May 2004 Archives

Sorry if this is a non-traditional Ish post, but I'm thinking of switching over to Sprint PCS and wanted any advice people might have. I've just been released from 2 year servitude to AT&T, and in a triumph of hope over experience, I'm thinking of signing up with Sprint for a 2 year contract b/c it will get me Nights starting at 7PM. I have no land line, so this would be very useful.

My main worry is stories from non-Sprint PCS folks stating that Sprint basically doesn't work in NYC. Thought I would ask for feedback from the Ish community ...

If there's no shortage of troops, then why are 44,000 under a stop loss order? The two articles form an interesting counterpoint.

[WARNING: This is a half-baked post (and that's being charitable). I decided that I would stop banking drafts for ages, and instead write much crappier posts. If that's annoying, let me know and I'll stop. This is an exemplar of what I don't like in half-baked posts, it's rambling, unedited, lacks links and references, and is vague at key points. Still, I'm among friends here, so I thought I warning would be enough]

"Almost half of a $273,000 grant awarded in 2002 to fight the Goth culture in Blue Springs has been returned because of a lack of interest — and the absence of a real problem. "

See, this is an example of how we tend to try to think of ideologies as "root causes" rather than trying to solve security problems by going after organizations and reducing structural vulnerabilities.

Post Columbine, many people blamed ... THE GOTHS. Goths were thought of as a cross between a gang (violent and dangerous) and a cult (white and satanic). It later turned out that the whole "Trenchcoat Mafia" thing was overblown, and that the two shooters weren't really Goths. Recently, the FBI has argued that the two shooters were not normal kids somehow corrupted by a sinister belief system, but instead were two kids with mental health problems, one of whom (the "normal one") was a classic psychopath.

But at the time, schools blamed "Gothism" (or whatever the ideology would be called) for the shootings and dealt with goth students accordingly.

A very different response would have been to say, yes, kids are violent. Even normal kids are violent. Why did these two act in the massively violent way that they did, and how did they get the weapons that allowed them to do so? It's not clear to me that we really have to care about what justifications were in their heads in order to deal with the problem effectively. Similarly, it is not clear to me that knowing what was in their heads helps us "understand" the situation. What I want to understand is their long term behavior pattern, not their values.

I've got a similar beef with the "War on Terror". Sure, if we go back to the origins of modern terrorism, to the Anarchists, there were people who argued that terror alone was an ideology. But most of the time, terror isn't a belief system, and it's never a person or group, it's a tactic. Even the US armed forces has attacked civilian targets to scare the beejezus out of the enemy. It's not some alien evil force, it's an evil thing that people and groups do.

I also don't think that we're at war with "Radical Islam" any more than we were at war with "Anarchism" or with "Communism". There is no intrinsic link between particular ideologies and particular tactics, although there is such a link between groups and situations and tactics.

Burglar calls police on himself

Does anybody else see the resemblance between Jamal Mohammad Ahmad Ali Al-Badawi (who the FBI wants to catch for the Cole bombing) and Anthony Hopkins?

I know I've been away a while (hey, its our busy season), but this was too important to ignore: The cicadas are here. Many online resources are available to protect you from this threat to your children, health and sanity.

The "Belmont Club" has been trying to piece together the truth of the "Wedding Party" massacre. Although he clearly wants to prove that Kimmet isn't lying, he's demonstrating serious intellectual honesty. He's carefully comparing competing stories and finding that there's a bit of truth in both. The dissonance is astonishing. This is reminding me more and more of a graduate history seminar, only this is no intellectual exercise.

Wedding Party Massacre

More quotes from General Anthony Zinni on the subject of Iraq. Quotes are presented out of sequence, but with no loss of meaning. Highlights: it is his patriotic duty to speak critically, the Pentagon has messed up royally and bears full responsibility for the outcome, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz should resign. His book, co-authored with Tom Clancy, comes out this week.

