From: TAPPED (permalink)A MUST-READ SPEECH. Make sure to check out the transcript -- now posted at TAP Online -- of Zbigniew Brzezinski's...
[TAPPED]
Ladies and gentlemen, forty years ago almost to the day an important Presidential emissary was sent abroad by a beleaguered President of the United States. The United States was facing the prospect of nuclear war. These were the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Several emissaries went to our principal allies. One of them was a tough-minded former Secretary of State, Dean Acheson whose mission was to brief President De Gaulle and to solicit French support in what could be a nuclear war involving not just the United States and the Soviet Union but the entire NATO Alliance and the Warsaw Pact.
The former Secretary of State briefed the French President and then said to him at the end of the briefing, I would now like to show you the evidence, the photographs that we have of Soviet missiles armed with nuclear weapons. The French President responded by saying, I do not wish to see the photographs. The word of the President of the United States is good enough for me. Please tell him that France stands with America.
Would any foreign leader today react the same way to an American emissary who would go abroad and say that country X is armed with weapons of mass destruction which threaten the United States? There's food for thought in that question. Fifty-three years ago, almost the same month following the Soviet-sponsored assault by North Korea on South Korea, the Soviet Union boycotted a proposed resolution in the U.N. Security Council for a collective response to that act.
That left the Soviet Union alone in opposition, stamping it as a global pariah. In the last three weeks there were two votes on the subject of the Middle East in the General Assembly of the United Nations. In one of them the vote was 133 to four. In the other one the vote was 141 to 4, and the four included the United States, Israel, Marshall Islands and Micronesia.
All of our NATO allies voted with the majority including Great Britain, including the so-called new allies in Europe -- in fact almost all of the EU -- and Japan. I cite these events because I think they underline two very disturbing phenomena -- the loss of U.S. international credibility, the growing U.S. international isolation.
Go read the speech.
From: The Scobleizer Weblog (permalink)Several commenters in the "How to Hate Microsoft" piece asked for a more "Unix-like Shell." Several employees wrote me and said "tell them about Monad." So, I'll send you over to Slashdot for news about Monad. The people over in Slashdot are always fun to read.
...of course, this seems to have mainly led to 50,000 people thinking they're witty for saying "Will the GNU version be called Gonad?"
A decent shell in Windows will be nice, especially if it can behave like SSH and allow me to get in and function on a remote machine without having to pop up Terminal Services or VNC. The overhead to do either to a machine in India from here in Massachusetts when all I want to do is run a script...yeah. You can see how that's annoying. And this rapture at having a shell that can interact with the guts of the system, which seems to have the Microsofties overjoyed, seems a little overrated when you're a Perl hacker by trade... =)
It's 1:55 and we'll be finding out if anyone claimed Manny sometime in the next few minutes...and John Henry, owner of the Red Sox, is showing up in the list of members that have been reading the Sons of Sam Horn message boards in the last couple minutes. And we know it's the real John Henry. I love it. =)
And it's sounding like Manny didn't get claimed. Hmm. Not sure if this is good or bad yet...
EDIT: Just to make it MORE fun, John Henry posted at SoSH regarding the whole furor. There's something a little surreal to seeing the owner of the Red Sox make a post at an Internet message board regarding huge changes to the club, etc - and using an emoticon. I'm not sure how I feel about that... =)
Flag blunder embarrasses PentagonWorld: After its second mix up over countries in a week, the Pentagon has apologised to the president of Romania for decorating his table with a Russian flag.
heh. These guys are boobs.
Clark And The MediaWesley Clark's primary campaign media strategy is taking shape. He's running directly and exclusively against Bush, criticizing him in such...
And this is why I'm a Clark supporter. He's not running against Dean, Kerry, etc... He's running against George W. Bush. He throws everyone in the media and traditional political establishment off, since he really does seem to be primarily motivated by a driving need to stop George Bush and his policies. Sure, there's personal ambition there, and he's attracted some less than savory people to his campaign, but I really believe he's running because he cannot sit back and accept the Bush administration tearing down everything he believes in. He is angry, but not like I'm angry. I'm a way-leftie who voted for friggin' Nader in '96 and '00 (disclaimer: I'm a Massachusetts voter, so it's not like it made a difference). Of COURSE, I'm going to be angry. But Clark, while he does feel like a liberal and obviously disagrees with a lot of the policies that Bush put forward before 9/11, is angry because he and his country have been betrayed. Bush is not just a political opponent to him - he's the man who has wasted lives, failed to protect the US, lied, cheated, stole, turned the world against us, etc...he's been the antithesis of Clark on foreign policy, and Clark sees exactly what's happening. Anyway - Clark says it better than I do. Go read his speech to the Center for American Progress.
Clark May Forfeit Public Funding"Democrats' decisions could doom public financing of campaigns," the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire reports. "Late entrant Clark joins front-runner Dean and Sen. Kerry in considering forfeiting federal funds, to be free to exceed the system's $45 million spending limit in the party's nomination race. Bush did so first, in...
