I'm underemployed (at best) (and recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout and other health problems). If you feel like reading this account, if you'd like & this -- December 19th, 2005 update --
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Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their "tendency" is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual; and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are ‘objectively’ aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the ‘objectively’ line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore ‘Trotskyism is Fascism’. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The guinea pig is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this lutefisk.
No, really, I seriously need the help at present. And I hate asking.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 334
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub,"
chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer
to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals."
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying.
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog.
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Harry Warner, Jr., Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
MichaelMooreWatch.org: Maybe that's what Gary Farber should rename his site, instead of arpagandalf or whatever.
-- Matt Welch
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
On June 8, 1954, Alan Turing, a forty-one-year-old research scientist at Manchester University, was found dead by his housekeeper. Before getting into bed the night before, he had taken a few bites out of an apple that was, apparently, laced with cyanide. At an inquest, a few days later, his death was ruled a suicide.
[...]
At Princeton, Turing took the first steps toward building a working model of his imaginary computer, pondering how to realize its logical design in a network of relay-operated switches; he even managed to get into a machine shop in the physics department and construct some of the relays himself. In addition to his studies with Church, he also had dealings with the formidable John von Neumann, who would later be credited with innovations in computer architecture that Turing himself had pioneered. On the social side, he found the straightforward manners of Americans congenial, with certain exceptions: “Whenever you thank them for anything, they say ‘You’re welcome.’ I rather liked it at first, thinking I was welcome, but now I find it comes back like a ball thrown against a wall, and become positively apprehensive. Another habit they have is to make the sound described by authors as ‘Aha.’ They use it when they have no suitable reply to a remark.”
In 1938, Turing was awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics by Princeton, and, despite the urgings of his father, who worried about imminent war with Germany, decided to return to Britain. Back at Cambridge, he became a regular at Ludwig Wittgenstein’s seminar on the foundations of mathematics. Turing and Wittgenstein were remarkably alike: solitary, ascetic, homosexual, drawn to fundamental questions. But they disagreed sharply on philosophical matters, like the relationship between logic and ordinary life. “No one has ever yet got into trouble from a contradiction in logic,” Wittgenstein insisted. To which Turing’s response was “The real harm will not come in unless there is an application, in which case a bridge may fall down.” Before long, Turing would himself demonstrate that contradictions could indeed have life-or-death consequences.
[...]
Known at Bletchley as the Prof, Turing was famed for his harmless eccentricities, like keeping his tea mug chained to the radiator and wearing a gas mask as he rode his bicycle to work (it helped to alleviate his hay fever).
[...]
While at Bell Labs, he became engrossed with a question that came to occupy his postwar work: was it possible to build an artificial brain? On one occasion, Turing stunned the entire executive mess at Bell Labs into silence by announcing, in a typically clarion tone, “I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.”
[...]
In 1945, Turing wrote up a plan for building a computer which contained everything from the abstract structure down to the circuit diagrams and a cost estimate of eleven thousand two hundred pounds. At Britain’s National Physical Laboratory, where he worked after the war, he had nothing like the resources of the Americans, and yet he rose to the challenge posed by his straitened circumstances. When it came to the computer’s memory, for example, the most obvious storage device was one in which the data took the form of vibrations in liquid mercury. But Turing reckoned that gin would be just as effective, and far cheaper. On one occasion, he noticed a drainpipe lying in a field and had a colleague help him drag it back to the laboratory for use in his computer hardware.
[...]
To Leavitt, the idea of a computer mimicking a human inevitably suggests that of a gay man “passing” as straight. Here and elsewhere, he shows a rather overdeveloped ability to detect psychosexual significance. (When, in the Mind paper, Turing writes of certain human abilities that it is hard to imagine a machine developing, like the ability to “enjoy strawberries and cream,” Leavitt sees a “code word for tastes that Turing prefers not to name.”)
I quote this because, although I have not read Leavitt's book, yes, this seems like a reach to me, and I've had similar thoughts about some other of Leavitt's work that I have read.
[...] It is on the technical side that Leavitt falls short. His exposition, full of the sort of excess detail that mathematicians call “hair,” is marred by confusions and errors. In trying to describe how Turing resolved the decision problem, Leavitt gets wrong the central idea of a “computable number.” Discussing the earlier logical work of Kurt Gödel, Leavitt says that it established that the axiomatic system of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s “Principia Mathematica” was “inconsistent,” when Gödel proved no such thing, and a definition of something called Skewes number is precisely backward. Although Leavitt seems to have made a valiant attempt to master this material in preparation for writing the book, his explanatory efforts will leave initiates irritable and beginners perplexed.
[...]
Although nominally the deputy director of the computing laboratory (which developed the world’s first commercially available electronic computer), he also took on a fundamental mystery in biology: how is it that living things, which start out as a cluster of identical cells, eventually grow into the variety of different forms found in nature? Working out systems of equations to model this process of morphogenesis, he used the prototype computer to find solutions; seated at the console, using the machine’s manual controls, Turing looked, in the words of one colleague, as if he were “playing the organ.”
[...]
Leavitt describes Turing’s life after his arrest as “a slow, sad descent into grief and madness.” That’s overly dramatic. Turing did start seeing a Jungian analyst and developed a taste for Tolstoy, but neither is an infallible sign of madness. He also, a few months before his death, sent a friend a series of postcards containing eight “messages from the unseen world.” Some were terse aphorisms: “Science is a differential Equation. Religion is a Boundary Condition.” Others had a Blakean cast: “Hyperboloids of wondrous Light / Rolling for aye through Space and Time / Harbour those Waves which somehow might / Play out God’s wondrous pantomime.” Well, it does rhyme.
[...]
Was it the perfect suicide—one that deceived the person whose feelings he cared most about, his mother—or, more improbably, the perfect murder? Leavitt is the latest to broach these questions without resolving them. Perhaps, he imagines at the end of his book, the message Turing wanted to convey is one that has so far been overlooked: “In the fairy tale the apple into which Snow White bites doesn’t kill her; it puts her to sleep until the Prince wakes her up with a kiss.” This note of macabre camp doesn’t suit a man who eschewed all forms of egoistic fuss as he solved the most important logic problem of his time, saved countless lives by defeating a Nazi code, conceived the computer, and rethought how mind arises from matter.
No grand conclusions from me, or, indeed, further observations at all; I just wanted to be able to find this again, and thought some others might find the article of interest, perhaps.
I may have blogged this simply to be able to quote "Turing did start seeing a Jungian analyst and developed a taste for Tolstoy, but neither is an infallible sign of madness."
IT'S JUST A THEORY, but it's possible that George C. Deutsch has resigned. It's even possible that this this was not his own idea, or his long-term plan, but remember! It's just a theory!
George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.
Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M; University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.
Officials at NASA headquarters declined to discuss the reason for the resignation.
"Under NASA policy, it is inappropriate to discuss personnel matters," said Dean Acosta, the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs and Mr. Deutsch's boss.
[...]
According to his résumé, Mr. Deutsch received a "Bachelor of Arts in journalism, Class of 2003."
Yesterday, officials at Texas A&M; said that was not the case.
"George Carlton Deutsch III did attend Texas A&M; University but has not completed the requirements for a degree," said an e-mail message from Rita Presley, assistant to the registrar at the university, responding to a query from The Times.
[...]
Mr. Deutsch's educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M; last year with a biochemistry degree and has been writing a Web log on science policy, scientificactivist.blogspot.com.
The Times even made that a live link. See specific entry here, though.
HEARINGS-IN-A-BOX. I'm still reading the transcript (while simultaneously, all day, reading from ten other tabs; not the most efficient and speedy approach I grant); I prefer not to start excerpting and posting until I'm done; maybe tomorrow [not a promise]).
Specter was talking about the kerfuffle over whether to swear in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before his testimony. But he could have been talking about the parameters he had agreed to for the hearing: No witnesses other than Gonzales. No new details of the National Security Agency spying program that the committee was supposed to be inquiring about. No request for the Justice Department's internal legal memorandums about the legality of the NSA program.
Given the box Specter constructed for the hearings, what could be learned from them? Actually, the day was pretty instructive, not on the topics of spying or national security, but on the bizarre embrace into which the legislature and the executive have locked themselves since Sept. 11. Congress claims that it wants to exercise its war powers and help set rules for NSA spying—but in fact it's afraid to, for fear of appearing to undermine the president. And the Bush administration acts like it wants to undo the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—but it fears the public uproar that amending the act would create.
The fuss over whether Gonzales should testify under oath seemed to be about the possibility, at least in Specter's mind, that the attorney general was about to say something that could get him into trouble for lying. Gonzales had been sworn in when he testified twice before, as have other Department of Justice officials. Today, though, Specter said such an oath was "unwarranted" (though Gonzales had agreed to take it). Specter cited the federal-code provisions for perjury and for making a false statement to Congress, mentioned the prosecutions of Oliver North and Adm. John Poindexter, and alluded to accusations that Gonzales had made past statements to the Senate, during his confirmation hearing, that are at odds with his defense of the president's authorization of the NSA wiretaps. (At his confirmation hearing, Gonzales demurred when he was asked by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., whether the president had ever invoked his authority "to conclude that a law was unconstitutional, and refused to comply with it." Gonzales would have known because at the time, he was White House counsel.)
[...]
The Democrats wanted Gonzales sworn in. They made Specter take a roll-call vote, and he had to vote on behalf of two absent Republican senators to break a tie. "Mr. Chairman, I request to see the proxies given by the Republican senators," Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., piped up. That led to Specter's hand-wringing and a speech by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., about "propriety and good taste and due respect from one branch to the other."
There must be a polite way to respond to that. Nice weather we're having, eh?
[...] Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was one of the Republicans who wasn't going for it. "When I voted for [the AUMF], I never envisioned that I was giving to this president or any other president the ability to go around FISA carte blanche," he said. "I would suggest to you, Mr. Attorney General, it would be harder for the next president to get a force resolution if we take this too far." Gonzales said he understood Graham's concern. But he didn't budge—how could he? Specter also had a question that Gonzales didn't want to answer. "Why not take your entire program to the FISA court within the broad parameters of what is reasonable and constitutional and ask the FISA court to approve it or disapprove it?" Specter asked. Gonzales muttered something about commending the FISA court for its service. "Now on to my question," Specter prodded. "What do you have to lose if you're right?" Gonzales promised that the administration is "continually looking at ways that we can work with the FISA court in being more efficient and more effective in fighting the war on terror." And then Specter let him off the hook. There was a time—remember when Anita Hill was in the witness chair?—Specter loved to strut his prosecutorial stuff. But now he's got a president who doesn't like him much and a chairmanship to protect.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, like other Democrats, took the tack of a spurned lover. He spoke longingly of the Republican administration that was in office when Congress drafted and passed FISA in the late 1970s and then said plaintively, "They came down and worked with us on FISA. … Why didn't you follow that kind of pathway, which was so successful?"
Gonzales' answer wasn't what most of the senators wanted to hear. "We didn't think we needed to, quite frankly," the attorney general said. Take that, co-equal branch. Then Gonzales treated his audience to the odd sight of the administration as FISA champion. The FISA statute has been a "wonderful tool," Gonzales said fervently. So wonderful, in fact, that not one hair on its legal head should be touched. "I don't know that FISA needs to be amended per se," Gonzales told Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. At another point, the attorney general stressed the importance of FISA's "peacetime safeguards." The statute as a means of law enforcement? "I don't want these hearings to conclude with the idea that FISA hasn't been effective." The judges on the special FISA court? "Heroes who are killing themselves, quite frankly, to make themselves available to us." And so "when you're talking about amending FISA because FISA's broke, well, the procedures in FISA under certain circumstances I think seem quite reasonable."
Except, apparently, when they're not. Gonzales also called the law "cumbersome and burdensome," as the administration has many times previously. "Layers of lawyers" have to sign off on a warrant application. "But even this is not the end of the story." The government also has to put up with that annoyance, judicial review. Sure, the law gives the president 72 hours after conducting a search to apply for a warrant. But the lawyers still have to write up all those tedious legal briefs. "All of these steps take time. Al-Qaida, however, does not wait." To do what exactly—keep talking on phone lines that have already been tapped?
Gonzales' dance on FISA—it's the best of laws; it's the worst of laws—makes the administration's defense of the NSA program seem all the more like a power grab. The most important thing isn't to make sure that the agency has undisputed legal authority to spy as it says it needs to. It's to make sure that Congress doesn't tell the president what he can and can't do. So, what's a responsible lawmaker to do? More than hold a one-day hearing. If Congress doesn't take back some of its war powers soon, there won't be anything left to fight over.
But while Republicans like Graham and Specter talk tough at times, they're not really up for the fight. And it's not entirely clear that the Democrats are, either. How should FISA be amended? Where do you draw the line to protect civil liberties while allowing all the searches that could ever snare a potential terrorist? Those are hard questions—too hard for Congress, it seems. You have to hand it to Bush and Gonzales. They don't have much to work with, legally speaking. But they're playing the politics just right.
As long as they can frame it as "the AUMF authorizes anything" and "it's just about listening to terrorists," they win the argument. Big Lies work that way.
They must not be allowed to stand.
The President can't be allowed to be above the law.
If that happens, you know what?
The terrorists will have won.
Really.
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5. But check out the other links at the bottom of the article.
Jacob Weisberg argues that President Bush's reading of the AUMF is dictatorial. Dahlia Lithwick goes to the Supreme Court arguments for Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and muses about why the government eventually decided to release Hamdi. Phillip Carter explains what the Supreme Court's terrorism decisions mean for the war effort.
Alyson Hannigan, who played Willow Rosenberg for seven years on the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, told SCI FI Wire that she occasionally hears rumors about proposed TV movies based on Buffy or its spinoff series, Angel, but doubts that creator Joss Whedon will ever get around to realizing a telefilm based on her character. "I don't know," Hannigan said in an interview while promoting her new film, the comedy Date Movie. "Yeah, it pops up every now and then, and I just don't know. I just treasure the experience. It was such a great, long chapter of my life."
Hannigan, who also co-stars on the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, added: "I think I would just be too scared to sort of go back and possibly tarnish it in any way. Joss is too busy [to do a Willow movie]. He's not going to write it. He's not going to direct it, you know? I'm sure he would get great people, but there's nothing like the Joss touch. I think by all means they should absolutely do the Spike movie. I think that's the logical next step, but ... I don't think Willow is the next step."
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5.
I watched How I Met Your Mother last night, by the way, and found it mildly amusing; I didn't turn it off, at least.
Amygdala's last comment about Whedon's plans here. Two days earlier, this. Then here. Then here.
For zillions more Whedon posts, drop "Whedon" or "Buffy" or "Firefly" into the google box on the left sidebar, and do the clickies!
SCI FI Channel announced that Lucy Lawless joins the cast of its original series Battlestar Galactica in the upcoming third season. Lawless will become a recurring cast member, reprising her role as D'Anna Biers in a 10-episode arc. The third season begins production in Vancouver, Canada, in April.
[...]
Lawless' second guest appearance will air on Feb. 24 in the episode "Downloaded," which gives viewers their first real glimpse into the Cylon world. (The second half of season two of Galactica premiered Jan. 6.)
I just saw "Final Cut" last night, along with the scrumptious and looong deleted scenes. Great! Eventually, I may do a post on which deleted scenes in 2.0 I think are most substantively interesting, although I doubt I'll get to that soon.
A very unusual ink-jet printer cartridge, containing explosive ink, has been patented by Qinetiq, the commercial spin-off of the British Ministry of Defence.
The ink is a mixture of very fine aluminium particles, each 1 micrometre in diameter, particles of copper oxide 5 micrometres wide, epoxy varnish and alcohol. The ink is stable in liquid form, making it safe to print onto conventional paper, but forms an explosive fuse once dry.
An engineer can easily sketch out a printable fuse using computer imaging software, modifying the delay in milliseconds by changing the length, thickness and pattern of the line on the paper.
The ink can then be printed between a small strip of metal and a larger patch of explosive ink. Feeding a current through the metal strip makes it hot enough to ignite the fuse, which burns until it reaches the explosive patch. This explosion can then trigger the detonation of a much larger amount of explosives.
Qinetiq suggests printed fuses could be used for precisely controlling fireworks, triggering vehicle air bags or for conventional munitions. Ganging hundreds or thousands of fuses together could even make a miniature rocket engine capable of precisely adjusting the orbital position of a spacecraft, the company says.
The threat to passenger planes posed by shoulder-launched missiles is a big concern to the airline industry. But Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, US, has come up with a novel way to jam this type of weapon.
[...]
The LLNL defence system relies on a laser to produce a rapid stream of picosecond pulses at an infrared wavelength. The pulses are fed through a crystal to generate harmonic distortion and the original and the distorted beams are recombined to create even more distortion across many infrared frequencies.
This distorted signal can be beamed in the direction of any incoming missile (detected by an airliner's radar). The pulsed infrared should blind and confuse the missile's sensor, causing it to veer off target. And the beam ought to pose no danger to other aircraft, because it is beyond the range of human vision.
Astronomers have measured the temperature of dark matter for the first time.
[...]
Now Gilmore and his colleagues have managed to map out its temperature and distribution in nearby dwarf galaxies. "These are the first properties of dark matter, other than its existence, that we've been able to determine," says Gilmore.
And the end result is startling: it seems that dark matter is whizzing about at some 10,000 °C.
[...]
The team used the Very Large Telescope array at the Paranal Observatory in Atacama, Chile, to measure the distance and speeds of hundreds of stars contained in 12 dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Plotting their trajectories then revealed the invisible dark matter in between.
The team found that each galaxy seemed to contain the same amount of dark matter: roughly 30 million times the mass of the Sun. They say this is no coincidence. Instead, it represents the minimum amount of dark matter needed for a stable clump to hang together.
This finding implies that individual dark-matter particles must be moving at about 9 kilometres per second. Any faster, and a clump of dark matter of that mass would fly apart; any slower, and more dark matter would accumulate into the same space.
From this speed, the team could work out the temperature of the matter, just as the speed of water molecules bouncing around in a glass relates to its bulk temperature. The result is surprising: it seems that dark matter is much more 'tepid' than conventional 'cold' dark models have predicted, they say.
Yeah, whenever I try to take a dark matter shower, it's always cooler than I want it. I've always figured it was just other folks in the apartment building using their hot dark matter tap at that the same time, though. Now I know better! They're all just a bunch of WIMPS.
But according to radiocarbon dating of burnt wood bits found in the plaster and from surrounding strata, it is by far the oldest known Mayan writing--dating from between 300 and 200 B.C., which is roughly concurrent with the earliest writings of other Mesoamerican cultures. Previous examples of Mayan script could only be confidently dated to around A.D. 250, leading to speculation that the Mayans may have inherited their writing from other, older cultures, such as the Zapotec, despite stylistic differences.
The find seems to upend that theory, proving that the ancient Maya were as literate as their descendants.
Unfortunately, it's so old, no one yet knows how to read what it says. Possibly "haha, you can't read this!"
More on the mission to Europa (that's the moon of Jupiter, not a Club Med), which disappeared from the new NASA budget.
SPLITS, or the friend of my friend might actually be my enemy. Naturally, one always has to consider the cui bono (who benefits?) aspects of every news story, and try to trace sources and their bias, so there's an obvious aspect of U.S. propaganda in this, just as there are undue aspects of insurgent propaganda lying behind other stories, but there have been quite a few stories of this sort in recent months, and an increasing number, so I think it's worth noting.
Sheikh Osama al-Jadaan, head of the influential Karabila tribe in Sunni Arab-dominated western Iraq, is more politician than traditional sheikh these days. He's given up his dishdasha and Arab headdress for a pinstripe suit with a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket.
He's also turned away from supporting Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi and other foreign fighters in Iraq. "We realized that these foreign terrorists were hiding behind the veil of the noble Iraqi resistance," says Mr. Jadaan. "They claim to be striking at the US occupation, but the reality is they are killing innocent Iraqis in the markets, in mosques, in churches, and in our schools."
[...]
In Anbar Province, an insurgent hotbed that borders Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, US and Iraqi officials say they have a new ally against the Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists: local tribal leaders like Jadaan and home-grown Iraqi insurgents.
"The local insurgents have become part of the solution and not part of the problem," US Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch told reporters at a press conference last week.
As I said, there's not exactly a concealed hand here. That doesn't mean it's not also at least partially true. Then there are all the "the Americans are negotiating with insurgents" stories, which clearly seem to have some truth to some of them.
[...] But Mr. Zarqawi's indiscriminate killing of innocent Iraqis has alienated many of his erstwhile Iraqi allies. His shadowy militant group, known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, is believed to have assassinated four prominent Anbar sheikhs. And in January when hundreds of Anbar men turned up at an Iraqi Army recruiting depot in Ramadi, the provincial capital, a suicide bomber killed 70 would-be soldiers.
Zarqawi's brutal methods have stirred controversy beyond Iraq, as well. When he declared an "all out war" on Shiites last September, his former mentor, Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi, publicly rebuked him and Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, warned him against alienating the Muslim masses.
But Zarqawi appears to have done just that. Last month, a poll of 1,150 Iraqis throughout the country, conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, the website World Public Opinion, and the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, revealed that just 7 percent of Iraqis approve of attacks on Iraqi government security forces.The same poll, which over sampled Sunni Arabs, found that only 1 percent of Iraqis support attacks on Iraqi civilians.
