unraveling
29.Jun.04
Michael
Ignatieff's piece in this weeks' NY Times Magazine is
powerful. This paragraph feels like a lightning strike just outside the
window:
"Again, you will say: Let's not exaggerate. Let's not lose our nerve
here. But no other democracy is so exposed by these painful moral
juxtapositions, because no other nation has made a civil religion of its
self-belief. The abolition of cruel and unusual punishment was a
founding premise of that civil religion. This was how the fledgling
republic distinguished itself from the cruel tyrannies of Europe. From
this sense of exceptionalism grew an exceptional sense of mission.
President Reagan's funeral was a high Mass of rededication to that
eternal mission. The question is whether these reaffirmations still
inspire Americans to be better than they actually are, or whether the
nation's rhetoric has degenerated into a ritual concealment of what the
country has actually become."
I like the younger Ron Reagan even more after reading
Deborah Solomon's pithy interview of him.
Someone noticed that
the word
"evil" was missing from George Bush's May 24th speech. Not
that the problem has been solved, to be certain, but it provided an
opportunity to consider the history and roots of this
"the fastest growing noun/adjective combination in the political
vocabulary."
And with the success of Moore's film, the
battle for that axis of Good and Evil has been joined.
David Hardy and Jason Clarke are following Al Franken's lead in the
insulting-funny book title genre, offering us "Michael Moore is a Big
Fat Stupid White Male," and the chilling indictment that "he creates a
false impression without ever uttering a word that is untrue."
Makes me think of
that false impression about a link between Iraq and 9/11 all over
again.
The
latest NY Times / CBS News poll results make it look like the
country is catching up to my point of view.
Not quite 80% of respondents think President Bush is hiding something
(59%) or mostly lying (20%) in his statements on the war in Iraq.
Almost half (47%) think the threat of terrorism against the US has been
increased because of the war in Iraq and more than half think we're
creating terrorists.
"Over the past 25 years, according to pollsters, presidents with job
approval ratings below 50 percent in the spring of election years have
generally gone on to lose. Mr. Bush's father had a 34 percent job
approval rating at this time in 1992." It's summer now, and Bush the
Younger is at 42%.
Speaking of the end of irony, can you imagine Ari Fleichser's brother,
appointed as top aide for for private sector development in Iraq,
saying this? "The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching
them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and
built-in review." Paul Krugman wonders
Who Lost
Iraq?
Maybe it's just the grass-is-greener phenomenon (or better marketing?),
but news about
Apple's next O/S
revision seems more interesting to me than what comes out of
Redmond. Some years after Google showed us all that a useful search
function is not only possible, but also essential, we might actually be
able to search our local heaps of data. Thank goodness.
Like so many other bits of technology, it was working long before it was
popular; I had Altavista Discovery running on my work PC for some
years after
its
rollout in 1998. The free software
went
unavailable from the source some time ago (as Altavista changed
hands and business models), but it seems to live on
in various
foreign languages. (OTOH, since they're all Greek to me, those search
hits could be just reminiscing.)
Altavista's current web presence
makes them look like a desperate Google camp-follower, no visible
remnant of what could have been their claim to fame if they had figured
out how to lead, instead.
The latest security response plan is simple, and devastating:
chuck Internet Explorer, in favor of a more secure (and/or less
popular) browser. Microsoft has a lot of inertia to fall back on, as
most of their users aren't up to changing browsers. That won't last
forever, though.
I got to watch much of the match between Federer and Karlovic yesterday
(thanks to NBC's generous broadcast coverage) and appreciated the beauty
of Federer's game.
Christopher Clarey's commentary in the NY Times:
"I was looking forward to this match with Karlovic, because
there's been so much talk about his serve," said Federer, sounding more
like a birdwatcher in search of the rare woodpecker than a defending
champion in danger.
Further down, we read what might explain some of that confidence:
Federer has yet to lose a set or his serve at Wimbledon this
year.
28.Jun.04
Another Sunday gone by, giving another
Frank Rich
column to savor.
"(John Ashcroft's) press conferences, whether to showcase his
latest, implicitly single-handed victory in the war on terror or to
predict the apocalypse he wants to make certain we won't blame him for,
are now as ubiquitous as spinoffs of C.S.I. and Law &
Order. While F.D.R. once told Americans that we have nothing to fear
but fear itself, Mr. Ashcroft is delighted to play the part of Fear
Itself, an assignment in which he lets his imagination run riot."
Oh, and
Fahrenheit 9/11 set a box office record over the weekend. We
couldn't get tickets in and amongst our
other events.
David Brooks is
so far
beside himself about Moore's ascendency that he couldn't assemble a
coherent column, just a collection of anecdotes about what a nihilist
and America-basher Moore is. I don't suppose his criticism of Moore's
comparing Iraqi resistance to our Minutemen benefited from the
historical irony of Ronald Reagan tapping that
rich vein.
Barbie's lost her edge against satire, too, thanks to the ruling
from Judge Ronald Lew of the Federal District Court in L.A.
So much for the moral high ground, as
Dick lets slip his true feelings toward Senator Patrick Leahy. Or
maybe it was just a friendly "go fuck yourself" on the Senate
floor? It does seem to characterize the contempt the current
administration has for its opposition. Certainly the rabid section of
their gallery has no problem with Dick telling off someone they all
agree is an
annoying little twerp. Bully, Dick.
If George and Dick would both wear sunglasses and tell us about
their mission from God we could turn this into a comedy, maybe.
Is Dan Akroyd still available for the documentary?