Regardless of how you feel about the idea of Clark busting the cap (I'm opposed to it on principle), it's pretty intellectually dishonest for the WSJ to headline this story like that. BUSH BROKE THE CAP FIRST. BUSH DOOMED PUBLIC FINANCING AS A WAY OF ENFORCING EQUITY BETWEEN THE CAMPAIGNS FOUR FREAKIN' YEARS AGO. Jesus CHRIST.
Norms of CivilityPeople can link to whomever they want to, but justifying your linking behavior based on some norms of civility and then linking to Andrew Sullivan is a bit, well...
My norm of civility is, roughly, tit for tat. I'm civil to people who are civil to me and "libruls" more generally, and I'm not civil to people who aren't. There's no point in trying to waste time grappling with why exactly Ann and Andy think I'm a traitor who secretly wants Osama and Saddam to establish a Muslim Theocracy in America, because after all theocracies are what liberals are all about!
More generally, there's no point in trying to get the people who have spent years debasing the political discourse in this country to elevate. And, there's also no point in grappling with why exactly some people are now pretending that somehow it was those eveil liberals who have lowered the quality of discourse.
It wasn't the Democrats that had HateRadio-Apalooza on the White House lawn.[Eschaton]
Atrios is the freakin' man. He brings the anger and confidence like no one else. This is our answer to Sullivan, Coulter, Reynolds, et al - except better.
Cricket: England take chargeEngland hold a lead of 467 over Bangladesh after day three of the second Test.
This isn't actually all that interesting. It's just that my reaction to cricket scores is always along the lines of "Whaaaa?" They just don't make any sense to me. I'm sure they DO make sense, and that once you understand the rules, it's all perfectly simple...but I rather enjoy being confused by it. =)
Art Martone of the Providence Journal has a post at Sons of Sam Horn explaining what he thinks is going on with this move. He says that there's more going on with Ramirez and Sox management's perception of him, and points out that if he goes to the Yankees, it handcuffs the Yankees: they can't go get another outfielder (Sheffield or Guerrero as free agents, Beltran in a trade for Soriano) because they'd have nowhere to put him, unless they also trade Nick Johnson, which would be, well, dumb on their part. They can't address their defensive problems in the middle infield by moving Jeter or Soriano to the outfield. They have to leave Bernie "No Knees" Williams in centerfield, leading to a truly horrendous defensive outfield of Manny in left, Bernie in center, and Hideki Matsui in right.
On Sons of Sam Horn and probably other message boards, some fans are freaking out, thinking that this is just a salary dump. They seem to actually believe that the Red sox ownership is trying to increase their profits by making the team worse. Uh, yeah. Right. This management group knows the best way to make money - put a playoff team on the field, year in, year out. I don't think they have a real problem with paying $20 million a year for one player, as long as the player is good enough. In this case, either they don't think Manny's worth it, when his defense, baserunning, off the field issues, etc... are factored in, or they feel that there are far better ways to spend the $100 million they've committed to Manny over the next 5 years - maybe not in 2004, but maybe 2005, 2006, etc...I dunno. It's going to be interesting. We won't know how this turns out until Friday at midnight, when the waiver period ends, unless Detroit (first in line to claim him since they were the worst team in the AL) claims him: at the end of the waiver period, one of two things happen - either he's not claimed and, well, nothing happens, or one or more teams claimed him and whomever has the highest waiver priority gets him. Just a note - waiver priority goes from worst to first in the league the waiving team is in (the AL in this case), followed by worst to first in the other league. So the Braves have the last priority, and the Tigers have first.
I went to the Celtics game tonight - fun game. They won - as they should, since they were playing a short-handed and crappy Miami Heat - but they were also buckets of fun to watch - great shooting, always making the extra pass, pounding the boards, 4 quality big men - three of them scoring over 10 points, and the fourth dropping an amazing five assists in 19 minutes. The C's aren't going to win that many games this year - their point guards are far from ready, for one thing - but they're going to be a lot of fun to watch.
And now Manny Ramirez has been put on irrevocable waivers - if anyone claims him, they get him and his whole contract, and the Sox can't do anything about it. Wow. I have no idea whether anyone's going to claim him, or what the Sox do if someone does...this is just plain strange... One possibility is that the Sox have a deal to get Alex Rodriguez from the Texas Rangers (ARod is the only player with a bigger contract than Manny, but he's without question a better player) but won't pull the trigger until they get rid of Manny's contract. Then they'd be able to trade Nomar and...yeah. Strange shit.
Oh - and here's the first of the articles on this: Providence Journal (whose sports editor broke the story on the always amazing Sons of Sam Horn message board), the Boston Herald, and the New York Times, which is where the story originated. The Yankees seem to be discussing whether to claim Manny as we speak - George Steinbrenner has gone megalomaniacal again and has taken direct control of baseball decisions again, which makes it seem very possible that they'll claim him...
Well, it wasn't work, I can tell you THAT much.
