Slashdot Mirror

I think that the best thing I've read on this issue lately is an article in the New Yorker by Louis Menand. It is about the historical perspective (TV robbing movies of their dominance, the rise of the blockbuster, etc.).

Here's the url:
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?050207cr at_atlarge

My favorite quote:
And what is the main cinematic experience? The tickets, including the surcharge for ordering online, cost about the same as the monthly cable bill. A medium popcorn is five dollars; the smallest bottled water is three. The show begins with twenty minutes of commercials, spots promoting the theatre chain, and previews for movies coming out next Memorial Day, sometimes a year from next Memorial Day. The feature includes any combination of the following: wizards; slinky women of few words; men of few words who can expertly drive anything, spectacularly wreck anything, and leap safely from the top of anything; characters from comic books, sixth-grade world-history textbooks, or "Bulfinch's Mythology"; explosions; phenomena unknown to science; a computer whiz with attitude; a brand-name soft drink, running shoe, or candy bar; an incarnation of pure evil; more explosions; and the voice of Robin Williams. The movie feels about twenty minutes too long; the reviews are mixed; nobody really loves it; and it grosses several hundred million dollars.

You might be interested in this article from the New Yorker, about the effect recording has had on the way classical music is performed. The gist of the article is that before classical musicians could hear recording of themselves and of interpretations from other countries, there was a lot more regional variability, and a lot less emphasis on perfection. Now that studio performances can be digitally tweaked or spliced together, the emphasis on perfection is even greater.

Edward Elgar's recordings of his Second Symphony and Cello Concerto, from 1927 and 1928, respectively, are practically explosive in impact, destroying all stereotypes of the composer as a staid Victorian gentleman. No modern orchestra would dare to play as the Londoners played for Elgar: phrases precipitously step over one another, tempos constantly change underfoot, rough attacks punch the clean surface. The biographical evidence suggests that this borderline-chaotic style of performance was exactly what Elgar wanted. "All sorts of things which other conductors carefully foster, he seems to leave to take their chance," a critic observed. Modern recordings of Elgar are so different in sound and spirit that they seem to document a different kind of music altogether.

I'm pretty sure that the CIA's job these days is just to tell Bush whatever it is he wants to hear.

From the article:

The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books--free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even call it 'covert ops'--it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it's 'black reconnaissance.' They're not even going to tell the cincs"--the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

I'm pretty sure that the CIA's job these days is just to tell Bush whatever it is he wants to hear.

From the article:

The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books--free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even call it 'covert ops'--it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it's 'black reconnaissance.' They're not even going to tell the cincs"--the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

I'm pretty sure that the CIA's job these days is just to tell Bush whatever it is he wants to hear.

From the article:

The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books--free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even call it 'covert ops'--it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it's 'black reconnaissance.' They're not even going to tell the cincs"--the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

I'm pretty sure that the CIA's job these days is just to tell Bush whatever it is he wants to hear.

From the article:

The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books--free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even call it 'covert ops'--it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it's 'black reconnaissance.' They're not even going to tell the cincs"--the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

Anthony Lane wrote my favorite review of this movie.

On Yoda:
"Also, while we're here, what's with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. 'I hope right you are.' Break me a fucking give."

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/articles/0 50523crci_cinema/

"Sith. What kind of a word is that? Sith. It sounds to me like the noise that emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other..."

"Mind you, how Padmé got pregnant is anybody's guess, although I'm prepared to wager that it involved Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes..."

"The general opinion of 'Revenge of the Sith' seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, 'The Phantom Menace' and 'Attack of the Clones.' True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion..."

"I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves..."

"If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you'd leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we're here, what's with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. 'I hope right you are.' Break me a fucking give..."

The New Yorker has a . They don't seem to be quite as excited as Ebert, though. Also, the : "This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That's right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it's better than 'Star Wars.'"

and it was positive: A.O. Scott in the New York Times.

Registration required (and fix the slash'ed URL):
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/movies/16sta r.html

Or for a perceptive scathing (and amusing) review, see Anthony Lane in the New Yorker (right now at http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema).

That would be: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/

Great review from the new yorker here:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/

For example, see this Fox story about the White House admitting that the Niger claims were based on forged documents.