Sunni Arabs vs. foreign fighters
"There is a change," says Mithal Alusi, a secular Sunni Arab parliamentarian. "After these attacks, and after the elections, we find the people are eager to be rid of the terrorists."
Analysts say the participation of Sunni Arabs in the December elections, and the tripling of that sect's seats in parliament, has convinced local leaders like Jadaan that political participation can bear fruit, such as infrastructure, jobs, and an end to US military operations in their cities.
"We are caught in the middle between the terrorists coming to destroy us with their suicide belts, their TNT, and their car bombs, and the American Army that destroys our homes, takes our weapons, and doesn't allow us to defend ourselves against the terrorists," says Jadaan.
It was that frustration that first pushed Anbar's elders to take a stand against outside terror groups, which set up camp there and turned Anbar's highways into rat lines for foreign fighters coming in from Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
US and Iraqi forces launched a series of offensives throughout the province last year. Caught in the crossfire, Anbar's residents began looking for a way out.
"A sheikh from the Samarra tribe, which had suffered a lot from the military operations, came to see the minister of defense, and he said, 'Give me two weeks to get rid of the foreigners from our city,' " recalls Mohammed al-Askaree, an adviser to Iraq's Sunni Arab Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaymi. "The minister said, 'Take a month. If you get rid of the foreigners and the terrorists your city will avoid further problems.' "
Other tribal sheikhs followed suit. About three months ago, Mr. Dulaymi, intent on exploiting the rift between the tribes and the foreign insurgents, convened a series of meetings with Anbar's tribal sheikhs, religious leaders, and local elders. The US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, attended some of the meetings.
The provincial leaders made a number of demands in return for their cooperation, Mr. Askaree says. They asked for weapons to fight the terrorists with, but the minister refused. Instead the minister agreed to step up recruitment of Anbar residents to the Iraqi security forces.
"If you want to participate in attacking the terrorists, you have no choice but to send your sons to volunteer for the Army and give the Army information on the terrorists," Askaree says the minister of defense told the gathered Anbar notables.
[...]
Those negotiations seem to have unsettled Zarqawi and his allies. But it remains difficult to gauge just how effective and how widespread the new wellspring of tribal support for the Iraqi government is.
A report released last September by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates that 4 to 10 percent of the country's combatants are foreigners. However, the report points out that this element represents a virulent strain of the militancy responsible for the most violent attacks. Furthermore, local insurgents have pragmatic demands and are more willing to compromise than Zarqawi-led fighters, who view the struggle in Iraq as part of a global jihad.
"If you can get real progress here, then it's a lot easier to end the insurgency by having the insurgents join the government than by hunting them down," says Anthony Cordesman, coauthor of the CSIS report.
Other military analysts have pointed to a decrease in US casualties in Anbar to show that the strategy is working.
Still, many Sunni Arab hard-liners remain defiant, and downplay the apparent rifts between foreign elements and local insurgents. "These are just a few sheikhs who want to get political power by claiming to be fighting the terrorists, and to be speaking for the resistance," says Sheikh Abdel Salaam al-Qubaysi, a leading member of the Muslim Scholars Association, a hard-line Sunni group that draws much of its support from Anbar. "They are slaves in the pockets of the occupation. They have no weight in the streets."
Mr. Qubaysi scoffs at suggestions that Anbar's tribes are starting to turn against the resistance. Last month's suicide attack on Sunni Arabs in Ramadi was not the work of the "noble Arab resistance," he says. "We know that 40,000 militants from Iran have to come to Iraq," he says. "I don't rule out that they did this to prevent Sunni Arabs from joining the Iraqi Army."
Sunni Arab demands
Sunni Arab politicians from Anbar also warn that this measured progress could wither just as quickly as it blossomed if the country's Shiite and Kurdish leaders don't respond to key Sunni Arab demands in negotiations to form a government.
Tariq al-Hashimi, leader of the Sunni fundamentalist Iraqi Islamic Party, laid out a 10-point ultimatum for the US and Iraqi governments last week. He demanded the release of political prisoners and the resignation of Iraq's controversial Shiite interior minister. He threatened "a massive civilian uprising" if his demands were ignored.
Another top Sunni demand, with a direct impact on negotiations with tribal sheikhs in Anbar, is ending the stringent debaathification law, which prohibits ex-Baath Party members above a certain rank from holding government positions.
On Thursday, the Ministry of Defense suddenly implemented a six-month-old order from the Iraqi Debaathification Commission that demanded the dismissal of 18 Iraqi generals, colonels, and majors. Most were Sunni Arabs from Anbar.
[...]
And even if Zarqawi and his ilk can be defeated in Iraq, this is no guarantee that the rest will be smooth sailing for the US. The same poll that showed Iraqi disapproval of attacks on fellow Iraqis, also reported that 88 percent of Sunni Arabs and 41 percent of Shiites approved of attacks on US forces.
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 for the CSM story, 3.5 out of 5 for Unqualified Offering, 2.5 out of 5 for the Donald.
My heretical opinion, though, is that I don't think Iraq is necessarily spiraling into disintegration and civil war; I think a lot more Watching And Waiting is still the only way to see how it will settle out. Of course, sometimes I'm an optimist, and sometimes I'm a foolish and wrong-headed optimist, but there I am.
2/07/2006 01:00:00 PM|permanent link| |
1 comments
PLASTIC FANTASTIC POLICE. Those wily Russians are a step ahead of us.
MOSCOW - This is one Russian traffic cop who will never issue a ticket or take a bribe: he's made of plastic.
A life-size mock-up of a traffic police officer is prompting more drivers to obey the speed limit on a highway in western Russia, the plastic policeman's flesh-and-blood colleagues said in a report on state-run Channel One television Sunday.
"Our monitoring has shown that drivers here ... are more disciplined: they slow down," said Ivan Zybin, the deputy commander of a traffic police detachment in the Belgorod region near the Ukrainian border.
A bit like the kind of flat cardboard cutout that enables tourists to snap photos with world leaders, this fake human figure comes complete with a nearly two-dimensional patrol car, a speed gun and a black-and-white baton — held up to signal travelers to be cautious.
But Alexei Zakharov, the officer who served as the model for the mock-up, said that the sight of his plastic double prompts some drivers to do more than slow down.
"Some drivers stop and come up to him to show their documents, others sit in their cars and wait for the inspector to approach them. They sit there for five minutes and they drive away," he said.
The stretch of highway is busy, in part because of drivers traveling to Ukraine, and officer Sergei Kurdyumov said the mock-up boosts manpower.
These aren't actually incorruptible, with use of some lighter fluid and a match. But, gentlemen, we cannot allow a plastic police gap!
Now all we need are plastic do-nothing mocked-up politicians.
Oh, right. Got those. Never mind.
I say that if we invade Iran, our lead troops should be plastic! It'll scare the crap out of the Revolutionary Guards, particularly if our plastic division all wear plastic yarmullkes.
Read The Rest Scale: depends who are you; do you feel you won't get fooled again, or will you let your love open the door? I'll be with the latter folks, on the magic bus.
2/07/2006 11:33:00 AM|permanent link| |
1 comments
SHUTTLE STILL A MONEY-SUCK. Same as it's ever been; despite Griffin's vows, NASA science money is cut and diverted:
NASA wants to divert money from its science programme to help pay for billions of dollars of projected space shuttle cost overruns, says the agency's chief, Mike Griffin. The cuts mean several key science missions will be delayed indefinitely and have sparked criticism from space enthusiasts and law makers.
Griffin and other NASA officials announced the cuts on Monday during a press briefing on US president George Bush's 2007 budget request to Congress. In the proposed budget, NASA would receive $16.8 billion in 2007, an increase of 3.2% over the amount Congress appropriated for the agency for 2006. (This excludes $350 million given in 2006 to cover damage caused by Hurricane Katrina.)
The budget breaks down as follows:
• $6.234 billion for space operations, such as the shuttle and the International Space Station
• $5.330 billion for science
• $3.978 billion for exploration systems, including the development of the shuttle's replacement, the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV)
• $0.724 billion for aeronautics research
The science programme, which Griffin called one of the nation's "crown jewels", increases by just 1.5% compared to 2006. Furthermore, science will receive annual increases of just 1.0% from 2008 to 2011, according to the budget request.
Forced U-turn
Such slow growth is down to NASA removing $2 billion from the science budget over the next five years to help cover projected cost overruns of $3 billion to $5 billion to fly the shuttles safely until they are retired in 2010.
Redistributing NASA's budget this way represents a turnaround for Griffin, who in September 2005 specifically vowed not to take "one thin dime" from the science budget to pay for human spaceflight.
When asked about his earlier statement, Griffin stunned reporters by admitting he had to go back on his word. "I wish we hadn't had to do it; I didn't want to. But that's what we needed to do," he said. "One plain fact is NASA can simply not afford to do everything our many constituencies would like us to do."
The science programmes affected include:
• Delayed indefinitely – the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), a mission to detect and study Earth-like planets
• Delayed by about three years – the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), designed to map stars with unprecedented accuracy and search for planets slightly larger than Earth will now launch no earlier than 2015
• Cancelled – four to six 1.8-metre "outrigger" telescopes designed to bolster the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii. The outriggers would have searched for planets and imaged newborn stars
• Delayed indefinitely – the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a 2.5-metre infrared telescope built into a Boeing 747 plane, will be put under "review" because it is behind schedule. It has been given no funding for the foreseeable future
• Delayed indefinitely – NASA's cosmology programme, "Beyond Einstein", is under review. Two of its missions – LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), to search for ripples in space-time called gravitational waves, and Constellation-X, to study black holes – will be delayed indefinitely
• Cancelled/Delayed indefinitely – Mars research has been cut by $243.3 million to $700.2 million. This reflects the cancellation or indefinite postponement of missions such as the Mars Sample Return Mission and the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter
• Cut – solar system research, largely in astrobiology, has been cut by $96.5 million to $273.6 million
"Anti-science NASA"
The budget announcement was "extraordinarily depressing", says Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a non-profit organisation in Pasadena, California, US, which promotes solar system exploration. "I would almost describe it as 'anti-science NASA' now, with these kinds of deep cuts," he told New Scientist.
[...]
Sherwood Boehlert, chairman of the House Committee on Science and a Republican Congressman from New York, also said he was "greatly concerned" over NASA's science budget.
"Science funding should not be taking a back seat to operational programmes that have much less impact," he said in a statement. "We have to be sure that we are not demonstrating that science is a 'crown jewel' of NASA by seeing how much we can get for it at the pawnshop."
Good sound-bite; it's almost as if this man knows how to do politics.
[...] Under the budget, the International Space Station will also be completed, with an estimated 17 more shuttle flights. If the next flight, currently scheduled for May, flies safely, one of those future shuttles would be sent to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble should receive an additional $118.5 million over its 2006 funding level, to a requested total of $336.7 million in 2007.
Maybe they could save a tiny bit of money by firing a pressflack.
Also, via Chris Mooney, a good NY Timespiece on Utah's debate over a teaching-evolution law.
Also via Chris Mooney, a good Timepiece by Matt Cooper and Christine Gorman on the Bush Administration's insistence on ideology and business-lobbied views over science.
MASTER OTAKU. Okay, this is deeply creepy in many ways, and it makes the Sexism Meter explode into a million pieces, of course, but in all that it's completely Japanese:
TOKYO (Reuters) - "Welcome home, Master," says the maid as she bows deeply, hands clasped in front of a starched pinafore worn over a short pink dress.
This maid serves not some aristocrat but a string of pop-culture-mad customers at a "Maid Cafe" in Tokyo's Akihabara district, long known as a Mecca for electronics buffs but now also the centre of the capital's "nerd culture".
"When they address you as 'Master', the feeling you get is like a high," says Koji Abei, a 20-year-old student having coffee with a friend at the Royal Milk Cafe and Aromacare.
"I've never felt that way before."
Maid cafes dot Akihabara, which has become a second home for Tokyo's "otaku" -- roughly translated as "geeks". They're known for their devotion to comics and computer games and can easily be identified by their standard outfit of track suit, knapsack and spectacles.
In the cafes, girls dressed in frilly frocks inspired by comic-book heroines wait hand and foot on customers, mostly male, who might have once been obsessed with naughty schoolgirls and nurses.
At one cafe, maids get down on their knees to stir the cream and sugar into the customer's coffee.
At Royal Milk, diners can follow up a meal with a range of grooming services, including ear cleanings.
Maids at some of the more attentive shops even offer to spoon-feed customers at their table.
Maid cafes have mushroomed since they first emerged about four years ago, evolving from cafes where waiting staff emulated characters from a popular series of role-playing video games, often dressed in schoolgirl-inspired uniforms.
Shops where computer-generated characters came to life to serve coffee to gamers have since morphed into establishments serving customers ranging from teens to septuagenarians.
Akihabara now boasts around 30 maid cafes that cater not just to male geeks but also to couples, tourists and the merely curious.
FANTASY ESCAPE
Patronage is also on the rise among young women, some hoping to snag a geek and turn him into Prince Charming in a real-life imitation of last year's hit movie "Train Boy", a love story set in Akihabara that also became a popular TV series.
"These cafes offer a chance for men oppressed in their daily life to escape into a fantasy world," said social commentator Tomoko Inukai, adding that the phenomenon hardly helped to promote gender equality in a largely male-dominated society.
Uh, gee, ya think?
For some of the "maids", who are often as keen on comics and games as their customers, the job is a kind of virtual world.
"Being a maid is all-consuming," said Hinaka, a maid at Royal Milk Cafe who goes only by her first name.
"I'm not acting like a maid here, I am one."
Besides serving diners from a menu of inexpensive cafe fare, Hinaka also offers fully clothed massages, and for 9,000 yen (43 pounds) customers can chat with her in a private room cluttered with comic books, character figurines and animation DVDs.
The average age of the maids at Royal Milk is 20, and an appearance of innocence is a priority.
"The concept of these cafes, where women who are physically and emotionally immature serve male customers, is not surprising given the fetish for young women among Japanese men," Inukai said.
Hinaka at Royal Milk gets plenty of stares as she moves around in a black dirndl-inspired pinafore worn over a white shirt, which is tied at the collar with a big ribbon that matches her billowing, short pink skirt.
"Sitting here and admiring how pretty the girls are is like admiring a flower," said Kinuko Nagahama, a 29-year-old woman sitting alone at the cafe. "If I were a few dress sizes smaller, I'd love to work at a place like this."
Hair salons in Akihabara are also cashing in on the trend.
At one such establishment called "Moesham", stylists dressed as maids give shampoos and cuts to a mainly male clientele not intimidated by the salon's decor, which resembles the bedroom of a young girl besotted by hearts and lace.
A few customers even come three or four times a week for a shampoo, said Yuki Todo, stylist-manager at the shop.
Yasunori Tomita, a 32-year-old salesman and first-time customer, said, "I don't have a girlfriend at the moment so getting pampered by maids will have to suffice for now."
Japan: advanced in many ways, amazing in many ways, leading the world in feminist analysis: not so much. Bullet training in the other direction, maybe, or at the very least, remaining largely planted in the feudal 18th century.
But in their own bizarre way. Is it kwaii? Maybe not so much.
HAMAS AND THE HUDNA OFFER: deal or don't deal, is the Israeli question. Play the hand, or fold and wait for a new deal?
I agree with a fair amount of Ehud Yaari's analysis, though not all, and not with all of his conclusions, although mostly I'm still reserving judgment for now on recommending actions by Israel (a stance I tend to always lean to, though not, ah, religiously, anyway, as I don't live there and don't have to live with any direct consequences).
Yaari is "is the Middle East commentator for Israel TV Channel 2 and an associate of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy," incidentally. Bits:
This is the concrete deal that Hamas is offering Israel: an open-ended armistice in exchange for a well-armed and independent Palestinian state; a prolonged cessation of hostilities, but no peace treaty and no resolution of the conflict's underlying issues. According to conversations with its leaders and its public statements, Hamas will recognize Israel as an "occupier state" while still rejecting its legitimacy. As a sign of their seriousness, the heads of Hamas have already quietly given assurances that they will unconditionally extend the tahdiah, the lull in attacks on Israel, that they painstakingly maintained in the year leading up to their stunning victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections on January 25. They will keep their terrorist weaponry on safety, without giving it up.
Unfortunately, it is likely that the Europeans will soon advise Israel to accept such a deal. The Egyptians are already arguing in private that an armistice without a peace treaty is preferable to another intifada. And, rest assured, down the road there will be Israelis who will urge taking the deal that is possible and giving up on the one that is necessary--that is, a final-status agreement incorporating Palestinian recognition of Israel. This is how Hamas hopes to achieve legitimacy and to consolidate its gains.
It's not clear to me that accepting such a deal temporarily requires "giving up on the one that is necessary--that is, a final-status agreement."
For one thing, making that deal is pretty much exactly what crazed left-wing peacenik Arik Sharon had been pushing for the last couple of years: no final-status agreement for an indefinite number of years to come, until there was a truly peaceful Palestinian Authority government to reach a final deal with, and meanwhile making temporary, largely-but-not-necessarily-entirely unilateral arrangements for "separation" between the Israelis and Palestinians. It's unclear to me how grossly different that is from what seems conceivably possible with Hamas.
More Yaari:
Israel, therefore, has a tough decision to make within weeks, if not days: test an extended ceasefire and allow Hamas to slide into power or prevent its worst enemies from taking control of the Palestinian Authority (P.A.).
I don't think it's a tough decision. I think it would be madness for Israel to keep Hamas from taking office. If it becomes necessary to fight a PA led by a Hamas majority, fine; if it becomes necessary to fight violent Hamas elements otherwise, ok. But overthrowing a democratically elected government would be grossly counter-productive, and in the end, these are people from whom we/the Israelis/the world have to, over time, separate out those who are persuadable towards eventual grudging acceptance of each other's states and peaceful relations, from those who are diehard violent irredentists, who must be dealt with otherwise. And make no mistake, Hamas supporters contain both sets of people, and many, though not all, people are changeable depending upon the circumstances they are given to deal with.
[...] As soon as they heard that their party had won 74 of the 132 seats in the Palestinian legislature, the heads of Hamas began to scatter vague formulae for a long-term hudna, or truce. The chairman of the Hamas political bureau, Damascus-based Khaled Mashal, and the movement's chief spokesmen in Gaza, Ismail Hanieh and Mahmoud Al Zahar, all quickly acknowledged their inability to enter into an all-out armed confrontation with Israel at the present time. The implication, of course, was that they wish they could confront Israel--and that they will prepare and mobilize the Palestinian society for an eventual showdown.
For the time being, however, Hamas is offering an armistice that recognizes the June 1967 lines, including Palestinian sovereignty in East Jerusalem. There are Hamas leaders who indicate that it may be possible to integrate this proposal with the establishment of a Palestinian state within "provisional borders," as envisaged in the U.S.-backed road map. In fact, they argue that there is little difference between their armistice proposal and Ariel Sharon's vision of a long-term interim agreement with provisional borders and Palestinian sovereignty. (Of course, Sharon never envisaged retreating to the pre-Six Day War borders.)
[...]
Hamas, in other words, understands that it must handle its victory with great care and that, if it wants to enjoy the fruits of the ballots, it must eschew the use of bullets. Its leaders are aware of the limitations of their achievement and of its potential pitfalls, so they are speaking far more softly than usual and keeping their sticks out of sight. The 6,000 members of their terrorist arm, the Izz a-Din Al Qassam Brigades, have been ordered not to carry arms in the streets, not to hold celebratory parades, and to keep away from the violent demonstrations that the defeated Fatah activists have been staging.
There is no reason, for now, to doubt Hamas's willingness to enter into a prolonged armistice. The volume of terrorism perpetrated by the movement has declined steadily since the summer of 2004. There was only one suicide bombing by Hamas during this period, in Beersheba, and that, according to reliable Israeli intelligence sources, was the result of a "misunderstanding" within its ranks. Since the withdrawal of Israeli settlements and troops from the Gaza Strip, Hamas has not fired a single rocket at Israel. (They have left that to the Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees, and some factions of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.)
This conduct reflected Hamas's decision to take over the Palestinian Authority before again turning its sights on Israel. Indeed, the Cairo agreement--an accord between Hamas and P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas in March 2005--comprised a simple tradeoff: a lull in terrorist operations in exchange for elections. In recent days, the Hamas leadership has been veritably gushing with praise for Abbas for keeping his side of the bargain. Now they want him to accept an armistice. The reason he might well accept that idea is plain: He is not capable of reaching a final-status agreement, both because it is now even harder to resolve the issues (such as Jerusalem and the right of return) that prevented an agreement at Camp David in 2000, and also because Fatah's power has shrunk. A hudna would therefore be better than nothing at all.
In the eyes of the Fatah leadership, too, a hudna is not out of the question, although Fatah still claims adherence to Oslo's principles of peace with and recognition of Israel. After all, even Arafat was working toward "runaway statehood," whereby Palestinians would gain independence but would not pay its price by making concessions leading to a formal "end of conflict, end of claims." The threat remains that, if a runaway statehood is not granted to them, the Palestinians will gradually run away from the concept of a small state alongside Israel. This danger--that the Palestinians will choose to collapse into Israel's unwilling arms--is the greatest challenge faced by Israel. Two states without peace, as opposed to two governments fighting within the same country--this, ultimately, is the choice.
