“He, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave.” ~ William Drummond
Month: September 2004
war is not business
Connecting some dots. Brad DeLong notes that the president sees/saw Al Queda as an organization rather than a movement.
Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Richard Clarke Is Moderately Shrill:
George W. Bush asked for an organizational chart of Al Qaeda so that he could cross people off as they were killed or captured. A very “MBA” way of looking at it, it seemed to me. I remembered “The Battle of Algiers”. At the end, the French have caught and tortured and killed all of the urban guerrilla leaders they had identified at the start. And the French had lost the war.
Gregg Easterbrook sees fit to revive the “flypaper” theory. Shorter flypaper theory: our troops are set up as a honeypot on the enemy’s turf and all the terrorists come to kill them but are killed themselves as a result of our genius. No more terrorists.
The New Republic Online: Freedom Core:
Finally, a thought: History may judge the invasion of Iraq a political fiasco, or simply judge it as morally wrong. But is it necessarily a diversion from the war against Islamist terror, as the Fallows article contends? What if the invasion of Iraq is having the unintended consequence of drawing terrorists and killers to that country, where our army can fight them on our terms? Supposedly bin Laden and a few others of his ilk trained thousands of fanatical followers. Though there have been awful terror strikes since September 11, world events have simply not reflected what might be expected to happen if thousands of fanatical terrorists were loose in the Western nations. Now there are said to be “foreign fighters” crawling all over Iraq, and whatever else is going wrong there, our military is killing significant numbers of armed fanatics, many of them not Iraqi. If we hadn’t invaded Iraq and drawn them there, where might these guys be instead, and what harms might they be doing?
I wonder if the reverse is true? Perhaps the terrorists have set up their own honeypot and by stretching the military thinner and thinner, they can do some unanticipated damage.
Is it not obvious that these terrorists, whoever they are, eschew conventional military doctrine and strike in ways that are hard to defend against?
great minds . . .
43 Folders: In praise of the junk folder:
I often end up using my Desktop as a parking lot for current files. Not exactly an inbox, but given how easy it is to hit CMD-D in a dialog box, it’s where a lot of tmp files, exported jpgs, and assorted stuff naturally ends up. Still, I find it distratcting when too much stuff accumulates there, so I also keep a “Junk” folder on the desktop.
I just did this last week: mine is called ‘junk drawer’ (since every house has one, why not every ‘puter?)
After a week, it’s been a big help. If stuff lands on the desktop uninvited (Expose helps you check up on yourself), file it or trash it.
9/11 wasn’t the driver for the PATRIOT act?
[IP] more on A New Selective Service Draft:
The Patriot Act wasn’t written after the 9/11 attack. It was written before it and was waiting for an opportunity to get through Congress. Right after 9/11, a bill which had previously been unthinkable had an opening and became law without enough public discussion at a time when emotions were running too high.
I haven’t heard this before. As bad as the PATRIOT act is, the fact that it was considered before the 9/11 attacks is far worse. There were plans in place to limit civil liberties before the catastrophic attack? So rather than a hastily assembled fix to a problem we don’t have, it was more deliberate attempt to undermine democracy, waiting for our representatives to let their guard down. I hope that’s not the case.
<update> looks like I was a tad behind the curve on this. The bill was largely done, but had yet to be named and required a catalyst. The WTC attacks were all that was needed.
Continue reading “9/11 wasn’t the driver for the PATRIOT act?”
another one bites the dust
Hmm, so the job I left last November is open again. Seems my successor didn’t even last as long as I did . . .
University of Washington Staff Jobs:
General Duties/Description: The Shidler Center for Law, Commerce & Technology is focused on the intersection of law and business innovation by examining the impact on domestic and global markets of changes in law and technology.
The Shidler Center currently consists of faculty and students from the Law School as well as an active external advisory board and external committees helping with specific projects. The Center has received funding from Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon.com and private donors as well as the University and the Law School. The Center offers various types of educational and outreach programs to members of the legal and business communities in Washington State and nationally; edits and produces a quarterly journal for legal practitioners; and is developing longer term research programs for which it will seek external funding.
Perhaps the job isn’t as fulfilling as advertised . . . . ?
buy an SUV, take it off your taxes
By taking advantage of a loophole in the tax code, small business owners can deduct the full cost of a SUV from their taxes. The provision, which allows deductions up to $100,000 on any vehicle heavier than 6,000 pounds, was originally intended to benefit farmers, who employ pickups and other heavy vehicles on a regular basis. But most SUVs weigh more than 6,000 pounds, and now the provision is being used by lawyers, doctors, and other self-employed individuals to write off SUVs bought for personal use.
I think a little judicious editing of the provision would be useful: if the vehicle in question
* has leather seats
* has a CD changer
* lacks a trailer hitch, not just a receiver
* lacks any mud
* lacks any dents
* doesn’t smell of agricultural products or animal feeds
it’s not included in this giveaway.
The march of folly, 21st century edition
A long essay, with some informative images: read the whole thing, as some have been known to say:
Informed Comment : 09/01/2004 – 09/30/2004:
For al-Qaeda to succeed, it must overthrow the individual nation-states in the Middle East, most of them colonial creations, and unite them into a single, pan-Islamic state. But Ayman al-Zawahiri’s organization, al-Jihad al-Islami, had tried very hard to overthrow the Egyptian state, and was always checked. Al-Zawahiri thought it was because of US backing for Egypt. They believed that the US also keeps Israel dominant in the Levant, and backs Saudi Arabia’s royal family.
Al-Zawahiri then hit upon the idea of attacking the “far enemy” first. That is, since the United States was propping up the governments of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc., all of which al-Qaeda wanted to overthrow so as to meld them into a single, Islamic super-state, then it would hit the United States first.