[Notes: (a) this is very lazy blogging, there is interesting context which I am not providing here and (b) the quotes below are out of sequence from the 60 minutes article, but who knows what the original sequence was. The meaning has been preserved in each case]

General Anthony Zinni, formerly CENTCOM commander, and Bush's former special envoy to the Middle East on the 10 big mistakes that the Administration made in Iraq. This is a placeholder post until I write something with more context / just in case I don't.

"It's extremely difficult to govern when you control all three branches of government," says Hastert spokesman John Feehery [WaPo] (Silly me -- I thought the Republicans were maintaining a pretense of judicial independence. But who needs a constitution anyway?)

I ran across this site full of great optical illusions on Eyebeam reBlog. Warning: do not view while drunk, or before operating heavy machinery.

Which reminded me of another site I'd seen blogged about. First: go to this site. You'll have to wait a bit for the video to download, it's 7 MB, and requires Java to be enabled in your browser. While you're waiting, go drink a glass of water. Not required, but you can always use more water.

OK, is it downloaded yet? Good. Now, before you press the green "Play" button, here are your instructions: count the number of times the players in the white shirts pass the ball to each other. Go watch the video, and wait to read the rest of this until you've counted the passes.

What did Shakespeare say about war in Iraq?

[Warning: Satire. Taken from Democratic Underground.]

The following is the "first final" list of events for the Republican National Convention in New York City, August 30 to September 2.

AUG. 30

6 p.m. -- OPENING PRAYER read by Mel Gibson, while being flogged with a spiked leather strap wielded by Ann Coulter, who Will enjoy it a little too much.

* TOM RIDGE raises National Alert Level to RED.

* LEST WE FORGET -- HONORARY ROLL CALL of All Members of (and Friends of) Bush Administration Who Might Very Well Have Been Killed In Vietnam If It Hadn't Been For Nasty Trick Knees, Anal Cysts, Recurrent Headaches, and Highly-Placed, Overly-Protective Parents. (Sponsored by Tyson Chicken)

* ANTONIN SCALIA speaks -- "SLAVERY - THE ORIGINAL INTENT OF OUR FOREFATHERS! (Sponsored by Wal-Mart)

* DICK CHENEY hosts AMBASSADORSHIP RAFFLE - Opening Bid 1,000,000 (cash, non-sequential bills 20's or less)

* CLIMAX OF THE EVENING -- FILM - "BRING IT ON!" Stirring fictionalized re-creation of Mr. Bush's actual dental appointment in Alabama in 1972, where he showed the incredible courage to allow "deep cleaning" of gums without anesthetic. (Sponsored by Sinclair Broadcasting)

* SUGGESTED AFTER-EVENT -- "GET BAKED WITH RUSH "Crankster" LIMBAUGH! (Location TBD) (Sponsored by Pfizer)

Do you knit? Are you in NYC? Do you like fuzzy cute animals? If you've answered yes to these questions, then head over to Central Park this Sunday May 23 for Liz's Knit Out to support her Critter Knitters project to donate blankets to pet shelters..

I'm faaaaaaling!!!

The deadline for Designs on the White House entries has been extended until Memorial Day. Sweet! Tell your friends, blog it up, spread the word. Oh, and in the mean time, head over to the site and vote on the designs!

The Pentagon wants the IRS to help it track down members of the Individual Ready Reserves for deployment. "For it to become practice, Congress and President Bush would have to approve the proposal, which would involve amending the tax code. " (Congress changed the tax code to increase privacy right a few years ago, so this would be significant).

... 500 pages, and innumerable footnotes. I'm so proud of you, Debbie, I could burst!

"[a]ccording to the office of Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, a Texas Unitarian church isn't really a religious organization - at least for tax purposes. Its reasoning: The organization "does not have one system of belief."

Never before - not in this state nor any other - has a government agency denied Unitarians tax-exempt status because of the group's religious philosophy, church officials say"

Article here

BugMeNot.com

Hot GOP on GOP Action. Via TVS.