At this stage, there's no telling whether the Hamas victory will save the P.A. from implosion and disintegration, or whether it will hasten that collapse. Within Fatah, a mighty brawl is underway, and the organization's future is in doubt. The Palestinian security apparatus--60,000 men with guns--is in disarray. The "armed tribes" that truly control the territories, be they political groups or local clans, are gaining strength. In the meantime, Hamas does not dare try to assert its authority.
On the Palestinian field, the only possible game is a local version of what is known in France as "co-habitation"--a regime in which a president works alongside a prime minister from a rival party. But the Palestinian situation is far more complicated, because the president is also the head of the opposition, and the parliamentary majority is a party that also functions as an underground. This is a structure with two hostile armies: the security apparatus commanded by the president and the militias commanded by the majority party. (Incidentally, Hamas is already planning to elevate the Qassam Brigades to the status enjoyed by Iran's Revolutionary Guards.)
To achieve a co-habitation agreement, Hamas is willing to let the Cabinet be made up of technocrats rather than Hamas officials, showing that it prefers to rule rather than govern. Its leaders don't delude themselves that Fatah's debacle at the polls meant the demise of that deep-rooted movement. Indeed, Fatah has several times more rifles than Hamas, and, by my calculations, it could have achieved near-parity in the elections if so many votes had not been wasted on the 76 Fatah leaders who ran as independents and lost. So, at least for the near future, Hamas will not confront Fatah, choosing instead to co-opt its rival and gradually erode its power. In the meantime, Fatah retains some power.
Hamas is forging a long-term strategy, building up its future capabilities instead of cashing in immediately on its election gains.
I agree with much of the above, but not all. There's more in the piece, a little of which I agree with, some of which I do not. But it's a relatively rational, if mildly more "worst-case" oriented a view than I hold, presentation.
I think that a lot of caution and patience is called for, among other qualities, for now. More specific policy recommendations I won't give, for now.
What we did was legal, or, in our opinion, could have been legal. Since there are arguments on both sides, we will rely on our opinion. However, we won't let a court decide the question, because then we wouldn't be able to rely on our own opinion.
We won't answer hypothetical questions about what we can do legally or constitutionally. We also won't tell you what we've actually done or plan to do; hence every question you ask will about legality be in effect a hypothetical, and therefore we can refuse to answer it.
I'm still making my way through the full transcript (with my usual 8 other tabs open, simultaneously following other news and articles), but that seems an accurate summary.
As I added here, the transcripts of the 2/06/06 NSA Senate Judiciary hearings starts here. Part II here. Part III here.
Read The Rest Scale: 0 out of 5 for that Balkin post, although Balkinization is a fine blog for these and other constitutional issues, of course.
I'm still casually looking for someone offering a defense of why Attorney-General of the United States of America Gonzalez couldn't be sworn in, as he was in his last testimony to Congress on this issue, and defending why the Republicans party-line voted to refuse to allow him to be sworn in, even though Gonzalez said he'd be fine with being sworn in.
2/07/2006 10:07:00 AM|permanent link| |
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Monday, February 06, 2006
MCCAIN TO OBAMA: DROP DEAD. Geez, and people think I'm snotty and rude? (Okay, sometimes I am.) But get this. (JPG here; PDF here. Obama PDF letter here.)
"I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform were sincere," McCain writes.
Obama attended a meeting with McCain and senators committed to a bipartisan task force on ethics reform. McCain left the meeting convinced that Obama was open to working closely together, according to an aide.
But the next day, Obama wrote McCain that he preferred his own party's legislation to a task force and suggested McCain take another look at the Democratic caucus's Honest Leadership Act, which does not have a Republican cosponsor.
Wrote Obama: "I know you have expressed an interest in creating a task force to further study and discuss these matters, but I and others in the Democratic Caucus believe the more effective and timely course is to allow the committees of jurisdiction to roll up their sleeves and get to work[.]"
McCain, in his letter, takes exception to Obama's suggestion that his task force, which Dem. Sens. Joe Lieberman and Bill Nelson support, would impede reform.
McCain: "When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership's preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable. Thank you for disabusing me of such notions with your letter. ... I'm embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interept your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in political to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won't make the same mistake again."
[...]
Writes McCain, "I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party's effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn't always a priority for every one of us. Good luck to you, Senator."
Gee, I guess those tales of John McCain having a temper are all wrong. (And, sure, I've written many a comment in this style.)
Twenty-one Republican state senators on Friday called for Ralph Reed to withdraw from the contest for lieutenant governor, declaring that his ties to Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff could jeopardize the re-election of Gov. Sonny Perdue and the rest of the GOP ticket.
"For the good of the Republican Party, for the good of Georgia, we encourage Ralph Reed to withdraw from this race," stated the petition signed by the senators, all of whom support Reed's GOP rival, state Sen. Casey Cagle of Gainesville.
I don't know which I'd prefer: to see Reed have to pull out, or hope he still runs and gets his not-so-Christian ass kicked. The latter, I suppose, if it were a lock.
It's an interesting example of the way the Abramoff Effect is rippling down to the roots of the various state Republican Parties. Woot. See here for another example in Nevada.
ADDENDUM: 2/07/06, 12:32 a.m.: I'd desired to post this additional link earlier in the evening, but Blogger's at-least-announced-in-advance downtime went way over the announced "hour," and, of course, "status.blogger.com" was down with it (I continue to marvel at the mad genius of this system), and then I was busy, and anyway, this decent and useful look at some of the races that are mostly likely to tip one way or another in November.
2/06/2006 07:13:00 PM|permanent link| |
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I use these two fine fellows as my examples because this post grew out of comments at Obsidian Wings. Their posts are quite temperate compared to many, Sebastian's particularly; I'm just arguing with the use of the generalization of "the Muslim[s]" here.
There are approximately 1.2 billion Muslims alive today according to here, estimated to be 19.2% of the world population in the year 2000.
That site quotes other estimates. 1.100 billion from the 1997 World Almanac, for instance. Don't like that site? Over here, we get an estimate of 1,126,325,000 cited to be from Britannica Yearbook, 1997. Here Afghan President Hamid Karzai says "a billion," a nice round figure.
Whatever the more refined number -- and obviously it's impossible to get a precise figure -- "a billion" seems a safe general estimate.
A billion people is a lot of people.
We see a number of protests, and some violent acts, around the world, in a number of countries.
In each case, the crowd is estimated to be, in every article I've yet read, "a few thousand."
Let's say that as many as 20 countries have protests with violence. That's far more than reported, but let's be generous.
Let's say that each one has 10,000 people, all of whom are eager to perform destruction of property (which seems fairly unlikely, but, again, let's be generous).
So, let's do the math that even I can manage: 20 x 10,000 =200,000 people, an amazing over-estimate, but let's use it.
(That they were present certainly doesn't prove they all approved of violence against property, let alone people, nor that they knew in advance it would take place, but let's assume they all thoroughly approved.)
1,000,000,000 divided by 20,000 is 50,000. 5 out of 100,000 Muslims, or 1 out of 20,000, at most, have demonstrated willingness to show up at a protest where damage to property took place.
This would not, I suggest, tend to suggest that "the Muslims" are supporting or calling for violence. It does not, I suggest, support the notion of a "clash of civilizations," nor does it, I suggest, support the use of language making any such claim.
Perhaps, I suggest, people might keep this in mind when they declaim generalities about "many in the Muslim world," and most of all, when they declaim about simply "the Muslim world" or "Muslims," or, as they are sometimes known, "the enemy," as can be commonly found to be the practice on innumerable blogs.
Example, because he's a grown-up who can take being my token: here is Stephen Green, the widely read Vodkapundit, for example, where he variously refers to "the Arab Street," "the Arab world," "the Arab World," (Also someone named "Salmon Rushdie," but we all make typos.) These are a typical few paragraphs:
If the Arab World's only effective means of fighting us is to threaten our authors and cartoonists, then it's obvious that we're already in a culture war. They can't win a stand-up fight with our military, but they'll for sure shoot back at our stand-up comics.
They want a culture war? Fine. Let's give them one.
[...]
Left and right, Americans know how to wage a culture war.
It seems we're in one. And as in any war, we can't afford to remain passive. Sun Tzu wrote that when your enemy is angry, annoy him. Is there any doubt the Arab Street is at long last really angry? Then it's time for us to wage an Offensive Offensive. If they're angry, let's really piss them off. Let's show the Arab Street that in a war between our attitude and theirs, we're the Fonz and they're Ralph.
Etc. There's a lot worse out there. Stephen is relatively lucid in comparison.
It's unclear to me this approach will help our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's quite unclear to me that this approach will aid our efforts to engage the Islamic world, of which most of the population are not, in fact, engaging in violence against the West, whether in Europe, or elsewhere.
Something to, perhaps, contemplate.
Comment?
My only other post on this topic is here. I did, however, include some relevant links at the bottom of this post.
ADDENDUM, 11:45 p.m.: Steve Green links to my post here. He also sent an amiable e-mail daring to say he welcomed civil disagreement!
The cad!
I sent him an amiable response, explaining among other things that I picked him because I figured it was unlikely he'd go ballastic, and if that unlikely event occurred, at least it would be well-written and likely entertaining.
But he called me a "gentleman"! This is outrageous!
Oh, man, now Atrios is never going to link to me! Cooties! Unclean!
What's a guy got to do to get denounced around here?
And if only some few cartoonists have the balls to say it, I'd rather stand with and even in front of them, than with some well-meaning but over-rationalizing group of deep, too calculating by half, thinkers.
A bit better, but still not really even close to rude. I demand to be properly denounced!
KING, HOOVER, AND AMERICA. This is one of those posts that's difficult for me to write, because I could write thousands of words on the topic.
The history of civil rights in America, as well as civil liberties, has always been one of "my" topics and fascinations. When Taylor Branch's first volume of his immensely important "America in the King Years" trilogy, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 came out in 1988, I read all of its 1,064 pages within a couple of evenings. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Every review I've yet read has been a rave. I may add links to more reviews to this post later. I urge you all to beg, borrow, and preferably not steal, these books, which your local library surely has, and read them, or at least dip into and through them, and know the burning passion of the crucible America passed through to get to today, and of the scourage of racism we've not yet fully freed ourselves from, of the Promised Land we have not yet reached.
But there's so much more in Branch's work. Not just King, and racism, but Lyndon Johnson, that evil man who did so much good, as well, of whom perhaps only Robert Caro has done a better job of explaining, and of all the struggles of America during the 1960s, and the battles that still scar our world of today.
Just one quote, on a topic of personal passion to me -- the twisted swine that was J. Edgar Hoover:
The most chilling passages in this book, for me, are about J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director. His hatred of King was not a secret. But Branch shows how far it went — beyond extremity to morbid depravity.
Hoover instructed all in the bureau not to warn King of death threats. He told President Johnson that any requests for federal protection of King would come from subversives, and that King was "an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our Nation." He listed King as a prominent target in an order to all F.B.I. offices "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations." There was no basis in fact for the calumnies. The charge of subversion hung on the dubious thread of an allegation that Stanley Levison, an adviser to King, was a Communist agent — an allegation never shown to have any convincing support.
The low point in the Hoover story may have been his performance on the killing of Viola Liuzzo. He tried to conceal the fact that one of the Klansmen who shot at her was an F.B.I. informant, Gary Thomas Rowe — and lied to President Johnson about it. He urged the president not to speak with the Liuzzo family, telling Johnson that "the woman had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope; that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearance of a necking party." (Liuzzo's arm was cut by a shard of glass from the shattered car window.) Branch calls Hoover's comments "slanderous Klan fantasy dressed as evidence."
J. Edgar Hoover was either a profoundly disturbed man by this time or that rarity, actual evil.
Yes. Yes. Yes. And: yes. And pure vile racist, to the core.
Beginning of the first chapter of the book here. The review, by Tony Lewis, also has some excellent links to past NY Times stories of the day. Check them out.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5.
Not worth a post of its own, but to note, here is a review in the same issue of the Sunday Book Review of James Risen's State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, by Walter Issacson. Long excerpts from Risen here. More from the first chapter here. The chapter excerpt is particularly worth reading.
2/06/2006 01:41:00 PM|permanent link| |
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THE FIRST LAW OF JOURNALISM IS, or should be, "get your quotes and facts right."
Here is a review of a play called "Heddatron," with five robot characters, who have been created by "Botmatrix, an art robotics collective."
First two sentences of the review:
ISAAC ASIMOV'S First Law of Robotics, as any science fiction fan can tell you, states, "A robot may not injure a human being." Perhaps Hans, a gleaming, barrel-chested automaton, hasn't read Asimov.
Back in our universe, here is the actual First Law:
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Another site about them. There are many, many such sites, and thousands of accurate quotations of the Laws on the interwub.
Pointing out the omission undoubtedly seems like pedantic nitpicking to anyone not familiar with the original Asimov stories.
But, in fact, the entire point of those stories was that precise focus on the precise full words, and the conflicts that arose between the different laws and their precise wording, conflicts that hadn't been considered by the creators of Asimov's robots, and which had to be puzzled out by the protagonists of Asimov's stories (usually Michael Donovan and his partner, Gregory Powell, sometimes by robot psychologist Susan Calvin [nobody ever picked up a gun in these stories, by the way, nor engaged in a car chase, nor had their shower habits described]).
The precise wording, and the full wording, of the laws, were the crucial plot element of each story -- the foundation of them, you might say.
So leaving out the additional 11 words, as this review starts, is actually a quite significant error, not a tiny pedantic one.
Having said that, it's intriguing to see a play with mostly robotic characters.
At a recent rehearsal for Les Freres Corbusier's coming play "Heddatron," he defies his radio-controlled commands and zips downstage, thwacking notebooks and coffee cups, as well as the director Alex Timbers and the playwright Elizabeth Meriwether.
Hans's creators, Cindy Jeffers and Meredith Finkelstein of Botmatrix, an art robotics collective, look on with a mix of worry and affectionate pride. Hans may be disobedient, even dangerous, but he's awfully cute. "He's our buddy," Ms. Jeffers explained. "When we were in the middle of making him and he would just be legs, we'd come in and say, 'What's up, Hans?' "
Ms. Jeffers, 31, and Ms. Finkelstein, 28, have spent more than a year designing the robots for "Heddatron." The work is inspired by "Hedda Gabler," Ibsen's 1890 drama about a desperately frustrated woman. (Yes, there are live actors in it, too.) But in this version, which opens at Here Arts Center on Wednesday, Strindberg and Ibsen fight over teacakes and dramaturgy while Jane, an Ypsilanti, Mich., housewife, is abducted by androids, conveyed to their rain forest lair and repeatedly forced to perform "Hedda Gabler."
"Heddatron" calls for five robots: Hedda's husband, George; his Aunt Julie; the maid, Berta; Judge Brack; and the dashing Eilert Lovborg, played by Hans. Hans and the robot Billy, who plays George, are the most sophisticated of the bunch. They not only move and speak, but also emit lights, smoke and ticker tape. Aunt Julie, who also speaks, looks like an elegant silhouette, while Berta is depicted as a bustling broom and Judge Brack as a box on wheels. "But he's dressed up," Ms. Finkelstein said. "He's got a cape. And a wig."
On a cold winter day, the Botmatrix women are dressed in jeans, engineer boots and layers of distressed T-shirts, which Ms. Jeffers accents with a sparkly gold scarf. If one were to believe the Botmatrix Web site (botmatrix.com), Ms. Finkelstein and Ms. Jeffers are robots themselves, escapees from a semiconductor plant in the Philippines and now dedicated to "the liberation and advancement of creative machines everywhere."
[...]
As part of her studies, Ms. Finkelstein designed scurrying robots made from chunky cellphones and children's toys from the 1970's. "They looked like stuffed animals," she said. For her master's thesis, Ms. Jeffers built a moving topographical map that monitored protest of semiconductor factories around the world.
N.Y.U.'s telecommunications program once had a school club called the Robotics Society of America, "but it had disappeared," Ms. Finkelstein said. "When we graduated from ITP, we thought it would be nice to have this group again. But Cindy wanted to call it the Botmatrix." The group, which builds all manner of robots, consists of Ms. Finkelstein, Ms. Jeffers and another ITP graduate, Shelley Ann West, currently on sabbatical. Their work sometimes resembles a jollier version of the destructive robot performances pioneered by the San Francisco collective Survival Research Laboratories, and sometimes embodies theories of writers like Ray Kurzweil, who envisions a blend of humanlike consciousness and technology. Perhaps most of all, however, they want people to appreciate robots — for their design, abilities and beauty. "There's a lot of anti-robot prejudice," Ms. Jeffers said, "and we'd like to turn that round."
The women designed mechanized wristbands for activists to wear during the 2004 Republican National Convention and also organized a robotics lectures series at the Tank, a center for visual and performance art. At the Tank, a friend introduced them to Mr. Timbers. For three years, he had dreamed of a "Hedda Gabler" with robots and he floated the idea to Botmatrix.
There's a bunch more. Fight the anti-robot prejudice! Robot liberation! Shed your humanism bias! Welcome our new robotic partners! Allow your keyboard to type posts like this on its own!
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5 as interested in silicon life. Don't get me started on the use of the word "singularity" in the unquoted part of the article.
2/06/2006 12:25:00 PM|permanent link| |
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LIVEBLOGGING THE SENATE NSA HEARINGS. That's what Glenn Greenwald is doing (offsite, at an apparently Undisclosed Location).
Check it out. It's his subjective impressions/notes, of course, and I greatly look forward to reading the eventual actual transcript, but meanwhile, you might want to check out this ongoing account of this extremely important hearing.
Among many other salient points: Attorney-General Alberto Gonzalez has not been put under oath. Why is that?
Preliminary AP story here. SOP will be that that URL will be frequently updated throughout the day, as well.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5, at least. Personal note: times like these (and the Alito hearings, and every day) I wish I had C-Span. I can't afford cable tv. If enough people were to hit the "subscribe" button, at the top of the page, for a mere $5/month, I could afford cable and C-Span, and live-blog this sort of thing myself; just a thought. (These hearings are on C-Span I or II, right? Please don't tell me they aren't.)
ADDENDUM, 4:08 p.m.: ReddHedd at firedoglake, where they don't believe in capitals in titles, is also liveblogging the NSA hearings, via C-Span. So far: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V. (Personally, I don't think it aids credibilty to resort to the language of an eight-year-old and use such oh-so-clever usages as "the Preznit," but we know that about me. I'd like to persuade people who may be on the fence about these issues, and I don't think using childish terminology helps; it gives an excuse not to listen. Obviously, I link nonetheless.)
ADDENDUM, 7:35 p.m.: From the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, this observation:
Gonzales, in an opening statement that mentioned "enemy" 10 times and "al Qaeda" 20 times, suggested that those who questioned the legality of the program were aiding the terrorists.
Indeed. The al Qaeda Legal Task Force is quite the threat.
Also:
[...] After yet another rebuffed question, Leahy replied to Gonzales with a tone of mock sympathy: "Of course. I'm sorry, Mr. Attorney General, I forgot: You can't answer any questions that might be relevant."
In an interview with The Freeport News Tuesday, Deputy Director of Government School Security for the Northern Bahamas Stephen Plakaris revealed an alarming trend among the female student population and called for a joint effort between parental groups, the Christian council, education officials and counsellors.
[...]
Now that it has come to his attention and he has read the article, Bishop Grant says the Christian Council will definitely launch its own investigation into the allegations.
The deputy director of government school security said the lesbian network in our schools could not be denied as the females are bold, growing in numbers and most disturbing is that they are preying on young girls.
He disclosed that the culprits are aslo adults who are parents and teachers.
But such information would not be publicized for various reasons, he said, as there is a risk of exposing the young girl to further victimization and the school public scorn.
He realizes, however, that in that vein, it cannot be denied that these "illicit sexual networks" are taking place in our schools.
The problem, Mr. Plakaris adds, stems decades old, as far back as the late 80s, but are now more blatant among teachers and students.
"We need more community, open, frank and honest discussions on the issue because these are our children and the trend is there," he marshalled.
The problem is not exclusive to The Bahamas as research shows that there is seemingly also rampant lesbianism in schools in the United States and Canada, Plakaris says.
[...]
Mr. Plakaris says once his department receives information on anybody it is passed on to the Department of Social Services.
"If criminal charges are necessary then we would recommend as such," he said.
"But we will not sit back and allow it to continue without letting persons know that we have been watching and we have been documenting -- teachers as well as students."
Thank heavens!
Look, it's either laugh, or cry, and I also do try to keep from having to pay my landlord to repair holes in my walls.
Something, perhaps, to keep in mind in making your vacation choices, though; and you might want to write the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism as to what you think of this, and how it affects your choice of vacation location. You can e-mail them here, or at tourism@bahamas.com. Snail mail is always better for this sort of thing. Here's the rest of their contact information:
The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism P.O. Box N-3701 Nassau, Bahamas Tel: 242-302-2000 Fax: 242-302-2098 E-mail: tourism@bahamas.com
Toll Free: 1-800-Bahamas
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5.
ADDENDUM: 2/06/06, 9:41 a.m.: I have no idea how long it will last, but this post has been linked and machine-quoted here, at the "BEST FUN VACATIONS!" site. Snicker. Good.
2/05/2006 10:52:00 PM|permanent link| |
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NO HOTEL SOUTER. I really shouldn't bother reading most American blogs tonight, since there's only one topic on most of them, which I have no interest in.
But that does mean they're almost all not blogging on anything else. Meanwhile, this.
