 |
 |
 |
| |
|
Blogging and Iran
Via Andrew Sullivan: "Weblogs are one weapon that even the Islamic Republic cannot beat."
The corrupting influence
Via Steve Clemons, from somebody named "JR" who flew with Duke Cunningham:
[I]n 1984 Cunningham was squadron commander of an A-4 aggressor squadron in a huge exercise in the California-Nevada desert that was a practice for a showdown with the Soviets in Iran. Our two squadrons, based at Nellis AFB, were the "Red" air simulating the bad guys, and again we Air Force fighter pilots lionized this legend.
I have no sympathy for him, given what he has done, and it has been a long time coming. However, it is a national tragedy nonetheless, that someone who performed so heroically in combat could allow himself to become so corrupted by Washington. I think it speaks to the corrupt environment as well as to the man. (emphasis added)
Something to that, I think, and worth keeping in mind before rallying behind this particular candidate or that in the future.
Green machines
Unveiled at the UN summit in Tunisia, $100 laptops capable of meshing together to form peer-to-peer networks. Promising.
To out or not to out
Ezra questions the propriety of attempting to uncoverthe gay NY writer behind a saucy Craigslist personal ad. I have to wonder whether folks might be confused on what the rules on this sort of thing are since the whole Gannon/Guckert situation.
E.J. Dionne on Congress
"Perhaps we should redeploy the democracy experts we have sent to the Middle East and ask them to work on our Congress. The past few days have confirmed that our national government is dysfunctional."
The State of AIDS
From UNAIDS today, a new report on the state of play on international HIV/AIDS. It's both encouraging and incredibly frightening. (Hat tip Dan Drezner) Among the good, infection rates in some places, like Kenya for example, are dropping due to increased sexual education and changes in personal behaviors. And in Southern Africa, the "epicenter" of the global AIDS crisis, increased condom use is helping to lower infection rates. Among the bad, almost five million new people were infected with HIV this year, and, the report says, the challenges ahead of us are "immense."
Running throughout the report is the idea that from this point forward, the challenge is really a social and cultural one:
Bringing AIDS under control will require tackling with greater resolve the underlying factors that fuel these epidemics-including societal inequalities and injustices. It will require overcoming the still serious barriers to access that take the form of stigma, discrimination, gender inequality and other human rights violations.
Among the social and cultural solutions, as suggested by the report? Improve the lives of women. End the stigmatization of those with HIV. Quit marginalizing gay people. Commit to science-based education. Take down road blocks to condom use and other responsible sexual behavior. And do it in every corner of the globe.
Sabbath mode
As today seems to be Judaism day here on the blog -- I met an interesting guy at a party this weekend who lives up in Williamsburg. He offhandedly mentioned something about how major appliances -- like stoves and refrigerators -- have built-in 'Sabbath modes,' designed in such a way so as not to violate prohibitions on doing any sort of work on the Sabbath. I was incredulous, but there does seem to be something to this. From an old issue of Wired, first the problem:
Opening a fridge seems like a harmless action without consequence. But every time you open that door, you let warm air in and cold air out, changing the temperature inside. So the compressor switches on to compensate, and you've effectively turned on the appliance and engaged in work. Mechalel shabbos - you've desecrated the Sabbath.
According to the article, manufacturers work around this by interrupting the connection between the action (opening the door) and the result (the compressor switching on.) For refrigerators, the solution is to go back to the old models where the compressor being turned wasn't tied to the door opening and the temperature dropping but instead having it just kick on every hour or five hours or whatever. And in the case a stove, the solution is to make it so that turning on dial turns it on, but not right away. There's a randomized time-shift, maybe a five second delay, or maybe a fifteen second delay. It's unpredictable, you see, and therefore doesn't count as a "direct action." No direct action, no violation of the Sabbath. Fascinating. And it's all going on right there in our kitchens.
You've made the rabbi very angry
The outrage of a prominent liberal rabbi is a useful reminder that political evangelicals of the "conservative" "Christian" variety are far from the full expression of the American religious experience and it's a damn shame that we've been continually complicit in allowing them to represent themselves as such.
UPDATE: Rabbi Yoffie's full speech is here. Worth reading the whole thing.
On the House floor
Jean Schmidt just called Murtha a coward. And that's where we are now.