26.Jun.04
The strike and counterstrike of email and web ads and firing up the
believers is going to be the hallmark of this presidential campaign.
The twists in the follow-up email from GeorgeWBush.com are a bit hard to
follow on Saturday morning after a bad's night sleep and before a whole
cup of coffee. Kerry's campaign denounced the use of the Bush-Cheney
'04 ads (the email over Ken Mehlman's signature tells me) and said "The
use of Adolf Hitler by any campaign, politician or party is simply
wrong." Mehlman responds: "We agree. These ads, like much of the
hate-filled, angry rhetoric of Kerry's coalition of the Wild-eyed, are
disgusting."
The bulleted points that follow belabor "you said Hitler" ad nauseum,
and oh-so-carefully avoiding any explanation of context. Believers
don't care about context. Opponents can complain, but the subtlety of
George Soros' personal experience of the Nazis in Hungary and what he
said about it does not have the same simple power of the rhetorical
question, "Why has John Kerry not denounced billionaire and Democrat
Party donor George Soros...?"
The punch lines: "We created this web video to show the depths to which
these Kerry supporters will sink to win in November. Is this the
Democratic Party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who reassured his
countrymen we have nothing to fear but fear itself? No. This is John
Kerry's Coalition of the Wild-eyed, who have nothing to offer but
fear-mongering."
Given the George "I am a war president" Bush's and his administration's
use of orchestrated media releases and color-coded alerts to take the
country to a real war, a pre-pre-emptive war, we're supposed to be
disgusted by the opposition's fear of what's going on? Yeah, that's the
plan: don't worry, be happy, safe, steady and secure. Bush is in the
House!
25.Jun.04
The
latest I, Cringely column has to do with packet switching,
its predecessor (circuit switching), $100 billion gambles, data
compression and doing away with blindness: "Out of Sight, Out of
Mind."
The technology of political ads on the web seems best positioned
for preaching to the choir. The latest offering from
georgewbush.com opened my eyes
with amazement that they'd use some of the most stinging indictments
against their own team in an ad, and then it made me laugh out loud when
it got to the strains of happy music in the last seconds, with "the
message": It's a time for optimism, steady leadership, and progress.
It feels like the journey through the underworld and into the sweetness
and light of a new day in heaven. Keep on the sunny side, friends.
Look how calm and collected our president is. Keep saying your prayers
and everything will be just fine.
The "coalition of the wild eyed" includes Al Gore's famous speech
("how DARE they drag the good name of The United States of America
thruogh Saddam Hussein's torture prison"), the Nazi ad that moveon.org
long ago repudiated, Howard Dean ("I want my country back"), Michael
Moore (good luck beating him at the video game guys), Richard Gephardt
("this president is a miserable failure"), and Kerry himself.
For lighter fare, consider the Featured Posts on the official blog:
Morning Reads: Kerry Struggles Not to Be Pessimistic; Poll: Bush Has the
Highest Number of Positive Supporters in Recent History, Kerry the
Lowest; and
Mrs. Bush's Oatmeal-Chocolate Chunk Cookies. (I had to include the
link for that last one; otherwise you might think I was making it
up.)
Apparently the Terrorist Threat Integration Center keeps on the sunny
side, too: DepSecState Armitage said they provided "clear evidence that
we are prevailing in the fight," when in actuality, the number of
significant terrorist attacks reached a 20-year peak in 2003.
Paul
Krugman wonders "was the report's squishy math politically
motivated?" and answers his own question: "Well, the Bush administration
has cooked the books in many areas, including budget projections, tax
policy, environmental policy and stem cell research. Why wouldn't it do
the same on terrorism?"
It's a time for optimism, steady leadership, and progress.
From the venue for next year's international conference on information
technology: "When President Ben Ali organized a referendum in 2002 to
alter the Constitution to lift the limit on presidential terms, Mr.
Yahyaoui organized a referendum, too, asking visitors to his Web site to
choose whether Tunisia was a republic, a monarchy, a prison, a zoo or
none of the above. The government voted by jailing Mr. Yahyaoui for
nearly 18 months."
Which was immediately followed by this in
The New York Times story: "The extent of the surveillance can be
baffling. When a Western diplomat complained to his service provider
that his e-mail had failed for a few days and he wanted back messages,
he received every message from the preceding two years."
24.Jun.04
When we were in Palo Alto a couple years back, we sang in the choir with
George Bunn, among others. His cheerful, friendly, and unassuming
nature revealed his rather remarkable career in relatively small and
understated ways. It was a delight to read Lisa Trei's article from the
Stanford News Service,
"At 79, arms-control maven still working for a safer world," and to
see his smiling face again. Consider this:
"The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates that 60 to 70
nations today possess the capability to build nuclear weapons but do not
do so because of their commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty."
(my emphasis) Thomas Graham Jr., who has been general counsel and then a
special arms control ambassador for the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency, notes: "The NPT converted what had been an act of national
pride—the acquisition of nuclear weapons—into an act
considered contrary to practices of the civilized world." If only we
were more civilized...
If I were close to L.A., I think I'd drive over to Peterson Automotive
Museum and check out the
French
Curves exhibit: The Automobile As Sculpture. We've got 'till
January 23rd to get there.
Ok, I got this joke from
another story on the Stanford News Service, whose author got it from
mathematician Persi Diaconis, a high school dropout and Harvard Ph.D.
I think I can tell it better than Esther Landhuis did, though:
Question: How do you spot an extraverted mathematician?
Answer: he looks at your feet.