I've spent the last couple hours getting something very nifty and yet very useless working: the "listening to..." column in the sidebar. It's akin to the Winamp trackback trick, but not quite - I'm not using Trackback, since that would require rebuilding either every page, all the time, whenever a track updates, or (at the very least) rebuilding an include file whenever a track updates. All told, more hassle than I want.
So I weaseled - my mp3/ogg player, J River Media Center, has a plugin that will generate a logfile of what you've been listening to - and then run a script of your choosing after it logs a new track, like the DoSomething plugin for Winamp. I've got mine just uploading the log textfile to my web server, where it can be read by a quick-and-dirty perl script that generates javascript to be displayed on the pages, like the blogrolling section just above the listening to section. It does involve hitting that perl script whenever someone loads a page here, but it's not like I've got tons of traffic - something like half to two-thirds of my bandwidth is spiders and robots anyway, which won't run the javascript. So yeah - that's what I'm listening to. I skip tracks a lot, since I just play randomly from my massive playlist of every song I own (or thereabouts). Have fun with it, and please don't ridicule my music choices too much... =)
From: A blog doesn't need a clever name (permalink)Dave, with what may be good news for the Salon Blogs gang/society/community:
I'm just about ready to flip the switch on the new archive for Scripting News. We've also made major progress on bringing a new management team on board for UserLand. Hope to have the deal ready to announce next week. And to celebrate 500 days of No Smoking Dave, I placed an order for two new servers, to run in a new cage here in Boston. This is where I'm going to put various specs and public services that are currently running at UserLand, so the new team can focus on Manila and Radio. Murphy-willing there will be quite a few changes, for the better, in the remaining weeks of 2003.
I tend to doubt it'll make much of a difference - unless they actually hire 3 or 4 people and start ignoring Dave. Dave's got the corporate skills of...ok, I can't think of a good analogy. I started going somewhere with "an iguana with indigestion" but that doesn't even make sense. Anyway - I have little faith in UserLand getting their act together. They're a company formed in the image of their founder, and their founder is an incredibly self-centered megalomaniac who doesn't seem to really give a crap about the people who are actually buying his product, and therefore providing him with his income. Until they change that core basis of the company and realize that they need to actually provide SERVICE for people, they'll keep sucking hard.
It's Time For Luskin To GoIT'S TIME FOR LUSKIN TO GO....Donald Luskin, like a too-clever adolescent who can't let go of an idea that he's convinced no one has ever thought of before, decides to compound his inexcusable charge that Paul Krugman condones anti-semitism today:I'm...
That jackass over at NRO somehow gets from this Krugman article in 1998 that Krugman's an anti-Semite - because Krugman:
Since George Soros is a Jew, that means that Krugman's an anti-Semite. Right? Right?
Damn, I hate Luskin.
Mission Accomplished" I am happy to see you, an so are the long-suffering people of Iraq. America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished."
-Bush to troops in Qatar, 6/05/03.
(via Kos)[Eschaton]
Originating from CNN - including a video!
So I get an email from the Clark campaign just now, regarding his policy speech on health care that he gave today. Here's how it starts:
Today in New Hampshire, I introduced my prescription for America's ailing health care system. This plan will do the right thing for Americans suffering under the crush of mounting medical expenses.
ARGH! I hope to God that whoever is writing his speeches isn't using lame plays on words like that...
Another Bush lie: blame the USS LincolnThis is pretty despicable: Q Mr. President, if I may...
I don't know why I didn't notice this when I read the press conference transcript, but yeah...Bush pushes the responsibility for the "Mission Accomplished" banner to the sailors on the Lincoln, a claim disputed by a NY Times story from May. Clark's got a press release out on this:
Today, President Bush backtracked on his May 1 political photo op on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln by blaming the troops on the aircraft carrier for the declaration of 'mission accomplished' in Iraq. This is wrong, this is irresponsible and this is not leadership. Politicizing the mission of those troops in the first place was bad theater, and diminished the office of Commander in Chief -- but to now turn his comments on those very troops is outrageous. Instead of trying to blame the sailors and soldiers, the President owes our troops in harm's way and the American people a plan to bring peace to Iraq and stability to the region.
What will we come to With all this pride of ancestry, we Yankees? -- Robert FrostAncestry Maps from the 1990 census: Which states have the highest percentage of people of Danish ancestry? Greek? Hispanic? Who (perhaps) doesn't realize that we almost all came here from somewhere else? Using the data provided on 1990 Census question 13, which asked respondents to identify the ancestry groups with which they identified most closely, the State of Minnesota provides us with these nifty Ancestry maps. More info here on 'the ancestry question' from the US Census Bureau. link via ::crabwalk.com::
There's a strange cluster of Belgians in the area where northeastern Wisconsin and northern Michigan meet. I'd be wary of traveling in those parts...
BTW, this is why Metafilter rules the world. I love this stuff!
NBA 2003-2004 Season PreviewPlastic::Etcetera::Sports: For many fans, the 2003-2004 remix couldn't possibly get here any sooner.
