unraveling
28.Feb.2003
I received several copies of
John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation from
the US Foreign Service in email. I can understand his wanting to get
out, even as it saddens me that the best people may be driven out by the
current administration. A few excerpts here:
"The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with
American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of
war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy
that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense
since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest
and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever
known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not
security....
"(T)his Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political
tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its
bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in
the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism
and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast
misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken
the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of
government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of
American society as we seem determined to do to ourselves. Is the Russia
of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire
thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status
quo?
"...We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our
friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over
a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is
justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S. to drift into
complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our
President condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our
friends and allies this Administration is fostering, including among its
most senior officials. Has
oderint dum metuant really become our motto?"
Muslims in Idaho are understandably on edge after the
arrest of
Sami Omar Al-Hussayen on a variety of charges, "seven counts of visa
fraud and four counts of making false statements," that purportedly
connect to terrorist activity. At least the accusations and arraignment
were public, like it used to be in the good old days when the accused
were presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Three-fourths of Idaho's Congressional delegation is falling all over
itself
to help out
Micron Technology, one of many tech companies on the
skids. Micron's attempt to buy a South Korean competitor, Hynix, fell
through last year, and the story is that the SK government is unfairly
subsidising them.
27.Feb.2003
Mr. Rogers passed away, at 74. The world has lost a gentle and
beautiful soul. Daniel Lewis wrote
a
nice obituary in the NY Times. Davy Rothbart has a
touching
memory there, too.
Bush's popularity was on a long slide down from the pinnacle that
9/11 took him to until last summer when his push for war in Iraq gave
him a bump and rising plateau (just in time for the midterm elections,
what a remarkable coincidence). It looks like the populace might be
catching on to the fact that war isn't a win-win (and just might be a
lose-lose). The latest
Harris poll numbers show just over half give him an "excellent" or
"good" rating, with 46% "fair" or "poor."
 |
The graphic describes the responses more succinctly than Harris' tables.
Other than the pre-9/11 Cheney, everybody's "positive" is north of their
"negative," which roughly translates to popular support. The less well
known a leader is, the further from a total of 100%; for example,
Attorney General John Ashcroft's positives are down to close to 50%
along with everyone else (except Colin Powell), but his negatives are
just now getting up to the high 30s. He's still below the radar of more
than 10% of the respondents and the population they represent. Colin
Powell is well known, and has a better than 3:1 ratio of excellent/good
to fair/poor ratings while the rest of these guys are going 50/50.
Once they start the shooting, they'll all get a "support our country"
pop, no doubt. That's what you call a "negative feedback" system.
I'm guessing that if Wolfowitz were included in these polls, he'd be
underwater by now. Especially if they polled the brass at the Pentagon,
whose professional estimates
he's
more than happy to ridicule.
A million or so Americans marched on Washington, yesterday.
Virtually. I was one of them, with two faxes to my Senators.
The White House "declined to comment" on how many calls they'd
received.
More interesting
poll results from Harris: "The Religious and Other Beliefs of
Americans 2003." I'm a solid "no sale" down the list of Table 1, which
puts me in a slim majority for the top half, and a strong majority of
astrological and reincarnation disbelievers. But ghosts?!
No more
benefit of the doubt for HP. Scott Herhold of the Murky News
reports on why analysts' glasses are half-empty after Carly reported
half-full quarterly results.
Yet another amazing thing about butterflies:
some of the color in their wings is from
photonic crystals
rather than pigment.
It's kind of interesting that the
White House now has some solar power, but the Park Service isn't
making a big deal out of the installation. Noting how small the PV
setup is (on the roof of a shed), the writer notes that "in the first
four months, the panels generated about 1,100 kilowatt-hours of power."
That's about how much electricity we use in 4 months.
After Iraq (maybe after), there will be
North
Korea to deal with. Nicholas Kristof has an unreasurring take on
the US' "Secret, Scary Plans."
On the environmental front, the problem is a shortage of plans.
The administration now
proposes
to "examine" climate change, with an insufficient budget, and
intentions to study questions that have already been settled. Other
than that, the plan lacks "a guiding vision, executable goals, clear
timetables and criteria for measuring progress, an assessment of whether
existing programs are capable of meeting these goals, explicit
prioritization and a management plan." It's still under
development.
25.Feb.2003
41 failed to get his second term due to that (lack of) vision thing
(or was it the economy?). 43's nemesis may be the
honesty thing. Paul Krugman notes that continued lying has
a way of eroding trust, let alone credibility.
Nicholas Kristof proposes that we consider
what Ike would do, providing a useful history lesson for those of us
who weren't paying attention in the late 50s.
After the
Saddam and George debate, maybe we should have the S&G
arm-wrestling contest and call it good.
Can you imagine saying something about killing someone and then not
remembering what it was you said? There may be some uncertainty
in Senator Fitzgerald's mind about
what Bush did or didn't say (I kind of doubt that), but what
is certain is that he won't be riding on Air Force One again for
a while.
Behind the scenes as the Bush administration
reshapes the judiciary.
This makes it sound like real grass (as opposed to RealGrass, which
we all know must be fake) is on its way out in sports stadia. If the
players like it, maybe it's OK, but it seems disgusting to me to play
American football on carpet of any kind.
Here's
a model ordinance
to identify corporate "personhood" as the unnatural, unConstitutional
fabrication that it is, and more importantly, to revoke it. Interesting
idea.
For your next flight,
this is your
Captain speaking... (Flash-y humor.)
Just in case you can't find enough reading enough about our wars in the
middle east, there's the
War Report,
suggested by the Internet Scout Project. "Select articles, key
documents, and analyses compiled (and updated frequently) by the Project
on Defense Alternatives." At the moment, the numerous links are in two
categories, Iraq War and Afghan Aftermath.