An attempt to take U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s home by eminent domain and turn it into a hotel was squashed by Weare voters at yesterday’s town deliberative session.
Residents voted twice to amend a warrant article which would have made way for the seizing of Souter’s home at 34 Cilley Road.
[...]
The new language bars selectmen from taking the property and calls for town officials to ask legislators to protect property from eminent domain takings that benefit private enterprise.
Seems fair. No matter how much you hate Kelo v. New London -- and it's hard to find people who do not -- I don't think that punishing federal judges, SCOTUS Justices or mere federal district judges, or for that matters, judges of any kind, is a road we should ever go down. Boring of me, I know.
YEAH, DATA-MINING. As I've said all along, confirmed, along with machine-filtering:
Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.
Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as "terrorist surveillance" and summed it up by declaring that "if you're talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why." But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.
Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.
The Bush administration refuses to say -- in public or in closed session of Congress -- how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.
The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.
Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to human analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening initially to brief fragments of conversation, "wash out" most of the leads within days or weeks.
[...]
About the same time, advances in technology -- involving acoustic engineering, statistical theory and efficient use of computing power to apply them -- offered new hope of plucking valuable messages from the vast flow of global voice and data traffic. And rapidly changing commercial trends, which had worked against the NSA in the 1990s as traffic shifted from satellites to fiber-optic cable, now presented the eavesdroppers with a gift. Market forces were steering as much as a third of global communications traffic on routes that passed through the United States.
[...]
According to surveys by TeleGeography Inc., nearly all voice and data traffic to and from the United States now travels by fiber-optic cable. About one-third of that volume is in transit from one foreign country to another, traversing U.S. networks along its route. The traffic passes through cable landing stations, where undersea communications lines meet the East and West coasts; warehouse-size gateways where competing international carriers join their networks; and major Internet hubs known as metropolitan area ethernets.
Until Bush secretly changed the rules, the government could not tap into access points on U.S. soil without a warrant to collect the "contents" of any communication "to or from a person in the United States." But the FISA law was silent on calls and e-mails that began and ended abroad.
Even for U.S. communications, the law was less than clear about whether the NSA could harvest information about that communication that was not part of its "contents."
"We debated a lot of issues involving the 'metadata,' " one government lawyer said. Valuable for analyzing calling patterns, the metadata for telephone calls identify their origin, destination, duration and time. E-mail headers carry much the same information, along with the numeric address of each network switch through which a message has passed.
Intelligence lawyers said FISA plainly requires a warrant if the government wants real-time access to that information for any one person at a time. But the FISA court, as some lawyers saw it, had no explicit jurisdiction over wholesale collection of records that do not include the content of communications. One high-ranking intelligence official who argued for a more cautious approach said he found himself pushed aside. Awkward silences began to intrude on meetings that discussed the evolving rules.
"I became aware at some point of things I was not being told about," the intelligence official said. 'Subtly Softer Trigger'
Hayden has described a "subtly softer trigger" for eavesdropping, based on a powerful "line of logic," but no Bush administration official has acknowledged explicitly that automated filters play a role in selecting American targets. But Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who chairs the Judiciary Committee, referred in a recent letter to "mechanical surveillance" that is taking place before U.S. citizens and residents are "subject to human surveillance."
Machine selection would be simple if the typical U.S. eavesdropping subject took part in direct calls to or from the "phone numbers of known al Qaeda" terrorists, the only criterion Bush has mentioned.
[...]
NSA Inspector General Joel F. Brenner said in 2004 that the agency's intelligence officers have no choice but to rely on "electronic filtering, sorting and dissemination systems of amazing sophistication but that are imperfect."
One method in use, the NSF report said, is "link analysis." It takes an established starting point -- such as a terrorist just captured or killed -- and looks for associated people, places, things and events. Those links can be far more tenuous than they initially appear.
[...]
Pattern analysis, also described in the NSF and DeRosa reports, does not depend on ties to a known suspect. It begins with places terrorists go, such as the Pakistani province of Waziristan, and things they do, such as using disposable cell phones and changing them frequently, which U.S. officials have publicly cited as a challenge for counterterrorism.
"These people don't want to be on the phone too long," said Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst, offering another example.
Analysts build a model of hypothetical terrorist behavior, and computers look for people who fit the model. Among the drawbacks of this method is that nearly all its selection criteria are innocent on their own. There is little precedent, lawyers said, for using such a model as probable cause to get a court-issued warrant for electronic surveillance.
Jeff Jonas, now chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics, invented a data-mining technology used widely in the private sector and by the government. He sympathizes, he said, with an analyst facing an unknown threat who gathers enormous volumes of data "and says, 'There must be a secret in there.' "
But pattern matching, he argued, will not find it. Techniques that "look at people's behavior to predict terrorist intent," he said, "are so far from reaching the level of accuracy that's necessary that I see them as nothing but civil liberty infringement engines."
[...]
Even with 38,000 employees, the NSA is incapable of translating, transcribing and analyzing more than a fraction of the conversations it intercepts. For years, including in public testimony by Hayden, the agency has acknowledged use of automated equipment to analyze the contents and guide analysts to the most important ones.
According to one knowledgeable source, the warrantless program also uses those methods. That is significant to the public debate because this kind of filtering intrudes into content, and machines "listen" to more Americans than humans do. NSA rules since the late 1970s, when machine filtering was far less capable, have said "acquisition" of content does not take place until a conversation is intercepted and processed "into an intelligible form intended for human inspection."
The agency's filters are capable of comparing spoken language to a "dictionary" of key words, but Roger W. Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until late 2002, said terrorists and other surveillance subjects make frequent changes in their code words. He said, " 'Wedding' was martyrdom day and the 'bride' and 'groom' were the martyrs." But al Qaeda has stopped using those codes.
An alternative approach, in which a knowledgeable source said the NSA's work parallels academic and commercial counterparts, relies on "decomposing an audio signal" to find qualities useful to pattern analysis. Among the fields involved are acoustic engineering, behavioral psychology and computational linguistics.
A published report for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said machines can easily determine the sex, approximate age and social class of a speaker. They are also learning to look for clues to deceptive intent in the words and "paralinguistic" features of a conversation, such as pitch, tone, cadence and latency.
This kind of analysis can predict with results "a hell of a lot better than chance" the likelihood that the speakers are trying to conceal their true meaning, according to James W. Pennebaker, who chairs the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin.
ADDENDUM/UPDATE: 2/06/06, 10:40 a.m.: Kevin Drum has posted on the Sunday's Washington Post story. I e-mailed Kevin, Matthew, Glenn, and Sifu Tweety Fish yesterday immediately after posting this post, and invited response. Kevin responded in e-mail last night, and we had a pleasant exchange on entirely another issue. So I have reason to believe he read this.
His post, as you will note, makes no mention of the contradiction in what he now writes with his past statements on the topic. There is no acknowledgement whatever of having asserted outright falsehoods, and having accepted the false words of General Hayden and asserting that they were true.
This leaves me disappointed with Kevin, although I hope he will yet reconsider. The comment I left in his comments, buried amongst hundreds:
Kevin, as I wrote about here, on January 28th, you wrote in this post that:
Here's another point related to General Hayden's admission today that the NSA's domestic spying program isn't some kind of dazzling high tech black op, but merely garden variety wiretapping that was done outside normal FISA channels because NSA couldn't meet the "probable cause" standard normally needed to get a warrant issued.
Administration apologists have argued that the White House couldn't seek congressional approval for this program because it utilized super advanced technology that we couldn't risk exposing to al-Qaeda. Even in secret session, they've suggested, Congress is a sieve and the bad guys would have found out what we were up to.
But now we know that's not true. This was just ordinary call monitoring, according to General Hayden, and the only problem was that both FISA and the attorney general required a standard of evidence they couldn't meet before issuing a warrant. In other words, the only change necessary to make this program legal was an amendment to FISA modifying the circumstances necessary to issue certain kinds of warrants.
What you wrote there, as I pointed out here on the 28th, and again yesterday wasn't true. It was wrong. You were wrong to assert "But now we know that's not true. This was just ordinary call monitoring" and to take General Hayden's word for it.
Now, I know you know this perfectly well, as we discussed it in e-mail back in January, and I e-mailed you a link to my post of yesterday last night, and you replied.
I'm rather disappointed that you aren't making a forthright correction, or acknowledgement of any of this. There's no shame in having been wrong about something. I hope you'll reconsider. Posted by: Gary Farber on February 6, 2006 at 12:08 PM | PERMALINK
Glenn Greenwald is clearly busy today, as noted a couple of posts above this one, so I won't be surprised not to hear from him. I'll let you know if I hear back from either Matt or Sifu Tweety Fish. So far: one link to this post, from Joe Gandelman.
The problem, of course, is that the right bloggers don't want to blog about this, even though they enjoy an opportunity to hack at/criticize left/liberal bloggers, because it's difficult to do that here without acknowledging that the NSA Program issue is important.
And the left/liberal bloggers don't want to blog about this, because it's criticizing prominent left/liberal bloggers, and they don't want to step into a food fight that isn't theres, and which they were also not covering this aspect of anyway.
And my points have been complicated, requiring following many links to fully understand.
(I had one e-mail last night from a prominent left blogger I had e-mailed asking "what I was on about"? I replied. That blogger has subsequently, many hours later, posted a link to the Washington Post story, with no mention of having had pointed it out in e-mail.)
So much for the "self-correcting blogosphere."
UPDATE, 1:12 p.m.: National Journal's "Hotline" Blogometerlinks:
The story also described the NSA program as a data mining operation, something Gary Farber had been arguing since 12/05, contrary to other left-of-center bloggers, who had taken at face value the Bush admin's word that it was not.
I really need to get around to Bill Beutler's interview questions/request, that I've been sitting on for months. Norm Geras's, too, which he asked at least six months ago. Note to self: get to this.
UPDATE, 6:40 p.m.: Marginal Utilitylinks. Double Plus Ungood links here. He's the first person to yet use these words about a single thing I've said so repeatedly on this topic: "He was right."
UPDATE, 02/08/06, 1:07 p.m. And Michael Makes Three (Tom Bozzo having updated his post to include the magic words "he was right"). Michael Berube shows the linky-love and declares "it appears there’s reason to believe that Gary Farber was right all along about the Cheney Administration’s illegal data-mining" and "So go show Gary some love today."
Thanks, Michael! Meanwhile, no response yet from any of the people named above who said I was wrong, nor anyone else I e-mailed all those links to all those past posts to (except for Bill Beutler of National Journal) (which didn't include, interestingly, Michael, or Tom Bozzo, or Double-Plus-Ungood).
But, hey, a link from Michael is a good step. He's a relatively Big Name. Meanwhile, the "oh, yeah, we always wrote about the data-mining; that's old news" posts have already been appearing elsewhere on the left blogosphere. There's nothing like rewriting one's memory and history, is there?
WEST WING EP LEADS TO DEFEAT FOR BLAIR, and for freer speech. Really.
The television series The West Wing about the life and times of a fictional US president was the inspiration for the "rebellion by stealth" that humbled Tony Blair and his Chief Whip, Hilary Armstrong.
Slumped in front of the television on Sunday night, one of the leaders of the revolt watched with growing interest as Democrats won a key vote on stem cell research by pretending not to be around.
The congressmen hid in an empty office and then triumphantly emerged in force when the vote was called by the unsuspecting Republican speaker.
"That's where the idea came from," the MP, who declined to be identified, told The Daily Telegraph. "We had no big press conferences, no events announcing the coming protest. It was directly inspired by the West Wing," he said.
The Tories toasted their success with champagne on Tuesday night. Not only had the Labour whips blundered by failing to appreciate the scale of the rebellion on their own side: they had also been outsmarted by a classic "under the radar" whipping operation by the Tories.
As a result, Labour crashed to only its second and third Commons defeats since Tony Blair came to power in 1997.
To add to Miss Armstrong's embarrassment, the Government lost the second, crucial division by just one vote. Had Mr Blair stayed - and not gone back to No 10 as he was told he could - it would have been a tie.
The Government would then have won because the Speaker, Michael Martin, would have used his casting vote to keep the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill in its original form, rejecting the watering down proposed by the House of Lords.
Unlike the rebellions over Iraq in 2003 and the anti-terrorism Bill last year, this was one the Labour whips should have contained with ease. It was a truly disastrous night for them.
"The first law of the whips is to get the intelligence from inside your party," said one former minister and rebel. "At no stage had they got a clue what their own MPs thought. I didn't have one conversation with them about the Bill."
It was not until 6pm on Tuesday - less than two hours before the crucial votes - that alarm bells began ringing in the Labour whips' office.
Miss Armstrong asked Mr Blair to come to Westminster for the first division - which the Government lost by 10 votes. It was immediately followed by a second vote. Miss Armstrong apparently told Mr Blair he did not need to stay and he went back to No 10. The Government lost by one.
[...]
In fact, the Tories decided to treat it as the equivalent of a three-line whip, making attendance and voting obligatory for Conservative MPs, though not telling their Labour opposite numbers that it had been upgraded.
The Liberal Democrats also worked closely with the Labour rebels and the Tories. Both Charles Kennedy, the former leader, and Mark Oaten, the former home affairs spokesman, made a reappearance at the Commons for the crucial votes.
There was no such discipline in Labour ranks.
Backbenchers said that they did not even get the normal daily reminders to alert the whips they had arrived at Westminster on Monday and Tuesday.
[...]
The rebels insisted that they were not out to get Mr Blair. "People were coming at it for all sorts of reasons; religious, civil liberties, freedom of speech, political reasons."
In blissful ignorance, the whips' office sanctioned a large group of Labour MPs to go campaigning for the forthcoming by-election in the Scottish seat of Dunfermline and West Fife - home to Gordon Brown, the Chancellor.
Up to 20 were given leave of absence. Observers of Scottish politics said Mr Brown is particularly keen for a good Labour vote and encouraged them up to Scotland.
While the hapless Miss Armstrong is taking the brunt of the blame, the problems go much deeper. Their roots lie in the Prime Minister's disdain for Parliament.
It is rare to see Mr Blair voting at Westminster. He may live just a couple of hundred yards away, but he has turned up for less than one in 10 divisions since he became Prime Minister - 221 out of 2,671.
When Labour had landslide majorities it did not matter, although many MPs believed it set a bad example.
[...]
Under Mr Blair they were banished to an anonymous corner of the nearby Cabinet Office to make room for No 10 spin doctors. Alastair Campbell moved into what used to be the Chief Whip's office.
On Tuesday night Mr Blair paid the price as he sunk to a defeat made all the more humiliating because it could so easily have been avoided.
I actually saw this episode, and remember snorting in derision that this could actually happen. Then again, what do I know -- I'm just a political scientist.
Also swiped from one of his commenters, Tresho, this:
Comic Rowan Atkinson was among the first to welcome the Government's defeat on its Bill to combat religious hatred today, and to applaud the enshrining in law of the right to ridicule religion.
[...]
Thanking MPs and organisations such as the National Secular Society and the Barnabas Fund, along with the Christian Institute and the Evangelical Alliance, who all campaigned ceaselessly against the legislation, he said: "Something I feel that I have learnt over this long campaign is that hate legislation, no matter how well intended, is never more than a mechanism to paper over the cracks in society.
"Of course, I would sympathise with anyone who says, 'I would rather look at the wallpaper than the cracks', and if such legislation can provide short term comfort to vulnerable communities, that is all to the good. But it will never provide any solutions to the ills of society. In the absence of other action, behind the paper, the wall will continue to crumble."
The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, who recently took his seat in the Lords, criticised the actions of the Government. "This has been a dog’s dinner from start to finish. The two amendments which were carried attempted to salvage an already flawed Bill. It was not necessary in the first place."
Dr Sentamu told The Times last week of his concern at this Government's propensity to make "too many laws".
Sounds right to me. This is, obviously, not entirely irrelevant to Other Events Around Us Just Now.
CARTOONS AND POLITICS. Judith Apter Klinghoffer, citing AL-AHRAM Online, the Eqyptian publication, and specifically a piece by Ramzy Baroud, a "Palestinian-American journalist," among other sources, points out a key underlying dynamic to current events: the protests are partially driven by an organized campaign of Muslim Brotherhood-types across Islamic lands as a weapon in their war for their style of Islamic radicalism against their repressive governments and those government's institutionalized, official (and tame) Islamic authorities.
Baroud:
But it's not the Western media's inconsistencies that I wish to focus on here. What I wish to examine are the inconsistencies of the Arab and Muslim collective response to aggression, tangible or otherwise.
The anti-Danish movement managed to build up across Muslim countries at such an impressive speed: grassroots collective action and decisive political moves led by various governments -- with Libya and Saudi Arabia on the helm -- quickly turned into determined diplomatic efforts. Arab League missions in Denmark and across Europe united in one of the most coordinated campaigns organised by Arabs since the 1973 War, heaping even more pressure on both Denmark and Norway. Meanwhile, a serious economic boycott campaign is rapidly translating into empty shelves in grocery stores that once offered Danish products across Saudi Arabia and other countries.
The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, although he didn't apologise personally, commended Jyllands-Posten for offering a clear apology for offending Muslims and Muslim nations for its editorial decision to publish the cartoons. But that would not suffice in the face of the gathering storm, as Arab League representatives are surely taking the matter to the United Nations, with the hope of passing a UN resolution, backed by sanctions that would protect religion from insults, according to the BBC.
While one must commend such a unified Arab and Muslim stance -- hoping that it would remain confined to legitimate forms of protest -- one cannot help but wonder where was such collectiveness when it was needed the most?
Then he sails off into wanting to know why such protests haven't been so widespread and effective against Israel, the "illegitimate US war on Iraq," and so on. Also, American fast food is evil:
[...] However, it is discouraging that the collective energy of the Muslim world is consumed punishing a small European country over a drawing, while US military bases infest the heart of the Arab world, and American fast food restaurants crowd every street corner, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Gulf, while few seem to notice or even care.
So I'm not addressing all that stuff. But I think the point about the dynamic in the Islamic world is important. It's always critical to understanding events anywhere that are directed at external factors to understand that they are almost always (there are occasional exceptions) driven by domestic reasons. This point can't be over-stated.
Klinghoffer says:
Anyone who misses the connections between "The days of Rage," the refusal of the Muslim governments to democratize and the determination of the Islamists to take over, misses the real story.
The anti-Danish campaign was mounted by Arab governments and organizations as a way to regain their legitimacy by demonstrating their efficacy by Punishing Denmark.
[...]
Having failed to declare victory and go home, the Muslims powers that be gave the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is an off shoot)an opportunity to take over the successful campaign. In fact, Bayoumi's venerable institution, Al Azhar, came under attack for not being forceful enough in "defense" of Islam."
The "disgruntled" Egyptian MP Hamdi Hassan, who is also a member of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, escalated the demands: "The Danish government needs to make a more formal apology in acknowledgment that freedom of expression does not mean people are free to insult prophets." When the European papers decided to republish the cartoons as to affirm the Western freedom of press, the debate was really on:
"Muslims might have miscalculated the manner in which they handled the crisis," noted prominent Islamic scholar Abdel-Sabour Shahine, who suggested that instead of pursuing a boycott of Danish products, the Islamic world should have shown more tolerance, by focusing on promoting dialogue with the west, and educating them more about Islam. "The Qur'an ordains Muslims to engage in peaceful dialogue and use a more logical approach with those of different creeds." The prophet himself, Shahine argued, was constantly subject to offence during the first years of his prophecy in Mecca, and his reactions were so tolerant that those who initially opposed him ended up becoming Muslim.
"After all," said Shahine, "we'd rather have the Danes apologising out of conviction, rather than because they feel threatened."
Others, like Hassan, continued to insist that the boycott was very effective in delivering an important message to the world: that Muslims are still "alive, and are ready to unite and move".
The question of who might lead that movement, however, was still very much up in the air. Many Egyptians were upset at what they called the "shamefully weak stance" of Al-Azhar, the Sunni world's foremost seat of learning. Al-Azhar's grand imam, often criticised for toeing the government line, had not been one of the first to speak up about the offensive cartoons. When he finally did, he sparked public outrage when he based his denunciation on the grounds that it is "not acceptable to ridicule dead people in general, and deceased prophets in particular"-- a statement that, albeit bearing the official seal of Al-Azhar, was heartily denied in a subsequent statement issued by Al-Azhar's Islamic Research Academy (IRA) on Wednesday.
Senior Al-Azhar cleric Mahmoud Ashour said that Al-Azhar scholars convened immediately after the publication of the offensive cartoons to study ways of countering them. "Our response appeared to be late because we had to first see how the Danish government would react," Ashour said. "But the press spares no effort in belittling the role of the grand imam, who loves Islam and the prophet more than anyone else."
Hassan and others remained sceptical of these kinds of claims. "The grand imam's response sounded even more offensive than the cartoons themselves because it supposedly came from the most prestigious seat of learning in the Islamic world," the MP said.
"How can Prophet Mohamed be compared with any other dead person?" asked Ibrahim El-Zaafarani, a Muslim Brotherhood member of the Shura Council who also serves as secretary-general of Alexandria's Doctors' Syndicate. "It's a shame, a shame."
Other scholars argued that the imam's statement ran counter to a principle enshrined in the Qur'an, which implies that Prophet Mohamed is spiritually alive amongst Muslims via his teachings. "If the grand imam is more interested in his [position]," El-Zaafarani said, "he needs to be made aware that the prestige of his seat stems from the grandiosity of his religion."