This New Yorker article discusses it in more detail. For instance, one of the forged documents was signed in 2000 by an official who had been out of office since 1989.

Read a little yourself.

What do we do?
Well, we know that there is one very effective way of lowering temperatures: large volcanic eruptions. We have enough nukes to create this effect on our own in a controlled way, and enough processing power to try to get it right. To me, this would seem to be one of the few approaches that could be used to buy us some time to invest in new technologies that would help us out in the long term.

Also, for those who are interested, the New Yorker just ran an interesting-but-depressing three-part series on climate change.
Parts one and two are online here: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050425fa_fa ct3

The gov? They're famous for outsourcing

I found the temperature profiles measured in Alaskan permafrost described in the first part of Elizabeth Kolbert's devastating series in the New Yorker to be extremely clear and decisive. So much of what is attributed to as "climate change" is easily dismissed as anecdotal (at least by those who wish to deny change.) But the permafrost is a spectacular low-pass filter, and provides incontrovertable evidence that the arctic is warming, and warming quite quickly.

Her description of the many positive feedback systems in the same article are, I'm sure, old hat to all atmospheric scientists -- but it was good to see them all in one place. If there's one link that you follow in Slashdot this year, let it be this one. The article is a tour-de-force. Authoritative, on-the-scene reporting, done with passion and grace.

I hope that things change, that people in general wake up to the impending climate catastrophe. I agree that the question now can only be how best to adapt to the oncoming changes, if possible -- because change is coming.

Let me offer my sincere hope that your training and observations, and those of your fellow scientists, will soon be appreciated and put to good use. I agree, these will be interesting times. I'm so devestatingly depressed about the world my children are going to grow up in.

Thad Beier

In case, you find that interesting, here is a more recent article on their exploits.

Capturing the Unicorn

May I take this opportunity to recommend the New Yorker's review of Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" to the author of the above comment?

It's not the ultimate authority some of its fans would have you believe.

IAAET (I Am An English Teacher), your mileage may vary.

I read a lot of magazines and newspapers online. When I'm in the US I buy most of them in paper form (including the NYT every day) but I'm in Europe most of the time and the online versions are the only reasonably fresh way to get the content I want.

I actually have paid for an online subscription to the New York Review of Books but it was a bit pricey.

What I would like to see is one place where I could pay a single price and select several online content sites to subscribe to. Even if each one has a separate price, I still want one place to handle the subscriptions. I think the hassle barrier is higher than any (reasonable) price barrier. I should have one account that gives me access to several journals.

I would happily pay US$50/year for combined unlimited access to the NYT, the NYRB, the New Yorker, and Artnet Magazine. (Most of that content is currently free.) But I'm not going to bother with four separate subscriptions.

And I really don't think a micropayment or other per-article payment scheme will ever work. The fact that Fark makes money should be a pretty strong hint (and they're not even selling content per se, just better access to their site).

Slightly off-topic aside: if we all use Firefox now, why the continuous grumbling about the NYT Free Reg Req? Whenever the cookie expires on my completely non-personal account, the Fox just logs me back in.

according to this article, 26 people have survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. So it is not guaranteed either.

It's a funny thing when people are so full of delusional self-importance that they think anybody out there gives a sh*t what TV shows they're watching or what books they're checking out of the library or what route they're taking to work.

Even if the Bush administration weren't trying so hard to find loopholes in the Bill of Rights, allowing the FBI to randomly monitor library records is a very bad thing indeed. They have a long track record of coming down on people simply because they have "dangerous" views. If ones choice of reading matter is enough to put you under suspicion, people will be very careful what they read. Not something you want in a free society.

Yeah, they can't even stand a little torture.

