you were looking for, and I hope further that you'll hit the "Main Page" link below (if you're arriving at an archived version of this one) and spend some time wandering through the rest of our site. Pleased to make your acquaintance...
This is funny, funny, funny.
(Bustamante's) membership (in) 'MEChA', whose acronym in Spanish means, "Mexican Ku Klux Klan," is more than a youthful indiscretion. Bustamante, which in Spanish means, "He who breaks open the skull of the White Man,"...
Via DailyKos.
California's Monterey Bay contains North America's largest and deepest submarine canyon, about the size of the Grand Canyon, with depths approaching 12,000 feet. The Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution is using an innovative new camera system and a lighted jellyfish lure to get previously impossible footage of animals and their behaviors in these lightless, watery realms.
Deep-towed nets can shred animals like jellyfish or damage captured animals to the point that their natural behaviors cannot be observed in the lab. Manned submersibles and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) can deliver humans to the depths in person or virtually to observe some animals in their natural environment. However, they typically do not allow researchers to see animals' natural behaviors because the lights, motors and electric fields such vehicles bring with them are more than enough to either scare animals away before they're ever seen or frighten them into unnatural behavior.
To get around such problems, Dr. Widder dreamed of and then, in partnership with the institution's Engineering Division, created an innovative camera system to record life in the abyss unobtrusively. Called "Eye in the Sea," the system is designed to operate on the seafloor automatically and, most importantly, unnoticed by animals. The system can detect animals nearby when they give off bioluminescent light, trigger a video camera to record the light being produced, then turn on a red light out of the animals' normal vision range to take illuminated footage. The system can also be programmed to film surrounding areas at scheduled intervals, for instance when the team places the system on the bottom along with bait to attract animals. In the past camera systems used on the seafloor have relied on bright and, for those creatures accustomed to the darkness of the depths, frightening lights.
The Eye in the Sea has been tested alone during brief deployments, and has already captured unusual interactions, such as a primitive hagfish annoying a shark. Widder now plans to take the deep-sea observation work one step further by deploying the camera system along with a simple electronic device designed to mimic the various bioluminescent light patterns given off by jellyfish known as Atolla. Various Atolla species are common in the deep sea and look something like a tie-dye splotch when their round bodies are viewed from above. The artificial jellyfish lure is a round disc about six inches across with a ring of blue LED lights around its outer edge that can be programmed to light up in patterns similar to those created by the jellyfish.
Interesting enough, but the main course of this meal is HBOI's photo gallery of bioluminescent ocean life. I've shrunk down a few of my favorites, but there are 20 thumbnail pages of higher resolution images at the site, and paging through them is pretty amazing.
(Governor) Davis has said he would sign the bill (passed this evening) into law.
The bill is scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, 2005. It would give domestic partners the ability to get child support and alimony, the right to health coverage under a partner's plan and the power to make funeral arrangements for a partner.
Other provisions would give domestic partners access to family student housing, bereavement and family-care leave and exemptions from estate and gift taxes, and in the event of a partner's death, the authority to consent to an autopsy and donate organs.
Like spouses, domestic partners would not be forced to testify against each other in a trial. They could also apply for absentee ballots on a partner's behalf.
In fact, here's what the legislation says: "Registered domestic partners shall have the same rights, protections, and benefits, and shall be subject to the same responsibilities, obligations, and duties under law, whether they derive from statutes, administrative regulations, court rules, government policies, common law, or any other provisions or sources of law, as are granted to and imposed upon spouses."
Elsewhere it reiterates: "This act shall be construed liberally in order to secure to eligible couples who register as domestic partners the full range of legal rights, protections and benefits, as well as all of the other responsibilities, obligations, and duties to each other, to their children, to third parties and to the state, as the laws of California extend to and impose upon spouses."
Domestic partners will not, however, be able to file tax returns jointly.
[...]
The legislation, by Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, also places marriage-like responsibilities on domestic partners. They would be responsible for their partner's debts, would have their income factored into their partner's eligibility for public assistance benefits, and would be required to disclose their relationships to avoid nepotism and conflicts of interest.
In spite of so much I hear, see, and read, there are glimmers of hope.
As I hope the UN, through willing member States, steps in with some heavy lifting in Iraq, I anticipate the spin. "Bush wins International Support for Operation in Iraq"; "UN Agrees to Assist in Iraq"; "International Body Finally Agrees to Help".
