Idle ramblings of an intermittently philosophical nature... Apologies to Martin Gardner, whose The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener is one of the best books you've (probably) never read.
An Idle Thought...
What a misfortune, and injustice, for the University of Tennessee College of Law that [Glenn "InstaPundit"] Reynolds should now be their best-known faculty member.
--Brian Leiter, Professor of Law and Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin
About Me (the condensed version)
A member of the tail end of the boomers; a middle aged recovering lawyer turned professional computer geek.
Native of St. Louis, Missouri, transplanted to Memphis, Tennessee. Avid reader, amateur philosopher, St. Louis Cardinals fan,
one of the last Renaissance men.
Blogger supplied Atom feed (in fairness, I should warn that this breaks non-Atom compatible aggregators, and frankly doesn't work
all that well in the one Atom compatible aggregator I have; don't ask me why):
Answering the yahoos.... In today's WaPo, two anthropologists decisively show that, whatever marriage is, through most of the history of the human animal it's not exclusively been the union of one man and one woman--and the religious bozos who claim that this marriage structure is a fundamental bedrock of human society from time immemorial are simply spouting off their ridiculous prejudices, not fact.
The cold hard fact is that if we have to wait for John Kerry to be elected, there won't be an Iraq to make policy for. No one, not pundits, not policy makers, realize that events are moving rapidly against us in Iraq. There are no secular politicians to make a deal with and the longer we remain, the worse the war gets.
Here are the reasons Iraq is not Vietnam: It is a desert, not a jungle. The enemy is not protected and supplied by major powers such as the Soviet Union or China, not to mention a formidable front-line state such as North Vietnam. The Iraqis are not, like the Vietnamese, a single culture fighting a long-term war of liberation from colonial masters. They are fragmented by religion and language, and they have been independent ever since the British left lo these many years ago. In almost every way but one, Iraq is not Vietnam. Here's the one: We don't know what the hell we're doing.
Juan Cole... gives us a most excellent analysis of Bush's assertions during his press conference yesterday: Arguing with Bush
Excerpts:
' A secure and free Iraq is an historic opportunity to change the world and make America more secure. A free Iraq in the midst of the Middle East will have incredible change . . . '
This premise is not necessarily true. Turkey has had relatively democratic elections since 1950, but this development had no resonances in the rest of the Middle East. Iran went theocratic in 1979, and Khomeini expected everyone in the Middle East to follow suit. No one did. Saudi Arabia is among the world's richest monarchies, but it has not spread monarchy in the mainly republican Middle East. Middle Eastern countries are often fairly insular with regard to politics, and every tub is on its own bottom. There is no guarantee that a "free" and democratic Iraq will have any real influence on the rest of the region.
At the moment, moreover, Iraq is a poster child for dictatorship. Any Egyptian who looked at what has transpired there in the past year might well decide that the soft dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak is altogether preferable to taking the risk of opening up the system and possibly causing a similar social breakdown!
...
Saddam Hussein was a threat.
It is difficult to see how a ruler whose army was so easy to defeat, and who was reduced to hiding in a spider hole, was a threat to the United States.
' He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people. '
I should think this proves he was a threat to his own people.
' He was a threat because he coddled terrorists. '
I don't know what this means, to "coddle" terrorists. Either he sponsored terrorist actions aimed at harming the United States directly, or he did not. He probably did not, after 1993. The State Department did not even list Iraq as a terrorist threat in recent years.
' He was a threat because he funded suiciders. '
Saddam Hussein never gave any real support to the Palestinian cause, and he did not pay suicide bombers to blow themselves up. It is alleged that he funneled money to the orphans of such suicide bombers, but I have never seen any documentation for the claim. Supporting orphans is in any case not the same as funding terrorism.
' He was a threat to the region. He was a threat to the United States. '
I can't see how, given the state of his military in 2003.
...
' He also confirmed that Saddam had a -- the ability to produce biological and chemical weapons. In other words, he was a danger. '
Saddam did not have any stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons at all, and had no nuclear weapons program. Iraq has the same ability to produce "chemical weapons" as all other industrializing societies do, no more and no less. But Iraq did not have such weapons, and it is hardly a casus belli that they had the potential to make them. So does Brazil, but we haven't invaded it lately.
' Finally, the attitude of the Iraqis toward the American people -- it's an interesting question. They're really pleased we got rid of Saddam Hussein. '
About half say the US presence in Iraq is a form of liberation. About half say it is a form of humiliation..
' And they were happy -- they're not happy they're occupied. I wouldn't be happy if I were occupied either. They do want us there to help with security, and that's why this transfer of sovereignty is an important signal to send, and it's why it's also important for them to hear we will stand with them until they become a free country. '
What? I thought they were happy. Now you say they aren't happy. Which is it?
Newly declassified!!! Here's President Bush's own copy of the infamous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief, complete with Bush's own notes and annotations.
My take: God, what a piss poor job. If the man would just simply say it up front: "I fucked up, and people died on 9/11. I'm sorry about that...." Granted, I'd not like him any better, but I'd respect him more.
Right now, not only is he a blithering idiot, he's a lying weasel, and beneath contempt.
But of course, those who like aWol are going to give him kudos for statesmanship and grim determination in the face of an almost impossible task. Sometimes I wonder if we're living in parallel universes....
Favorite quote department. This could be in the running for "Gem o'the Day" (which isn't really a daily feature, but the past few days I've run into quoteworthy passages):
QUESTION: In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you’d made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa.
You’ve looked back before 9/11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?
BUSH: I wish you’d have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it.
Dammit, I want to have the election NOW!!!! I know, it's not scientific, and it ain't worth the Ronald Reagan Memorial Dog Turd that Joli dropped this morning, but while reading George aWol Bush's opening remarks to his news conference yesterday, I took 20 seconds to answer their survey: "If the election were held today, who would you vote for?". Results as of about two minutes ago: George W. Bush 36%, John Kerry 61%, Ralph Nader 3%.
"Did I miss some kind of armed forces swearing-in ceremony?" --George Carlin There's probably some significance to this, but I'm not sure what. It's just amusing me that, listening to Air America yesterday and this morning that in several references to Attorney General Assh..., uh, Ashcroft (in connection with his recent testimony to the 9/11 commission), and in one reference to former Attorney General Janet Reno the speaker has called him/her "General Ashcroft" and "General Reno".
Or are we taking this "war on terrorism" bullshit just a bit too seriously?
Though in my heart of hearts, I have always suspected that the Attorney General has always been a bit envious of the Surgeon General. Granted, the AG is a cabinet level position, but the SG gets to wear that cool uniform (see picture at link). And I guess maybe the "General Ashcroft" stuff reflects the fact that the Surgeon General does, pursuant to his office, rate the rank and title of "Vice Admiral" (though that's in the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, not the Navy/Coast Guard).
