I'm still unemployed (beyond some temping). Please read why -- and if you like my blog, please think about helping keep me in peanut butter and ramen noodle -- via an above donate button; clicking a Google ad also helps, as does buying via Amazon on the left sidebar. Thank you muchly.
"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
"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 master pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The puppy is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this fuzzy widdle gerbil.
No, really, I seriously need the help at present.
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."
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.
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog; if you comment on someone's writing, without linking, drop them an e-mail of notice.
People I knew and miss include Isaac Asimov, Charles Burbee, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Harry Warner, Jr., Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
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
MichaelMooreWatch.org: Maybe that?s what Gary Farber should rename his site, instead of arpagandalf or whatever.
-- Matt Welch
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
A team led by Dr. Baoxiu Qi at the University of Bath, UK, genetically altered a cress plant to produce both omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, which are thought to be protective against cardiovascular disease. These oils are also important for infant brain and eye development.
The accumulation of these fatty acids in plants "is a breakthrough in the search for alternative sustainable sources of fish oils," Qi's team concludes in the advance online edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology.
I envision a squadron of Jiant Space, Air, and Underwater Rescue vehicles named "Omega 1," "Omega-2," and so on, by the way, whenever I think of these fatty acids. Think there's anything to the idea? Omega-1 is go!
You can also download the Digital Universe software here.
I've been in love with the Hayden Planetarium, and the NY Museum of Natural History as long as I can remember. (I'm also very attached to the Brooklyn Museum, and should have linked to one of the many recent articles about it's apparently gorgeous re-creation.)
Do the first click if you have any interest in space.
SURPRISE! Okay, don't worry much. Rest assured that for no value of "final" are these color changes "final." It's just as much as I'm going to do tonight; I plan to make further color, if not layout changes, shortly.
I just thought it was time to make the first color switch since I started in December of 2001.
As ever, any and all suggestions, requests, tips, comments, and feedback, are solicited.
Whatever my final choices are, I intend them to be very calm and mild, and as easy on the eyes of most people as seems reasonable. Fear not, I'm aware that the colors at present are far too electric and contrasting.
Three key witnesses, including a senior officer in charge of interrogations, refused to testify during a secret hearing against an alleged ringleader of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal on the grounds that they might incriminate themselves.
[...]
Just a week after the hearing, on May 3, the judge, Maj. Dewayne McOsker Jr., ruled that there was enough evidence to proceed. He cited a CD-ROM containing photographs and videos taken inside the prison showing detainees being abused and humiliated, along with written statements from four of the other six guards implicated in the scandal.
"I believe there is enough credible evidence to establish reasonable grounds" that Graner is guilty, McOsker concluded.
Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said no soldier is allowed to invoke his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination unless he knows his testimony would leave him open to criminal charges.
"You can't assert it unless you have a belief that there is some criminal exposure," he said. "That's why people do it."
Fidell said he had never heard of a case where every prosecution witness called to the stand refused to testify, but then said, "I can't say I know of any case that is like this one either."
[...]
When the Graner hearing convened in Iraq, the first government witness to refuse to testify was Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, who as director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the prison oversaw the military intelligence operations.
[...]
Next on the witness stand at the Graner hearing was Capt. Donald J. Reese, who as commander of the 372nd Military Police Company was Graner's supervisor. He also signed the Article 31 form and was excused.
[...]
The last prosecution witness to plead the 5th was Adel L. Nakhla, a U.S. civilian contractor employed by Titan Corp. and working as a translator in Baghdad. According to a transcript of the Graner hearing, Nakhla "elected not to participate in the proceedings and was excused."
Interesting note:
Army Spc. Joseph Darby, who was disgusted by the abuse photos and first alerted authorities, was called as a defense witness, but the military judge presiding over the April hearing in Baghdad said the whistle-blower was "unavailable."
Most Americans, opponents and supporters of the war alike, have been surprised by the stories of prisoner abuse that are now flooding the media. But I don't think that we ought to have been surprised. War breeds sadism, and prisoner of war camps are one of the prime breeding grounds. It's not only the heat of battle, the fear and anger produced by combat, that is morally dangerous, but also the unchallenged power that comes with victory. Only a steady effort to maintain discipline and to train soldiers in the rules of war and the rights of prisoners will prevent abuse and atrocity. But that requires the commitment of political and military leaders, and our current leaders are visibly uncommitted. In fact, I think that most regular army officers believe in the rules; they are professionals, and their code of honor, as well as the legal and ethical code of jus in bello, excludes the mistreatment of prisoners. And they understand the reciprocity of the codes; they know that one day they may be prisoners themselves.
But the present government in Washington seems to operate without moral awareness and without any sense of the meaning of reciprocity. Rumsfield's Pentagon put Iraqi prisoners into the hands of reservists who were told nothing at all about the Geneva Convention, and of intelligence operatives committed only to the extraction of information, and of private contractors some of whom, apparently, were already experienced in both prison management and the abuse of prisoners. And the message communicated to these people was one of callous indifference or worse--for some of them concluded from the orders they were given that the humiliation of captured Iraqi men was part of their job. They were supposed to do what was necessary to weaken the men's resistance to future interrogations. All this is shameful, but I am afraid that it fits all-too-well alongside other attitudes and policies of the Bush administration.
[...]
Second, Bush and his colleagues are contemptuous not only of the international enforcement of human rights, but of the rights themselves, whenever they conflict with the administration's political or military aims. In wartime, rights do have to be balanced against security, but there isn't much evidence of balancing in the last few years. The Attorney General seems committed to the establishment of a category of persons, "illegal enemy combatants," who are literally without any rights at all, who can be held incommunicado, indefinitely. The prisoners in Iraq presumably don't fall into that category; at least, most of them don't. But they certainly have not been treated as if they are rights-bearing beneficiaries of the Geneva Convention. A casual attitude toward the Convention is very much in the style of this administration. The same style is reflected in the fact that its members are much less worried about the violation of rights than about the photographs of the violations. Months of protests from the Red Cross brought no response; the frank and detailed (and, I suspect, very brave) report from General Antonio Taguba wasn't even read in the Pentagon-until the photos began to circulate.
All this shouldn't be surprising. We should be ashamed of ourselves for being surprised, for that is a sign that we have been hiding or repressing what we really know-that is, how authoritarian our government has become. We have to read in those awful pictures of young Americans humiliating and torturing young Iraqis the moral physiognomy of older Americans, who are running the show in Washington. The US government will now, I am sure, proceed to punish the young prison guards who appear in the pictures-and perhaps their immediate superiors. There will be military trials in Baghdad. But there is another kind of justice, political justice, that must be done in Washington. The leaders who fostered the climate of casualness about and contempt for international conventions and human rights must be forced to resign or defeated in the upcoming elections. What the courts do is very important; but what the people do is much more important.
I LACK PITH, YOU SAY? I've always figured that's what I'm doing wrong.
His insight from having read so many blogs during his downtime after Moreover was that blogging's laws of popularity revolved around the frequency of posts, not the density. Readers wanted ever-quicker hits, not chewiness.
Of course, blogs don't work if they come out of cookie-cutters.
Of course, tone and attitude were also key.
I gotta get me some of that!
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5 if you want gossip about Nick Denton, pro blogging ($1000 a month? Sucks, but I'd take it), dot.coms, and such.
KAKEYNA. I last wrote about Kakenya Ntaiya here, with links to the first three parts of her breathtaking story.
I linked to part four on a missing archive page, and today the WashPo did part 5.
This is not an "important" story, Kakenya's story, in the sense of affecting thousands of people, but it's an important story in how people can change each other's lives for the better.
It's a human story.
It's also one of the most heartwarming, moving, and yes, affecting you stories you might ever read. I strongly urge you to go read the series from the start. You won't regret it, I promise you. Though it might bring you to tears of laughter and joy.