"The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges." - Senator Lindsay Graham(R)

...an Iraqi woman in her 70s had been harnessed and ridden like a donkey at Abu Ghraib and another coalition detention centre after being arrested last July.
http://www.awakenedwoman.com/abu_ghraib.htm

The nightmarish images showed American soldiers at Abu Ghraib Prison forcing Iraqis to masturbate. American soldiers sexually assaulting Iraqis with chemical light sticks. American soldiers laughing over dead Iraqis whose bodies had been abused and mutilated
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4989422/site/newsweek/

The White House's top lawyer warned more than two years ago that U.S. officials could be prosecuted for "war crimes" as a result of new and unorthodox measures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4999734/site/newsweek/

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fa ct

...the practice shown in that photo is an arcane torture method known only to veterans of the interrogation trade. "Was that something that [an MP] dreamed up by herself? Think again," says Darius Rejali, an expert on the use of torture by democracies. "That's a standard torture. It's called 'the Vietnam.' But it's not common knowledge. Ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4989422/site/newsweek/

Most of the prisoners, however--by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers--were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fa ct

...prisoners being ridden like animals, sexually fondled by female soldiers and forced to retrieve their food from toilets.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A437 83-2004May20.html

...Army translator having sex with a boy at the prison. He said the boy was between 15 and 18 years old. Someone hung sheets to block the view, but Hilas said he heard the boy's screams and climbed a door to get a better look. Hilas said he watched the assault and told investigators that it was documented by a female soldier taking pictures.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5030097/

"The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges." - Senator Lindsay Graham(R)

...an Iraqi woman in her 70s had been harnessed and ridden like a donkey at Abu Ghraib and another coalition detention centre after being arrested last July.
http://www.awakenedwoman.com/abu_ghraib.htm

The nightmarish images showed American soldiers at Abu Ghraib Prison forcing Iraqis to masturbate. American soldiers sexually assaulting Iraqis with chemical light sticks. American soldiers laughing over dead Iraqis whose bodies had been abused and mutilated
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4989422/site/newsweek/

The White House's top lawyer warned more than two years ago that U.S. officials could be prosecuted for "war crimes" as a result of new and unorthodox measures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4999734/site/newsweek/

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fa ct

...the practice shown in that photo is an arcane torture method known only to veterans of the interrogation trade. "Was that something that [an MP] dreamed up by herself? Think again," says Darius Rejali, an expert on the use of torture by democracies. "That's a standard torture. It's called 'the Vietnam.' But it's not common knowledge. Ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4989422/site/newsweek/

Most of the prisoners, however--by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers--were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fa ct

...prisoners being ridden like animals, sexually fondled by female soldiers and forced to retrieve their food from toilets.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A437 83-2004May20.html

...Army translator having sex with a boy at the prison. He said the boy was between 15 and 18 years old. Someone hung sheets to block the view, but Hilas said he heard the boy's screams and climbed a door to get a better look. Hilas said he watched the assault and told investigators that it was documented by a female soldier taking pictures.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5030097/

Spitefulcrow, it sure looks like I was wrong about Iran. Sy Hersh has a remarkable track record.

I'd agree the situation here is not clear though I imagine the FBI, or more probably their masters in White House and the Pentagon, developed a strong desire to frustrate and stonewall FOIA seraches when these. surfaced.

Of concern, DOD interrogators impersonating Supervisory Special Agents of the FBI told a detainee that REDACTED. These same interrogation teams then REDACTED. The detainee was also told by this interrogation team REDACTED. These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date and CITF believes that techniques have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee. If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done the FBI interrogators. The FBI will be left holding the bag before the public.

Not sure how much truth there this is to Seymour Hersh's recent expose on Pentagon special ops in Iran, I wouldn't be surprised if the Bush administration is duping Hersh' and feeding him all this to rattle cages around the globe and at home. If its true though it tends to suggest the Bush administration is making one Presidential finding after another in which they are giving the Pentagon a blank check to wage the war on "Terrorism" without congressional oversight, with complete disregard for the integrity of borders of sovereign nations, some probably ostensibly American allies, and most probably with complete disregard for the Geneva conventions and U.S. law against torturing prisoners. I'm pretty sure you send an FOIA request to the Pentagon you will get back sheets of wide black magic marker lines.

From Hersh's article:

"The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia."

"The Presidents decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the booksfree from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) The Pentagon doesnt feel obligated to report any of this to Congress, the former high-level intelligence official said. They dont even call it covert opsits too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, its black reconnaissance. Theyre not even going to tell the CINCsthe regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)"

Add to that other attractive benefits...like having a staging area for further adventurers.

Does nobody know who Seymour Hersch is any more?

The reason that many in the US Armed Forces don't like Seymour Hersch, besides the facts that he has some of the best sources in the business, is that he was almost single-handedly responsible for breaking the story of the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam, where US soldiers murdered hundreds of innocent men, women and children.

