Category: 2004 US Election

ongoing · Torture:

The right reason to invade Iraq was because Saddam was weak and it was cheap to take him out. If we could get Kim Jong Il and Bob Mugabe at acceptable cost I’d be in favor of those ones too.

So Tim Bray thinks that it’s OK to knock off the leaders of sovereign nations if the price is right. This sets a dangerous precedent, which is illustrated by the Executive Order banning assassinations[1]: if you do it, it’s OK for the other guy to do it. Do we want a world where we off each other’s presidents/premiers/prime ministers until we run out of candidates?

I’m not sure what to make of a _Canadian_ making this case. Nothing against our northern neighbor: I gaze wistfully at it on the map when I reflect on how weird things are getting. But there’s a hint of bullying by proxy in that line of thinking. If Canadians were opposed, by and large, to this misadventure, why does extending it into Korea and Zimbabwe make any sense? And I don’t see any groundswell of support for a global house-cleaning in Canada.

While Tim may be justifiably sympathetic with the victims of Saddam Hussein’s regime, it’s important to remember that he was ‘the enemy of our enemy’ (Iran, in the Khomeini era) and was supported by prior US administrations. As FDR said of Somoza and some folks are updating to refer to Saddam, “he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

Do we never learn from our mistakes? Do we even willing to admit them?

fn1. CNN.com – U.S. policy on assassinations – Nov. 4, 2002:
According to an October 21, 2001, Washington Post article, President Bush in September of last year signed an intelligence “finding” instructing the CIA to engage in “lethal covert operations” to destroy Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization.

White House and CIA lawyers believe that the intelligence “finding” is constitutional because the ban on political assassination does not apply to wartime. They also contend that the prohibition does not preclude the United States taking action against terrorists.

In case the title doesn’t sum it up, I would like for the iTunes tracks I include with weblog entries (using KungTunes or ecto) to point interested parties at the relevant tracks on Amazon or the iTunes music store. Extra credit if the relevant affiliate links can be inserted in the Amazon links (like the following example).

now playing: Black And White from the album Anthology [1968-1985] (Disc 2) by Todd Rundgren

At the suggestion of the folks on my local mailing list and the entrepreneurial fellows at iPodhead.com, I bagged a pair of these and it makes the iPod a whole new experience.

They’re great. I’m able to hear a lot more than I ever did before on stuff I thought I knew. And the bass response is a lot better (that was when I realized the old ones weren’t going to cut it). The stock earbuds just never fit in my ears (so they’re a little small: sue me). These are designed to fit *in* the ear with three sizes of little adapters (hey, Sony realizes people come in different sizes: clever, that).

now playing: Hello It’s Me from the album Anthology [1968-1985] (Disc 1) by Todd Rundgren

[click for larger image]

now playing: The Last Ride from the album Anthology [1968-1985] (Disc 1) by Todd Rundgren

The Deep North: Northern Summer:

[ . . . ] we talked to a psychologist in Tromsø who was interested in seasonal affective depression, and she told us that there was no evidence whatsoever that it exists. What drives people nuts is trying to lead inflexible nine-to-five lives when the seasons are definitively against them. The cure for SAD is to embrace dimness, to walk in the twilight, to sit as long as possible enjoying the infinite subtleties of endlessly long evenings without putting lights on, adjusting yourself to the turn of the year. As the Finns have long since done; they have developed a whole aesthetic of twilight, or so we are told by our Finnish friends. Which suggests that, as with so many aspects of modernity, it’s not the weather as such but forcing people to live their lives like battery chickens which causes the actual grief.

This actually makes some sense: I have long thought if you’re not comfortable where you live, you should move. I hated living in the sauna that is the Southeastern US, but I never knew how much until I moved to the opposite corner of the country. We *like* watching the sun march across the horizon from equinox to equinox. The quality of light more than makes up for the difference in quantity, and the variety of wildlife, flowers, and edibles makes it a great place to be.

Condoleezza Rice Puts Prisoner Abuse in Prospective:

Someone screwed up and released the wrong images. It’s like during the civil rights movement. The protesters kept emphasizing the lynchings and the angry mobs; they never showed photos of the terrific restrooms and water fountains the white folks so thoughtfully provided. You can see how people got the wrong idea.

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so. — Will Rogers

This is the infamous chart that shows the average IQ of states that were won by Gore or Bush in 2000: the Gore-won states are at the higher end of the scale. Almost certainly not statistically valid, but the correlation between facts that aren’t and support for the president is more likely to be accurate and disturbing.

The American Assembler – States With Higher IQ Vote Democrat:

A significant percentage of Americans are factually incorrect about very important issues. These include whether we found WMDs in Iraq, Iraq’s ties to 9/11, and Iraq’s ties to al Queda and terrorism in general.

What’s more striking is that of those who hold factual misperceptions of one or more of these issues, a vast majority support Bush.

Bush’s support is directly proportional to misperceptions of facts. This should give even the most allegiant Bush supporter pause.

The future of Weblogging | The Register:

We also need to find ways to categorise posts – to bring the kind of structure that Yahoo! brought to information on the Web – and the seeds of this concept can be seen in Movable Type, NewsMonster and other tools.

This was the kind of problem the WayPath engine’s ancestor was designed to solve: given a text artifact, it could locate others that were similar in content. At the above-mentioned startup where I came to know about this stuff, there was some effort being applied to a categorization engine, but it never saw the light of day.

I have wondered about this for weblogs, given the categorization tools provided in tools like MovableType. Trouble is, in MT you define your own categories: one man’s trenchant political analysis is another’s joke of the day, but both are filed under ‘politics.’ I’m skeptical of assigning a taxonomy: this gets me back to my half-baked idea of using some kind of barcode/SKU for any given post, allowing a user to locate similar ones. But how to do that in an n-dimensional matrix?

fn1. The idea of a straw versus a needle in a haystack is borrowed from Josh @ communications from elsewhere: he discussed how more complicated finding a specific straw is than a needle and while the old expression is understandable, anyone with a magnet can render it meaningless.

random but apropos

When I was seven years old, I was once reprimanded by my mother for an act of collective brutality in which I had been involved at school. A group of seven-year-olds had been teasing and tormenting a six-year-old. “It is always so,” my mother said. “You do things together which not one of you would think of doing alone.” … Wherever one looks in the world of human organization, collective responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards. The military establishment is an extreme case, an organization which seems to have been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things together which nobody in his right mind would do alone.
— Freeman Dyson, “Weapons and Hope”

Hmm, it appears my iPod was not misbehaving all that badly: I’m out $30 for shipping and it was returned today with a badly photocopied note explaining that it “meets Apple’s standards for acceptable performance, usability and/or functionality.”

And of course, it comes back wiped clean and reformatted so everything has to be restored: perhaps that will eliminate the annoying behavior of stopping in the middle of a track.

I also got a shipping confirmation that my new earphones are on their way so here’s to an overall improved aural experience.