UPDATE: Aw, she didn't mean Murtha. Asked that her words be withdrawn.
UPDATE: From the Post:
Rep. Harold Ford, D-Tenn., charged across the chamber's center aisle screaming that it was an uncalled for personal attack. "You guys are pathetic. Pathetic," yelled Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass.
Bush in a nutshell
I've just started reading James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans. Even in the first thirty-four pages, it makes clear that the mess in Iraq has been a long time coming. Wolfowitz first embraced in U.S. hegemony at the University of Chicago. Rumsfeld's learned disdain for the American people way back in the Nixon White House. Yes, yes, all true. But I think John Murtha may have hit on an important point yesterday. In the end, this really is all George Bush's fault. For a simple reason -- compared to even just a moderately successful president before him, he lacks either the skills or the temperament to be a decent boss and leader:
They don't want input... Bush I (George H.W. Bush) was the opposite. Bush I might not like the criticism and the constructive suggestions, but he listened to what we had to say.
Probably reason enough not to have picked this Bush for president in the first place.
UPDATE: I've just struck upon an idea. How about we begin vetting possible presidential candidates Apprentice-style? Get the basic job skills questions out of the way during the thirteen-week interview process.
They both wear tuxes
Central Park's got gay penguins. Go figure. (Hat tip: Will & Grace)
Lessig password
Anyone attempting to watch the webcast of the Lessig at al discussion at the New York Public Library tonight -- the password and username are both "quicktime." Seems as if they were trying to keep it as some sort of a secret.
UPDATE: Never did get the webcast working right. Damn shame. Would have like to have watched it.
Iraq on the Record, have you no shame?
She's getting aroound. This from Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing:
So what is Cheney's response to his critics? He's going to "throw their own words back at them."
That's the strategy in its entirety.
He is not, by contrast, offering to clear up, say, any one of his 51 misleading statements compiled by House Democrats on the Government Reform Committee.
Jonah's right. But misleading.
I had previously suggested that the Iraq on the Record database, buillt by the Government Reform Committee a while back, was a nice little resource for looking up Administration official quotes on pre-war intelligence. And right here we have an example of how one might use it. Jonah Goldberg (soon-to-be both L.A. Times columnist and "Liberal Facism" author) says today at the National Review Online:
George W. Bush never said Iraq was an "imminent" threat. But it's funny: Democrats constantly insisted — during the last round of liberal whining — that Bush had implied the threat was imminent in order to short-circuit debate over the war.
Okey doke. So we trot on over to our handy dandy Iraq on the Record to see if that's true. We select Bush in the speaker field and type in "imminent" in the keyword box and we get, well, nothing.
But wait! Perhaps Jonah's being a little bit clever here. Maybe it's not just Bush that Democrats are talking bout but, you know, the people who obstensibly worked for him -- you know, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the like. So let's just leave the speaker field open, type in "imminent" one more time, and see what we get:
Secretary of State Colin Powell:
"The imminent threat is that suddenly, this biological warfare lab, for example, could have been put to use."
Source: Interview on NPR's All Things Considered, NPR (6/27/2003).
Okay so one case of an Administration official slipping and saying "imminent," but just that one time. Let's see, what else can we search for that might convey the idea that we're all about to die if we don't go in to Iraq.
How about something simple like "soon"?
Vice President Richard Cheney:
"On the nuclear question, many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire such weapons fairly soon."
Source: Vice President Honors Veterans of Korean War, White House (8/29/2002).
Okay, let's think outside the box. Maybe something like "within a year"?
Vice President Richard Cheney:
"If we had had that information and ignored it, if we'd been told, as we were, by the intelligence community that he was capable of producing a nuclear weapon within a year if he could acquire fissile material and ignored it . . . we would have been derelict in our duties and responsibilities."
Source: Vice President Dick Cheney Remarks at Luncheon for Congressman Jim Gerlach, White House (10/3/2003).
"Each passing day"?
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:
"With each passing day, Saddam Hussein advances his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and could pass them along to terrorists. If he is allowed to do so, the result could be the deaths not of 3,000 people, as on September 11th, but of 30,000, or 300,000 or more innocent people."
