Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting in 1974, as well as a variety of other work experience, but have been, in recent years, recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring major clinical depression and bipolar disorder. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. I'm available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The lutefisk is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this gefilte fish.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 618
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 30 sign-ups; 24 cancellations; Total= 6
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 7 sign-ups; 3 cancellation; Total= 4
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 10 sign-ups; 6 cancellations; Total= 4
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub,"
chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer
to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals." (Note: I have to say I don't give that much of a damn any more.)
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying.
(Note: Partially suspended for the Duration. Later note: forget I ever said this.)
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog.
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object.
-- Hilzoy
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
THE EKPYROTIC UNIVERSE. John Scalzi explains the difference between how science is actually challenged, and creationism. He does this by way of briefly and clearly explaining the "brane" theory of creation. This after arousing the ire of Creationists here with a post on the much-discussed proposal that Georgia delete the word "evolution" from their curriculuum.
So, why is this good science?
1. It attempts to explain the observed data collected about the universe.
2. It does not start from a conclusion about the nature of the universe and work its way backward.
3. Those who have presented the hypothesis work in the field and know its intricacies -- indeed, one of of the presenters helped create the current "best-fit" model of the universe.
4. The presenters questioned their own hypothesis extensively and critically over a significant amount of time before presenting it to their peers -- i.e., performed due diligence.
5. They have presented it for peer review and accept the idea that it may be incorrect and recognize the need for data to support their hypothesis.
Should we teach the ekpyrotic universe in our schools alongside the Big Bang, as an alternate theory of the creation of the universe? No -- because there's not enough data to support its hypothesis one way or the other. And certainly if its fundamental theses are disproved by data, it should be tossed aside as a viable theory -- much like the "Steady State" theory was displaced by the Big Bang theory. We might briefly note it as an example of an alternate theory (and I should note that in my own astronomy book, I do just that -- giving it a paragraph in a sidebar about alternate theories), but until it proves itself viable, it doesn't merit displacing the current model or being taught as a "separate-but-equal" alternative.
This is how science is challenged: Thoughtfully, carefully and in service to the universe as it is, not how we wish it to be. Would that all those who wish to their "theories" considered in our places of learning were so devoted to the processes of science, and willing to have it challenged before proclaiming it as a viable "alternative."
THE OBJECT OF EMULATION. Some examples of speech-writing for the current crop of Presidential candidates to study:
"Progression is not proclamation nor palaver," began his speech nominating William Howard Taft at the 1912 convention. "It is not pretense nor play on prejudice. It is not of personal pronouns nor perennial pronouncement. It is not the perturbation of a people passion-wrought, nor a promise proposed...."
In the 1920 campaign he used a memorable stream of alliterations to tell the country what to expect of a Harding presidency:
not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality.
As the famous quote goes:
Senator William McAdoo described his mature speeches as "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea."
Suggestion for a slogan for one candidate: "Return To Joenormalcy!"
Read The Rest as interested if you want to see the interesting meeting of John W. Dean and Warren Harding, as narrated by Russell Baker.
NOT THE SCHOOL OF ROCK. Inspired by the Jack Black film, the Guardian gathered several 6 and 7-year-olds, played them some classic rock, and asked them what they thought. The results: pretty hilarious.
Gabrielle Argh! Vampires!
Beth Ooh, I think this is by my dad.
Ben This is rock music but you could play it at a disco.
Benjamin Yeah, at a dude disco.
Sophie No, not Australia, somewhere like Australia but different.
THE VERY MORAL, ANTI-WAR EU. Peace is the new way for Europe. In this it contrasts with the militaristic United States, whose arms, along with Israel's, are a threat to the whole world. Right?
The Bush administration has quietly lodged a series of formal protests with the European Union and its members in an attempt to persuade the body not to lift its 14-year ban on weapons sales to China, according to diplomats from several European countries.
China has stepped up its campaign to persuade the European Union to end the arms embargo it adopted after the Chinese military's violent 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. France and Germany have already sided with the Chinese and succeeded in pushing the EU to conduct an unprecedented review of the embargo.
LEO FRANK AND MARY PHAGAN. I don't know if you've heard of this famous case that took place in 1913 in Atlanta, Georgia, but in the guise of a book review, as is the norm, the New York Review of Books has a superb recounting.
I remark from time to time that many Jews, having some knowledge of the long course of three thousand years of anti-semitism, remain always alarmed at possibilities of recurrence. Here's a typical example why:
Mary Phagan was a country girl, her family part of the haggard Southern yeomanry that, with the onset of industrialization in post-bellum Georgia, had forsaken the land for the bleak mill villages around Atlanta. She was auburn-haired and blue-eyed, with ruddy cheeks, and was said to have an eager and sprightly nature. Little more is known of her beyond, as Oney reports, the fact that she was entranced with the new glamour of the movies. She had been working since the age of ten, most recently for about a year in the National Pencil Factory. On the morning of the day she was to die—Saturday, April 26, 1913—"after eating a breakfast of cabbage and wheat biscuits," in Oney's striking opening line, she had dressed and boarded a trolley car for downtown Atlanta to pick up her pay envelope of $1.20.
[...]
But many of its factories were flourishing on child labor, Georgia law allowing ten-year-olds to work as long as eleven hours a day. The dispossessed country folk like Mary Phagan's family, from whom those child laborers came, felt a sullen resentment at their desperate dependence on that license. It was a rancor, with many of the factories owned by Jewish entrepreneurs, that would smolder throughout the trial following Mary Phagan's death.
[...]
While Atlanta had long shown an unusually easy and hospitable acceptance of the Jewish families settled in its midst, neither they nor Frank could have been unaware that they made their home in a region of raw racism. Though the Klan with its anti-Semitic vituperations had been fairly dormant since the 1870s, lynchings continued at a brisk pace—in Georgia, there would be 508 of them between 1882 and 1930, twenty-two in 1915 alone. But this readiness for vigilante execution had seemed almost exclusively occupied with African-Americans, and Atlanta's Jews maintained a resolute cheerfulness about the comfortable normalcy of their own place in the community.
[...]
However bizarre and unlikely these notes seemed, police suspicions quickly settled on Leo Frank, principally owing to his behavior when they arrived at his house early Sunday morning to notify him of Mary Phagan's murder. It was a time when much melodramatic import was placed on particulars of manner, and police would later testify that Frank paced about his front parlor "nervous" and "excited," blurting questions as he twisted his hands, his voice "hoarse and trembling." Being aroused early on a morning to receive such macabre news from two bluff and baleful Atlanta police officers might have been enough to unnerve anyone. But it was to be presented as additionally incriminating that when Frank was taken to the factory site, he answered detectives' queries with explanations that struck them as too elaborately voluble and that, on being taken to a mortuary, he had turned away from the sight of Mary Phagan's body lying on the concrete slab. On little more evidence than this, he was formally arrested a day later and put in Atlanta's city jail.
The murder notes, though, remained something of a puzzle until the factory's twenty-nine-year-old black sweeper, James Conley, was also arrested when seen at the factory's water cooler trying to wash out red stains from a work shirt. Having been frequently jailed before for drunk and disorderly conduct, once for attempted armed robbery, with two terms on Georgia chain gangs, Conley now offered up a succession of contradictory avowals—including, initially, that he couldn't read or write. But under the sort of strenuous interrogation Southern lawmen could apply to a black subject, he finally professed that Frank, after killing the girl on the factory's second floor in a ravishment attempt gone awry, had enlisted his aid in transporting her body in the elevator down to the basement, and then dictated to him the murder notes, with the rather improbable remark to him, Conley claimed, "Why should I hang, I have wealthy people in Brooklyn."
Meanwhile, public fevers had already begun gathering. On the afternoon of Frank's visit to the funeral home, some ten thousand local folk had also collected there to shuffle past an open casket holding Mary Phagan's body, and Frank's subsequent arrest was announced by a local paper, above a photo of him, "POLICE HAVE THE STRANGLER," in what had become a free-for-all among the city's three newspapers of clangoring headlines like "NEIGHBORS OF SLAIN GIRL CRY FOR VENGEANCE." This rising clamor stirred no little unease among those in Atlanta's Jewish community sensitive to the precariousness of their position in a society into which they had assiduously strived to absorb themselves. After a somewhat raffishly opportunistic local attorney was found to have offered money for stolen police documents that might compromise the case against Frank, he simply counter-blustered that the police had "sold out to the Jews for big money" to humiliate him in order "to protect this damned Jew." Thus, only a month after Frank's arrest, what Atlanta's Jews feared most—an outbreak of anti-Semitic antipathies lurking in the populace—was loosed into the air.
[...]
Instead, those proceedings to decide Frank's fate turned into largely a tournament of competing racisms. It was one of the few instances in the South of a white man, in every other way impeccably respectable, being tried for a capital crime mainly on the testimony of, as Conley was characterized by the defense, "a plain, beastly, drunken, filthy, lying nigger...fired with lust...." In fact, the racial derision of Conley was heartily participated in by all parties, including the press, one reporter pointing out, "Conley isn't a cornfield negro. He's more of the present-day type of city darkey," and even The New York Times would eventually describe him as a "drunken, lowlived, utterly worthless...black human animal." But the prosecution as well concurred in the racist caricaturing of its central witness, Dorsey declaring, about Frank's reluctance to directly confront Conley before the trial, "never in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race...did an ignorant, filthy negro accuse a white man of a crime and that man decline to face him."
The telling difference in that formulation, of course, was that Frank didn't happen to be of the Anglo-Saxon race. And as if in acknowledgment of that liability, a defense lawyer insisted, "Frank's race don't kill. They are not a violent race," and later, the defense felt it had to stipulate that one of its witnesses was, "it's true, a Jew, but she was telling the truth." The defense finally risked arousing exactly what it was protesting by claiming that Frank had only invited prosecution because he "comes from a race of people that have made money." To counter that suggestion, Dorsey intoned that while "this great people rise to heights sublime...they sink to the depths of degradation, too," mentioning among a list of Jewish malefactors Judas Iscariot, "a good character and one of the Twelve" who nevertheless "took the thirty pieces of silver and betrayed our Lord Jesus Christ."
It wasn't long before these two contending racisms would be joined by the offstage vociferations of Georgia's raucous demagogue Tom Watson. A scruffy populist evangel descended from Jefferson's old dream of a democracy of small farmers, Watson had originally labored to mobilize, against the advent of the industrial Gilded Age financed by Wall Street, an alliance between the poor whites and blacks of the South. But after a defeat for reelection to Congress and then as the vice-presidential nominee of William Jennings Bryan's Populist Party, Watson by 1913 had retreated into a rancorous vilification of not only blacks but Catholics and Jews. He wrote in his weekly The Jeffersonian, as the trial began to catch the appalled attention of the national press, "It seems that Negroes are good enough to hold office, sleep in our beds, eat at our tables, marry our daughters, and mongrelize the Anglo-Saxon race, but are not good enough to bear testimony against a rich Jew!"; "the fact" was, he quoted from a dingily anti-Semitic volume of the time, "pleasure loving Jewish businessmen spare Jewesses, but PURSUE GENTILE GIRLS...." Before things were over with, Watson's weekly had tripled its readership to almost 100,000 across the state.
[...]
After a trial lasting a month, the jury took only an hour and forty-five minutes to declare Frank guilty. The throng of five thousand outside the courtroom broke into a tumult of celebration, hats tossed in the air, and when Dorsey emerged, he was hoisted up and passed by jubilant hands over the heads of the crowd. The next morning, Frank was sentenced to hang, and shortly thereafter, the jurors, Dorsey, the judge, and reporters congregated at a park for a convivial barbecue with catfish and Brunswick stew.
But Atlanta's Jewish citizens had been left profoundly shaken by the trial's revelations of the anti-Semitic sentiment lingering in the society where they had with such determined optimism chosen to make their lives. Even so, against the pronounced misgivings of some Jewish leaders, others now mounted within the nation's Jewish community—which would later evolve into the Anti-Defamation League—a campaign to appeal to the whole country's conscience, for a rejection of the plainly anti-Semitic verdict against Frank. The publisher Adolph Ochs, after an initial reluctance to involve his New York Times lest it be perceived as simply "a Jewish newspaper," finally opened its pages to a series of condemnatory reports and editorials. And before long, the Frank case had amplified into a national scandal, with protests in magazines and newspapers from Boston to Milwaukee to Houston, and popular appeals for clemency and a new trial from an array of governors and senators and figures ranging from Boston's mayor James Curley to Jane Addams, Thomas Edison, even, improbably, Henry Ford.
Yet for the most part, the national furor only had the effect in Georgia of producing a popular backfire of indignation over being maligned by outsiders, and an intractable resolve that Frank must hang. That reaction was especially invigorated by the invective of Tom Watson in The Jeffersonian: "The pure little Gentile victim is dust in the grave, while the Sodomite who took her sweet young life basks in the warmth..., the be-flowered pet" of a national solicitude promoted by "millionaire Jews." And he delivered, in his usual circus-poster effusion of punctuation and typefaces, clear exhortations to a lynching: "If Frank's rich connections keep on lying about this case, SOMETHING BAD WILL HAPPEN."
TRIPPIED UP. Long, in the end, sad, profile of Joe Trippi, done in a very intimate way. A few excerpts:
"WHAT?" he screams into his cell phone. It's Kristen Morgante—his fiercely capable assistant, a pretty 24-year-old who often prefaces her reports to Joe with "Listen, asshole." "His mom's gonna be calling me? ME? About what?" He moans like he's just been stabbed. "Why, Kristen, why?" It turns out Howard's mother is concerned that her son is worn-out and wants to discuss this with Trippi. Like a lot of people, Mrs. Dean is apparently under the impression that Howard actually listens to everything Trippi tells him.
A minute later, Kristen calls back. Now the man himself is trying to reach him, she reports. "Fuck!" Trippi says. He's lost his signal. He contemplates what could be so important to Howard this late at night. He's dialing like a madman and finally gets through to headquarters. Howard didn't say anything, um, wrong today, did he? Not today. The only glitch was when Howard veered off his prepared speech, the one they'd handed out to the press. "He delivered the first one and a half pages of it," Trippi explains. "He promised to deliver the first three pages of it and then go off." He laughs. "But that's one of the reasons people like Howard Dean. He's unscripted. He speaks extemporaneously. And I don't wanna mess with that." Well...maybe sometimes. "When I leave, I'm terrified. Half the shit he's had to apologize for is stuff the staff did when I was on the road."
And the other half?
"You can't tell him what to say. I mean, you just can't. It pisses me off sometimes."
[...]
But the tears first come when he talks about...Kevin Costner.
Kevin Costner?
"You don't get it," he says.
Costner, it turns out, did a treacly movie called For Love of the Game that is well-known in the Dean campaign as "Trippi's movie." When he first tells me that I have to watch it to unnerstand him, he insists that I not say in print that he told me to watch it. Until I discover that Joe Trippi has told everyone in the Burlington headquarters to watch the movie. So they could unnerstand him. It's about an old pro baseball player, he explains, "who's pitching the game of his life, knowing"—drama-queen pause—"that it's his last game." He gets choked up. "That's what's going on here," he says. "This is it for me."
There is one particular scene in the movie that so resonates with Trippi that the young members of his staff will frequently walk into his office and shout the line. It's when the catcher approaches Costner on the mound and says: "We suck, but right now we're the greatest team in baseball."
He pulls himself together. "I don't usually come unglued," he lies. Then he shouts: "We SUCK, but right now we're the greatest team in baseball!"
Almost on cue, his little dog, Kasey—an overly caffeinated terrier who appears on the Dean Web site as the "director of canine outreach"—comes scampering into his office. "Kasey!" says Joe. "Sit!" He rises from his desk and stands menacingly over the dog. "Would you rather work for John Kerry or be dead?" The dog whimpers. "WOULD YOU RATHER WORK FOR JOHN KERRY OR BE DEAD?" Kasey rolls over and acts dead.
"Good girl! Good girl!"
Some excellent stories here; very flavorful. I love this stuff, because, y'know, politics is my sports. And Trippi is my kind of amiable passionate nutbar.
Read The Rest as interested. (Fans of The West Wing should give it a try; picture a younger, crazier, more Internety, more frenetic, non-Jewish Toby Ziegler.)
Congressional and CIA investigations into the prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons and links to terrorism have found no evidence that CIA analysts colored their judgment because of perceived or actual political pressure from White House officials, according to intelligence officials and congressional officials from both parties.
Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy CIA director who is leading the CIA's review of its prewar Iraq assessment, said an examination of the secret analytical work done by CIA analysts showed that it remained consistent over many years.
"There was pressure and a lot of debate, and people should have a lot of debate, that's quite legitimate," Kerr said. "But the bottom line is, over a period of several years," the analysts' assessments "were very consistent. They didn't change their views."
Kerr's findings mirror those of two probes being conducted separately by the House and Senate intelligence committees, which have interviewed, under oath, every analyst involved in assessing Iraq's weapons programs and terrorist ties.
[...]
There were instances before the war in which intelligence analysts said they sensed pressure to reach certain conclusions, but the House and Senate investigators said there was no indication they bowed to such wishes.
Last year, for example, some analysts at the CIA complained to senior officials when Vice President Cheney made multiple trips to CIA headquarters to question their studies of Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda.
And analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency told investigators they sensed pressure when civilian Defense Department leaders constantly questioned why their analysis had found only tentative links between al Qaeda and Iraq.
But "their constant message" to congressional investigators was "they didn't buckle to pressure," another congressional official said.
Neither the CIA inspector general nor the agency's ombudsmen received any complaints about outside meddling, a senior intelligence official said. Added one congressional official: "There were no anonymous calls, no letters, nothing."
People of my predilection were/are prone to conclude or assume that part of the responsibility for the conclusion that the WMD stockpiles existed lay in pressure from the Administration. Now, it shouldn't escape anyone's attention that both Congressional investigations are run by the Republican majority, and that there's still potential bureaucratic pressure not to complain.
Nonetheless, I'm not going to insist that my prejudices are correct in the face of no evidence. If it's not there (at this time), it's not there, just like the WMDs themselves. In neither case does it do to not face reality-as-we-know-it and make claims supported only by our preferences, rather than by, you know, mere evidence.
IT'S THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY; IT'S NOT A BLOOD OATH. Rather wrenching examination of the black voting community in rural South Carolina, and how the Democrats are losing them by ignoring them and taking them for granted.
Countywide, unemployment is 14.5 percent and the average wage is $8.72 an hour, but a more palpable measure of the area's financial state is the generous presence downtown of pawnshops and all manner of loan-fixer and car-title repurchaser.
[...]
More than 27 percent of the county's households survive on $15,000 a year or less, a condition of persistent poverty that ensnares so much of the South, especially the rural Black Belt.
[...]
And everyone says it: the poor have been written off. The poor, the state, the South. Who's next?
[...]