In the meantime, a host of other organisations -- including the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, the Federation of Arab Journalists, the International Union of Muslim Clergy, the Islamic Conference Organisation, the Arab League, and the Egyptian Parliament -- all joined the fray, issuing statements condemning the cartoons. Several protest marches are also being planned for Cairo and Alexandria this Friday.
In other words, having lost the battle, the Arab governments did what they have always done. Moved to the right to accommodate the Islamists. The Islamist warning to the West not to try to strengthen the hand of the moderates, can be found in yet another article in the same paper, it has the misleading name, "Arab Liberals, Unite!"
This seems correct to me.
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5.
ADDENDUM, 12:19 p.m.: Tangentially, here is a little development that might go little-noticed, as well, but shouldn't:
In Sudan, protests at the cartoons attracted as many as 15,000 people. Politicians then led the crowds in a march on the United Nations offices in Khartoum and called for holy war against any move to send a UN force to Sudan's war-ravaged Darfur region.
LOTR: THE MUSICAL has previewed. There are actually 434 stories on this in GoogleNews at this moment. I'm not making this number up. None actually strike me as fascinating.
HOW DID I MAKE IT TO THE 21ST CENTURY, AGAIN? The New York Timesreviews the DVD set of half of Time Tunnel. I was 7 years old when I watched this series in original broadcast, and I thought it was fucking moronic. How could they possible always wind up by coincidence at the site of famous events? How the hell could they land on the Titanic out of the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean (not to mention keep landing on Earth, and not above or below it or somewhere else in solar orbit)?
I was 7 years old and these questions seem completely obvious to me. (Okay, that's the kind of 7-year-old I was; not all that different from today, and yes, I see your point, thanks.)
My favorite moment, burned into my memory despite not having seen these shows in thirty years: Tony and Doug land on the Titanic as mentioned. What is their solution to the problem they see? (Setting aside that they never, in thirty episodes, manage to change a goddamned thing about the past [there were a couple of crazed episodes set in the future, and with visiting aliens, as the formula wore out, as well].)
They run up to the captain of the liner and yell at him: "Captain! This is the TITANTIC!"
Because that's the way to convince him the ship will hit an iceberg and sink. (They get hauled away by attendents and locked up as loony stowaways, and righteously so; unfortunately, they didn't drown, and went on to be in more equally stupid episodes.)
These freaking morons deserved every damn hard-luck story they wound up in.
Over to Frank Decaro:
A handsome actor who achieved teen-idol status as the surf hunk Moondoggie in a trio of "Gidget" films, Mr. Darren — wearing those form-fitting slacks and an olive green turtleneck — played Dr. Tony Newman on a 1966 ABC series called "The Time Tunnel." Fifteen of the show's 30 episodes, plus an unbroadcast extended version of the pilot, are now available on four double-sided discs.
A big-budget enterprise by mid-60's standards despite its lack of costume changes, the series followed two eternally emoting scientists from Project Tic Toc who inadvertently — was there ever another way? — found themselves racing up and down what the show's stentorian announcer called "the infinite corridors of time." Robert Colbert (who later spent a decade as Stuart Brooks on "The Young and the Restless") went along for companionship as Dr. Doug Phillips, while the former Miss America Lee Meriwether, as a fellow scientist named Dr. Ann MacGregor, watched and fretted from back home in the present.
The series ran for only one season, making it the least successful of four fantastically implausible (but fondly remembered) shows created and produced between 1964 and 1970 by Irwin Allen.
[...]
Later known as the master of such disaster films as "The Poseidon Adventure" and "The Towering Inferno," Mr. Allen infamously considered his TV series "running and jumping" shows. To his mind, the stories didn't need to make sense as long as those screens were packed with action, smoke and flying sparks. "Time Tunnel" embraced substantially less science and considerably more fiction than its competition that season, NBC's "Star Trek."
In the first episode of "Time Tunnel," logic is thrown out the nearest porthole when the Tic Toc docs land on the deck of the Titanic and try to persuade the ship's captain (played by Michael Rennie in a stick-on beard) to change his course — and the course of history — and avoid hitting that fateful iceberg. Even those of us who learned all our science from a pointy-eared Vulcan named Spock know you can't avert disaster without wreaking it along the time continuum.
But the "Time Tunnel" travelers didn't have the time for such contemplation: they had to take part in the War of 1812 (fighting a pre-"All in the Family" Carroll O'Connor, no less) and stand up to the Gestapo two days before D-Day. These guys didn't remember the Alamo, they relived it.
Today, the series is a guilty pleasure. Who wouldn't get a giggle out of a line like "Wherever he and Doug are now, at least they're together"? But all that action without a dull moment is exhausting. It is no wonder the show didn't last.
As early as the fourth episode, when the time travelers land inside the Japanese consulate in Honolulu on Dec. 6, 1941, Dr. MacGregor is already fed up. Exasperated, she seems to be thinking what we're thinking: If Doug and Tony had to land in Hawaii, why couldn't it have been during the filming of one of Mr. Darren's earlier beach party movies rather than on the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked?
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5. Fan website here. Another.
Lee Meriweather, of course, was also one of several Catwomen on that horrible Batman tv show that nearly destroyed the franchise. Fortunately for that tradition, Joel Schumacher eventually picked up the torch of terribleness and similarly destroyed the decent Tim Burton movie franchise, until the Great Restoration gave us The One True Batman Movie.
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5. The sets were hilariously as cheesy as the dialogue, by the way. Possibly if I had been an adult, it would have just cracked me up; instead, I wanted a serious time travel series, and this was as good at that as It's About Time, which was supposed to be funny, yet wasn't.
2/04/2006 10:10:00 PM|permanent link| |
6 comments
IT'S ALL GOOD says AG Gonzalez of NSA program. I'm not going to quote much of this, since most of it is just denial and assurance. Just a few bits:
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales plans to use a Congressional hearing on Monday to lash out at "misinformed, confused" news accounts about President George W. Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program, and to declare it "is not a dragnet," according to administration documents provided to TIME. "I cannot and will not address operational aspects of the program or other purported activities described in press reports," he plans to say in testimony prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee. "These press accounts are in almost every case, in one way or another, misinformed, confused, or wrong."
According to the documents, Gonzales plans to assert in his opening statement that seeking approval for the wiretaps from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court could result in delays that "may make the difference between success and failure in preventing the next attack." He will compare the program to telegraph wiretapping during the Civil War. In accompanying testimony, the Attorney General plans to leave open the possibility that President Bush will ask the court to give blanket approval to the program, a step that some lawmakers and even some Administration officials contend would put it on more solid legal footing.
In pointed written questions posed in advance by Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), Gonzales was asked whether he would "consider seeking approval from the FISA Court at this time for the ongoing surveillance program at issue." According to 11 pages of answers to the 15 questions, Gonzales will reply, "We use FISA where we can, and we always consider all of our legal options."
[...]
"Contrary to the speculation reflected in some media reporting," Gonzales writes, "the terrorist surveillance program is not a dragnet that sucks in all conversations and uses computer searches to pick out calls of interest. No communications are intercepted unless first it is determined that one end of the call is outside of the country and professional intelligence experts have probable cause (that is, ‘reasonable grounds to believe') that a party to the communication is a member or agent of al-Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organization."
[...]
Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat who was Senate Majority Leader at the time, wrote in the Washington Post in December that White House lawyers had used negotiations over the resolution to seek broader presidential authority within the U.S. and not just overseas. "I refused," Daschle wrote.
Some administration statements have suggested Bush went ahead with the program after concluding that Congress would reject legislation specifically authorizing it. However, Gonzales says in his answers to Specter that members of Congress "advised the Administration that more specific legislation could not be enacted without likely compromising the terrorist surveillance program by disclosing program details and operational limitations and capabilities to our enemies."
[...]
Specter asked Gonzales if the program allowed monitoring of foreign calls if they were routed through switches physically located on U.S. soil. "None of the intercepts at issue constitutes a violation of law or regulation," Gonzales replies. "I cannot give a more complete answer here, because I cannot go into operational details."
[...]
Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a letter to President Bush on Wednesday that the "activities of the NSA program can — and should — be accomplished within the law, not by circumventing it." Harman, one of the few lawmakers who has been briefed on the program, wrote that she is "not clear why FISA as presently drafted cannot cover the entire program."
Gonzales contends in his 10-page opening statement for Monday's hearing that fighting al-Qaeda "is, in fundamental respects, a war of information," and that asking the FISA court for permission for each intercept "would necessarily introduce a significant factor of delay, and there would be critical holes in our early warning system." Lawmakers in both parties have asked why the Administration could not use a FISA provision allowing petitions to the court after monitoring has begun. Gonzales says there "is a serious misconception" about those provisions, and that the administration could not begin surveillance "without knowing that we meet FISA's normal requirements." He said a FISA application "involves a substantial process" that "consumes valuable resources and results in significant delay," when what is needed is "the maximum in speed and agility."
Don't expect any real news to come from Gonzalez's testimony.
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5. And, yes, both Blogger and apparently all of Blogspot have been down most of the day. I won't be surprised if they keep popping up and down. Naturally, "status.blogger.com" was equally inaccessible. Genius system. In fact, right this moment, if you go to that URL, you get a blank page with this in the upper left corner: "ok".
FLACK HACK YACKS WITH KNACK AS IF ON CRACK. First, the good news:
A week after NASA's top climate scientist complained that the space agency's public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness" throughout the agency.
"It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency's 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical staff."
But also:
Other National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists and public-affairs employees came forward this week to say that beyond Dr. Hansen's case, there were several other instances in which political appointees had sought to control the flow of scientific information from the agency.
They called or e-mailed The Times and sent documents showing that news releases were delayed or altered to mesh with Bush administration policies.
In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times.
And in December 2004, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory complained to the agency that he had been pressured to say in a news release that his oceanic research would help advance the administration's goal of space exploration.
On Thursday night and Friday, The Times sent some of the documents to Dr. Griffin and senior public-affairs officials requesting a response.
While Dr. Griffin did not respond directly, he issued the "statement of scientific openness" to agency employees, saying, "NASA has always been, is and will continue to be committed to open scientific and technical inquiry and dialogue with the public."
Because NASA encompasses a nationwide network of research centers on everything from cosmology to climate, Dr. Griffin said, some central coordination was necessary. But he added that changes in the public-affairs office's procedures "can and will be made," and that a revised policy would "be disseminated throughout the agency."
Asked if the statement came in response to the new documents and the furor over Dr. Hansen's complaints, Dr. Griffin's press secretary, Dean Acosta, replied by e-mail:
"From time to time, the administrator communicates with NASA employees on policy and issues. Today was one of those days. I hope this helps. Have a good weekend."
[...]
Many people working at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said that at the same time, there was a slowdown in these centers' ability to publish anything related to climate.
Most of these career government employees said they could speak only on condition of anonymity, saying they feared reprisals. But their accounts tightly meshed with one another.
One NASA scientist, William Patzert, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, confirmed the general tone of the agency that year.
"That was the time when NASA was reorganizing and all of a sudden earth science disappeared," Mr. Patzert said. "Earth kind of got relegated to just being one of the 9 or 10 planets. It was ludicrous."
In another incident, on Dec. 2, 2004, the propulsion lab and NASA headquarters issued a news release describing research on links between wind patterns and the recent warming of the Indian Ocean.
It included a statement in quotation marks from Tong Lee, a scientist at the laboratory, saying the analytical tools could "advance space exploration" and "may someday prove useful in studying climate systems on other planets."
But after other scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory queried Dr. Lee on the statement, he e-mailed public-affairs officers saying he disavowed the quotation and demanded that the release be taken off the Web site. His message was part of a sequence of e-mail messages exchanged between scientists and public-affairs officers. That string of messages was provided to The Times on Friday by a NASA official.
In his e-mail message, Dr. Lee explained that he had cobbled together part of the statement on space exploration under "the pressure of the new HQ requirement for relevance to space exploration" and under a timeline requiring that NASA "needed something instantly."
The press office dropped the quotation from its version of the release, but in Washington, the NASA headquarters public affairs office did not.
Dr. Lee declined to be interviewed for this article.
[...]
The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M;, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.
In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."
It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."
The memo also noted that The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual specified the phrasing "Big Bang theory." Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's boss, said in an interview yesterday that for that reason, it should be used in all NASA documents.
The Deutsch memo was provided by an official at NASA headquarters who said he was upset with the effort to justify changes to descriptions of science by referring to politically charged issues like intelligent design. Senior NASA officials did not dispute the message's authenticity.
Mr. Wild declined to be interviewed; Mr. Deutsch did not respond to e-mail or phone messages. On Friday evening, repeated queries were made to the White House about how a young presidential appointee with no science background came to be supervising Web presentations on cosmology and interview requests to senior NASA scientists.
The only response came from Donald Tighe of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "Science is respected and protected and highly valued by the administration," he said.
This is clearly reflected in the quality of their appointments.
You noticed that bit about Deutsch being "a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office," right? I can't resist pointing out what I wrote here:
I'm willing to bet a quarter that "George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters" (see previous story linked just below) was not Dr. Griffin's personal first choice, and rather have a strong suspicion that Deutch came off a list sent over from the White House. Call me crazy.
These things aren't difficult to discern, no matter from how afar, when you understand how they work.
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5. Prior directly related post here. Mark Kleiman also has a good post here.
Kind of a good thing no one actually was hurt, other than as in "wits, frightened out of."
Most Canadians still haven't forgotten U.S. Air Force Maj. Harry Schmidt's name and style of friendly greeting, I think, nor his punishment, even though few Americans would recognize the name or story.
HAMAS WOMEN. Another good story from Steven Erlanger (this is not unusual).
To a degree specialists said was new in the conservative Muslim society of the Gaza Strip, Hamas used its women to win, sending them door to door with voter lists and to polling places for last-minute campaigning.
Now in surprise control of Palestinians politics, Hamas can boast that women hold 6 of the party's 74 seats in parliament — giving the women of the radical group, guided in all ways by their understanding of Islam, a new and unaccustomed public role.
"We are going to lead factories, we are going to lead farmers," said Jamila al-Shanty, 48, a professor at the Islamic University here who won a seat in parliament. "We are going to spread out through society. We are going to show the people of the world that the practice of Islam in regards to women is not well known."
If Ms. Shanty's prediction is true, the role of women will certainly not be along the secular Western lines followed largely, and with real strides for women, under decades of leadership by Yasir Arafat's now defeated Fatah faction. The model will be Islam: women in Hamas wear head scarves and follow strict rules for social segregation from men.
[...]
The Islamic University, an oasis of order in the grit and chaos of Gaza, shows as well as any place the conflicting images of Hamas in relation to the women who strongly support it. A stronghold for Hamas, though not exclusively for its supporters, the university is split in two by sex, and it can be jarring to cross the corridor from crowds without a woman's face to another of only women, all with their heads covered, some wearing the full veil, the nikab. And on the day of the rally, some also plopped a green Hamas baseball cap on top.
Yet Hamas encourages, and in some cases pays for, the education of these women. Sabrin al-Barawi, 21, a chemistry student, said she had grown up with Hamas programs for women: social groups, leadership courses, Koran classes.
"It's not only religious," said Ahlan Shameli, 21, who is studying computers. "It's the Internet, computers."
"Before Hamas, women were not aware of the political situation," she said. "But Hamas showed and clarified what was going on. Women have become much more aware."
In nearly two decades, the top tier of Hamas's leadership has seemed very much reserved for men. But supporters of Hamas, as well as those of Fatah and other specialists, agreed with Ms. Shameli that Hamas had earned strong support among women. In fact, studies and results from municipal elections show women support the group in higher numbers than men.
If the men's most visible role has been fighting Israel, Hamas's social programs have attracted the loyalty of women. Hamas offers assistance programs for widows of suicide bombers and for poor people, health clinics, day care, kindergartens and preschools, in addition to beauty parlors and women-only gyms.
Women "are the ones who take kids to clinics," said Mkhaimar Abusada, professor of political science at Al Azhar University here. "They are the ones who take children to schools."
It seems quite obvious that many mothers would naturally support those who have helped their children with clinics and schools, although I recall seeing little discussion of this.
And during the elections, he said, Hamas mobilized these same women as if it had been "building up for this occasion for 30 years," using them as grass-roots campaign workers.
"It's something noticeable in the Gaza Strip," he said. "In Palestinian society, our values do not accept women to go out and campaign in the street. It's really a new phenomenon, especially for Hamas."
Reem Abu Athra, who directs women's affairs in the Fatah youth wing, said that her party did not seem to understand how mobilized Hamas's women were generally — and that it did not match the grass-roots work by Hamas women during the elections. She said that Fatah seemed to think it would naturally win the women's vote, as the more secular party that has been in some ways a leader in the Arab world in rights for women.
"Fatah took women for granted, and this is one reason it lost," she said.
Seems quite plausible to me.
The questions now seem to be what role Hamas's women will play, and exactly how that will be expressed in the rules of Islam.
Naima Sheikh Ali, a Fatah legislator who runs a group for women here, said that Hamas's strict interpretation of Islam would remain a bar to true participation by women. They cannot, for instance, be judges under Islam, she said, and will generally remain segregated and pushed to the side.
"Yes, they respect women, but as they conceive that respect," she said. "It is from a religiously fundamental view. For the women's movement, this will set us back several steps."
Ms. Shanty, one of the new Hamas legislators, begged to differ. She said that women, and especially the wives of top Hamas leaders, had long played a central role in Hamas's leadership, though she said that had not been publicized to protect them.
"Every decision that is taken by Hamas is passed to us, not after the decision is made but before," she said.
One measure of participation by women may be the extent that they take part in addressing the main problems facing Palestinians, not only on social issues that affect women, families or children.
In an interview before she won a legislative seat, Mouna Mansour, 44, a physics teacher and widow of Jamal Mansour, an assassinated Hamas leader, seemed very much engaged in the central issues. The peace process with Israel, she said, was dead. There should be a Palestinian state, but not at the cost of Jerusalem or the claims of Palestinian refugees, who under previous negotiations would not be permitted to move into what is today Israel.
Hamas, she said, needs to rebuild the economy, get rid of poverty and unemployment and, for now, to continue the cease-fire with Israel.
But she also defended the decision of a young Nablus man to become a suicide bomber. "Why not ask the question from another angle?" she said. "Why would he blow himself up if he was not subject to such great pressures? What leads you to do such a bitter thing? People do this from anger and injustice, to bring back life to their own people by sacrificing their lives."
But there is also unease over what Hamas might mean for women. At least one Islamic University student said Hamas represented an unknown for women like her. The student, Rula Zaanin, 19, said that Hamas had, at least, earned her trust.
"A lot of Palestinians love Hamas and wanted them," she said. "But we don't know what will happen."
Hamas leaders, showing how their role has changed since their election success last week, quickly and publicly reacted to calm fears of Gaza's small Christian population, only 3,000 people. On Thursday a top Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, visited the only Catholic church in Gaza to condemn any threats against Christians.
"He said he is protecting us not because he is Hamas," said the Rev. Manuel Musallam of the Holy Family Roman Catholic Church, who said he has long and friendly relations with Hamas. "But he is protecting Christians and our institutions as the state of Palestine and as a government."
[...]
Hamas also seemed to be making possible moves toward Israel: In an article published Friday in a Palestinian newspaper, Khaled Mashal, the top Hamas political leader, who lives in Syria, said that while Hamas would never recognize Israel's right to exist, it was prepared to discuss a long-term truce.
"If you are willing to accept the principle of a long-term truce, then we will be ready to negotiate with you over the conditions of such a truce," he wrote.
Previous Hamas statements about a truce included, among other demands, the requirement that Israel pull back to its 1967 borders.
I hear rumors that there's other news of late about cartoons. I like a good cartoon, but given the vast plethora of idiotic posts on these cartoons, I have little to say that couldn't be boiled down to the obvious: violence bad, responding with words good.
But a few links, without comment, for your reading and information pleasure: this, this, this, this, and this. See what you think.
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5 for the initial Hamas (Islamic Resistance Party) story; 2 out of 5 for the other Times story; 3.5 out of 5 for the last links.
2/04/2006 12:31:00 PM|permanent link| |
0 comments
The plan is to capitalize on the popularity of the Red Bull genre while trading on the retro cachet of Tab, with those iconic pink cans—a plan that could threaten the sanctity of one of journalism’s secret, and most self-conscious, power cliques: the cult of Tab lovers, who have persisted in drinking the pioneering diet soda, despite its virtual disappearance from the market.
“This is a lonely but inspired society,” David Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic Monthly and National Journal, said recently, before news of the brand’s reëngineering had spread. “You can’t imagine the purchasing and trucking and warehousing issues we address in getting Tab into Washington.”
[...]
Present-day Tab enthusiasts must seek out wholesalers (New York Beverage, in the Bronx, is a local favorite) or rely on a kind of sixth soda sense—“the ability to spot the pink,” David Edelstein, the film critic for New York, calls it—in obtaining their daily fixes.
[...]
At the end of last term, Isaacs threw a party for his students, at which he served Tab. “I was surprised at how many of them drank it,” he said. “One was putting Scotch in it. I mean, that sounds fucking awful.” Isaacs no longer drinks alcohol, for health reasons, but he doesn’t much mind, because he thinks that the flinty taste of Tab is like a fine Sancerre.
[...]