I just thought of a dilemma, when composing a reply to a request
from someone paying for my services: I can't really say "I need to get
off my butt and do some work on that," since computer-aided symbol
manipulation typically requires me to sit down. "I need to get on my
butt and do some work on that" just doesn't sound right.
23.Jun.04
I found out that another one of my windsurfing buddies is an
M.D. this morning (that makes two), when I finally jumped in the lake
for my first time out in my sailing season.
("The" sailing season never ended if you count snow-kiting; "first on
the water" happened in February!) He's having an open house at
his new clinic, Pain Care Boise
today.
22.Jun.04
Waaaayyyy down at the end of
the story as told by
the American International Automobile Dealers (or closer to the
middle, in
some
versions), we read that in spite of stumping for
Spokane's congressman and Senate candidate George Nethercutt, raising a
cool three-quarters of a $mil, because he made a "nonpolitical" stop at
Fort Lewis (over on the other side of Washington state), "many of the
expenses for his trip to Washington state will be paid by
taxpayers."
The Georges thank you for your support, taxpayers!
The local university team has sported a Denver Broncos wannabe set of
colors (the old colors? smurf blue and blare orange) and mascot for many
years but now that
the
arena management has inked a deal with Taco Bell, it seems pretty
obvious that the new mascot must be... the chihuahua!
¡Vamonos!
There are two kinds of people in the world, Costco members and everyone
else. We crossed over into the first camp yesterday, at a friend's
recommendation and tip about a $20 off per tire deal. (After paying the
membership fee, it worked out to $8.75/tire, and who knows if their
$70/tire price was jacked up... I see a MSRP of $48 on
one site, but that's probably not including $10 worth of
installation.)
In my experience, Costco people have a need to identify themselves (see
here?), and to tout how much they "saved" on their most recent bulk
purchase. Now having covered that, I think the business model and
cultural divide is a more interesting story to tell. My friend said he
liked the company, for its CEO's unwillingness to jerk people around to
please Wall Street, and his humane treatment of his employees. In the
couple visits I've made over the years, tagging along with members, I
always thought the place was a little creepy, but Costco had the tires I
needed in stock so I took the plunge.
First up, the membership application. I had to supply my date of birth,
which I don't much care to do. My employer? Don't have one. Are you
self-employed? Yeah, that's it. Do you want a business membership?
Uh, no, why would I? Business name? No business name, it's just me.
Is there a problem? "Well I'm just trying to qualify you. Are you a
member of a credit union?" Yeah, that gets me in. I said hey, my
money's as green as the next guy's, isn't that good enough? "I'm just
doing my job."
They didn't ask for my SSN, so we didn't have that scene, but they did
want my driver's license number. Asterisk: this is optional, only if
you want to pay by check. Ok, so I'll skip that. Oh, what's this, they
don't take Visa/MC? Just Cash/Check/AmEx. (AmEx?!) I was worried
about having to drive home and back on my spare, but I learned I could
pay with a debit card, same as "cash." Guess I can live with that
(but is there a security camera trained on the keypad where I have to
punch in my PIN? Call me paranoid...)
A different clerk finished me off, as the first guy was now on the
phone. "I just need a quick look at your driver's license..." What, so
you can enter in the number that I didn't put down on the application
ON PURPOSE, and because it was OPTIONAL? "Yeah, that's right. I could
put a HOLD on here so that you can't pay by check if you like." I let
it pass, with increasing annoyance, said "Strike two" to deaf ears.
I had to have my picture taken, that's creepy too. The reproduction
quality of the tiny black-and-white makes a driver's license picture
look like a professional portrait, not sure why they set the bar so low
on that.
As I sat outside reading, waiting for my installation, I appreciated the
architect's inclusion of seating at the base of the walls, and was
amazed at the steady rattle of shopping carts and flatbed carts being
collected from the parking lot and wheeled back into the store. It was
noisy and annoying for one thing, but did the one-by-one exiting
customers really equal this wholesale inward flow? It didn't seem
possible. Maybe they let them build up over the morning and then send
out the troops to reel them in during the afternoon.
I thought about what fun it would be to bring a videocamera and record
the stream of consumers and their bulk-full carts, and imagined the store
manager coming out and kicking me off the premises, citing some fine
print of my membership agreement.
On the way home, I
heard on
NPR that
Larry Hiibel lost his case before the Supremes: when the cops ask
for your ID, you have to give it up. Nevada State Public Defender
Steven McGuire said, "A Nevada cowboy courageously fought for his right
to be left alone, but lost." Sorta makes us all pine for the Old West,
doesn't it? Ironically, Hiibel is no longer likely to be anonymous
anywhere near his ranch, anytime soon. And as far as his right to be
left alone, avoiding fisticuffs with family members might help with
that. Just a suggestion.
If you want to see what other citizens think,
slashdot has more than 1,000 posts on the subject. The
Las Vegas Review-Journal takes the high dudgeon route, deriding this
next step in the "progressive demolition of the once proud right of
Americans to stand silent when braced by government agents."
21.Jun.04
Get ready to be searched and show your ID whenever you use public
transit now. As if random bag searching could actually stop a
terrorist? The reasoning is that it's better to light a candle than to
curse the darkness, I suppose, but the MBTA probably hasn't made a
serious consideration of the statistics. How many people ride Boston's
transit in a week? Two million? If the searches are truly random, and
not based on some sort of probably cause (he's got dark skin and a
turban, she's got a parcel that looks like a bomb), the chances of
catching a one-in-a-million terrorist with any sampling rate short of
what would shut the system down are essentially zero.