''If you want to know what's wrong with the Democratic Party, just look right here. There's this perception that there's a strong Democratic toehold in Orangeburg County, but really the party itself is almost nonexistent. There's no real concerted effort to involve young people. And at the state level, until the old guard got thrown out in '02, it was like, to hell with the base vote.''
Separately, each woman noted that the former state party chairman, Dick Harpootlian, who is white, had once quipped, ''I don't want to buy the black vote; I just want to rent it for a day.'' That was in 1986, he told me, an offhand joke that no one takes seriously, adding that as a state and a country, ''we've got to get beyond racial division, and we can't seem to do that.'' Memories are long; the three women were not the first to mention his quotation to me. Nor were they the first to assert that white Democrats would jump party (and have) before accepting black leadership. Or to say they'd felt used by the former Democratic governor, Jim Hodges, who was elected in 1998 with the help of black party activists and who then, some say, ignored black, poor and working-class voters.
Many fault Hodges for skimping on grass-roots campaigning in his 2002 re-election bid. He went down on Nov. 5, Cobb-Hunter's birthday. It was, her friends joked, the best present she got. '''Y'all ain't got nowhere to go,' Dick Harpootlian would tell me in meetings for the 2002 cycle,'' she said. '''Are they gonna vote Republican?''' One of her best friends, a born Democrat, did. More than 10,000 South Carolinians left the top of the ballot blank or, like at least one of Cobb-Hunter's fellow legislators, voted for Kevin Gray, a black write-in candidate. Gray, who later served as an adviser to Carol Moseley Braun's campaign, studied state Election Commission statistics and found that almost 289,000 blacks stayed home in the 2002 election, more than went to the polls.
The state Democratic Party executive director, Nu Wexler, maintains that as a percentage of overall turnout, that was among the better recent performances, which can't be reassuring. In any event, it's hard to overstate the residual bitterness. Just last November the Rev. Hayes Gainey of Edisto Fork United Methodist Church, in Cobb-Hunter's district, got ''amens'' when in a Sunday sermon he mentioned black voters' feeling of being used and abused by the Democrats, specifically noting 2002. It's a sensitivity that carries over in assessing national candidates now. ''John Kerry had his people in Orangeburg one night,'' Gainey told me. ''They were trying to push his platform to a group of us, and one of them says, 'If we decide to use you -.' Well, 'Hold on,' I said. 'You're not going to use anyone in this room. If we decide to support John Kerry's campaign, we'll let you know.' Thought to myself, Man, you talking to us as if you're the pimp and we're the workers.''
[...]
Some 260,000 eligible black voters in South Carolina aren't registered. Added to registered no-shows, that means half a million or so African-Americans are ''missing voters,'' a group sizable enough to turn any statewide election for the Democrats -- if they saw a reason to. But everyone I met who's doing voter registration in town, on campus or in the countryside said they're up against it. Cheeseboro recalled that two years ago, ''folks actually ran me out their yard. They'd say: 'Get out! I'm not voting. I don't want anything to do with it. Ain't nothin' gonna change.' I have heard that over and over again.''
You can't take people for granted. And, moreover, both Democrats and Republicans have been fixated for the past thirty-five years on "the middle-class." Remember when the Democratic Party had an anti-poverty agenda? Whatever happened to that?
Read The Rest if interested; it's a well-written piece, mostly told through characters.
SHIA RISING. No great revelations, but a good summary of the growth of Shiite political power in Iraq.
A few excerpts:
For centuries, Najaf and Karbala were among the principal places of pilgrimage for pious Shiites. They were also the places for funerals. Religious injunctions encouraged the faithful to bury their dead in these cities' vast cemeteries. Iraqis call it the ''coffin trade,'' and it has gone on for centuries, to the point that Najaf today really is as much a city of the dead as of the living. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, there is a constant movement of coffins in and out of the mosques, some accompanied by vast motorcade corteges, others by a few elderly men barely able to carry the casket through the mosque entrance. You see the cars, coffins strapped on top, leaving Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad for the south, and in Najaf, you see buses taking mourners back to these same Baghdad neighborhoods, the most popular destination being Sadr City.
At every major Shiite shrine, elderly pilgrims -- not only Iraqis but now, with Hussein gone, large numbers of Iranians too -- are being fleeced by trinket salesmen, as ubiquitous in the Shiite holy cities as they are in Lourdes. Entering one mosque, my interpreter whispered to me, ''Watch out for your wallet.''
[...]
In the wake of the failed Shiite uprising of 1991, Hussein turned much of southern Iraq into a Shiite graveyard. Its deserts and its farmlands hold the corpses of the tens of thousands of Shiites murdered by Hussein's security forces. Almost every Iraqi, and certainly every Shiite, seems to believe that the United States encouraged them to rise against Saddam Hussein. The fact that the Americans did nothing to help causes many Shiites to feel great enmity for the United States. For most Iraqi Shiites, the betrayal of 1991 is a scar that even the overthrow of Saddam Hussein cannot heal.
Moderate voices, including some Iraqi exiles who lobbied hard for the American invasion, will tell you that it was the American decision not simply to liberate Iraq but to declare Iraq an occupied country that has turned the Shiites against the United States. Some radical clerics agree. Moqtadah al-Sadr's deputy in Najaf told me: ''The Americans say they're sorry about 1991, and that now they're liberators. At the beginning, in early April, that was very good. But when they declared an occupation, everything changed in our minds.
''Why should we believe the Americans have changed since 1991, when they showed no concern over our fate, when, after tantalizing us, they stood by as we were tortured?'' he continued. ''It is the same people, Cheney, Bush's son, the Zionist Wolfowitz,'' he said, referring to Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary. ''It is not our liberation they want; it is to strengthen Israel and to fight Islam everywhere in the world. We think you are crusaders, not liberators. If you were liberators, you would give us free elections, not the fake ones to put Ahmad Chalabi in power that the Americans want.
Of course, this is one of the best examples of "Zionist" being used when what is meant is "Jew," there is. But the resentment over the stain of '91 is very real, and very justified.
''We must wait,'' one cleric in Najaf told me. And, almost ruefully, he added, ''We in the Shiite majority of this country have been waiting to play our rightful role in Iraq since the death of Imam Hussein'' -- some 1,300 years ago. ''Having done that, we can certainly wait another six months.''
Not long after talking with that cleric, I met an aide to Ayatollah Bashir al-Najafi, a close associate of Sistani's, and asked him what he thought of that proposition -- that the Shiites had been waiting to remake Iraq since the death of Imam Hussein in 680. He grew indignant. ''What do you mean, Imam Hussein?'' he replied. ''We have been waiting since the murder of Imam Ali'' -- 19 years before Imam Hussein was killed -- ''to begin a just Iraq!''
[...]
Yet Sistani's call for demonstrations and the rhetoric of those demonstrations were anything but moderate. The crowd shouted slogans like ''One man, one vote'' and ''No, no to appointment,'' and demonstrators and speakers insisted that they would never accept an American ''colonialist'' state.
A very odd characterization by David Rieff. How much more moderate can a demand be than "one man, one vote"?
[...]
Baghdad remains an anomaly -- a place where, for the moment, anyway, secularism is still alive and well in the schools and streets and nightspots. But in all of the Shiite south and even in Baghdad's Sadr City, a slow-motion Islamicization is steadily gathering strength. It is difficult to see how any transitional government, even one shaped by the Iraqi Governing Council and the C.P.A., could stop this.
A balanced solution, many think, would be some sort of federal system, and a two-body Parliament, with the senior body balancing the population centers, something like our own system. Of course, the Turks, Syrians, and Iranians all oppose this as granting dangerous amounts of power to the Kurds and possibly leading to the fragmentation of Iraq, and it's difficult to imagine there would be much enthusiasm for such a scheme by Iraqi Shi'ites. In the end, I'm dubious it's possible to achieve in the present day.
Meanwhile, debate begins today in the Iraqi Government Council on the draft law for the transitional government.
Iraqi leaders are to begin debate Saturday on a newly crafted proposal for a transitional government that would fuse European and American styles of democracy, with executive, legislative and judicial branches underpinned by a bill of rights.The draft law calls for a tripartite presidency, which could help balance power between the three dominant religious and ethnic groups. It is likely to be made up of members of those groups -- Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
The proposal would also require that women hold at least 40 percent of the seats in the transitional national assembly and in a constitutional convention, an effort to ensure women's rights in a nation that has vocal fundamentalist Muslim strains.
[...]
Included in the draft law is a bill of rights that guarantees freedom of speech, the right to peaceful assembly, freedom of movement, the right to demonstrate and strike and the right to schooling and healthcare.
The law also grants an array of other rights that were unheard of in Saddam's time, including a ban on arbitrary arrest or detention; the right to a fair and public hearing, the right to speedy public trial, the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty and a ban on the use of physical or psychological torture.
Whether any of this will have much effect upon reality remains to be seen.
KAZIRANGA, India (AFP) - Nearly 100 elephants played soccer and saluted spectators as India's northeastern Assam state kicked off a three-day carnival to boost tourism and end bitter rivalries between local inhabitants and the giant beasts.
[...]
The annual elephant festival in central Assam, home to more than half of India's estimated 10,000 elephants, also packed in a majestic parade by the beasts with their keepers playing drums and cymbals in the swampy riverside park.
IS THAT A MILLION BARRELS OF OIL IN YOUR POCKET, or are you just glad to see me?
ABC News is buying that list of people who allegedly were bribed with oil contracts with Saddam. They better hope it turns out to be accurate, or won't they look funny with oil on their face?
It's not as if I have trouble believing that George Galloway received profits of 19 million barrels.
Read The Rest Scale: depending upon how prurient you are.
A LOTR NIT-PICKER'S GUIDE to differences between Tolkien's books, and Peter Jackson's movies. Note that I am not endorsing any specific plaints; I'm just letting y'all know that this is here in case you want to improve it.
Read The Rest if you're a Tolkienite, or, on the contrary, if you're not, but are curious for a quick version of the differences.
First, while I think Trippi was absolutely right on the conceptual level, his execution clearly left something to be desired. For example, the idea of flying thousands of twentysomethings into Iowa to help organize the state for Dean--Trippi's so-called "perfect storm"--proved to be a colossal, money-draining failure. As Ryan Lizza has reported, these twentysomethings turned out to be incompetent amateurs who got their hats handed to them on caucus night--not only by the professional organizers of rival campaigns, but by these campaigns' more dedicated volunteers. Worse, the perfect stormers probably scared off a significant number of Iowans, who took one look at their nose-rings and their died hair and decided that they had nothing to talk about. In retrospect, it would have obviously been wiser for Trippi et al to rely on local volunteers to beef up his Iowa ground game--something that worked reasonably well in New Hampshire (at a fraction of the cost).
Second--and this is something I completely missed in the piece, but which proved to be hugely important--is that Trippi, though a brilliant tactician, turns out to be a less than brilliant strategist. That is, Trippi was great at engineering the machine that would get the most out of a given message; he was not so good at devising the message itself. Now there was clearly a point in the campaign when that didn't matter, since the machine was the message--i.e., the idea of bringing new blood into the political system and making an end-run around the Washington establishment. But, as we found out in Iowa last week, when it came time to actually pick a candidate, voters wanted a worldview, not just a set of procedural innovations. With Trippi at the helm, the campaign didn't make that leap until the eve of New Hampshire, by which point it was probably too late.
Later, at the Kerry victory party, giddy aides were stunned at how over-hyped and amateurish the Dean ground game was. "The Dean people were on the corner of the street in downtown Des Moines waving signs," one woman laughed into her cell phone. "They had no sense of organization." The Dean campaign called it the "perfect storm," which produced chuckles from Holly Armstrong, a Kerry organizer. "I kept telling everybody," she said, "in The Perfect Storm everybody dies at the end." Vindication.
For months now, Pentagon officials have resisted growing political pressure to add more soldiers to the nation's overstretched fighting force. To understand why, meet the $99,000 soldier.
That's how much, on average, each active-duty service member cost in 2002 in pay and benefits, the Congressional Budget Office said this month. And it is what makes defense officials quake at the prospect of putting more men and women in uniform.
[...]
Benefits aside, members of the military average $43,000 a year in pay, and most won't stay long enough to reap retirement money. But all the entitlements wreak havoc with the defense budget's bottom line -- and raise the stakes of increasing the size of the military.
[...]
Between 1988 and 2002, Pentagon spending on healthcare -- adjusted for the overall rate of inflation -- tripled, while salary per active-duty service member increased by 39 percent, the CBO said. That far outstripped the gains by other federal employees.
If Congress approves the Pentagon's budget request for fiscal 2005, the amount being spent to pay the nation's soldiers will increase still more. According to budget documents disclosed Friday, base pay for members of the military would rise by 3.5 percent.
[...]
The Army is so strained that it has pulled up more than 100,000 reservists for long stretches, doubled the length of deployments for regular military and ordered tens of thousands of soldiers to remain in the service involuntarily. With some commanders on the ground in Iraq complaining publicly that they are short the soldiers they need, more than two dozen House Democrats have backed a bill to add about 82,000 troops -- 40,000 soldiers, 27,000 airmen and 15,000 Marines -- to the congressionally approved limit of 482,000.
This week, in an unexpected move that military officials say will relieve some of the stress on the force, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld invoked emergency orders authorizing the Army to grow temporarily by 30,000 troops.
But defense officials insist that the increase, expected to be in effect for about four years, should not be permanent.
"There are real fixed costs here, and I can understand why the tops of the heads blow off the budgeters at the Pentagon when they think of adding people. But you cannot fight the reality that this is a labor-intensive war, and we're in it, and I don't know anybody that has the ability to predict when we'll be out of it," said Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher, D-Calif., one of the bill's sponsors.
Such talk is precisely what worries administration officials. If Congress votes to approve the Pentagon's 2005 budget request for $401.7 billion, a 7 percent jump, it will be the seventh straight year of Pentagon budget increases -- a string unprecedented since the end of World War II.
"There's good reason to think that this ride won't go on indefinitely, and that if we increase end strength, that we might be left with a larger force structure that we don't have money to modernize," a defense official said.
[...]
Base pay, bonuses, special pay and allowances for things including food and on-base housing -- plus the advantage troops receive because some allowances are not subject to federal income tax -- typically make up only 43 percent of a service member's total compensation.
The other 57 percent is made up of subsidized goods and services that can be used immediately, such as medical care, groceries and child care, along with the accrued cost of retirement pensions, health care for retirees and veterans benefits that service members get after they leave the military.
No one begrudges this, of course. People who risk their lives for us deserve thanks and support. It's just that it adds up.
WHY DEAN WAS YELLING. Not everyone has heard what Diane Sawyer said:
After my interview with Dean and his wife in which I played the tape again -- in fact played it to them -- I noticed that on that tape he's holding a hand-held microphone. One designed to filter out the background noise. It isolates your voice, just like it does to Charlie Gibson and me when we have big crowds in the morning. The crowds are deafening to us standing there.
But the viewer at home hears only our voice.
So, we collected some other tapes from Dean's speech including one from a documentary filmmaker, tapes that do carry the sound of the crowd, not just the microphone he held on stage. We also asked the reporters who were there to help us replicate what they experienced in the room.
Reena Singh, ABC News Dean campaign reporter: "What the cameras didn't capture was the crowd."
Garance Franke-Ruta, Senior Editor, American Prospect: "As he spoke, the audience got louder and louder and I found it somewhat difficult to hear him."
Dean's boisterous countdown of the upcoming primaries as we all heard it on TV was isolated, when in fact he was shouting over the roaring crowd.
And what about the scream as we all heard it? In the room, the so-called scream couldn't really be heard at all. Again, he was yelling along with the crowd.
Of course, the facts about this don't matter now. It's too late for Dean.
HOW REPUBLICANS HAVE CHANGED THE RULES OF CONGRESS. My impression is that there are a lot of independent, and sensible moderate Republican, folks who have not paid attention to this stuff, and have the impression that Congress is either doing business as usual, or has simply redressed Democratic unfairness. That's not the case.
The power to write legislation has been centralized in the House Republican leadership. Concretely, that means DeLay and House Speaker Dennis Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, working with the House Committee on Rules. (Hastert is seen in some quarters as a figurehead, but his man Palmer is as powerful as DeLay.) Drastic revisions to bills approved by committee are characteristically added by the leadership, often late in the evening. Under the House rules, 48 hours are supposed to elapse before floor action. But in 2003, the leadership, 57 percent of the time, wrote rules declaring bills to be "emergency" measures, allowing then to be considered with as little as 30 minutes notice. On several measures, members literally did not know what they were voting for.
Sorry, No Amendments. DeLay has used the rules process both to write new legislation that circumvents the hearing process and to all but eliminate floor amendments for Republicans and Democrats alike. The Rules Committee, controlled by the Republican leadership, writes a rule specifying the terms of debate for every bill that reaches the House floor. When Democrats controlled the House, Republicans complained bitterly when the occasional bill did not allow for open floor amendments. In 1995, Republicans pledged reform. Gerald Solomon, the new Republican chairman of the committee, explicitly promised that at least 70 percent of bills would come to the floor with rules permitting amendments. Instead, the proportion of bills prohibiting amendments has steadily increased, from 56 percent during the 104th Congress (1995-97) to 76 percent in 2003. This comparison actually understates the shift, because virtually all major bills now come to the floor with rules prohibiting amendments.
DeLay has elevated votes on these rules into rigid tests of party loyalty, on a par with election of the speaker. A Republican House member who votes against a rule structuring floor debate will lose committee assignments and campaign funds, and can expect DeLay to sponsor a primary opponent.
[...]
The Senate still allows floor amendments, but Senate-passed bills must go to conference with the House. Democratic House and Senate conferees are increasingly barred from attending conference committees, unless they are known turncoats. On the Medicare bill, liberal Democratic Senate conferees Tom Daschle and Jay Rockefeller were excluded. The more malleable Democrats John Breaux and Max Baucus, however, were allowed in. [See Matthew Yglesias, "Bad Max," page 11.] All four House Democratic conferees were excluded. Republican House and Senate conferees work out their intraparty differences, work their respective caucuses and send the (nonamendable) bill back to each house for a quick up-or-down vote. On the Medicare bill, members had one day to study a measure of more than 1,000 pages, much of it written from scratch in conference.
Legislation Without Hearings. Before the DeLay revolution, drafting new legislation in conference committee was almost unknown. But under DeLay, major provisions of the Medicare bill sprang fully grown from a conference committee. Republicans got a conference to include a weakened media-concentration standard that had been explicitly voted down by each house separately. Though both chambers had voted to block an administration measure watering down overtime-pay protections for workers, the provision was tacked onto a must-pass bill in conference. The official summary of House procedures, written by the (Republican-appointed) House parliamentarian and updated in June 2003, notes: "The House conferees are strictly limited in their consideration to matters in disagreement between the two Houses. Consequently, they may not strike out or amend any portion of the bill that was not amended by the other House. Furthermore, they may not insert new matter that is not germane to or that is beyond the scope of the differences between the two Houses." Like the rights guaranteed in the Soviet constitution, these rules are routinely waived.