Tab Energy, for its part, is “really good-tasting,” according to a Coke spokesman, and “reminiscent of a liquid Jolly Rancher,” according to Fashion Week Daily, which recommends vodka as a mixer. The new can is slimmer, but it’s still pink, with the same Pop-art font. Whereas old Tab has thirty-one milligrams of caffeine and zero calories, Tab Energy has ninety-five milligrams and five calories.
And so on. Never a drink of mine, I've known fantatics in the past. All women, I think, though perhaps my memory is selective.
It would be interesting, of course, if a Coke spokesperson said Tab Energy was “really bad-tasting.”
One can be moderate in any number of different respects. One can hold moderate political views. One can be only moderately committed to whatever political views one holds. One can be quite committed to some position, and willing to fight hard for it, but not willing to do literally anything in support of it. No doubt there are lots of other ways to be moderate.
I am never sure whether or not to say that I hold moderate political views. I think of myself that way, but the political spectrum has shifted so far to the right that I think that just be staying put, I have ended up farther to the left than when I started. This implies nothing about either my willingness to fight for those views, or whether I accept limits on what I am willing to do to advance them. In fact, I do accept limits on what I am willing to do to further political goals, limits that I take to be set by morality and my belief that our present political system, for all its flaws, is a lot better than anarchy. But this doesn't imply anything about my willingness to fight hard for what I believe within those limits. In particular, it doesn't follow from my (or anyone else's) being moderate in either my political views or my acceptance of limits on permissible tactics that I am wimpy or half-hearted. (I may be, but that wouldn't be why.)
Tactical Thinking: There is a difference between attending to tactics and being willing to compromise one's core principles in order to win elections. Anyone who cares at all about her political goals should attend to tactics: caring about your goals means wanting them to prevail, and attention to tactics is attention to what course of action will be most likely to help them prevail. This isn't a way of compromising your core values; it's essential to being committed to them.
Being willing to compromise your supposed "core values" in order to win elections shows that the values in question are not what matters most to you. If you're compromising because winning elections is essential to achieving some political goal that matters even more to you than the alleged "core values", then that goal matters more to you than they do. If you just want to win, period, however many goals you have to sacrifice in order to do so, then winning is your core value, and if I have to vote for you to avoid someone even worse, I'll do so while holding my nose.
But inattention to tactics shows that you aren't really committed to your supposed "core values" either. There is no special bonus prize for simply announcing your allegiance to the right side and then proceeding to pay no attention to how to achieve its goals. One might think there is if one thought that there was a real conflict between idealism and realism (outside of foreign relations, where these words have special senses.) Idealism is about having noble ideals: a noble vision of what the world should be like. Realism is about having an accurate view of the way the world is, and of what steps need to be taken if one wants to change it. Realism does not require idealism, but idealism always requires realism, since, again, you do not care enough about your ideals if you pay no attention to how to achieve them.
[...]
I want Democrats to be firmly committed to their views, and to be willing to fight for them. I want them to be tactically shrewd, but never to compromise what matters most. I want them to reframe as many issues as possible in ways that allow us to claim whatever is attractive about them for our own. Most of all, I want them to recognize that there is no reason to accept public opinion as it is. It can be changed, but only by people who articulate a consistent and attractive position, and who are genuinely committed to it.
One of the things that bothers me most about a lot of the Democrats in Congress is that they do not seem to be able or willing to do this. We deserve better.
I'd like to say "so say we all." But we don't.
But I do.
There's more: Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5. RTWT.
ADDENDUM, 11:30 p.m.: This Timothy Burke piece, which is quite lengthy, strikes me as making some interesting points (that I wouldn't attempt to summarize, save to say that they're about distinctions between liberals and left radicals) worth mentioning in the context of the above; it's possibly a bit of a large mouthful of a post for some, but then, not for others. RTRS: 3 out of 5 as interested.
ADDENDUM: 2/04/06, 12:28 a.m.: Something I neglected to say is that I agree with Tim, agree with Scott Eric Kaufman whom he links to, and disagree with Paul Buhle, one of the founders of "the new SDS," whom Kaufman in turn links to.
I'm pretty much a "liberal," more than not, and distinctly far more than I share many "radical" left views. I hate talking in generalities and labels, since I'm, as we know, very much an issue-by-issue guy, but in the specific context here, I'll declare that, while retaining the right to speak directly to specific issues as preferable, and to reject signing on for a general prix-fix in favor of a la carte.
2/03/2006 01:28:00 PM|permanent link| |
4 comments
PLAY MISTY FOR ME, AND SPYING SATELLITES WITH YOUR LITTLE EYE. Nice little Wired magazine story on the satellite-tracking hobbyists, specifically, military surveillance satellites, and the recent obsession with the stealth satellite known as "Misty."
I've always followed these issues, of course, and was sad when in the mid/late Eighties, I had the "intelligence/covert ops" nonfiction purview at Avon Books amongst my many portfolios, and I tried desperately to get authorization to buy paperback rights to James Burrows' Deep Black, which was the definitive book on spy satellites up to then, but didn't succeed (Berkeley Books out-bid us); long excerpt here. It's out-of-print (O/P) now, and ten years out of date, but still a good book; the Amazon link mentions some other good books on the topic.
Anyway, nice little Wired piece. Tease:
Sometime around dawn on the first day of the 1991 Gulf War, Ted Molczan was woken by a mysterious phone call. Molczan had been up until 3:30 am in his Toronto apartment, riveted by the televised images of Tomahawk missiles raining down on Baghdad, so he was groggy when the phone rang. A male voice with a thick accent said: "I know you're involved in satellite tracking. I'm interested in doing a trade." The caller offered Molczan information on the orbiting patterns of a constellation of eight US satellites. In exchange, he wanted to know the orbits for the CIA's KH-11 "Keyhole" satellites - from space they can discern an object as small as a softball, and they were sending US forces hi-res digital imagery of Iraq and Kuwait.
The man made no apology for the early hour and wouldn't say why he wanted the information. But one thing was clear: He had found the right guy.
A prior post that touches on Misty, without using the name is here. I'm sure I made another post about the Congressional debate about Misty, and the problems debating spending the money without being able to discuss it in public, somewhere between late 2003 and mid 2005, but I can't quickly find it admidst the number of posts I've done on satellites and intelligence.
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 as interested.
In a non-sequitur, save that I don't want to do too many posts on Wired magazine pieces, this is a decent one-pager on comics/manga/graphic novelist Paul Pope, and his new Batman-in-2039 (actually called Batman: Year 100) graphic novel.
2/03/2006 11:50:00 AM|permanent link| |
0 comments
Thursday, February 02, 2006
CAN'T... RESIST. I thought of blogging this post early this morning, but I hate to ever link to the Malkin, and it's not hard for me to talk myself out of posting. I wound up making the point in a comment here.
But now I'll note it here.
It's just so very Malkin to over here be complaining about the terrible offensiveness of Toles' Washington Post cartoon, and over here, just a few entries away, she’s busily standing up for the rights of cartoonists to be deeply offensive.
I'm sure she has no cognitive dissonance whatever. Have to have cognizance, first.
Read The Rest Scale: eh; just typical Malkin nutziness, after all.
ADDENDUM: 2/04/06, 1:25 p.m.: I'm one of Malkin's unnamed "moonbat readers". (As mentioned in comments below, I got a hit from her SiteMeter, suggesting a strong likelihood of a quick glance at this, though, of course, perhaps not.)
2/02/2006 09:07:00 PM|permanent link| |
10 comments
"We started talking about 10 or 15 or 20 years from now," said Rickard, "when there are no more airplanes for fighter pilots to fly and everything's done remotely with unmanned vehicles. What's going to happen to guys like us that want to fly fighters and pull 9 Gs and do all the things that we get to do now?" To Rickard and Grantham, the answer was obvious: They'll fly rocket racers.
[...]
Last month, the RRL cut a deal with the state of New Mexico and the city of Las Cruces to locate its headquarters there. "As the future home of Rocket Racing League we look forward to welcoming the hundreds of thousands of people who will come to New Mexico to enjoy NASCAR in the sky," said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson in a statement. Las Cruces donated 10 acres of land to the RRL for a 50,000-square-foot headquarters building at the airport, and has also reserved 10 aircraft hangars.
[...]
Spectacular, chest-pounding rocket boosts up to 30 seconds long will be followed by periods of silent coasting. After burning through its fuel supply, each X-Racer will have to land for a pit stop, during which ground crews will quickly refuel it so it can take off again. Four or more pit stops will be required to complete each 60- to 90-minute race.
The ability to "pit" rockets like race cars is just one of the unique technical challenges faced by the RRL. RRL contractor Xcor Aerospace had already demonstrated its ability to build rocket engines that could be shut down and relit multiple times during a single flight with its EZ-Rocket prototype plane. But rapid refueling of a cryogenic liquid like liquid oxygen had never been tried before Xcor developed the RRL's proprietary system for doing so.
The RRL has also had to develop fighter-pilot-style heads-up displays that until now have only been available on military aircraft. Pilots will use these displays to fly through virtual racetracks outlined by floating, 3-D wickets that are precisely plotted by on-board GPS navigation systems. Fans on the ground will see the virtual track superimposed over the action on giant TV screens as well as on specially developed handheld units. A video game also in development by the RRL will pit fans at home against actual pilots during races.
Zoomie go the zoomies. Good to know there will be something else for them to do when it's otherwise mostly just drones droning.
OTHER THINGS NEW CAMERA SYSTEMS CAN DO have been moving along, as outlined by Noah Schactman:
The camera network - using software from 3VR Security Inc., a San Francisco company that makes surveillance technology - already knew what the houseman looked like; facial recognition algorithms had built a profile of him over time. With a couple of mouse clicks, managers combed through hours of videotape taken that night by the hotel's 16 cameras, and found every place he had been - including the back entrance he slipped out of, three hours into his shift. He became 1 of 10 employees dismissed from the hotel since 3VR's surveillance package was installed last June.
Until recently, the only place where an employee could have been caught that easily was in a Hollywood script. Digital spy cameras can instantly pick people out of crowds on the television show "24." But real-world video surveillance was stuck in the VCR age, taking countless hours to sift through blurry black-and-white tapes. Stopping a problem in progress was nearly impossible, unless a guard just happened to be staring at the right video monitor.
But surveillance companies, using networks of cheap Web-connected cameras and powerful new video-analysis software, are starting to turn the Hollywood model into reality. Faces and license plates can now be spotted, in almost real time, at ports, military bases and companies. Security perimeters can be changed or strengthened with a mouse click. Feeds from hundreds of cameras can be combined into a single desktop view. And videotape that used to take hours, even days, to scour is searched in minutes.
Some experts question the effectiveness of such "intelligent video" systems, which are sold by ObjectVideo, Verint and VistaScape as well, and worry about the privacy implications. But Brian Russell, chief of the Drake's engineering and maintenance departments, is happy with the results. "People know we're watching," he said. "Word travels fast. Fear travels as well."
The first step in setting up the Drake's surveillance system was tying the hotel's cameras together. That has become easier in recent years, now that digital video images can be collected directly from the cameras that record them - through the same closed Internet protocol-based network that links the hotel's computers to one another.
But digital video requires far more space on the network than e-mail or Web pages do - so much that the extra data traffic can quickly cause the whole network to grind to a halt if it is not managed properly. The trick is for the system to send as little high-resolution video as possible - and instead pass on short descriptions about what the cameras are seeing.
That is where 3VR comes in. Every time someone passes in front of a camera connected to the system, the software logs a separate "motion event." The time and location of the event - along with a still picture - are sent to a security guard's desktop computer. The guard can then browse through these pictures instead of staring at a bank of black-and-white monitors showing images that are constantly changing, waiting for something to happen. If a picture catches the guard's eye, he can click on it to see the video of the scene.
The system shows more than what the cameras see. Often, it can tell who the cameras are watching, too. The 3VR software assigns an identification number to every person a camera spots, and establishes a profile based largely on the geometry of the person's face. Whenever the face is captured from a different angle or in a different light, the system creates another mathematical model. Each time a person is taped, another model is added to the profile, increasing its accuracy.
Once the profiles reach a certain critical level of detail, it becomes fairly simple to search the "motion events" to find out where someone has been - essentially the same as entering a name on Google. The video forensics made possible by such software can be valuable; similar technology was used to trace the suspects in the London terrorist bombing last summer. But 3VR can be set up to do more than retrace a person's steps. The system can also set off an alert almost instantly if someone on a watch list enters a building or a restricted area. That ability is one reason the Central Intelligence Agency has become interested in the company, said Gilman Louie, who recently stepped down as the chief executive of In-Q-Tel, the agency's investment arm. It took part in a $10 million round of financing for 3VR, a 25-employee company led by former executives at TiVo and Inktomi, an Internet distribution company.
"We've had cameras," Mr. Louie said. "But their biggest weakness is being proactive - 'Hey, this guy's been here before, stop him.' And that's because we've had to be 100 percent reliant on the operators. You can't expect a guard to remember a face months after the fact. But put a little intelligence into the recording box, and it can remember for months at a time."
For now - and the foreseeable future - 3VR's system is effective only in small, controlled environments where the lighting is consistent and only a few people pass in front of one camera at a time. Picking out criminal suspects on the street or in a crowd - as the city of Tampa, Fla., tried to do in its Ybor City district from 2001 to 2003 - is still beyond the ability of 3VR and every other surveillance system.
Bruce Schneier, of course, comments:
[...] "These things aren't designed to catch the bad guys," Mr. Schneier said. "They're for watching the good and the stupid. The bad guys, they'll just wear a hat and sunglasses the day that they want to avoid the camera." (Mr. Russell of 3VR says that his software can see through some disguises.)
To Mr. Schneier, the camera networks are part of a larger trend - along with Britain's plans to monitor every car on every major road, and the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program - toward "wholesale surveillance, the kind of stuff Stalin only dreamed of," he said. "The question is, do we want that?"
But he says that intelligent video systems like 3VR's can fill an important, and less controversial, security need. "The cameras are best in no-man's land: 'If anyone climbs this fence, sound an alarm,' " he said.
So I really should rush to finally put a webcam on myself, and stream it to Amygdala, right? That would really make donations shoot up. To get me to turn it off.
THOSE DANGEROUS GUYS AT GUANTANAMO. Ignorant nitwits keep "explaining" how everyone held at Guantanamo is a violent terrorist "captured on the battlefield" who was killing Americans. More on how this is nonsense later.
But you may not be familiar with the name of "Abdallah Tabarak." Let's find out more about him, shall we?
For more than a decade, Osama bin Laden had few soldiers more devoted than Abdallah Tabarak. A former Moroccan transit worker, Tabarak served as a bodyguard for the al Qaeda leader, worked on his farm in Sudan and helped run a gemstone smuggling racket in Afghanistan, court records here show.
During the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when al Qaeda leaders were pinned down by U.S. forces, Tabarak sacrificed himself to engineer their escape. He headed toward the Pakistani border while making calls on Osama bin Laden's satellite phone as bin Laden and the others fled in the other direction.
Tabarak was captured and taken to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was classified as such a high-value prisoner that the Pentagon repeatedly denied requests by the International Committee of the Red Cross to see him.
This is clearly a guy so dangerous that it's reasonable to hold him indefinitely, right?
Then, after spending almost three years at the base, he was suddenly released.
Today, the al Qaeda loyalist known locally as the "emir" of Guantanamo walks the streets of his old neighborhood near Casablanca, more or less a free man. In a decision that neither the Pentagon nor Moroccan officials will explain publicly, Tabarak was transferred to Morocco in August 2004 and released from police custody four months later.
Tabarak's odyssey from Afghanistan to Guantanamo and back to his native land illustrates the grit and at times fanatical determination of one bin Laden recruit. Yet his story also shows how little is known publicly about al Qaeda figures who were captured after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Major gaps remain in his account, and terrorism experts and intelligence officials continue to debate whether he was a member of al Qaeda's inner circle or its rank and file.
His case also highlights mysteries of U.S. priorities in deciding who to keep and who to let go. As the Pentagon gears up to hold its first military tribunals at Guantanamo after four years of preparations, it has released a prisoner it called a key operative. At the same time, it retains under heavy guard men whose background and significance are never discussed.
Eighteen months after he left Guantanamo, Tabarak, 50, still faces minor criminal offenses in Rabat, the capital, such as passport forgery and conspiracy. But his attorney predicts that it's only a matter of time before the case is dropped and all allegations of terrorist activities are dismissed.
[...]
A review of Moroccan court documents, including records of his interrogations by Moroccan investigators, shows the U.S. military had good reason to consider Tabarak a valuable catch. In addition to his firsthand knowledge of how bin Laden survived Tora Bora, he had worked for the al Qaeda leader since 1989 and was often at his side as he built the terrorist network from bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan.
According to the documents, details of which other foreign intelligence officials confirmed, Tabarak served as a jack-of-all-trades for members of the inner circle. For several years, he received his orders and a regular salary from Saeed Masri, an al Qaeda financier, military training camp leader and relative of bin Laden.
Tabarak also dedicated his family to the cause. One daughter, Asia, married a top al Qaeda operations commander, Abu Feraj Libi, who was captured in Pakistan in May 2005 and is blamed for assassination plots against Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
A son, Omar, fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001 and was captured by Afghan allies of the Americans. When he was released in a prisoner swap, bin Laden threw a feast to celebrate, according to Tabarak's statements to interrogators.
Definitely not a guy we like, right? So what's going on with releasing him?
[...] Defense Department officials declined to say why Tabarak was released from Guantanamo, in August 2004, when he and four other Moroccan detainees were handed over to authorities in Rabat. "The decision to transfer or release a detainee is based on many factors, including whether the detainee is of further intelligence value to the United States and whether the detainee is believed to pose a continuing threat to the United States if released," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.
According to interviews in Rabat with people who are familiar with Tabarak's case, however, Moroccan officials had pressed the U.S. military for many months to hand over Tabarak, arguing that they would have a better chance of persuading him to reveal secrets about al Qaeda.
Moroccan interrogators visited Tabarak and other Moroccan detainees at Guantanamo on two occasions and urged them to cooperate, according to his attorney and two fellow prisoners. "They came to see us and brought us coffee and sandwiches," said Mohammed Mazouz, one of the Moroccans who was later released with Tabarak. "But the Americans, they would just abuse us."
So it sounds like another rendition, right? Let the Moroccans work him over but good, eh? But.
[...] Tabarak's next scheduled court appearance is Friday in Rabat. Officials with the Moroccan Communications Ministry declined to comment on the case.
Mohammed Darif, a Moroccan terrorism analyst and political science professor, said Moroccan intelligence officials have overstated Tabarak's role in al Qaeda. He said bin Laden relied almost exclusively on fellow Saudis and tribal relatives from Yemen to provide for his personal safety and was unlikely to accept an uneducated, poor Moroccan into his inner circle.
"People who have known him all along say that Tabarak was a serious player but that perhaps his reputation is a little overblown," said Darif, who interviewed Tabarak after his release from Guantanamo. "He may have been a loyal worker, but he's not sophisticated. When you talk to him, you see pretty clearly that the guy does not have a strong personality."
But other intelligence sources in Europe and the Middle East suggest that his behavior at Guantanamo is further confirmation of his importance. There, they say, he developed a reputation as a tough-minded leader among the detainees. Moroccan officials have described him as an "emir" of the camp who resisted his American interrogators and catalyzed hunger strikes among prisoners.
Defense Department memos obtained by The Washington Post in 2004 show that Guantanamo officials repeatedly prevented inspectors from the International Committee of the Red Cross from seeing Tabarak.
Although the Red Cross was supposed to have access to all persons in military custody, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller told Red Cross inspectors on Oct. 9, 2003, that they could not visit Tabarak or three other detainees "because of military necessity," according to the memos. On a follow-up visit Feb. 2, 2004, Miller informed Red Cross officials that they could see anyone at the base, except Tabarak. Miller once again cited "military necessity." A Defense Department spokesman declined to comment on the memos.
Tabarak has told his attorney and other detainees that he was kept in an isolation cell during most of his stay at Guantanamo. For about one year, he said, he was interrogated only while blindfolded, so he could not see his captors or even know for certain if he was in Cuba or another country.
So why is this guy walking free in the streets of Casablanca? (Although I assume he's under close surveillance.)
He must be there for the waters.
Maybe he's made a deal to work for us; maybe he's being dangled to see who he contacts. Maybe we've traded him to the Moroccans for something more valuable. Maybe it's a bureaucratic error. Maybe Martians used mind-control satellite beams. The real answer? I have no idea. Worth wondering about, though, isn't it?
For some info on people not remotely "picked up on the battlefield" who are held at Guantanamo Bay, try this. Please. 5 out of 5.
Also hereand here, for starters. There's plenty more info available.
For more on rendition, read these posts (I could give you strings of my posts on these topics, but Katherine and Hilzoy's are better).
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5 for the initial Washington Post story on Abdallah Tabarak. Jeanne D'Arc also has a post. (I have my own post coming on the Haiti story, which I've been dawdling about since Monday.)
2/02/2006 11:50:00 AM|permanent link| |
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THE UNBLINKING EYE. I've yet to own a digital camera (lack of budget, not lack of desire), but there was a time when my job required me to pay fairly close attention to the field. It's been a few years, and recent developments are damned impressive:
By some tallies, 92 percent of all cameras sold are now digital.
!