Not that anybody's rushing to get in there. The lads lined up for team picking in this kickball game are wishing they hadn't grown so tall over the Summer.
This whole affair has been one unmitigated disaster after another and the folks who screamed "NO" last winter - or (pause) at least, who said it was pursued and executed in the most counterproductive of manners -
were slam on target.
All the efforts of importance - our economy, our environment, our security, not to mention improving virtually any aspect of the lives of Iraqi people - have been set back incalculably and the personalities who wish us harm are so utterly stunned that our quarterback has forgetten the color of his jersey and is tossing the ball straight at them that they are speechless.
So what now? From the brewing spin about the hopefully-upcoming 'diplomatic accomplishment' in New York, our most oft-repeated potential contributors are:
Turkey - Oh, having them there is likely to reduce tensions up in Kurdish country, the realm closest to sanity in the whole place.
India - Great, the only thing better than a Crusader target is a Hindu one. Did I mention that most of al-Qaeda's rank and file are Pakistani? Recruitment is gonna go through the roof. At least maybe some will be drawn away from Southern Afghanistan.
France, Germany and Russia (it is an historic feat of epic proportions to have galvanized an alliance amongst these three. Truly astounding.) were apparently the only friends willing to talk straight with us several months ago. To put words in their mouths: you dug this sorry-assed hellhole, you get yourself out of it. If you want me to rescue you, it'll cost you; pay me ahead of time because I'm not sure I can.
The unfortunate pawns in all this? Soldiers and Reservists. Bless them. They are disproportionally the cops, first responders, firefighters, and generally folks with training in how to deal with crisis situations. Reservists learn how to dress a wound, move people to safety, and solve their way out of dangerous logistical nightmares. When we get blindsided again, how foolish will it be to have stationed them on the other side of the planet in a country that quite explicitly does not want them there?
Mr. Powell will hopefully find some gathering of benevolent, risk-taking souls game to step in and help this traumatized, fractured, lacerated patient of a country begin to heal. I hope he can. I also hope he realizes the role he played in causing this catastrophe. If he doesn't of his own enlightenment, I hope some diplomats in New York explain it to him.
UPDATE: 11:16 Sept 3:
Like I said, all the issues of importance - our economy... stupid.
The planned (budget) request - which congressional budget analysts said will be nearly double what Congress expected - reflects the deepening cost of the five-month-old U.S. occupation and serves as an acknowledgement by the administration that it vastly underestimated the cost of restoring order in Iraq and rebuilding the country's infrastructure.
Hasan Nafaa cuts to the chase. In one of the best summaries that I've read of the double-bind in which Palestinian leaders find themselves, he points out numerous intractibilities of the conflict.
Any talk about an "independent Palestinian state", although theoretically encouraged, is bound to remain ineffective unless it is linked to a clear US vision concerning the borders and legal configuration of such a state. The quarrel between Israel and the Palestinians is not about the existence of a Palestinian state, but the borders and powers that state would have. The Palestinians want a true state within known and recognised borders, with geographical continuity and the powers international law accords to states. They want a state with East Jerusalem as its capital and the 1967 lines as its borders. Sharon, meanwhile, wants to create a Palestinian state covering only 42 per cent of the 1967 areas and is geographically fragmented, surrounded by settlements in every direction. And he wants Israel to control the crossing points, borders, airspace, and even its water resources.
[...]
The US and Israel are using the roadmap as a tool to dismantle Hamas and Jihad, disregarding the possibility that its attempts could trigger a Palestinian civil war.
[...]
Israel is promising Abu Mazen a state. But first, the Palestinian prime minister will have to arrest all Hamas and Jihad members, confiscate their weapons, and eradicate every trace of their former existence. Whenever Abu Mazen asks the US for guarantees about the Palestinian state, he is told that this is something that future negotiations will take care of, and that the Palestinians should keep an open mind for the time being.
In a nutshell, Abu Mazen has been asked to start a civil war and destroy half of his people just for the sake of talks with no clear outcome.
His conclusions are neither shiny nor happy.
Subjecting Palestinian leaders to this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't armlock inspires nothing but desperation on the part of the unemployed, dispossessed, uprooted youth of the West Bank and Gaza. It's humiliating.