[...]
Appropriations bills are must-pass affairs, otherwise the government eventually shuts down. Traditionally, substantive legislation is enacted in the usual way, then the appropriations process approves all or part of the funding. There has long been modest abuse in the form of earmarked money for pet pork-barrel projects and substantive riders being tacked onto appropriations bills. But since Gingrich, a lot of substantive bill drafting has been centralized in House leadership task forces appointed by the majority leader. And under DeLay, Appropriations subcommittee chairs must now be approved by the leadership, as well as by the Appropriations chairman.
But didn't the Democrats commit the same abuses during their 40-year House majority? Basically, no. The legislation written by stealth in the Rules Committee and in conference, and the exclusion of the minority party from conferences, are new. In 1987-89, Speaker Jim Wright occasionally used closed rules restricting floor amendments, but DeLay has made the railroading systematic.
Before 1975, conservative Democratic committee chairs often blocked liberal legislation, despite nominal Democratic House majorities. In 1975, rules changes supported by the large and idealistic "Watergate class" allowed the caucus to elect committee chairs, overturning the system of seniority. During the speakerships of Tip O'Neill (1977-86) and Wright, the caucus gradually strengthened both the leadership and itself at the expense of committee chairs. As speaker, Wright gained control of the Rules Committee and occasionally used his powers to frustrate floor amendments. He devised complex rules that permitted nonbinding preliminary votes to be overridden by the final vote. This maneuver, bitterly criticized by Republicans at the time, was the germ of the rules abuses that DeLay has taken to dictatorial levels.
To enforce party discipline, the DeLay operation has also perfected a technique known as "catch and release." On close pending votes, the House Republican Whip Organization, with dozens of regional whips, will target, say, the 20 to 30 Republican members known to oppose the legislation. When the leadership gets a final head count and determines just how many votes are needed, some will be reeled in and others let off the hook and given permission to vote "no." According to Michigan Republican Nick Smith, the leadership threatened to oppose his son's campaign to succeed him unless he voted for the Medicare bill. Basically, Republican moderates are allowed to take turns voting against bills they either oppose on principle or know to be unpopular in their districts. On the Medicare bill, 13 Republican House members voted one way on the House-passed bill and the other way on the conference bill. That way they could tell constituents whatever they needed to. As one longtime House staffer observes, "They can say, 'I would have voted to amend it, but I didn't get the opportunity.'"
Here again, some previous House and Senate leaders were adept at squeezing wavering members with rewards or punishments. The difference is that today's tight caucus discipline is used to enforce broader anti-democratic abuse. On the Medicare bill, the final roll-call vote was held open a full three hours well after midnight so that the leadership could keep pressuring Republican legislators who wanted to vote "no." Back in 1987, Republicans went ballistic when then-Speaker Wright held a vote open for a then-record extra 15 minutes. Dick Cheney, at the time a Wyoming representative, termed the move "the most arrogant, heavy-handed abuse of power I've ever seen in the 10 years that I've been here."
In short, some of these maneuvers had embryonic antecedents, but under DeLay differences in degree have mutated into an alarming difference in kind. Wright's regime lasted just one congressional session. It ended unceremoniously when a minor ethics breach (Wright's bulk sales of his book) was bootstrapped into a major scandal by a Republican back-bencher named Gingrich, leading to Wright's resignation and his replacement by the far less partisan Tom Foley, and then to the Democrats' loss of the House in 1994. DeLay's regime shows every sign of going on and on and on -- with abuses of which the Democrats never dreamed.
Why is there no revolt of the Republican moderates? They are split along issue lines, too intimidated and too few to mount a serious challenge, and almost never vote as a bloc. The only House Republicans who openly challenge DeLay as a group are those to his right, almost all of whom voted against the Medicare bill as too expensive.
It's easy to hand wave this stuff off as either boring, or exaggeratedly partisan, or however. But it's important, and unless you have a few spare tens of thousands of dollars to slip in the right pockets, or are the head of a powerful Republican interest group, Tom DeLay and company are not your friends, even if you think they are.
KEVIN PHILLIPS, probably the most experienced political demographer in America, makes the case for a Democratic Northern Strategy that doesn't neglect the South.
LAGOS, Nigeria, Jan. 28 — North Korea has offered to share missile technology with Nigeria, and the two countries are expected to sign a preliminary agreement soon, a Nigerian government spokesman said Wednesday.
The United States said it would encourage Nigeria to reject any arms deals with the Communist government of North Korea.
One can certainly understand why North Korea would be thrilled. Hard currency? Wonderful!
Heck, soft currency, which could be spent on whatever is available in some country, say, Cuba, would be a tremendous boon.
Barter, even, for some natural resource, would be a great aid.
Actually, a shipload of grass would be a worthwhile addition to the national diet.
When you come right down to it, a boatload of fertile dirt would be a trade the North Koreans would make, and be ecstatic with it.
In the end, the deal was made for a drawer full of used cellophane, and three pencil stubs. And the North Korean reaction? Good deal!
THE GROWTH OF RUSSIAN PROTO-FASCISM, the decimation of its democracy, and how US papers largely ignore it. Good coverage by TNR of Putinism and the last "election." No password required.
NEW HAMPSHIRE'S FLAVOR ISN'T MAPLE. Some campaign tidbits:
Lieberman has a unique strategy for winning the Democratic primary--ignoring the Democratic vote. Well, almost. These days, Lieberman is targeting independents all but exclusively. He talks about John McCain more than he talks about Bill Clinton. "John McCain and I--have I mentioned him enough?" he jokes in Nashua. His campaign's final piece of direct mail in New Hampshire goes out to 70,000 independents. You have to look hard at the two-sided flyer to learn that Lieberman is, in fact, a Democrat. In big, block letters it announces that "independents can vote in the democratic primary," "you can make a difference for our country," and "you can make a difference by supporting joe lieberman." It is left to a smaller subheadline to note that Lieberman is "The one Democrat who every day has leveled with voters"--the only explicit mention of his party affiliation anywhere on the flyer. By contrast, it refers to McCain three times and Lieberman's nearly 300 endorsements from New Hampshire independents twice. A featured quote from Greg Smith, former New Hampshire attorney general and "lifelong Independent" (mentioned twice by name in the mailer) declares, "I don't vote for the party, I vote for the person."
One peculiarity of trying to cobble together a coalition from people who don't vote by party is that the people who attend Lieberman's events are more quirky and unpredictable than the staid, establishment Democrats who pack Kerry's events or the Paul Wolfowitz-hating liberals who swoon for Wesley Clark.
[...]
Lieberman also seems to attract an inordinate number of voters with attitudes and people with pet issues, who, if Lieberman were president, I suspect he would not spend much time on. (For example, one voter complains to the senator about car insurance.) These people occasionally make Lieberman's town-hall meetings compelling theater. His first question in Nashua is from a visibly agitated woman who has apparently seen an ad on television that has made her furious. She leaves the crowd of about 500 people that rings Lieberman and walks right into the open space where he stands. "You knew about Al Qaeda, and you did nothing about it!" she charges, pointing a finger. It turns out the ad in question is actually a Lieberman commercial, which boasts that the senator knew about Al Qaeda before Bush ever heard of the group. Lieberman tries to explain that he knew Al Qaeda was a threat but didn't have any foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks, but this only angers her more. "How did you know about Al Qaeda?" she asks. "What ties do you have to them?"
[...]
Like all seasoned politicians, Kerry tries to take any question and answer it with one of the key messages from his stump speech. The more obscure the question, the harder it is for a candidate to do this, and Kerry's very first question is plenty obscure. It's one of those setups from a supporter who thinks he is helping his candidate even as he's steering him into trouble. "I think it's unfair that, as a New Englander, people often say that you won't resonate with the key Democratic constituencies around the country," a man tells Kerry. He suggests that the Massachusetts senator demonstrate his broad appeal by explaining the importance of the letter X on his baseball cap. At first, Kerry is confused. "The importance of ... the Latin--the ten?" he asks. The man clarifies that he means Malcolm X, which hardly makes things any easier for Kerry. His challenge now is to move from the deep water of radical black politics to the island safety of one of his campaign slogans.
[...]
"We need a political process," he says, finally confident he is reaching safe harbor, "that keeps faith with those real concerns that stare us in the face and not a political process that is there for the benefit of Halliburton, and drug companies, and powerful people who distort the agenda of the nation. That's at the center of what this race is about." Kerry has managed to jump from Malcolm X to campaign boilerplate about special interests in just three moves. Not bad.
That woman at the Lieberman rally better not find out about my ties to al Queda (string ties, they are, and hideous).
Read The Rest only if you're a campaign obsessive.
IF JEROME K. JEROME were alive today, he would be proud. Over a century after he wrote it, "Three Men in a Boat", his quintessentially English comic novel about accident-prone Victorian gentlemen paddling down the River Thames, is a bestseller in southern Sudan.
This may seem unlikely. Southern Sudan is the scene of Africa's longest-burning civil war. Its people have for decades lived in fear of death or enslavement at the hands of mounted militiamen. How could they relate to a comedy about chaps in red-and-orange blazers sculling to Hampton Court and getting lost in the hedge maze there?
Sudan's two wars.
"People find this book a bit hard to understand," admits William Luk, a bookseller in Rumbek, the war-scarred capital of Bahr el-Ghazal province. But a book doesn't have to sell many copies to qualify as a bestseller in this part of the world. Mr Luk's shop, which he opened in May 2002, is believed to be southern Sudan's only bookshop, and its stock is limited. Apart from three rather tattered mathematics text books, it has Charles Dickens's "David Copperfield", Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and 20 copies of “Three Men in a Boat".
Since he opened his shop, Mr Luk has sold eight books, five of them “Three Men in a Boat”. “If I had a catalogue I would try to choose different books but for now we have to rely on the Ugandan distributors to send us what they think is appropriate,” he says.
Some of his customers are happy, though. A friend enjoyed the book so much that he named his goat “Montmorency” after the dog that accompanies its three heroes down the river. And the Rumbek Secondary, one of the few remaining secondary schools in the south, is considering making it a set text this year, in place of “A Tale of Two Cities”.
There may not be many books, but at least they're good books. Still, gotta feel for these poor folk. And how many people can afford books?
Electronic paper looks set to start rolling off the presses soon, thanks to a new process developed at the electronics company Philips1.
The Philips researchers, based at Eindhoven in the Netherlands, have figured out how to make thin, flexible sheets of electronic paper using inexpensive and light-weight organic materials that don't demand the costly production methods used for conventional silicon microelectronics.
The electronic paper (e-paper) looks like a flexible plastic sheet printed with black and white text or images. But the 'ink' can be rearranged in an instant to display different words or images. A single page could effectively house an entire library.
The new 'organic' e-paper unveiled by the Philips team can be switched up to 75 times per second - faster than a standard television screen.
[...]
The prototype e-paper made in this way has a fairly crude resolution: the display contains 64 by 64 pixels, each half a millimetre across. By comparison, a computer screen is typically 800 by 600 pixels. But a sheet of e-paper weighs only about a gram, and can be rolled up tightly without damage. Powered by the kind of battery typically used for portable electronics, it can operate continuously for 20 hours - but the Philips team wants to find ways of reducing the power consumption.
Philips has formed a company called Polymer Vision to turn their approach into an industrial process. Polymer Vision is now setting up a pilot production line, and hopes soon to be producing more than 5,000 e-paper displays a year.
Unlike a lot of tech news, which is about prototypes or theories or vaporware, this seems very very real. Yee-ha.
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5 for more technical details.
In another sign the Islamic militant group is changing course, its leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin declared Friday that his group is making an all-out effort to kidnap Israeli soldiers to use as bargaining chips for Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Yassin spoke a day after a prisoner swap between Israel and the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah. Israel released more than 400 prisoners, mostly Palestinians, in exchange for an Israeli businessman and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers.
Yassin appeared to be trying to explain why Hamas has failed to free its prisoners from Israeli jails. 'The (Palestinian) factions will not spare any effort to kidnap Israeli soldiers,'' Yassin said outside a Gaza City mosque after Muslim prayers. "And they tried many times, but the Israeli soldier today is as cautious as a bird is about its chick.''
About 7,000 Palestinians remain in Israeli custody. "They (Israelis) only understand the language of force, and they will never give us our freedom,'' Yassin said.
This is the problem with making deals to trade 400 Palestinians for one live Israeli and three dead ones. Talk about incentives in marketing!
LET US REMEMBER. I was more than a little annoyed last week, when in discussions of Howard Dean's yelling in Iowa, there were repeated mentions by tv pundits, as context, of how "Al Gore lied [or exaggerated] when he said he invented the Internet," and other such variants.
It's probably impossible to kill this untrue (lying?) trope, but a reminder by Declan McCullagh, not exactly a Democrat, but someone out to depth charge them with distortions and insults (now trying the same on Howard Dean):
If it's true that Al Gore created the Internet, then I created the "Al Gore created the Internet" story.
I was the first reporter to question the vice president's improvident boast, way back when he made it in early 1999.
Since then, the story's become far more than just a staple of late-night Letterman jokes: It's now as much a part of the American political firmament as the incident involving that other vice president, a schoolchild, and a very unfortunate spelling of potato.
Poor Al. For a presidential wannabe who prides himself on a sober command of the brow-furrowing nuances of technology policy, being the butt of all these jokes has proven something of a setback.
[...]
Which brings us to an important question: Are the countless jibes at Al's expense truly justified? Did he really play a key part in the development of the Net?
The short answer is that while even his supporters admit the vice president has an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate, the truth is that Gore never did claim to have "invented" the Internet.
During a March 1999 CNN interview, while trying to differentiate himself from rival Bill Bradley, Gore boasted: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
That statement was enough to convince me, with the encouragement of my then-editor James Glave, to write a brief article that questioned the vice president's claim. Republicans on Capitol Hill noticed the Wired News writeup and started faxing around tongue-in-cheek press releases -- inveterate neatnik Trent Lott claimed to have invented the paper clip -- and other journalists picked up the story too.
My article never used the word "invented," but it didn't take long for Gore's claim to morph into something he never intended.
The terrible irony in this exchange is that while Gore certainly didn't create the Internet, he was one of the first politicians to realize that those bearded, bespectacled researchers were busy crafting something that could, just maybe, become pretty important.
In January 1994, Gore gave a landmark speech at UCLA about the "information superhighway."
Many portions -- discussions of universal service, wiring classrooms to the Net, and antitrust actions -- are surprisingly relevant even today. (That's an impressive enough feat that we might even forgive Gore his tortured metaphors such as "road kill on the information superhighway" and "parked at the curb" on the information superhighway.)
Gore's speech reverberated around Democratic political circles in Washington. Other Clinton administration officials began citing it in their own remarks, and the combined effort helped to grab the media's attention.
Their timing was impeccable: In July 1993, according to Network Wizards' survey, there were 1.8 million computers connected to the Internet. By July 1994, the figure had nearly doubled to 3.2 million, a trend that continued through January 2000, when about 72 million computers had permanent network addresses.
Small wonder, then, that as the election nears, Gore's defenders have been rallying to defend him. In a recent op-ed piece in the San Jose Mercury News, John Doerr and Bill Joy claim "nobody in Washington understands" the new economy as well as Gore does.
Net-pioneers Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, a Democratic party donor, have written an essay saying "no other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time" than the veep.
Scott Rosenberg, in a recent Salon article, joined the fray: "The 'Gore claims he invented the Net' trope is so full of holes that it makes you wish there were product recalls for bad information."
It's also true that, as a senator, Gore in the 1980s supported universities' efforts to increase funding for NSFNet, a measure that became law in the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Gore's guest columns in Byte magazine at the time showed an appreciation of technology that was far from usual on Capitol Hill.
Read The Rest Scale: 0 out of 5. In the words of Kahn and Cerf:
Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore’s initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening.
SHOCKING SURPRISE: Republicans don't use party's winter meeting to praise Kerry, but to bury him. As I'd expected.
Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, devoted much of a speech at the party's winter meeting here to questions about Mr. Kerry's positions on military strength and national security and his voting record over four terms as a senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. Gillespie's focus on Senator Kerry, compared with only passing references to other candidates — Howard Dean, Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Senator John Edwards of North Carolina — left the impression that Republicans are convinced that Mr. Kerry is likely to be President Bush's opponent in November.
Mr. Gillespie cited at least eight examples, like a 1972 promise Mr. Kerry made to vote against military appropriations when he was running, unsuccessfully, for Congress and a 1995 Senate vote to cut spending for the F.B.I. by $80 million.
In another sign of Mr. Kerry's rise, the Republican Party of South Carolina, one of seven states with a Democratic primary or caucus on Tuesday, held a news conference with veterans to raise questions about the candidates' records, focusing particularly on Mr. Kerry, said Luke Byars, executive director of the state party.
Citing a 1972 promise? That's relevant. Just killer. Don't they have something on what Kerry said in third grade about not liking the Korean War?
JUST WONDERING. So, now that Dr. David Kay, whom President Bush has declared he has the utmost faith in, and whom we look to for answers, has answered, and has declared that "we were almost all wrong" that there were stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; now that it seems uncontrovertibly uncontroversial that there was certainly no uranium imported from Africa, including Niger, is there anyone who attacked Ambassador Joe Wilson, praised by President George H. W. Bush, who has something updated to say about the Ambassador?
Specifically, is there anyone who attacked him as a "tea-drinking, partisan, incompetent, out to get President Bush, utterly unreliable and wrong about whether uranium went from Niger to Iraq, hack" who would like to, you know, admit that, in fact, they were wrong?
For the sake of their credibility?
Anyone?
Anyone?
Anyone?
We can fact-check your ass with Google, you know, and provide lists.
FORGET THE SOUTH? Timothy Noah argues that Democrats should stop coddling and pandering to the South. It's a debate worth having, and Noah supplies some good argumentation.
Steve Jobs often came by Texaco Towers after dinner, to see what was new, and we'd usually show him whatever recent progress we made. Sometimes he'd be pissed off about something, but other times he'd be really excited about a new idea.
I was the only one in the office one evening when he burst in, exclaiming that he had a flash of inspiration.
"Mr. Macintosh! We've got to have Mr. Macintosh!"
"Who is Mr. Macintosh?", I wondered.
"Mr. Macintosh is a mysterious little man who lives inside each Macintosh. He pops up every once in a while, when you least expect it, and then winks at you and disappears again. It will be so quick that you won't be sure if you saw him or not. We'll plant references in the manuals to the legend of Mr. Macintosh, and no one will know if he's real or not."
Engineers like myself always daydream about building surreptitious little hacks into the software, but here was the co-founder and chairman of the company suggesting something really wild. I enthusiastically pressed him for details. Where should Mr. Macintosh appear? How often? What should he do when he shows up?
"One out of every thousand or two times that you pull down a menu, instead of the normal commands, you'll get Mr. Macintosh, leaning against the wall of the menu. He'll wave at you, then quickly disappear. You'll try to get him to come back, but you won't be able to."