That story marked a seminal moment in US journalism, demonstrating the power of the media by uncovering the truth and the lies of the Viet Nam conflict. It was Hersch's work that more or less guaranteed the end of US involvement in Viet Nam due to the huge outcry when the details came out.

Given that you don't appear to know that tiny bit of your own history, it might also surprise you to learn that a young officer named Colin Powell was assigned to investigate the massacre. He claimed to find no credible evidence that the massacre ever occurred. Hersch made a fool of Powell and many others in the military when he convinced one of the soldiers present during the mass murder to go public with his story.

Now tell me that Tommy Franks and others don't have an axe to grind.

Hersch is known to everyone who works in the business as one of the best informed correspondents in the US media. His research is impeccable. Read his columns in the New Yorker if you don't believe me. His writing is clear, and extremely well documented.

My biggest regret these days is that there's no new generation of independant reporters with the skills and determination that Hersch is still showing. I'm glad that someone broke the Abu Ghraib story; I'm only sorry that Hersch is still the one doing the ground work.

Now, to bring this post back on topic *grin*: It's precisely because of threads like this that I like Wikipedia and Wikinews. Someone makes wild-assed claims, backs it with weak evidence from a tainted source, and call it fact. On Fox and CNN, this goes unchallenged. In a wiki environment, it can be corrected and refined quickly and efficiently, and the public get the truth, rather than some shill's doublethink. Hopefully Wikinews will provide the training ground for a few more Seymour Hersches. We need them now more than ever.

Just because the Iraqi government didn't publicly bomb it's victims does not mean they were not terrorized.

Uday and Qusay were not nice people, and neither was John Gotti as long as we're comparing apples to oranges. However, most of the Iraqi populace weren't on the Olympic track team. I don't have the stats at my fingertips, but I bet the number of Iraqi non-combatants killed in the US invasion is greater than all the Iraqi citizens killed by Uday and Qusay.

[Those objecting to the war in Iraq] would like to maintain the status quo.

Unlikely. The point is the current situation in Iraq is in many ways worse than the old status quo, and if improvement were to be made it would have required a less blunt method.

This isn't just hindsight: George H. W. Bush ("the Elder") chose not to overthrow Saddam because his team anticipated that it would lead to a long, violent occupation. And the conventional wisdom in US foreign policy was that every time the US invades an Arab country it inspires new terrorists -- if Bush's goal was to test that assumption, he should have run the experiment on a smaller lab animal.

The al Qaida apologists for them would like to maintain the status quo.

This is not just a cheap slur, but evidence of some serious ignorance.

Al Qaida are probably much happier this way, as Iraq is now a nursery for their type of people. Prior to the invasion, Al Qaida and Saddam were mutual enemies. It's hard to overstate what a big favor the US inadvertently did al Qaida by invading Iraq.

If anything I'm an apologist for "the Elder" Bush not finishing Saddam off while he had the chance (tho having Norman Schwarzkopf work out the peace treaty was a major bungle).

At least the intentions of the US are for the good, albeit misguided.

Tell that to tens of thousands of victims' families. I'm sure they'll be relieved.

By the way, do you know what those intentions are? They're not to fight terrorism, or to stop WMDs, tho such was implied early on. And the idea that Bush just wanted to liberate Iraq from its cruel dictator seems implausible considering all the other dictators with whom the US does business, not to mention Bush's objections during the 2000 campaign to the Clinton's intervention in the Bosnia-Serbia conflict as "nation building", and the current american indifference toward the situation in Darfur.

Was the intention to show that Bush was a big man, who could be stronger than Clinton or even his own mighty father? If so, that intention isn't very good. Stupid as all getout, really.

Are you just presuming the invasion had good intentions?

If you think those prisoners at abu Graib were tortured, you demean those who have truly been tortured. Humiliation is NOT torture. Where is your indignation over the beheadings of innocents?

What a conservative stock retort. It compares the actions of a gang of thugs on one side to the US government on the other. Gee the US comes out better? Pats on the back all around.

Do you remember the first wave of beheadings? They were justified as being revenge for the US treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Prior to that no one would have gone public with such a brutal act because it would have destroyed all Arab sympathy for the terrorists. In effect, the US did regional advance PR for the beheaders.