Will it make MBTA customers feel more secure to know that potential
terrorists (and they) are subject to random search, even though it
doesn't make a significant change in actual security? Will terrorists
be intimidated and go to some other transit authority to do their
business? The 9-11 perps flew out of Boston, so maybe the city is
focused on not having the next blot on their record, at
least.
Expect to hear one of the arguments typically given by proponents of
pre-employment drug testing very soon: since everyone else is (or will
soon be) doing this testing, if we don't test, then all the bad
guys will come to our neighborhood.
Solstice
...coming right up, 18:57 MDT
We were out in the weather yesterday evening, for a remarkable
show. Cumulus stacked up into cumulonimbus over SE Oregon and
SW Idaho through the afternoon, and after introductory sprinkles, a big
gust of wind that seasoned our dinner and drinks with rhyolite dust.
Fortunately, the steel pole-supported tent didn't blow over on our
heads, and the worst of it passed pretty quickly. A double rainbow
arched over the North and Middle Forks of the Owyhee as we listened to
after-dinner speakers, and slanting light played in and out of the
dissipating clouds as day slipped to night. By dusk, the clouds had
cleared up enough to reveal the first sliver of the moon, ready to wax
into summer, and we watched it set over the canyon rim, checking the
spotting 'scope for craters revealed at the terminator, as the
earthshine stood out against the darkening sky. Once the stars and
planets came out, we found 4 moons around Jupiter as well.
I discovered that I could take a pretty good picture of a crescent moon
by turning my
camera's exposure compensation down (darker) a couple notches.
I set the ISO up to 400, but that's probably not such a good idea for
nighttime shooting as it turns up the noise. (I hadn't read the review
before today!) I framed the shot with the LCD screen, with the camera
sitting on top of the car, used all of the zoom, to 300mm (35mm
equivalent). The exposure was several seconds, not sure how long I can
go with that, either, but enough to get a minimal crescent moon!
The trailer for Fahrenheit 9-11
has a snippet of Bush looking quite snazzy and comfortable in white tie,
joking with (or at?) people who paid a lot to be in his presence: "This
is an impressive crowd: the haves and the have mores. Some people call
you the elite; I call you my base." In Arabic, that's "al
Qaeda," by the way. That should make for an interesting translation
problem.
Speaking of which, the use of the "proof by repeated assertion"
rhetorical device plumbed new depths this week, after the 9-11
Commission reported no link between ObL and Saddam. We knew that
(didn't we?), but the Commission provided official confirmation,
which was then "refuted" by Bush saying, "the reason I keep insisting
that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda is
because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."
Their relationship was... they were neighbors? had common ancestors?
all lived in the Middle East?
The two were certainly neighbors in most every press release for the War
on Terror, as the administration made sure that they were linked in the
mind of John Q. Public, Fox News personnel and everyone else who's only
paying half attention to the news (or paying attention to half the
news). Bush's claim that "there was a relationship" also takes
advantage of a pettifogging absence of qualifiers. Was it a
meaningful relationship, and does it have any pertinence to
threats to the US past, present or future? Well, he didn't say that.
No doubt some assistant undersecretary's legal counsel has written a
memorandum detailing the meaning of "relationship" for Presidential
speech background.
(The 9-11 Commission responded by reiterating their position -- no
evidence of a collaborative relationship -- and noting that their
position didn't differ with the administration's. That qualifier
"collaborative" is the difference, of course.)
15.Jun.04
Frank Rich writes about drama for The New York Times, sort of.
Politics is dramatic, after all, and he finds fascinating ways to
knit the two subjects togther. His take on last week's passing,
"First
Reagan, Now His Stunt Double" is another in a long line of
first-rate columns.
"Reagan's body was barely cold when Ed Gillespie, the Republican
chairman, said: ''The parallels are there. I don't know how you miss
them.'' Yes, the parallels are there -- hammered in by Mr. Bush's
packagers so we can never miss them. But Karl Rove and company may have
overplayed their hand. The orgiastic celebration of Reagan's presidency
over the past week, an upbeat Hollywood epic that has glided past
Iran-contra, Bitburg and the retreat from Lebanon with impressive ease,
has brought into clear focus the size of the gap between the two men. To
say that difference in stature is merely a function of an actor's
practiced skill at performance is both to understate the character of
Ronald Reagan and to impugn the art of acting."
The classic parental injunction against pop music of the day -- "turn
that garbage down!" -- takes on new meaning as companies such as
Overpeer
and MediaDefender flood peer-to-peer networks with noise,
designed to frustrate those seeking to pirate music. As one of the
"older set," the obvious question that comes to mind is "how can you
tell the file is bad?"
Krugman:
"John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history."
I read about
Ashcroft's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week
before I saw some video excerpts. The latter brought the somewhat
dry "contempt of Congress" term of art to life. The ill will between
the parties was palpable. Biden's reminder that Aschroft used to be
a member of Congress could have been a friendly bit of banter, but it
fell cold and rattled on the desk. That was about the time Ashcroft
turned around to get his lawyer's opinion before answering the question
from the committee chair (Republican Orrin Hatch) -- this was supposed
to be a softball, I think -- "is the memo classified?"
Or how about this exchange:
SEN. LEAHY: Does that mean because you don't know, or you don't want to
answer? I don't understand.
ATTN. GEN. ASHCROFT: The answer to that question is yes.