NO OUTGOING E-MAIL, AND COMMENTING. I know that I post a lot, and since, for some odd reason, people won't at least skim me religiously, items will be oft-missed.
Therefore I'll repeat again that my outgoing e-mail is temporarily kaput; I can receive, but outgoing is refusing to make the connection, and instead times out; I'm working on it. So, no, I can't "send you an e-mail," or reply to yours at present, though I've probably read it.
Also to repeat (without bothering to link), I've not enabled registration for commenting; it's one of the new Bloggers many glitches, which I'm sure they'll fix, that throws up that screen, but if you don't want to "register," all you have to do is comment as "anonymous," though I'd appreciate your including some sort of name, if not your "real one," in your message. There is no actual obstacle here.
Thanks. I'll be more focused on getting outgoing e-mail working again tomorrow. I'm a bit under the weather today, actually.
NOW FIX MY STARSHIP WITH STONE KNIVES AND BEAR-SKINS
Treske used a tungsten filament from light bulbs, recycled Styrofoam blocks and a PC sound card to create a low-cost tunneling microscope that delivers improved resolution over standard light microscopes.
Nice little story on the Intel Science competition (ah, I'm old, in my day it was Westinghouse).
Zhu developed software that speeds up the rendering of high-quality three-dimensional computer graphics.
Langberg, 17, a junior from Canterbury School in Fort Myers, Florida, said getting to attend the competition more than made up for the hours of leisure time dedicated to her research. While most of her peers memorize lyrics from Usher or Coldplay, Langberg's primary rock interest is understanding the chemical properties of magma found in undersea volcanoes. Her winning project combined chemical analysis, mathematical simulations and motion studies to explain the undersea action along the southern Juan de Fuca Ridge, which is located off the northwest coast of the United States and southwest Canada.
[...]
Fan saw a report about a fire in a tall building that couldn't be put out because the hoses couldn't spray the water high enough.
Fan researched the phenomenon that tiny "mesobubbles" join together and create drag that slows the flow of liquids through a pipe. Her project revealed that sound waves could be used to move the bubbles around to increase the flow of liquid. Fan said she worked for 350 hours on the project and has been getting four hours of sleep per night.
[...]
Anna-Marie Gulotta, a senior at Charlottesville High School in Virginia, who didn't win an award, took a more humanistic approach with her project. She built a solar oven that can be used to pasteurize milk or boil water during the winter and at higher altitudes. Gulotta realized that Afghanistan is at the same latitude as northern Virginia, and decided on a project that could help refugees.
It's good to read some good news these days, isn't it?
Oh, and could you build me a phaser, please, while you're at it?
The Web SE allows anyone, on any platform, to run a facsimile of Macintosh System 7, the Mac operating system circa 1990.
The mockup was created by website project manager Oliver Soehlke, 32, and interface designer Lukas Pajonczek, 28, both of Berlin.
"It is a homage to show the beauty of the system and to make sure it is not forgotten," explained Soehlke by phone from Germany. "It's not 100 percent. It's a little bit simpler, but mostly you can fool around and see what it was about, this little system."
I had an SE; it was my first computer, and my main computer for many many years; I was very fond of System 7 (though I was also fine with 6.7).
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 only if you're a Mac buff.
POLITICS OVER HOMELAND SECURITY. An issue I've meant to blog more about is mentioned here by Mayor Bloomberg.
Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge also said that New Yorkers bore a disproportionate amount "of our collective burden," and told the panel in response to a question about the distribution of funds, "We've advocated for two years that the system be changed."
"New York City has already been targeted by terrorists six times since 1993," he said. "Yet inexplicably, today New York State ranks 49th among the 50 states in per capita Homeland Security funding.
"During fiscal year 2004, New York State received $5.47 per capita in Homeland Security grants. Nebraska got $14.33 per capita; North Dakota. $30.42; Wyoming $38.31; and American Samoa $101.43."
And if the city does not get adequate funds, "we'll be back where we started," he added.
He urged that the commission, in its final report, recommend "desperately needed reforms" in the way homeland security money is distributed and created grave hazards "not just for New Yorkers, but for all Americans."
He went on: "And what does it say of our national resolve to combat terrorism that after everything this commission has learned in the past year, our city has been advised that Congress has reduced our proposed Homeland Security funding for fiscal 2004 by nearly half � from $188 million to $96 million?
"This is pork barrel politics at its worse. It's the kind of shortsighted `me first' nonsense that gives Washington a bad name. It also, unfortunately, has the effect of aiding and abetting those who hate us and plot against us."
Now, New Yorkers are used to being screwed by Republican Congresses and Presidents, because, of course, NYC is overwhelmingly Democratic.
But this isn't a highway bill. Really, isn't this an issue that's a bit more important than standard screw-you politics?
GOOD OLD VICTOR BOUT, our Russian arms dealer of choice, and International Man Of Mystery, has attracted a flurry of attention again, pretty much due to this somewhat heavily blogged story.
Meanwhile, back on March 1st of 2002, I was complaining that no one was blogging about Victor Bout.
WHAT YOU CAN'T DO IN PARLIAMENT, PT. II. No sooner had I posted this bit of amusement than this happens.
Tony Blair was hit between the shoulders by a missile thrown by protestors during prime minister's questions today - forcing the Commons chamber to be abandoned.
Two objects which appeared to contain purple powder were thrown, the first landing behind Mr Blair and the second hitting him in the back.
Reporters present in the chamber at the time said the prime minister "visibly blanched" as he was struck.
Mr Blair left the chamber with a purple stain on his suit, while the chamber descended into pandemonium.
I think there's a rule against that, too.
No purple stains allowed.
Here's something I'd not heard before:
Purple powder was used because "purple is the international colour for equality", the spokesman said.
OUTSOURCING SPYING. Privatisation is, after all, always a virtue.
For Dave Tittle, who has run an executive placement company in northern Virginia for the last 30 years, business has never been so good. That is because Mr Tittle's speciality is supplying talent for the growing number of private companies that do the US government's spying.
"An awful lot of activity has been outsourced," says Mr Tittle, who himself once worked at the National Security Agency. "Anything that has to do with collection or analysis of intelligence data is being done by the private sector."
[...]
Meanwhile, smaller companies have cropped up to supply former agents as actual "bodies on the ground" in hazardous locations. Some former intelligence officials claim that these "spooks" are currently operating in the tribal lands of Pakistan, where US soldiers have been forbidden in their hunt for Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda leader.
"The agency's being run by contractors in a certain sense," said Robert Baer, a former CIA agent who operated in northern Iraq.
While I certainly wouldn't knee-jerk condemn anything done under this rubric, it does raise many questions of accountability.
I might, if I knew the facts, support pretty much all of this out-sourcing. But I don't know the facts, and I doubt the Intelligence Committees in Congress know the facts, and it's not clear that anyone really knows all the relevant facts of what might be going on by such contractors, just as what was going on with CACI and Titan only recently began to emerge.
That's pretty much the point. Who's responsible for these people? Who makes sure they don't commit abuses, or stupid acts that lead to worse problems for the U.S.?
THE BUBBLE. Sgt. Stryker thinks the right has gone into it.
I think it's safe to say that a good portion of the Right's reaction to the Abu Ghraib scandal and the Nick Berg beheading has officially served notice that they've gone into their own bubble. The Left, of course, have been in a bubble of their own ever since Bush was elected, but that odd faction of the Right that I call the "Nobody But Bush" crowd has pretty much bubbled itself up as well
[...]