I can see where that'd intimidate a mere shyster like Ashcroft, at any rate.
Neat factoid of the day: according to his biography, the current Surgeon General is a high-school dropout who got his GED while serving in the Army, and got his medical education after that. Kind of a real life Horatio Alger story...
Thought for the Day: Gosh, we are having such a swell time here in Texas. For starters, once again the speaker of the Texas House is under investigation by a grand jury. We're so proud. We have nothing against this guy personally -- we're just rooting for an indictment as a matter of Texas tradition.
You must admit, we've got some record. Consider Gus Mutscher, Billy Clayton, Gib Lewis... and Price Daniel Jr., who was not indicted, but rather was shot to death by his second wife. However, she was indicted -- although not convicted, because in Texas we recognize public service when we see it. --Molly Ivins
I knew I shouldn't have awarded the "Gem o'the Day" yet... This, from The Onion is probably the better candidate, but it's a close call. From the "What do you think?" feature:
"A handful of kidnappings and a few armed insurrections doesn't mean we're losing control. It just means that we never really had control." --Frank Himmelbaum Systems Analyst
Interesting observation.... by Billmon, who shares his experience with a little quiz being conducted concerning the loathsome Little Green Footballs website (no link to it; I'm not giving them any added legitimacy, however the quiz is not at LGF, so if you're interested you can try it out here). The quiz basically gives you a set of quotes; some are by German Nazi leaders, some by posters at Little Green Footballs. Billmon notes:
Well, I went and took the Little Green Footballs quiz, in which contestants are tasked with distinguishing between quotes from famous "Late German Fascists" such as Heinrich Himmler and old Adoph himself, and comments posted on our favorite right-wing eliminationist web site.
It's a tough test -- go see for yourself. I mean can you tell the difference between this:
A. "I would be a coward ... if I allowed these hate-filled children of subhumans in the battle between human and subhuman."
and this?
B. "I really don't consider it killing. It's simply [the] extermination of vermin, diseased vermin..."
(A. Heinrich Himmler; B. Little Green Footballs)
Definitely a challenge, but (no false modesty here) I'm pleased to report I aced it -- 14 out of 14 quotes correctly identiifed. I might have had a bit of an edge going in, since I once wrote a college term paper on the cultural antecedents of Nazi rhetoric. But reading the quiz quotes carefully, I also noticed two things:
1.) The average Late German Fascist was considerably more articulate -- and almost certainly more intelligent -- than the average Little Green Footballer.
2.) The Late German Fascist quotes tended to describe genocide as a harsh and disagreeable duty that had to be done to save the Fatherland. The Little Green Football quotes generally made it sound like a spectator sport .
The first difference obviously reflects the difference in rank and station between the two groups. The Late German Fascists quoted in the test were all leaders -- top party officials, Werhmacht generals, etc. And many of the quiz quotes were taken from their public remarks, which no doubt were written by the finest speechwriters Nazi Germany had to offer.
I'm sure if we could go back and transcribe (and translate) the beer hall boasts of a typical group of SA men, or the shop talk of a couple of Gestapo torturers, it probably would sound a lot more like the typical Little Greenfoot Balls comment -- a kind of pidgin Mein Kampf.
The second contrast -- genocide as patriotic duty versus genocide as a blood sport -- probably reflects the fact that the Late German Fascists quoted in the quiz were all experienced practitioners, while the gang over at Little Green Footballs are, at best, aspiring amateurs.
Little Green Footballs is one of those websites that I just don't get. While I don't understand why InstaPundit is the single most read website in the universe, at least Glenn Reynolds isn't a complete idiot (despite the abuse I heap on him); he is a graduate of Yale Law School (not that this is particularly impressive to me; I'm a graduate of Northwestern University Law School back when it was still good) and a professor at a law school (albeit a mediocre law school). That bespeaks of more than minimal intelligence; my real beef with InstaPundit is that he's simply influential out of all proportion to the value of his writing (which is really sort of pedestrian and completely unremarkable).
Little Green Footballs, though? The fact that they are number six in the Truth Laid Bear Egosystem*grin* says something about the collective intelligence of the blogosphere. And what it says isn't encouraging.
A fast-food loving beauty queen from Missouri who has two master's degrees and once wrestled a greased pig in a mud pit was crowned Miss USA 2004.
Shandi Finnessey, 25, won the title Monday night over 50 other contestants and will represent the United States at the Miss Universe pageant in Quito, Ecuador, on June 1.
Amanda Helen Pennekamp, Miss South Carolina, was first runner-up. Ashley Rachel Puleo, Miss North Carolina, was second runner-up, followed by Miss Oklahoma Lindsay Hill and Miss Tennessee Stephanie Culberson.
Finnessey, a 5-foot-11, blue-eyed blonde who said her favorite food is a supersized extra-value meal from McDonald's, jumped up and down and pumped her right arm while steadying the crown with her left hand after it was pinned on by outgoing titleholder Susie Castillo.
She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology and counseling from Lindenwood University, and would like to use her counseling degree in a television job. She has published a children's book.
Not only a score for Missouri, but a score for Greater St. Louis (Florissant is a St. Louis suburb, and I'm very familiar with Lindenwood University since it's located, as I once was, in St. Charles, Missouri).
For the most part, I love my XM Satellite Radio... but I really wish that their "This day in history" feature that they run every hour would stop reminding me that on this date 27 years ago the most popular song in the United States was the loathsome "Don't Give Up On Us, Baby" by David "Hutch" Soul. I spent 26 years and 11 months trying to forget that stinker.
At least when Owen Wilson sang it in the movie version of Starsky & Hutch it was a hoot... But even that still reminded me of it. *sigh*
Prophecy of the Day From Daily Kos. Though I give no special credit to Kos for this one; anyone with two functioning eyes can see it coming over the horizon:
So you're a war supporter, and Iraq is going to hell. You want to pull the troops out, but doing so might require admitting defeat. And admitting defeat would mean that the bloodbath in Iraq was all for naught.
What to do? Easy.
Blame Iraqis. Talk about how the US came in, altruistic at heart, hoping to spread "freedom" to the Iraqi people. And then, pointing to the current broad-based rebellion, screech about how "ungrateful" the Iraqis are to the US for bringing said "freedom" to the country.
And then cut tail and run.
Watch the Right. It's gonna happen.
And then of course, they'll be saying that those ignorant, ungrateful, rag-head, heathen Eye-rackees don't deserve no freedom.....
In the varied explanations for the 9/11 attacks and the rise in terrorism, two themes keep recurring. One is that Islamic culture itself is to blame, leading to a clash of civilizations, or, as more nuanced versions have it, a struggle between secular-minded and fundamentalist Muslims that has resulted in extremist violence against the West. The second is that terrorism is a feature of the post-cold-war landscape, belonging to an era in which international relations are no longer defined by the titanic confrontation between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.