I loved the idea and promised that I would implement Mr. Macintosh, but not right away, since there were still so many more basic things to get done. Steve told the idea to the marketing team, and eventually recruited the French artist Folon to do some renditions of Mr. Macintosh. I also asked my high school friend Susan Kare, who hadn't started with Apple yet, to try to draw some Mr. Macintosh animations.
Most of the Macintosh system software had to be packed into a 64 KByte ROM, and ROM space got more scarce as development proceeded and the system grew. Eventually, it was clear that we'd never be able to fit bitmaps for Mr. Macintosh into the ROM, but I wasn't willing to give up on him yet.
I made the software that displayed the menus look at a special low memory location called the "MrMacHook", for an address of a routine. If the routine is present, it's called with parameters that let it draw in the menu box, and it returns a result that tells the menu manager if it did anything. Using this, an application or system module could implement Mr. Macintosh (or perhaps his evil twin) if they saw fit.
I'm not sure if anybody ever actually implemented Mr. Macintosh or used the "MrMacHook" for something worthwhile.
LOVE ME, I'M A LIBERAL, but I think this is a bad idea.
President Bush plans to scale back requests for money to fight AIDS and poverty in the third world, putting off for several years the fulfillment of his pledges to eventually spend more than $20 billion on these programs.
Hardest hit would be the United Nations-supported Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, whose contribution from the United States would drop to $200 million in fiscal year 2005 from $550 million, according to Congressional officials who have been briefed on the president's budget proposal.
Over all, however, Mr. Bush's programs to combat AIDS and poverty to the world's poorest nations still represent a big leap from those of the Clinton administration.
The financing request to fight AIDS for the 2005 fiscal year would be nearly $2.7 billion. That includes an increase for bilateral programs to $2.5 billion from $1.9 billion. That is still less than the $3 billion expected when Mr. Bush promised in his State of the Union address last year to increase financing for combating H.I.V. and AIDS by $15 billion over the next five years.
"I would love to see the administration match the figures outlined in the president's speech," said Patrick Cronin, the former assistant administrator at the United States Agency for International Development."But for all of our quibbling, this is a serious commitment and these figures are still very good."
Nonprofit aid organizations complained on Wednesday that while the request represented an overall increase for some countries, it would be a blow to international cooperation in the fight against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
"That's robbing Peter to pay Paul," said Jamie Drummond, executive director of DATA, a nonprofit organization created by the Irish rock star Bono to help Africa. "We will work with Congress to increase the contribution to the fund."
In the fiscal 2004 budget, Congress more than doubled the administration's orginal request of $200 million, giving the fund $550 million.
]...]
The request for Millennium Challenge Account, a new development initiative that requires poor nations to meet criteria of good government in order to receive aid, will be $2.5 billion, down from the $3.3 billion expected this year.
At a conference in 2002 in Monterrey, Mexico, Mr. Bush had promised to increase America's foreign aid budget by 15 percent a year — or $5 billion over three years, the first real expansion in more than a decade.
I am, of course, aware of the deficit. I'd much rather take the money from farm subsidies.
ANOTHER STEPtowards human augmentation, the Starship Troopers battle armor, and new ways of interacting. Like all such steps, possibilities both useful and alarming abound.
One corporate executive who heard about the project e-mailed Merkle and asked, "Where do we get the version that tells people they are boring in meetings? Please hurry and send that system to us. A truck full or two should cover us."
This system could also be terribly useful if we could get feedback from blog readers with it.
THE INTERSECTION OF GEEKDOM AND REPORTINGoutlined in a good Times story.
Howard Dean was taking questions from a crowd of New Hampshire voters the other day when a young man asked him, "Governor Dean, can I pray for you?"
Dr. Dean, the Democratic presidential candidate and former governor of Vermont, responded that he could use all the prayers he could get. Whereupon the young man immediately began a dialogue with the Almighty.
"Oh, I didn't know you meant right now!" Dr. Dean interjected, before telling him to go ahead.
As bizarre campaign moments go, this one was brief and not really all that bizarre. But Mike Roselli, a producer for CNN, thought it was worth alerting his bosses in case they needed fresh tape of Dr. Dean.
So Mr. Roselli quickly punched an e-mail message into his BlackBerry. He titled it "Pray For Me," concisely recounted the incident and concluded: "The prayer includes a plea to God asking him to cure Dean's cold." It ended: "Amen. Live NBC Feed. 12:47:22."
With the time code, CNN could find the comment, which was being filmed by a pooled crew from NBC. Mr. Roselli, a campaign veteran, thought the prayer was more interesting than some of the material being beamed from CNN producers who were following other candidates ("Candidate X drinks a chocolate milkshake!") but conceded that he had sent it partly because he could. And he worried that someone else might.
A prelude which seques into descriptions of exactly what sort of tech reporters are carrying now, and how they use it. And what the effects are:
But there is a drawback. Because reporters can now file around the clock without a hard phone line, campaigns have reduced the filing time that they build into a candidate's schedule. This has also reduced the need for a filing center, an often-intense place that campaigns would set up at least once a day with phone lines and power outlets for the traveling press corps.
For reporters, filing time in the filing center was relatively sacred. It was a chance to sit still, hook up with the home office, check e-mail, focus, and usually eat. But on a bad news day for a candidate, the campaign handlers might restrict that time.
"Sometimes, campaigns would limit the time you had for filing so they could control the amount of research you did and who you talked to," said Mr. Johnson of The Globe. With wireless Internet access, "we're free from that shackle," he said. "The wireless card works in 75 percent to 80 percent of the places where we are. You don't have to work within the parameters of the filing center."
Mr. Naylor agreed. "This rewrites the rule book of the little chess game that the media and the campaigns play, and it tilts the advantage more toward the reporters," he said. "A campaign operative can't use a filing center or a phone cord to limit your access to what's happening in the world."
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union has taken one more step towards removing a five-year unofficial ban on new biotech crops and products when its executive backed a proposal to allow imports of gene-altered sweetcorn.
EU ministers now have three months to consider the proposal to authorise the maize, known as Bt-11 and marketed by Swiss agrochemicals firm Syngenta.
A "yes" verdict would end the EU's biotech ban, which has angered its top trading partners. If ministers cannot agree by the deadline, the executive Commission will then have the right to rubberstamp its own proposal.
"The EU has put in place a clear, transparent and stringent system to regulate genetically modified food, feed and plants," Commission President Romano Prodi said in a statement on Wednesday.
"It is only logical that this safe system continues to be applied in practice and that the EU moves ahead with pending authorisations," he said.
Now if only the British papers would stop their demogogic use of the term "Frankenfoods." Don't they remember that the stirred-up peasants with pitchforks, led by fear-mongerers, out to destroy the "monster," were in the wrong?
FERMIONIC CONDENSATE. They do good scientific work in my current adopted hometown. This is just one example:
A long-sought new form of matter has been created for the first time. The matter, called a fermionic condensate, consists of atoms that are ordinarily forbidden to exist in the same quantum state but have been tricked into it by linking into pairs.
It occupies the middle ground between loosely linked particles that form superconductors and tightly bound ones in Bose-Einstein condensates, another exotic form of matter produced fleetingly since 1995. The creation of the new condensate is considered the crucial first step toward producing superconductors that work at room temperatures.
"This is a tremendous success," says Keith Burnett, a physicist at Oxford University, UK. The University of Colorado researchers who accomplished the feat are "fantastic experimentalists", he says, adding that scientists around the world have been racing to overcome the technical challenges of creating the matter.
[...]
Researchers hoping to create a fermionic condensate doubted they could even reach the super-cold temperatures necessary for the fermions to pair up. But in 2001, physicist Murray Holland suggested controversially that the fermions could be coaxed into pairing up at somewhat higher temperatures by subjecting them to magnetic fields of particular strengths.
That is what University of Colorado researchers Deborah Jin, Markus Greiner, and Cindy Regal did in December, and announced on Wednesday. First they cooled a gas of half a million potassium atoms to just 50 billionths of a degree above absolute zero, and then precisely tuned a magnetic field to force the atoms into pairs.
Two fermions that bind strongly into a molecule become a boson because their spins add to an integer value but, in the Colorado experiment, the fermions did not link that tightly. However, they behaved enough like bosons to allow them to share the same momentum for about one ten-thousandth of a second.
"When we first saw it, we were sceptically excited," Jin told New Scientist. "It looked very interesting, but we wanted to make sure we knew what was going on." A week of feverish checking later, she and her team were convinced.
The ability to create new forms of matter by simply tuning a magnetic field presents a powerful new tool to study basic physics, she says. Burnett says the research could lead to "forging other types of matter from the ground up", including condensates formed from linking three or more particles.
But the ultimate goal is to create room-temperature superconductors, which would revolutionise the supply of electric power. Currently, the highest temperature at which superconductors work is a chilly -135°C.
A room-temperature super-conductor would have revolutionary effects upon technology, of course, leading to astounding ability to give tremendous power to tiny devices, and endless repercussions.
But the possibilities opened up if we gain the "ability to create new forms of matter by simply tuning a magnetic field" are almost out of E. E. Smith.
Read The Rest for a few more details. This work, incidentally, is done a not long walk from where I type this
I HAVE ALMOST AS LARGE A VOCABULARY MYSELF as 1,000 words.
A lot of bloggers have been gawking at this story. I'll simply quote Chuq von Rospach's entry on it:
British Scientists are in a dither because of N'Kisi, an African Grey with a vocabulary of almost 1,000 words, and the ability to use them in complex sentences in with proper tense.
there's very little N'Kisi is doing Alex didn't do a decade ago. It's a little disingenuous to be declaring this as new or revolutionary when it's a rehash of stuff others have been showing for a long time. At best, more sloppy, lazy journalism.
As someone who's lived with large birds for almost 20 years now, and who's currently involved with an exceptionally intelligent female cockatoo going through her sullen teenager years (her current tactic uses self-invented passive-aggressive control techniques. it's been -- fun. At least she hasn't gone off and gotten a tattoo... yet....), none of this is surprising. My bird's the intellectual equal of a four year old, at least. Very expressive in language, not in number of words, but through inflection and tonality. She's a toolsmith, she's self-aware, she has a fairly good understanding of time, she is stubborn as hell (just like her dad), and she's smart enough and aware enough to know that a given behavior will get herself in trouble and to decide that it's worth doing anyway. it's one thing to be unaware of the implications of something, and quite another to decide to do it anyway, and then haul your little white feathered butt off to your cage and put yourself into a time-out, just to prove a point.
Trust me. If these folks really want to understand this stuff, go talk to Dr. Pepperberg. or stop by some night about bed time. Tatiana has decided that she's a big girl now, and she'll put herself to bed, thank you.
N'Kisi is a fascinating bird -- but he's not new, or original. or, so those of us who share their lives with these birds, particularly surprising.
Now, Chuq's a smart guy, but not a professional in this area, so I don't take his word as gospel, but his cites seem good to me.
MY GOODNESS, OR YOUR BADNESS. Norman Geras points out this amazing exchange with -- how to characterize him?; let's minimize -- "opposition journalist" John Pilger, including this quote:
Do you think the anti-war movement should be supporting Iraq's anti-occupation resistance?
Yes, I do. We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the "Bush gang" will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang.
Isn't it lovely to have one's priorities straight? Killing British, American, and soldiers and civilians of all the other countries serving in Iraq, along with whatever Iraqi civilians and police it is necessary to kill, destruction of whatever Iraqi services are being built, assaults upon whatever NGOs and Iraqi institutions are necessary, all are a small price to pay to deal a blow to the imperialists.
Nothing more need be said. And, no, Pilger's views should not be attributed to the masses of good citizens who oppose the war, because very few venture anywhere near that territory, or anything like it, and it is not an inevitable extension in the slightest from the many sorts of sensible anti-war positions. But: my goodness.
It was also Mr. Trippi who suggested that Dr. Dean give a rousing, fired-up speech after his crushing third-place finish in Iowa, a speech — and screech — that may have led to his undoing in New Hampshire.
Rather large error, that. And, no, one really can't place all that much blame on "the media" for that debacle. Anyone with the slightest media sense would know that anything perceived as a major gaffe -- let alone one with such a dramatic audio-visual flair to it -- would be replayed eight hundred million times.
Hell, one of those sets of thousands of falling dominos the Japanese so love gets replayed a lot on tv news, or pictures of a guy getting repeatedly buried by a snow-plow. A front-running outsider presidential candidate acting like a cross between Tarzan and the Hulk? Yeah, that'll get endless play, and a manager who can't forsee that is sending his candidate over the cliff, no matter his other virtues (and make no mistake, Joe Trippi has displayed virtues no other campaign pro of modern times has, in his ability to see and act at the intersection between new technology and the new social phenomena it produces).
Of course, there were plenty of other reasons to take Trippi out as the sole Commander, no matter how inspiring he was. It's a classic dynamic of campaigns for a charismatic leader-behind-the-scenes, a Big Vision person, to take the campaign to a brink, but also be a very disorganized person, a person lacking the ability and experience to put into logical order, and control, and delegate-but-supervise, an organization that has grown several quantum levels of size and complexity. (It's not just a campaign thing; it's common and inevitable in private business, non-profits, and simply any sort of organization experiencing massive growth in numbers and complexity.)
Which leads to these sort of strains:
Since his third-place finish in Iowa, Dr. Dean has been flooded with advice from all corners, and spent much of the week huddled with two long-serving aides from Vermont, exacerbating a standing feud between them and Mr. Trippi.
Those aides, Kate O'Connor, who travels with Dr. Dean, and Bob Rogan, a deputy campaign manager, did not return telephone calls.
And now they're down to ~$5 million. So much for the "war chest" to carry them throughout the campaign. That is the truly huge news, the devastating news, the overwhelming news, for the Dean campaign. It's now make-or-break in the next two weeks, possibly a month. Either the momentum can be kept up (even without a victory, the way they're trying to sell it now?; possible, but unlikely), or the wheels come off.
I'd go for Washington State, among other states, Doctor; it's your kind of territory, in the urban western part -- trust me. And Michigan would be a great prize, but you probably don't have the connections and organization to take it -- but if you can, go for it. Wisconsin also has a lot of your kind of Democrats. Good luck.
Myself, I've very much warmed to John Edwards, and wish him more luck, I think, than any other Democrat in the race. Go, John.
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - A Danish biotech company has developed a genetically modified flower that could help detect land mines and it hopes to have a prototype ready for use within a few years.
[...]
The genetically modified weed has been coded to change color when its roots come in contact with nitrogen-dioxide (NO2) evaporating from explosives buried in soil.
Within three to six weeks from being sowed over land mine infested areas the small plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red whenever close to a land mine.
[...]
Aresa's invention, based on research at the Institute of Molecular Biology at Copenhagen University, uses a plant's normal reaction to turn red or brown when subjected to stressful conditions such as cold or drought, but has genetically coded it to react only to nitrogen-dioxide.
This could actually be terrifically useful, and it sounds pretty darn simple and plausible.
They're known as chavs, scallies or neds. And mocking them - in all their sportswear-clad, hot hatch-driving glory - is the craze that's sweeping Britain. As Irvine Welsh prepares to film the story of one such gang, Oliver Bennett asks: is chavspotting just harmless fun or a sinister new form of snobbery?
[...]
"It's OK," said a girl, of her patch of north London. "But there's quite a few pikey estates in the area." Despite the anti-gypsy roots of the term, there was no change in register. Everyone knew what it meant: daggy, slaggy, minging, dodgy - plebby.
[...]
There is the increasingly common epithet "pramface" or "council face", popularised by the Popbitch website, to be applied to such exemplars of working-class beauty as Patsy Kensit, Cheryl Tweedy and the entire line-up of Atomic Kitten, and alluding to the hoop-ear-ringed, leisure-suited single mother tendency.
[...]
It's the lifeblood of urban folklore, and those of us at state schools in the 1970s might think back in bitterness to the days of smoothies, scrubbers, stigs, hards, hairies and wallies; often formed along class lines and devoted to beating each other up, or at least "flobbing" at each other.
[...]
Or a vent for society's toxins, if the forum in Chavscum.co.uk is anything to go by. This cult website was set up in December 2003 to chronicle the chavs, also known as neds, townies, kevs, charvers, steeks, spides, bazzas, yarcos, ratboys, kappa slappers, skangers, janners, stigs or scallies.
[...]
First, the word "chav". It turns out that he wasn't familiar with it either. "My girlfriend lives in north Kent, and I think it comes from there," he explains. "I didn't know it before her. I think it comes from the Medway towns." One of the first usages was on the infamous Chatham Girls website in 2002 - one of several similar neo-snob sites to which Chavscum is linked - and last year there was a lively debate in the letters pages of The Gloucester Citizen, chronicling that most pressing clash of civilisations: "chavs" vs "grebos". "The 'chavs' try to mug us," bemoaned a "grebo", setting off a chain of responses, while The Citizen offered a glossary. "Many townies (that is, chavs) like to wear jewellery, particularly chains, which are usually gold or gold-plated. [Boys] will usually have their heads shaven or gelled with a fringe." A Belfast newspaper has also had to educate its readers: "The underbelly of youth culture is made up of smicks, goths, metallers, rockers, trekkies, punks, skaters and a few outlaws that float between the clans or completely avoid them. Smicks, otherwise know as moakes, steeks or spides, wear baseball caps, big gold-coin rings, white tracksuits and use the word 'like' in every other sentence."
[...]
The first-generation Thatcher chavs have spawned second-generation Blair chavs with long-term welfare interests, mired in screw-you individualism. "
[...]
More serious is the word "pikey", which is used a lot in the website. "I'm nervous about what happened after Firle (the Sussex bonfire where a van bearing the word "pikey" was burned, attracting police attention). "But 'pikey' is also used generically to mean trashy and ostentatious." And the CRE will be happy to hear that chavism is equal opportunity: "Chavs can be Asian and black, too."
Aren't you glad we've cleared all that up for you? If you have any remaining questions, there is a quiz at the end:
To chav or chav not: are you a 24-carat ned?
But I'm sure you already know the answer.
Why am I so so so unsurprised to see Irvine Welsh's name show up in this enlightening article?
An anti-racism rally outside Belfast's city hall is the main focus of today's annual UK Holocaust memorial day amid fears that the city could become known as the "racist capital of Europe".
One of the organisers of the day, Davy Carlin, of the Anti-Racism Network, said he hoped thousands of people would join the rally to register their disgust at attacks on Belfast's Chinese, Pakistani, Ugandan and Filipino communities in recent weeks.
Nothing whatever to do with the actual Holocaust, or Jews, but okay, it's a good thing. I'm willing to bet it will do its job, and we will not be seeing death camps anytime soon in Belfast. Good job!
The archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, the cardinal archbishop of Westminster, Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, and the chief rabbi said in a letter to the Times that incitement to hatred and actual violence against Jewish people has increased.