Ashcroft wouldn't answer questions, and he wouldn't say
why he wouldn't answer. What explanation there was sounded a lot
like "executive privilege," but the latest dodge is to not call it that,
so that legal limitations (I guess?) don't kick in. Maybe he could take
the 5th.
Our "Free Press" isn't perfect, but it does have some power of
oversight. What Ashcroft is trying to hide has been
excerpted on the FindLaw site, via The Wall Street Journal.
David Brooks is making a career out of stereotyping affinity groups,
wringing his hands over the polarization in our society even as he throws
fuel on the fire for his columns, books and talking head spots.
His
latest offering makes it all clear:
"Democratic administrations tend to value self-expression over
self-discipline. Democratic candidates -- from Clinton to Kerry -- often
run late." "Republican administrations tend to be tightly organized and
calm, in a corporate sort of way, and place a higher value on loyalty
and formality."
Phoebe, Titan, Iapetus, Enceladus, Mimas, Tethys, Hyperion, Dione, Rhea,
Prometheus
and 22 others: the moons of Saturn, about to get visited up close and
personal by
Cassini, after its
7-year journey from Earth. We could have a half million pictures to
look through if all goes well, and awesome images are already rolling
in. (The photo excerpt here is linked to the source page for the
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute image. Its scale is 82 miles per
pixel.)
CICLOPS (Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations) has
a bloggish journal
(and lots more) that gives a taste of the explorers' excitement.
The flight of Cassini has coincided with a truce in ethics charges in
the House of Representatives, although I doubt there's a connection.
Now the gloves are coming off, starting with
an ethics complaint against Tom DeLay, an oil-patch politician if
ever there was one.
"A DeLay ally, Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.), said Republicans ''are
going to have to respond in kind'' by filing ethics charges against key
Democrats. From now on, he said in an interview, it's a matter of ''you
kill my dog, I'll kill your cat.''"
If your business is humanizing technology in a culture with a short
attention span, what better medium than haiku?
Tinywords.com has a
convenient summary of their business plan... in 17 syllables.
Dylan Tweney reports
bad news about
Quicken, not long after they sent me their own bad news. I'd been
using their portfolio tracking service with daily email updates, and they
informed me that since I hadn't bought anything recently enough, they
were cutting me off. (Or at least handing me off, to Yahoo,
which is apparently more willing and/or able to sell advertising
piggybacked on electronic services.) We still use Quicken98, on
Windows95; it's not as clean and simple as the previous version we had,
but it has a few more features, and works. There are a few more it
needs, but it sounds like they come with unwanted baggage, with each new
version "more complicated, more unstable, and slower than the version
before." Aside from plain old tight-fistedness, the requirement to
get a new O/S has also kept me from getting a new version.
Here's a way to get yourself a little piece of heaven on earth:
Accept Jesus Christ as Your Personal Savior Before January 1, 2005 and
Receive a Free Wireless Phone, compliments of AT&T and the
Landover Baptist Church.
14.Jun.04
If the Supreme Court had a sense of humor, or timing, we might suspect
that their ruling on the Pledge of Allegiance came out on Flag Day,
on purpose.
Their decision seems better suited to illustrate that the law is an
ass. They were asked to rule on the Consititutionality of the Cold War
insertion of "under God," giving us a combination pledge and National
Prayer, and while they offered some opinions on the side, the actual
ruling was that the girl's father didn't have standing to bring the
legal challenge. Brilliant, eh?
How about this to kick off your summer:
the first private enterprise expedition out of the atmosphere?
Cruising altitude just about 10x your typical airliner, at 100km (62
miles). After getting dropped off at 50,000 feet, and an 80 second
burn for a three to four G vertical climb, the "cruise" is 3 minutes of
weightlessness out where the sky turns black.
12.Jun.04
It's mourning in America.
Thank goodness this week-long national trauma (or was it two?!) has
concluded and we can all stand down. I confess that I did watch a few
bits of the proceedings while channel surfing. It was hard to miss,
covering nearly half of the channels that we get with our "Lifeline"
cable service. Much of it seemed majestic, regal even, solemn,
beautiful, bathetic. We are desperate for something to unite us, I
think, in these moments of our often self-induced trauma. My favorite
part of what I saw was Patti Davis telling the story of her goldfish's
funeral, against the backdrop of the golden rolling hills of California.
(I was a little embarassed for those assembled when applause awkwardly
smattered out of the group after she'd spoke, though.) For those who
loved him, Reagan left much to celebrate, and no one could ask him to
stay alive any longer. We certainly sent him off in style, with a
bicoastal state funeral for the ages.
I didn't "get it" ahead of time (and maybe a bit miffed that things aren't
lined up any better than two chances in a lifetime), but now that
the pictures of the transit of Venus are in, I'm sorry I didn't get
over to the viewing area and see it for myself. Special mention to Ray
Hayes' photo with reflection off Perdido Bay in Alabama.
The European Southern
Observatory has a big collection, too, including
this
one at the edge, showing refraction through Venus' atmosphere.
I'll be paying better attention in 2012, I hope!
11.Jun.04
American Experience's
Reagan retrospective
put me to sleep somewhere about the start of the 4th (!) hour, long
after the Pistons had crushed the Lakers in game 3. What I saw of it
pretty much agreed with my recollections of history, with a whole lot
less Vaseline on the lens than most of the pictures frome this last
week of mourning and co-opting. John Patrick Diggins describes
How
Reagan Beat the Neocons, in contrast to our current president,
who has fallen in with them, even as he and his campaign team strive to
cloak themselves as the heirs of the Reagan legend. "The difference
between Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush's militant brain staff is that he
believed in negotiation and they in escalation. They wanted to win the
cold war; he sought to end it."