[...] Next, there's the end of the megapixel race. "In compact cameras, I think that the megapixel race is pretty much over," says Chuck Westfall, director of media for Canon's camera marketing group. "Seven- and eight-megapixel cameras seem to be more than adequate. We can easily go up to a 13-by-19 print and see very, very clear detail."
Yes, quite.
[...] IMAGE STABILIZERS The hot trend for 2006 is image stabilization. This feature, available in a flood of new camera models, improves your photos' clarity by ironing out your little hand jiggles.
It's a feature that's been around for years, but only in the higher end models; now it's becoming standard save on the low end.
[...] Today, camcorders still take crummy photos, but digital still cameras take increasingly high-quality movies.
[...]
Canon, in particular, is pushing the envelope here. Its PowerShot S80 can capture movies larger than TV size (1,024 by 768 pixels), for better viewing on high-definition screens and computer monitors; meanwhile, several cameras in its SD and A series can film at 60 frames per second. That's twice the smoothness of TV, and a great help when analyzing your golf swing or tennis serve. Canon's S2 IS can even film and snap stills simultaneously, thanks to separate shutter and start-stop buttons.
Kodak, Samsung, Canon and Olympus offer cameras that can zoom and refocus while you're filming.
Again, a feature that's been common for some years, even on the low-end, but the quality is far higher now.
[...] Many of the cameras you'll buy in 2007 and 2008, in other words, have already been designed.
They may include global positioning system receivers, so that, as you browse your photos in iPhoto or Picasa, you'll know not only when you took them, but where.
Some of Nikon's CoolPix models already contain face-recognition software, a feature that supposedly assists focus by scanning the scene for human facial features. And Canon is working on even more sophisticated recognition software. One, called Blink Shot, would prevent the camera from taking the picture when your subject's eyes are closed. A companion feature, called Smile Shot, waits to fire until your subject manages a grin.
[...]
According to Mr. Westfall of Canon, however, the future is hydrogen fuel cells, which will provide far longer-lasting power. "This technology is already in development," he said. "They'll probably make their debut in laptop batteries first, and then make their way into cellphones and digital cameras."
[...]
Still, there's hope — in the form of liquid lenses. When an electrical charge is applied to a liquid lens, the droplet changes shape. Apply the charge in just the right way, and you can make the droplet change focus, or even zoom. Although liquid-lens technology is only in its infancy, it could one day replace the huge, heavy discs of glass that weigh down the digital S.L.R.
[...]
Will the under-the-skin nanocomputers of 2100 still recognize JPEG files?
Even so, you have a lot to look forward to: hydrogen-powered shirt-pocket cameras with liquid lenses, four-inch OLED touch screens, G.P.S. features, software that snaps only the best facial expressions and wireless circuitry that beams the result to your friends and fans.
You think February 2006 is exciting? Wait till February 2020.
My kind of guy, David Pogue. Gotta get a camera someday or other (after I can afford to see a dentist and other more pressing matters); then maybe I'll finally post a picture of myself that isn't a decade old.
MR. DERAKHSHAN GOES TO ISRAEL. This seems a good thing, as the father of Iranian blogdom pays a week-long call:
Last June, after a brief visit to his native Iran, Hossein Derakhshan wanted to return to Canada, but was delayed at Tehran airport for questioning. For seven hours he was interrogated by an Iranian Information Ministry officer concerning the blogs he writes in English and Farsi. He was told that he could no longer criticize the Ayatollah Khamenei and was asked to make a public apology or be banned from leaving the country. Derakhshan apologized but continued his activities undeterred. This week he succeeded in angering the Iranians again, when he decided to visit Israel in order to present Israel to his Iranian readers through his moderate eyes.
Derakhshan, 31, who was born to a traditional Iranian family with ties to the government, is the godfather of the Iranian blog culture. Five years ago he left Tehran after the regime shut down the newspaper at which he worked, as there was strict censorship in Iran at that time. Since then Derakhshan has settled in Toronto, where he writes a political blog (www.hoder.com), and helps young Iranians launch their own blogs in order to feel culturally involved and to cope with the strict censorship of the media in Iran.
"My goal is to break through the apathy of young Iranians," he says in an interview last week at a Tel Aviv cafe.
[...]
Derakhshan, whose ideas approach those of the Iranian Reform Party, which failed miserably in the last parliamentary elections, says the situation in his country can be altered only via elections, "which are the hole in our political system," and not by external pressure.
"In order to bring young people closer to politics," says Derakhshan, "we have to change their language, because that is where ideas are created and determined. I write in unofficial language in my blog, and sometimes even crudely, like in the satirical programs on American television. This is the only way to create new norms."
In a country in which censorship of the media is so all-encompassing, Derakhshan's quest is no small thing. In the past few years several Iranian bloggers have been arrested for their activities, and some are still serving prison terms. Last week the Iranian government blocked the access to the Farsi version of the BBC Web site, and at present Iranians cannot even surf to the Flickr photo-sharing site. "Ever since the last elections the government censorship policy has become even stricter," says Derakhshan. "Iran is heading in the direction of China. The screening of sites is becoming worse all the time, and more sophisticated tools are being used."
When Derakhshan's blog was censored, too, after his interrogation by the Information Ministry, he was forced to find alternate ways to disseminate his ideas. Since the method used to block access to Web sites in Iran is not sophisticated, some 13 percent of Derakhshan's readers reach his site via sites with alternative domain names that he purchased with the help of donations. Most of Derakhshan's 11,000 readers ask to receive his blog by e-mail, which Derakhshan says is the best way to evade the censorship. "After they interrogated me, censored my blog and arrested other bloggers, I realized how important blogs are - otherwise the government would not care about them," says Derakhshan. "When all the media are suppressed and controlled by the government, blogs can provide reliable firsthand reports of what is going on in the country, and can be a tool for cultural change.
"Blogs relay information that is not broadcast on the news, and they help connect different parts of the population.
"Blogs are the only place where I and other moderates can read what is happening to extremists and fundamentalists who are managing blogs, and they can read what we are thinking and can respond. This is also the only platform that enables women to express themselves freely, to write about their lives, without censorship or editing by men."
A bomb in the right hands
Derakhshan has dreamed of visiting Israel for years. Now, at the height of the war of words between Israel and Iran, he feels that this is the right time to realize his dream and to share his experiences with readers of his blogs. During the week he spent in Israel, he met with Israelis who emigrated from Iran, lectured at Tel Aviv University on how young Iranian reformists are using the Internet for political purposes and sought mainly to see and speak to as many Israelis as possible. "The idea is to come to Israel as a civilian and a journalist, to contribute to the dialogue and perhaps to help a little to dispel the tension between the two countries," explains Derakhshan. "Both Israel and Iran gain from this propaganda machine that portrays the other side as the bad guy, and our goal as civilians is to change this.
"I am trying to show Israelis that there are lots of people like myself living in Iran, with the same moderate ideas about Israel and the world. Most Iranians want normal relations with Israel, and do not view Israelis as bloodthirsty Jews who want to kill all Muslims, which is how the regime tries to portray them."
As expected, one of the common subjects in Derakhshan's conversations with Israelis is fear of the moment Iran completes the development of nuclear weapons. Derakhshan denounces and opposes any idea of an external attack in an attempt to destroy nuclear weapons.
"When the world focused on stopping Iran's development of nuclear arms, it led to the electoral defeat of a moderate president and the rise to power of a more radical president," explains Derakhshan. "I understand the fear of nuclear arms, but the focus has to be on democratic means and not on halting nuclear development. If the bomb is in the right hands, it won't be dangerous at all." Instead of preventing the development of nuclear arms, Derakhshan wants to halt the mutual demonization of Iran and Israel. He suggests, for example, that expatriate Iranian Jews living in Israel write about their everyday lives on Farsi blogs.
"People in Iran," says Derakhshan, "will be very interested in discovering that there are Iranians in Israel living completely normal lives, without any connection to bombings and incitement."
Blogistan - the Internet nickname for the Iranian blog community, has grown very rapidly in the past few years. Out of 6.4 million Iranians who are connected to the Internet (about 10 percent of the population), some 700,000 write on blogs. Derakhshan, who views himself as the evangelist of Iranian blogs, contributed considerably to this revolution.
The first Iranian blog was launched in September 2001, and a few months later Derakhshan published the first Farsi guide to writing blogs.
"For the past few years I have been preoccupied mainly with the dissemination of the blog idea," says Derakhshan. "In order for this medium to gain momentum, I convinced famous public figures to publish blogs, provided them with technical support and built an index of Iranian blogs."
The regime did not object directly to this activity, and granted licenses to open offices in Tehran to the seven companies that provide platforms for uploading text files to the Internet.
"The authorities censor content in blogs if it looks sensitive to them, but many politicians, even from the fundamentalist stream, use this tool, so it is considered acceptable. As long as you choose your words carefully, you should have no problem."
Despite his optimistic tone, Derakhshan's visit to Israel and his critical writing against the Iranian government institutions cost him dearly. He has been warned that if he returns to his homeland, he could be detained and tried. For his part, Derakhshan contends that he is a product of his upbringing and does not understand why the authorities are bothering him.
"I am against [U.S.] President Bush and capitalism, just as much as I oppose Khamenei," says Derakhshan. "I am a product of their system, of what the regime did during 20 years of revolution. I came from a very religious background and attended a private school designed to produce Iran's religious leaders. It is impossible to say that I have been brainwashed, because all my ideas were created by the establishment. Maybe I'm the black sheep of the family, but I am not anyone's puppet."
In preparation for the upcoming municipal elections in Iran, Derakhshan is trying to convince bloggers to recruit support for a non-party candidate. "If 1,000 bloggers manage to convince 20 people each," explains Derakhshan, "we will be able to send a representative of Internet users and bloggers to the Tehran council, without any assistance from another source."
The idea of translating blogs into votes at the polls was inspired by the Internet campaign conducted by Howard Dean and John Kerry in the United States. Derakhshan is planning for blogs to spread messages, and sites similar to Wiki (which hosts the Wikipedia encyclopedia that anyone can edit), will be used to formulate the Internet representative's platform.
"If we can prove that this works," says Derakhshan, "it will be the most impressive example of the ability of blogs to influence politics, and we will use them in the next parliamentary elections, too." How can Derakhshan preach to people to criticize the government and risk being arrested, when he himself is living outside Iran?
"I can't. Of course, it is easier for me to do this from Canada, and I respect anyone who lives in Iran and has to make the appropriate adjustments. In addition to the great fear of the government, pressure from surroundings, family, friends and the discourse in Iran make people more conservative. When I was there, I too felt that I had to stop writing that way, and had to get away from there to see clearly."
This all strikes me as worth listening to and paying attention to, although many have, of course, been writing about the Iranian blog revolution since 2001; I've read a fair amount, but managed to neglect saying much of anything about it. I hope Derakhshan's trip to Israel is a watershed, and in a good way.
ACCELERATING THE NEWS. Whatever happened to the days when Alaskans were bold liberterians, all for freedom and all that? Nowadays you can't even have a cyclotron in your back yard.
The Anchorage Assembly voted 6-3 Tuesday to ban a businessman's plan to install a cyclotron at his South Addition home to manufacture radioisotopes used to detect cancer and other diseases. Albert Swank Jr. argued that the device is safe, and that allowing him to put a cyclotron his garage would trim medical costs for a lot of people. Hospitals here now have to import radioisotopes from facilities in other states.
A supporter, chemist Paul Simonds, said the Assembly should draw on experts at local universities in weighing the worthiness of Swank's plan, which he said "will be beneficial to my fellow citizens as well as myself."
The ordinance proposed by Downtown Assemblyman Allan Tesche doesn't completely prohibit cyclotrons, or "particle accelerator systems," from being operated in Anchorage. It just says they should be located in areas zoned for commercial or industrial uses, not in residential neighborhoods.
Back in the 1930s and 1940s, and even up through juveniles in the 1950s, with Heinlein's first such, Space Cadet, scientists or kids or the two combined, were always building spaceships and other projects in their backyard in the science fiction of the day: you mean to tell me that was all fiction? Oh, no!
Albert Swank Jr., a 55-year-old civil engineer in Anchorage, Alaska, is a man with a mission. He wants to install a nuclear particle accelerator in his home.
But when neighbors learned of plans to place the 20-ton device inside the house where Swank operates his engineering firm, their response was swift: Not in my backyard.
Local lawmakers rushed to introduce emergency legislation banning the use of cyclotrons in home businesses. State health officials took similar steps, and have suspended Swank's permit to operate cyclotrons on his property.
"Some of the neighbors who are upset about the cyclotron have started calling it SHAFT -- Swank's high-energy accelerator for tomography," attorney Alan Tesche said. "Part of what's got everyone so upset is we're not sure when it's going to arrive on the barge. We know Anchorage is gonna get the SHAFT, but we just don't know when." Tesche is also the local assemblyman who represents the area where Swank and his cyclotron would reside.
Johns Hopkins University agreed to donate the used cyclotron, which is roughly six feet tall by eight feet wide, to Swank's business, Langdon Engineering and Management.
[...]
Short for positron emission tomography, a PET scan is similar to an X-ray. During the imaging procedure, radioactive material administered to the patient can help medical professionals detect cancerous tissue inside the body. The substance typically remains radioactive for only a couple of hours.
For Swank, the backyard cyclotron is a personal quest: He lost his father to cancer years ago, and he says his community needs the medical resource. He also wants to use it to inspire young people to learn about science.
"My father worked with me while I was building my first cyclotron at age 17 in this same home, and he encouraged all of the educational pursuits that resulted in who I am," Swank said.
"Because of that and my desire to not see other cancer patients suffer -- if I can use this technology to prevent one hour of suffering, or stimulate one young person's mind to pursue science, I will devote every resource that I possess to that."
Swank maintains the device is not dangerous for nearby residents.
And, of course it isn't in the least.
But assemblyman Tesche says noble intentions don't outweigh potential risks and nuisances. He and others fear a particle accelerator could pose hazards such as radiation leak risks to nearby residences. They also think the large amount of electricity it consumes could drain available power in the neighborhood.
"We in Alaska embrace technology, and we love it -- but we would like to see this in a hospital or industrial area, where it belongs," Tesche said. "We don't need cyclotrons operating out of back alleys, or in someone's garage."
In a letter to the city assembly, the South Addition Community Council compared potential damage from a cyclotron mishap to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident.
"Cyclotrons are not nuclear reactors," explains Roger Dixon of the Fermi National Accelerator laboratory or Fermilab in Illinois, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. "Probably the worst thing that could happen with small cyclotrons is that the operator might electrocute themselves."
But, of course, ignorant people, which is to say, most people, go nuts when they hear the word "radiation," not realizing that, in fact, everything on planet earth, including their own bodies, are "radioactive" and emit "radiation."
That tree in front of your house? Radioactive. Your spouse? Radioactive. Your kids? Radioactive. Your dining room table? Radioactive. Etc.
Everything emits radiation. It's all just a matter of degree.
Once again: superstition wins out. (Not to say you shouldn't be at least slightly knowledgeable about the electro-magnetic spectrum, the difference between a gamma emission and a beta emission, what a rem is, and how many you're getting; but if you did, you'd have a clue as to what is harmful radiation and actully dangerous, and what isn't.)
Read The Rest Scale: 0 out of 5 for the latest news; 2.5 out of 5 for Jardin's earlier piece.
ALITO'S FIRST DECISION was to block an attempt to lift a stay on a Missouri execution.
New Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito split with the court's conservatives Wednesday night, refusing to let Missouri execute a death-row inmate contesting lethal injection.
Alito, handling his first case, sided with inmate Michael Taylor, who had won a stay from an appeals court earlier in the evening. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas supported lifting the stay, but Alito joined the remaining five members in turning down Missouri's last-minute request to allow a midnight execution.
THE WORLDCON DEPARTMENT OF REDUNDANCY DEPARTMENT seems to still be in operation. It only just crossed my sphere of attention that LACon IV, this year's Worldcon, has another new Hugo category to experimentally play with. It's for "Best Interactive Video Game."
I like this phrase. I assume it clarifies that they're not making eligible those old-fashioned non-interactive video games that used to be so popular. Those would be, I take it, the ones you can't interact with or actually play.
Didn't we used to call that, back in the 20th, "tv"?
The explanation, by John Lorentz, who will no doubt dislike me more than ever should he ever run across this post, carefully uses the term "Interactive Video Game" five times, not including the title. I'm glad they wanted to make the distinction so clear. Wouldn't want any confusion with those old non-interactive video games that used to be all the rage.
SPIMES AND HE WHO SHAPES. The latest from Chairman Bruce is reviewed in the LA Times by Susan Salter Reynolds:
You're here because you liked the look of Sterling's new book, "Shaping Things," (sleek, in pale shades of green and red, with text in different fonts streaming phrases like "technosocial transformation," "young souls," "designers and thinkers.") On the cover, there's a bottle of wine with a bar code where the label should go: two different worlds, two cultures. Bar codes belong to the scary version of the future, wine to the warm and fuzzy past. You live in a world of things that create longing and revulsion at the same time. You don't know if you want the things you want because you want them or because somebody has provoked your desire. It's hard to tell anymore if they are bad things — made by people under duress, bad for the environment and your body — or good things that fold neatly back into the biosphere when they're used up.
[...]
In "Shaping Things," Sterling divides history into five eras. In the Age of Artifacts, hunters and farmers work with "simple artificial objects, made by hand, used by hand and powered by muscle." Around 1500, the Age of Machines emerges, featuring "complex, precisely proportioned artifacts with many integral moving parts that have tapped some non-human, non-animal power source." By World War I, we have entered the Age of Products ("widely distributed, commercially available objects, anonymously and uniformly manufactured"), which is followed by the Age of Gizmos (post-1989), a highly unstable world of end users, or people "linked to network service providers; they are not stand-alone objects but interfaces." Finally, there is the Age of Spimes (a Sterling neologism), which is where we live now, adrift in data "designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time throughout their earthly sojourn." It sounds more complicated than it is, but Sterling is mapping out a progression, a journey from consumption to control. "Tomorrow composts today," he repeats throughout the book, a phrase that seems dangerously reminiscent of Orwell's flashing slogans in "1984" but which Sterling uses to remind us that "new capacities are layered onto older ones."
[...]
Sterling doesn't say so (that would be too cute and patronizing), but he believes in the power of what he calls "transparent production." In an age of spimes — products with websites and bar codes — we can and will make the right decisions about what to purchase and produce. "The only sane way out of a technosociety," he writes, "is through it, into a newer one that knows everything the older one knew, and knows enough new things to dazzle and dominate the denizens of the older order. That means revolutionizing the interplay of human and object. It means bringing more attention and analysis to bear on objects than they have undergone."
With that in mind, Sterling does not worry about the nefarious uses of radio frequency identification chips — the technology behind highway E-ZPasses and remote keyless entry — arguing that they can be used to measure light, airborne pollution, pathogens and pollen counts, creating a world that's "auto-Googling" all the time. He envisions three kinds of technology that would make our future more sustainable: one that "can eventually rot and go away all by itself"; one built to withstand the passage of time; and "a fully documented, trackable, searchable technology" that would, as it reached obsolescence, "have the grace and power to turn itself in at the gates of the junkyard and suffer itself to be mindfully pulled apart."
In such a world, humans, who have for generations absorbed industrial effluent — just as the natural world has absorbed fertilizers and pesticides — will redesign themselves to have longer, more efficient life spans.
Squeezing these ideas, created on screens, into that dear old artifact, the book, is no easy task, and Sterling is game to take it on.
I'll likely get to the book sooner or later. I usually find Bruce nothing if not interesting, and I've often had the odd feeling that if I ever wrote fiction, it's conceivable that he might be the writer I'd wind up writing most in the vein of, though I should only be so lucky.
WHO CAN RESIST THE LURE OF BEASTS? Your Washington State tax dollars at work:
OLYMPIA - After the infamous incident at an Enumclaw farm last July that left one man dead after he had sex with a horse, state lawmakers are trying to close a loophole in Washington’s animal cruelty laws.
Sen. Pam Roach, R-Auburn, will present her anti-bestiality bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday afternoon. Bestiality is not illegal in Washington. Roach says people who have sex with animals are victimizing them, just like pedophiles molest children.
“Animals cannot give permission, contrary to what people may think,” Roach said. “So you go under the assumption that they are innocent.” Susan Michaels, co-founder of Pasado’s Safe Haven, an animal rescue sanctuary in Sultan, came to Roach with the idea for the legislation last year because of the Enumclaw case.
“It brought to light to many what happens behind closed doors, what no one wants to talk about,” Michaels said.
The measure – Senate Bill 6417 – would make having sex with an animal, alive or dead, a class C felony, which would result in a one to three month sentence in most cases, according to Dan Satterberg, chief of staff at the King County Prosecutor’s Office.
Satterberg and other proponents say sexual predators often have a history that includes sexual abuse of animals. “It is frequent to see that they began their offense with an animal,” Satterberg said.“Obviously, animals can’t testify right now, there’s nothing that can be done that can bring that kind of attention of the court.”
The bill originally included language that would have made videotaping – as was done in the Enumclaw incident – of animal sex illegal, but sponsors took it out because profiting from electronic images is already illegal under the state’s laws against lewd matter.
Oh, hell, just make it illegal yet again; we just can't have enough laws.