24.Feb.2003
The plan for "Patriot 2" was most likely to spring it on the Legislature
once the next military adventure was underway, providing for the same
careful (NOT!) consideration that the USA Patriot act got. The draft
text was leaked, however, offering citizens the opportunity to preview
this piece of rancid sausage, and perhaps to do a little pre-emptive
attack of their own. The ACLU has posted a
detailed summary of egregious provisions, as well as
section by section analysis.
Swami Beyondananda's
State of the
Universe address is a wonderful tonic to current events.
"Each time we let laughter bubble up from the well, we experience deep
wellness. Levity helps us overcome gravity, especially when we shine the
light of laughter on those poorly-lit corridors of power."
Gender scientists explore a revolution in evolution:
"At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, leading researchers and theorists in the evolution of sexual
behavior gathered Monday to present the growing evidence that Darwin's
idea of sexual selection requires sweeping revisions."
In 2001, more than half the autos sold in the US were light trucks,
according to this
NY
Times story. They mention the
EPA ratings
for the 2003 model year, which has our lovely car at #2 behind the
Honda Insight. (Our other car, the Windstar, is a mediocre 5, so we
drive it only when we need the "RV" thing.)
The diesel truck that pulled out in front of me as I rode my bike to
work this morning ranks about a -2, dumping buckets of unburned fuel
and exhaust in my face and spoiling the crisp (low 20s!) air.
23.Feb.2003
Ever wonder where whacky ideas like "windows of vulnerability,"
CIA support for covert wars, the denigration of international
institutions and treaties, using deficits to rein in government
and freeing corporations from regulations and accountability
come from? Robert
Borosage takes a look under the hood of the Heritage Foundation's
first 30 years.
When I saw the Internet Scout's blurb for
Simpson's Contemporary
Quotations
I thought it might be a compilation of Bart and Homer's best
witticisms, but no. It's James B. Simpson's collection of quotes
from 1950 to 1988. It's some fun (in spite of the pop-under windows
for the Sylvan Learning Center from every page you load)
to just wander around in it.
"America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it
wags its tail, it knocks over a chair." -- Arnold Toynbee
"Kissing power is stronger than will power: Girls need to 'prove their
love' like a moose needs a hat rack." -- Abigail Van Buren
"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."
-- Gore Vidal
You're not supposed to actually use
that duct tape and plastic sheeting that you bought when we went to
orange alert, but deep in
this story about our protectors in government is some useful
information, from our Senate majority leader (wearing his "doctor" hat),
noting that "the interests of public health would be better served if
people paid attention to more obvious threats to their physical
well-being, including stress."
22.Feb.2003
SUVs are still burning gas like there's no tomorrow, but they got
great
mileage in the big snowstorm back east. So now we know that once
every couple of decades, it's good to have hundreds of people who
drive inefficient, oversized vehicles. Maybe we could have an
organization that coordinates this sort of effort, and reserves
resources for such rare emergencies. We could call it... oh, I don't
know, something like "The National Guard."
Thomas
Friedman is still support war on Iraq, even as he describes how the
Bush team is totally bungling the statesmanship required. Is there any
reason to suppose they'll get a clue and turn that around? No. Is
there any reason to suppose they're prepared to do what Friedman says is
necessary, "years of occupying Iraq and a simultaneous effort to defuse
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to create a regional context for
success"? I don't see it. (Neither does
Paul
Krugman: "This administration does martial plans, not Marshall
Plans...")
Bill
Keller thinks we're committed at this point, and the risks are
greater if we don't follow-through with our threats. In other words,
Wolfowitz' planning of a decade ago has finally produced a fait
accompli.
I wonder what the spin-doctors who are doing the marketing for popular
support make of Friedman's headline, "Tell the Truth." Somehow, I don't
think that's going to happen, either. You can't handle the
truth.
Amos
Oz, on the "arousing a wave of fanaticism" argument against war:
"(T)he evil of Saddam Hussein's regime, like the evil of Osama bin Laden,
is deeply and extensively rooted in vast expanses of poverty, despair
and humiliation."
You would think the media's promotion of the coming war
would have killed the notion that they have a liberal bias, but
old notions die hard.
Richard Blow
gives a capsule history of the sea change in the balance of
power, "Conservatives Have More Fun."
Also on TomPaine.com, Arianna Huffington examines
The Bottom Line On
Iraq: as Bush economic guru Lawrence Lindsey put it, "The successful
prosecution of the war would be good for the economy."
And we learn that the First Lady wasn't so sure she
did want to hear
Poetry and the
American Voice after all, when it started to look like the poets
might not all have opinions she liked.
Speaking of
Tales of Airport
Security, we have two recent stories from the Boise airport. The
first was in the news, when an "unknown substance" was discovered in
some drink cups on a Horizon flight, and they held the plane -- and
everyone on it, of course -- while they checked it out. We heard this
story on the radio, and it ended with the report that
they
decided it wasn't hazardous, but airport police chief Mike
Johnson would not say what the substance was. (We can't handle the
truth?) Non-dairy creamer? A busted sugar packet? Everyone went along
with the gag, peacefully, so maybe it's better we don't know.
That was last Saturday, so perhaps things were still a little tense
when I took Jeanette to the airport on Tuesday. They now have a
uniformed officer at a little guard booth with a stop sign as you
drive up to the front of the terminal, and he checked us out real good.
He looked in the back seat, at the bag there. And then waved us on
ahead. Ah, what if we had a bomb in the suitcase? Or something in the
trunk? What kind of nonsense is this? If you're going to stop and
search (oh wait, the Constitution says you can't do that, or has that
part been rewritten?), at least do something useful, but just looking in
the side window?
3.2.21
Jim and Tim, the Duct Tape Guys, remind us that
"no home is truly secure without duct tape."
Homeland security on a roll.
eTravel: a step beyond teleconferencing, creating an immersive
depiction of the real world. This sounds like a funny
little lab project, but I'm betting that it'll be
tremendously useful.