The letter said: "We recognise that the suffering of the Jewish people is a stain on the history of Europe and our total rejection of anti-semitism, amid evidence of its resurgence, is a signal that we will not permit it to stain our continent's future as it has its past."
They said Britain has been less affected than many other countries by the resurgence of anti-semitism, but has "certainly not been immune". The letter goes on to say that criticism of government policy in Israel is a legitimate part of democratic debate but that it should never be inspired by anti-semitic attitudes or extend to a denial of Israel's right to exist.
The letter is written under the auspices of the religious leaders' positions as presidents of the Council for Christians and Jews, which was founded in 1942.
CLASSIC. So, all those accusations that one can't criticize Sharon or Israel without being called "anti-semitic"?
Well, according to -- wait for it -- yes, the man himself, the champion, the all-time contender, the greatest of the great, the one, the only, Robert Fisk, if you criticize Hanan Ashwrawi, or Edward Said, you are "making 'Arab' a dirty word" and it's "goodbye to Palestinians."
Thank you, thank you. Robert will be here all week. Read him if you wish.
CAIRO, 6 November 2003 — The Egyptian Press Syndicate Council has decided it has had enough from US Ambassador David Welch. His complaints about the journalistic standards of its members and his perpetual defense of Israel were bad enough. But when he recently took Al-Gomhouriya to task for calling the bombing of a Haifa restaurant a commando operation instead of a terrorist attack, the council labeled this as interference and asked Egyptian editors and journalists to give Welch the cold shoulder.
Egypt’s Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher put his stamp of approval on the council’s attitude by saying that Welch’s attempts to influence the media were undemocratic. Then actor and director Mohammed Sobhi came in the line of America’s fire for his serial “Knight Without a Horse”, deemed anti-Semitic by the US and Israel even before it was screened.
Yeah. Without seeing it. Well, I guess they don't know much about this "internet" thing in Eqypt.
Except that the writer of this piece is "Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Mideast affairs and can be contacted at heardonthegrapevine@yahoo.co.uk." But, what the heck, who could object to drama about The Protocols of The Elders of Zion? Pretty damn nervy of that American Ambassador, David Welch.
NOT TOO EARLY. Prominent Palestinian intellectual recants his opposition to the Iraqi invasion and declares -- in the pages of Arab News:
No, I don’t believe that by going to war, America had dark designs on Iraq’s oil or pursued an equally dark conspiracy to “help Israel.” I believe that the US, perhaps willy-nilly, will end up helping Iraqis regain their human sanity, their social composure and the national will to rebuild their devastated nation.
And no, it’s not too early to adopt a revisionist view of the US war in Iraq, or too late for a columnist to say he was wrong all along.
Dean enthusiasm got its first reality check at 4 a.m. Tuesday, two hours before the polls opened here, at a Dunkin' Donuts on the east side of town. There stood volunteer Elizabeth Kieckhaefer, 19, determined to turn anyone who walked through the door into a voter for Howard Dean. And in walked John Sanborn, 89, deaf in one ear, a Bush fan and -- unbelievable to Kieckhaefer's empowered self -- a nonvoter.
"Yep. Haven't voted in 20 years."
"I can tell you where your voting site is. I really think you should vote for Howard."
"Can't do it."
"That's insane. That's insane," she concluded, after a long and valiant effort. "Stories like that just break my heart. I just don't understand why they believe what they believe."
Yes, well, that's a problem, isn't it?
Precisely the problem. Politics is, among other things, about understanding what people's needs, and desires, and beliefs, are, and reaching them on at least one of those bases. If you can't undersand why people believe what they believe, you simply have no basis for communication, let alone persuasion.
And here's a hint: "I really think you should vote for [My Candidate]" is not, a crack team of nanotech scientists have discovered, actually an argument.
There is a technical term for what it is, however. The term of art is: "being a damned annoyance."
This is precisely the problem I've been discussing here and here.
THE ONLY NON-INCUMBENT campaigner since the advent of the modern nomination system in 1972, to win the Democratic contests in both New Hampshire and Iowa is John Kerry.
That's "incumbent" in national office, that is, which is to say that the only other Democrats to ever do the hat trick was President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Vice-President Al Gore in 2000.
It's only interesting trivia, but it just occurred to me.
ADDENDUM: Thinking about it, I realized I'm an idiot. Jimmy Carter won both in 1976.
Who, exactly, is "Wonkette," the scheming parvenu wannabe blogger who is saying such awful things about the indispensable Media Whores Online?
The despicable cretin that goes by the name "Wonkette," in writing about MWO says this, while referring to the latest disgraceful behavior of right-wing mouthpiece and self-styled media critic Howard Kurtz as a scare-quoted "scandal":
There have been reader inquiries as to the reliability of Media Whores Online as a news source for the Kurtz item below. Here's our take: They are not reliable at all. Repeat: Not reliable at all. Somewhere below Drudge and above a Ouija board. More politically motivated than either.
Gosh, just when "Wonkette" was raising her profile by, among other things, absurdly offering others to, of all selfish and greedy things, "buy a link" from her disreputably Andy-Grove-esque gossip column, it's time for her to go away. To slither into the slime from which she arose, to die, at least in her public "persona," an ignored and ignominious death.
I've only done this once before, but I'm going to do it again. If you link to "Wonkette" through your blogroll you cannot and will not enjoy, for what that might be worth, a link from The Rittenhouse Review.
And this time, at least, there is, there will be, no "grandfathering." Take a stand, bloggers.
I shall! I am convinced! Moved to action! I shall strip Rittenhouse Review from my blogroll!
Oh, wait, it's never been there. Darn. Wonder why?
Incidentally, "who, exactly, is "Wonkette?" is a deep, enigmatic, brain-shattering, mystery, solvable only by the utterly impossibly challenging task of... reading her masthead, where, deeply encrypted by putting it into rot-26 English, are the words "Editor: Ana Marie Cox." Truly a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a pompous asshole.
Wonkette, as you probably know, is a heck of a lot more indispensible than the entirely dispensible, always anonymous-source-quoting while condemning use of anonymous sources, MWO, who, strangely, have also never made it onto my blogroll -- probably due to my famed bias against the left, as can be seen by examination of my blogroll. Blogrolls, as everyone knows, are tools of political purity, and one measures the blogger's purity by administering litmus tests as to the political reliability of who is on them. Political officers make weekly rounds of Purity Testing. Failing is... well, we won't speak of that. It's far too distressing.
Oh, wait, maybe it's actually my bias against heavy-breathing conspiracy sites of whatever political persuasion? Naaaah. Must be my worship of President Bush.
LANGUAGE LESSONS, AMBASSADOR, LANGUAGE LESSONS. Patrick Belton of Oxblog was in a discussion at Oxford with Grigory Karasin, the Russian ambassador to the Court of St James and a former deputy foreign minister. He has a transcript, but provides highlights:
on the Holocaust When we think of anti-Semitism, we shouldn’t overemphasize that part of [the] Holocaust. At [the] same time, some people tried to put anti-Semitism into [the] Middle East to discuss [a/the] Middle East settlement. That is [a] different thing, entirely.
on Iraq, and impersonating Madonna We think that what happened was not optimal, but we recognize that we are living in a material world, and we think the best thing that can be done is to bring back the U.N.
on imaginative construals of what it means to have free and fair elections Russia is a multiparty democracy with elections, plus and minuses with them, for examples – but take [the] last Duma election, roughly 23 parties took part in that, generally well organized, honest and fair. I can argue with those who think it was not like that.
on having your next presidential election be a foregone conclusion, in a multiparty democracy with elections; also, on the virtues of going to work each day On march 15, there will be the election of the President, not many people hesitate to predict the result, and it is not because we live in a society where everything is predictable, it is because the personal record of President Putin is absolutely obvious. People trust him, they see that he is really a working President, that every day he tries to handle in a really constructive way some questions with the government.
on optimism Because Britain is traditionally the land of very good and positive inventions, so let us hope it will invent something to allow us to prosper as an economic power.
WHOA. Local newsflash. Wellington Webb, three-term Mayor of Denver for many years, now retired for six months but still a vice-chair of the national party, just gave his first interview since he retired, to the local CBS tv affiliate, and declared that Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, rather popular Republican incumbent with a massive war chest, was "not unbeatable."
They'll have the second part of the interview in the morning. I don't know if this is just some sort of tease to indulge Webb as a power-broker and for his ego, or if it presages a possible run, but it's interesting either way.
COUNT ME IN as a doubter of many aspects of the Peter Landesman's New York Times Magazine cover story, "The Girls Next Door," on alleged massive sex slavery in America, along with Jack Shafer and Daniel Radosh, for the reasons they've been giving. (Incidentally, irrelevantly, the picture Radosh has just below that entry, of Kerry and the baby, with the caption, is pretty funny.)
"...perhaps tens of thousands of women and children" are in sexual slavery in America today? Perhaps so. I certainly hope not. If so, much must be done about it. But this story seems to be very bad journalism, and doesn't make the case at all well. It seems immensely below the generally fairly good standards of the Times Magazine.
ROBERT KAISER of the WashPo is currently doing live Q&A on the primary results here. (It will be just transcript later.) Feel free to join in. A couple of my questions have gotten in (I didn't always use "Boulder, Colorado," as I was afraid they might reject too many questions from one area/person. Here's one of mine:
Boulder, Colo.: Many commentators have suggested various reasons Kerry and Edwards surged in Iowa and in the past week, particularly that their re-tooled stump speeches were vastly improved, whereas, among better-known factors, Dean stuck to his tired speech, which was that of the insurgent he no longer, pre-Iowa, was, rather than that of the front-runner he temporarily was.
Others feel that the Deaniacs, Dean's campaign workers, were too insular, inexperienced, and inward-looking, to be persuasive in the complex Iowa caucus system, and to them, foreign Iowa culture.
I've read the blogs of a number of ordinary Iowa and New Hampshire voters who said clearly they were annoyed and turned-off by overly-aggressive Dean supporters.
Do any of these criticisms seem accurate to you? Or inaccurate? If so, could you discuss them briefly?
Robert G. Kaiser: They all seem pretty good to me. My personal theory about Dean was that in the beginning, many commentators missed the point about him that mattered: people who hadn't previously felt the urge to support any politician really responded to Howard Dean. I thought he showed real political creativity last year, and grew steadily through the spring and summer. I actually said to several friends, if this guy can keep growing month by month as he has so far, he could be really formidable.
But sometime late last year, it seemed to me, he stopped growing. He stopped surprising me, anyway. He did seem to get stuck in a rut. And our reporters picked up the growing dispaleasure in Iowa, where he really did poorly in the caucus before his famous scream speech.
I SEE DEAN PEOPLE is the too-good-not-to-steal title of this William Saletan piece that seems right on target to me.
The crowd in the Palace Theater in Manchester has come to see a live performance by Howard Dean. But the theater also shows movies, and that's how today's "town hall meeting" begins. From every corner of the auditorium, people with Dean shirts, Dean stickers, and Dean posters cheer and clap as they watch a film about people with Dean shirts, Dean stickers, and Dean posters. If you want to understand why Dean has gotten where he is, for good and ill, here's your answer: a campaign about itself.
The Internet helped Deaniacs find, organize, and fortify each other. Together, they built confidence and strength. They spent hours discussing topics such as "Why I love Howard Dean," "When did you fall in love with Howard Dean," and "Enough about Howard Dean—what do you love about Howard Dean?" But the more they affirmed each other, the more they lost touch with the rest of us. Even their first taste of reality, a third-place finish in Iowa, couldn't shake them.
I did a ramble earlier today through a dozen or a few more LiveJournals of "ordinary" Iowa and New Hampshire voters -- though naturally biased towards the young, which only emphasizes the point. They all stressed how immensely annoyed they'd become with Dean supporters/campaigners in the week before the caucus/vote, by the hard-edged tactics, the inability to understand why said person wasn't automatically for Howard and couldn't see the wonderfulness of Howard, and by the way the main argument many had was "you really, really should be for Howard, don't you see that"?
True Believers.
I'm not saying this isn't something the Dean campaign couldn't yet overcome, and go on to triumph. It may be able to and may. But it's something they need to deal with.
MOSCOW -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Tuesday that the United States may establish military bases in parts of the former Soviet empire....
Y'know, I'm not opposed in the least to the esablishment of a base, or "place" any where particular. But get your frigging story right so we don't look like furshluginer lying idiots, please?
GUESS WHO. You should be able to figure out the author of this by style. If not, click on the link.
I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think it was me. As it turns out, physics, like a grating relative, has all the answers. The big bang, black holes, and the primordial soup turn up every Tuesday in the Science section of The New York Times, and as a result my grasp of general relativity and quantum mechanics now equals Einstein's - Einstein Moomjy, that is, the rug seller.
How could I not have known that there are little things the size of "Planck length" in the universe, which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimetre? Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theatre how hard it would be to find. And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly would certain restaurants still require a jacket?
[...]
I awoke on Friday and because the universe is expanding it took me longer than usual to find my robe. This made me late leaving for work and, because the concept of up and down is relative, the elevator that I got into went to the roof, where it was very difficult to hail a taxi.
Please keep in mind that a man on a rocket ship approaching the speed of light would have seemed on time for work - or perhaps even a little early and certainly better dressed. When I finally got to the office and approached my employer, Mr Muchnick, to explain the delay, my mass increased the closer I came to him, which he took as a sign of insubordination.
There was some rather bitter talk of docking my pay, which, when measured against the speed of light, is very small anyhow. The truth is that compared to the amount of atoms in the Andromeda galaxy I actually earn quite little. I tried to tell this to Mr Muchnick, who said I was not taking into account that time and space were the same thing.
[...]
My advice to anyone has always been to avoid black holes because, once inside, it's extremely hard to climb out and still retain one's ear for music. If, by chance, you do fall all the way through a black hole and emerge from the other side, you'll probably live your entire life over and over but will be too compressed to go out and meet girls.
And so I approached Miss Kelly's gravitational field and could feel my strings vibrating. All I knew was that I wanted to wrap my weak-gauge bosons around her gluons, slip through a wormhole, and do some quantum tunnelling.
It was at this point that I was rendered impotent by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. How could I act if I couldn't determine her exact position and velocity? And what if I should suddenly cause a singularity; that is, a devastating rupture in space-time? They're so noisy. Everyone would look up and I'd be embarrassed in front of Miss Kelly. Ah, but the woman has such good dark energy. Dark energy, though hypothetical, has always been a turn-on for me, especially in a female who has an overbite.
Here's a hint: he grew up two short blocks from me, him on Ave K and East 12th St., me on East 10th St., between J and K, we both went to P.S. 99, where we had the same fifth grade teacher, among others, and we both went to Midwood High School, where we also had a couple of teachers in common.
This is only about half the piece, if you want to Read The Rest. If not, not.
JULIE SCHWARTZ. Some of you know the name well, some not at all. For the latter, a brief biography republished by my old acquaintance Don Markstein, and scroll down to his entry here.
In a nutshell, Julie was one of First Fandom (science fiction, that is), in the 1930's [though his claim to having done the first fanzine is arguable; one can make the case, one can make the case for a couple of others, depending upon definitions; but this is unimportant trivia], rapidly moving into becoming a key agent, and then became one of the most important comic book editors of all time, for decade after decade after decade].
I've met Julie on a dozen or so occasions, though I'm fairly sure he'd not remember me from a hole in the wall, since I was never introduced by one of our more memorable mutual friends, such as Harlan Ellison, and literally tens of thousands, maybe more, told Julie how important his work was to them over the years.
Mark Evanier on his website and Harlan Ellison at Ellison Webderland have been keeping people up to date in recent months on Julie's hospitalization for pneumonia and general state. Now Julie finally went home, fell, and is back in the hospital, at the age of 89. Mark Evanier has set up an e-mail address to send messages and good wishes to Julie, and asks that the e-address be distributed.
You can send mail to schwartz - at -- newsfromme -- dot -- com. Go forth and do so if you like, or say, ever enjoyed Superman, Green Lantern, Batman, The Flash, Hawkman, or the Justice League of America.
IRAQI NEWSPAPERS. Here's a valuable new resource. The Iraqi Press Monitor gives short daily summaries of the 13 largest newspapers published in Iraq.
Iraqi Press Monitor is published by the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, an independent non-profit organisation supporting regional media and democratic change.
I'M AN OSCAR MEYER WIENER for doing this, but what the heck. Here are the Oscar nominations. Some guesses from me, without having seen most of the movies involved, on who will win in a few categories, in order of likelihood:
Best Picture: 1) Return Of The King 2) Lost In Translation 3) Mystic River
Director: 1) Clint Eastwood, Mystic River 2) Peter Jackson, Return Of The King 3) Sofia Coppola
LATER: I'm now more persuaded it will be Peter Jackson. (Jan. 30th)
Actor: 1) Bill Murray, Lost in Translation 2) Johnny Depp, Pirates of the Carribean 3) Sean Penn, Mystic River
Supporting Actor: The toughest call; I'm particularly likely to be wrong 1) Tim Robbins, Mystic River 2) Ken Watanabe, The Last Samurai 3) Alec Baldwin, The Cooler
Supporting Actress: Also very hard 1) Renée Zellweger, Cold Mountain 2) Someone else
Original Screenplay: 1) Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation 2) No one else
Adapted Screenplay: 1) Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 2) Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, American Splendor 3) Someone else
Animated Feature: 1) Finding Nemo
Art Direction: 1) Ben Van Os and Cecile Heideman, Girl With a Pearl Earring 2) Grant Major, Dan Hennah and Alan Lee, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Make-up: 1) Richard Taylor and Peter King, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 2) Ve Neill and Martin Samuel, The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
Documentary Feature: 1) The Fog of War 2) Capturing the Friedmans 3) The Weather Underground
Visual Effects: 1) Jim Rygiel, Joe Letteri, Randall William Cook and Alex Funke, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Being an Arab custom, they were entitled, as the others, to visit the Sacred Enclosed Sanctuary. However, the Quraysh took this as the greatest threat ever.
They sent Khalid ibn al-Walid [who embraced Islam less than two years later] with a troop of two hundred horses to bar the pilgrims' entry by force of arms. The Prophet [s], having no intention to fight, changed his route and alighted on the plain of Hudaibiya.
[...]
The prophet [s] and his Companions remained in Hudaibiya for the next few days. There and then negotiations were opened between the Muslims and the Quraysh.
[...]
The treaty that was signed came to be known as 'The Treaty of Hudaibiya'. The following terms and conditions were agreed upon-
1. There would be peace for ten years. During this period, Muslims could go to Makkah and the Quraysh could go to Syria through the Muslim areas.
2. There would be one-sided extradition - the Makkans taking refuge with the Prophet [s] would be handed over on demand to the Quraysh. But Muslims taking refuge with the Quraysh would not be handed back.
3. Muslims would depart from Makkah this year. They would be free to perform umrah the following year and remain in Makkah for only three days.
4. Any tribe wishing to sign the agreement with the Makkans or the Quraysh, would be able to do so.
[...]