From the item:
Depending on the health of Antonio McDyess and testicular fortitude of Keith Van Horn, the Knicks may be able to sneak up the ladder.
...which merits this wonderfully dead-on response in a comment:
And for the record, any team depending on the "testicular fortitude" of Keith Van Horn is completely and utterly boned.
How perfectly true. =) This is why I know the Celtics won't finish in the bottom of the Atlantic Division this year: we've always got the Knicks to beat on.
President Holds Press Conference
Q Thank you, sir. Mr. President, your policies on the Middle East seem, so far, to have produced pretty meager results as the violence between Israelis and Palestinians --
THE PRESIDENT: Major or meager?
Q Meager.
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, okay.
Q Meager.
THE PRESIDENT: Meager.
and from Dana Millbank of the Post, I presume...
Q Thank you, Mr. President. You have said that you are eager to find out whether somebody in the White House leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent. Many experts in such investigations say you can find if there was a leaker in the White House within hours if you asked all staff members to sign affidavits denying involvement. Why not take that step?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, the best person to that, Dana, so that the -- or the best group of people to do that so that you believe the answer is the professionals at the Justice Department. And they're moving forward with the investigation. It's a criminal investigation. It is an important investigation. I'd like to know if somebody in my White House did leak sensitive information. As you know, I've been outspoken on leaks. And whether they happened in the White House, or happened in the administration, or happened on Capitol Hill, it is a -- they can be very damaging.
And so this investigation is ongoing and -- by professionals who do this for a living, and I hope they -- I'd like to know.
Wow, I'm shocked. He didn't answer the question. There's more along the same lines throughout - Bush ducking the criticism of the Kay report, Bush ducking criticism of his administration blowing off questions as just politics while raising $80 million for his campaign, and so on... You can also see how he works so hard to ingratiate himself with the press pool, and you can see that it works. Imagine a roomful of REAL reporters, rather than just a couple and the sycophants that fill the rest of the chairs in the briefing room...now THAT'd be an interesting press conference.
...I was able to get a $10 ticket to tomorrow night's game, the first of the season, last evening. I gotta say - I think this team's going to be a lot more fun to watch than any the Cs have had for years, and if less people go to the games...well, it's all the easier for me to go to as many as possible, for as cheap as possible. =)
Video Games Gone Wild!Check out the hottest and newest XCubeStation titles. By David Cross from Wired magazine.
One supersecret game that's been on everyone's hot and new list is Extreme Special Olympics, by the folks at EA Sports. This one's self-explanatory. You control one of four athletes, each with a distinct personality and skill set. My favorites: Daphne, who believes she can fly (she can't, and this comes into play later in the game), and Mickey, who has a mild form of autism and the ability to avoid hugs.
David Cross is a bad, bad man. Arwen introduced me to Mr. Show and I've been converted - but it doesn't change that David Cross is a bad, bad man. This article is yet more evidence.
From: Scripting News (permalink)AP: Red Sox fire manager. Obviously he made some incredibly good decisions over the season. Only two teams did better than the Sox. Could they have won? Yeah they could have. They didn't, but sheez, what happened to their sense of humor? What happened to the Red Sox philosophy? They should beg him to come back. What's next, are they going to fire the Green Monster because the team wasn't number one. Mark your calendars. 2003 -- the year the Red Sox became the Yankees.
Dave displays his utter stupidity when it comes to baseball. Sorry, Dave, but Grady Little is an idiot. His mismanagement of the pitching staff ALL YEAR LONG is what got him fired, not Game 7. This isn't the Sox turning into the Yankees - it's the Sox being smart enough to not listen to people like you and your average Boston sportswriter. Grady let the players get away with whatever they wanted, which could lead to problems. Grady ignored the directives from his bosses on how to run his team, especially in regards to the bullpen. He then proceeded to fuck up with the bullpen on the largest stage his life has ever seen (and will ever see, for that matter) - Game 7 of the ALCS, Yankee Stadium. He blew that HARD - frankly, he'd deserve to be fired for that alone, but that's NOT IT. What happened to their sense of humor, Dave? Are you saying that the Red Sox and their fans should just shrug off incompetence? This team won 95 games this year - and for that, Grady should be fired. What's that, you say? 95 wins is a lot? True, true - but THIS TEAM WAS THE GREATEST SLUGGING TEAM IN HISTORY. Yeah, that's right - there are only a handful of teams that have performed better, offensively, than the '03 Red Sox. They had Pedro Martinez, no longer the greatest pitcher alive but still great. They had an amazing array of talent in the bullpen by the end of the year - don't forget, Mike Timlin had retired 25 of 26 batters he faced in the postseason prior to Game 7. And all Grady could do was win 95 games and humiliate himself in the ALCS. Then there's the jackass's post-elimination statements: "Oh, I'm going to haunt the Red Sox." and crap along that line. Screw you, Grady. Get the hell out of town and NEVER come back. And Dave, don't write about the Red Sox with your normal holier-than-thou, father-knows-best style unless you actually know of what you speak.