Hasan is a self-described pessimist; as an Egyptian PoliSci professor specializing in Palestinian affairs who wouldn't be. And his rhetoric, while not furious, will no doubt make you roll your eyes a few times. But he is not some firebrand demagogue. His recommendation of breaking off talks with the US is not to be seen in a Khomeiniesque, "Great Satan" light. It is a sign of perceiving the futility of trying to get a point across to those who refuse to listen. And there are plenty of signs that vast numbers of people throughout Palestine and the rest of the Arab world have just given up on reasoning with us.
I think they're making a dreadful mistake. But we ignore this growing frustration at our own peril. If we don't appeal (appeal, not appease, go look it up) to the younger generation of Arabs with something other than Nike and KFC then someone else will.
Perhaps our leaders - high in profile in every corner of the world - could set an example of how people from different countries can work together through international organizations instead of acting out unilaterally; govern with truth and openness and humility; and not rush to settle differences or allay fears with missiles and tanks. Oh well; maybe next year.
Via the sharp eyes of Anonymoses comes the news that Froz and I (and Anonymoses to boot) reside in the nation's best place to live.
Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill has the warmth and charm of a small southern town, while still being large enough to provide all the amenities of big-city living. Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill's scores are above average in nearly every category. The city has the second-best health score in the nation, thanks to great air quality and affordable health care. The citizens of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill are a smart bunch—91% of its 312,000 residents have graduated from high school, and nearly 19% have a four-year college degree. A healthy economy and a low cost of living cement Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill's ranking as America's Best Place to Live.
Ya' damn skippy. We rule, byatch. What they didn't mention: the nation's highest rate of top-flight college basketball per square mile, Research Triangle Park, complete strangers will look you in the eyes and smile when you pass on the street, southern manners wrapped around progressive politics, the Durham Bulls, the Cat's Cradle, and trees, trees, trees everywhere you look.
Saddest loss since my childhood here: since the closure of the Liggett-Myers plant, downtown Durham is no longer draped daily with the sickly sweet scent of curing tobacco. I miss that.
Update (7:20 pm): Oh yeah, and more kick-ass college radio than you can shake a pointed stick at:
WXYC 89.3 (where I dj'ed from '90-'92)
WNCU 90.7
WSHA 88.9
WXDU 88.7
WKNC 88.1
When you wake up tomorrow morning, the average IQ and aggregate morality of the American citizenry will have have jumped sharply.
Paul Hill, a former minister who gunned down an abortion doctor [apostropher: also murdering a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and injuring the doctor's wife], said he feels no remorse and suggested the state will be making him a martyr when he becomes the first person executed in the United States for anti-abortion violence. [...] "The sooner I am executed ... the sooner I am going to heaven," Hill said in a jailhouse interview. "I expect a great reward in heaven. I am looking forward to glory."
Hoo boy, is he in for a surprise. "Wait a minute, how did Mohammed Atta get into heav-- Oh shit."
He wants to be a martyr? Fine by me.
44 major names from the progressive end of blogland are collaborating to form Open Source Politics, which they are terming a blog, but it seems to me rather larger in scope than that term generally implies. It's an imposing lineup of talent and lots of 'em to boot, so you can't help but be excited. Big congratulations to Kevin (Cowboy Khalil) Hayden for pulling it all together. Permalinked over on the left, appropriately enough.
And those fine folks linked to us, which is high flattery indeed.
Glad to hear that. But what am I gonna do with all this duct tape?
Given the alternatives, though, that spacerock might not have been too bad.
As Owlmother points out in the comments, the showing of Alyssa Ghirardelli's choreography and Maria Rowan's fabric art is on the quite real Friday September 5, 2003 and not the ficticious Saturday September 5, 2003.
Froz Gobo apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused.
In his latest column in the Boston Globe, James Carroll finally comes out and says what everybody else is afraid to say about Iraq: We have already lost. It's time to get out as fast as possible.
Democrats and Republicans alike want to send in more US soldiers. Some voices are raised in the hope that the occupation can be more fully "internationalized," which remains unlikely while Washington retains absolute control. But those who would rush belligerent reinforcements to Iraq are making the age-old mistake.
When brutal force generates resistance, the first impulse is to increase force levels. But, as the history of conflicts like this shows, that will result only in increased resistance.
Yes, just ask the Palestinians. The disparity of power between them and the IDF is several magnitudes higher than between the Anglo-American troops and the irregular forces they face, and 35 years of ratcheting up the occupational firepower has certainly pacified that conflict.