It hadn't occurred to me that you can
calculate the value of pi with toothpicks, but I guess you can.
Watched a presentation from the
Digital Aboriginal
authors. They talked some about the world of blogging, and some
other worlds: Dweezer, Cranium, E-bay/Party central,
House
concerts,
Legos/Mindstorms
+Creativity Institute. I don't think I need the first 2,
but the E-bay thing sounds like a good time, and I've got a good set of
Legos. I realize I am taking part in at least one product-related network,
the one populated by happy Prius owners. The idea of
Superplayers
is nicely illustrated by one node of that network.
Business creation process idea: take 5 things that don't make sense
together, and make a business out of it. (Of course, their business idea
was to come up with a catchy two-word phrase and make a book and lecture
tour out of it.)
They mentioned Mecca-cola, too:
the hottest selling cola in the mid-East, from a French company that
didn't exist a year ago. 10% of the profits go to charities operating
in Palestinian territories and 10% to European NGOs, according to
the BBC story. "Ne buvez plus idiot, buvez engagé."
February could be the cruelest -- and
last -- month for Salon.
20.Feb.2003
I heard a poem last August that moved me, but I didn't make a note of
the author or title. Then I came across it again today, and read it
aloud to myself. It still sounds good, but as the title says, it's
really
A Ritual To Read To Each Other, by William Stafford. The stanza
that was emphasized in August, and that I keep remembering is:
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
19.Feb.2003
How many protestors were out last Saturday?
This
site has an estimate of 11 million, with photos from around the
world.
The truth
behind
today's popular music...
And just when you thought it was safe to go out and play!
What happens if you play a music video backwards, I wonder?
Our favorite monopolist up to
dirty
tricks again: apparently they're still fighting the browser war.
Most times when a site doesn't work for me, I assume carelessness or
stupidity rather than malice.
The Swiss may not have a coastline, but they've got a team (of New
Zealanders, as it turns out) in the America's Cup, and they're up
3-nil. Today's race was
canceled due to light and shifty winds. It's best of 9, so it's
time for the Kiwis (on the New Zealand team, that is) to buck up.
Some amazing facts to consider from
deconstructing
the Slammer worm: 90% of the 75,000 hosts it infected were infected
within 10 minutes. Its doubling time was 8.5 seconds, at least until it
started saturating the internet bandwidth (after about 3 minutes).
(Thanks to
the Harrow Technology report for the link.)
Something more useful to think about than buying duct tape:
how to prevent a
terrorist attack (or at least how to prevent being paralyzed by
fear).
18.Feb.2003
A lunchtime conversation today prompted me to describe the reasons why I
oppose the US going to war with Iraq, and I posted them as a
new essay here.
More bad news for the local economy:
Micron to lay off more than a 1,000 in Boise.
The Arab News editorial
page is an interesting place to browse. Today's offerings include
a letter to Osama
bin Laden from an American Muslim;
one to Tom
Friedman, wondering why he's all hawk on Iraq these days;
a ramble about
conspiracy theories that doesn't sound so far-fetched; and a
powerful call for granting
more independence
to Saudi women.
From Hussein Shobokshi's speculation about the US' hidden agenda:
"It is quite clear that foreign policies are influenced and directed by
people with dual loyalties and secret objectives like Paul Wolfowitz and
Richard Perle. These people’s have a hidden agenda that is an integral
part of every key foreign policy decision, particularly the fantasy
linking Saddam to Al-Qaeda in the name of the war on terrorism. That is
the work of dreamers who believe that a war will deter
terrorism...."
 |
A few days before the Senate bogged down in the filibuster to prevent a
confirmation vote for Estrada, and then took a two week recess (?!),
Robert Byrd
made these remarks:
"...On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and
destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq -- a population, I
might add, of which over 50% is under age 15 -- this chamber is silent.
On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own
citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare
-- this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a
vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is
business as usual in the United States Senate. We are truly
'sleepwalking through history.'"
The speech is powerful. If only his colleagues and this administration
would pay attention.
Here's something useful the Senate did get to before the recess:
putting
the brakes on the Total Information Awareness program's ability to
spy on citizens.
That may lesson the
boon TIA promises for IT vendors, but only a little.
And just in case you're starting to feel comfortable with your supply of
duct tape and plastic sheeting, consider that
you're no longer allowed to take pictures around the Golden Gate bridge,
among other places. It's just too dangerous to allow that sort of
thing.
Canon shifting
operations from China back to Japan might be a statement about the
limits of outsourcing, or it might be a statement about the Japanese
economy. They're still talking about efficiency through automation, so
things can't be too dire back home.
On butterfly flight, in
Technology Research News:
Free-flying butterflies "use all of the known mechanisms to enhance lift --
wake capture, leading-edge vortex, clap and fling, and active and inactive
upstrokes -- as well as two mechanisms that had not been postulated, the
leading-edge vortex during the upstrokes and the double leading-edge
vortex." Who knew?
An online resource for getting rid of Windows annoyances:
annoyances.org
Evan Williams finds an exit strategy,
sells Pyra to Google! 200,000
Blogger users told to expect no
immediate change in service, while Evan goes from entrepeneur to
presumably well-endowed employee. In the blogosphere, and especially in
the California metropoli where bloggers can get together and schmooze,
this is huge. In the mainstream press, this is a non-story, but in a
month or quarter or year, you'll be reading feature pieces about how
Google's hegemony has been extended by its subsuming (part of) this
other universe.
Howard Rheingold drops in on
Cooltown
to chat about mobs, online communities and such. My first sight of
"moblog" <- mobile blogging <- mobile web logging.