But in the eyes of Mahmood Mamdani, a Uganda-born political scientist and cultural anthropologist at Columbia University, both those assumptions are wrong. Not only does he argue that terrorism does not necessarily have anything to do with Islamic culture; he also insists that the spread of terror as a tactic is largely an outgrowth of American cold war foreign policy. After Vietnam, he argues, the American government shifted from a strategy of direct intervention in the fight against global Communism to one of supporting new forms of low-level insurgency by private armed groups.
"In practice," Mr. Mamdani has written, "it translated into a United States decision to harness, or even to cultivate, terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered pro-Soviet." The real culprit of 9/11, in other words, is not Islam but rather non-state violence in general, during the final stages of the stand-off with the Soviet Union. Using third and fourth parties, the C.I.A. supported terrorist and proto-terrorist movements in Indochina, Latin America, Africa and, of course, Afghanistan, he argues in his new book, "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror" (Pantheon).
"The real damage the C.I.A. did was not the providing of arms and money," he writes, " but the privatization of information about how to produce and spread violence — the formation of private militias — capable of creating terror." The best-known C.I.A.-trained terrorist, he notes dryly, is Osama bin Laden.
Again, where is Walt Kelly when we need him? We have met the enemy, and he is us.
In his Saturday radio address, George Bush described Iraqi insurgents as a "small faction." Meanwhile, people actually on the scene described a rebellion with widespread support.
Isn't it amazing? A year after the occupation of Iraq began, Mr. Bush and his inner circle seem more divorced from reality than ever.
Proof positive that we need a President who cares enough to read newspapers, rather than have them read for him.
Yuk o'the Day Of course, it's quite obvious why I elect to post this one. From an email correspondent:
Three surgeons were golfing and trying to impress each other. One said, "I'm the best surgeon in New York City. A concert pianist lost seven of his fingers in a horrible accident; I reattached them and less than a year later he performed a command concert for the Queen of England." The second one said, "That's nice, but I operated on a young man who lost both of his arms and both of his legs in an accident. I reattached them and a year later he won a track and field gold medal in the Olympics." The third surgeon said, "Well, that's not bad, but a few years ago a cowboy, high on cocaine and alcohol, rode his horse head-on into a freight train. All I had to work with was his cowboy hat and the horse's ass. And yet, three years later, he was President of the United States!"
Today's "Duh" moment... Stumbled across this at "Catholic Online" (no, I'm an ex-Catholic, but I still keep an eye on the old homestead for amusement value): 'Left Behind' series called 'overtly anti-Catholic'
The wildly popular "Left Behind" series of Christian apocalyptic novels denies a number of Catholic teachings and "is both subtly and overtly anti-Catholic," says an article in The Living Light, an official quarterly publication of the U.S. bishops' Department of Education.
Duh! Considering that the Left Behind series is written by a couple of Fundagelical Protestants, members of that part of Protestantism most overtly hostile to Catholicism, can one seriously think anything else?
But let's jump in, and show that nothing is too stupid that we won't claim that Catholics came up with it first:
In another article Thigpen, author of "The Rapture Trap: A Catholic Response to "End Times' Fever," traced the emergence of rapture theology to an early 19th-century Chilean Jesuit named Manuel Lacunza who proposed a theory that those who receive the Euchrast often will be taken up early at the end of the world and be spared the final 45 days of terrible judgments visited on the rest of the world.
Rome condemned his writing as doctrinally unsound, Thigpen said, but it was translated into English by the Rev. Edward Irving of the Church of Scotland, one of the earliest Protestant preachers of the secret rapture, who was excommunicated from his own church for teaching that Christ's human nature was sinful.
Thigpen said it is unclear to what extent Rev. Irving may have influenced the Rev. John Nelson Darby, leader of a small English sect who travelled to the United States and Canada seven times between 1859 and 1874 to spread his teachings about the secret rapture, becoming the chief historical influence behind rapture teaching in North America.
I realize, of course, that a Catholic media outlet is constrained to analyze end-times prophecy silliness as a matter of doctrine and correctness of Biblical interpretation and whatnot.... but we really know what the problem is with Rapture theology, right?
It's so fucking stupid!
I know I've highlighted this before, but I still think that poet Andre Codrescu said it best: The evaporation of 4 million who believe in this crap would leave the world a better place.
Interesting report from usability guru Jakob Nielsen... about some field research in the social impact of technology: Why mobile phones are annoying. Apparently, the problem is missing information:
The researchers asked test participants to rate how annoyed they were by the mobile phone's ring tone. (No comparable question applied to the face-to-face condition.) However, people didn't find the ring to be particularly bad, so the fact that mobile phones ring doesn't seem to explain why bystanders hate mobile-phone conversations.
Speech volume did affect bystanders' annoyance level: loud phone conversations were judged more negatively than phone conversations conducted in a normal voice. Designing phones that encourage users to speak softly will reduce their impact on other people. For example, more sensitive microphones and improved quality on incoming audio will make most users less inclined to shout.
But loudness wasn't the worst problem with mobile phones. In fact, even phone conversations in a normal voice received worse scores than face-to-face conversations. The worst problem seems to be that conversations on mobile phones are more noticeable than face-to-face conversations. This seems odd, since two people talking together project twice the amount of audio as one person talking on the phone.
Unfortunately, Monk and his colleagues don't provide the final answer; more research is called for. But the problem seems to be that people pay more attention when they hear only half a conversation. It's apparently easier to tune out the continuous drone of a complete conversation, in which two people take turns speaking, than it is to ignore a person speaking and falling silent in turns.
Based on this early research, it's hard to know how we might design phones that overcome the turn-taking problem in audio projection. Speakerphones might be an answer, but I don't think so.
What is certain is that the research documents the fact that mobile phones are annoying, and that conversation loudness is only one factor. If mobile-phone vendors want to avoid a backlash against their products, they're well advised to heed these findings and launch a major effort to make mobile phones less irritating to bystanders.
Let me make an observation here. While at first glance, Nielsen's observation that the increased annoyance factor of half a conversation seems odd seems intuitively correct, a few seconds thought on the matter makes one realize that this isn't so odd after all. It seems to me that it's easier to tune out a complete conversation precisely because we have it all in front of us, so to speak; there's no "mystery" or "puzzle factor" to consider (I suppose that if you're a believer in some sort of "unconscious mind", you can suggest that while one is consciously tuning out the conversation, the unconscious mind is taking it all in). But if you're hearing only half the conversation, your mind is probably trying to deduce what the other half of the conversation is, and that requires a bit of conscious thought. You can't help yourself; you're naturally nosy, and you want to know what's going on on the other side of the phone link, but unlike a face to face conversation happening in front of you, you can't just take that in passively; you need to do some active reconstruction. And this is distracting from whatever other things you think you'd really want to be doing.