Source: Donald H. Rumsfeld Delivers Remarks to American Troops, Defense Department (3/20/2003).
Perhaps, "mushroom cloud"?
President George W. Bush:
"Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
Source: President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat; Remarks by the President on Iraq, White House (10/7/2002).
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice:
"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Source: Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, CNN (9/8/2002).
So that's how Iraq on the Record works. It's also fun to try out old favorites like 9/11 and September 11.
Activist, advocate, health commissioner!
It is with enormous pride, though I had absolutely nothing to do with it, that I announce that Dr. Joshua Sharfstein has just been named Commissioner of the Baltimore's Department of Health. And that's exciting to me for two reasons. First, Josh is Rep. Waxman's health policy advisor and I've had the good fortune to work closely with him on a number of issues over the last few years. (I cherish the long hours that Josh and I spent working on child porn together. Good times.)
And second, Josh is an amazingly brilliant guy who is not only a great physician (or so I hear, he's a pediatrician by training so I don't know for sure) but I policy rock star so skilled that he can take your breath away. Josh has chosen to make a career not only as a medical practioner (he still does rounds, or whatever it is that doctors do, on the weekends) but also as an advocate and activist. A very model of a professional guy who has chosen to make a difference through policy work. And a fabulous and funny guy to boot. I'm lucky to know him and Baltimore is lucky to have him. I think he may well lick that syphilis problem. Congrats, Josh.
East Village? No country. Jackson Heights? No country. And so on.
Jane doesn't believe me that there are no country music stations in all of New York City, so I present incontrovertible proof.
Bush Was Right!
I think that I may have found the clearest proof yet that the right wing is crumbling before our very eyes. I was once at a conference with Bill Green of RightMarch.com, a favorite website of political evangelicals and the like. And while he was of course ridiculously conservative, he still seem, well, somewhat reasonable. And now, via tonight's Keith Olbermann show, comes this -- a hard-rockin' new song Green has put together with the Right Brothers, a hip duo out of Nashville, to let young people know what he calls "the TRUTH":
Freedom in Afghanistan
Say goodbye Taliban
Free elections in Iraq
Saddam Hussein locked up
Osama's staying under ground
Al Qaeda now is findin' out
America won't turn and run
Once the fighting has begun
Libya turns over nukes
Lebanese want freedom too
Syria is forced to leave
Don't you that all this means,
Bush was right!
(guitar makes 'nah nah nah nah nah nah' sound)
Bush was right!
(nah nah nah nah nah nah)
Ah-Bush was right!
Ted Kennedy...Wrong!
Cindy Sheehan...Wrong!
France...Wrong!
Zell Miller...Right!
Please. Listen. You must.
CW
This line, in an interesting article about whether budding academics should or should not blog, serves as a good reminder that many many people make entire careers out of sucking in and spouting back out whatever passes as "conventional wisdom":
Shortly after Professor Tribble's second column, a campus career counselor advised several of my fellow job-hunters and me to limit our online presences, because, she said, The Chronicle had published articles saying it was a bad idea.
It's a practice made effective by the fact that the conventional wisdom is probably more right than wrong most of the time. But it still sucks.
I admit, sometimes I like to listen
How is it that there is no country music station in all of New York City?
Writing for Recon Watch
The Institute for Southern Studies has launched a new project that they're calling the Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, under the leadership of the NAACP's Julian Bond and others. I'll be a contributing writer there over the next several weeks and months, writing on social and cultural issues raised by reconstruction, as well as the occassional piece on contracting stuff.
Here's what you said back then
A useful companion to things like this about the use of intelligence before the war is Iraq on the Record, a database of 237 pre-war statements by Administration officials that they should have known were misleading at the very time they were saying them. For example, search for say, "Cheney" and "trailers" and you get this quote:
Public Statement of Vice President Richard Cheney:
"In terms of the question what is there now, we know for example that prior to our going in that he had spent time and effort acquiring mobile biological weapons labs, and we're quite confident he did, in fact, have such a program. We've found a couple of semi trailers at this point which we believe were, in fact, part of that program." Source: Morning Edition, NPR (1/22/2004)
And a short explanation of how he should have known that what he was saying was misleading:
Why This Statement is Misleading:
This statement was misleading because it claimed the purpose of the trailers was to produce biological weapons without disclosing that engineers from the Defense Intelligence Agency who examined the trailers concluded that they were most likely used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.