Since I'm not wireless (other than premonitions and stuff), I can't
play, but since it's on the web, we can all
see what it looks like
at least. Sorta like a blog with small pictures, a lot of "is this
thing on?" posts and scattered gems. "I'm missing a button on my work
shirt..think anyone would notice if I just took a sharpie and drew a
button in there?"
I guess the Joe Millionaire thing is over? We happened to flip over the
finale last night (and also the continuing saga of Michael
Jackson - can we have the finale of that, too?) before settling
on the decidedly more interesting
story of Mt. Rushmore & Lincoln and Gutzon Borglum.
Anyway, the Motley Fool goes with the flow
advising Joe what to do with the real million he got for being
the star of the show.
17.Feb.2003
Pictures of Saturday's Peace Rally in Moscow, Idaho: I was standing
atop one of the play area's columns to take it, and the two girls in the
foreground were on another. There were tie-dyed banners strung between
the trees with "peace" in 50 different languages, and the square was
jam-packed with more than 300 people. There were so many that the
"sound system" (a boombox with a microphone) was overwhelmed, and the
nearby music store (Guitar's Friend) produced an amp and another mic to
help out. A dozen or so pre-arranged speakers, including old friends
Stan Thomas (shown below) and Nick Gier and one local minister stated
their reasons for opposing US military action in Iraq. It was beautiful
and patriotic; citizens peacefully assembling to have their say about a
terribly important political issue. Are our leaders bold enough to
listen?
Some of the signs:
Leave no child an orphan
Where was Dubya during Vietnam? A.W.O.L.
Sleepless Women Say No to War in Iraq
Bombing Spawns Terrorism
Kenton Bird (just behind Stan, in the hat) was the M.C. for the
organized speakers, and the open mic session afterwards, and at one
point, he asked us to take a moment in memory of George Driskell,
Jeanette's ex-husband, whose sculpture provided the backdrop for the
"stage" and which has long been a favorite of children in the square.
Another speaker remembered our friend Frank Seaman. UUs were out in
force, with a busload from the district annual meeting taking time out
of the weekend conference to join the rally. Our minister had a sign
that Bird spotted and read to the cheers of the crowd, "UU Ministers
for Peace."
We cruised home from Moscow in record time, thanks to our early-rising
hosts. We've never pulled in close to 2pm Mountain time in
the summer, let alone mid-winter. The Palouse was icy after last
night's thunderstorm (!) and snow shower, the Lewiston hill dry,
Winchester grade had rain sprinkles turned to snow by the top, and slick
conditions on a snow-covered road across Lawyer's Creek. The Salmon R.
canyon was warm and dry, and even with some rain, snow and graupel along
highway 55, the road never got worse than a few slushy spots. The
Payette canyon was warm and spongy, the snow long out of sight before we
got below the trees, and then sun over Horseshoe Bend hill and almost
50°F here. We had regular updates from NPR about the huge blizzard
out east as we drove -- two feet of snow in New York and
Washington, D.C. -- just to make the "winter" scene more bizarre.
Now to try catching up after 4½ days away... after dealing with
the messages requiring my immediate attention and deleting the spam,
I still have 100 unread to go, a folder full of reading, some music
to transcribe and 3 dozen more pictures.
My soccer index
has been moribund for some time, reflecting my acceptance of age and
apathy and giving up playing, in favor of other sports. But I can still
appreciate
a good
story from that part of the world that puts football first in the
world of sport. I especially liked Sir Alex' nickname, and the gossip
about former Spice Girl Victoria and biggest-man-in-sport Dave. Nice to
have something other than war to talk about once in a while.
16.Feb.2003
Today's editorials in the Lewiston Morning Tribune provide an
illustration of how the state government works in Idaho. We have
regulations about the burning of agricultural fields, "enforced"
by the Department of Agriculture and the Dept. of Environmental
Quality. Being as there is not penalty for non-compliance, it isn't
clear just what enforcement could mean, though. Greg Nelson is
sponsoring legislation to protect farmers from lawsuits over burning,
and justifying it by saying that we have existing state regulations.
Suck it up folks!
It's interesting to think about how this compares to California's state
regulations concerning medical marijuana, which the Feds saw fit to
override in the name of the War on Some Drugs. It's also interesting to
think about how it meshes with the general libertarian, "less is more"
attitude to government around here. Citizens should have no recourse to
farmers who injure them because... there are state regulations with no
penalties? When my daughter called the DEQ about her tenant farmer
neighbor burning two fields on opposite sides of the road, with no
help to assist if things got out of hand, they said "he didn't register
with us for that." Duh, why should he bother with the red tape?
15.Feb.2003
What Would Jesus Bomb?
Listening to Hans Blix yesterday, I was thinking about how the
Bush administration seems to have committed itself to war
regardless of the course of events. No weapons found? Iraq's
still hiding what they have. Weapons found? See, we told you
so! The case for that country being an imminent threat just
does not seem to exist, beyond the attempts at proof by repeated
assertion and the Condition Orange general scare tactics.
(Got your duct tape yet?)
More than anything else, I think Bush's failure to come up
with a constructive answer to the situation is a failure of
imagination. Iraq was our ally once upon a time; it's arguable
that their belief in our support emboldened them to attack
Kuwait in the first place. Since then, none of the statesmanship
and enlightened self-interest that brought about the positive
results from WWII has been in evidence. In all the talk about
UN resolutions, there is none about those concerning Israel,
which have been breached and ignored for some years. Solving
the problems of the region is not possible without solving the
problems between Israel and the Palestinians, and the resolve
to do that seems to have evaporated.
STOP MAD COWBOY DISEASE
I hear there were millions of people demonstrating today.
In my neck of the woods, it was proportional to the small
town we're visiting: several hundred of us packed Friendship
Square, listened to speeches, waived signs, howled as the dogs
of peace and just said no to Bush's immoral push for war.
It was a wonderful, patriotic outing. Pictures to follow
when I get a little more bandwidth.