It was a trying period for the Muslims. The treaty was a blessing in disguise. They had hoped to visit the Ka'bah and were now disappointed. Some of the general bitterness at having signed a treaty where the Muslims seemed 'obviously' at loss, smoothed over.
'He rewarded them [Pledgers of allegiance] with a speedy victory.' [Qur'an 48: 18]
Most of the commentators assume that the above verse relates to the conquest of Khaybar, which took place a few months after the Truce of Hudaibiya. It is probable, however, that it is a prophecy of the almost bloodless conquest of Makkah in the year 8H, the victorious establishment of Islam in all of Arabia and, finally, the tremendous expansion of the Islamic Commonwealth under the Prophet's [s] immediate successors.
[...]
The Treaty of Hudaibiya proved to be of the greatest importance for the future of Islam. Muslims were united for a cause like never before.
[...]
The Treaty brought about the moral and political victory of Islam all over Arabia.
Blocked from getting to your sacred site? It's okay to make a treaty of peace for ten years, even one that gives unfair advantages to your enemy, and then -- somehow or other -- you will conquer in only seven years!
Prima facie the pact was loaded in favor of the Quraish and most of the Muslims were critical of its terms. Abu Bakr and Ali, however felt that the Holy Prophet knew things better than what his followers could comprehend, and that what appeared to be disadvantageous to the Muslims might ultimately turn to their advantage. Umar waited on the Holy Prophet, and gave expression to his dissatisfaction with the terms of the treaty. The Holy Prophet assured him that whatever he had done was under the command of God, and that the terms which appeared to he against the interest of the Muslims would turn out to their favor. While on the way back to Madina, God sent a revelation that the treaty was a victory for the Muslims. As subsequent events showed this treaty was in fact a prelude to the conquest of Makkah. In later years some one asked Ali as to how the treaty of Hudaibiya was a victory for the Muslims when the terms thereof were apparently in favor of the Quraish. Ali pointed out that during the previous seventeen years the Quraish had been waging a war against the Muslims sometimes cold, sometimes hot. Their aim was to crush Islam. When by the treaty of Hudaibiya the Quraish agreed to a truce for a period of ten years, it amounted to a confession of their failure. Heretofore the Quraish had exercised a pressure on the tribes of the desert not to ally themselves with the Muslims. By the treaty both the Muslims and the Quraish could have allies from amongst the tribes. This was a subtle point fraught with grave consequences. As things took shape later, it was such alliances that paved the way for the conquest of Makkah by the Muslims.
JUST LOVED THAT WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON JOKE. Excerpted from an upcoming book by Mark Katz, who was basically the chief humor speechwriter consultant for Bill Clinton, this is some pretty funny and fascinating stuff for any political junkie. It reads something akin to if Aaron Sorkin wrote reality. It also has interesting insights on how Bill Clinton's public sense of humor developed from, well, mean, to self-deprecating.
Self-deprecating humor comes naturally to only the most skillful practitioners of public power and your average Jew. At that moment in his presidency, the benefits of self-directed jokes were not yet evident to Bill Clinton.
[...]
The night before the speech, we sent a draft to the president; the night after that, a tuxedo-clad Bill Clinton took the podium to address the same Washington journalists who had recently made "Whitewater" a household word and opened with a geographic version of a time-honored line: "I am delighted to be here tonight. And if you believe that, I have some land in northwest Arkansas I'd like to sell you."
[...]
When I arrived in DC in the spring of 1999, it was as if I were walking onto the set of "Geraldo!"--a place where anything can happen because it already has. A humor speech on the heels of an impeachment trial? Sure, bring it on!
[...]
My first conversation with head speechwriter Michael Waldman that spring set the tone for what was to come. After a few minutes spent hashing out the challenges of this political science-fiction scenario, we agreed that we had more latitude than usual: "What are they going to do," he said, "impeach us?"
[...]
In the frenzy of our free-for-all, we came upon another ambitious idea that would not, in fact, get Clinton re-impeached: a parody of a transparent White House ploy, employed frequently during the past 14 months to restrain the press corps. As Clinton's renewed interest in foreign affairs had grown over the past year or so, so too had the number of joint press appearances with world leaders. The White House clung to the faint hope that the press corps would be less aggressive about asking the president compromising questions as he stood on the international stage.
Our version of this strategy had Clinton calling to the stage the fictional chief executive of a fictional nation, who would provide cover from the press corps on this night as well. Within an hour of hatching the premise, we had fused stray syllables together to create both our world leader's name (Shoreb Arnsvat) and his sovereign state (Karjakistan).
[...]
Ted returned later with good news and bad. Concerned that our parody might hit a little too close to home in places abroad, the NSC had decided that we could not use the name "Karjakistan," as it was a pretty obvious slur on the lawlessness of the fledgling breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union. Also, the national security staff was running a linguistic check on the name of our leader to see if it contained any unintentional ethnic or regional ties. ("Shoreb Arnsvat" could be a name right out of the Macedonian phone book, for all we knew.) I was heartened by the NSC's diligence but also quietly enthralled by the idea of writing a joke that set off an international incident.
[...]
Ted planned to submit this joke directly to Sandy Berger, the White House national security advisor, for approval. (How cool was that?) This was a threshold I had never crossed in my many years inside the White House joke-vetting process.
The next morning, Ted returned with bad news: "Sandy killed the Taliban joke." Jeff and I emitted loud, stereophonic groans. "He didn't think it was funny," Ted explained. "Say that again?" I asked. "He didn't like it. He said he didn't think it was funny." "Ted, hold on," I said in disbelief. "We need some ground rules here: The national security advisor can kill any joke he likes on the grounds that it compromises national security. But he can't kill a joke because he doesn't think it's funny."
[...]
Former White House aide George Stephanopoulos's then upcoming book played another, even more important role in the president's speech. It gave us the idea for a memoir theme--a joke-breeding ground that Jeff and I found too fertile to ignore. For the better part of two days, we took turns sitting at his computer, trying our hand at a comic preview of the forthcoming Clinton memoirs that would become the premise of his Gridiron speech.
"Page 134: "Election night, 1994. A tense and difficult night. In the family quarters of the residence, Hillary and I watched the returns with a few close friends and advisors. Sperling paced nervously. Begala stared sullenly into space while Leon Panetta bit his nails. 'Bite your own nails, Leon,' Begala snapped. "My own temper flared at the notion of Newt wielding the Speaker's gavel. 'Damn it,' I said, snapping a pretzel stick in my clenched fist. It was a display of anger that startled everyone present, even myself. "I took a deep breath. I counted to ten. By the time I hit six, word of my outburst had reached CNN. But all of a sudden I knew exactly what to do. I saw it all very clearly, the path to yet another comeback. 'Panetta,' I said, 'take a memo. I want you to book Newt Gingrich a seat on Air Force One soon, in the back of the plane.' "Page 319: "I was sitting at my desk reinventing government one day when [pollster] Mark Penn walked into the Oval Office. He was waving a sheet of paper. 'Mr. President, the overnight polls say. . .' I cut him off: 'The polls? Why are you always bringing me polls?' At my strong urging, Mark spent the next six months as an AmeriCorps volunteer.
[...]
This, I would learn, is a common phenomenon among people who find themselves in a conversation with a president. They interject the words "Mr. President" into nearly every sentence, as if afflicted with a very proper strain of Tourette's syndrome. There is just something about talking to the president that makes you punctuate your sentences with the words "Mr. President." Not because he wants to hear it-he knows very well who he is--but because you just love to hear yourself say it. After all, when is the next time you'll get to say "Mr. President" in a sentence? A co-op board meeting? More than that, interjecting those words adds import to any sentence you might say. Compare these sentences: A. Cheese sandwiches are very tasty. B. Cheese sandwiches are very tasty, Mr. President.
This condition is only made worse by the fact that speaking to the president can also make you talkative to the point of babbling. This happens for much the same reason: you are not really talking to the president, you are listening to yourself talking to the president. Your brain, so absorbed in listening to the conversation, becomes a cognitive bystander engaged in an internal monologue that goes something like this: I am talking to the president. I am talking to the president. I just said something to the president. The president is responding to something I just said.
NORWEGIANS AND ISRAEL. Bjorn Staerk has pulled a bunch of comments from one of Norway's major newspapers' blog's comments, and has a number of observations. It all bears on the European anti-semitism question, and the general "sorting criticism of Israel from anti-semitism" topic.
This stems from the whole Zvi Mazel/Dror Feiler affair, which I've not blogged a word about, because it happened while I was off-line and when I came back anything I'd link to had already been blogged by all the usual sites more focussed on anti-semitism than I am (of which there are quite a few indeed).
If you're someone interested in the topic, you'll find Bjorn's quotes and commentary of interest, and if not, not. He and a number of others also have a great deal to say in comments on that post.
DEAN'S TIMING. I think this is definitely only one facet of Dean's trouble in Iowa, but that Tomasky is correct insofar as it goes:
The single most important thing Dean should have done, which probably would have balanced out all his misstatements and gaffes, was to retool his stump speech. The speech itself -- "take our country back," "you have the power," all that -- was great, and it got him where he was. But it's an insurgent's speech. It's not a front-runner's speech. A front-runner's speech looks to the future and finds subtle and nonchalant ways to suggest (without really suggesting) that the person speaking these words is indeed inevitable.
[...]
So now he limps into New Hampshire doing what he should have done three weeks ago, with a new speech that's meant to show us a new Dean. But whereas three weeks ago the transition to the mellow, substantive Dean would have come across as interesting and ingeniously ahead of the curve yet again, now he just looks sort of desperate.
Clearly there were a number of other significant errors, as well, among which I suspect are remaining too inwardly-focused on the already converted and not enough on finding new ways to bring non-True-Believers into the fold. I suspect too many of the young and super-enthused TBers didn't have experience of, or knowledge how to, talk[ing] to people from different backgrounds and different mind-sets. That's almost inevitably the case with True Believers of all stripes; why should Deaniacs be different? And lastly I suspect that in a caucus situation, too many lacked experience and knowledge of how to directly persuade undecideds over to their side (something I actually have some experience with, after participating in several Washington State caucuses, and being elected a delegate; sometime I will write about why I say "pish-tush" to all the poo-pooing of the "undemocratic nature" of the caucus system, which I believe to be far superior to the primary system).
MARS ATTACKS. A number of bloggers have, understandably, declared their lack of interest in the Mars landings. That's completely reasonable. That's how they feel, and I imagine some feel a bit swamped or defensive by so many other people having an apparently inexplicably different reaction.
Since the rover Spirit landed on Mars three weeks ago, 32 million people have visited the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Web site, dwarfing the numbers of any other space event, including last year's space shuttle accident. The agency recorded four billion hits, one for each item called up on the site, as the visitors browsed through hundreds of pictures considering what rock to zoom in on. That was well over the number of hits recorded in the entire previous year.
Woo-hoo.
Read The Rest if you want to know about "Mars addiction."
Check it out; it loads in just a few seconds. Watch the numbers fly by for a few seconds. That's your tax dollars at work, American citizens. Now, on the other hand, if the product were instead legal and taxed....
Takes me back to my own experience volunteering for John Anderson in 1980.
As I've mentioned before, in 1980, I caucused for John Anderson in Seattle, Washington, in a I-knew-it-would-be-futile-but-what-the-hell effort to deny Ronald Reagan some support.
Seattle being a very liberal Democrat town, our precinct caucus consisted of me, my sweetie, and six or so blue-haired grandmothers.
And the editorial cartoonist of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, not-yet-then Pulitzer-winning David Horsey.
Resulting in the next day's editorial cartoon being an entirely recognizable cartoon of me and my sweetie, in a slightly exaggerated "hippie" look (which we definitely had; just less so) saying to a prune-faced-looking old women in a bee-hive hair-do holding a clipboard and wearing a skeptical look on her face, the caption being either me or my sweetie saying "why, yes, ma'am, we're life-long Republicans!"
So, you see, I've always been iconoclastic. Yep. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
(Wish I still had my copy of that cartoon; can get it from microfilm sometime, I suppose.) And, seriously, I very much admired Anderson, and was very comfortable with his platform and person. Still am. (For the record -- and I know this will shock you -- I voted for Carter in 1980; also for the record, that was the first Presidential election I could vote in; I missed 1976 by a couple of days, which irritated me no end.)
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez's widely reviled film Gigli has topped nominations for the Razzies, awards presented for the year's worst films.
The film, memorably described by one critic as having "a special badness all its own", won nine nods, including worst picture and worst screen couple.
Mike Myers's Dr Seuss adaptation The Cat in the Hat - which another critic said deserved to be called Mike Myers: Asshole in Fur - came in joint second with eight nominations, alongside From Justin to Kelly, a film based around the American Idol television show. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, and The Real Cancún complete the worst picture shortlist.
[...]
Sylvester Stallone continues a long acquaintance with the Razzie shortlist. The actor is nominated for his part in the hugely successful Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. Stallone enjoys the questionable accolade of being the most successful ever Razzie contender, with 30 nominations and nine wins. "He plays five different characters in Spy Kids 3-D," said Wilson, "and none of them well."
COLORADO SPRINGS - A woman who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on perfume after embezzling more than $600,000 from two Colorado Springs nursing homes was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
[...]
Investigators think Williamson spent $200,000 on perfume - often Chanel No. 5 - at Saks Fifth Avenue, Foley's, Dillard's and elsewhere.
WHO COMES ACROSS AS A LOON? Everyone and their mother, as the saying goes, has been talking about Dean and how his howl/screech/yeargh came across as either "angry" (no, not at all) or "crazy" (granted, a little bit, though he was obviously playing to his young 'un followers and wanting to keep them pumped); what's indisputable is that it assuredly was not "presidential" and was tactically immensely unwise.
Remarks by the President to the Press Pool Nothin' Fancy Cafe Roswell, New Mexico
11:25 A.M. MST
THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs.
Q Mr. President, how are you?
THE PRESIDENT: I'm hungry and I'm going to order some ribs.
Q What would you like?
THE PRESIDENT: Whatever you think I'd like.
Q Sir, on homeland security, critics would say you simply haven't spent enough to keep the country secure.
THE PRESIDENT: My job is to secure the homeland and that's exactly what we're going to do. But I'm here to take somebody's order. That would be you, Stretch -- what would you like? Put some of your high-priced money right here to try to help the local economy. You get paid a lot of money, you ought to be buying some food here. It's part of how the economy grows. You've got plenty of money in your pocket, and when you spend it, it drives the economy forward. So what would you like to eat?
Q Right behind you, whatever you order.
THE PRESIDENT: I'm ordering ribs. David, do you need a rib?
Q But Mr. President --
THE PRESIDENT: Stretch, thank you, this is not a press conference. This is my chance to help this lady put some money in her pocket. Let me explain how the economy works. When you spend money to buy food it helps this lady's business. It makes it more likely somebody is going to find work. So instead of asking questions, answer mine: are you going to buy some food?
Q Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. What would you like?
Q Ribs.
THE PRESIDENT: Ribs? Good. Let's order up some ribs.
Q What do you think of the democratic field, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: See, his job is to ask questions, he thinks my job is to answer every question he asks. I'm here to help this restaurant by buying some food. Terry, would you like something?
Q An answer.
Q Can we buy some questions?
THE PRESIDENT: Obviously these people -- they make a lot of money and they're not going to spend much. I'm not saying they're overpaid, they're just not spending any money.
Q Do you think it's all going to come down to national security, sir, this election?
THE PRESIDENT: One of the things David does, he asks a lot of questions, and they're good, generally.
END 11:29 A.M. MST
Contrary to popular impression, that is not "Mystery Science Theater."
No, I'm not saying, in the least, anyone should take this seriously. I'm saying that it's pretty damn funny. And I avoided the obvious location jokes!
Read The Rest Scale: 0 out of 5; that the entire entry.
ADDENDUM: It belatedly occurs to me that I was unconsciously "hearing" an echo of the SNL/John Belushi "cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger" sketch in the back of my head when I read the dialogue. It reads like a comedy sketch with the same rhythm. To my ear, anyway.
BEING CLEAR. Michael J. Totten points out this 2002 reprint of a John Edwards Washington Post Op-Ed piece on Iraq policy. I like it. It suggests Edwards, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, might have some foreign policy ideas. Real anti-war folks, on the other hand, won't be pleased.
THE WORD OF HAMAS. Truly, a great beginning for peace. Not.
Hamas spokesman, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, said on Sunday that his organization is willing to declare a limited truce with Israel and will accept a “temporary” Palestinian state in areas captured by Israel in the 1967 six day war. “We propose a 10 year ceasefire in return for (Israeli) withdrawal and the establishment of a state” Rantisi said in a telephone interview with the Reuters news agency from his hideout in the Gaza strip.” It is difficult to liberate all our land at this stage, so we are willing to accept a phased liberation. We accept a state in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip”, said Rantisi.
Rantisi emphasized that Hamas would not recognize Israel or view the truce as an end to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
According to Rantisi, debates over agreeing to a Palestinian state with pre ’67 borders are not new. “Now the movement has accepted the notion”, said Rantisi who doubts the Israelis would accept the proposal. “They rejected the Palestinian Authorities’ proposal that demanded less land than what we are offering”, he said.
If one really stretches one's mind, it's possible to interpret this as actually edging towards a long-term eventual acceptance of Israel, but I'm rather more inclined to take them at their word.
MORE OF US PLAYING THE VICTIM. Another cheery poll.
A poll of nine European nations that was released Monday found that 46 percent of respondents said Jews in their nations were "different," and 35 percent said Jews should stop "playing the victim" for the Holocaust.
Some 9 percent of the respondents said they "don't like or trust Jews," and 15 percent said "it would be better if Israel didn't exist."
The poll by the Ipso research institute for Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera was conducted in Italy, France, Belgium, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, and Britain.
Asked if Jews in their countries had a "mentality and lifestyle" different than other citizens, 46 percent said yes. About 40.5 percent said Jews in their country had "a particular relationship with money" and 35.7 percent said Jews "should stop playing the victim for the Holocaust and the persecutions of 50 years ago."
The poll also differentiated between the countries surveyed, finding that German, Austrian, Spanish and Italian hostility toward Jews was higher than that in the rest of the countries. In all the countries, anti-Semitic sentiment was positively correlated with anti-Israel sentiment.
One thing I understood decades ago is that many, though not all, Jews are steeped in the long-term history of anti-semitism, and the awareness of how much death and suffering it has led to in the past two thousand years, with only a few patches of exceptions here and there. That many Jews currently live more or less safely and more or less well-off is therefore viewed as a trivial blip in time and space that is, viewed historically, perfectly apt to disappear in a blink of an eye.
Many, though certainly not all, non-Jews are relatively ignorant of this long, blood-soaked, history, and certainly don't feel it in their bones (what were the last ten book-length studies of the subject you've read?).