Also, when you characterize the prisoner treatment at Abu Ghraib as "humiliation", "NOT torture", I have to presume it means you look at the pictures but don't read the text.

"... an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called "O.G.A.," or other government agencies--that is, the C.I.A. and i

But that remains ahead, and meanwhile Mr Bush's credibility has been considerably undermined not just by Guantánamo but also by two big things: by the sheer incompetence and hubristic thinking evident in the way in which his team set about the rebuilding of Iraq, once Saddam Hussein's regime had been toppled; and by the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which strengthened the suspicion that the mistreatment or even torture of prisoners was being condoned.

Claiming that the Rev. Moon-owned Washington Times, the long-time Conservative lap-dog The Wall Street Journal, and most especially Fox News (which Rupert Murdoch explicitly founded as a right-wing news channel) are "less bias[ed]" simply reinforces the perception of your poor judgment one would form from your bizarre claim that running stories about Abu Ghraib would affect a newspaper's circulation to its detriment while at the same time singling out The Economist for "experienc[ing] strong growth." (By the way, the magazine that published the source material for most of the Abu Ghraib stories, Seymour Hersh's superb series of articles, the New Yorker, saw its circulation increase to 1,000,000 for the very first time in its 79 year history.)

So I think we can all pretty much assume that you have no idea what you're talking about. By the way, you know how many times the Abu Ghraib story ran on the Times front page - not sure where it appears on this Physicians for Human Rights page about Tibet which you cited, nor could I find anything on their page about Abu Ghraib - I would guess that the link here is a red herring. What I really want to know, though, is where you got your figures for how many times Hussein's very real acts of genocide (hey, look, Physicians for Human Rights were talking about Hussein's use of weapons of mass killing back in 1993, and they talked about Abu Ghraib!), extra-judicial execution, torture, violence against women were covered. I was not surprised to see that you have no figures or links to back up your assertions on that! I chose to link to Amnesty International coverage, by the way, because they are an organization that was heavily criticized for its response to the Abu Ghraib scandal as being too liberal and ignoring Hussein's mistreatment of the Iraqi people.

This is not a competition, "whose the bigger torturer?" This is not a case in which we can apply a calculus of torture and murder and use of weapons of mass killing and determine that so much torture in Abu Ghraib is justified because we are preventing the far greater tortures that Hussein committed. President Bush himself denounced the abuse of US prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Do you wonder why? It's because he at least realizes that the US has a responsiblity to rescue the people of Iraq from Hussein in a way that will not make them think there is no qualitative difference between us and Hussein, only a quantative one - which is something some of his most ardent supports do not seem to grasp. And people think GWB is stupid!

The US can

I recently read an article in the New Yorker magazine about an influential blog called "The Note."

They said it was very influential in Washington, DC politics. It is said to be read by the "Gang of 500" political elites.

I suspect the Drudge Report is another influential one. The page rank is an effect of influence and not a cause.

Page ranking can measure who's web site links to a blog. But it doesn't measure who reads it and how influential they are.

I'd be inclined to say you are both right and wrong. Here is a pretty good write up on the Afghanistan war. Its is obvious that the war on the ground was waged by special forces working with local militias. Its nearly impossible to sort who among them were CIA and who were Army. It is a certainty the CIA had a major contingent there and that its a normal career path to go from military special forces to the CIA field operations so they are nearly synonymous.

I recall a documentary on the prison uprising where CIA agent Michael Spann was killed showing Americans in civilian dress coordinating the battle, and threatening the news crew for filming them. I'd make a guess they were CIA and not Army.

Here is an article on a couple more CIA agents killed in Afghanistan, they were former special forces soldiers.

Obviously the air war was coordinated from CENTCOM but I imagine there was a mix of CIA and special forces telling them where to bomb.

On the other hand, I don't think I'd say that the plan for the Afghanistan war was really any better than the one in Iraq. They mostly just scattered the Taliban and Al Qaida and didn't really kill them, kind of like Fallujah. Its not like the countryside in Afghanistan is any more under control than the Sunni triangle. Its just a smaller country, a smaller war, and there is a much smaller U.S. contingent that tends to huddle in a few well secured areas so it doesn't make the news as much as Iraq.

