Tristero

Thursday, March 18, 2004

Another Car Bomb

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 10:44 AM

Invade Their Country, Kill Their Leaders, And Convert Them To Christianity

Ann Coulter had it exactly right. And that's how many Iraqis look at the Bush occupation of their country. And in the LA Times today is a disgraceful article that makes the idiotic buffoons who are over there trying to "save souls" look like some kind of heroes. Buried towards the end, finally a voice of reason:

"[The evangelical prosletyzing in Iraq] adds to a growing perception that all Americans want to convert Muslims," said Leanne Clausen with Christian Peacemaker Teams, an American aid group that does not proselytize. Nonevangelical Iraqi churches have been vandalized in recent weeks. Newspaper editorials and Islamic clerics charge that Americans are in Iraq on a religious crusade. Clausen warned: "The missionaries coming here don't realize the danger they are placing us in."

Some of those dangers extend to missionaries visiting Iraq who are unprepared for violence. Independent missionaries working in Iraq have little or no formal training for war zones. Some are just American pastors who fly to Iraq and begin working on behalf of a new church.

Once again, there is a huge difference between Christianity and Christianism. It's time to stop confusing them.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 10:42 AM

Perish The Thought

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 10:02 AM

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Richard Holbrooke On Naming Foreign Leaders Against Bush

And Holbrooke doesn't even bother to pretend to suffer a fool:

BLITZER: Ambassador Holbrooke, thanks very much for joining us. A little revised version of what John Kerry said. He said, "I've met more leaders who can't go out and say it all publicly, but boy, they look at you and say, you got to win. This you got to beat this guy, we need a new policy, things like that." So there is enormous energy out there. The president today said, if he makes an accusation, he has a responsibility to back it up. What do you say?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE, FRM. U.S. AMB. TO U.N.: John Kerry committed an unpardonable crime in Washington: he spoketh the truth. What he said is self-evidently true. There's a new poll out today by the Pew Institute, a worldwide pool, which shows massive and growing anti-Americanism around the world. Now American voters need to make up their own mind who they prefer, George W. Bush or John Kerry. But they also ought to know this administration is isolating us in the world, weakening us. Recent events in Spain, this election are another example.

John Kerry said something everybody knows is true. And, Wolf, you know it's true. And why don't I say just one other thing. Why don't you, instead of staging a silly he said/he said between the White House, which is throwing all this mud at John Kerry after he said something true. Why don't you poll your foreign correspondents on CNN. And ask them who the population and leaderships in the world would prefer to see elected? Very simple.

Hee hee.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:52 PM

"Flypaper" Theory Doesn't Stick Well

Douglas Green at Buzzflash:

...the Fly Paper Theory is now dead. This little stinker of a theory was created after we invaded Iraq and found neither WMDs nor "smoking gun" documents tying the regime to external terror. So, our good friends on the right put their little heads together and came up with the lame idea that our efforts in Iraq would be like fly paper -- keeping the terrorists "tied up .... over there" so they would not attack us "over here."

Madrid shows that al Qaeda is not "tied up" in Iraq. Rather, it's the other way around. Coalition troops are stuck doing a job the UN should be doing, while the individual coalition nations are now each a target. That will provide incentives for each nation to walk away from us, thereby handing al Qaeda victories.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 4:16 PM

Conason Reaches For High C

...and hits it repeatedly in this magnificent op-ed on Spain:

Neither ideological inconsistency nor moral cowardice explains why the Spanish electorate dumped the discredited conservatives. The Bush administration’s reckless drive to war in Iraq, against majority dissent in Spain and elsewhere, undermined support for the United States. Since then, people around the world have been confirmed in their worst suspicions about the purported causes of that war. Now we are discovering the destructive impact of the lies told by our own leaders and diplomats, about Baghdad’s weapons of mass destruction and cooperation with Al Qaeda.

The neoconservative strategy in Iraq has proved wrong in almost every particular. The costs of the war have been far greater than predicted, while the benefits remain in grave doubt. Meanwhile the Western alliance continues to decline, as does the moral reputation of the United States.

We certainly have enemies who are working to destroy us. We must use every instrument at our disposal to destroy them instead, including diplomacy, intelligence, foreign assistance and—sometimes—military force. Before their next assault, however, we should ask ourselves why we have made it so easy for our enemies to separate us from our friends.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 3:44 PM

Josh Completely Gets It

Exactly, sir:

Clearly, the Kerry campaign should highlight the inaccuracy of the charge [some trumped up nonsense in the latest Bush campaign ad]. But I think they should be focusing their fire on the shamelessness, the disrespect for the intelligence of the public and the press.

They simply can't stop lying.

That point should be hit again and again and again. And not simply -- or even primarily -- on the narrow point of dishonesty but on the broader issue of disrespect for the people they're communicating with.

'Disrespect' doesn't quite convey the intended message. But it comes close. It may be closer to 'contempt' though I think the attitude is somehow breezier than that. They don't think any rules apply to them.

They want to say up is down. And they're sure they can get away with it because they think the people who are listening are either chumps or that their trust can be exploited endlessly.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 3:36 PM

The Life Of A Political Cartoonist Is A Tough One.