Hey, here's a simpler explanation: People don't expect Americans to do the sort of things depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos. People aren't surprised when they hear that Arabs beheaded someone. It's shocking when Americans do it, it's not shocking when Arabs do it. See, not everything is about Bush and the War, although like the "Anybody But Bush" crowd, the Right has lost the ability to perceive any information outside the context of Bush. Facts either hurt Bush or help him. The Left magnifies those things that they believe hurt Bush's chance at re-election, and the Right does the opposite. The Abu Ghraib scandal is a prime example. Almost immediately, most on the Right began the type of equivocation common to the Left since 9/11. Now with the Nick Berg story, they can downplay Abu Ghraib and focus on something that they think supports Bush. This has nothing to do with principle, what's right, or even what's actually going on. It's about politics. It's about keeping Bush in office or trying to kick him out.
[...]
But Common Sense doesn't matter anymore. It's all about Bush now. Why, if he doesn't win, then the terrorists will have won! The War in Iraq will surely fail! Western civilization as we know will fall! I'm sorry, but if the fate of the world rests upon one man's shoulders, then we've already lost. It's a democracy, and the one thing that makes our Republic so damned great and nearly impervious to destruction is this simple fact: All politicians are dispensible. One guy leaves, another takes his place. The nation endures. No one is supposed to to be so vital that their loss would seriously cripple our country or its interests. We don't have kings, czars, or chiefs. We have a President and Congressmen, all of whom could be easily replaced tomorrow with almost no ill effects. We'd just have a new set of assholes to deal with.
Are these the sort of people you want on your side if you're an Israel-supporter?
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 for generall nutbarism, but 5 out of 5 if you're particularly concerned about Israel. I want to assure you I'm speaking as a "career citizen."
Still, the possibility of blowback has been worrisome throughout the talks because the paramilitaries, unlike the rebels, are entrenched in Colombia's institutions, including the military, the police and the attorney general's office. Its fighters control whole neighborhoods in many Colombian cities, and the group has been supported in the past by wealthy and influential Colombians.
"They are politically very able, which the rebels are not, and they are more popular in certain areas," the Western diplomat said of the paramilitaries.
In a tour in early May of C�rdoba, a state in the north that is the traditional heart of the paramilitary movement, it was clear that contrary to the government's assertions, the paramilitaries enjoyed a lock-down control that made them more influential than the traditional enemies of the state, the left-wing guerrillas, ever were. Interviewed here in this town in C�rdoba where talks are taking place, a local commander said the organization did everything from paving roads to paying teachers' salaries to punishing law-breakers, even summarily executing those who violate paramilitary edicts.
"We are the de-facto state in all areas we occupy - in health, in education, in roadwork, everything that the state should offer," said the commander, who goes by the nom de guerre Miguel Antonio. "We are the law here."
The Self-Defense Forces also draw strength and financing from their close alliance with Colombia's most infamous drug cartel, the Norte del Valle group, which American officials said recently had exported more than 500 metric tons of cocaine worth $10 billion to the United States since 1990. In an indictment against nine cartel members unsealed in Washington, American officials accused the Self-Defense Forces of protecting the cartel's drug routes, laboratories and members.
It's almost too incredible to excerpt; and it wouldn't have happened, most of a country under a defacto fascist regime, if it weren't for the WOSD.
Go read the whole thing. Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5.
THE INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS REPORT AND TAGUBAexamined.
And then one comes upon this quiet little sentence:
Certain [Coalition Forces] military intelligence officers told the ICRC that in their estimate between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake. [emphasis added]
Army officials in Iraq responded late last year to a Red Cross report of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison by trying to curtail the international agency's spot inspections of the prison, a senior Army officer who served in Iraq said Tuesday.
After the International Committee of the Red Cross observed abuses in one cellblock on two unannounced inspections in October and complained in writing on Nov. 6, the military responded that inspectors should make appointments before visiting the cellblock. That area was the site of the worst abuses.
Steve Coll's background is quite different. He was a reporter in Afghanistan, and he has been the managing editor of The Washington Post since 1998.
Ghost Wars, which has taken him twelve years to write, spells out the CIA's covert work in Afghanistan ever since the Soviet Union invaded that blighted country in 1979. Coll recounts in detail the CIA's encouragement and support of the Islamic jihad against the Soviets, and the consequences of this support for the rise of radical Islamists like bin Laden. Not surprisingly, the book gives particular emphasis to the critical period during the late 1990s after bin Laden established himself in Afghanistan and then, with the help of the Taliban regime, began his global jihad against the US and the West.
Coll was able to secure secret documents about the CIA's operations. He talked not just with its officials, but with spymasters and spies in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and other countries. No one else I know of has been able to bring such a broad perspective to bear on the rise of bin Laden; the CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events. Rarely hasa book been able to anticipate, as Coll's has, the revelations of government bureaucrats, such as Richard Clarke, about intelligence. It does so, moreover, in a more comprehensive way than the recent testimony of US officials has done.
[...]
Coll quotes a prophetic statement by President Najibullah, the Communist leader who was ousted by the Mujahideen in 1992. He attempted to convince Washington to help put together a coalition government in Kabul that would keep out the most hard-line Islamic Mujahideen leaders such as Hekmatyar. "We have," he said,
a common task�Afghanistan, the USA and the civilized world�to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism. If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism.
In 1992, Najibullah took refuge in a UN guest house in Kabul and was then captured and hanged by the advancing Taliban.
The author of the piece, Ahmed Rashid, slams Woodward's uncritical acceptance of his sources' claims, in comparison.
Worse yet, rumors are now swirling that one of two maneuver squadrons (battalions) of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment will soon deploy from Fort Irwin, California, to Afghanistan, and two of the three companies of the 1st Battalion of the 509th Infantry Regiment will travel from Fort Polk, Louisiana, to Iraq. These units are the permanent "opposing forces," or OPFOR, at the National Training Center and the Joint Readiness Training Center respectively. Their sole mission is to prepare other Army units for deployment to Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever the nation needs them. Throughout the year, units from all over the Army go to the NTC and the JRTC and run field exercises trying to defeat the OPFOR in "laser-tag" simulations using real weapons and equipment. The training those units receive is only as good as the OPFOR makes it, since soldiers would learn little fighting an incompetent opponent.
In which they're nice enough to include me on the blogroll, though that's not too exclusive a list, since it seems to consist of more or less every Jewish blogger in creation.
But it's still nice. Beats a poke in the eye with a sharp comment.
BLOG ADS. If you're terribly observant, you'll see on the left, just under the half-complete Amazon stuff, that I've begun the process of setting up Blog Ads. Feel free to sign up.
Meanwhile, you can simply take a survey here, if you like, and enter "Amygdala" to question 22.
DOESN'T CONTRIBUTE TO U.S. POPULARITY in Iraq, this doesn't.
It begins with a blast at the front gate in the middle of the night. Troops pound their way into the home. Males are rounded up. They disappear into a chaotic system of U.S.-run jails and prison camps and emerge months later, sometimes battered and often never knowing of what crime they are accused.
That has been the experience of many of the nearly 40,000 Iraqis who have been detained and released by U.S. forces occupying Iraq for more than a year.
[...]
"They just don't know how to handle us properly," said Ghazwan Alusi, 26, a car dealer held in two prisons for four months late last year. He described being transported from one detention center to another 600 miles away, hogtied by the arms and legs to other prisoners in the back of an uncovered truck.
"We were treated worse than animals," he said. But Iraqis say even the routine treatment is humiliating and unjust, especially for the vast majority of those rounded up in sweeps by U.S. troops, who cast an ever-wider net, sometimes with faulty intelligence. The detainees were often denied access to lawyers and seldom charged with a crime.
[...]
Afraid that a grandchild had found the family Kalashnikov, he shouted out, "What's going on?" and started to hoist himself off the sofa.
As he looked up, he saw a U.S. soldier towering over him and heard him shout: "Put your hands up!"