Ok, so that was just a confluence of my general urge to smack Dave when he gets like that AND my general urge to annhilate Grady Fucking Little. I've wanted that insolent moron fired for a while now - during the dark days of the Oakland series, I was pointing out that the one positive thing that could come out of being swept by the A's would be Grady getting the axe, no questions asked. And then Game 7...god DAMN.
From: Scripting News (permalink)Kicking Ass, the DNC weblog, on robots.txt disabling of caches on White House pages about Iraq. Interesting point. Now would be an appopriate time to ask the Democrats if they will have a different policy should a Democrat be elected to the White House in 2004.
The White House Memory HoleTHE WHITE HOUSE MEMORY HOLE....Yesterday Atrios reported an odd thing: someone at the White House had modified their website so that items related to Iraq were no longer indexed by search engines such as Google. You could still get to...
And this all started here and spread via Atrios, as things are wont to do. You've got to look at the robots.txt to really appreciate this - they're blocking searching and archiving of every directory containing the word Iraq, and an equivalent directory for each of those, but with "text" rather than "iraq" in the path. This means that Google and The Wayback Machine, just to name a couple, aren't able to search through and cache the web pages in those subdirectories. Now, obviously, one could write a spider that ignored robots.txt - but that's very poor form. The White House has a right to block spiders, of course, and search engines should respect that. But this is just goofy - for example, they changed all references to the end of "combat" in Iraq to the end of "major combat" - that's the kind of thing that we won't be able to prove any more.
In response to my search for UK political blogs, cs of not watching television pointed me to the excellent Guardian Unlimited Weblog from, shock and surprise, the Guardian. There's only one problem - I can't find an RSS feed. There's an RSS feed for the Guardian itself, which I've already got, and some homebrewed feeds for various sections of the Guardian online, but nothing for their weblog. Anyone have any suggestions on where to go from here?
ESPN.com - MLB - Little surprise: Red Sox to fire manager today
Earlier last week, Little said he was ready for the worst.
"I'm prepared for the likelihood," Little told the Globe. "I am not sure that I want to manage that team. That's how I felt when I drove out of town."
[ESPN.com]
'bout time. I'd say don't let the door hit you on the way out, but I hope it DOES hit you - and hard. Goddamn Grady Little...I should be hungover today from celebrating the Sox win in Game 7 of the World Series last night - which I would have been at! Damn you, Grady Little! Damn you to hell!
Unclench Those Cold, Dead Hands - Dems Back Away From Tough Gun LawsPlastic::Politics::Guns: Howard Dean said he would leave most gun laws to the states; Lieberman says "People have a right to own and purchase guns"; and even Richard A. Gephardt, a longtime gun control advocate, is careful to highlight his support for law-abiding gun owners.
Pfeh. I'm a fervent gun-control advocate - ideally, I'd ban all guns that don't have hunting as their primary purpose. But I understand that the 2nd Amendment is...ambivalent, at best.* Whether I like it or not, we're not banning handguns in the US any time soon. But backing down from what we've already got? Yeah, because people really need freakin' AK-47s. Sellouts.
* - We really need to rewrite the damned amendment one of these days. Either make it clear that you've got to be in the Army Reserve or National Guard to own a gun or make it a free-for-all - the current wording just leaves it open to either interpretation. If we DON'T rewrite it, then I think we should go with a literal reading - if you're in the Michigan Militia, you can own a gun, but no one else can. That'd shake things up...
BostonHerald.com - Red Sox: Little left to say: Manuel, Remy are candidates to replace Grady
As far as Little's future goes, he would immediately become a candidate for the vacant job in Baltimore, where he was a finalist before Mike Hargrove got that job, and in Chicago. Also, with Don Zimmer resigning Saturday night as Yankees manager Joe Torre's bench coach, do not be surprised to see his name surface as a candidate to replace Zimmer. Torre is known to be fond and respectful of Little.
You've got to be kidding me. Grady gives the game (and AL championship) to the Yankees, and now they might look at him for their bench coach job? Jesus. I guess it makes sense, though - the last Red Sox manager to hand a championship to the Yankees that blatantly was Don Zimmer in '78 - and we all know where HE ended up.
One of the fun things about a managerial search is that every name under the sun will be mentioned as a possible candidate for the job. Every sportswriter in Boston will have his ideas as to who the Sox should be looking at, and will start throwing those names around in an attempt to either get the Sox to look at them or to come across as prescient when the Sox DO look at them. So retreads like Terry Francona will get name-dropped alongside old warhorses like Whitey Herzog and young bucks like Glenn Hoffman. The funniest possibility yet, though, has to be Jerry Remy, the Red Sox' brilliant color commentator, ex-second baseman, and Fall River, MA native. He's really a great broadcaster - he does a few Sox national games with Fox and it's obvious that the only reason he hasn't been offered a more regular national gig is because of ihis strong Boston accent. He's got a very good grasp of in-game strategy and buys into the Sox management team's ideas about building and running a team. But he's a broadcaster! That's all he's done since retiring from the field! Ain't gonna happen...
