I've been pondering Bush's press conference and his frequently-stated impatience with the media seeming to demand instant results. While he may have a point in some cases, his crabbing at them about it has bothered me for a while. First, it strikes me as somewhat petty. There's nothing he can really do about the news media, so it would be better to just deal with it. Second, at least in the case of Iraq, part of the problem is the administration's own doing. By consistently refusing to give us (and here I include not only the media, but Congress and the general public as well) any sort of real estimate of how long we're going to be there, they only invite questions. Here, what Bush perceives as the media nagging about instant results could in fact simply be people trying to find out what the timeline is.
It's like we're all going on a road trip, and want to know when we're going to get there. All we've been hearing is "Just a little while longer," when what we want to hear is a firm number of miles, or an estimated time of arrival. After we've heard "Just a little while longer" for the umpteenth time, we begin to wonder if the driver knows where he's going.
Just watched Bush's press conference from yesterday, and one particular bit caught my attention. When asked about the prospects for peace in Iraq, Bush said:
Now, of course, the question is, will Iraq ever be free, and will it be peaceful? And I believe it will. I remind some of my friends that it took us a while to go from the Articles of Confederation to the United States Constitution. Even our own experiment with democracy didn't happen overnight. I never have expected Thomas Jefferson to emerge in Iraq in a 90-day period.
So first off, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, which was published on July 4, 1776. He was around well before either the Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution. Second, the Articles of Confederation were agreed to in November, 1777 and ratified in 1781. Third, the Constitution was signed in September 1787. The Revolutionary War ended in April 1783. (See, kids? Dates are important.) All this information is available on-line, for those (like me) whose American History might be a little shaky.
So here's my follow-up question. If we're using U.S. history as the baseline, and we assume that present-day Iraq is roughly where the U.S. was in it's pre-Articles of Confederation period, does that mean that we can expect to be in Iraq for roughly a decade before a functioning democracy appears? And further, if it took the U.S. a decade to reach that point with a Thomas Jefferson at hand, what should we reasonably expect from Iraq, which apparently has no such figure (yet)?
Looks like the folks at Paramount are blaming the guys at Eidos for the poor showing of the new Tomb Raider movie.
Please.
The new movie sucks, that's why no one's going. Perhaps more importantly, so did the first one. We rented the first one on DVD, and even with diminished expectations didn't think much of it. Once bitten, twice shy.
Now, the new Tomb Raider game may not be so hot either, but that has nothing to do with the performance of the movie. Movie guys, if you want to get people out to see your flicks, put more effort into getting decent scripts written, and less into trying to cover your ass for putting out crappy product.
Looks like those wacky congressdudes in Texas are on the lam again. Yee-haw!
Nothing like an impromptu house cleaning. Usually that only happens when we have unexpected company, but in the land of the web sometimes flaky software triggers a housecleaning, too. I'm still not sure what happened, but one of yesterday's entries seems to have put the database into a tizzy. So...archive everything, delete the blog, re-create the blog, restore all the settings, import, yadda yadda yadda...and we're back. (Did you miss me?) Hopefully that won't happen again, because boy what a hassle.
This is just too weird. The Pentagon is apparently looking to create a "Policy Analysis Market," where traders can buy futures on specific events. Here's the first paragraph of the story from Bloomberg:
The U.S. military plans a worldwide on-line futures market to help it predict events in the Middle East. Traders could bet on the likelihood of events ranging from the overthrow of a government to the collapse of an economy or the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Some in Congress are saying that this is morally wrong. I don't know about that (if it's not morally wrong to have a policy of assassination, which is essentially what we have towards the Hussein family, and what Israel practices in a more general sense without anyone complaining, then why would it be morally wrong to bet on it?), but it does strike me as, well...whacked. I'm guessing that what the Pentagon folks are hoping is that they'll gain some insight into events by attaching a nice number and a direction to them. It's as if they'll look at the market & say, "Oh, look-- "Overthrow of the Saudi Government" is up 5.25 today. Better call the Marines."
Check this out-- two different versions of the same story posted on the Washington Post yesterday.
I find this striking not so much because of the story itself, but because of the phenomenon of news stories changing after they've been posted. This is something that happens every once in a while. What I find a little disconcerting is that there's no record of the change. Were someone to link to the earlier version with some commentary, it might not make sense later on if the original story changes. I have no problem with revisions being made to a story, but there should really be some sort of trail to follow to earlier (or later) versions of the story. Ideally, there should also be some sort of commentary by the authors as to why the changes were made.
There was a fire in the UGA Main Library a couple days ago, and now they're saying that it looks like arson. Why anyone would set fire to a library is beyond me, unless you're a Nazi.
I hope when they catch the guy they throw the book at him.
Apparently the Bush Administration is threatening to veto recently passed legislation designed to roll back the recent FCC changes regarding media ownership. If you don't want all media in this country effectively controlled by a group of people small enough to fit in a Yugo, go over to Common Cause and sign this petition telling Bush to sign the bill rolling back the recent FCC change.