Yes, I have a libertarian streak, as well as a socialist streak; my politics are not simple. As much freedom as is consistent with my idea of minimally acceptable social justice and as much social justice as is consistent with my idea of maximally reasonable freedom. (Here's where libertarians ask me with a mix of puzzlement and outrage what I mean by "social justice" and I start talking about negative income tax and social programs, and they flee or cast stones, and where democratic socialists usually don't actually need to ask questions.)
ISRAEL AND HAMAS UPDATES. I've been pointing out various things to various people in blog comments for days, as usual, and I might as well note a few here.
Patrick Belton has been wandering the West Bank and reporting from there for weeks. Check out this bit:
I was surprised when many Ramallah Christians today told me that they, like those of Taibeh, voted Hamas because it was historically Fateh loyalists who attacked their businesses, agitated against the sale of alcohol, and engaged in communal reprisals against the Christian community, as when a Christian butcher stabbed a man in Qalqilya. In the latter instance, it was Hamas members who stopped the Fateh crowd from attacking the Catholic church in Ramallah. And this debt of loyalty was remembered on election day.
Fateh is not down for the count - 2 seats moved to the Fateh column in today's final vote tally, and these were significant votes, as they denied Hamas a two-thirds majority. Lacking it, the other parties will in concert be able to block constitutional changes and deny Hamas the ability to override legislative vetoes by the president.
OxBlog: You yourself are liberal, and a Catholic woman. How do you view the Hamas victory?
JM: Well, it's normal. They're Palestinians, they have their rights. I think the world helped Hamas win, by talking about them. They had a slogan - Israel says no, America says no, and what are you going to say?
Sometimes - corruption is all around, the politicians haven't provided good services for the people. Hamas are not that bad as people see them - they're religious, conservatives, they want people to obey their rules, they have their thoughts and way of thinking, but they're disciplined. They're not that bad. If you look at religious stuff, they are conservative, and that worries people.
OxBlog: And does it worry Ramallah Catholics?
JM: We are 10 per cent Christians in Ramallah. I think Fateh knew this point - that we are Christians, and they wanted a Christian presence to stay in the city because of its history. Hamas - I think everything will be all right, yes. I think Hamas is going to change, after the election. The Palestinians are different than the Saudis and the Iranians - the Palestinians are more open than any other Arab people. In Saudi Arabia, women can't drive cars or walk in the street without anybody with them. Here, it is different.
OxBlog: What are your relations like with Hamas members in the munincipality?
JM: They're very nice people. In the municipality, they gave me their votes for mayor - they knew me, I used to work twenty years as headmistress of the girls' school, they knew my work, I'd taught their wives, sisters, and daughters, and they knew I was a hard worker. Politically, within the council voting, Hamas and Fateh are not close, so Hamas supported me because I was not Fateh.
OxBlog: Do you think Hamas will negotiate with Israel?
JM: Israel? That needs time, for them.
OxBlog: 10 years, maybe?
JM: Maybe two, three years.
OxBlog: Will social changes come to Ramallah, with Hamas's political ascendancy?
JM: Don't think they're going to change the way people dress - maybe they might try to be more conservative for Muslims, but not for Christians. We Christians wear normal clothes, Hamas maybe won't like this, or girls to go to parties, dancing. Restaurants are scared - might not let people sell drinks, that's why people are scared of Hamas. Anyway, we wait and see - we can't say now, maybe in a year. I don't think they're that bad. We'll wait and see.
We in Ramallah are an open city, that respects everyone who comes here. They like it because it's liberal, they can live free here. There are jobs here, with PA, with banks. We need to enlarge the city, take more care to urban planning, and do better with providing services.
A month after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon left the public stage and a week after Hamas's victory in the Palestinian legislative elections, an Haaretz-Channel 10 poll reveals Israeli voters remain consistent in their positions and voting intentions.
[...]
Had the elections taken place now, Kadima, which last week presented its impressive Knesset candidate list, would have won 43 seats (one seat less than in the previous week) and Labor would have won 21 seats (no change). The Hamas' victory did not strengthen Likud as predicted, and the party even lost a seat compared to last week (13 seats compared to 14).
No major changes were listed in the situation of the rest of the parties. Green Leaf, which last week almost reached the election threshold is now buried under it and Uzi Dayan's Tafnit, which may have Ehud Barak as its chairman, is nowhere near the election threshold.
Zehava Gal-On, fourth on Meretz-Yahad's candidate list, who last week remained out of the Knesset, returns to it this week. This is good news for the Knesset.
With less than two months to the elections, and after all the turmoil and dramas, the picture remains almost unchanged: Kadima remains strong, the Likud is struggling to get MK Uzi Landau, 14th on its list, into the Knesset, and Labor fails to win an additional seat to the number of seats it had in the 16th Knesset.
The fear campaign against Hamas that Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers hurried to launch did not benefit the party. Labor Party Chairman Amir Peretz's odd statement that the recent development within the Palestinian Authority would erase the differences between Labor and Kadima and clear the stage for a "social agenda" didn't help Labor either.
The Likud wins this week's failure index big time: If Likud failed to win back disappointed Likud voters (21 votes) even after the Palestinian upheaval, what will bring them back home? Certainly not their nostalgia for Uzi Landau.
However, 32 percent of the respondents said that "there is a chance" that they would change their minds by election day. What could change the way they vote, and in which direction, nobody knows.
The freeze in the seat distribution can be explained by the answers given to the following question: "Have you changed your decision regarding which party you would vote for following Hamas' victory?" Only five percent of the respondents - a negligible number - answered this question positively.
Where do we see a certain change? In the public's attitude towards Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who inherited Sharon as Kadima's leader. When the public was asked to score his functioning, there was no significant change to the score he received last week (6.52 compared to 6.47 on a scale of 1 to10). But when Olmert's status is compared to his two rivals, Netanyahu and Peretz, in the question of suitability to the role of prime minister, the data reflects a significant decrease in Olmert's stand, which benefits Peretz: Olmert gets 33 percent this week while Peretz receives 22 percent. Three weeks ago Olmert got 44 percent and Peretz only 13 percent. There is almost no change in Netanyahu's results.
However, Olmert shouldn't be too worried. His status remains strong among Kadima voters.
The survey was carried out before Wednesday's Amona outpost evacuation, so the violent clashes between settlers and security forces are not expressed in the poll, but it is doubtful whether the picture would have changed had the poll been carried out on Wednesday rather than Tuesday.
Kadima is convinced that that polls, which week after week give it over 40 seats, are not lying, and that this would be the election result. In such an event Olmert, who would be elected as prime minister, will be able in a short time to easily form a stable coalition with Labor and the ultra-Orthodox parties, or with Likud and the ultra-Orthodox parties. Such a scenario would enable Kadima to hold on to its three major portfolios: finance, defense and foreign affairs.
A senior Kadima official said this week that in such a scenario Shaul Mofaz would remain defense minister, Tzipi Livni would remain foreign minister and the major fight would be waged on the treasury, apparently between Meir Sheetrit who was finance minister in 1999 and a minister in the treasury in 2003, and between Abraham Hirchson, Olmert's close associate.
All good news, in my book.
The rightish Jerusalem Post reported polling data showing that the Palestinians stay where they've been for quite a while, as every poll consistently has reported for that while: 84% of Palestinians support a peace deal with Israel; 75% of Hamas voters are opposed to calls for the destruction of Israel, although it's behind the JP pay firewall, and I'm quoting this. Since that's not an authoritative cite, see here, and most recently here, though that's dated, as it was almost a year ago, in March, 2005:
The poll examined Israeli and Palestinian preferences concerning the next steps that should be taken in the course of the peace process. 84% of the Palestinians and 85% of the Israelis support a return to negotiations on a comprehensive settlement.
[...]
48% of the Israelis believe that Israel should negotiate also with the Hamas if it is necessary in order to reach a compromise agreement; 47% oppose it. Among Palestinians, 79% support the participation of the Hamas in the negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel compared to 19% who oppose it.
[...]
General support for reconciliation among Israelis has also increased and stands now at 84 percent compared to 80% in June 2004. 81% of the Palestinians support reconciliation today compared to 67% last June. More important however is the consistent across the board increase in support for a list of specific reconciliation steps, varying in the level of commitment they pose to both publics.
· 55% of the Israelis and 89% of the Palestinians will support open borders to free movement of people and goods after a comprehensive settlement is reached, compared to 44% of the Israelis and 82% of the Palestinians who said so last June.
· 70% of the Israelis and 73% of the Palestinians support joint economic institutions and ventures compared to 66% and 66% respectively last June.
· 43% of the Israelis and 40% of the Palestinians will support joint political institutions designed eventually to lead to a confederate system given a comprehensive settlement compared to 35% of the Israelis and 26% of the Palestinians who said so last June.
· 66% of the Israelis and 42% of the Palestinians support taking legal measures against incitement directed towards the other side compared to 61% of the Israelis and 35% of the Palestinians who said so in June 2004.
Total size of the sample is 1316 adults interviewed face to face in 118 randomly selected locations. Margin of error is 3%.
[...]
80% support, and 18% oppose, the extension of the “quiet” period which ends at the end of December 2005. Moreover, a similar percentage (75%) supports, and 23% oppose, the current ceasefire. Percentages of support for extending the “quiet” period and for the ceasefire are larger in the Gaza Strip (86% and 77% respectively) than in the West Bank (77% and 74% respectively).
[...]
82% support and 17% oppose the absorption of members of armed groups from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fateh in the Palestinian security services so that they would become part of the PA. Support for this measure reaches 84% in the Gaza Strip compared to 80% in the West Bank.
While 83% of the Palestinians view the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip as victory for armed resistance and while 68% believe that armed confrontations have so far helped Palestinians achieve national rights in ways that negotiations could not, the percentage of those supporting armed attacks from the Gaza Strip does not exceed 36% while 60% oppose it. Opposition to such attacks increases to 66% in the Gaza Strip compared to 57% in the West Bank. Moreover, 61% of all Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip oppose, and 33% support bombing attacks or the launching of rockets from the Gaza Strip. In the Gaza Strip, opposition to such attacks increases to 68% compared to 58% in the West Bank.
For the first time since the start of the peace process, a majority of Palestinians support a compromise settlement that is acceptable to a majority of Israelis.
More specifically (PDF if you don't have the Firefox "convert to HTML" extension option), well, most of it is in tables, and I don't know how to pull tables/pictures out of a PDF, but a bit of the words summarizing (view the tables youself):
Support for the Tel Aviv suicide attack that took place in March 2005 received the support of 29 percent and the opposition of 67 percent. It is clear that once a mutual cease-fire was instituted, Palestinian threat per- ception diminished, and so did the level of support for violence and suicide attacks. In June 2005, in the wake of Israeli official announcement of plans to build thousands of housing units in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, support for violence against Israeli civilians increased again, reflecting increased Palestinian threat perception. Indeed, the June survey found a significant negative correlation between the belief that more Israeli settlements would be built in the West Bank in the future and a willingness to support collection of arms from armed Palestinian factions: 59 percent of those respondents who believed most settlements would be evacuated supported collection of arms, compared with only 28 percent of those who believed that many settlements would be added.
[...]
Despite the increased support for violence during the second intifada and the increased belief among the majority in the positive utility of violence, support for the peace process among Palestinians has remained strong. Moreover, the increased public support for the Islamists has not diminished the public's willingness to support compromise. The change in views regarding violence and the Islamists does not reflect an ideological transformation toward radical positions. Rather, it demonstrates an angry response to the pain and suffering inflicted by Israeli occupation policies and retaliatory measures, particularly since the start of the second intifada. Indeed, an examination of the views of Hamas supporters during 2003-2004 shows them divided on fundamental issues such as acceptance of the two-state solution (including the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state), the Road Map, the Geneva initiative, and reconciliation with the Israeli people. In other words, once the level of Hamas support increased, the group was no longer homogenous, because many of the new converts maintained their moderate views on the peace process.
[...]
When Palestinian respondents assumed the existence of a Palestinian state--recognized by the state of Israel and emerging as an outcome of a peace agreement between Palestine and Israel--support for reconciliation, between July 2000 and September 2005, ranged between two-thirds and three-quarters. In December, one month after Arafat's death, support for reconciliation jumped to 81 percent.6 Indeed, a majority of Palestinians are willing to accept the two-state solution, even when this entails a formula whereby Palestinians recognize Israel "as the state of the Jewish people" and Palestine "as the state of the Palestinian people." In June 2003, 52 percent supported and 46 percent opposed this formula, and by September 2005 support rose to 63 percent and opposition dropped to 35 percent.
And so on and so forth. You can find bad stuff to point to, as well, but there are plenty of other polls consistently reporting this data, which are the actual facts, rather than what various echo-chambers assure themselves are the facts.
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK. Declan McCullagh reports on games being played on Wikipedia with entries on Congresscritturs from IP addresses allocated to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
[...] The latest episode appeared last week in the form of a report that aides to Rep. Marty Meehan, a Massachusetts Democrat, deleted references to his broken term-limits pledge and massive campaign war chest on Wikipedia.
Then the trusty editors at Wikipedia got together and compiled a list of over 1,000 edits made by Internet addresses allocated to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The IP address subsequently was blocked and unblocked.
[...]
One edit listed White House press secretary Scott McClellan under the entry for "douche." Another said of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma) that: "Coburn was voted the most annoying Senator by his peers in Congress. This was due to Senator Coburn being a huge douche-bag."
This juvenalia is, of course, thoroughly bipartisan. Another change to the Iraq invasion entry shows that the anonymous congressional editor played up the dubious connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
It's true, of course, that the cretins who are behind the Wikipedia alterations can (and probably will) do this from their home computers in the future. But the difficulty in policing the political class shouldn't make us any less alarmed at the most recent evidence of its misdeeds.
Good to know they're found a distraction from having sex with interns. In memory of Ana Marie Cox and the transition at Wonkette: a-f! a-f! a-f!
ANNALS OF GENUIS. Don't do so much of your own stuff. I don't know if that would help here.
OREM, Utah - An man who called police to report the theft of a quarter-pound of marijuana was arrested when police recovered the bag of pot and then invited him to come to the Public Safety Building to identify it.
Kory C. Tippetts, 18, identified the pot as his and then was arrested and booked into the Utah County jail for investigation of possession of marijuana in a drug-free zone with intent to distribute, police said Tuesday.
Tippetts had called police on Monday evening after he returned home and found that someone had broken a window, got cut on the glass, and crawled into the house. Tippetts told police the only thing missing was the quarter-pound of marijuana he was selling.
Tippetts also told officers that earlier in the day a man had called him about buying some marijuana, but he was on his way to work and told the caller no.
Tippetts gave police the man's name.
Officers found Richard W. Hight, 23, at his mother's home in Provo. He had a cut on his arm and blood-soaked pants. Police also recovered six ounces of marijuana at the home.
Hight was arrested for investigation of burglary, theft and possession of marijuana in a drug-free zone with intent to distribute and booked into the Utah County jail.
Pot, which I do feel very strongly should be decriminalized, does make you stupid. But I suspect mere amplification of native tendency here.
NEURODIVERSITY. My beautiful shiny mind. This review by Polly Morrice of Susanne Antonetta's "A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World" wields a nice and amusing stiletto on a topic that interests me.
The notion that society should accept, even prize, people whose brains are wired differently than the so-called norm arose about five years ago when some adults with Asperger's syndrome decided their off-kilter traits weren't disabilities but "neuroatypical behaviors." The neurodiversity movement soon attracted converts, at first among the ranks of those whose brain differences have been otherwise diagnosed (attention deficit disorder, Tourette's syndrome), but eventually among a lay audience: witness the interest in Temple Grandin's books, which detail the workings of her autistic mind. It would seem the perfect time, then, for Susanne Antonetta, a poet with bipolar disorder, to publish her meditation on neurodiversity. Unfortunately, with the muddled, self-referential essays of "A Mind Apart: Journeys in a Neurodiverse World," she has missed her moment.
Antonetta, the author of a highly praised memoir, "Body Toxic," conceives of neurodiversity as a mantle covering not just the usual neurological suspects but also schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder and "my Van Gogh's disease," as she calls her bipolarity. Ostensibly, she's seeking to explore "different kinds of minds," but Antonetta so often extols her own brain - speculating that being a "bipolar" enables her to love more deeply, react intensely to colors and, above all, think creatively - that the reader may assume she's writing "My Beautiful Mind."
The book's loosely related chapters, some previously published in small magazines, ruminate on topics like the nature of evil, evolution and the birth of human consciousness. Many follow a pattern, mixing the author's personal experience - e-mail messages from an in-law who's a "many-head" (inhabited by multiple personalities) or excursions to view whales near her Bellingham, Wash., home - with reflections on her current reading and gnomic insights on the neuroatypical condition. ("Autistics, manic-depressives, schizophrenics can think musically. We have imagined ourselves as being not just God's image but an image that replicates shiny and alike as sequins on a gown.") In this context, the few pieces intended as journalism, albeit subjective, feel welcome but aren't enlightening. When Antonetta heads for a peace conference at the Maharishi University, we anticipate that she'll debunk the event. And her encounter with an orangutan named Chantek, who signs hundreds of words and comprehends many more, makes her look oddly credulous. The claim by Chantek's trainer that "enculturation" has reshaped part of the orang's brain into that of a "neuroatypical human" doesn't send Antonetta to an animal behavior expert for a second opinion. Instead, she notes that "Chantek's color processing might resemble mine."
Even as Antonetta celebrates the "lusciousness" and value of neurodiverse minds, she fears that advances in "gene testing and gene correcting" may cause such brains to be absent in future generations.
[...]
Yet it doesn't seem to occur to her that many others, who can't afford these interventions, don't have the luxury of choice. "There exist severe, low-functioning autisms and other cases, like untreatable manic depressions," she declares, "that probably warrant the term tragedy. I do not address myself to those and would not have the hubris to declare anyone's life livable for them." Reducing an enormous moral question to one sentence may not be hubris, but it's arguably the "Animal Farm" approach to neurodiversity. Some minds might turn away.
As long as no one is hurting others, I might say that I'm content to let people, "neurodiverse" or not, do as they would. The controversy, of course, arises over the cases where you think someone is hurting themselves, but in a manner less than an overt attempt at suicide or something quite so extreme (chopping off a limb, say). That's where it can get a bit tricky.
But while I've always been around people who think interestingly and differently and creatively, I'm also inclined to be judgmental as to how close I wish to be with a person who thinks in a way I find unpleasant, which is an entirely different flavor of metric.
THE KINKS star RAY DAVIES is brushing up on his pornography knowledge for a new stage musical based on his 1970s hit LOLA.
The WATERLOO SUNSET singer fears he doesn't know enough about the world of porn movies to make a start on the provocative stage show, and so he's planning to research the genre thoroughly.
He explains, "I'm going to write a porn musical called Lola... I'm not a porn actor, so I have to do a bit of research, but I believe that society is so graphic that it's going to be my first Broadway hit."
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised at a Broadway hit musical made from the phone book, or a grocery list, or Bush's State of The Union Address. Anything. This one is less implausible than plenty of other notions I've heard.
GOOD SHOOTIN', TEX! I missed this from last Friday:
RICHMOND, Jan. 26 -- Del. John S. "Jack" Reid had gone through this morning routine dozens of times. He'd reach into his pocket, pull out his small semiautomatic .380 handgun, release the clip and store the weapon safely in the desk drawer of his office on the seventh floor of the Virginia General Assembly Building.
But something went wrong Thursday. Reid's pistol, which he said he carries for protection, fired as he popped the clip from the handle, sending a single bullet into the cushion of a bulletproof vest that was hanging from the back of his closed office door.
Convenient, eh?
No one was injured, although Reid said he suffered a cut on his hand from the friction of the gun's slide snapping back.
The incident prompted an unexpected debate about gun control and also something uncommon in Virginia political circles: contrition from a state legislator. Reid, a Henrico County Republican, rose from his seat on the floor of the House of Delegates, asked to be heard, explained what had happened and said: "I want to apologize to the members of this body and to the greater body. . . . I'm just thankful that nobody was hurt."
Even a few hours after the incident, Reid -- a 16-year veteran and one of the House of Delegates' most popular and free-spirited members -- was at a loss to explain how an experienced gun owner found himself discharging a firearm during one of the busiest parts of the business day at the state Capitol complex.
"If you asked me if I ever put a finger on a trigger when I wasn't at the shooting range, I'd say no," Reid said at a news conference after his apology. "Whether that's what happened, I can't tell you. I really don't know."
The incident immediately reopened the debate among lawmakers and lobbyists about whether firearms should be allowed at the Capitol, a discussion that has been held for several years. Although Maryland law generally prohibits the carrying of unconcealed or concealed firearms in government buildings, including the State House, anyone in Virginia until recently could carry firearms openly into the legislators' office building and the nearby Capitol.
Then, last year, a committee of delegates and senators passed a rule requiring residents to have a concealed weapon permit to bring a firearm into the complex, even if the gun is carried openly. Some senators proposed barring guns from the buildings altogether. But many gun rights groups opposed the move.
Naturally. You never know when you might have to defend against invading terrorists. Or make your move on the opposition.
[...] "Richmond is a dangerous place," said Del. Charles W. Carrico Sr. (R-Grayson), a former state trooper who spent a year as an undercover police officer in Richmond and carries his gun in the lawmakers' office building. "I carry to protect myself and my family."
Prudent? Or terrorized and terrified? Your call.
I've never owned a gun, probably never will, but I can certainly imagine circumstances that would change my mind.