It's hard to know whether it will make any difference in the War on
Terror®, but
a Boise jury has at least struck a blow in favor of our
Constitution's first amendment right to free speech. Sort of. Had
Al-Hussayen claimed authorship of the content he was providing web
support for, it might not have come out the same way.
"Not guilty" on the 3 biggest counts and 2 others, another moot, and
we're left with 8 unresolved visa and immigration fraud charges good
enough to scare his wife and children back home and leave him
deportable, at least. The government may not be able to convict him,
but they can sure let him know that "we don't like your kind around here,
pardner."
9.Jun.04
The singing senators went flat a long time ago, when Jeffords turned
Independent and quashed the Republican majority (temporarily, as it
turned out). Now Larry Craig is one of the few Republican Senators
not lining up to defend John Ashcroft without reservation.
Talking about the growing power of the executive branch, Craig said:
'I hope that in the end, Saddam Hussein will not have
taken away from us something that our Constitution, in large part,
granted us, and that we have it taken away in the name of safety and
security.' (After the NY Times story goes behind the paywall, try
MSNBC, which has
a different angle on Craig's comments.)
The Americans United for the Separation of Church and State
is not an organization that's big on humor, as far as I can tell,
but they sure dug up something funny on this
church electioneering issue:
"Two sections of H.R. 4520, the
American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, deal not with jobs but with
partisan politicking by churches. The so-called 'Safe Harbor for
Churches' provisions would essentially gut current law, which forbids
churches from endorsing candidates for public office, and replace it
with watered-down language giving wide latitude to such activity. The
bill, introduced by U.S. Rep. William M. Thomas (R-Calif.), contains
provisions that would allow church leaders to 'unintentionally'
endorse or oppose candidates up to three times per year. It also
greatly reduces the tax penalty for church electioneering."
The bill is half a megabyte of omnibus pork barrel
in printer-friendly text format, if you can believe that.
How many legislators do you suppose actually read this stuff? It seems
to be up to watchdog groups like AU to ferret out the most egregious
attempts at slipping things into law.
They're seeking to exclude employee stock option income from
"compensation," I noticed, and take your pick from the list of "other
incentive provisions," including Special rules for livestock sold on
account of weather-related conditions, Improvements related to real
estate investment trusts, Taxation of certain settlement funds,
Expansion of human clinical trials qualifying for orphan drug credit,
Simplification of excise tax imposed on bows and arrows, Repeal of
excise tax on fishing tackle boxes, and Sonar devices suitable for
finding fish.
There might even be some good stuff in there, but who could know?
"Repeal of exclusion for extraterritorial income" and
"Incentives to reinvest foreign earnings in United States" sound good,
don't they? Many of the provisions are fussy amendments to legal jargon
that require looking up the original legislation to understand the
context. It's safe to assume there are a bunch of "rifle shots" in
there, designed to benefit one or a very few particular corporations,
lobbyists and/or campaign contributors.
Under Title VI, Revenue Provisions, Subtitle E, Other Revenue
Provisions, we find Sec. 692, "Safe harbor for churches."
It restates what I understand to be the current law: that church leaders
can make personal political statements, but if they do so
with the appearance of organizational support, or with
the organization's logistical support (such as publication in a church
newsletter), that's a violation. The new subsection, "UNINTENTIONAL
VIOLATIONS," gives a free pass for 3 violations, so long as they don't
reflect "intentional disregard" by the organizations or leaders,
something which a good lawyer could always dodge, eh? The good news is
that a religious leader or organization would never lie about their
intentions...
And over on the other side of the Congress,
here comes Judge Roy Moore for a song and dance before the
Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil
Rights and Property Rights, on America's hostility toward religion.
Only three senators could be bothered to attend, and hear an appointed
church official, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on
Public Affairs, counter the self-appointed (and dis-appointed) Moore's
unconstitutional notions.
8.Jun.04
The extremes of hero worship being rolled out in memory of Ronald Reagan
are rather amazing. The construction of a Republican monument for the
purpose of mounting GWB on top seems to be the subtext of a lot of it,
as if "look how great he was, so is George" were intelligible in some
way. The Capitol Times provides
some antidote: "Commentators seem to have forgotten that members of
his administration investigated and indicted at a staggering rate and
Reagan himself could have been impeached for allowing aides to create a
shadow government that peddled weapons to sworn enemies of the United
States and used the profits to fund illegal wars in Central
America."
They even acknowledge some grudging respect for the man, in spite of the
disagreements. How much more meaningful that is than the fulsome price
that's being dolloped out everywhere you look this week.
Our Toyota Prius came with 5 sessions of warranty service, every 7,500
miles or 6 months. I took it to the dealer for #4 yesterday, on an
extended time schedule, but well short of 4 x 7,500 miles.
Peterson's web property
is a lot like their 13 acres -- flashy, full of shiny attractions, and
maybe a little short of underlying substance.
I noted that the right rear tire had a leak, and Matt, my service
advisor said he was sorry, but they didn't have tire repair facilities;
I might like to go to Les Schwab or Bruneel for that. The book said the
service should take 3 hours, would I like a courtesy shuttle to
somewhere? I had brought some reading, and could have gone the
duration, but I figured I'd rather hang out at home, so I said "yes."
He invited me to have a seat in the waiting room, which I took to mean
someone would come when my ride was ready. An hour later, having
finished one magazine, started another and having begun to be annoyed by
the TV chattering on about Reagan, I went in and asked the cashier about
the shuttle.