Sattar watched the soldiers throw his grown sons to the floor, handcuff them with plastic "flexicuffs" and pull hoods over their heads. A moment later, it was Sattar's turn. He was pushed flat on his face, he said, a bag was pulled over his head and his hands were tightly cuffed behind his back. An ill man who walked with difficulty, he was dragged on the ground, suffering bruises and a twisted ankle.
Hours later, the hood was taken off and Sattar found himself in the total darkness of a closet so narrow that he could only stand. It was almost a day before he saw light again, he said, emanating from an electric bulb in a small, wood-frame cell.
The details of Sattar's arrest are similar to those of thousands of Iraqis detained by U.S.-led occupation forces, according to a February report by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The report alleges that the abuses were part of a pattern at detention centers across Iraq. The Red Cross lists a dozen methods used, including three that involve sexual abuse.
[...]
Alusi was jailed alongside Sadun Hamadi, the 75-year-old former speaker of the Iraqi National Assembly, who lay on a single blanket in a sweltering tent, using his shoes as a pillow.
Alusi said he offered to bring water to the respected statesman, but the guards required Hamadi to get it himself. In his underwear, before all to see, Hamadi crossed the sand to retrieve a bit of water.
"Oh my God," Alusi recalled thinking to himself. "If they do this to him, a man of his position, what is in store for the rest of us?"
You could find Iraqis writing about this sort of thing all over the Internet for the past year; but a lot of people have been in denial.
EVERYTHING WANTS TO CHAT WITH YOU, NOW. It's truly a Phil Dick/Robert Sheckley world. Earlier, talking condoms. Now, this.
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German inventor who developed a gadget that berates men if they try to use the toilet standing up has sold more than 1.6 million devices, his business manager says.
German women fed up with a man with a poor aim can turn to the ghost-shaped gadget, which lurks under the toilet rim and, if the seat is lifted, declares in a stern female tone:
"Hello, what are you up to then? Put the seat back down right away, you are definitely not to pee standing up ... you will make a right mess..."
Alex Benkhardt, 46, invented the "WC Ghost" and its creators are in negotiations to market it in Britain, Canada and Italy.
I suspect it's fair to say that Reuters gave a rather free-hand translation of the original German, but on the bright side, I managed to avoid making any cliche ethnic German jokes!
Achtung, read The Rest Scale, schnell: 0 out of 5.
Oh, damn.
Amygdala, the blog that won't hesitate (long) to bring you toilet jokes! Ethnic toilet jokes!
YUMMY. I realize I'm just being a bit squeamish about this when it's actually no more gross than any slaughterhouse, but isn't this just such a lovely image?
Cattle brains and other remains that may carry the deadly mad cow disease would be turned into biofuels under a plan announced on Monday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Cattle brains, skull, eyes, spinal column, small intestine and other parts suspected of harboring mad cow disease were...
[...]
Under the new USDA program, a $50 million loan guarantee program would be set up to help small businesses in rural areas develop ways to turn cattle brains and other high-risk parts into a "bio-based source of energy."
Bill Hagy, a deputy administrator at USDA's rural development agency, said the purpose of the pilot program was to gauge commercial interest and to solicit ideas for alternate energy uses for the cattle parts.
Now, as I indicated, there's nothing here more gruesome than the way I get my hamburger.
I'm just envisioning signs being put up: "My home powered by dead cattle brains, skulls, eyes, and intestines!"
It would make a place ever so much more cozy, don't you think?
An amateur rocket called GoFast has made history by becoming the first such rocket to reach 100 kilometres altitude - the official edge of space.
The seven-metre-tall rocket was launched from Nevada's Black Rock Desert on Monday carrying a ham radio avionics package which broadcasted position and altitude data during its ascent.
The Civilian Space Exploration Team (CSXT) built the rocket at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars.
[...]
The rocket accelerated rapidly, reaching nearly 6500 kilometres per hour in just 9 seconds. On reaching its altitude it then lingered for a few minutes before beginning its descent. The whole trip took less than fifteen minutes.
Step 2: I purchase a large, hollow, volcano in Japan.
The Food and Agriculture Organization, in a 106-page report, came down on the side of biotechnology. It said genetic engineering, as part of a broader program, could help farmers increase their output and, by lowering food prices, help consumers in developing nations.
The report said that achieving such gains required that the proper crops be developed and the seeds made available on terms allowing the farmers to profit. "Thus far, these conditions are only being met in a handful of developing countries," the report said.
Prabhu Pingali, director of agricultural and development economics at the agency, which is based in Rome, said that most work on biotech crops was done by big companies and aimed at the needs of the developed countries.
[...]
The biotech crops available are primarily canola, corn, cotton and soybeans that have been made either insect-resistant or herbicide-resistant.
While some of the crops and traits are useful in developing countries, Dr. Pingali said, there is a need for biotech potatoes, cassava, rice, wheat, millet and sorghum. And there is a need for crops that can tolerate droughts or the poor soils often found in developing countries.
Even now, the report said that some biotech crops, particularly insect-resistant cotton, "are yielding significant economic gains to small farmers." And, despite concerns that farmers would become beholden to big biotech companies, "farmers and consumers so far are reaping a larger share of the economic benefits of transgenic crops than the companies that develop and market them."
A distinctly mixed bag of results, but overall good news, and pointing the way forward.
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5; the rest is what you'd expect, and not much of it.
WE CONTROL THE VERTICAL; WE CONTROL THE HORIZONTAL. I was occupied on Sunday, so I missed out on the whole shutting down Powell's interview with Russert thing, alas.
But here's something that's in the No Surprise Department:
In 2001 Miller was working as press secretary to then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay when she lashed into Post Magazine writer Peter Perl while he was doing a profile of her boss, screaming: "You lied! . . . You betrayed him! You twisted his words! . . . We don't know you. You don't exist. . . . You are dead to us." A DeLay spokesman told us yesterday, "Tom thinks Emily did a fine job for him."
I've read about all this stuff all my life, but actually seeing so much of the imagery in one place is simply extraordinarily invaluable. I heartily recommend taking the time to peruse each page. Thomas Bilbo. Charles Coughlin. Huey Long. So many other masters of propaganda, from all around the spectrum.
And, who knows?, you might want to buy one.
View The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5. Hat tip here. (Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 if interested in background.)
If you read the foreign news, and in the last couple of years, the news from Iraq, you've read Burns, possibly without noticing bylines (which is the way most people read newspapers, unlike me, it finally dawned on me fifteen or so years ago).
If you're yet more of a newsjunkie, and have access to US PBS, you may have seen any of the countless daily accountings he's given the Newshour from Iraq.
He cuts a memorable figure, pictorally, as well as textually.
Which is to say that he's a giant explosion of hair, under which a person strides (or perhaps shambles; I've had little experience of seeing him actually mobile).
When New York Times foreign correspondent John F. Burns returned home to England after the fall of Baghdad last year, he nearly collapsed of exhaustion. Diagnosed with an electrical flutter of the heart, he was certain of the cause: the stress of those many months in Iraq, the hounding by the secret police, the accusation that he was a C.I.A. agent, the bombing, the invasion, his escape. Surely a martyr�s death awaited. But under questioning from his doctor, Mr. Burns admitted that he had been drinking 25 to 35 cups of tea a day, enough caffeine to kill old Earl Grey himself.
"I lost my Purple Heart right then and there," he said on a recent morning at The Times� Baghdad headquarters, to which he returned in October as bureau chief.
[...]
At 59 years, he is possibly the oldest member of the Western press corps in Iraq. He is certainly the hairiest.