Beetle Ghraib

Jew. (Via wizbang! who reminds us that the anti-semitic site Jew Watch is winning the "Google" war over this search term.)

I cannot begin to tell you how outraged, how sick, how shaken I am at the beheading of Nick Berg in Iraq. Not since the murder of Danny Pearl have I felt this way.

My first reaction is horror.

The second is: fucking barbarians. Who could cut off a human being's head, and then shout the name of God?

The third is: this isn't just barbaric. It's calculated. Which is worse, of course.

Andrea has launched New York Snap Exchange as part of psy.geo.conflux. It's a "round-robin, massively multiplayer street photography game" where you go around taking pictures of stuff in NYC and issue challenges to other players. You know, like a scavenger hunt. But digital and all.

new york snap exchange

My entries:

"Pop quiz: Groucho or Karl Marx? Salma or Friedrich Hayek? Lou or John Rawls? Explain; brevity counts."

and

"Hermann Zapf jokingly quoted Roman type elements in dingbat collection, but got mixed reviews."

Enter to win valuable fonts!

stock.xchng. Thanks to Liz for the tip.

First, watch this commercial. Some pretty freaky shit, huh? A robot cop patrolling the streets of South Africa, looking, well, mighty Imperial Storm Trooper. But skinnier.

And completely fake. That's 100% CGI, kids. Watch it again, and tell me that you can tell it's not real.

I mean, apart from the whole robot thing.

Apparently, this is an ad for some company called OCP Trans Vaal, but the url at the end of the ad doesn't resolve. Yet.

[via Milk and Cookies]

Via robotfilter, of course.

A fascinating read: Le Monde has published a compilation of the emails and letters sent by one of the MPs involved in the prison scandal to his family from Iraq. The docs are together as a pdf, and although the first page is a French introduction, all the rest is in English. Le Monde says that the soldier's father provided this stuff to them. Note the dates.

Letters from an MP

A Belgian motorist has been sent a speeding ticket for travelling at 2,100 mph. Naturally, he was in a Mini.

First people are going to say "It wasn't so bad". Then they're going to say, well, war's ugly business, and you need to be able to use torture in order to get what you need.

But what do you say when

Intelligence officers of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq estimated that 70 percent to 90 percent of Iraqi detainees were arrested by mistake, the Red Cross said in a report that was disclosed Monday

The Army's own report puts the number at 60%, so the ICRC's claim is plausible on its face.

What's annoying me is that this critical bit of info is often missing from news stories, making it easy for Americans to believe that this was about bad guys being treated badly.

Um... awesome?

I mean, I suppose if porn is going to exist, shouldn't it be for a good cause?

____

Norwegians set up porn website for the environment

Two young Norwegians have set up a porn website to raise money to help protect the environment.

"In light of the turn things are taking in the world today, I think that this is a very honourable way of raising money for environmental causes," said Tommy Hol Ellingsen, the 27-year-old creator of F***forforest.com.

Visitors to the site can pay to view explicit videos of Ellingsen making love to his 21-year-old girlfriend Leona Johansson.

The two plan to donate most proceeds from the site to different environmental organisations, although, they admit, their organisations of choice are still hesitant to participate in the project.
_____

Adds new meaning to the phrase, "Rainforest Action Network."

Excerpt in the NYT from current Supreme Court case about the authority of "the executive"* to freely classify citizens as, well, basically whatever he wants.

I'm sure Oversimplification Cop (whoever he or she may be) will tap me on the shoulder here, but don't we have a judicial branch for a reason?

(Also, um... "War footing?" What if we're just playing "war footsie"?)
____

Justice Kennedy: What's constraining? That's the point. Is it just up to the good will of the executive? Is there any judicial check?

US Dep. Solicitor Gen.: This is a situation where there is jurisdiction in the habeas courts. So if necessary, they remain open. But I think it's very important - I mean, the court in Ludecke v. Watkins made clear that the fact that executive discretion in a war situation can be abused is not a good and sufficient reason for judicial micromanagement and overseeing of that authority.