I might be biased and in hindsight it would have been great if the quotes and statements were linked to original sources, but I still find it a valuable resource.
What a waste
Just because of this jerk, I've just advanced purchased two tickets to Ang Lee's upcoming gay cowboy film, Brokeback Mountain. Okay, I didn't actually buy them yet, because it's too early to do so. But I've signed up to get an email notification when they do go on sale, and then I'm gonna purchase the hell out of them:
The day Jake Gyllenhaal was cast in "Brokeback," the chatter around the industry was not about what a wise choice he'd made. "It's the most stupid move he could make," said one top producer over lunch that afternoon. "It'll alienate his teen-girl fan base and could kill his career. What a waste."
While I'm not a member of the much-desired teen-girl fan base, as a grown-up I will do all that I can to make this joker look like the jackass that he is in front all of his top producer friends. I will perhaps see it two times.
My root zone file or yours?
At issue at the UN World Summit on the Information Society, currently underway in Tunisia, is whether the traditional U.S. role as guider and shaper of the Internet should be no more. Jon Zittrain suggests that all this focus on the domain name system and in particular who owns the root zone file is silly. (And perhaps, he suggests, part of a clever plot cooked up by techies worldwide to keep governments occupied while they go about the real business of running things.)
Stoller on CNN
The head of Matt Stoller, former Corzine blogger and fun guy to have beers with, made its CNN debut this weekend. Congrats, Matty.
Andrew Sullivan gets a new home
Looks like the guy you either hate to love or love to hate will be moving over to Time.com.
Margaret Mead Film Festival
I saw two movies at the Margaret Mead Film Festival yesterday at the American Museum of Natural History, Mead's old stomping grounds. The first was Children of the Decree about Nicolae Ceauşescu's plan to grow Romania's population through a 1966 ban on abortion.
The lack of legal access to abortion became the tool by which the state imposed Ceauşescu's grand social vision. There was no sex education, no condoms, no birth control pills, no legal means by which to control reproduction. In response, the film alleges, many Romanians just stopped having sex all together. The plan stopped working so well in the 1980s when expanding families ran into shortages in housing and food shortages. Children who couldn't be cared for and were placed in orphanges, in utter filth and, as one of the nurses put it, sentenced to death.
Then revolution came and, of course, Ceauşescu and his wife were shot to death by firing squad.
While Ceauşescu clearly comes off as the bad guy, and though the showing I saw was sponsored by Planned Parenthood, the film is interestingly fuzzy on abortion itself. The film features Adrian Sangeorzan, a Romanian doctor who had been responsible for examining female factory workers to monitor menstruation and pregnancies. Now an OBGYN in New York City, he took questions after the showing. When asked his opinion of the anti-abortion movement in this country, he called it a "strange thing." Banning abortion is dangerous, he said. And a woman "going to New Jersey" to abort a fetus at 24 weeks makes him uncomfortable.
I highly recommend that one. Very highly.
And the second, Awake Zion explores the somewhat weird connections between Judaism and Rastafari/reggae culture. There's much there -- how Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie (aka Ras Tafari) is known as the lion of Judah, how both speak of the lost tribes of Israel, the shared use of the Star of David, how dreadlocks find their roots in Leviticus 21:5 ("They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard...") Fascinating topic, though I thought the film could have dug deeper into the wealth of material there. But well worth seeing if only to witness the stylings of Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae wonder.
Waxman on Huffington Post
Rep. Waxman has joined the ranks of the Huffington Post-ers with this post on last week's aborted meeting with Ahmed Chalabi.
Liberia elections
Liberia may well have just elected Africa's first female president. Geena Davis. No, no, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
Drinking Liberally
For those of you in the Brooklyn area, or I suppose those willing to travel, I'll be checking out my new local chapter of Drinking Liberally tonight at Commonwealth. Even though it's raining. Cause I'm hard core like that.
We won
As it turns out, Maine won't discriminate.
UPDATE: Joe in DC, who was on the ground in Maine for the last week and a half, has more.
Maine won't discriminate?
On Saturday and then again last night, I phone banked with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (where Jane is, not coincidentally, a Vaid fellow), calling Maine voters to ask them to vote "no" on Question 1.