Read all about it.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 3:27 PM

Killer App

Not exactly the use Apple had in mind:

A Memphis woman was arrested and charged with first-degree murder after she bludgeoned her boyfriend to death with an iPod...

Police said no motive has been confirmed, although evidence suggested the murder was the result of a domestic dispute after Pulaski erased the contents of Mathers’ iPod.

According to law officers, Mathers was hysterical when police arrived and told them that she killed her boyfriend only after he accused her of illegally downloading music and erased about 2,000 of her MP3s. Mathers complained that it took 3 months to build her music collection...

“It took him a while to die,” Dr. Klamut said. “She must have stabbed him 40 to 80 times with that iPod. His death was not instantaneous, that’s for sure”

The article was accompanied by this ad:

WARNING: The iPod Mini, which is much smaller than a standard iPod, is not recommended for bludgeoning anyone over the age of 10.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 2:47 PM

The Most Useful Online Quiz You Will Ever Take

100% accurate.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 2:15 PM

College Degree May Be A Hindrance In Bushland

Unemployment level of college grads surpasses that of high-school dropouts

Cute. Link via Atrios.

[Update:] In related news, Metafilter rounds up some links on how awful job prospects are during the Bush administration for those foolish enough to finish grad school.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 2:06 PM

Christian Parenti Does The Impossible

He woke up Jim Lehrer:

Parenti, author of an upcoming book on occupied Iraq, was being interviewed by NewsHour's Ray Suarez. He and Middle East history professor Juan Cole were analyzing the recent suicide bombings in Iraq and various groups that might have been involved. Then something went terribly wrong: Parenti suggested that Halliburton and Bechtel have failed to provide "meaningful reconstruction" and that the U.S. occupation might actually be contributing to the instability in Iraq. Lehrer apparently went ballistic.

Michael Mosettig, senior producer for foreign affairs and defense at NewsHour, told me, "This was not reportage, this was giving his opinion, and that's not why we brought him on." The next day, according to Parenti, Dan Sagalyn, NewsHour's deputy senior producer for foreign affairs and defense, called to inform him that top people were upset, that his comments had lacked "balance," and that Lehrer was planning to run an Editor's Note acknowledging the mistake [He did.]. It seems they had violated one of Lehrer's internal "rules of journalism," which mandates that producers "carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories" and label it as such.

And what did Parenti say? He was asked whether recent bombings would make the job of reconstruction harder in Iraq. And he responded.

'I would think so. I would think that we have to look at some of the deeper causes as to why there's so much frustration. Why are Iraqis so angry and willing to point the blame at the U.S. after this sort of bombing? A lot of it has to do with the failure of meaningful reconstruction. There still is not adequate electricity. In many towns like Ramadi there wasn't adequate water. Where is all the money that's going to Halliburton and Bechtel to rebuild this country? Where is it ending up? I think that one of the most important fundamental causes of instability is the corruption around the contracting with these Bush-connected firms in Iraq. Unless that is dealt with, there is going to be much more instability for times to come in Iraq.'

I suspect the part that got Lehrer's goat was "the corruption around the contracting with these Bush-connected firms in Iraq." There was simply too much proximity between the words "corruption" and "Bush." Parenti's insinuation was blatantly obvious.

The fact that it's also true may have been the final spark that provoked Lehrer's fury.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 1:57 PM

Of Course Bush Is Disliked Abroad. But That's The Least Of It.

Here, Josh Marshall weighs in on how poorly US interests have been served abroad by the Bush administration:

As Fareed Zakaria — hardly a lefty or a Bush-hater — noted a year ago, the president’s policies have “alienated friends and delighted enemies. Having traveled around the world and met with senior government officials in dozens of countries over the past year, I can report that with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country the administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it.”

For anyone who follows foreign policy even remotely closely, it has to be close to a given that the overwhelming majority of foreign heads of state and foreigners in general hope that Bush will be heading back to Crawford next January.

The president’s deep unpopularity among foreigners and foreign governments is a fact that either campaign could probably use to its advantage. But the fact itself can’t be denied.

But the real point isn't that foreign leaders want Bush out just as much as the majority of the US voters do. The real point is:

Given that America permitted a man as uniquely unqualified and extremist as Bush to run the country, why should any foreign government trust the US to act in a consistent and responsible fashion in the future?

Answer: They shouldn't. Bush's catastrophic regime has made it abundantly clear to the world that one of the most urgent goals of the next ten to fifteen years simply must be to develop reasonable, viable alternative structures to limit America's hegemony.

In other words, Bush's behavior, instead of soldifying American supremacy, may very well have wrecked it.

Back in October, 2004 I discussed The End of The American Century in detail.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 1:36 PM

Wonders Of The Millenium: Squeezebox

Okay, folks. Trust me on this. Don't bother waiting for an explanation. You need a Squeezebox. So click the link right now, get out your credit card, and buy one. Well, at least one.

Okay, now that a Squeezebox is speeding its way to your home, wtf did you just buy?