"What kind of car did you bring in?" Excuse me? She was trying to clue
me in that not every schmuck gets a free ride, but she picked up on the
fact that I was real close to being Unhappy Customer and had been told I
was getting a ride. She made a couple calls. "It'll be about half an
hour until that shuttle is available," she told me, and I figured I
could walk home faster than they could take me. I asked Matt to
just give me a call at home, and hoofed it.
Two hours after I'd dropped off the car, I got a call back. It
was ready, or would be as soon as they finished washing it. Great. I
got a ride from Kayla (payback time!) to go pick it up, and asked Matt
if there was anything he needed to tell me about as I signed their forms
and looked over the maintenance record. "Nope, it all looked fine," he
said. "Hmm, 'Recommendation -- needs rear tires,' what's that?" I
asked, reading the receipt. Someone closer to the work was
nearby and kibitzed "side wear," and Matt says "oh yeah, it needs rear
tires; side wear."
I noted the tires had been rotated, and I asked "so the tire with the
leak is now on the front?" He figured it was, and confirmed that the
worn tires were the ones now on the rear. I left with the
receipt, the "warranty procedures bulletin" (listing the service that
they were required to do, no doubt the most that they did), and the
clear impression that Matt had no clue about what was and wasn't done to
my car, or what condition anything had been in. This morning, I checked
the tire pressure - around 40 on 3 of them, 34 on the leaky one. I'd
already seen that the leaky tire held pressure overnight, but not over 2
or 3 nights. In other words, the Peterson mechanic rotated the tires,
but didn't bother to check or adjust the tire pressure. Great
work, guys.
And the 3 hours' worth of service (by Toyota's estimate, and what
they'll pay the dealer for) getting done in 2? Well, either the
mechanics are really, really good, are maybe, just maybe, they cut a few
corners.
Going to "detention" was kind of a joke in school days, but it's
not
funny these days. Selective enforcement of the "special visas
required for foreign journalists" turns ugly at LAX. Even if there were
some justification for deportation, there is no reason for it to be
humiliating or cruel. Some members of the government don't seem to
understand the difference between legal behavior and
appropriate behavior, and the problem seems to start
at the
top.
When you pluck one guitar string, the others vibrate sympathetically.
The ones closest to integer multiples resonate with each other,
acknowledge their fundamental sameness.
So it is with human lives, as we live atuned to others like us,
those who share an interest, children of a certain age, birthdays,
birth years. On the cusp of my 2nd half century (should I be so lucky),
news of other mid-50s babies gets my attention. The ones that make the
news are typically larger than life, of course, but when it comes to
distant drama, it seems all the same.
Here's Bill Joy featured in the NY Times Magazine, having
"finished his 21-year career" and leaving with no definite plans.
I didn't have 900 pounds of papers or 20 file cabinets, and no one was
pressing me to archive anything. I saved some of what I had, passed
a few things on to colleagues, but mostly it was recycled (assuming the
best), the same as most of the computer peripherals I'd helped engineer.
I'm not splitting my time between two houses, I don't have a
50,000 word manuscript about the dangerous trajectory of science and
technology collecting dust, I'm not "a millionaire many times over" and
mostly there isn't much connection beyond the very few similarities.
7.Jun.04
Here's something for you if you're interested in a Saturday bike ride:
The Bob LeBow Bike Tour
in Canyon and Owyhee Counties. Anywhere from 3 to 100 miles, something
for all abilities.
It could be something having to do with having a job again, or it could
be the unfolding arms race in motor vehicle mass and volume, or it could
just be relentless advertising and "rebates":
SUV sales rebounded in May. I always use "sale" prices as an
indication of how much profit someone's making. $5,000 rebates? Must
mean they're making a good bit more than $5,000 on every SUV, n'est-ce
pas? Auto-makers are making a ton of money in the "cars, vans
and small trucks" segment, which is why they're advertising them like
crazy and why they're willing and able to "rebate" some of that to pump
up sales. $2 a gallon for gasoline? Not a problem, apparently.
DUMMER sales continue to slip, though, and Nissan's Armada is not
yet conquering the highways.
And while we're talking about automobiles, let me announce that there's
a brand new driver on the roads of Boise (and beyond!); after more
visits to the DMV than I care to describe in detail, she got the DL
today, along with title to a red GEO Prizm. She dropped me off at the
house and went off to... work, of course, to earn the money to pay for
her entry into the automotive lifestyle. Hello world!
6.6.4
D-Day + 60 years. The retrospectives that ran so thick in the past
couple days now seem likely to be overshadowed by eulogies to
Ronald Reagan. The ersatz Gipper had a long and interesting life,
ending with 10 years of "long goodbye." Among the
many
vignettes, I was struck by this one, and its parallel to the current
resident of the White House:
In his biography of Mr. Reagan, Mr. Cannon noted the president's
tendency to misspeak: "He did not know enough. And he did not know how
much he didn't know. Because of Reagan's knowledge gaps, his
presidential news conferences became adventures into the uncharted
regions of his mind."
Bush will never match the simple beauty of Reagan's correction of his
denial of the Iran-Contra debacle, however: "My heart and my best
intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence
tell me it is not." And yet, the mess we're in now is so much deeper,
we keep having to extend our superlatives to describe it all.