That's why we obsessively study these polls and discuss them, and obsessively look for signs of flare-ups and talk about them. It took only a handful of years for Germany to turn from the eminently civilized place in Europe where Jews were most accepted, integrated, making the largest contribution, and safe, to you know what.
Give us a couple of hundred years, at least, of living in general safety in most of the world, and maybe we'll start to relax a bit. Not likely sooner.
I'm completely serious.
One of the defining points of Jewish culture is its long-term memory.
Therefore I wish I could get across to all those 35% above the difference between, however rationally or reasonably, "living in fear" and "playing the victim."
George W. Bush says he wants to go to Mars—a motion that many of his fellow-citizens would heartily second—but he probably doesn’t mean it. The speech in which he announced his “New Vision for Space Exploration” was exceedingly vague about how and when the trip was to be made. It did say that in 2015 or maybe in 2020 Americans would be going back to the moon, where they would build a base for "human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond." An official likened this speech to President Kennedy’s address of May 25, 1961, in which he asked the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”
A week later came Bush’s State of the Union address, the text of which one scans in vain for any mention of Mars, the moon, or space exploration. The subject has already been dropped. (By contrast, Kennedy’s 1962 State of the Union reiterated and discussed the lunar excursion he had proposed eight months before.) Nor is a short attention span the only sign of Bush’s lack of seriousness about his interplanetary venture. There is also its Wal-Mart price tag. The President is asking Congress for an extra two hundred million dollars per year, about what it costs to make a movie like “Waterworld.” Another couple of billion is to be cannibalized out of the existing space budget. This kind of money will get no one to Mars, but that isn’t to say that Bush’s project will yield no results. It has already led to the cancellation of maintenance on the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s most scientifically valuable project, which means that the Hubble will go blind in three or four years’ time. Bush’s "New Vision" is a sharp stick in the eye.
Polls published between the two Bush speeches revealed a distinct lack of public enthusiasm for the President’s space proposal, and it will be surprising if he mentions it again anytime soon.
THE GENE AND NEIL SHOW. Neil Gaiman interviews Gene Wolfe:
Gene Wolfe: I'm anxious to get our interview under way, so I've decided to answer your first three questions before you ask them—You can work out the questions at leisure.
1. Although I considered placing The Knight in the universe of the Book of the New Sun series, I soon saw that there were too many dragons.
2. The Knight is to some degree autobiographical, as all my books are. For example, Able falls off a horse. I have done that myself. One is encouraged to remount as soon as possible, but not by the horse.
3. I do in fact own a sword. It is possible, as you say, that it is under some subtle, obscure spell. That might account for a few of the things that go on around here.
Are these satisfactory? I can elaborate on my replies if you wish, but they are certain to get worse.
We were having dinner in the elegant restaurant of a Davos hotel: some reporters, some academics, and Kamal Kharrazi, the foreign minister of Iran, accompanied by his entourage.
[...]
Kharrazi is a striking man, severe and dignified. His English is fluent – he has a PhD in education from the University of Houston – and he speaks slowly, heightening the effect of each word. He never says anything unreasonable-sounding, and every so often he drops an endearingly self-deprecating remark. Iran, he says, "has not been understood outside." He is here to help us to understand.
[...]
The time has come for questions from the floor. I have mine: If Israel withdraws to the June 4, 1967, lines, would Iran recognize Israel? I'm guessing he'll answer yes.
Of course, he does not. Land that's occupied must be returned to its rightful owners, he says. And he means all the land, reciting the history of Iran's dissent in 1947 from the UN's partition plan. That Israel had diplomatic representation in Iran during the period of the shah is glossed over: Evidently, he does take us for fools.
"The final solution to the dispute," Kharrazi concludes, "is a one-state solution." As is his habit, the words are carefully chosen.
ROUND SHINY OBJECTS. I didn't watch last night's Golden Globes show. Although I don't take any awards or their shows seriously, I do sometimes enjoy the spectacle on tv of watching people act in strange and bizarre ways; it's the one type of "reality" tv I do sometimes watch. But didn't feel like it last night. So, for those like me, one person's selected Best Quotes:
A. "I would like to thank ['Lost in Translation' film executives], except there's so many people trying to take credit for this I wouldn't know where to begin." -- Bill Murray, on his win for best comedy film actor for "Lost in Translation."
B. "I'm from a little place called England -- we used to run the world before you did." -- Ricky Gervais, accepting the best comedy TV series award for "The Office."
C. "I shall not be beaten up this time . . . " -- best comedy actress winner Sarah Jessica Parker after mentioning her spouse (she was clearly scarred from the time the tabloids went wild with innuendo when she failed to make reference to spouse Matthew Broderick in a previous acceptance speech).
D. "I share this with you. But I'll keep it at my house." -- best supporting television actor Jeffrey Wright to his "Angels in America" co-nominees Ben Shenkman and Patrick Wilson.
E. "Two Australians surrounded by English seamen." -- Robin Williams description of nominated drama "Master and Commander."
Nice that Return Of The King won everything it was nominated for, including Best Picture. Even if it does come from the infamous "Hollywood Foreign Press," who are not in Hollywood, mostly not foreign, and not press. (It amazes me how this bunch of irrelevant pipsqueak freeloading boozehounds have worked their way into producing the second most "prestigious" awards in the business, pretty much entirely by historical accident and the ardent desire of the industry to have Yet Another Award to help boost sales and publicity.)
THOSE BOEING WELFARE QUEENS: more on how You, Too, can get prime welfare support from the White House if you are a huge corporation.
Mitch Daniels, then President Bush's budget director and now the Republican candidate for Indiana governor, thought the tanker deal violated government accounting rules.
"The central problem was that the tankers were not on [the] Defense Department's wish list until somebody [at Boeing] came up with this idea," an administration source said.
Faced with Daniels' objections, Boeing did what only a handful of American businesses can do: It went over Daniels' head and straight to Bush. Through a series of meetings among the president and his staff and key members of Congress--including House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.)--Boeing applied enough pressure at the top to push its contract through in May.
[...]
Under the lease plan, the number of planes involved grew to 100, and the cost also grew. While leases would be cheaper for the government at first, they would be costlier in the long run.
"Throughout the uniformed AF [Air Force], the realization exists that leasing is considerably more costly to the AF and the taxpayer," said a Sept. 30, 2001, e-mail from Boeing executive John Sams Jr.
[...]
It was Daniels who issued the White House response.
"We have grave reservations about leasing these aircraft," Daniels wrote to Dicks on Dec. 12, 2001. "Our analysis shows that over the long term a lease-purchase program would be much more expensive than direct purchase of the same aircraft."
Boeing and the Air Force redirected their main lobbying effort at Congress, but Daniels continued his protests. In an April 2002 letter to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)--then one of the few vocal opponents of the lease--Daniels outlined a series of objections. In his view the lease, which he said had grown to nearly $150 million per plane, ran afoul of the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990.
That law, he wrote, requires agencies to "fund the full cost of purchase, lease purchases and capital leases up front in the first year of the transaction."
A push to Bush in '02
By early autumn 2002, only Daniels stood in the way of the lease plan being accepted by the White House. That's when Boeing turned to Bush for help.
[...]
As 2003 began, Daniels and his staff at the White House Office of Management and Budget continued to object, but the momentum had shifted. Once Bush had agreed with the need for the tankers, the question wasn't whether to lease more tankers, but at what price.
End result to date: resignation of Boeing chairman, firings of officials involved, corruption investigations, and The Deal Goes Through. Pork Uber Alles.
Read The Rest for more details as this story, which I've continued to blog, goes on.
LESS CAMPAIGN ROAD SEX: The true priorities of campaign reporting, in a nostalgic Travel Section report on the historic Wayfarer Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, and how campaign reporting has changed.
"We are all so much more boring now," explained Tucker Carlson, the co-host of "Crossfire" on CNN, who recalled being challenged to a late-night bar fight at the Wayfarer in the 1990's. "At least I know I am. Everybody has been turned into a wire service reporter. Hardly anybody drinks anymore. Put it this way, it's hard to be drunk if you are always filing to the Web or appearing on TV."
[...]
"In the good old days," Ms. Warren said, "reporters used to swap tips about the best bars and restaurants. Now, it is all about which hotels have gone wireless or have the best hours in their business center."
WHAT technology has brought us is more reporters and more competition," said Chuck Todd, editor in chief of The Hotline, a political newsletter. "And more competition means less time for alcohol. God only knows what this has done to campaign road sex. You used to be able to keep an eye on your competition just by sitting at the bar. There were enough bar stools at the Wayfarer to go around for all the top reporters. That's not the case anymore."
"Everybody used to hang out, waiting to see who would show up," said Nance Carrier, who has been a bartender at the Wayfarer for 23 years. Over the years, Ms. Carrier observed, "The Boys on the Bus" have become a bit tamer. "For the most part, I would say that they are now more sippers," she said. "They just sit there and sip their drink slowly, and you almost want to tell them that it is a five dollar cover charge just to sit at the bar."
[...]
For his part, Mr. Germond, who retired in 2000 from The Baltimore Sun after publishing "Fat Man in a Middle Seat: Forty Years of Covering Politics" in 1999, laughed heartily when remembering his Wayfarer days, and the gift of the barstool. "You couldn't have the rooms that they called Waterside, because the ducks in the pond would wake you up at 6 in the morning. You wanted to be housed in the Upper Falls building."
Mr. Brokaw acknowledged that some of the fun is now missing from campaign coverage, recalling again that birthday party in 2000. "I remember Jack came up to me at that party we had at the Wayfarer for him," Mr. Brokaw said. "We had a whole corner reserved. We were watching the Super Bowl on the one hand, talking politics on the other and celebrating Jack. Jack threw his arm around me and said, `Brokaw, these kids today are going to the gym and drinking Perrier water at the end of the day. I've got to get out of this business.' "
Where's Hunter S. Thompson when you need him? (This is a rhetorical question; he's actually not all that far from me, as the coconut-bearing swallow flies.)
Read The Rest if you're into nostalgia about campaign reporting.
FORK YOU. I am not a Dean partisan; as I've said, I'm Undecided. But:
Mr. Clyburn's support might be especially helpful to Dr. Dean. When the first Dean office opened in South Carolina , almost no blacks attended the ceremony. Nearly all those holding up "African-Americans for Dean" signs were white, though Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr. of Illinois, who was born in Greenville, endorsed Dr. Dean at a news conference shortly before.
"He's not going to get Southern votes anyway," Mr. Harpootlian asserted. "He's not one of us. He's toast. Stick a fork in him. He's done."
When was the last time you read of a Northerner saying they wouldn't vote for a Southern candidate because the candidate "wasn't one of us"?
Yet we hear the reverse as a drumbeat.
Read The Rest only if you want to see Johnny Apple note that, gee, South Carolina is an important race, and Kerry is not well pre-positioned for it. You really have to be on-location, and have major reporting skills, for that insight.
OWWIE. Over the course of the past day I've developed one of the gout attacks I'm begun having every so often in the last few years (I think this is about the sixth attack in four years). It's hit the point of Agonizing Constant Pain, Unable To Bear Any Weight On Right Foot.
Naturally, this happened when I was planning to make a grocery run today and am low on food, as well as same re laundry, plus need to get out to do all sorts of things I now won't be able to do. Best of all was I just took my last two aspirin. "Get aspirin" was on the list.
I don't know if blogging will be light or heavy, as, on the one hand, I'm not going to be getting out of this chair very much, and on the other, I can barely rub two brain cells together, or string three coherent words together.
We'll see, but there's apt to be more links than my own writing today, I suspect.
With luck, this will pass in a day, though sometimes it can last up to four days or so, based upon experience up to now.
Damned inconvenient. Hope your week has gotten off to a better start.
ACTUALLY MAKING THINGS WORSE THAN UNDER HUSSEIN, of course, would be switching from contemporary Iraqi law for women to Sharia law.
This is, of course, quite appalling, and does not contribute to the argument that we're doing such a great job of improving the lives of Iraqis. Our intentions and our consequences are not the same thing.
Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5. (Again, use "laexaminer" as ID and password.)
KENNEDALE, Texas — It's 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon, and inside a windowless adult video store a dozen people are perusing XXX-rated movie titles. Pastor Jim Norwood surmises this because he has photographed the customers' cars in the parking lot, carefully adjusting his digital camera so that each license plate is in focus.
Each car owner will soon get a postcard in the mail from Norwood's Oakcrest Family Church. On the front will be a color photo of their vehicle in the video store parking lot. On the back will be a note: "Observed you in the neighborhood. Didn't know if you were aware there is a church in the area … please stop by next time. We'd love to have you visit."
Norwood, 56, who says he is a reformed drug abuser on a mission to rid the town of sexually oriented businesses, calls the postcards an "invitation to church."
I don't think this sort of thing brings good karma. I'm probably wrong, though.
SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONEabout this, but I'm not entirely sure what. I don't know how far things can be pushed in Pakistan without pushing the government wholly into the hands of those who want to kill us.
But it's a good piece, an important piece, and I commend it to you, 5 out of 5. (Use "laexaminer" as password and ID.)
HE WAS DISTURBED BECAUSE HE WAS DEPRIVED. This goes a considerable ways to helping explain the WMD fiasco.
He said Baghdad was actively working to produce a biological weapon using the poison ricin until the American invasion last March. But in general, Dr. Kay said, the C.I.A. and other agencies failed to recognize that Iraq had all but abandoned its efforts to produce large quantities of chemical or biological weapons after the first Persian Gulf war, in 1991.
From interviews with Iraqi scientists and other sources, he said, his team learned that sometime around 1997 and 1998, Iraq plunged into what he called a "vortex of corruption," when government activities began to spin out of control because an increasingly isolated and fantasy-riven Saddam Hussein had insisted on personally authorizing major projects without input from others.
After the onset of this "dark ages," Dr. Kay said, Iraqi scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state.
"The whole thing shifted from directed programs to a corrupted process," Dr. Kay said. "The regime was no longer in control; it was like a death spiral. Saddam was self-directing projects that were not vetted by anyone else. The scientists were able to fake programs."
In interviews after he was captured, Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, told Dr. Kay that Mr. Hussein had become increasingly divorced from reality during the last two years of his rule. Mr. Hussein would send Mr. Aziz manuscripts of novels he was writing, even as the American-led coalition was gearing up for war, Dr. Kay said.
[...]
The former Iraqi officers reported that no Special Republican Guard units had chemical or biological weapons, he said. But all of the officers believed that some other Special Republican Guard unit had chemical weapons.
"They all said they didn't have it, but they thought other units had it," Dr. Kay said. He said it appeared they were the victims of a disinformation campaign orchestrated by Mr. Hussein.
So there were reasons for both Saddam and us and everyone else to think there were some significant WMDs, and programs, and in fact there were minor things going on, but the big stuff we bought into came as a result of our having bought into Saddam's increasingly delusional state (in two senses of the word). I can buy that.
THE BBC CHEERFULLY EXPLAINS TO THEIR READERS/VIEWERS the origins of the blood libel, something they presumably are sufficiently unaware of as to need the explanation.
As this is probably true in all too many cases, this is something to applaud. That the blood libel is an English creation is mentioned matter-of-factly, but of course not emphasized.
The piece will apparently be on BBC Radio 4 on Monday.
No mention is made of, say, the blood libel showing up this year in a major newspaper cartoon which was subsequently given the top journalistic award of the year. This is not something to applaud.
Read if you don't know the subject.
They do include a link to their story on the comparative ickiness of Jews as Prime Ministers or otherwise, with a couple of details not included in the story I previously blogged.
Those most likely to underplay the Holocaust were under the age of 24 or over the age of 65.
Only 53% of those questioned would be as happy with a Jewish prime minister as one of any other faith, with 18% saying they would find it less acceptable.
Happy Holocaust Memorial Day on Tuesday, one in seven Britons who believe Jewish suffering in the Holocaust had been exaggerated! Have a jolly holiday! (Please don't any of my non-anti-Semitic British readers take this as an insult; the figures are what they are, and most Britons, by this measure, are not anti-Semitic, and I doubt anyone who reads me is.)
1/25/2004 11:19:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page |
Other blogs commenting on this post
GRUMBLE. I don't want to name names, but there are several prominent, fine, bloggers very fond of not just having a lot of text -- about which I have no complaint -- but with posting several megabytes of photos at any given time. I have no objection whatever to some discreet use of pictures -- it can dress a site up a bit. But getting into multi-megabyte amounts means that for those of us stuck on 56k, or worse, 33k, dial-up accounts, that means a site can take five, ten, maybe even fifteen minutes for a site to load. That's asking a lot for a quick pass, particularly when there's not exactly a shortage of other blogs and sites to go through.
To top it off, those sites typically are written so that the comments won't work unless the site is 100% fully loaded. So if the reader wants to short-circuit the process for a quick reading of text, the reader is prevented from commenting.
Hey, it's up to you what your priorities are for you site, but it would simple enough to set up a second page and dump the large pictures there, keeping small thumbnails or links for the main page. Otherwise, well, it's not exactly a warm, friendly, interactive, I value your viewage and comments, way of blogging. Could you maybe think about this, please?
But this time, three human players control the ghosts (for those who don't remember - Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde) on the TV screen while Pac tries to avoid them on the GameBoy Advance.
Ghosts have only a limited field of vision, while Pac can see the entire maze as he racks up the points munching on dots, fruit and power pills.
It'll be given away free on upcoming Gamecube titles. No word yet on Ms. Pac-man.
FRENCH FRIED. A review of French historian and economist Nicolas Baverez's La France qui tombe (France Is Falling Over), a critique proclaiming the decline of the French economy and polity.
This book has apparently caused quite a large stir in France, and no small amount of both umbrage and agreement.
I've not read the book, but this comes across as a good summary; here's the conclusion:
But today, Baverez challenges French thinkers to look within and realize that their nuclear deterrent, the overvalued euro, and the reform stalemate in the public sector are undermining the nation’s standing in a rapidly changing global environment. Trapped in its statist model, Baverez contends, France is stagnating by refusing to open its eyes.
Naturally, France bashers will find this a must-read, but anyone interested in the situation in Europe should be aware of this debate.
CONNECTIVITY HAS AS MANY EDGES AS CONNECTIONS. This piece is a bit obvious, but it's a valuable point that the power of the net, and of blogs, what it also calls "micro-punditry," which everyone understands has been a key, if not the key, tactical element in Howard Dean's success up to now, is not controlled by any person, any blogger, or any campaign.
Punditry wants to be free, to coin a phrase, and people will take developments, and info, and sounds and images, and use them to their own ends and points of view, and then the memes will live or die, influence or disappear, depending simply upon how popular they become, how much people like them.
An interesting example of the Dean campaign at least temporarily missing their own point:
DeanGoesNuts.com was actually started by a creative Dean supporter, Caner Ozdemir, a 21-year-old college student in Muncie, Ind.
"I thought the more people saw it and heard it, the less shock it has," said Mr. Ozdemir, who posted requests for remixes on the Dean campaign blog, identifying himself as a Dean supporter.