Given this, I'm even more sure than Nielsen is that speakerphones aren't the answer, but that's because of the essentially annoying nature of speakerphones. This may be a personal thing though. My experience with "witnessing" speakerphone conversations (i.e., overhearing a phone conversation being conducted on a speakerphone, not being on the other end of a conversation where the person I'm talking to is using a speakerphone) derives almost completely from law practice, where conducting a conversation via speakerphone in the presence of others (or, in some cases, conducting a speakerphone conversation where people aren't in one's own office being a forced witness, but where one knows that others will be able to overhear it in the wider office spaces as they pass by) seems to be a practice of people who have an inflated opinion of themselves and their importance, and who are using the speakerphone to draw others' attention to their belief in their superiority (I'm tempted to call it the Law Firm Partner's Syndrome, and from that you can tell who the most egregious offenders have been, in my experience *grin*).
And in that vein, let's not discount the differential status explanation. In his CD Complaints and Grievances, George Carlin does a brilliant rant against hands-free telephone headsets that makes the observation that the folks who use them (particularly the idiots who walk around all day with their cell phone clipped to their belts and their hands-free headsets on) do so precisely to give themselves an inflated view of their own importance: "Gotta keep plugged in, you know.... you never know when it'll be Henry Kissinger on the line....."
Bottom line: I don't think it's even possible to reduce the annoyance factor of mobile phones. I'm not sure we should even try; sooner or later the non-mobile (and the more courteous mobile users, in which category I like to think I qualify myself, though I'm probably fooling myself) are going to rise up and put the annoying mobile phone users to death. Painfully. And that's going to be an example of natural selection at work.
Some good news? On the other hand, given that Bud Selig is Bud Selig, and I don't think there are very many situations where Bud wouldn't sell his grandmother into white slavery to make a buck, I'm not completely at ease in my mind. However, for what it's worth, King Kaufman in Salon is reporting today that the boneheaded plan to sell ad space on Major League Baseball uniforms is dead... at least for now:
The New York Post reported late last week that the idea to put advertising on major league baseball uniforms -- much discussed in these parts lately -- has been abandoned.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told the paper that commissioner Bud Selig had promised him "he was not going to allow it to happen."
You can decide for yourself how much faith you want to put in a Bud Selig promise, or actually a third-hand report of one -- from a senator, no less. A message left at the commissioner's office Monday went unanswered. But if true, it would be a victory for the sanctity of the big-league uniform. It would be nice to know there are a few inches of real estate not for sale.
Now, about those patches that have become ubiquitous on the left sides of caps ...
Interesting introspection.... from a legal academic. But then again, I'd expect this kind of introspection from a legal academic, the value system of practicioners doesn't exactly put a great deal of value on introspection. From Legal Affairs, Lawrence Lessig muses on "How I Lost The Big One".
Thought for the Day: Digital media presents with a particularly nasty social problem: we love to share and enjoy our common culture, but we want the artists to be rewarded, too. But when the distribution medium is as careless and fluid as the Internet, dues are easily overlooked. We're simply too lazy to reward the artists. However, inspired by NGO-backed initiatives as the move to low-costs drugs, a global consensus is coalescing around the idea of something called "compulsory licensing".
This can take many forms, but if you want it simple, it means a cent on your income tax, or your blank CD purchases. Are you still standing? Good, for this creates a vast pool of wealth from which the artists can be rewarded. It's not alien to most people: we pay taxes everyday for roads we don't use, or healthcare for neighbours brats we'd rather see strangled. But that's how society works: with a bit of give and take. --Andrew Orlowski [www.theregister.co.uk]
And we get a special edition of The Smoking Gun today.... Let me just quote their email newsletter:
Dear Friends:
With the September 11 commission focusing this week on unheeded warnings and myriad intelligence malfunctions by the CIA and FBI, here are a few government memos that did not spur action:
* As Condoleezza Rice tells it, the August 6, 2001 President's Daily Brief was old news and contained "no new threat information." You know, apart from that stuff about the 70 ongoing FBI investigations of al-Qaeda cells and those bothersome "patterns of suspicious activity." Read the PDB:
* Then there was the July 2001 memo from the Phoenix FBI agent who noted the possibility of a "coordinated effort" by Osama bin Laden to place his disciples in U.S. flight schools. Agent Kenneth Williams, whose warning was ignored by bureau bosses, wrote that the terrorist's followers would be in a position "to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets." Read the Phoenix memo: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0412042phoenix1.html
* In May 1998, an FBI agent in the bureau's Oklahoma City office penned a memo, titled "Weapons of Mass Destruction," warning that "large numbers of Middle Eastern males" were taking flight lessons at local airports. The agent thought the enrollments may have been "related to planned terrorist activity." Read the Oklahoma City memo:
Gem o'the Day: Fellow RTB member Kevin from LeanLeft wins the prize today with this gem (ok, it from a post yesterday, but I read it today, which is what counts in my book):
Apparently, the new Bush line is that the PDB entitled "bin Laden Determined to Strike in US", the one that warned of al-Queda operatives surveying New York Federal buildings, attempting to get explosives, and planning hijackings, is that it wasn't a warning for 9/11. Because it didn't mention that the terrorists were intending to use the planes as weapons.
Yep. The official Bush defense is now "This administration consists entirely of idiots." Seriously, that's their defense: if the entire plan wasn't laid out in exacting detail, including, apparently, time, date, location, fight number and the exact floor the terrorists intended to hit then it don't really constitute a warning, and so, hey, what could they have done.
I don't want to wish ill on anyone, so I hope that rumor isn't true. But if it is, it's a stroke of luck for the Cards (and the rest of the NL Central)....
Repent, The End is nigh.... When I see this kind of shit, I realize that the Apocalypse is probably just around the corner. Say next Tuesday, about 9:43 AM, Central Daylight Time....
The next time a major-league baseball manager gives the go-ahead to steal, the sign may be "Gatorade, Gatorade, Nike, Microsoft, Pepsi."
The MLB is considering whether to allow advertising on uniforms, selling the rights to patches on shoulders or corporate names on batting helmets.
There is still disagreement over the move, and negotiations would take months, perhaps years, but Tim Brosnan, MLB's executive vice president for business, said it may only be a matter of time.
The sport could bring in $500 million a year from putting pitches on pitchers, according to a recent Advertising Age estimate.
"We're unashamed of the fact that we are a business," Brosnan said. "We're mindful of the fans, but I don't think this is unreasonable."
When it comes to sponsorship rights, he added, baseball lags other sports. Jerseys in cycling and soccer are packed with corporate names, as are race cars and motorcycles.
Jeebus. Do we really want to see MLB unis festooned shoulder to ankle with sponsor patches like a fucking NASCAR jumpsuit?