14.Feb.2003
Happy Valentine's Day to all lovers, would-be lovers and those who
have the capacity to love.
I'm writing remotely, on a mind-numbingly slow computer: P1-100
w/16MB RAM and a 14k modem (remember those?). Hours after fixing
this thing's email setup and updating it from IE4.0, I was able
to check my email with Earthlink's Webmail service. That went from
execrable to pretty slick and then back to execrable in its last 2
revisions. The latest is larded with Javascript, messages popping
up in a window that's too small or too large, a one-at-a-time
interface for the narrow-minded. We should give developers
underpowered computers with the o/s and apps a few revisions behind
the latest and greatest so that they don't come up with this
"works great on my machine" crap.
I'd write more, but I see that this file is as big as Notepad
can handle. Notepad. What more can I say?
(Nothing, it's out of memory.)
11.Feb.2003
Russ Baker has some
Questions Of Faith
for our president, concering the federal government's support of
religious groups. "I’m assuming you don’t want to make selections, so I
guess you’re good with taxpayer money being used by the Raelians and L.
Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology, the Hare Krishna, and so on?"
On TomPaine.com.
Here's another issue concerning the government trying to limit the
power of juries: so-called "tort reform." TomPaine.com serves up a
series of
articles on the topic, along with the observation that
insurance reform may work better than limiting how much juries
can award deserving plaintiffs. Insurance companies have taken a
beating in the stock market the same as you (may) have, but unlike you,
they can make it up by raising premiums, even as they wail about jury
awards doing them in. (That's why their profits were up almost $12
billion in the first 3 quarters of 2002.) Since money buys influence,
and insurance companies have a lot more money than you do, tort reform
is getting the air time rather than insurance reform.
Do you remember gas lights? Me neither, unless you count the car
kamping mainstay of Coleman lanterns. In a decade or two, incandescent
lights may seem as quaint to us, as
LEDs
take over. The ones I've seen so far (like the blinking taillight
on my bike, going "forever" on a couple AAA batteries, or the traffic
lights or the stop lights on cars) look great.
Doc reports on a
clue
smackdown, courtesy of Coca-Cola: "We will use a diverse array of
entertainment assets to break into people's hearts and minds. In that
order. For this is the way to their wallets. Always has been. Always
will be."
I used to drink Mountain Dew as a kid (in the tall green, 10 cent
bottles), and had the habit as an adult for a while, too. I used to
drink a Coke a day, until an overdue visit to the dentist had me posing
for drilling into 5 teeth some years back. It wasn't that much
fun! Now I find that water adds life, tastes great and is less filling,
and the price is right, too. Coke can have a little piece of my heart,
I don't mind, but no part of my wallet. Go ahead, entertain me, you
little clown.
Spaceflight Now has a
detailed account of Columbia's last minutes, examing what
we have of telemetry, communications, sensor readings and a telling
photograph from a ground-based Air Force tracking camera. It's dated
Feb. 7, but more detailed and informative than I've seen in the
mainstream press. Lots more from their
main index.
It looks like the Big Crunch is off, according to the people who know
how to make sense of a
full sky map of
the oldest light in the universe. Apparently they did not get the
memo that the universe is beige (the color of my blog's background,
in case you were wondering) though, rather than aqua, but the comparison
between COBE's image and the latest one is very, very cool. (The
nominal temperature of the microwave background radiation is 2.73K, just
above absolute zero; the variation has now been mapped to better than
one part in a million.)
NASA's principal investigator for the WMAP project reports on the "gold
mine" of results it has returned: "Number one, we have produced a new
detailed, full-sky picture of our infant universe, the afterglow of the
big bang. Number two, we have discovered the era when the very first
stars in the universe turned on, ignited. Number three, WMAP lays the
cornerstone of a coherent cosmic theory with a new set of accurate and
precise numbers. An example of that is a new determination of the age of
the universe."
The bigger picture is incomprehensible, and unsatisfying: the universe
is said to be made up of 4% ordinary matter, 23% some sort of "dark
matter" we haven't figured out, and the rest -- not quite 3/4ths of it!
-- "dark energy" which we also haven't figured out, but which is
repulsive. As John Bachall of the Institute of Advanced Study at
Princeton puts it, "we have to learn to understand this unattractive
universe because we have no other choice."
The universe became transparent at T + 380,000 years (the story goes),
but it took another 200 million years for there to be any starlight
to shine through it.
Finally, how old is this little bubble of spacetime/energy/matter?
13.7 billion years. Plus or minus 1%.
10.Feb.2003
Bill Moyers' NOW
publicized the
Center for Public Integrity's story about "Patriot 2," the
bundle of "protective" assaults on freedom and democracy that the Bush
Justice Department has been polishing in secret, waiting for the right
time to roll it out. Or maybe the marketing campaign is still
unfinished, you think? This is a package that would sound best during
an undeclared war, or perhaps in the aftermath of the next big terrorist
act on American soil. Turning the temperature up to "Orange" or even
"Red" won't be enough, we need something on the news with live footage
to make secret trials and forced expatriation to sound like a good
idea.
Dick and Dennis (otherwise known as "#2" and "#3") got to see a copy,
but the House Judiciary Committee did not. Folks in the Senate were
told "no such legislation being planned." Hmm, I guess that was a big,
fat lie, wasn't it?
M.W. Guzy, a retired detective who teaches criminology seems like a good
person to tell
this related
story: comparing Desert Redux to Operation Just Cause, that other
Bush I military adventure.
9.Feb.2003
Steve Chapman writes on
Intellivu
about the surprisingly emotional response from conservatives to
Bush's State of the Union speech. David Brooks lauded the
president's "moral vision," of all things. Bush has his strong points,
but only a vivid imagination could number moral vision among them.