Political Meltdown Done RightPOLITICAL MELTDOWN DONE RIGHT....Democrats and Republicans have their ups and downs, but for real political theater you need to go to Britain. Over there, when a party takes a fall, it takes a fall. During the 80s and early 90s,...
This reminds me - I've got all these great feeds for discussion/gossip/etc on American politics: I want the same for BRITISH politics. Suggestions? Anyone know of any great blogs from the left in the UK?
The One State Solution -Oh, Yeah!Tony Judt has an essay arguing that Israel and the OT should move (or be sheparded) towards forming a single...
Oh yeah, indeed. The Poor Man is campaigning for a single-state solution for North America - unification, here we come! I'm in favor - adding Mexico and Canada to the US would destroy the Republican party for decades to come, if not forever...not to mention that DC and Puerto Rico would probably (finally) get statehood.
From: Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall (permalink)Boy, where to start with this article in Sunday’s Post? Not only is it clear, according to the Kay team’s own internal findings, that Iraq had no nuclear program. But we’ve known this pretty much since we first pulled into...
The defenders of the White House now seem intent on lowering the bar to the most comical of levels, arguing that Saddam Hussein had not relinquished the “desire” or the “ambition” to have nuclear weapons. But by this standard (viz, Matthew 5:27-30) probably half the married men in America have cheated on their wives with Pam Anderson or Angelina Jolie. So I’m not quite sure what that proves.
The imminent threat, it seems, was that Saddam was lusting in his heart for nukes, not that he was doing anything to get them.
Say it, brother Marshall! And you, dear reader, stop reading me and go kick in a few bucks to help send Josh Marshall to NH for the primary. I know that I'm all kinds of excited at the idea of having Josh out there live-blogging the inner workings of the week before primary day - so I've given 80 bucks. I meant to give 50, but I seem to have accidently hit 8 instead of 5. No matter - more money for the Cause!
Some Worthwhile ReadingThree things worth reading related to gay issues in the church and otherwise: well done summary of "revisionist"/"traditionalist" interpretations of biblical passages deemed relevant to gay issues; John Lewis's (D-Ga) op-ed in the Boston Globe about gay marriage; and Nicholas...
Read the John Lewis op-ed. I'm still campaigning for Lewis to be on the Dem ticket next year as VP - he's a leftie with MASSIVE dignity and credibility - oh, and he's black. He goes after the various means of opposing gay marriage (religious opposition, legal trickery, civil unions) and tears them all down, arguing the equivalence of banning gay marriage with banning interracial marriages. I've got to agree with Congressman Lewis completely here. It is straight-up discriminatory to not allow gay marriage, and there's no way around that.
Senior U.S. Officer Is Killed in Rocket Barrage at Baghdad HotelThe attack killed a senior U.S. military officer but Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who was at the hotel, was not injured.
Iraq Resistance Lasting Longer Than Expected, Powell ConcedesBut the secretary of state denied that the administration was trying to minimize the seriousness of problems in Iraq.
I just think it's worthwhile to look at these two stories right next to each other. Says something, doesn't it?
YANKEES LOSE! THUUUUUUUUH YANKEES LOSE!
Yeah, it's not who they SHOULD have lost to, and the owner of the team that won is the only guy who can challenge Steinbrenner for the title of Sleaziest Jackass In Baseball...but still. The Yankees LOSE!
If you can make it thereBen Smith has a fascinating piece in the New York Observer on GOP plans to orchestrate media coverage of next years Republican National Convention in Madison Square Garden. (Also the site, Smith reminds us, of the Westminster Dog Show.) The...
The thing that I'm wondering about is "free speech zones" - we can safely assume that the Bushies will do their best to cordone off protestors as far away from MSG as possible. But will it work? It's downtown Manhattan, for one thing, and there's the lawsuit in a Philly federal court that could very well strike down the whole concept. Hopefully, the media will realize that if the Bushies fuck with them, don't let them report worth a damn in the convention itself, etc...that they'll come out to the streets and talk to Pissed Off America. There's some big advantages to this all being in NYC - if we can't get near MSG, we can still get behind the Today Show windows, for example. It's kind of hard to ignore the masses on the streets in NYC, especially during the weekdays...
The cool conWhatever happened to Blair's dream of a hipper, cooler Britian? Zoe Williams reports.
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And six and a half years later, comrades, halfway through our second term of cool, we are no longer cool. We are uncool. All the things that we thought were cool - the bars, the artists, the obsession with youth, the thrill of buying pointless tat, the politicians, the music, the drugs, the culture, the posh people who were also models, the arrogance and cruelty, the whole sorry lot has blown up in a stench, like the swollen roadside carcass of a badger.
In a few cases, it's because the cool people doing the cool things have taken a coolness sabbatical. Others, mainly on the political wing, have done coolness u-turns. Overwhelmingly, though, it's because so many of the things that were packaged as pure cool were, in fact, its polar opposite.