____

*Now there's a reality show waiting to happen... oh, wait.

The Abu Ghraib travesty has home-grown roots.
__________

"The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system."
__________

And for a peek into the bully-boy culture at the "highest levels" of the administration, check this out fromJosh Marshall's blog.

Rumsfeld did not describe the photos, but U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys. [verbatim from the MSNBC article.]

From the Guardian

"The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources."

[more selected excerpts from this and other sources follow]

[verbatim] May 28, 2004 (getting close, folks!). Dress up like a super hero, heroine, sidekick, supervillain, henchman, or minion THEN: Go out to a restaurant in a group of other heros and villains, et cetera, or out to a bar. Make it a travelling themed costume party or public performance art. Get on the news, be seen. And tell us what you did for International Superhero Day!
it's gonna be sooooo cool.

I'm hoping to blog this more fully later, but for the time being, here's a link to the latest Gallup poll which makes for fascinating reading.

[Grammar folks -- how should I have punctuated that sentence?]

The new explanation for Abu Ghraib: blame West Virgina. Who says you can't play the race card about white folks? The sad part is, people in her home town are playing along.

Mac pointed out that it's National Prayer Day! Now, I'm all for an ecumenical, latitudinarian promotion of religion. But come on -- does the sponsoring organization really have to tell us what to pray for?

I'm pretty amazed at the way Designs on the White House has taken off. The list of judges on board is pretty amazing (see below; there are a few other Big Names in the works as well), thanks to Debbie's great work at organizing. The whole web team (Mac, Liz, John, Kerim, and Colin have put together a kick-ass site. And I'm not just talking about a regular website here, this is one where you register, upload designs, vote on shirts -- the real deal. So many of my friends have pitched in with work, help, advice -- Debbie, Andrea, David, Chris, Emily, Ennis, Cebra -- am I missing anyone? And there are the folks I don't even know, like half the design team, or Kalisa who's done an amazing job on PR, or our volunteer DReBos (the folks who review designs before they're released for voting.) A huge shout out to them and everyone who's lent a link and a hand.

Evidently, DOTWHO was in the Boston Globe on April 25. A friend of Debbie's gave her the article last night. (We had a great comedy routine going while Ben tried to play with the paper while I tried to read the article.) "They quote you, did you talk to this reporter?" I read it and realized that he'd taken my quotes directly from Ishbadiddle. From these pages direct to the newspaper! How about that?

So the contest is open, we've been receiving designs, and voting starts tomorrow. Please, head over, register to vote, tell your friends, link to us, etc.

Blurb follows.

...............................................................

Inspired by MoveOn's Bush in 30 Seconds contest, an independent group of designers and bloggers has created Designs On The White House (www.DesignsOnTheWhiteHouse.org), a design contest to create T-shirts for the Kerry Presidential Campaign.

We’re calling on every American with a conscience, a mouse, and a good idea to send in your designs for a better John Kerry 2004 Presidential Campaign T-shirt.

The contest is now open, and we will be accepting designs in the following categories until May 22nd, 2004:

1. Best Pro-Kerry Shirt
2. Best Anti-Bush Shirt
3. Best Issue Shirt - Domestic
4. Best Issue Shirt - Foreign
5. Funniest Shirt
6. Best Retro Shirt
7. Best Get Out The Vote Shirt
8. Most Stylish / Most Likely to Be Seen On Queer Eye

We, the people, will vote on designs, and then our esteemed panel of judges will make the final selections. Our judging panel includes lefty celebs Moby, Al Franken and Margaret Cho, blogger powerhouse Atrios, political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, political strategist Joe Trippi, designers Milton Glaser, Ed Schlossberg, Chip Kidd, and Todd St. John, playwrights David Auburn and David Henry Hwang, author / musician / designer Maura Moynihan, and fashion editor Mary Tannen.