The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the US fleet so that they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian petroleum. The US was going to cut off imperial Japan from petroleum, and without fuel the Japanese could not maintain their empire in China and Korea. So they pushed the US out of the way and took an alternative source of petroleum away from the Dutch (which then ruled what later became Indonesia).
[ . . . ]
Bin Laden hoped the US would timidly withdraw from the Middle East. But he appears to have been aware that an aggressive US response to 9/11 was entirely possible. In that case, he had a Plan B: al-Qaeda hoped to draw the US into a debilitating guerrilla war in Afghanistan and do to the US military what they had earlier done to the Soviets. Al-Zawahiri’s recent message shows that he still has faith in that strategy.
The US cleverly outfoxed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, using air power and local Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) to destroy the Taliban without many American boots on the ground.
Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason, where Americans faced the kind of wearing guerrilla war they had avoided in Afghanistan.
This analysis is interesting, (shades of The March of Folly) and the excerpts above deserve a wider audience: bin Laden misunderstood how well the Taliban could protect him and his presence in Afghanistan led to their demise, but the administration lost interest in him (Osama been forgotten) and got tangled up in Iraq. The rumor is that bin Laden is dead, since he failed to make an appearance for this Sept 11: if true, we still allowed him the better part of three years to inspire and indoctrinate the recruits created by the Iraq invasion. And while it’s not assured, if the remnants of bin Laden’s entourage had been aggressively pursued, Al-Zawahiri might have been taken out of the picture as well. If the WTC attacks were his idea with bin Laden’s contribution being charismatic leadership, I don’t know that we can consider Al Queda weakened all that much.
why — and how — we fight
I found this collection of wisdom earlier today, and I was struck by this quote and how it flies in the face of the “nuke ’em back to the stone age” rhetoric:
Words to Live By:
You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life — but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud. – T.R. Fehrenbach
So I looked up Colonel Fehrenbach and learned that he wrote the definitive history of the Korean War and drew some keen observations about troop readiness and realistic planning from it.
Severe peacetime budget cuts after World War II left the U.S. military a shadow of its former self. The terrible lesson of Korea was that to send into action troops trained for nothing but “serving a hitch” in some quiet billet was an almost criminal act. Throwing these ill-trained and poorly equipped troops into the heat of battle resulted in the war’s early routs. The United States was simply unprepared for war. As we enter a new century with Americans and North Koreans continuing to face each other across the 38th parallel, we would do well to remember the price we paid during the Korean War.
The whole business of “serving a hitch” was how Vietnam was fought with its one year tours, 15 years later. Doesn’t sound like anyone learned from Korea.
inventing the future
I missed this earlier in the week when Gary originally posted it, but caught the echoes of it this weekend.
TeledyN: Living with Webservices:
Of course, it’s early now and history tells us that the early market-share owners tend to have a large say in the eventual standards, but history also tells us we don’t get far with divide-and-conquer market strategies. Whether it’s Skype or FlickR, Amazon reviews, FOAF files or bookmarks, I’ve said it before and I say it again, the better strategy is to make the pond as large as possible lest you become the fat fish in a shot-glass.
The old quote — the best way to predict the future is to invent it[1] — comes to mind. It’s interesting to ponder the services mentioned in Gary’s piece and reflect how open infrastructures and ideas have fared in the market vs closed or proprietary ones. While the closed variety often gets out to a commanding lead in mind and marketshare, when the reasons for adopting that strategy — marketshare and revenue — are relegated behind openness, cooperations, respect for users, etc., it helps to remember that “it’s early yet.”
Gary has stuffed a lot of insight and experience into this essay: he’s been working on and with the internet since before most of us had heard of it or knew what it was. (That includes me: I was using packet-switched networking to get to the WELL via CompuServe’s dialup service, but I was unaware of what it meant. I just knew I was able to make a local call and teleport my mind across the country.) Some of these things — Flickr, del.icio.us — I have yet to really look at. I’ll be re-reading this a time or two more.
fn1. Alan Kay.
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the iPod is not a WalkMan
Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | New adventures in hi-fi:
While [Michael] Stipe and [Mike] Mills have developed other interests in their adult life beyond the band and music, [Peter] Buck hasn’t. He recently filled up the iPods of everyone who worked on REM’s new album with songs that he thought they might like – and considering iPods can take up to 10,000 songs, this was a Herculean feat of downloading. “He’s become obsessed with it,” says Stipe. “He has done this for everyone who worked on our new record, including the engineers, who he had only known for a couple of weeks. What’s interesting is to discover what he thinks we should be listening to. Mike got entire albums by Miles Davis, for example, while I only got the greatest hits. It must have taken him weeks, but he really isn’t interested in anything apart from his family and music,” adds Mills. “He reads books, and plays music, and hangs out with his family. That’s it. So he loves the iPod because it gives him a chance to go through thousands of records that he hasn’t played for the last 20 years.”
And who wouldn’t want Peter Buck to turn you on to a playlist, even one that had 10,000 tracks: I wonder how long it would take to listen to that? My 10Gb one has 1,565 tracks, for 8.78 Gb of space and a playing time of 4 days, 18 hours, 52 minutes, and 23 seconds. So a 40Gb one might have as much as 480 hours of music on it: that’s a lot of bus rides. I shudder to think how much disk space he has at home . . .
This is the second city where I have had a chance at a Peter Buck sighting: it was always interesting to see people’s reactions in Atlanta when he would stop into Oxford Books (RIP) or Wax n’ Facts. Oxford? Awe and speechlessness. Wax n’ Facts? Who cares?
Continue reading “the iPod is not a WalkMan”