Sooner or later, the United States must admit that it has made a terrible mistake in Iraq, and it must move quickly to undo it. That means the United States must yield not only command of the occupation force, but participation in it. The United States must renounce any claim to power or even influence over Iraq, including Iraqi oil. The United States must accept the humiliation that would surely accompany its being replaced in Iraq by the very nations it denigrated in the build-up to the war.
We have no options left except withdrawing. The Bush and Blair administrations bet the farm on the ultimate inside straight - that we could knock out the leadership of Iraq, preserve the physical and societal infrastructure, hand the reins over to better governors, and POOF! magically transform the region. Not only did they not pull the card they needed, everybody else at the table knows they have been dealing from the bottom of the deck throughout the game.
The bloodshed will continue (and increase) as long as we are there. We haven't the faintest idea how to stop it. Whatever good intentions we had have been buried in chaos. A civil war is brewing and the bombing in Najaf is just the first shot across the bow. We will be blamed if we stay and blamed if we go, so let's cut our losses and stop crippling and killing our own young men and women - and theirs. They are going to do a swell job of it all by themselves. What the rest of the world decides to do about this situation is their decision. We no longer retain any legitimacy in the matter. If our goal was to combat terrorism, we couldn't have failed more spectacularly. That was never a battle that was going to be won by tank columns anyhow; you fight that with coordinated intelligence and police.
Where will this leave Iraq? Unfortunately it leaves it as New Afghanistan. Terror Central. Unacceptable, you say? I would agree, if I thought we had any choice about accepting it. We don't. It is a fait accompli, it is our fault, and we don't have the ability to right the situation. All we can do is stand there amidst the wreckage and take RPG fire.
I'm not willing to have a limb amputated or my face disfigured or die for this debacle. If you aren't willing to do it either, then we have no business asking our soldiers to do so. Clearly, our troop levels are insufficient for maintaining order, and we don't have the soldiers to spare to get to that level. Piddling contributions from Eastern Europe aren't the answer. So, let's re-institute the draft, with no exemptions, period. Then let's see how much stomach the American public has for this occupation.
You know the answer.
A little bit of local culture here. If you’re in the Triangle area (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) of North Carolina this Saturday evening Friday evening (see "Correction") this show is a must see. (Scroll down to the second listing)
Choreographer Alyssa Ghirardelli of Choreo Collective brings her work, Surface Tension together with fiber artist, Maria Rowan's Surfacing: Dream Series for one evening at WPA. Ghirardelli and Rowan created these works separately and found amazing connections in their visions. Themes of flow, texture, movement, and layers in emerging reality and submerged nonreality are explored and reflected individually and in the dialogue between their works.
Both of these artists got criminally more than the fair share of talent when it was doled out. Your imagination will bristle. Your preconceptions about the definition of 'medium' and role of 'artist' will be questioned.
I found this small gallery of paintings by Japanese artist Masaru Shichinohe, who seems to have an insatiable interest in rabbits, big-eyed children, and red balls. There is definitely a distinct theme going on here, but I'm completely at sea as to what that theme is, exactly. In googling about for more information on the artist, I found a link to the artist's blog, which is, unsurprisingly, entirely in Japanese and hence utterly incomprehensible to yours truly. It is, however, full of pictures.
(Gallery link via ArtKrush, blog link via Superfluous Man)
This Atlanta Journal-Constitution headline kills me: Ingesting plants risky, CDC warns.
This message brought to you by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Beef Council. Of course, they were speaking about certain specific plants, particularly a relative of jimson weed called a moonflower that apparently packs an unexpectedly mighty wallop.
The new approach to flower power landed 14 Ohio teens in an emergency room last fall after they ate seeds or drank tea from the seeds of the plant, which blooms at dusk. The teens had dilated pupils, a rapid heart rate, hallucinations and an inability to urinate. [apostropher: inability to urinate?] They had no long-term effects.
In the past four years, there have been 4,240 reports of poisonings nationwide from a group of toxic plants including the moonflower, said Dr. Martin Belson, a CDC medical toxicologist. That included seven deaths. About 200 of the national total were in Georgia, where officials couldn't say if any involved moonflowers.