Wow. Long but amazing article on the hope and disappointment of Blair-era Britain, embodied in its supposed coolness - not just Blair's (though he did, for example, invited Damon Albarn of Blur to Westminster before becoming Prime Minister, he had Noel Gallagher over to No. 10 Downing for a cocktail party and made a cocaine joke, etc...) but all of Britain. They were conned, tricked by a culture that seemed oh-so-cool at the time, by a Labour party that seemed oh-so-cool at the time...and in the end, the culture fell back on itself and now all they've got left is exporting reality TV shows to the US, while the government is Tory-Lite and Blair has betrayed everything people once thought he stood for. A damning condemnation of late-'90s Britain on all counts. Some more quotes:
The interplay between pop, art, advertising and politics in this period is a lot like the end of Society (the lame 1980s Brian Yuzna film, not the fabric of human intercourse). It starts off looking like a regular orgy, and then you realise that everyone's torsos have melted into each other in a mulch of hollow love and unclaimed limbs. I think this endlessly repeated rallying cry of "youth" was just a euphemism for sex. It says, "We're the sexy ones!" It's like an advert of a naked hottie lying on the bonnet of a car - buy this ... sexy people like it. It fails, at the final count, to say anything real about the car.
Nothing in the rich history of leftwing internationalism could have prepared us for a Labour government that would side with the Bush family against the rest of the world. And all this would have been unthinkable without the erosion of ideas brought about by the "freshness", the "newness", the "thinking outside the box" that actually equated to "treading on the box, then throwing it away, even though it was a perfectly good box".
But the root truth of Uncool Britannia is that not only was it not cool in the first place, but that a lot of the things dressed up as cool have actually contributed to a tide of squareness (if you can picture such a thing). It's as if the emperor weren't just naked - it's as if just looking at the naked emperor made all our clothes fall off.
Read this article. This is why The Guardian is so stunningly important: remember that there are no newspapers in the US that would ever print anything like this. This is radical, this is angry, this is almost punk. Things ARE going to change in the UK, even more surely than they will change in the US, and Tony Blair's going to fall. This shows why he has to.
So today, I woke up late - I was up 'til almost 2 talking with Arwen. I *meant* to wake up at a reasonable hour, but instead...I wake up at 9. Whoops. I get in to the office and start working...this lasts for maybe fifteen minutes before I get distracted by hacking around with tools. Specifically (for the none of you who are interested) - hacking Xemacs on Win2K to run Emacs Code Browser on Perl files properly. It took a while - including a temporary detour that had me seriously considering writing a language definition of Perl for Emacs' Semantic parser - but it's working, thanks to an Emacs feature called imenu. Now, of course, I want more out of it, but I should probably do work now... =)
Clinton brokers landmark Aids dealBill Clinton reaches a deal with drugs firms to slash the cost of Aids medicines for developing countries.
Hey look! Clinton's been out of office for near three years and he's STILL accomplishing more in the fight against AIDS than Bush. Shocking, huh?
A co-worker of mine just stopped by and gave me a bunch of maps and advice on going to Prague - he's been there a few times recently. So now I'm all wrapped up in these very nifty looking maps, trying to plan out the trip...and yeah, I should be working. Ah well. =)
Oh god - it's snowing. It isn't sticking, but it's snowing. I'm not ready for winter! For a few minutes there, it was REALLY coming down...it should be gone soon, according to the radar, but this is just the beginning. There's 4 or 5 months of worse than this to go...
In today's edition of The...In today's edition of The Nelson Report, Chris Nelson says that, according to his sources, the Pakistani-Saudi nuclear pact story reported today in the Washington...
The rest of the sentence is this: "is completely bogus". Yeah, I know, I'm shocked - who would ever doubt as illustrious a newspaper as The Moonie Times?
Thrilla in ManilaHarper's, James Pinkerton and Slate's Fred Kaplan all noted the disturbing historical precedent that President Bush cited in his speech in the Philippines. From Harper's "Weekly Review": President George W. Bush traveled to Asia and gave a speech in Manila...
The always wonderful Slacktivist brings us more in the way of commentary on Bush's malapropism-writ-large. Kaplan is an especially good read, as always.
Now that I've gotten my newsreader behaving the way I want, I need more feeds again. I trimmed out a lot of stuff that I wasn't actively reading while I was using AmphetaDesk, since I couldn't handle the amount of data it was throwing at me, and now I'm ready to go back up, and add more things that I've never seen before. You can see a quick-and-dirty list of my current feeds here - please, let me know feeds I should be reading.
'Sushi options' memo frenzyBack in September, my news aggregator page, Mediajunkie, picked up a link to a Gawker entry on a sushi memo being faxed and emailed around New York. A real-life (or fake?) parody of lawyerly lingo.
Over a month later, the tale has made it into the New York Times, leading who knows how many people to search Google for "Paul Weiss sushi memo" and variations on that query. Such a search turns up the Gawker entry as a first result but also includes Mediajunkie as the second result, even though MJ is currently a robotically controlled news repeater with no editorial judgement or commentary involved at all (aside from which feeds to repost).