And the worst part of it: you know that 1) The Hated Yankees are somehow going to get The Lion's Share of all that sponsorship money (and still use it to try to buy a World Series win), and 2) ticket prices are still going to go up. And up. And up.
My position is that there's only one way I'll accept sponsorship patches on baseball uniforms: if that means that admission to all professional games (MLB, Triple-A, Double-A, A ball and the rookie leagues, at least) will be free. In perpetuity.
If professional baseball will agree to that, I say, break out the sponsorship logos. But only on those conditions.
Thought for the Day: God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That sir, is not free will. It would be akin to a man telling his girlfriend, do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out. When a man says this we call him a psychopath and cry out for his imprisonment/execution. When god says the same we call him "loving" and build churches in his honor. --William C. Easttom II
More from Juan Cole.... I wonder how InstaDipshit is spinning this:
AP reported that the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) issued a demand early on Saturday that the US cease its military action against Fallujah and stop employing "collective punishment."
Not only has what many Iraqis call "the puppet council" taken a stand against Bush administration tactics in Iraq, but individual members are peeling off. Shiite Marsh Arab leader Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi suspended his membership in the council on Friday. A Sunni member, Ghazi al-Yawir, has threatened to resign if a negotiated settlement of the Fallujah conflict cannot be found. Old-time Sunni nationalist leader Adnan Pachachi thundered on al-Arabiya televsion, "It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah, and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal." For him to go on an Arab satellite station much hated by Donald Rumsfeld and denounce the very people who appointed him to the IGC is a clear act of defiance. There are rumors that many of the 25 Governing Council members have fled abroad, fearful of assassination because of their association with the Americans. The ones who are left appear on the verge of resigning.
This looks to me like an incipient collapse of the US government of Iraq. Beyond the IGC, the bureaucracy is protesting. Many government workers in the ministries are on strike and refusing to show up for work, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Without Iraqis willing to serve in the Iraqi government, the US would be forced to rule the country militarily and by main force. Its legitimacy appears to be dwindling fast. The "handover of sovereignty" scheduled for June 30 was always nothing more than a publicity stunt for the benefit of Bush's election campaign, but it now seems likely to be even more empty. Since its main rationale was to provide more legitimacy to the US enterprise in Iraq, and since any legitimacy the US had is fading fast, and since a government appointed by Bremer will be hated by virtue of that very appointment, the Bush administration may as well just not bother.
Robin Wright of the Washington Post goes Bernard Lewis one better with an insightful piece on What Went Wrong with the American enterprise in Iraq. The Post is on a roll today, with an excellent overview of how things spun out of control in recent weeks by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Anthony Shadid . (I had to scroll down to see it at the MSNBC site in IE for some reason). The article argues for arrogance and ignorance as motives in coming after Muqtada and his people right before Arba'in. But I still wonder about a darker side. The CPA told them that they cracked down on Muqtada because his militias threatened to make democracy impossible. I wonder if what they really meant to say was that his militias threatened to make it impossible for the Pentagon to install Ahmad Chalabi as prime minister.
U.S. military view Iraqis as "untermenschen"... according to this report from the UK's Telegraph.
Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.
One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of "unease and frustration" among the British high command.
The officer, who agreed to the interview on the condition of anonymity, said that part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen - the Nazi expression for "sub-humans".
Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful.
"The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn't in Iraq. It's easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them."
...
The officer explained that, under British military rules of war, British troops would never be given clearance to carry out attacks similar to those being conducted by the US military, in which helicopter gunships have been used to fire on targets in urban areas.
British rules of engagement only allow troops to open fire when attacked, using the minimum force necessary and only at identified targets.
The American approach was markedly different: "When US troops are attacked with mortars in Baghdad, they use mortar-locating radar to find the firing point and then attack the general area with artillery, even though the area they are attacking may be in the middle of a densely populated residential area.
"They may well kill the terrorists in the barrage but they will also kill and maim innocent civilians. That has been their response on a number of occasions. It is trite, but American troops do shoot first and ask questions later. They are very concerned about taking casualties and have even trained their guns on British troops, which has led to some confrontations between soldiers.
"The British response in Iraq has been much softer. During and after the war the British set about trying to win the confidence of the local population. There have been problems, it hasn't been easy but on the whole it was succeeding."
I'm fighting with my tendency to discount this..... surely Americans wouldn't be this callous. Unfortunately, we suffer from the tendency to go for the simplistic answer, and to de-humanize our enemy. It's unfortunately all too American, and all too believable.
UPDATE: Juan Cole seems to find the report credible:
This attitude tracks with what I know of racial attitudes that are all too common (not universal) in US military ranks. Press reports speak of US troops and some officers routinely denigrating Arabs. Even calling them "hajjis" and "Ali Babas" betrays the attitude. (Hajji is a strange thing to call Iraqis, who have lived under a militantly secular socialist regime for 35 years and most of whom couldn't have gone on the pilgrimage to Mecca even if they wanted to). The contempt for Iraqis and Arabs and Muslims that is widespread in the ranks, the British maintain, spills over into operational plans, creating a contempt for human life and a willingness to endanger and kill civilians in a ruthless effort to get at insurgents. This approach produces, of course, further insurgents.
Games we'd like to see.... Aaron Gleeman at The Hardball Times engages in an extended meditation on walks, which ends with his picking an all-hacker (i.e., players who almost never walk) and all-walker (players who take lots of walks) team. He ends thusly:
If you were to put together an All-Hacker and All-Walker team, here's what they'd look like...
HACKERS
C A.J. Pierzynski 1B Randall Simon 2B Cesar Izturis SS Rey Ordonez 3B Shea Hillenbrand LF Carl Crawford CF Corey Patterson RF Garret Anderson
Now, I don't care if you call yourself a stathead or not, you can't possibly tell me that wouldn't be a fun team to watch. Their average game would probably be like an hour long.
WALKERS
C Jorge Posada 1B Jason Giambi 2B Frank Menechino SS Mark Bellhorn 3B Robin Ventura LF Barry Bonds CF Brian Giles RF Rickey Henderson DH Jeremy Giambi
In addition to having Bonds, Giambi and Giles in the starting lineup, that team would also have guys like Thome, Adam Dunn and Edgar Martinez on the bench.
It's tough to find a catcher for the Walkers. Jorge Posada led all catchers in non-IBB/PA, but he ranked just 36th overall, whereas there were catchers all over the fewest-walks leaderboard.
Here's what I want to see happen...put those two teams on the field, with Brad Radke (1.20 walks per nine innings since 2001) pitching against the Hackers and Kaz Ishii (6.19 walks per nine innings career) pitching against the Walkers. Radke could probably go about 20 innings and there's a good chance Ishii wouldn't make it out of the first.
Forget all this baseball World Cup talk, let's make this happen.
What I don't like about living in Memphis... though it's probably a matter of what I grew up with...