Doctors Without Borders has pulled out of both Iraq and Afghanistan because they are both considered dangerous and that is a group that rode out the duration of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Speaking of which that was a war in Afghanistan that was run entirely by the CIA which is another indicator they were probably major players in this war. They used indigenous forces in that war to, and interestingly enough, after they were armed, funded and trained by the U.S. they turned in to the nucleus of Al Qaida.

Get up off your ass and SERVE YOUR CUSTOMERS. Do business in a way that will make customers WANT to keep you as their source.

That's what really gets me about this crap- it's just another form of vendor lock-in. I can't do it one way because someone "owns" it, so I either pay them to do their job for them, or I find another way. The reason people want method patents is simple...they want to be able to stop after only half the job is done and still walk away with a pile of money.

Remember something...the US did superbly WITHOUT business method patents up until 1998. Here's a good article that appeared in The New Yorker Magazine, that explains the issue quite nicely.

Also, the story that drugs are more expensive in the US is largely an urban myth. Patent-protected drugs without significant competitors are more expensive in the US, but because of free-market competition, generics are a lot cheaper here than in Europe or Canada. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an excellent article on this topic in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago:

It is not accurate to say, then, that the United States has higher prescription-drug prices than other countries. It is accurate to say only that the United States has a different pricing system from that of other countries. Americans pay more for drugs when they first come out and less as the drugs get older, while the rest of the world pays less in the beginning and more later. Whose pricing system is cheaper? It depends. If you are taking Mevacor for your cholesterol, the 20-mg. pill is two-twenty-five in America and less than two dollars if you buy it in Canada. But generic Mevacor (lovastatin) is about a dollar a pill in Canada and as low as sixty-five cents a pill in the United States.

This was also mentioned recently in New Yorker's Talk of the Town

The original intent was to have the House more subject to the "whims" of the voters, all its members having to face election every other year, while Senators, with six-year terms, would be a bit safer from having to shift according to how the political "winds" were blowing. The Senate would then be able to take a longer-term view and offset some of the volatility of the House.
Ironically, despite having to face the voters three times as often as Senators, House members are now "safer" than Senators, because incumbents win (significantly) more frequently in the House than in the Senate. How can this be? Through the magic of gerrymandering. A Senator must face all the voters in his state. A member of the House need only face the voters in his own district, which in many cases was created to give his party an advantage there (whether his own party set it up to give him a safe seat or whether the other party set it up to concentrate his voters in one district and keep his party from winning two districts).
An interesting article on this subject appeared in The New Yorker late last year. The piece is sympathetic to the Dems in Texas who got squeezed by the unusual redistricting orchestrated there by Tom DeLay last year, but I think even Republican partisans might find the parts about the software available for gerrymandering and how fiendishly effective it is pretty interesting (especially since both parties have done their share of gerrymandering).
I personally see gerrymandering as a problem peculiar to two-party political systems. I also think it's one of the biggest problems in the US political system, but it is largely ignored by the media and most voters.

--Mark

"We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections," the authors write. Bush's "idiocy and religious fanaticism" are useful, the authors contend, for they stir the Islamic world to action.

It absolutely amazes me that the Kerry campaign is not using this to promote their candidate. Kerry has all but conceded major ground to Bush by not explaining that it is Bush who is the far more palatable candidate for terrorists, because it is the Bush Administration which has done more than any previous U.S. Administration to encourage and facilitate the spread of international terrorism. And the terrorists know it.

On a lighter note, here's another Bush endorsement that we might want to be concerned with.

the stunning thing is that Nader persists in campaigning in the light of this obvious fact. he's being helped by Republicans, and another four years of Dubya will pretty much undo Nader's entire life's work.

sadly, Nader is likely to go down in history as a fool, especially if he turns out to be instrumental again. a visionary fool, yes, but a fool nonetheless.

It's already been reported!

Yes I noticed, I thought you were wrong then too

>>Since you are counting percentages, you get a 0 out of 1 for contradicting yourself.

Do you even understand what "contradicting" means? If so, where have I "contradicted" myself?