Of course, there are greater mysteries in the quicksand of this country than the grooming habits of journalists. But at a time when attacks against foreign civilians have led to a run on black hair dye and Iraqi makeover specialists, Mr. Burns� eye-catching crown of curly white fleece begs the question with all its unkempt mortar-magnet glory.
"Why do I not go to the barber very often?" he said. "This may be an affectation, but it�s true. My father was an air force general�Royal Air Force. Twenty years ago, I went to have my hair cut in England, and in talking to the woman cutting my hair, she said that her father, a pilot, was killed with the Royal Air Force in Germany. And I said, �Oh, my father was there at the time.� We quickly discovered that it was the same time. The following morning�I was staying at a hotel in the West End�she came to my room and said, �I want to show you a photograph.� And it was the photograph of her mother and herself as a young child at the funeral of this pilot, and my parents, my father in uniform and my mother, standing on either side of her. And she said, �My mother said your parents were so kind that I wasn�t to charge you for the haircut.� And I said, �I�ve got a better idea than that. Charge me for the haircut, but I will never have my hair cut anywhere else again other than by you.� And I have not had my hair cut by any other person than that woman in 20 years, and I�m not very often in England."
Among other interesting bits, he also spoke of the end results of his rather famous indictment of some journalists' cowardly reporting under Saddam Hussein:
It reminds me of a wonderful phrase from Rupert Brooke�s First World War poem. In another context, he talked about �all evil shed away.� We�re all in this together now. If there were people who were wary about stating the essential truth about Saddam Hussein�s regime, which is to say that it was a terror state, those people now are showing tremendous bravery, and I�ve also seen just how good they are as journalists. It�s a different time. It�s a different challenge. That seems a country far away and long ago. And one or two of my colleagues who were upset by those remarks are now friends again. So all evil shed away."
Smoking is not allowed in the chamber and has been banned since the 17th century. Members may take snuff though and the Doorkeeper keeps a snuff-box for this purpose.
Members may not eat or drink in the chamber. One exception to this is the chancellor who may have an alcoholic drink while delivering the Budget statement.
[...]
Hats must not be worn unless a point of order is being raised during a division - a fashion that has long died out - and a member may not wear any decorations or military insignia.
Members are also not allowed to have their hands in their pockets, this offence was committed by Andrew Robathan MP (Con) on December 19th 1994.
Swords may not be worn in the chamber and each MP has a loop of ribbon in the cloakroom where their weapons may be left. Nowadays the loop is more often used to hold an umbrella.
[...]
Finally, members must not die on the premises! This is because the Palace of Westminster is a royal palace where commoners may not die. Any deaths on the premises are said to have taken place at St. Thomas' Hospital - the nearest hospital to the palace.
Fetch me some snuff, and my sword, before I die! And put my hat on me when you carry me out.
Roughly two months after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, a group of high-level officials met here in Macedonia's Interior Ministry to determine how their country could take part in the United States-led campaign against terror.
Instead of offering troops to support American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, as other countries in the region had done, senior officials and police commanders conceived a plan to "expose" a terrorist plot against Western interests in Skopje, police investigators here say.
The plan, they say, involved luring foreign migrants into the country, executing them in a staged gun battle, and then claiming they were a unit backed by Al Qaeda intent on attacking Western embassies.
On March 2, 2002, this plan came to fruition when Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski announced that seven "mujahedeen" had been killed earlier that day in a shootout with the police near Skopje. Photos were released to Western diplomats showing bodies of the dead men with bags of uniforms and semiautomatic weapons at their side.
[...]
"It is monstrous, there is really no other explanation for it," said Dosta Dimovska, a former deputy prime minister in Mr. Georgievski's government and later chief of Macedonia's intelligence agency. "The damage will be difficult to repair."
A senior government adviser and former Interior Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity said: "The state did it. The Republic of Macedonia did it. And we will have to pay the price."
It used to be a rare day when I thought that Gandhi might have had a point.
Those days seem to be coming more frequently of late. (Well, other than on that drinking urinething.)
Estimating North Korea's nuclear potential is an inexact science. But some experts say Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal is expanding and could grow by as many as six weapons if it produces plutonium from the 8,000 spent fuel rods it has kept in a cooling pod. A parallel program to produce bomb grade uranium would allow Pyongyang to expand its arsenal even more in several years time.
"Jack was here for a couple of years," Powell told The Washington Times in April. "He was an expert in these matters, and he thought we ought to be moving in another direction. And I said, 'No, the president wants us to do it this way.' And he left, and now he's writing long, tortured articles about how we are doing it wrong." Pritchard says he loyally defended the administration's line while in government but now has an obligation to call it as he sees it.
I've kept forgetting to link to this Michael Gordon piece which has been up for almost a couple of weeks, but it's just a bit of a wee tad of an important story. WMD, anyone?
OLD HICKORY. A good look at the twists and turns at the ways historians have looked back at our beloved and revered (and inarguably extremely important) seventh President, Andrew Jackson (often called "Andy").
When I first began reading history, Arthur Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson was a famed work. But as Amy H. Sturgis points out:
Schlesinger in effect read history backward to cast Jackson as a reformer in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt; the result amounted to a lively and articulate love fest that had little to do with Jackson himself.
Nevertheless, Schlesinger�s warm fuzzies attached themselves firmly to Jackson�s mystique.
But less loving versions will mention:
By examining Old Hickory�s private relationships and intimate correspondence, he tries to make Jackson "more knowable." In so doing Burstein tells a story of how Jackson used his power against those he disdained (the physically weak or culturally different, the "dishonorable," Native Americans, blacks, and others), and how his bullying violence and uncontrolled temper eventually transformed U.S. policy in what became an "avenging" presidency. This Jackson made the personal political, using politics to right perceived personal wrongs, governing by inciting and unleashing fears in others. "He did not accept the rule of law," Burstein argues, "unless he made it."
[...]
Jackson helped to engineer a duel to settle the issue and fantasized about "pistols suspended -- until after the word fire -- and I will soon put an end to this troublesome scoundrel....I pledge myself on the foregoing terms, if my pistol fires -- I kill him."
When diplomacy forestalled the duel, Jackson could not let the disagreement die a natural death. He pursued Erwin, finally going all the way to President James Monroe in order to crush his detractor�s hopes of a political career. This need to end every "battle" decisively carried over into the policies he pursued, be they the removal of American Indians or the death of the Bank of the United States, regardless of the dictates of the Constitution.
[...]
The story reveals how personal were Jackson�s politics in a variety of explosive and often deadly ways: acting on his hatred of Native Americans as well as the English and Spanish, glorifying the trappings and rituals of military might, adhering to a two-dimensional and unsophisticated patriotism, and disregarding the letter of the law and those who sought to enforce it. The Heidlers argue that "mature deliberation and rational thought were always brittle facets of this man�s turbulent personality....Jackson was an angry young man who became an angry old man."
The Heidlers provide numerous examples of how, through his impulsive and often illegal behavior, Jackson moved Manifest Destiny ideas into imperialist action. For example, during the First Seminole War of 1818, Jackson captured two British citizens in Spanish Florida, Robert Ambrister and Alexander Arbuthnot. The former was an ex-Marine turned mercenary who was apparently working with area blacks and American Indians to undermine the Spanish. The latter was a private businessman and trader who, from a combination of humane concern and his own economic self-interest, sought peace between the Seminoles and the United States. Because they were English, because they collaborated with Native Americans, and because they interrupted his burning and looting of native villages, Jackson demanded satisfaction.
He engineered a jury of 12 of his most trusted officers to court-martial the two Brits. The fact that the trial was unlawful did not faze Jackson, who justified himself by saying, "The laws of war did not apply to conflicts with savages." When even his hand-picked jury failed to reach the conclusion he desired, Jackson simply ordered Arbuthnot hanged and Ambrister shot. In essence, Jackson executed two British subjects on Spanish land in the absence of authorization or precedent, despite the fact that the United States was technically at peace with both Great Britain and Spain at the time.