I attended the Redbirds game yesterday, where it was Cellular South T-Shirt night (the more I think of it, I should have tried for tickets Friday night, which was a schedule magnet promo; I have t-shirts out the ying yang, but I could use a schedule magnet either at home or work; oh well, hindsight is always 20/20). Here at Auto-Zone Park, it seems like whatever the promotional giveaway is, it's limited to the first thousand or fifteen hundred in attendance. Granted, it's a smaller venue, but I always remember the promos at Busch Stadium being given away to the first 30,000 in attendance--rarely did you see a promo limited to as few as the first 20,000. Given that Busch holds 40-something thousand (and before the refurbishing, held in the low 50-thousands), that means that the most skimpy promos still got out to almost half of the attendees. AutoZone holds 14,320, which means that a typical giveaway here goes out to a bit more than 10% of the possible attendance (and maybe 12-15% of the actual attendance on a given day.
Then again, not like I have much of a reason to feel slighted; I always try to get to the park soon after it opens (have to see what I can of batting/fielding practice), so I'm usually there in time to get the giveaway. It just feels weird to see such low numbers....
Is it just me.... or would T-Mobile's commercials for their "Couples Talk Free" program have a bit more oomph to them if they'd bring Michael Douglas into it along with their longstanding spokesbabe, Catherine Zeta-Jones?
Fun facts to know.... On the topic of Presidents throwing out Opening Day pitches, we learn from Brian Gunn at Redibird Nation (via his sources, of course), that Harry S Truman (my favorite prez, and not just because he's another Missouri native), who was ambidexterous, threw out two opening pitches in 1950, one righthanded, and one lefthanded.
One clear inference can be drawn from Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission this morning: She has been a bad national security adviser—passive, sluggish, and either unable or unwilling to tie the loose strands of the bureaucracy into a sensible vision or policy. In short, she has not done what national security advisers are supposed to do.
The key moment came an hour into the hearing, when former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste took his turn at asking questions. Up to this point, Rice had argued that the Bush administration could not have done much to stop the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Yes, the CIA's sirens were sounding all summer of an impending strike by al-Qaida, but the warnings were of an attack overseas.
Ben-Veniste brought up the much-discussed PDB—the president's daily briefing by CIA Director George Tenet—of Aug. 6, 2001. For the first time, he revealed the title of that briefing: "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States."
Rice insisted this title meant nothing. The document consisted of merely "historical information" about al-Qaida—various plans and attacks of the past. "This was not a 'threat report,' " she said. It "did not warn of any coming attack inside the United States." Later in the hearing, she restated the point: "The PDB does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says Bin Laden would like to attack the United States."
To call this distinction "academic" would be an insult to academia.
Go read the whole thing; it's so excellent it's infuriating.
On "The O'Franken Factor" last week, Al impersonated VP Dick Cheney explaning to co-host Katherine Lampher why Condi's aborted 9/11 speech (the one which identified ballistic missile defense as the most urgent national security problem facing the U.S. in the future) needed to remain classified: because it would jeopardize our national security for our allies and our enemies to learn how far the Bush bAdministration had it's head up its ass on 9/11.
Unfortunately, that's coming to look more and more credible as more and more information comes out about how Bush and his puppetmeisters fucked up 9/11.
For the record, I don't know that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented. What's clear, is that Bush and his handlers didn't lift even one finger to try.
And that sick, twisted bastard has the nerve to run for re-election on his record of handing the war on Terra™.
Being voted out of office is nowhere near as painful as that prick deserves. But it'll have to do.
The Battle of Hastings never took place and Adolf Hitler is a fictional character. Robin Hood really existed, Harold Wilson saved Britain during the Second World War and Conan the Barbarian is a bona fide figure from early Nordic history.
It might sound like the latest attempt by revisionist extremists to pervert the past but the reality is perhaps more disturbing: this is how a significant chunk of the British population, muddled by Hollywood films and unmoved by academia, sees history.
A survey of the historical knowledge of the average adult, to be published this week, has uncovered "absurd and depressing" areas of ignorance about past events, and confusion between characters from films and historical figures.
Researchers, who conducted face-to-face interviews with more than 2,000 people, found that almost a third of the population thinks the Cold War was not real and 6 per cent believe The War of the Worlds, H G Wells's fictional account of a Martian invasion, did happen.
Some 57 per cent think King Arthur existed and 5 per cent accept that Conan the Barbarian, the warrior played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 1982 film, used to stalk the planet for real. Almost one in two believe William Wallace, the 13th-century Scottish resistance leader played by Mel Gibson in his film Braveheart, was invented for the silver screen.
What really scares me is that British education, through the equivalent of the U.S. secondary school level, is very much superior to U.S. education (and you can make a good argument for the superiority of British collegiate and post-collegiate level education as well). If a better educated populace is this woefully ignorant of its own history, I'd hate to read the report of results of a similar survey of the U.S. population....
Given enough ingenuity.... some demented genius can achieve anything. The most recent evidence for the truth of that proposition comes from mathematician Stan Wagon of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, who's actually invented a bicycle with square wheels. And, wonder of wonders, it rides smoothly. The catch? Well, the road down which the bicycle does have to have a particular surface shape (an inverted catenery (more accurately, a set of them), a shape which has a meaning for me, only because I'm a native of St. Louis, Missouri, and I know a very famous structure that has just that shape).
Follow the link for an explanation and a picture; I really can't do it justice here myself.
Interesting portrait of the woman in the news yesterday... Alan Gilbert, one of Condoleeza Rice's professors in graduate school, assesses her performance in front of the 9/11 committee, and as national security advisor, and finds it wanting: The performer lost in her performance (premium content; you need to click through a short ad if you're not a Salon subscriber)
How did this comparatively thoughtful person end up missing the threat of al-Qaida? As she grew more conservative, it became useful to her to emphasize only great power politics and military arrangements. She knew Russia and Eastern Europe, but not other areas of the world. She apparently did not -- despite Richard Clarke's and Sandy Berger's warnings -- take al-Qaida seriously. In her testimony on Thursday before the 9/11 commission, she differed with Clarke's claims that 100 meetings of the "principals" -- the main secretaries not including Clarke ? occurred without once discussing al-Qaida. There were only 33 meetings, she said. But 33 is many meetings without discussing al-Qaida. This is a minor tangent, not a defense.
Clarke fiercely tried to get al-Qaida before the Bush administration. He was consistently frustrated. Eventually, he and his top three aides, all of whom stayed in the White House at Condi's request on 9/11, left government service. The Bush administration has undercut -- perhaps destroyed -- responsible career civil service in many areas. Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill charged that this administration has only political discussions, not policy ones. But worse yet, it may have destroyed its civil service, which is a precondition for serious evidence gathering and deliberation over policy. On 9/11, Condi prepared to give a major speech -- on a missile defense system for the United States.