I generally don’t like phone banking, what with all the calling and talking to actual voters. But this experience was an enjoyable one because what we were pushing was an easy sell. Here’s the issue. Maine has on the books a law that bans discrimination in housing, jobs, credit, education, and public accommodations on the basis of gender, nationality, religion, age, and disabilities. The state legislature recently added to that the law "sexual orientation" and they broadly defined sexual orientation as somebody's "actual or perceived heterosexuality, bisexuality, homosexuality, gender identity or expression."
So, a vote "no" keeps a law that simply says that a Maniac (that's what they're called!) can't be fired from their jobs or denied a place to live because they're gay or because somebody thinks that they might be a little gay. A vote "yes" means that you think that it's okay that there be two classes of citizens in Maine – gay and non-gay. Really no two ways about it.
I had one call where I started giving the guy on the phone my whole "can I ask you to take a stand against discrimination" spiel and he interrupted me to say, “Ma'am, I've Native American. I know what discrimination is all about. I'm voting no." Amen, brother.
Polls close in about 25 minutes and MaineToday is reporting that "no" votes are outpacing "yes" ones.
Reflections on the Rasiej campaign
Micah Sifry, who guided online efforts for Andrew Rasiej's recent campaign for NYC Public Advocate, offered up a post-mortem of the race. I shared a few thoughts on why, as Micah discusses in his post, the online community may not have embraced Andrew in the way that one might have hoped: Thanks for the willingness to think through the campaign and then share it with us, Micah. A few thoughts about your disappointment in the responsiveness of the "tech community."
In the early going, I was excited about Andrew's campaign as a chance to advance ideas about bringing technology and politics together -- rebuilding community, harnessing the collective wisdom of groups, all that good stuff. But as I engaged in the campaign through the blog, mailing list emails, a conference call with Andrew, and a couple emails back and forth with you, I had the sense that you guys maybe weren't finding any joy in doing politics online. And I think that's going to limit your effectiveness.
Also, while it certainly may have been sensible to rally around a simple idea like "universal free wireless," it seemed like a limited vision for a campaign as creative as this one seemed to want to be. Having first seen a fired-up Andrew speak at the Personal Democracy Forum conference a few years back, when he started to run what got me excited was that we were going to have a chance to think through questions like "how would it change New York if New Yorkers were wired into their city and to each other?" and "what would happen if every adult and child could get online from every street corner and every park in the city in New York?" But in the end, it seemed like the campaign stopped short of exploring those things.
Of course, cultivating those questions may have been difficult in the time that you had. But doing so may have given the online base that you hoped would be more responsive – the tech-savvy, bloggers, whatever you want to call them -- some meatier ideas to sink their teeth into. Just trying to be helpful. I had high hopes for Andrew's campaign and he did get more than five percent in a tough town to break into. But it'd be great if there might be lessons learned from what went wrong in this race.
On the Online Freedom of Speech Act
Over on Daily Kos, we're having a vigorous debate on H.R. 1606, the Online Freedom of Speech Act, that failed in the House this week. By way of background, H.R. 1606 was a one sentence bill that would amend campaign finance law to exclude all "communications over the Internet" from regulation. It was sponsored by Rep. Jeb Hensarling and brought up under the supspension calender which limits debate and allows for no amendments, more generally used for less controversial measures like whether or not to name a post office building after an LA Lakers announcer Chick Hearn.
(Any discussion of this issue by way of Daily Kos would not be complete without a mention of the work of Adam B -- counsel for Markos, Duncan/Atrios, and other bloggers -- who has been writing on it for some time.)
To recap, this particular debate began when Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman went on Kos to say that they wouldn't be voting for the bill and attempted to explain why. Markos gave his take on the situation and then, the next day, Adam did a morning after round-up of the day before. Later, Markos offered his understanding of why the bill failed. And finally, Adam offered answers to the questions -- on the merits of the bill, on the way that it was brought up in the House, and on next steps -- bubbling up at the grassroots.
I think that covers most of it. Interesting back and forth, and as I'm staff with Mr. Waxman for the next few weeks or so, I'll leave it at that.
|
| «
October 2005 | Main
| December 2005
» |
|
|
|