As for your poll, check the facts again. The CPA's May survey said:

"The Coalition Forces should...
Pull out immediately 41
Wait for an Iraqi government 45"

The 55% was in response to a question as to whether or not they believed attacks would decrease after U.S. troops left, not whether or not they wanted troops to leave immediately. Take note that this survey was also conducted just after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. In March and April CPA polls the number of Iraqis who wanted the U.S. to leave immediately numbered under 20%. I'm trying to find any polls since May, but the CPA seems to be the only one that took them regularly and obviously they're long gone.

Furthermore, I love how your blog guy complains that the poll results were surpressed even though I easily found articles about it on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and Fox websites just now.


>>Hans Blix, Hillary Clinton, The Queen of England, a number of international courts of law, several insurance agencies, and what were you saying about credibility?

Do you make a habit of ridiculous statements? Show me any link that shows any of those people saying that Iraqis haven't seen an increase in freedoms and opportunities. Senator Clinton not only didn't say what you claim she said, she's said the exact opposite, that she doesn't regret her vote to approve military action in part precisely because it has increased freedoms for the Iraqi people.


>>No. URL?

There is no URL that points this out. As far as I know I'm the only human being who has actually noticed this fact. But sometimes it's actually possible to discover things by looking up the numbers yourself. For instance you can go here to find out that over 500,000 U.S. troops were deployed in the first Gulf War, along with around 75,000 troops from other countries. Meanwhile under 200,000 U.S. troops were involved with Iraq this time around, along with about 50,000 foreign troops. (in both wars Britian carried the vast majority of the foreign load - 50k in '91 and 40k last year) Really the only substantive difference between the "coalition" in '91 and the "coalition" in '03 is that a bunch of countries in '91 gave their verbal support while not actually doing anything to help. But the media makes it out as if we had so much more international support in '91. Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one skeptical enough to actually look up the numbers myself. Anyone who did would have noticed that the percentage of U.S. troops was actually lower this time around.

Nobody's saying that the only thing worth doing with the robots is exploration. And few are saying that sending humans into space is never worth it. But MANY people are saying, and rightly, that sending humans into low earth orbit to get whacked by orbiting socket wrenches and then attempt to return safely in a balsa wood glider is NOT worth it.

This editorial by Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker hits the nail right on the head.

The Hussein government demanded kickbacks on almost every contract it negotiated, beginning in 2000, according to documents from Iraqi ministries obtained by The New York Times this year.

Here's a long New Yorker piece on MM:
Michael Moore can make you cry.

If Osama bin Laden was only upset about the USA having troops in Saudi Arabia, why didn't he make a statement of peace when the US started carrying out plans to get all US troops out? IOW, your claims are not consistent with the reality of his behavior.

For a better idea of the mentality of these people, look at this New Yorker piece. Read the last paragraph first, then back up and read the last two. Then RTWFT.

Nevertheless, we also have a compelling public interest in keeping Big Brother from using the backdoor to enforce stuff that goes beyond keeping the peace and encroaches on our fundamental (and hard earned!) liberties.

The bottom line is that blocking all law enforcement access to these technologies is going to cost people their lives, but letting the pigs sniff around where they don't belong is going to ruin everyone's life. This is just another balancing act in the giant circus we call a democratic society.

So, rather than moaning about one side of this argument or another, doesn't it make sense to focus on getting just the right sweet spot in between?

There is one thing that can't be outsourced. Culture.

Don't be so sure. People are surprisingly quick to adopt the cultures of others.

That happens to be one of Radical Islams greatest fears: cultural imperialism. Our ideas about freedom have been called "Murderous Germs".

From an article about the origins of fundamentalist Islam:

In his essay "Between Yesterday and Today," Banna [founder of the Muslim Brotherhood] wrote that the colonialist Europeans had expropriated the resources of the Islamic lands and corrupted them with "their murderous germs":

"They imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with
their liquors, their theaters, their dance halls, their amusements, their
stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and
their vices. . . . The day must come when the castles of this materialistic
civilization will be laid low upon the heads of their inhabitants. "

The Brotherhood's slogan was, and remains, "God is our objective; the Koran
is our constitution; the prophet is our leader; struggle is our way; and
death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations."


Or how about Osama's Letter to America:

(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.

(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest.

[snip]

(iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.

[snip]

Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?

If culture couldn't be outsourced, terrorists would have must less to be angry about.