How did Condi end up supporting a diversionary war in Iraq? The 9/11 committee did not ask her to address Clarke's fundamental charge. Like a "warrior princess" (her aides' nickname) in a fairy tale, Condi simply ignored it. She was allowed to reiterate lies, for example an elliptical statement that al-Qaida had some connection with Saddam and the bizarre claim that a "strategic" offensive against al-Qaida involved Iraq. She presented no evidence for these claims.
As Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke have reported, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney had been determined to overthrow Saddam from the earliest days of the Bush administration. (Clarke was outraged on Sept. 12 when Rumsfeld defended this position by saying there were no good targets in Afghanistan, but lots in Iraq. As Clarke said, it would be as if, after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had gone to war with Mexico, not Japan.) But Condi is not simply an ideologue: Even in the pressure cooker of war meetings, she probably still noticed that there was no hard evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or was linked to al-Qaida. She must have known that the administration was suppressing counter-evidence from the CIA, the "bulldog" Clarke, and others.
Yet she could not say to her boss and the others: wait a minute. She could not draw a line in defense of principle: the United States' government must wage the "War on Terrorism" on al-Qaida, not on dictators who had nothing to do with terrorism. If the president is going to launch a "preventive" attack on a sovereign state -- a violation of the cardinal ban on aggression, Article 2, section 4 of the United Nations Charter -- and send American soldiers to die, at least don't do it for lies.
Why?
Condi has always been a great performer. As a pianist, as an ice skater, as a student, as a provost, as a presidential advisor, she has always been on stage. She adapts her performance to her audience: Josef Korbel and, to some extent, me once upon a time, President Bush now. She can be fierce. Donald Rumsfeld, who waged war in Iraq without a plan for the occupation, lost control to Condi and the National Security Council. But tragically, she is also a person without a core, who loses herself in her performance. National security was her responsibility. She failed in that responsibility because she was too busy perfecting her performance as a Bush team player when the Bush team, obsessed with wild fantasies of global domination, had lost touch with reality.
In contrast, Richard Clarke was not concerned about applause. He saw the threat of al-Qaida. He fought in the Bush bureaucracy to get them to pay attention. As early as the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, he had warned of the threat of planes crashed by terrorists into targets. In frustration at the Bush administration, he resigned his position of over 25 years. He apologized to the American people for 9/11.
As Sen. Kerrey's questions indicated, Condi refuses to admit any mistakes. She goes on, skating over and over again, blaming turf wars between the CIA and FBI. The Bush administration, she suggests, had no responsibility for dropping the ball on al-Qaida.
Clarke unites what Max Weber called an ethic of responsibility and a visionary ethic of intention. He wanted to fight terror and maintain American liberties.
Condi justified the so-called PATRIOT Act by saying it was necessary to get the FBI and CIA to cooperate. She failed to mention the reactionary nostrums that fill over 300 pages of the act: for instance, spying on books people read at libraries or locking up American citizens without a right to counsel as supposed "enemy combatants" or throwing out the rule of law at Guant?namo.
In a brief statement, Kerrey insisted that the occupation forces could not deal with the current uprising in Iraq with military force. He spoke of it as a "civil war." (In fact, the Bush occupation has united Sunnis and Shiites in a national insurrection against it.) Condi smiled, and was silent.
Condi's speaking was rapid and articulate. She is by far the best public face for the Bush administration. She is not the cantankerous Rumsfeld, or Bush who cannot speak cogently about his own administration's record without a minder, or Cheney the extreme rightwing oilman, or Wolfowitz, the neo-conservative ideologue.
But the fact is inescapable: Condi did not pay attention to al-Qaida before or after 9/11. The Bush administration has stonewalled the 9/11 hearings, postponing them for over two years, because they had a terrible secret to hide.
Even now, the Bush administration is striving to keep Presidential Daily Briefings classified. When Condi and committee members differ sharply over their meaning -- when Condi says the Aug. 6 briefing that cited the threat Osama posed to the United States was merely "historical" and required no "action," and the committee asks in the name of American democracy that the public see the document, she will not declassify it. Perhaps Democratic pressure will force Bush to relent.
It was Condi who led the unheard-of Bush administration attack on Richard Clarke, charging (without addressing his major claims) that this Republican civil servant for four administrations, whom she left in charge of the White House Situation Room on 9/11, was somehow distorting the Bush record. Yet she did not dare -- it would have been too obviously untruthful -- to attack him before the committee. Perhaps Condi's performance, which ran on all the major channels, can take voters' eyes off the fact that due to the invasion of Iraq, al-Qaida has only grown stronger in the past three years. Perhaps Condi can turn our eyes from the fact that the president asked American soldiers to die for lies about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's supposed links to bin Laden. Perhaps Condi can claim that all is well in Iraq while Shiites and Sunnis unite to fight the American occupation and kill American soldiers. The fairy tale continues. The performer skates on.
And he oughta know.... As the one strongly Christian president we've had in my lifetime, Jimmy Carter shares his reasons for concluding that the Christian right isn't really Christian, in an interview with American Prospect:
How do you think the fundamentalist Christian right has misrepresented Christianity, as well as the democratic process?
Well, what do Christians stand for, based exclusively on the words and actions of Jesus Christ? We worship him as a prince of peace. And I think almost all Christians would conclude that whenever there is an inevitable altercation -- say, between a husband and a wife, or a father and a child, or within a given community, or between two nations (including our own) -- we should make every effort to resolve those differences which arise in life through peaceful means. Therein, we should not resort to war as a way to exalt the president as the commander in chief. A commitment to peace is certainly a Christian principle that even ultraconservatives would endorse, at least by worshipping the prince of peace.
And Christ reached out almost exclusively to the poor, suffering, abandoned, deprived -- the scorned, the condemned people -- including Samaritans and those who were diseased. The alleviation of suffering was a philosophy that was enhanced and emphasized by the life of Christ. Today the ultra-right wing, in both religion and politics, has abandoned that principle of Jesus Christ’s ministry.
Those are the two principal things in the practical sense that starkly separate the ultra-right Christian community from the rest of the Christian world: Do we endorse and support peace and support the alleviation of suffering among the poor and the outcast?
You spent so much of your career working toward a reasonable, peaceful solution to violence and strife in Israel and Palestine. Increasing attention has been paid to traditionalist evangelicals’ strong support for Israel, based on the New Testament prophecy that the reconstruction of the ancient kingdom of David will usher in the “end times” and the Second Coming of Christ. As a believer and a peacemaker, how do you respond to this?
That’s a completely foolish and erroneous interpretation of the Scriptures. And it has resulted in these last few years with a terrible, very costly, and bloody deterioration in the relationship between Israel and its neighbors. Every president except for George W. Bush has taken a relatively balanced position between the Israelis and their enemies, always strongly supporting Israel but recognizing that you have to negotiate and work between Israel and her neighbors in order to bring about a peaceful resolution.