The rational part of the call to war -- Hussein's undeterrability,
his irrationality, his links to al Qaeda, his record on torture (as
compared to, say, the Phillipines, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, Egypt)
-- does not withstand the light of dispassionate analysis.
Wendell Berry's
Citizen's response, which ran as a full-page advertisement in
today's NY Times is similarly disenchanted.
Quoting Bush's "we will not hesitate to act alone" statement, Berry
asks about that first person plural:
A democratic citizen must deal here first of all with the question, Who
is this "we"? It is not the "we" of the Declaration of Independence,
which referred to a small group of signatories bound by the conviction
that "governments [derive] their just powers from the consent of the
governed." And it is not the "we" of the Constitution, which refers to
"the people [my emphasis] of the United States."
This "we" of the new strategy can refer only to the president. It is a
royal "we." A head of state, preparing to act alone in starting a
preemptive war, will need to justify his intention by secret
information, and will need to plan in secret and execute his plan
without forewarning. The idea of a government acting alone in preemptive
war is inherently undemocratic, for it does not require or even permit
the president to obtain the consent of the governed....
One reviewer thought it was a "fine paper," before the news
(and now the admission) that the authors pulled it together from "a
variety of sources." The subtitle was "Its Infrastructure of Concealment,
Deception and Intimidation," but there seems to be some competition for
who the "it" shall refer to.
Speaking of defending the Constitution, Jacob Sullum's
column in Reason
online gets to the heart of the matter in the case against Ed
Rosenthal: juries are our last resort against the tyranny of the state.
That's why jury tampering is such a serious crime, unless of course it's
the judge that's doing it. If you're on a jury, remember what Nancy
Reagan told us:
Just say No!
(Thanks to reader Lee Killough for more links on the case, and for
setting me straight on what year this is.)
Lee also sends a pointer to The Memory Hole, a site acting as that
Orwellian repository where things "go away," but what makes it
interesting is that the web means they're still here.
Mystery
Nations Aided 9/11 Plot is one banner headline you didn't
see, after the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
talked on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Could it have been...
Saudi Arabia? We damn well know it wasn't Afghanistan or Iraq he was
talking about, because the administration would have been writing the
headlines for that revelation in its own PR.
"Half of Wisconsin's residents favor requiring that public schools teach
the biblical theory of creation along with evolution, according to a
poll conducted by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center."
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the merged remnant of the two newspapers
from my hometown
reports
with this rather astounding observation on the state of science
awareness. You can almost hear the respondents thinking, "since I don't
have a clue, one story seems about as good as another to me."
8.Feb.2003
I got out to the corner of Milwaukee and Fairview for another of the
weekly peace demonstrations. Probably the nicest weather we've had in a
month, with sunshine, but the temperature not too high in the 40s, and a
brisk wind. The turnout was slimmer than
last time, but the 30 or so of us were
in good spirits spreading our terse messages against war. I was
standing next to a fellow with a "Honk" sort of sign (which had amusing
and contradictory fine print that read "Don't [Honk] it's illegal...")
that prompted lots of responses. We got cheerful waves, and thumbs up,
and a few thumbs down, and one pantomimed gun shot. Sentiment was
running better than 15:1 in favor of our demonstrated sentiments.
There were a few men who tried to express their contrary opinions
en passant, mostly failing to make themselves understood or to
demonstrate coherent thought. One guy on a motorcycle was shouting into
his full helmet as he drove off and we couldn't make out a single word.
Another stylin' dude in yellow fleece and yellow sunglasses made a go at
spewing out his most risable pro-war invective to get a reaction out of
us. I smiled sweetly at him and said "you don't really believe that."
He didn't skip a beat until he had to save his elbow from the woman
driving hitting the mute button on him, powering up his window.
One fellow two lanes over with some time on his hands at the green light
leaned over to roll down his window, and with my full attention,
launched into his rant: "If you hate this country so much, why don't
you just move outta here!" I love my country, I replied. "You
pervert!" was his clever rejoinder. I admit, this left me struggling to
connect some dots, but I tried "God bless you, man" to see if a kind
word does indeed turn away wrath. (It didn't in this case. Maybe if
I'd been closer to him.) After some curse about long hair (my
buddy's, I cut my hair just this week), his last try was "get a job!"
eliciting nothing but warm chuckles from the two of us, both
gainfully employed and enjoying our weekend.
Kasparov was happy not to lose, and Deep Junior wasn't able to beat him,
so we're going to
call it a draw. This time.
If you remember a group named "Chaos," it may be as the nemesis of
secret agent Maxwell Smart on the 1960's TV series
"Get Smart"
(although technically, that was "KAOS"). Coincidentally(?), there was a
no-joke Operation CHAOS back then, which the ACLU characterizes as "the
CIA’s most notorious political spying and harassment program," which
"collected dossiers on upwards of 7,000 Americans." Sounds like it's
just what we need today, eh? Indeed, one of Bush's pitches in the State
of the Union speech was for
a new
umbrella agency, headed by the CIA for just that sort of thing,
and much, much more.
 |
Charles Sheehan-Miles, a 20-year-old Abrams tank crewman in Gulf War I,
has started Veterans
for Common Sense to oppose GWII.
"I can say from personal experience, the media
got it wrong. The first Gulf War wasn't clean, it wasn't pretty, and it
wasn't precise. In the chaos and destruction of battle, anything can
happen. We killed a lot of people." Of course, those were mostly Iraqi
people, so we didn't have to care too much about it at home.
The BBC reports
that British intelligence rejects the claim that there is a current
Iraqi-al Qaeda link.
(And the
US intelligence agencies don't believe what Bush is selling either.)
Such a link of course is a big selling point for the war: we were
attacked, we must return fire. But blindly?! Of course the plan to get
after Iraq predates the terrorism of 9/11, and is far from a blind rage.
That's what gives the whole thing the stink of pretense. It wouldn't be
surprising if Iraq and al Qaeda do (soon) find reason for common cause
-- they share an enemy who is ready and apparently eager and willing to
kill their people.