Michael Moore's career as a rabble-rousing populist has been marked by a frequent pattern of dissembling and factual inaccuracy. He distorted the chronology of his first movie, "Roger & Me"; repeatedly peddled the myth that the Bush administration gave $43 million to the Taliban; published two books, Stupid White Men and Dude, Where's My Country? , that were riddled with factual errors and distortions; and won an Academy Award for "Bowling for Columbine," a documentary based on a confused and often contradictory argument that features altered footage of a Bush-Quayle campaign ad, a misleading presentation of a speech by National Rifle Association president Charlton Heston, and other factual distortions.

With his new documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11," which won the prestigious Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was #1 at the US box office last week, Moore has surged to new prominence -- and come under increasing scrutiny. His staff has made much of elaborate fact-checking that was reportedly conducted on the film. And fortunately, it appears to be free of the silly and obvious errors that have plagued Moore's past work, such as the claim in Stupid White Men that the Pentagon planned to spend $250 billion on the Joint Strike Fighter in 2001, a sum that represented over 80 percent of the total defense budget request for the year.

However, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is filled with a series of deceptive half-truths and carefully phrased insinuations that Moore does not adequately back up. As Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum and others have noted, the irony is that these are the same tactics frequently used by the target of the film, George W. Bush. Moore and his chief antagonist have more in common than viewers might think.

The 2000 Florida recount

Reviewing the 2000 election during the opening of the film, Moore uses a quote from CNN legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin to make a deeply misleading suggestion about the results of the media recounts conducted in Florida:

Moore: And even if numerous independent investigations prove that Gore got the most votes --

Toobin: If there was a statewide recount, under every scenario, Gore won the election.

Moore: -- it won't matter just as long as all your daddy's friends on the Supreme Court vote the right way.

But the recount conducted by a consortium of media organizations found something quite different, as Newsday recently pointed out. If the statewide recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court had gone ahead, the consortium found that Bush would have won the election under two different scenarios: counting only "undervotes," or taking into account the reported intentions of some county electoral officials to include "overvotes" as well. During the CNN appearance from which Moore

After you prosecute Halliburton* and every other US defense, technology and financial company for doing the same thing for 150 years or so and to the tune of trillions of dollars - come to think of it, isn't that the whole thing that the Bush Administration doesn't want people to know from Moore's 911? Come on, when the bribe you were caught giving was 180 million how many and for how much were there that didn't get publicized - it would be like saying there is only one bug because it is the only one that was reported.

* How about today I saw a blurb on Bloomberg news that Halliburton and others are using their offices in the Cayman Islands so they could make deals with countries that the US labels as "terrorist"

Brown and Root's Candidate
Most Unpatriotic US Company
Halliburton to stop Soldier's emails during 2004 summer
Empty trucks crossing Iraq to increase profits
Libyia
The Dresser merger also raised ethical questions. The United States had concluded that Iraq, Libya, and Iran supported terrorism and had imposed strict sanctions on them. Yet during Cheney's tenure at Halliburton the company did business in all three countries. In the case of Iraq, Halliburton legally evaded U.S. sanctions by conducting its oil-service business through foreign subsidiaries that had once been owned by Dresser. With Iran and Libya, Halliburton used its own subsidiaries. The use of foreign subsidiaries may have helped the company to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
and on and on...
Halliburton: We like third world people - for slaves
mining and oil are controlled by a small elite group that know no national boundaries

Atlantic Monthly They regularly link to past stories in order to give better historical reference to current news items. I think the earliest story they have that mentions Saddam Hussein is from the late 1950's.

Harpers Yet another independantly owned journal that's not afraid to piss off thier advertisers.

The New Yorker Not independant, but has a long tradition of actually checking their facts. Great comics (understated, yet twisted, humor).

I also read my hometown newspaper every day, plus the New York Times on Sundays, and I scan BBC News, Google News, and The Guardian world news online daily. Plastic is good for getting an idea of what (somewhat educated) people think of the goings on in the world, and B3TA is a somewhat effective cure fore too much awareness of world events.

I also get The National Security Archive newsletter in my email about once a week or so.

For tech, I mostly read Linux Journal, SysAdmin, and occasionally Doctor Dobbs Journal.

Of course I always read The Debian Weekly News and /..