Roughly two-thirds of the cases nationwide are likely from intentional ingestion of the plants among teens, Belson said. Many of the incidents involve jimson weed, another plant in the toxic group, which has been known for several years to be abused. At least 68 of the reports were from moonflower, only recently recognized as a recreational substance.
I'll bet those 68 folks don't recognize it as "recreational" any longer. Stick to the classics, kids - they've had a lot more beta testing.
I’ve fallen for three women in my life because they composted. Well, to be truthful, I fell for them for a whole host of reasons, an important one of which was their interest in natural gardening. But anyone who has mentioned composting, this most sacred of rites, either in deliberate explanation or in casual passing, has immediately piqued my interests in the depths of their experience, theories and praxis. Composters are weird like that; an odd cult with a shared bond than runs as deep as the thickest loam.
What more noble a personal effort is there to rectify a host of problems to which every person, to a special degree ones in this most consumer-oriented of societies, is a guilty party? It is at once the smallest of gestures and the grandest of undertakings. It is at once the religion and the science. It is at once the doing and the undoing.
One of my favorite pearls of wisdom – I forget which wise old fart told it to me – is that the best gardener doesn’t grow healthy plants, rather he grows healthy soil and good soil can’t help but produce bounty. In my limited experience I’ve only begun to taste this realization; but so far it seems right on. Dark chocolate in color with just as sweet a bouquet, slightly moist even if it either has or hasn’t rained for a week straight, this humus is. It is loose enough to sift gently through your fingers yet clench that fist and the resulting clump will survive a 3 foot toss landing back into your hand virtually intact. It is the flesh of the Earth. And, of course, every spadeful is animated by hundreds of wriggling, writhing earthworms, Gen. Lumbricus and Helodrilus.
Charles Darwin once said "It may be doubted whether there are many other creatures which have played so important a part in the history of the world."
So you can imagine I was pretty shocked when I read this.
The idea of earthworms as ecological enemy seems as foreign as the earthworms themselves. But because glaciers eliminated earthworms from vast reaches of North America thousands of years ago, forests across the northern part of the continent have evolved without earthworms. “In agricultural settings, in gardens, everything that our grandmothers told us is true: They are good for the soil, they aerate the soil, they turn over organic matter, they break down and loosen the soil, they allow moisture,” said Dennis Burton, director of land restoration at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philadelphia.
“But when you put them into a forest situation, that’s where the problems begin.” That’s because in a forest, earthworms quickly devour the leaf litter and other surface material that form an integral part of the ecosystem. In doing so, the earthworms reduce acidity and boost the nutrients available in the soil. In a garden, that’s great; but most of the plant species in northern forests have evolved to do well in the low-nutrient, high-acid soils — conditions that had also prevented weeds and other invasive species from gaining a foothold.
Maerz also found that the presence of earthworms often signaled a sharp decline in salamander populations. By eating the leaf litter, worms destroy the habitat that housed tiny insects and arthropods that salamanders fed on. “We think that the earthworms are affecting the (food) chain below them,” Maerz said. “And there are lots of things, at least historically, that would have fed on salamanders — snakes, shrews, thrushes, screech owls, everything.”
Here it is graphically. Continue also to the links on both the “WITH-“ and “WITHOUT earthworms” pages.
And to boot, this from Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources:
What about worms in compost piles?
Non-native “red wiggler” earthworms are sold and shipped all over the country for home compost piles and vermicomposting (worm composting) operations. Thus far, they are not known to survive Minnesota winters. However, if they or other species are able to survive winter and escape from compost piles they could further harm native forests. If you have a compost pile in a forested area, do not introduce additional non-native earthworms. If you are concerned about spreading non-native worms with your compost, you can kill worms and their eggs by freezing the compost for at least 1 week.
Egads. What next? Smiling rots your teeth?
The Kansas City Star's David Goldstein notes that despite all Bush's military posturing, plenty of military folks - ones that don't just pretend to be in it - are noticing a distinct disconnect between his mouth and where he puts his money.
A sign of political trouble for the president surfaced at a breakfast meeting in July at an unlikely place: the Capitol Hill headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Present were groups representing the leading veterans organizations. Their members might be viewed as likely Bush backers in 2004, given that troops are under fire overseas and given the traditional loyalty former servicemen and servicewomen show the commander in chief. But angry over health care and other issues, the veterans told a White House official that it will take more than patriotic appeals to win the support of their combined membership of about 5 million.