It’s nearly the 25th anniversary of my consummation of a treaty between Israel and Egypt -- not a word of which has ever been violated. But this administration, maybe strongly influenced by ill-advised theologians of the extreme religious right, has pretty well abandoned any real effort that could lead to a resolution of the problems between Israel and the Palestinians. And no one can challenge me on my commitment to Israel and its right to live in peace with all its neighbors. But at the same time, there has to be a negotiated settlement; you can’t just ordain the destruction of the Palestinian people, and their community and their political entity, in favor of the Israelis.
And that’s what some of the extreme fundamentalist Christians have done, both to the detriment of the Israelis and the Palestinians.
How did we get in so much trouble? Part of the problem here has to do with the way outsourcing has changed over the years. The business was invented back in 1962 by Ross Perot when he founded EDS, then called Electronic Data systems, to buy unused time on corporate mainframe computers and resell that time as a computing service to customers lacking computers of their own. The EDS people would show up at night, their car trunks filled with computer tapes, and until dawn the XYZCo computer would be used to run jobs for any number of smaller companies. Eventually EDS got its own mainframes, but the job remained essentially the same -- to do data processing for organizations unequipped to do it for themselves.
What has changed since then is the decline of mainframes. I know, I know, there are plenty of mainframes still in operation, but the NMCI contract is workstation-centric. NMCI and similar arrangements aren't contracts to bring new technology to organizations that lack the internal capability to provide that technology for themselves. They are pure cost-saving plays, or at least that's what they are intended to be. The sales pitch -- and yes it is a SALES pitch, not a pricing pitch -- is that integrating all this activity under a single contractor will eliminate duplication, standardize services, improve efficiency, and save money. Only it doesn't work that way in practice.
Somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as PCs and networks were beginning to have their way with corporate America, the definition of outsourcing changed from buying outside services that you couldn't afford to do inside to buying outside services that you ALREADY WERE doing inside only outsourcing would save money. Maybe it was Gartner, maybe Andersen Consulting, certainly some outfit was the first to add this slide to their presentation deck, and while it makes some sense in theory IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO MAKE WORK IN PRACTICE.
Most outsourcing contracts don't live up to their service promises and the only ones that live up to their pricing and profitability promises are those that have an artificially-low labor component, which is why we're suddenly shipping so much work to India and China. And as I have shown in earlier columns, foreign outsourcing brings new problems of its own.
Trying to put this all in a useful context, I wondered whether contracts like NMCI would take place at all in a profit-driven environment, rather than in the loosey-goosey world of the military where there is so much talk of discipline yet so little history of it actually being consistently implemented in areas like procurement and IT? Would Wal-Mart, the world's largest company and one of the world's largest consumers of Information Technology even consider a deal like NMCI, which ostensibly would make all IT costs and performance predictable on a multi-year basis?
The comparison is an apt one, though Wal-Mart is actually about three times the size of the U.S. Navy. Obviously the Navy has more firepower, though in a protracted conflict I think I'd put my money on Wal-Mart's supply lines. But what about this IT question? To find my answer I began calling people in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Wal-Mart has its intergalactic HQ and where my Mom lives next door to the former CEO and head of Wal-Mart's Executive Committee. I have my sources you see.
And those sources were clear: there is no way Wal-Mart would entrust its IT services to an outside contractor or even to several outside contractors. Doing so would threaten the entire organization. If costs are out of control and services are inconsistent, that's something to be dealt with internally, not by hoping some outside organization is smarter or more disciplined. "We have suppliers, sure, but the ultimate responsibility always remains here in Bentonville," said my Ozark IT guy. "We centralize it, we control it, we know what we are buying and what we are doing with it. Anything less is just too much of a risk."
I think it was Yogi Berra who expressed it best: "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
Thought for the Day: We've got some patriots here who are enough to give the word a bad name. Their ugly side is always brought out by war: the professional-patriot bullies have never been able to distinguish between dissent and disloyalty. In WWI, we had citizens who used to go around kicking dachshunds, on the grounds that they were "German dogs." You notice people like that never go around kicking German Shepherds. --Molly Ivins
We condemn the methods of the Occupation Forces in dealing with the events that have occured, just as we cricitize the transgressions against public and private property and all acts that lead to the collapse of order and prevent the Iraqi authorities from fulfilling their duties in serving the people. We call for the use of wisdom in treating this situation, through peaceful means, and for avoiding any escalatory step that will lead to more anarchy and bloodshed. It is the duty of the political and social forces to participate in an effective manner, and to put an end to these tragedies. God grants success.
Professor Cole comments:
The US needn't take any heart from Sistani's fatwa, which seems to equate the US military with the Army of the Mahdi insofar as both have acted unwisely, used unseemly methods, and been responsible for a breakdown in public order.
I'm getting the feeling that when (not if, but when) Sistani decides he's sick of the occupation, we're screwed. Unless Bush can figure out a good way to withdraw with grace, we'll look back fondly at Vietnam compared to this.
And, I note with interest that Professor Cole gets this from the Ayatollah Sistani website that I blogged about yesterday. If I get the time I may check the Sistani website to see how Cole's translation compares to the Sistani webmaster's "official" translation.
George W. Bush may have only exacerbated partisan divisions in the United States but he's doing a marvelous job of united the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq.
There's nothing that unites feuding parties like a common enemy, and Ol' Dubya has certainly provided a common enemy.
Gem o'the Day By way of putting things in context, reports are that at Condi Rice's long-awaited testimony to the 9/11 commission today, Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste noted that the title of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing was: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.". Given that, Billmon notes:
[I]t does help explain the extremely careful wording of Bush's most recent public statement regarding what he was or was not told during that long, lazy summer on the ranch down in Crawford:
"Had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on September the 11th, we would have acted."
I'm waiting for excuse 2.0, which will probably be rolled out after the 9/11 Commission report is released this summer. I'm guessing it's going to sound something like this:
"Had my administration had positive confirmation that on the morning of September 11, nineteen Al Qaeda operatives were going to hijack American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston's Logan Airport, and American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington's Reagan National Airport, and United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark airport, and then fly them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- and either the White House or the U.S. Capitol in the case of Flight 93 -- we would have acted."
Thought for the Day: It's a rite of spring for me, picking the Red Sox to win the [American League] East and the Yankees second. I do it every year, and every year I'm wrong. Some people clean their houses. I do this. I don't pick the Red Sox because I like them or root for them or even because I particularly think they're going to win. I pick them because I feel like I am a decent person, one who for all my flaws tries my level best to live a good life and do right by others, and I deserve to see someone other than the New York Yankees win the Eastern Division in my lifetime. --King Kaufman