Got a new toy today, a Regal resonator guitar. Very shiny. Not quite as nice as the National Delphi I tried last weekend, but at 1/3 the price it'll do just fine until I start making money in Nashville. I've been having fun noodling around with the open tuning (D-A-D-F#-A-D) it came with, but I'll probably try some other voicings too before I sit down to actually learn some music with it. I may have to drag out my Robert Johnson stuff & try my hand at that again.
Now like the guy at the store said, I just nee the sunglasses & the hat.
I got my preview copy of Panther a couple days ago and have been using it on our old iBook. Now I find I wish I had it on my desktop, if only so that I could take advantage of Exposé. Just knowing that there's a better way makes rummaging through windows all that much more a drag (no pun intended). I'm sitting here with something like 14 windows open in Photoshop alone, and it's just not fun trying to figure out where the duckie picture went when I need it. Let's see, is it "Untitled-11" or "Untitled-9"...
Time to update the résumé again...always a fun job. The web version differs a little from the printed (or pdf) version, since I don't feel constrained to a 2-page limit there. It's always a struggle to try & convey the essence of what a particular project or job entailed with just small sentence fragments. What to leave out, what to include, etc...much as I think the CVs used in academia are verbose to the point of insanity, sometimes I think there might be something to just listing everything & being done with it.
Won't be going to see this one, but the last few moments of the trailer are pretty funny.
Saw another story about a soldier killed in Iraq, talking to the bereaved widow, mother, etc. With the steady drip, drip, drip of casualties over there, we're probably going to be seeing a lot more of these. The soldier in question always seems to be an all-American dude, with a young wife (ideally pregnant or with young kids), cut down in the prime of his life. You could almost cut & paste the faces & names in these stories, they all seem to be so similar.
I wonder what the story would have looked like if Timothy McVeigh had been killed in the first Gulf War.
As I see these stories, I'm left thinking-- Aside from the human-interest angle and potential fodder for Lifetime movies, what purpose do these stories serve? Are they supposed to remind us of the cost of war? Are they supposed to make us think of the noble sacrifice these families are making? Are we supposed to want to bring them all home? Are we supposed to go buy yellow ribbon? An American flag? Vote Democrat? Sing Kumbayah?
Came across an article today (courtesy The Agonist) that calls into question just why the Iraqi guerrilla fighters are attacking U.S. troops.
This caught my attention because the conventional wisdom here seems to be that the guerrilla fighters are Saddam loyalists, but this is the first time I've heard anyone actually talk with them. According to this interview, they're not loyal to Saddam, but are instead battling against what they see as U.S. occupation. Of course, there are a couple of problems with putting too much stock into this:
Not that any of this helps understand what's going on, other than to acknowledge that everyone is trying to put their own spin on the situation. I suppose it'll be years before anyone really knows what's happening...
In skimming the O'Reilly site for a book on Final Cut Express, came across this cool movie archive site. Old TV ads, mental hygiene films, etc. I'm thinking this could be a fun site to explore...and you can download "editable" versions of their films, hmm...
Got hold of Final Cut Express over the weekend, and am now starting to capture footage from the 9 hours worth of video I digitized last month. Tried doing it on Chandra's iBook last night & didn't have much luck, so today I've moved on to my desktop machine. Turns out there seems to be some sort of glitch in tape 1 at about 53 seconds in, which is what put the laptop into such a tizzy. The same thing happened to my desktop, much to my annoyance. So...reboot...fast-forward past the glitch & try again. Everything seems okay so far.
The real trick is going to be trying to cut the footage down to a reasonable amount so that we can work with it without having to purchase another hard drive. I'm going on the assumption that it will be quicker to do wholesale capture & then edit down the resulting file, rather than try to mark ins & outs then importing select clips. The camera's slow to respond, so every stop, rewind, play adds a couple seconds to a process that's going to be tedious enough as it is.
So anyway, looks like a good portion of the day today will be devoted to figuring out the logistics of working with Final Cut Express. Always fun to learn about new toys...
That's "Garbage In, Garbage Out" for those not familiar with the acronym.
Just saw a piece in the NY Times headlined "'Compelling Evidence' of Iraq Weapons Cited in Report." The report in question is the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. Note the mention of the footnote, buried in the middle of the article.
Now the funny thing is, I read something about this particular report earlier today in an article called "Spooked by the White House." This article features an interview with a former CIA officer who goes into some detail as to what happened & why the NIE document in this case is full of garbage. According to this former intelligence officer:
It's very clear to me how [the Iraq-Niger claim got in the NIE]: Condoleezza Rice has actually told us how it happened. Her explanation says the evidence was in the National Intelligence Estimate prepared last August and September on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- which is true. The NIE is by far the most authoritative pronouncement, not only by the CIA, but by the entire intelligence community. It's very carefully done. This story about Iraq trying to get uranium from Niger was in there -- this was evidence long since disproved, and yet someone insisted it be included in the document. The State Department was so shocked by this, they put in a footnote saying that in their view, the information was garbage. Rice says the footnote appeared on Page 55 or something like that, so that nobody paid any attention to it.So the real question is, how did that information get into the NIE last fall? The reality is that the vice president's office knew that it was spurious -- but the vice president had led the charge on Aug. 26, saying Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, and there wasn't a shred of evidence of that. So they dusted off this forgery and peddled it on the Hill to get Congress to vote for war. Since the NIE was in progress at that time, they insisted it be included despite [objections] at the State Department and the Department of Energy.