There is also the
Constitutional issue, which Congress punted on last October.
Did they give Bush a blank check? Given enough air time and
so-secret-we-can-only-share-little-bits intelligence (real, fabricated
or plagiarized), the Bush administration seems ready and willing to
market any military adventure to the public, defying the UN in the
bargain, as if this is a sign of strength. Yes, we can defy the UN, but
it is a sign of stupidity more than strength, I'm afraid.
Is there an imminent threat from Iraq? Is it not possible to deter
Iraq's belligerence, short of a preemptive war upon them? These are the
points that don't stand up well to scrutiny, but they are not being (and
I suspect will not be) addressed directly by the people making the
decisions. The questions are certainly out of Congress' hands, by their
own doing. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt provide a historical
background to the Iraq situation and illustrate why the claim that
Hussein is undeterrable is false. Too bad Blair and Bush aren't
plagiarizing better sources.
If you're fascinated by those tiny little dot portraits in the Wall
Street Journal (they call them "hedcuts") but can't handle the rest of
the newspaper, you can stop in at the
Smithsonian
National Portrait Gallery and enjoy a show around artwork donated by
the Journal. Thanks to the Scout
Report for turning up that gem.
And they tell me that
the Devil's Dictionary
is now online. For example...
AGE, n. That period of life in which we compound for the vices
that we still cherish by reviling those that we have no longer the
enterprise to commit.
7.Feb.2003
One German politician noted that
"Rumsfeld is no diplomat." Wie sagt man "DUH!" auf Deutsch?
The
GAO backs down and our vice president gets to keep his wheeling and
dealing with corporate kingpins secret with his "just say no" disclosure
strategy.
The radio news this morning said something about North Korea
threatening a "pre-emptive" strike on the US, and I couldn't help
but notice the eerie parallel between US and NK tactics. "I know you
are, but what am I?" I seem to recall the way to break such deadlocks
is to admit "I'm an idiot," the other guy is tricked into admitting that
he, too, is an idiot, we all have a good laugh and start a new game.
Tony Blair didn't get his homework done in time, and so he
cobbled something together from some stuff he found on the web.
One wonders how strong the case for war can be if this is the kind of
supporting documentation proponents come up with. One also wonders
about the quality of the staff that would cut and paste without even
editing the typos out of the original. And finally, one wonders if Mr.
Blair is going to keep his job much longer.
6.Feb.2003
When we contemplated a temporary move to a foreign land (well almost,
California), we realized our friendly local ISP was not going to be able
to make the trip. I asked "what ISP should I use?" one day at lunch
with coworkers, and one fellow answered without hesitation: Earthlink.
That was a worth a month's free ride for him, eventually, as we switched
and stayed. My website used to be there (in the "free" 5MB, now 10MB?
of web space), before it became fortboise.org. Now, we get a fairly
reliable dialup connection, email service with good spam blocking and
web access, and... well, what else is there for them to provide?
Our need for technical support is nil (as long as their reliability
holds up), so the main thing they could do is charge less, but I don't
think they're going to do that. They'd like to charge more
actually, and sell us broadband, but we haven't bitten yet.
I was never interested in their "easy to use" prepackaged stuff, as I
already knew how to work email, surf the web, use ftp, etc. Now I hear
from Cringely that their "Total Access 2003" is worse than bad, but more
like a
Trojan
horse. In exchange for blocking popups, "Total Access 2003 trashes
your e-mail, can't import favorites into the new browser, and it has
automatic updates, which means Earthlink can load anything else it likes
onto your system at any time. And it can't be uninstalled." What are
these people smoking? From
their point of
view it's your "launchpad to the internet." Thank goodness I'm
inoculated by not having their minimum O/S - win98 (soon to be obsolete,
btw, even obsoleter than my win95).
Oh, and pop-ups? With Opera's tabbed browsing, I just right-click on
the suspicious tabs and Close them without ever seeing them.
5.Feb.2003
The "protato" - potatoes enhanced with a gene from Amaranth to
produce a third more protein, with extra amino acids lysine and
methionine. Selective breeding of food crops is OK (presumably), can
the anti-GM crowd accept this?
Internet Week looks at building a better browser.
Game 4 is a draw, and it's
2 pts.
apiece for Kasparov and Deep Junior. Man and machine are tied.
Bananas not on the verge of extinction, says the
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN.
Reading articles about nanotechnology, it seems that every press release
author is required to mention that a nanometer is one billionth of
a meter. Since that's not particularly meaningful compared to anything we
can experience, they add something like "a fraction the width of a human
hair." Well, micrometers ("microns" for short) are a fraction the
width of a human hair, too... and since any number can be expressed as a
fraction, everything is a fraction of the width of a human hair.
How about this: a nanometer compares to a meter the same way your
forearm compares to a trip to the moon.
1 out of 20 (a record turnout) of the
voters
in Boise's Auditorium District rejected the Convention center,
as they reelected the incumbents on the board that brought the proposal
to the voters, go figure. The district gets to try again, of course...
better luck next time, maybe in May.
4.Feb.2003
The Action Group on Erosion,
Technology and Concentration, otherwise known by its abbreviation
for et cetera (and previously known by the less catchy
"Rural Advancement Foundation International"), is stirring the nanotech
pot with fears of runaway technology. "The Big Down: Atomtech -
Technologies Converging at the Nano-scale" is an 80 page manifesto,
urging us to hold on just a dang minute. "The ETC Group proposes that
governments declare an immediate moratorium on commercial production of
new nanomaterials and launch a transparent global process for evaluating
the socioeconomic, health and environmental implications of the
technology."