The campaign staff, however, didn't see eye to eye with him. The Web site administrators deleted his requests and suspended his account.
"They didn't feel like that at the time,'' he said, "and they just wanted to shut me up."
STABILITY AT THE EXPENSE OF LIBERTY. Remember that great speech Bush gave at Banqueting House in November? New ways of doing business, and all that? Nice words, but:
ILHAM ALIYEV was inaugurated as president of the oil-rich Muslim country of Azerbaijan three months ago after an election condemned by international observers as blatantly fraudulent. When members of the opposition tried to protest, they were brutally beaten by police. There followed a massive, nationwide crackdown in which more than 1,000 people were arrested, including opposition leaders, activists from nongovernmental organizations, journalists and election officials who objected to the fraud. More than 100 remain in prison, including most of the senior opposition activists. A new report by Human Rights Watch documents numerous cases of torture, including severe beatings, electric shock, and threats of rape against the opposition leaders. Mr. Aliyev, who succeeded his strongman father, meanwhile has been consolidating dictatorial powers: Most recently he was named director of Azerbaijani radio and television.
Azerbaijan, in short, might look like a good place for President Bush to start implementing his frequently declared policy of "spreading freedom" to the world -- and in particular the greater Middle East. Instead he is doing the opposite. The president and his top aides have embraced Mr. Aliyev, excused his fraud and ignored his human rights violations -- not to mention reliable reports of his personal corruption. The administration waived congressional restrictions to grant Azerbaijan $3 million in military aid and is winding up to give still more. The Pentagon is talking with Azeri officials about the possible use of bases for U.S. operations. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Baku last month to confer with Mr. Aliyev. When asked about the electoral fraud, he replied: "The United States has a relationship with this country. We value it." Said Mr. Aliyev proudly: "The United States is a strategic partner."
The third pillar of security is our commitment to the global expansion of democracy, and the hope and progress it brings, as the alternative to instability and to hatred and terror. We cannot rely exclusively on military power to assure our long-term security. Lasting peace is gained as justice and democracy advance.
In democratic and successful societies, men and women do not swear allegiance to malcontents and murderers; they turn their hearts and labor to building better lives. And democratic governments do not shelter terrorist camps or attack their peaceful neighbors; they honor the aspirations and dignity of their own people. In our conflict with terror and tyranny, we have an unmatched advantage, a power that cannot be resisted, and that is the appeal of freedom to all mankind.
[...]
Perhaps the most helpful change we can make is to change in our own thinking. In the West, there's been a certain skepticism about the capacity or even the desire of Middle Eastern peoples for self-government. We're told that Islam is somehow inconsistent with a democratic culture. Yet more than half of the world's Muslims are today contributing citizens in democratic societies. It is suggested that the poor, in their daily struggles, care little for self-government. Yet the poor, especially, need the power of democracy to defend themselves against corrupt elites.
Peoples of the Middle East share a high civilization, a religion of personal responsibility, and a need for freedom as deep as our own. It is not realism to suppose that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to liberty; it is pessimism and condescension, and we should have none of it. (Applause.)
We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.
As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found. (Applause.)
Except when it's inconvenient. Back to the WashPo:
Only 42 years old, Mr. Aliyev is renowned in Baku as a playboy with a bad gambling habit. During his tenure at the state oil company, Azerbaijan was rated the sixth most corrupt nation in the world by Transparency International. An indictment unsealed in the Southern District of New York charges that millions of dollars in bribes were channeled to top Azeri officials in 1997 as part of a scheme to privatize the oil company, of which Mr. Aliyev was then vice president. Since his "election," Mr. Aliyev has reappointed his father's key ministers and promised to pursue the same policies -- including, apparently, ruthless suppression of the peaceful and pro-democracy opposition.
It's clearly expedient for Mr. Bush to back Mr. Aliyev, just as for decades U.S. governments found their interest in propping up dictators in the Persian Gulf. But Mr. Bush himself has said -- in one of his several major speeches about democracy -- that such policies were mistaken. "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe," the president said two months ago. "In the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty." It may take the United States decades to overcome the legacy of embracing corrupt dictators in the Arab world. The least Mr. Bush can do is avoid repeating the mistake in the new oil states of the Caucuses and Central Asia -- beginning in Azerbaijan.
But it truly was a lovely speech.
Here is the Human Rights Watch press release with other links and here is Friday's report. (Not a canny idea to release it on a Friday, guys, the day to bury news releases.)
Last September, top officials of the Navy prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, told a military judge in Florida that the prison's Muslim chaplain, Army Capt. James Yee, would soon be charged with mutiny, sedition, espionage, spying and aiding the enemy -- crimes that could lead to his execution.
Based on those allegations, Yee was held in solitary confinement in a Navy brig in South Carolina for 76 days. But authorities never charged him with any of those offenses. Instead, Yee will face much less serious charges, such as mishandling classified materials and adultery, when the case against him resumes at a hearing at Fort Benning, Ga., scheduled for Feb. 4.
At the same time Yee was being detained, Air Force Senior Airman Ahmad I. Halabi, who worked as an Arabic translator at Guantanamo Bay, was also in solitary confinement 3,000 miles away, held in California on charges of espionage and aiding the enemy. In time, the most serious of those allegations have been withdrawn as well.
Some experts on military law and the men's lawyers say the prosecutions of Yee and Halabi have been riddled with inconsistencies and oddities that cast doubt on the government's original fears that a spy ring was operating in the high-security prison for alleged al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
"I find it difficult to believe professional prosecutors are proceeding with these two cases in this manner," said Gary D. Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor who teaches the law of war at Georgetown University. "The ineptitude at each step of the proceeding is amazing. . . . It seems there's been investigative overreaction in both cases."
[...]
In an unusual episode last month, military investigators raided offices used by Halabi's military lawyers at an Air Force base in California, temporarily seizing one computer and copying its hard drive in a search for evidence against the airman.
Rehkopf protested the search in a letter to Air Force officials, calling it "bizarre" and "a conscious disregard of the attorney-client relationship."
"We are imploring the senior leadership of the Air Force to get this case under control," the letter said.
Raiding a military lawyer's office on an Air Force base? WTF?
Unfortunately, no one outside the investigation seems to really yet have a clue as to what the story is or has been. It's all wrapped in Top Secret.
And thus we see some hints of some of the dangers of tribunals and secret courts and secret warrants and secret secrets.
I WASN'T GOING TO POST MY PUTATIVE PRESIDENTIAL PREFERENCES any time soon, for reasons obvious in a moment, but Roger Simon is calling for all bloggers to go on record, and since I did just yesterday post a casual response here, I'll repost it:
Colorado decided a while ago that democracy was an unnecessary expense, and canceled the planned primary. So I don't got a real vote there.
But I'm still for Undecided at present. In alpha order, either Clark, Dean, Edwards, or Kerry. Lieberman won't be a real choice, or I might include him, but he unnerved me with all his cluckings on the evils of Bad Words In Bad Music, Tv, and Movies some years ago, and while this may seem a tad less important than wars on terror and such, it really really really bothers me. It's not that I worry he'd seriously intitute censorship, but it is, indeed, a values issue, and says to me that he has a serious misunderstanding of how people work, and should work.
I'm still unenthused about any of the candidates, though the only choice I can imagine to not voting for one of the above Democrats -- if I had a vote -- would be to sit on my hands. But while I'm unenthused, neither Clark, Dean, Edwards, or Kerry, has yet done anything to cause me to definitively run screaming from the room, either. (The strong possibility certainly exists.)
There, didn't you all find that enlightening and helpful?
MY ENORMOUS SPLIFF. To test out Britons' knowledge that this week marijuana has been downgraded to the lowest level of illegal non-prescribed drug, a Grauniad reporter wanders around locations famous and otherwise in London with a huge fake joint, and reports the sometimes hilarious reactions.
'Oh look, someone's been a naughty girl,' one guard cheerfully says, emerging from my cubicle with the paraphernalia cupped in her hand.
'Wish my Friday could start as early,' her colleague replies. 'Is there any left over?' They prod at the remains, then wander off sadly, discussing handbags.
At Tate Modern, I buy a coffee and ask if I can smoke. A waiter points to the balcony. 'You can go out there,' he says.
I produce my mammoth spliff. There is a gasp from the schoolboys in the queue behind me. Can I smoke this? I ask. He barely hesitates: 'Of course,' he says with a sweet, complicit smile. 'It's a nice view out there to relax with.'
The woman at the central reception of St Thomas' Hospital in Lambeth directs me outside to smoke. I produce the joint and she registers it calmly, with the air of someone regularly asked much worse.
I try for a second opinion and target a doctor and nurse. Perhaps less hardened to the unpredictable demands of the public, the nurse doubles up in hilarity when I produce the joint.
'I don't see a problem: the law has changed, hasn't it?' says the doctor. 'You should probably be discreet though; choose somewhere quiet.' As I move away, the nurse turns to the doctor: 'It was polite of her to ask though, wasn't it?'
Staff at the neighbouring Guy's Hospital are less welcoming. 'What are you doing?' shrieks the woman at reception. Convinced such behaviour must be proof of foreign blood, she mimes handcuffs and speaks slowly. 'You'll be arrested. Put. It. Away.'
A CULTURAL PARTNERSHIP IN BRISTOL, ENGLAND is sending out 7 foot high triffids on tour, along with over 4,000 copies of John Wyndham's Fifties sf book, The Day of the Triffids, as part of:
...a campaign designed to boost literacy levels in a city where a quarter of the adult population cannot read as well as an 11-year-old.
Apparently the intent is to let her Majesty's subjects of Bristol know that if you don't buck up, get to work, and learn to read better, we'll kill you with murderous plants.
OTTAWA (Reuters) - A song lauding the joys of an "enormous penis" is not obscene because the object of the lyric's affection isn't necessarily sexual, a Canadian regulator ruled on Friday.
The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council was reacting to a complaint from a Calgary radio listener to a joke song that declared: "I've got the cure for all of my blues/I take a look at my enormous penis/And my troubles start a-meltin' away."
The listener's complaint that the song was obscene fell flat before the council's members, who said the item did not break its code of ethics.
"The discussion of penis size is not in and of itself sufficiently unequivocally a sexual matter that it can be said to be in breach of the code," the council said.
Calgary's CJAY-FM replied to the complaint by saying most of its core audience -- men from 18 to 49 -- enjoyed such items as "Enormous Penis" by Da Vinci's Notebook, which also features the line: "I gotta sing and I dance/When I glance in my pants."
Read The Rest Scale: 0 out of 5.
Here is the group's website, where you can download a minute of mp3 of the song.
Nothing else picks up your spirits when you're down like a toe-tapping, finger-snappin' melody about your own self-assurance, so sing out!
Streets of London Sing along!
1200 maps from the Crace Collection chart the capital's transformation through three centuries. Online now.
Illustrated sheet music for piano pieces and songs from the heyday of Victorian Music Hall. Online now.
Read all about it! Military alert
The Penny Illustrated Paper chronicles Victorian life through 40,000 pages and 500,000 images. Selected pages online now.
Original drawings for the Ordnance Survey maps commissioned under threat of French invasion. Online now.
Everything curious... On the road
A sketchbook tour of England between 1750 and 1850 featuring drawings by Samuel Grimm. Selected drawings online now.
Ride into Regency London through 30 coloured drawings from the Kensington Turnpike Trust. Online now.
The Queen had the last laugh yesterday when she answered a question about Harry Potter that had defeated a group of children at church near Sandringham.
She chuckled when, in conversation with the Bishop of Birmingham, the Rt Rev John Sentamu, she was able to name Professor Dumbledore as the head teacher of Hogwarts, J K Rowling's school for wizards.
The Queen attending morning service at St Mary's church, Flitcham
"The Queen was laughing because she knew the answer and none of the children did," said the bishop. "She said: 'Fancy the children not knowing about Harry Potter - I knew.'"
However, after the Police Department's bomb squad, fire marshals and eventually the department's elite counterterrorism unit arrived to investigate, a band of somewhat sheepish — but admittedly relieved — law enforcement officials had a vastly different story to tell.
The owner of the loft, Christopher Hackett, 31, was not a terrorist but a performance artist, they said. His gun powder and assault rifles, while illegal, were not weapons meant for some dark purpose. They were ingredients for eccentric public happenings and pyrotechnic works of art.
Although some might say that Mr. Hackett's only crime was to extend the label of art to a jury-rigged ice-cream truck that spewed flames from its cargo bay, he was, in fact, arrested yesterday and charged with several weapons violations. Mr. Hackett was in stable condition at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn with burns related to the explosion.Officers from the 76th Precinct in Boerum Hill received a report about the explosion around 11:30 a.m. yesterday, said Deputy Chief John Colgan, who leads the department's counterterrorism unit. When they arrived at the loft at 217 Butler Street, they found a burned and bleeding Mr. Hackett with some sort of propane or acetylene torch, Chief Colgan said.
In a typically deadpan police manner, the chief then described what Mr. Hackett had been doing with the torch. "A preliminary investigation showed that he was trying to construct a confetti gun," Chief Colgan said.
The confetti gun, made from a two-foot-long metal tube, was to be used a short while later as the starter pistol in a wacky shopping cart race from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Friends and neighbors called the piece typical of Mr. Hackett, who liked to fashion real guns into fanciful, harmless weapons that shot things like soap bubbles.
Mr. Hackett is the chief creative force behind a loosely federated group of sculptors and performance artists known as the Madagascar Institute. The group is known for putting on weird events like a restaging of Pamplona's running of the bulls in which a crowd of men and women in bull costumes rode through the city streets on bicycles, some wearing tutus and carrying giant packages of Oscar Mayer Bull-loney.
"They're not terrorists," Andrew Robinson, a painter and neighbor, said.
Though it eventually became apparent that Mr. Hackett was no threat to national security, nearly a dozen emergency vehicles were outside his loft all afternoon, and the block was cordoned off.
It seemed a clashing of two distinct and very separate worlds as agents of the Joint Terrorism Task Force descended on the cluttered, funky workshop on the fringes of hipster Brooklyn where Mr. Hackett dreamed up his shenanigans.
Spelling "bologna" that way is definitely criminal, and possibly terroristically intended.
BAD ANALOGIES DEPT. On plans for developing NYC transit:
"This is like a moon shot," said Peter Kalikow, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, about the sudden confluence of blueprints. "The planets are lined up right. We can't let this opportunity drop."
How many planets have to line up for a moon shot, anyway? And which ones, exactly? This could be very important again in the mid-term future.
Read The Rest: only if you're fascinated by the NYC transit system.
Jeff Jarvis points to it as "a demonstration of why we really don't want politicians blogging." I like to think that's overly pessimistic, but it truly is a stunning example of blithering nothingness.
YEAH, I STILL COULD USE DONATIONS FOR FOOD AND RENT, being unemployed, but, still:
Body Bucks: How to Make Money Selling Your Body to Science While You're Still Alive
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Although it is an easy way to make money, there are many hurdles and hoops to jump through before you start raking in the cash. This course:
Offers immediate access to resources in your area, so you can get right to it.
Saves you lots of time by teaching you what restrictions you are likely to come up against.
You’ll know what activities pay the most and for which you are best qualified.
Tells you what questions you’ll be asked and the answers they are looking for.
Gives you the where, the what, the how often and how much of fluid donation.
Enroll Now, make money and stay happy, healthy and alive doing it.
Instructor Bob Heyman, Harvard ED.M, renown author and lawyer, explores the pros and cons of earning money through medical research. There are many ways that you can work with medical science and safely and legally earn money with your body...your very own renewable natural resource.
During what years does your body have its highest value?
What is the ideal height for a sperm donor?
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THE LIBERAL HAWKS. Although I blogged the beginning of this superb and thoughtful and rational Slate discussion on the wisdom of the war, my phone was cut while the rest was published.
POINTING AND CLICKING started here. In 1950. Along with using hypertext, videoconference, networking, digital text editing. using a mouse, and using a 2400 baud modem. It demoed in 1968.
Very cool story.
Read The Rest if you're any kind of computer geek at all.
THE CORD THAT BINDS. This could be awfully convenient, if it pans out. To put it mildly.
It may well be the smallest scaffolding in the world, and the easiest to set up. Researchers have devised a tiny self-assembling structure that they hope will help repair damaged spinal cords.
Every year in the United States alone, about 15,000 people damage their spines. Few recover fully as it is difficult for damaged nerves to grow across the gap in a severed spinal cord.
Researchers have tried to build bridges across these gaps, so that nerves can grow. Most of these are made out of a solid material such as collagen, but require invasive surgery that can cause extra trauma to the injury.
Samuel Stupp and colleagues from Northwestern University, Chicago have now found a way to build a bridge out of liquid instead1.
When the solution is injected into a damaged rodent spinal cord, it turns into a gel-like solid, says Stupp. The scaffold is designed to disintegrate after four to six weeks, hopefully leaving healthy spinal cord behind.
Self-assembly
The liquid is made up of negatively charged molecules. Normally, they repel one another and keep the substance in liquid form. But when the fluid encounters positively charged molecules - such as the calcium or sodium ions found in living tissue - they clump together. "The effect happens almost instantly," says Stupp.
The molecules are designed to aggregate in a particular way, forming a mass of tiny, hollow tubes. Each tube is about 5 nanometres wide - 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair - and several hundreds of nanometres long. The structure is porous, allowing nerve cells to grow through and around it.
Yep, more nanotubes. Y'know, there are endless known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, about what will be possible with nanotechnology, but the possibilities only range from the amazing to the effing unbelievable.
I tried to explain to a wannabe sf writer a few years ago, whose desire was to write a realistic hard science novel set a half-century to a century hence, that completely ignoring any of the potential of nanotech would be like writing a hard science novel in the 1910's, setting it in the 1950's, and having air flight not be possible. "But I don't want to have to learn about science!" Yeah, then stick to being a wannabe fantasy writer....
IT'S FOR THE CHILDREN. Or something. Wouldn't you think that folks in the south would like to get away from a reputation for this sort of thing?
A book store removed copies of Playboy and Playgirl magazines from its racks after a Cullman County prosecutor warned they violated Alabama's strict anti-obscenity law.
District Attorney Len Brooks said he was pleased that Books-A-Million Inc. had removed the magazines, but an investigation was continuing.
"We must continue to work to ensure the community standard and values of morals and decency that have been established here are not compromised," Brooks told The Cullman Times in a weekend story.
[...]
Known as one of the nation's strictest anti-obscenity statutes, Alabama's 1998 anti-obscenity law prohibits any display of human genitalia, buttocks or female breasts "for entertainment purposes."
In the pre-Internet days, people eagerly sought each other out for rational, calm, cross-partisan political debate. Now, thanks to cyberbalkanization, which we've been reading about for several years, all that has changed! People are now bitter partisans who only seek out information they agree with! It's all different than it was before nasty Internet came along.
Did you know?
In other news, children now disrespect their parents thanks to instant messaging, and their downloaded music -- it's just noise, I tell you!