Veterans are angry. And they're ready to take their frustrations out on the Washington politicians at the ballot box. They say the praise for troops by the president, other top administration officials and Republican congressional leaders is "ringing hollow" because they have broken promises to veterans and active-duty soldiers about benefits and services.
[...]
"I believe that, like his father, there is a strong possibility that (President Bush) could very easily lose the support of veterans," said Richard Schneider, director of veterans affairs for the Non Commissioned Officers Association. "It's not a foregone conclusion that this president is going to be re-elected. Quite the contrary. People are waiting. I think there is going to be an accountability from the veterans, not only for themselves, but for these veterans who are going to be coming out of Iraq."
Like these guys, for example.
U.S. battlefield casualties in Iraq are increasing dramatically [...], with almost 10 American troops a day now being officially declared "wounded in action." The number of those wounded in action, which totals 1,124 since the war began in March, has grown so large, and attacks have become so commonplace, that U.S. Central Command usually issues press releases listing injuries only when the attacks kill one or more troops. The result is that many injuries go unreported.
[...]
With no fanfare and almost no public notice, giant C-17 transport jets arrive virtually every night at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, on medical evacuation missions. Since the war began, more than 6,000 service members have been flown back to the United States. The number includes the 1,124 wounded in action, 301 who received non-hostile injuries in vehicle accidents and other mishaps, and thousands who became physically or mentally ill.
[...]
Kiley said rocket-propelled grenades and mines can wound multiple troops at a time and cause "the kind of amputating damage that you don't necessarily see with a bullet wound to the arm or leg." The result has been large numbers of troops coming back to Walter Reed and National Naval Medical with serious blast wounds and arms and legs that have been amputated, either in Iraq or at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where virtually all battlefield casualties are treated and stabilized.
"A few of us started volunteering [at Walter Reed] as amputees in 1991, and this is the most we've seen ever," said Jim Mayer, a double amputee from the Vietnam War who works at the Veterans Administration. "I've never seen anything like this."
In the San Francisco Chronicle today:
Howard Dean has zero experience in international affairs," said Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry on NBC's "Meet the Press." "The presidency is not the place for on-the-job training in this new security world," he said.
As Bubba used to say: You've given me 2 things to comment on there; I'll answer the second part first and the first part second. They were usually dazzled at this point. My guess is I won't have quite the same effect.
Mind you I'm not a committed Dean man by any stretch of the imagination, but...
1. "The Presidency is not...on-the-job training..." The hell it isn't. It's thrown every man I've ever seen get sucked into it for a loop and given them grey hairs within 12 months. Everyone that is, except the Gipper and I think he was made out of wax and polyeurethane. The Presidency is by its very stature and nature "on-the-job training."
2. "Howard Dean has zero experience in international affairs". Well then, Mr. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, how in the hell even after all your high-level security briefings and access to sensitive information regarding international and military affairs did he manage to come to the not-so-difficult-to-reach conclusion that invading Iraq was a stupid idea and you didn't if he hadn't at least the mind for international affairs that you do?
Also from the same article:
White House hopeful Joe Lieberman also had Dean in the political crosshairs. The Connecticut senator said Dean is not the candidate to take on President Bush: "I worry that he cannot win."
"I worry that he cannot win."?!? Like Joe Lieberman can get elected President. He's got a less inspiring presence on TV than the leftover tofu I ate for lunch today. And I saw that tofu live.
I will barely refrain from pledging to eat one of my shoelaces if Joe Lieberman is elected President of the United States. But that is because the Presidential race is too unpredictable. Dubya may waltz into his second term. He may, conversely, be so weak that $200M couldn't buy him 100 electoral votes, and Anyone(D) could beat him. But Joe Lieberman loses more in the electability department by being so incapable of firing up folks' imagination than Howard Dean loses by being pugnacious.
UPDATE MON 9AM: Note to self: Don't offer political insight to the world late at night when you're cranky and you've had a few. Mr. Senate Foreign Relations Committee is an American Hero and perhaps I should give his intellecual honesty (with himself) and ability to evolve an opinion more credit. It's certainly superior to the black and white Bush sees the world through which is utterly incapable of grasping current developments in Iraq with any degree of accuracy.
But still, Dean called this one right before he did.
Senator Lieberman has impeccable credentials and has done more for progressive causes than I ever will. There. He's still not going to get elected.