Then we'll throw open the doors on the world's most democratic campaign T-shirt outlet! All proceeds after expenses will benefit the John Kerry Presidential campaign.

Please head over to www.DesignsOnTheWhiteHouse.org to learn more about the contest, submit your design, and register to vote. Voting starts May 7, so go over and check out the designs!

Designs on the White House Organization (DOTWHO) is an independent political committee and is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

Genius that I am*, I of course had this idea long ago: if I were a record company, concerned with piracy over P2P, why not just flood the networks with fakes? You pay a dozen college interns to spoof the networks, and soon the signal-to-noise ratio drops to the point where it's no longer worth using Kazaa etc.

Obviously, I should have patented the idea. Too bad researchers at the University of Tulsa have
beaten me to the punch.

Of course, any decent Internet piracy story has a
Simpsons angle, doesn't it?

Hale said he came up with the idea when watching an episode of "The Simpsons." In it, Mr. Burns is unable to pick a specific dog from a group of Dalmatians because all the dogs are identical.

"It was a serendipitous moment," Hale said.

Remember Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment? Op-Ed writers all over America seem to be cracking open their yellowed copies of Zimbardo, Milgram, and Arendt. And you hoped that Psych101 would never be useful ...

Love is a drug (it bends your gender, impairs your judgement, and gives you OCD), while some drugs (namely anti-depressants) can interfere with love.

I like this one the best. Here's a selection of the lyrics: "If you're angry you will make yourself an ugly little child. Ugly little child, put a smile on your face and cheer up, you will make your mommy and daddy proud.... so smile and bright up your day!"

Thanks to Mike's Private Chance link to BlackFive, I've spent dozens of hours exploring the strange world of right-wing and militarist bloggers. Basically I went through all the BlackFive links. Most of what I found just frightened me and reminded me of why I am a Democrat. However, I wish to report two finds, sites that are unusually informative and open-minded. And they draw on a military knowledge seldom found among us Dukakis types.

The first is Iraq Now, run by a journalist who has apparently just served a tour in Iraq as a Guard lieutenant. His assessment of the prison abuse scandal is particularly valuable. And damning. A taste of it is in the extended entry.

The second is "The Belmont Club". I have no idea who runs it, but at the moment it's almost entirely dedicated to teasing out what's going on in Falluja. Fascinating stuff.

Both seem to reveal two huge problems: 1. total disconnect between Washington and Baghdad and what's happening in the field, leaving local commanders to improvise, for better or for worse. 2. Shinseki was right, lots more troops were needed. Thanks to Rumsfeld's theories lots of people there now are doing things they're not trained for, and to a large extent many had left most of their equipment behind in the rush to go to war.

I've been wondering what it would take to politicize America and get people to think a little. It occured to me that perhaps a draft might be best for all of us, but then I saw this in today's Times. Of course, it's easy for me to agree with this now that I'm too old to be conscripted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/opinion/04BROY.html

Welcome to the newest member of the blogroll, Israfel • Scorched Angel Films. Who is Israfel? I have no idea. A filmmaker, apparently. But he's linked to Ish, so we link back! Because we're friendly that way. Welcome to the family, Israfel!

At first, General Myers insisted that the instances of mistreatment was not widespread and were the actions of "just a handful" of soldiers who had unfairly tainted all American forces in Iraq. But when pressed, he acknowledged that he had not yet read a classified, 53-page Army report completed in February by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, first reported in the May 10 edition of the New Yorker, that chronicled the worst of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Myers left open the possibility the abuses could be broader, saying "We don't know that yet."

A spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that the secretary had not been briefed on General Taguba's report either, but had been kept abreast of the investigative process.

Even vietnamese waterparks about Buddhist hell! It looks like a blast. Better than Hell House. I wanna go! [via BoingBoing]

"On more careful reading of the SEC filing I note that the value of the
IPO set by the founders is $2,718,281,828, a number that fellow
mathematicians will realise is an in-joke based on an approximation of
e ( = 2.718281828...)."