Month: January 2007

spending other people’s blood and treasure

Obsidian Wings: The most important thing right now:

“The plan has not remained stubbornly still but has changed over the years… The administration’s recent use of the banner ‘clear, hold and build’ accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week.” -Joe Lieberman, November 2005

“We recognized the problem, and we changed our strategy. Instead of coming in and removing the terrorists, and then moving on, the Iraqi government and the coalition adopted a new approach called clear, hold, and build.” -President Bush, March 2006

“Embedding more of our soldiers with Iraqi troops and training more Iraqi troops are part of the package, and so is adopting an effective clear-hold-build strategy in the areas of conflict.” -Charles, today

I’d love to believe that there’s a new strategy which deserves a chance to work. But this is the same “new strategy” we’ve repeatedly tried over the years, only this time we’re going to somehow make it work. Sorry, Bullwinkle, but real people are dying while you keep trying to pull a rabbit out of that hat. I don’t support it.

Seriously, if the people who keep saying escalating the war is the key to victory (assuming they can define it in a way that approximates the dictionary entry) would converge on their local recruiting stations, grab a kit bag and go fight for this “most important thing,” I could take them seriously. But they can’t even agree to call it an escalation.

Am I wishing they were all getting their heads blown off? No. I wish them no harm. But the words of John Stewart Mill come to mind:

Lord, enlighten thou our enemies. Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom.

Is it too much for them to go to this place they claim to care so much about and see it for themselves, unfiltered, unedited, and take their place in that line of defense they talk about so much? Is their sense of sacrifice, of commitment, limited to arguing over the internet?

restoring a Verizon V3c’s OBEX/Bluetooth functionality

After a lot of reading and searching, I found it is possible to fix a crippled RAZR V3c (thanks, Verizon) so OBEX can be used. There is a lot of conflicting information out there and I’m not sure I can retrace my steps: even if I could, the files you need are not supported or provided by Verizon or Motorola (meaning they are provided by the modern equivalent of Blackbeard and Long John Silver — yarr!). And they may not be in the same places, for obvious reasons.

But as a crib sheet, you can search for a V3c flash file that enables OBEX, should be numbered 04 (02 is the version that worked initially, 03 is the crippled version, and 04 restores OBEX with other fixes). You also need software to flash the phone: a tool called RSD Lite, in versions 3 or better, seems to work. And a cable to hook up the phone, though this may be the last time you need it (yay!). You will have better luck looking at torrent sites to find these items. And sadly, the software is Windows only. It may work in Parallels/VPC, but since it requires a good grip on the hardware/USB, I don’t know and can’t speculate. Let me know if you get it work and I’ll add it to this entry.

I found that I had to run the flash process twice, as it failed the first time. The phone seemed hung, but when I power-cycled it and did the flash again, it worked. And I just used it to browse and retrieve files. So it may just require it to be started right before you do this (perhaps memory is an issue).

Now, by submitting this, I don’t want to be seen as encouraging piracy or theft of anyone’s intellectual property. But since the software feature you want came with the phone but was disabled to support the telco’s business model, rather than to empower you, do what you feel is right. The only company who has a beef here would be Motorola since the flash tool is an item they sell (but not to us mortals). But since we’re all fans of their hardware — seeking it out, despite their partners’ best efforts to weaken it — they shouldn’t be too upset.

Good luck.

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links for 2007-01-26

cakewalk, flowers and candy, greeted as liberators

Haifa Street:

Help get the video — and the word — out. Ms. Logan has asked the bloggers of the world for aid in getting this shown on TV.

Nearly four years on, is it too much to ask that we have one street in Baghdad?

The video itself.

The firefight depicted took place with 1.5 miles of the Green Zone, the seat of American power in Baghdad. So ineffective was the planning for what came after Saddam’s overthrow that open warfare between rival factions is taking place within earshot of Bush’s Imperial Palace.

The whole post has more on the utter failure of this administration to manage their war.