Hmm, caution is warranted, but I have to wonder if they have any other
proposals that might have more than a snowball's chance in hell of going
anywhere. Turn off all "new nanomaterials"? Even if we had a governing
body with scope and jurisdiction, they'd be fussing over what that term
meant for years. (Of course, the lack of a forum to discuss
regulation, much less a governing body is one of their concerns.)
If Appendix B is any indication, the paper might serve as a good
introduction to the subject, though. I haven't read the whole thing
just yet...
Joel Spolsky finds himself a Canadian colo and lives to tell about it.
The colo gets some
great word
of mouth advertising for contributing some bandwidth and 2Us of rack
space.
One of the benefits of spam (no really!) is that it creates a shared
cultural context for humor. This
send-up of the
Nigerian money-handling scam is elegantly done (although I don't
really think it needs to be in ALL CAPS, DOES IT?). I hope someone has
sent it in email to Nigeria...
"I KNOW THAT A TRANSACTION OF THIS MAGNITUDE WOULD MAKE ANYONE
APPREHENSIVE AND WORRIED. BUT I AM ASSURING YOU THAT ALL WILL BE WELL AT
THE END OF THE DAY. A BOLD STEP TAKEN SHALL NOT BE REGRETTED, I ASSURE
YOU."
I forgot to mention the
graupel yesterday morning - little pellets of snow falling down and
somehow keeping their 6 points on the way. They looked like little
cartoon snowflakes. I learned their name when I told a friend at work
about them and he said, "oh, graupel?" Aka "soft hail." I guess when
things get fully graupelized, there aren't any points left, but then
they wouldn't have caught my eye, and you wouldn't be reading about
them.
3.2.3
A bonus palindromic date today, tersely symmetric in 2 of 3 numbering
methods.
My comment about cell phones elicited a reply from my Buffalo
readership, asking me "really?" about my claim to $.05/min long
distance. Well, no, not really, it's that and a $.50 minimum
and now a $2.95/mo fee. That last bit had escaped my notice, so
thanks for the heads-up, jqt.
I did notice that VarTec sent me something in the mail last week,
and that they hinted that "fees may be increasing in some areas," but
scanning the 8-sided foldout's fine print did not turn up anything
explicit. I sent it to recycling, but checking
their website today revealed the
new regime. Bummer. I gave a call to their "customer care" line and
let them know I thought it was b.s. that they didn't have the honesty to
tell me in big print about their rate increase. The first line at CC
probably sends that sort of complaint to the bit bucket, but I had to
try.
As a side note, his (?) voice sounded rather strange, semi-robotic as if
I was talking with a relative of Stephen Hawking's. And the accent was
impossible to place, rather like someone from Jamaica or India or
Australia trying to fake an American accent and not succeeding. I asked
him where he was from, and he said "we're not allowed to reveal that."
In some recent story about outsourcing, I recall reading that American
accent coaching was part of the deal. I hope this guy hasn't graduated,
yet.
Anyway, it's time to go
shopping for
VarTec's replacement, I guess. Everdial looks like
the front runner, $.06/min (billed in .01 increments), no monthly fee,
and no other tricks, but you have to sign up ahead of time.
Oops, scratch that! Their in-state rate in Idaho is
no good, $.22/min (your state may vary!). How about WorldxChange, with
a $.40 minimum (better than the $.50 minimum we've been living with),
$.049/min after the 10 minute minimum, and $.065/min-ish (with the 9.5%
USF) within Idaho on the Penny Plan.
Whew.
www.10-10phonerates.com
is a great resource to cut through this morass. Now we just need
someone to do that for cell phones, but it's probably 10 times
more complicated.
Groundhog Day
It was sunny here, anyway, with ice in the shadows and a brisk NW wind
after yesterday's rain. If
Punxsutawney Phil were in Idaho,
he would've been scared by his shadow, and guaranteed us 6 more weeks of
winter. Tell that to the crocuses, tulips and irises that are sending
up shoots right now!
Terry Tempest Williams tells us why we should care about
Groundhog Day, with some praire dogs
in the
shadow of extinction.
The NY Times offers to
solve the Cellphone maze for us, but I'm skeptical. I haven't found
a pressing need for a mobile phone just yet, and I have an adverse
reaction to people trying to sell me things without making all of the
details explicit. "They're trying to cheat me," I think to myself.
"(T)he average mobile phone customer spends $50 to $55 a month for
service and uses 500 to 600 minutes a month. But the industry spends
$300 to $400 a person to acquire each customer..."
I'm sure we don't spend hundreds of minutes on the phone each month (as
long as we don't count the dialup time!), and our average bill is closer
to $40 than $50 for our landline and all our long distance (at
$.05/min.). If someone wants to "acquire" us for $300, they must be
expecting to milk the deal for a while.
The only really solid advice in the article is what you knew already:
"it makes sense to talk to your colleagues or your neighbors before
selecting a plan."
3.2.1 (get it?)
Saturday mornings are usually pleasant affairs, time to sleep in a
little, roll over and turn on the radio to hear our favorite DJ's
show. The news headline "Columbia shuttle missing" was a punch
in the gut, though. It seems small comfort to know that it wasn't
the result of sabotage or terrorism, and even less to know that's
now the first thing we wonder about.
Condolences to the family and friends of the 7 intrepid explorers who
gave their lives in the quest at the frontier of knowledge.
News of the
conviction by a federal jury of Ed Rosenthal is more bad news. For
growing plants that provide medical benefits, he faces a minimum
sentence of 5 years in prison. I can't fathom the logic that imagines
this to make our society a better place. On top of the direct
injustice, there is the fact that the federal government has overridden
the will of California voters. I suspect that if the jury had been
aware of their power of
nullification, the result might have been different.
When John Ashcroft was a Senator, and Bill Clinton was in the White
House, he had
a
slightly different point of view:
"The state's interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate
the citizens' Bill of Rights."
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
ISSN 1534-0007
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Friday, 14-Mar-2003 15:15:45 MST
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