Any parallels found in Jackson's history to any more recent events of the day are left for the reader to contemplate.
Jackson made crucial changes in a still young US government, including the attacks on the Second Bank of the US, the critically important face-down over States's alleged rights to nullify US laws (later, of course, revisited by the Civil War), and, yes, the Manifest Destiny expansionism of the country.
But he was a deeply, deeply, hateful and ugly man.
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 if you're at all interested.
Then came the news that Solzhenitsyn was writing a major history of the Jews in Russia. The first volume of Dvesti let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together), covering the period from 1795 to 1916, appeared in 2001; the second volume followed in 2003. According to Solzhenitsyn, the work was intended to give an objective and balanced account of Russian-Jewish relations: "I appeal to both sides -- the Russians and the Jews -- for patient mutual understanding and admission of their own share of sin." This comment seems suspicious in itself, given that, for most of their history in Russia, Jews were victims of systematic oppression and violence. To talk about mutual guilt is a bit like asking blacks to accept their share of blame for Jim Crow.
Either you're interested enough to want to read the rest, or not. Personally, I find the apologetics for Solzhenitsyn's anti-Semitism that Cathy Young discusses to be rather outrageous. What she says here is true:
Solzhenitsyn�s anti-communism, it is increasingly clear, was never a defense of individual freedom. It was a defense of a different kind of collectivism: ethnic, religious, and traditionalist. This is far from the only time that such a mind-set -- anti-secular, anti-modern, anti-individualist -- has been linked to prejudice against those who don�t fit into the collective.
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 if you are interested.
ALT.CHRISTIANITY. I'm afraid I really have nothing useful to say about this. (I can't hear you, in the back row, asking how this is different from normal.) I'm not a Christian and I neither think the "movement" is good or bad.
Why am I linking to it, then? Because I think it's interesting, and I'm pointing it out.
GIELGUD'S TRUTHS. That is, I don't know that they were truths. But they were his truths.
But to those who knew him he was also celebrated for his candor and, sometimes, his indiscretions. Reminiscing about the Hamlet he had triumphantly performed in New York in 1936, for instance, he told a group of actors that included Harry Andrews, ''Of course I had a really terrible Horatio -- oh, it was you, Harry, isn't it wonderful how much better you've got since?''
It's just as well poor Andrews is not alive to read the letters that Gielgud wrote about his subsequent performance of Brutus. Gielgud called Andrews unintelligent in the role, ''terribly low and lacking in vitality'' and guilty of a ''sonorous showiness which I always hated.'' Likewise with Gielgud's close friend Lillian Gish, whose nurse in ''Romeo and Juliet'' was ''Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm with a dash of Mary Poppins,'' and with his even closer chum Vivien Leigh, whose acting in ''Titus Andronicus'' was ''like paper, only not so thick.'' Again and again in ''John Gielgud: A Life in Letters,'' he does what one had hoped: he says in private the things he somehow managed to suppress in public.
Yet, seldom if ever does one feel there is anything mean-spirited in Gielgud's opinions. It's simply that he is gloriously, appallingly, hilariously truthful about those who practiced an art that he took with unerring seriousness -- and not least about himself, whom he variously accuses of having a ''beaky'' nose, of being insufficiently energetic to play Macbeth and of a tendency to '' 'hold the pose' and sit down with my knees together.''
[...]
True, these have their moments, like Gielgud's reports of his encounters with Greta Garbo, with her little-girl looks and odd, brainless chatter, but he is more memorable when, a decade later, he evokes the actress for one of his lovers, Paul Anstee: ''Met Miss Garbo on Park Avenue looking like a displaced charwoman. I'm sure she cuts her own hair with nail scissors.''
[...]
Again, one of the most impressive letters in the collection is to the American actor Richard Sterne, then about to perform Romeo. ''I know how to play it well now but I could never convey it on the stage,'' Gielgud writes with his usual realism in 1963, and proves the point with a detailed account of the role that should be read by anyone attempting it. But he is never, ever solemn -- quite the contrary.
Again and again he encapsulates a person or performance. John Barrymore in Max Reinhardt's film of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'': ''a monstrous old male impersonator jumping through a hoop.'' Thornton Wilder: ''a funny little nervous man like a dentist turned professor.'' Edward Albee: ''a surly pirate with a drooping mustache.'' Alfred Drake and Eileen Herlie as Claudius and Gertrude: ''an ex-croupier from Monte Carlo who has eloped with a fat landlady who keeps a discreet brothel on the Cote d'Azur.''
Marlon Brando and James Mason, who played Antony and Brutus in Joseph Mankiewicz's film of ''Julius Caesar'' in 1962: ''James Mason . . . talks through his nose and Marlon looks as if he is searching for a baseball bat to beat out his brains with.'' Yet Gielgud, who played Cassius, ended up hailing both men's performances and was clearly fascinated by Brando from the start, describing him as a ''funny, intense, egocentric boy'' with huge sincerity and a capacity for painstaking work. And yet again he gently mocks himself, this time for a beard that makes his Cassius ''look like a burglar or the 13th apostle.'' ''If they cut me cleverly,'' he adds, ''I think I may pass muster but I hope they won't think I give a theatrical and over vehement performance.''
Gielgud maintained that wry modesty and sense of insecurity into old age, when the movie ''Arthur'' (''I have a death scene in hospital wearing a cowboy hat. Keep your derision for when you see the film!'') brought him greater fame and fortune than the theater ever had.
Favoring campaign contributors is, of course, an ancient practice. But there are new heights being reached.
Since 1998, Bush has raised a record $296.3 million in campaign funds, giving him an overwhelming advantage in running against Vice President Al Gore and now Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). At least a third of the total -- many sources believe more than half -- was raised by 631 people.
[...]
For achieving their fundraising goals, Pioneers receive a relatively modest token, the right to buy a set of silver cuff links with an engraved Lone Star of Texas (Rangers can buy a more expensive belt buckle set). Their real reward is entree to the White House and the upper levels of the administration.
Of the 246 fundraisers identified by The Post as Pioneers in the 2000 campaign, 104 -- or slightly more than 40 percent -- ended up in a job or an appointment. A study by The Washington Post, partly using information compiled by Texans for Public Justice, which is planning to release a separate study of the Pioneers this week, found that 23 Pioneers were named as ambassadors and three were named to the Cabinet: Donald L. Evans at the Commerce Department, Elaine L. Chao at Labor and Tom Ridge at Homeland Security. At least 37 Pioneers were named to postelection transition teams, which helped place political appointees into key regulatory positions affecting industry.
A more important reward than a job, perhaps, is access. For about one-fifth of the 2000 Pioneers, this is their business -- they are lobbyists whose livelihoods depend on the perception that they can get things done in the government. More than half the Pioneers are heads of companies -- chief executive officers, company founders or managing partners -- whose bottom lines are directly affected by a variety of government regulatory and tax decisions.
When Kenneth L. Lay, for example, a 2000 Pioneer and then-chairman of Enron Corp., was a member of the Energy Department transition team, he sent White House personnel director Clay Johnson III a list of eight persons he recommended for appointment to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Two were named to the five-member commission.
Here's the hilarious part:
Asked whether the president gives any special preference to campaign contributors in making decisions about policy, appointments or other matters, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said, "Absolutely not." The president, Duffy said, "bases his policy decisions on what's best for the American people."
Some of the details of how the Pioneers and Rangers are organized and tracked are quite innovative.
The Bush campaign's innovation in the late 1990s was to institutionalize what other administrations had done more informally, which is to create a special class of donors that can be singled out from the pack and tracked with precision. Some of their transactions with the administration can also be tracked.