I haven’t watched the video myself. The description —

Several bodies are shown in the two- minute segment–”some with obvious signs of torture,” as Logan points out. She also notes that her crew had to flee for their lives when they we were warned of an impending attack. While fleeing, another civilian was killed before their eyes.

is quite enough for me.

down, down, down

The Bush Presidency:

This New York Times’ graph offer a telling look at the failure of Bush’s presidency:

Users Paul Library Application-Support Ecto Attachments 0123-Nat-Webbush-1

Bush has had precisely two serious and sustained bumps. One came after a horrifying attack on the country, the second after he launched a horrifying attack on Iraq. His presidency, then, has been vampiric in nature, thriving when the republic waned and the body counts mounted. He has received precisely no big boosts for domestic policy priorities or achievements. And the trend, after 9/11, is down, down, down. Not just a natural drift out of the stratosphere, but a plummet to the depths. Only three presidents in the 20th century reached Bush’s lows of unpopularity. Carter and Nixon never recovered — but they, at least, had the excuses of rampant corruption, stagflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis. Bush’s unpopularity is entirely the fault of his own mismanagement. According to early reports, tonight’s proposed salve will be a minor change to the marginal deductibility of employee benefits packages. That’ll save him.

Continue reading “down, down, down”

quote of the day

‘There is no war on terror’ | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited:

“London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, ‘soldiers’. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a ‘war on terror’, just as there can be no such thing as a ‘war on drugs’.

“The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.”

Think about that: who wants you to be afraid? These ‘inadequates’ or the people who want you to think about them all the time? They are the terrorists.

[via]

hasn’t he done enough?

Gingrich’s Secret Plan:

On the other presidential candidates, Gingrich says, “We’re not in the same business. They are running for the White House. I am trying to change the country.”

Please shut up, you fathead. You already changed the country once when you enabled and empowered Tom Delay and his cronies. Now that we’ve gotten rid of them, you can stay gone as well.

campaign innuendo, old school style

George Smathers – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Although it is sometimes said that Time Magazine reported that Smathers had said, “Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper before his marriage habitually practiced celibacy,” the magazine actually referred to the quote as a “yarn.” No Florida newspapers covering the campaign ever reported such remarks contemporaneously. Smathers offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove he said it, and to this day there have been no takers.

He may have had to deny it just to give it that ring of truthiness: whether he said it or not, he has benefited from the coverage of it.

Smathers died just this week, on Jan 22. The book “They Love a Man in the Country: Saints and Sinners in the Political South” has more of this kind of thing.

interesting but flawed

I saw this linked and had to take a look.

What Does 200 Calories Look Like?:

what’s this? Some foods have significantly more Calories than others but what does the difference actually look like. Each of the photographs below represents 200 Calories of the particular type of food; the images are sorted from low to high calorie density.

When you consider that an entire plate of broccoli contains the same number of Calories as a small spoonful of peanut butter, you might think twice the next time you decide what to eat. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average adult needs to consume about 2000 – 2500 Calories to maintain their weight. In other words, you have a fixed amount of Calories to “spend” each day; based on the following pictures, which would you eat?

Well, great.

What I sent them just now:

Your “how much is 200 calories” page is interesting but not as useful as it might be. For instance, in your intro text you reference a “small spoonful of peanut butter” but don’t show it in the displayed foods. It might be helpful to show it alongside the other choices. [argh, my search was case-sensitive so peanut butter is there. Hard to say how much that is, though.]

Also, here in the US, I find that serving sizes are closer to 140 calories on stuff like snacks/chips and cereals, the kind of “serve yourself” foods that are likely to get people in trouble, dietwise. It might be more useful to show what 140 calories of those look like. As an example, check out the large “king-size” candy bars on sale these days and marvel at how the manufacturer thinks the consumer will cut one up into three servings.

The small spoonful thing may seem silly but I think the visual evidence would help make the volume relationship clear. And of course, that’s not to say that peanut butter is bad nor does it go into how many different kinds there (I only buy the stuff I grind myself or that has no extra ingredients, like emulsifiers and add sugars).

And programmatically, it should be trivial to display ounces instead of grams.