A quarter million jobs added in May, that's good news. The unemployment
rate stayed stuck at 5.6%, though, as the improving prospects
"draw hundreds of thousands of people back into the labor force
in search of a job." That's just shy of a million jobs in the last 3
months, and net net of 1.4 million of the 2.6 million lost during Bush's
tenure. The stats will be flogged, hard, both ways: lookit how good
things are looking now, and "yeahbut..." As Tom Friedman likes to say,
when you lose your job, the unemployment rate isn't 5.6% (or whatever),
it's a hundred percent at your house.
Under Bush I, the economy turned around, but not in time for the
electorate to notice and pull his lever. He won the war, dang it, but
that didn't seem to matter. Under Bush II, there's going to be a ton of
ad money spent to make damn sure the electorate knows how good the
statistics are, and he won the war (didn't he?), but who knows if all
that's going to be good enough? Stay tuned.
This is not good, if it's anywhere close to accurate:
"It reminds me of the Nixon days," says a longtime GOP political
consultant with contacts in the White House. "Everybody is an enemy;
everybody is out to get him. That’s the mood over there."
Paranoia and religious fanaticism aren't a good combination.
Our "voluntary" armed services aren't what they used to be.
Once you're in,
you may not be getting out when you want, thanks to "stop loss"
orders. The "National" Guard ain't what it used to be, either, and
there are a lot of its members getting new emphasis on the back half of
"citizen soldier," a long way from their home state. From
The
NY Times:
"The Army is just running out of creative ideas for coping with the
level of commitment that Iraq requires," said Loren Thompson, a military
analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "It's clear there
was a fundamental miscalculation about how protracted and how intense
the ground commitment in Iraq would be."
Charley Reese says,
Vote for a man,
not a puppet. "It is not at all conservative to balloon government
spending, to vastly increase the power of government, to show contempt
for the Constitution and the rule of law, or to tell people that foreign
outsourcing of American jobs is good for them, that giant fiscal and
trade deficits don't matter, and that people should not know what their
government is doing."
3.Jun.04
School's out, the first crop of hay is cut, the season is ripening
nicely. It got up to hot in the last couple days, high 80s,
morning wind is trying to get started, but
still a bit iffy.
As Steve Schmidt says, "people of faith have as much right to
participate in the political process as any other community."
What people of faith don't have,
according to the IRS
(c.f. Pub. 1828),
is the right to use their faith-based, tax-exempt non-profit
organizations for political purposes. "The most sophisticated
grass-roots presidential campaign in the country's history" may be
skirting the law. If they're passing out "general information/updates
or voter registration materials," that's fine, but if they're
electioneering, not so fine.
From
The NY Times' story: "In a statement, Rev. Dr. C. Welton
Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, a liberal group, called the
effort 'an astonishing abuse of religion' and 'the rawest form of
manipulation of religion for partisan gain.' He urged the president to
repudiate the effort."
Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen.
2.Jun.04
Harry Shearer's weekly
program is nominally humor, but he occasionally provides memory
assistance, as in this week's
review of Richard Perle, helping us forget. (If you can't remember
how to pronounce "Abu Ghraib," stick around for that, too.)
Nicholas Kristof was in Tiananmen Square 15 years ago this month, at
the moment when
"the
Communist Party signed its own death warrant." His impression of
the rickshaw drivers of Beijing is considerably more dramatic than
our minor vignette.
It doesn't take a crystal ball to predict that
warnings
of terrorist attacks are going to be increasing between now and
November. We'll likely never know what is "credible intelligence" and
what is more cocked-up nonsense serving a misguided political strategy.
We can't know what might have happened, what almost
happened, and so on. Having dire warnings raised and then squelched as
fast as the last round was certainly creates some doubt about the
quality of the effort.
1.Jun.04
The Project for the Old American Century takes a look at
the traditional
features of fascism, starting with powerful and continuing
nationalism and ending with fraudulent elections, with a lot
of disdain in between. The whitebread Republican team giving the Power
to the Preppies salute in the photo for the last point is worth a
thousand words.
Another niece sent me a change of address from her work email, and it
had one of those boilerplate disclaimers that some corporations have
taken to appending automagically on outgoing email. Perhaps the
military should be doing this for its soldiers' accounts?
"...If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are
hereby notified that any unauthorized disclosure, dissemination,
distribution, copying or the taking of any action in reliance on the
information herein is strictly prohibited...."
In other words, forget you saw that.
Jeanette does essentially all the cooking in the house, a bit on the
traditional side for a couple of liberals, but man, can she
cook. Recipes are starting points, suggestions, sources of
ideas. The most phenomenal dishes may be one-time-only, but not to
worry, something else will follow. Yesterday's original production was
a walnut-date pie with a chocolate crust. Oh me oh my,
love that
country pie.
Paul
Krugman: "Beyond the routine mendacity, the case of the leaked memo
points us to a larger truth: whatever they may say in public,
administration officials know that sustaining Mr. Bush's tax cuts will
require large cuts in popular government programs. And for the vast
majority of Americans, the losses from these cuts will outweigh any
gains from lower taxes." The metaphor he comes up with to describe the
"starve the beast" tax cut plan seems apt: "It's as if someone expected
gratitude for giving you a gift, when he actually bought it using your
credit card."
David
Brooks tries his hand at an econ column, too He kinda thinks the
President's team deserves its C+ average, and that that's a pretty good
grade, considering.
I'd have to stretch to give him a gentleman's C with this idiotic and
useless conclusion: "After all, this election will probably hinge on
Iraq anyway. The Bush folks might as well roll the dice with some
attention-grabbing domestic ideas. That way if Bush is re-elected, he'll
have a mandate to do something big."
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
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Thursday, 08-Jul-2004 17:59:46 MDT
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