[...]
The Pioneer tracking system ensures that hard work gets noticed. That's why Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) signed up this year. He read that Dunn, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), and others were Pioneers. Portman had already raised money, "but I didn't have a tracking number. I finally decided to get one. I wanted to be supportive, and be viewed as supportive."
It's definitely hardball.
Follow-up on how this affects policy (hint: it might not be in your interest) here.
Investigating the Hamburg cell after September 11, German authorities came across another terrorist group called al-Tawhid (unity), made up mainly of Palestinian militants trained in Zarqawi's Afghan camps. Tawhid operatives told investigators they got their start in Europe selling stolen and forged documents to militants traveling between the Middle East and Western Europe.
With the outbreak of war in Iraq, Tawhid converted its alien-smuggling and document-forgery ring into a two-way underground railroad between Western Europe and the Middle East. According to European press reports, networks in Spain, Italy, and Germany send recruits into Iraq via Syria. U.S. military officials in Iraq now blame the most heinous terrorist attacks on "the Zarqawi network." But Zarqawi's alien-smuggling system also dispatches Middle Eastern jihadis into Europe via Spain, Turkey, Italy, and Greece. In November 2003, Italian wiretaps recorded two Tawhid operatives speaking of "the jihad part" and its "battalion of 25-26 units" of suicide bombers.
[...]
PROBABLY THE MURKIEST and most intriguing feature of this man of many mysteries is the question of Zarqawi's relations with Osama bin Laden. Though he met with bin Laden in Afghanistan several times, the Jordanian never joined al Qaeda. Militants have explained that Tawhid was "especially for Jordanians who did not want to join al Qaeda." A confessed Tawhid member even told his interrogators that Zarqawi was "against al Qaeda." Shortly after 9/11, a fleeing Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the main plotters of the attacks, appealed to Tawhid operatives for a forged visa. He could not come up with ready cash. Told that he did not belong to Tawhid, he was sent packing and eventually into the arms of the Americans.
Zarqawi and bin Laden also disagree over strategy. Zarqawi allegedly constructed his Tawhid network primarily to target Jews and Jordan. This choice reflected both Zarqawi's Palestinian heritage and his dissent from bin Laden's strategy of focusing on the "far enemy"--the United States. In an audiotape released after the recent foiled gas attack in Amman, an individual claiming to be Zarqawi argued that the Jordanian Intelligence Services building was indeed the target, although no chemical attack was planned. Rather, he stated menacingly, "God knows, if we did possess [a chemical bomb], we wouldn't hesitate one second to use it to hit Israeli cities such as Eilat and Tel Aviv."
The Tawhid cell uncovered in Hamburg after 9/11 scouted Jewish targets, including businesses and synagogues. Zarqawi's operatives have been implicated in an attack on a Mombassa hotel frequented by Israeli tourists and an attempt to shoot down an Israeli jetliner. He is also suspected to have played a role in the Casablanca bombings of a Jewish community center and a Spanish social club. In February 2002, a Jordanian court sentenced him in absentia to 15 years' hard labor for his involvement in a failed plot to kill American and Israeli tourists at the turn of the millennium, a scheme coordinated with Abu Zubaydah, a top lieutenant of bin Laden. And another Jordanian court sentenced him, again in absentia, to death for the assassination of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley. Zarqawi is also the prime suspect in the August 2003 truck bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad.
Zarqawi has been associated with other groups besides Tawhid. Most notorious is Ansar al Islam, a largely Kurdish organization operating out of Northern Iraq, which U.S. officials have linked to al Qaeda. Before the war, Ansar al Islam ran chemical warfare camps in northern Iraq. Last year British counterterrorist investigators traced poisonous ricin found in Manchester to those camps. Zarqawi has been linked with two less-known al Qaeda splinter groups, Beyyiat el-Imam, implicated in attacks in Israel as well as the November 2003 attack on a synagogue in Turkey, and Jund al-Shams, a Syrian-Jordanian group blamed by Jordanian authorities for the assassination of Foley. Zarqawi has also been linked to Chechen jihadis, and Indian intelligence says he belongs to Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), a Pakistani Sunni group responsible for slaying hundreds of Shias in South Asia.
The slaughter of Shias touches on another Zarqawi beef with bin Laden. While both men follow the strict code of Salafi Islam, which reckons Shias as apostates, bin Laden prides himself on being a unifying figure and has made tactical alliances with Shia groups, meeting several times with Shia militants. Zarqawi, by contrast, favors butchering Shias, calling them "the most evil of mankind . . . the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom." American military officials hold Zarqawi responsible not only for assassinating Shia religious leaders in Iraq, but also for the multiple truck bombings of a Shia religious festival this past March, which killed 143 worshippers.
There is one obvious conclusion to draw from the results of last week's balloting in the world's largest democracy: Uncle Sam's coattails do not stretch to foreign political leaders this year. Incumbents abroad with an American connection gain no advantage by brandishing it before voters. They may even pay a price for getting too close to the Bush White House.
Britain's Tony Blair already pays that price within his Labor Party, even as he presides over a robust economy. In Spain, Jose Maria Aznar's conservatives fell in March despite a strong economic record. Now Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist party and its regional allies, which steered India to impressive growth rates, must hand over power to the once-discredited leftist groups led by Sonia Gandhi.
Wow. I'd never have been able to figure this out without Hoagland's sage guidance. What would we do without such expertise?
The Three Amigos are talking prophylactics. They have been appearing for the past few months, as often as twenty times a day, in a series of animated public-service announcements on the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Their names are Shaft, Dick, and Stretch. Shaft is tall and black, and wears a backward-facing baseball cap. He speaks in a deep baritone. Dick is white, with an open Hawaiian shirt, and he talks like a surfer dude. Stretch is short, squat, and blue, with a Hispanic-sounding voice. (Quinn is partial to Stretch, whom he calls �an eager little chap.�) Each of them cares principally about getting laid. According to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Amigos are �wonderfully human-like characters.�
�Essentially, they�re these three amigos going on adventures,� Quinn said. �The comedy is driven by three mates in a sort of contaminated war zone, out to get lucky.� The Amigos� adventures�depicted in short cartoons ranging from fifteen seconds to one minute, and from tot-friendly to steamy�include space travel (punch line: �No condom, no blastoff�), soccer (�You just can�t score without a condom�), an African safari (�It�s a jungle out there�carry protection�), and bungee jumping (�Never make a leap of faith�always wear a condom�). They even have a sister, Femidom, a siren who lives in a pond in a mystical forest. They are a hit with young children�including Quinn�s own, aged seven and nine.
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate �high value� targets in the Bush Administration�s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap�subject to the Defense Department�s most stringent level of security�was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America�s most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy�s submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force�s stealth bomber. All the so-called �black� programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.
�Rumsfeld�s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target�a standup group to hit quickly,� a former high-level intelligence official told me. �He got all the agencies together�the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.�to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.� The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.
The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America�s �lite forces�Navy seals, the Army�s Delta Force, and the C.I.A.�s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: �Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress.�
In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military�s facilities at Guant�namo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations�using force if necessary�at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the �white,� or overt, world.
Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were �completely read into the program,� the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. �We�re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,� he said. �The rules are �Grab whom you must. Do what you want.��
[...]
Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.
�They weren�t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,� the former intelligence official told me. �No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I�ve got to crack this thing and I�m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I�ve got this apparatus set up�the black special-access program�and I�m going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it�s working. We�re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We�re getting good stuff. But we�ve got more targets��prisoners in Iraqi jails��than people who can handle them.�
Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap�s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap�s auspices. �So here are fundamentally good soldiers�military-intelligence guys�being told that no rules apply,� the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. �And, as far as they�re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it�s to be kept within Defense Department channels.�
[...]
Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib�whether military police or military intelligence�was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others�military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program�wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. �I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn�t know,� Karpinski told me. �I called them the disappearing ghosts. I�d seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I�d see them months later. They were nice�they�d always call out to me and say, �Hey, remember me? How are you doing?�� The mysterious civilians, she said, were �always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.� Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski�s leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)
By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. �They said, �No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan�pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets�and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets���the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. �The C.I.A.�s legal people objected,� and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.
The C.I.A.�s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. �This was stupidity,� a government consultant told me. �You�re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.�
[...]
�Why keep it black?� the consultant asked. �Because the process is unpleasant. It�s like making sausage�you like the result but you don�t want to know how it was made. Also, you don�t want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison.�
That last bit is a key piece of stupidity (among so many). What you're doing with these sorts of security classifications are keeping it (temporarily) hidden from the Western world; not from Iraqis.
Not when tens of thousands of them are being picked up and run through the prison system, not when many of them are, according to the Army itself, innocent, and when they have large families, sets of friends, and tribal connections (in many cases) whom they all speak with after they've been let out.
If this is all true, then the responsibility for Abu Ghraib belongs to the Secretary of Defense and his top assistants who directed and controlled this problem. Just as we would hold field commanders vicariously liable for their subordinates' criminal actions under the "command responsibility" doctrine, so too should hold the SecDef accountable if it turns out that he did direct these things to be done. Indeed, we send a very dangerous message by not holding these top officials accountable in the same way that these junior soldiers are by a court martial this week. That message is: senior leaders are not responsible for their actions, and soldiers will hang for the actions of their superiors. Suffice to say, that message does not support a good command climate for America's military.
Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5; Carter's blog is essential reading on matters where the military and the law intersect. (Newsweek is also on the story here; 4 out of 5.)
5/17/2004 11:28:09 PM|permanent link| | |
0 comments
HISTORY IN FILM Nice little site looking at certain historically-based movies and closely annotating how they compare to the real history; a fair job.
Here's one on a film, Hamburger Hill, I read in script form and worked on the publishing of the novelization we commissioned, in the mid-Eighties (the book was of considerably higher quality than most novelizations, I like to think; the film, incidentally, is one of the best straight war movies set in Vietnam, and its cast of then-unknowns included such actors as Dylan McDermott, Courtney B. Vance, Michael Boatman, Steven Weber, and Don Cheadle).
SF may have broken out of the ghetto people always used to talk about, but the tropes of SF are now available for use by everybody else, which is not what anyone expected. Now, science fiction is like some big generation ship that's crash-landed on a planet. People are taking away bits of it in order to build new structures. You can still see the shape of the thing, but a lot has been cannibalized for different purposes. Quite a lot of what's out there is still recognizable as science fiction, but is recognizable as other things as well.�
[...]
�I went to my first SF convention in 1963 and here I am, still going and enjoying them, 40 years later. SF fandom seems to have an aging core group, but Discworld fandom seems to be all ages. Discworld is nearly 21 years old and people who were young when they started reading it can be grandparents now, so you get families of Discworld fans in the queues at signings. That is very nice. I've got maybe a million readers in the UK, but probably fewer than 5,000 are the 'buy the t-shirt, go to the convention, hunt first editions' sort. Lots of people out there read and enjoy lots of SF, lots of fantasy, and never think of themselves as fans in the participatory sense. At the first UK Discworld convention, in 1996, there were almost a thousand people, and fewer than ten percent had ever been to a science fiction or fantasy convention of any sort before. Not many of them knew about fandom at all. It's quite strange to think of a purely Discworld fandom.�
Aristotle: Hey, man, it's cool. Cool. Boats are cool by me. I was just on a boat recently.
Socrates: [Putting away his gun.] Well good for fucking you. This makes you special?
Aristotle: From Mycinea.
Alcibiades: What's it like? I hear they do some crazy-ass shit there.
Aristotle: Man, that place is like Mount-fucking-Olympus. Every night, they gather round the fire in certain legally designated areas, where government-licensed civil servants throw the roots of a domestically cultivated plant in the fire.
Socrates: So fucking what?
Aristotle: So the smoke makes them giddy and lighthearted as if they had drunk on wine, only they don't have a headache in the morning, that's fucking what.
Aristotle: No, I don't know a better city, motherfucker, but that don't mean fucking Mycinea is fucking perfect. "Perfect" doesn't mean that there ain't nothing better, it means perfect.
Socrates: Can you explain that lofty idea in terms a base, wandering street philosopher like myself might be able to understand?
Aristotle: Well, allow me to demonstrate. Let's say there was an imaginary city, and all the people were divided into three groups. Let's say I represent the Gold group, I'd be Mr. Gold, you, Socrates would be Mr. Silver, and, you, Alcibiades, Mr. Bronze.
Alcibiades: Why do I have to be Mr. Bronze?
Aristotle: Because it's only a demonstration. So me, Gold, I'd be the philosopher king --
Alcibiades: But why can't I be the philosopher king? Look, Socrates, I'll trade with you.
Aristotle: [Draws a gun, fires a shot into the air, and points it at Alcibiades] Interrupt me again, motherfucker. Interrupt me again. Nobody's trading with anybody. This is my allegory.
[Alcibiades gestures submission.]
Aristotle: [Putting away gun.] So as the philosopher king, it would be my duty to keep seditious literature out of the city
-- Socrates: I got it. I understand.
Aristotle: Shut up, motherfucker, how can you understand my perfect city when I haven't explained it yet?
Socrates: No, dickhead, not that, I understand what you were saying before, about perfection. It's all about forms.
Aristotle: Forms?
Socrates: Yeah, motherfucker, forms. Like, something don't have to physically exist for it to be perfect; it exists as the perfect ideal, the perfect form, beyond mortal comprehension.
See, it's just like my blog!
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 only if you're amused; there's considerably more.
Just about every method of detecting land mines has a drawback. Metal detectors cannot tell a mine from a tenpenny nail. Armored bulldozers work well only on level ground. Mine-sniffing dogs get bored, and if they make mistakes, they get blown up.
The Gambian giant pouched rat has a drawback, too: It has trouble getting down to work on Monday mornings. Other than that, it may be as good a mine detector as man or nature has yet devised.
Just after sunup on one dewy morning, on a football field-sized patch of earth in the Mozambican countryside, Frank Weetjens and his squad of 16 giant pouched rats are proving it. Outfitted in tiny harnesses and hitched to 10-yard clotheslines, their footlong tails whipping to and fro, the rats lope up and down the lines, whiskers twitching, noses tasting the air.
[...]
Bananas and peanuts, after all, are what drives giant pouched rats to excel. Which is why they are often at their worst on Monday morning.
I know the feeling.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.75 out of 5 for useful weirdness.
EVIL. This was the first ever (and therefore next-to-only, at most, given it's the next to last) episode of Angel that ever frightened me, or seriously disturbed me.
Nothing supernatural involved. Just talk, and moral evil.
Evil in Angel, himself. Not Angelus. Just: corruption. (It's as disturbing as intended; and that's well, damnably.) (Of course, of which I can't speak more, or the Real Powers, or the Cordelia connection; but, bowsers.)
SMALL KICK about the Kerry commercials running every two minutes (alternating with the Bush commercials) in Colorado: "He was born in an Army hospital in Colorado."
I suppose I need to run a transcription of these things for you poor benighted outsiders not living with this stuff whenever you have that "television" on.
Oh, by the way, it's frigging snowing again.
Rained all last month, aside from a three-day snow flurry. Been hot of late, in the eighties. Then more rain. Now, snow again.
Yesterday, I was wondering when the pool would be filled again. Minor news note: it's, according to the weather reports, 40 degrees colder today than yesterday.