The end result is that my MJ sites now have nearly 1000 hits this morning, almost all of them from Googlers looking for more info on the sushi memo. It's nice to get the traffic, but it's all reflected glory, since at best MJ is a good way to find the Gawker article, which is already available from the same types of searches.
I actually just noticed this myself and was amazed. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why something that Google only seems to show two relevant search results for should suddenly become a massive hit-machine...now we know. I've always found the insta-memes to be interesting. I've never gotten near as much attention as Mediajunkie's getting today, but in the first couple days immediately following Game 7 of the ALCS, I got a LOT of hits from people searching for "baseball sucks" - everyone ahead of me in the Google search was bashing baseball as a sport, while I was bashing it for being painful. =)
A new Philippines?In 1898, the United States made a major move in the direction of colonial imperialism with the acquisition of the Philippine Islands from Spain. President Bush, in a recent speech in the Philippines, pointed to that country's story as a model for rebuilding Iraq. Perhaps a history lesson about the American and Filipino experience in this occupation is in order for both us and our President. The atrocities committed during the Filipinos' struggle for independence (including the use of concentration camps), the high death toll (between 250,000 and 1,000,000, according to this article), and the American occupation which spanned six decades lead me to question whether Bush is just ignorant of the associations made in this comparison, or if it's a subtle way for the administration to set the stage for what possessing Iraq is actually going to entail. (Most links courtesy of the outstanding BoondocksNet, a collection of primary and secondary sources related to American imperialism.)
No, seriously, he didn't really say that, did he? The US involvement in the Philippines was pretty horrendous from every angle - we invaded in the first place, and then turned on our local allies. After all, once we booted out the Spanish, claiming that we were "liberating" the islands, the local resistance got this silly idea that they might actually get some independence now, thanks. Nope - even more so than in Cuba (where the US at least paid lip service to the idea of an independent Cuba, though the Platt Amendment to the Cuban constitution made that freedom no more than a mirage), we fucked over the Filipino nationalists. So yeah, they started fighting against the American occupiers, giving the US its first Vietnam (though it may be more accurate to refer to Vietnam as our second Philippines). Read any history of US involvement there, even Max Boot's - even right-wingers can't deny that our behavior there was monstrous. The very idea of suggesting that the Iraq occupation will be like the Philippine occupation is terrifying.
Then there's the time factor. We didn't even give the Philippines their official independence until 1946. 1946! Yeah. We forget that, don't we? The Japanese invaded the Philippines in World War II - that's common knowledge. That they actually invaded a large American property...people definitely forget that. Even after their independence, we controlled the country, for all intents and purposes, for decades. After all, we weren't going to give up that great location, right near Japan, Korea, China, AND Southeast Asia. The massive Air Force and Navy bases (Clark and Subic, I think?) were the main jumping-off point for moving forces to Vietnam, and we left about as pleasant a legacy in the areas around the bases as we have in Okinawa. Oh, and remember that kooky, crazy Ferdinand Marcos? He was ours. If the Philippines truly serves as a model for the occupation of Iraq, we're looking at over three quarters of a century of neo-colonialist occupation and puppet regimes.
While I highly doubt that we WILL be there that long, there are some real parallels here. In both cases, we came in claiming the moral high ground, asserting that we were, in fact, liberating the Iraqi/Filipino people. In both cases, it's questionable whether that was the real intent. Even if we ascribe the imperialists and neo-imperialists the best of motives, their treatment of the "liberated" was/is extremely patronizing and condescending. The American in the Philippines was the target of Kipling's "The White Man's Burden", and the Americans governed in that way - assuming that they knew better than the Filipinos what was best for the Filipinos, and if the Filipinos didn't like it, well, too bad. Now we've got an occupying force and administration with profound Arabophobe tendencies:
Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, has berated Arabs on the "need to change their behaviour". Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defence for policy, has talked of Israel's "moral superiority" over its neighbours. And the veteran foreign policy hawk Richard Perle, when asked about the fears Egyptians had of the Iraq war provoking an Arab backlash, replied: "Egyptians can barely govern their own country, we don't need advice on how to govern ours."
Yeah. This all sounds real good, doesn't it?
Ashcroft Briefed Regularly on Inquiry Into C.I.A. LeakAttorney General John Ashcroft's briefings suggest that he has taken a more hands-on role in the politically charged investigation than the department had acknowledged.
Oh, wonderful. I'd make a point about how this shows the need for an independent counsel, but that's just beating a dead horse, isn't it? So instead, I'll leave you with a quote from Sen. Patrick Leahy, keeping the Toss Ashcroft From The Train flame a-burnin'...
[Leahy] said Mr. Ashcroft has fueled that problem by attacking critics of the Patriot Act in ways that the senator said he found "arrogant, dismissive and condescending."
The K ChroniclesThose damn Yankees! (By a bitter Red Sox fan.)
Even Knight's German wife, who'd never seen baseball until 10 days earlier, knew that leaving Pedro in was a mistake...