So around Christmastime, here's this drafter of the State of the Union speech, whom Condoleezza Rice instructs to draft a couple of paragraphs about WMD in Iraq, and the drafter says, "Where do I get that?" and she says, "Well, consult the NIE." So the damage had already been done with the NIE report itself. Condi should've known better with this. The key question is, who allowed it to stand in that report? It's exactly the kind of pressure that folks who are malleable managers do not have the guts to resist. The senior person in charge of the NIE bowed to the pressure that came from the White House, and presumably from the vice president's office, so that the report would support what the vice president had already said. Cheney set the terms on Aug. 26, and who's going to come out with a report that says otherwise?
So...it's no wonder this report supports claims of the Iraq-Niger thing, if it was doctored to do just that.
Reading an article in Salon today about the Iraq situation, and came across this tidbit:
The intensity of the 3rd I.D.'s outspoken criticism of its leaders is unprecedented, says Lang. "You're getting professional, noncommissioned officers in the U.S. Army complaining to media people about the leadership," he says. "I can't remember an instance when a sergeant first class with 20 years of service says the same kind of stuff" he's hearing from such soldiers in Iraq. After all, such complaints are actually illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which, says Lang, "forbids active-duty military personnel from publicly holding up to ridicule people in the chain of command above them." (emphasis added)
So, I looked it up, and sure enough, according to Sub Chapter X, Section 888, Article 88:
Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
So my first thought (aside from "the Secretary of Transportation?") was, "So it's illegal for a U.S. soldier to say that Donald Rumsfeld is an old poopy-head?" I'm sure exceptions are made for the military, but this strikes me as something that should be unconstitutional.
Yup. Almost six months to the day after I started this blog-that-wasn't-supposed-to-be-a-blog, I've taken the plunge and set up a full-blown blogging system. As you can see on the left, I'm using Movable Type. Why them? Well, I had to install the Movable Type system for a client, and once I did it for them I figured what the heck.
Anyway, turns out the system was easy to install, but getting the templates re-worked for the current design here was a challenge. I ended up changing the design slightly so that I didn't end up with boxes overflowing each other's bounds.
There will probably be some additional changes here as I figure out whether to carry the remaining elements over from the old design (namely, links to pictures & music). Otherwise, I'll leave it to readers to alert me to anything that needs attention.
There's an article in Salon today arguing that the new "do not call" list is going to kill telemarketers, and further argues that this will hurt the overall economy.
I say baloney.
The article claims that due to the number of lost customers, telemarketing firms won't be able to make as much money. This is crap. Telemarketers don't make money based on the number of calls they make, they make money based on the number of sales. Rather than hurting telemarketers, I would argue that the do-not-call list is increasing the chances that any given call will result in a sale, thus actually improving telemarketer's profitability.
The article also claims that shifting to other forms of mass-marketing (such as regular mail) will be an increase in expense that will also hurt firms' profitability. First, I can't imagine that phone costs are really cheaper than mass e-mailings, that other bane of our collective existence. Second, the number one source of telemarketing calls in our household is credit card companies. These same companies are also the number one source of junk mail to the house. Obviously, it can't be hurting MBNA too badly to be so desperately trying to get our business.
So...sorry Mr. (or Ms.) telemarketing exec. No sympathy for you here.
Just because I hate posting items without links...
A New York Times article touches on the whole "minders" issue:
Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton suggested that the Justice Department was behind a directive barring intelligence officials from being interviewed by the panel without the presence of agency colleagues.At a news conference, Mr. Kean described the presence of "minders" at the interviews as a form of intimidation. "I think the commission feels unanimously that it's some intimidation to have somebody sitting behind you all the time who you either work for or works for your agency," he said. "You might get less testimony than you would."
Just heard on NPR that the Bush Administration wants "minders" to be present when the commission established to investigate 9/11 talks to government employees.
Umm...isn't that one of the things this same administration harped on Saddam Hussein about as evidence that he was hiding something? Are we going to need to send government employees off to Switzerland to get answers to what happened? I can't imagine what they think they have to hide, and maybe this is just a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the administration, but IMHO this stinks to high heaven for a whole bunch of reasons.
Sister Joan Chittister calls W, the administration, and the American people to task, questioning (rhetorically) "Does Anything Matter?"
I just linked to a nun.
...or a cheerleading competition.
According to a transcript on USA Today, here's part of what Dubya said yesterday:
There are some who feel like that if they attack us that we may decide to leave prematurely. They don't understand what they're talking about, if that's the case.Let me finish.
There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.
Enough with the freakin' macho posturing, already! Sometimes it feels like Bush thinks this is all some big playground fight where everyone gets to pick themselves up at the end, wipe the blood off their nose & go home. Does he really want people coming home in body bags?