Squeezebox lets you play the music collection stored on your Mac or PC over any stereo system in your house. Via WiFi. Perfectly. You can pick anything you want to play via either a remote control or from a webpage on your computer. It takes 5 minutes to set up.

Okay, what does this mean in practical terms?

I have a large cd collection, well over 1000 cds. This creates numerous problems. First of all, storage is a royal pain as that many cd's takes up a lot of space and is remarkably heavy. In addition, it becomes extremely difficult to organize a collection that large, especially if you have a lot of classical music where a performer could easily combine Beethoven, Part, and Corigliano on a single disc. The typical solution is to buy cd players with a 300 cd capacity and network them together. But this is bulky and unreliable.

No. The obvious solution is to rip your collection to hard disc, organize them in iTunes or some similar program, hook your computer up to a great stereo and put your cd's in storage for backup. But why stop there? Better yet, what you want to do is to set up a music server - a single computer where all your music is stored - and then stream the music to any stereo in your house, using a remote control to select what you want without having to run back to the computer.

That's what squeezebox does. And since it has WiFi built in, there's no need to run cables all over the place. Since WiFi is much faster than necessasary to stream audio, you can surf the net while you listen to Squeezebox or even have several squeezeboxes hooked up to several stereos, streaming different music.

And how does it sound? In a word: as perfect as your source. If you rip to aiff (which is, essentially, a clone of a cd file) and you use the digital outputs, it should be indistinguishable in terms of sound quality from the cd. Remember: this is not an fm broadcast, but a streaming of digital audio data over a WiFi network. There is no signal loss. If you play an mp3 file, the quality should be as good (or bad) as the original file.

The mind boggles at the possibilities.

Criticisms:

1. While you can play many formats, including aiff, mp3, and aac, you cannot -at least at present- play downloads from the iTunes music store. That's because Apple uses a copy protection scheme that's proprietary on downloads and they haven't released the software hooks needed for squeezebox to play these files. Workaround: burn any iTunes Music Store downloads to cd. Rip the cd back into iTunes as mp3, aiff, or aac. This will eliminate the copy protection and allow streaming.

2. It would be real nice if you could dispense with their web access and, when using the computer to choose music, simply use the iTunes software.

3. It costs around $300 which, given what it does, is a steal. Still, if it was, say, $150, there would be little reason for most music lovers not to have a squeezebox on every stereo in their house.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 10:14 AM

Iraq on the Record

Rep. Waxman has prepared an excellentsearchable database of Bush administration lies on Iraq. Oh excuse me, misleading comments and statements.

You can download the whole thing as a pdf but it's much for fun to just search.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:22 AM

Seraphiel's Daily Cartoon Roundup

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posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:06 AM

Tuesday, March 16, 2004

Arguments For Marriage

In case you need any, here's a good roundup of reasons to support extending marriage rights to those who currently aren't allowed to enjoy them.

Frankly, there's only one good argument against allowing gay couples to wed. Where will that kind of permissiveness stop? If it continues, sooner or later, they'll allow even Republicans to marry! And then where would our society be?

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 1:13 PM

CIA Coup Possible In Syria?

It sure sounds like it:

First, on March 7 a gaggle of demonstrators—no more than 20 to 30...was squelched by Syrian police, who arrested not only the demonstrators but swooped up a "junior diplomat from the American Embassy," says the Times. "The United States government protested the detention of the American diplomat to the Syrian government, a spokesman for the embassy told The Associated Press." Now the question is: what was a "junior diplomat" from the United States doing there in the first place. Could he have been from the CIA? (Syria is wondering the same thing.)

Second, the Bush administration is going to announce sanctions against Syria this week, thanks to a law passed by Congress demanding them...

And finally, on March 14 The New York Times gave prominent coverage to Kurdish riots in northeastern Syria, which spread to Damascus. ... it strains credulity to think that the Kurdish unrest in Syria is spontaneous.

Go to the link for backup and detail.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 12:57 PM

Krugman

Krugman is so, so good:

Some of the administration's actions have been so strange that those who reported them were initially accused of being nutty conspiracy theorists. For example, what are we to make of the post-9/11 Saudi airlift? Just days after the attack, at a time when private air travel was banned, the administration gave special clearance to flights that gathered up Saudi nationals, including a number of members of the bin Laden family, who were in the U.S. at the time. These Saudis were then allowed to leave the country, after at best cursory interviews with the F.B.I.

And the administration is still covering up for Pakistan, whose government recently made the absurd claim that large-scale shipments of nuclear technology and material to rogue states — including North Korea, according to a new C.I.A. report — were the work of one man, who was promptly pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf. Mr. Bush has allowed this farce to go unquestioned.

So when the Bush campaign boasts of the president's record in fighting terrorism and accuses John Kerry of being weak on the issue, when Republican congressmen suggest that a vote for Mr. Kerry is a vote for Osama, remember this: the administration's actual record is one of indulgence toward regimes that are strongly implicated in terrorism, and of focusing on actual terrorist threats only when forced to by events.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 12:53 PM

Seraphiel's Daily Cartoon Roundup

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posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:52 AM

A Victory For Reason, Not Al Qaeda

The CW around the blogosphere is that the defeat of Aznar was a victory for al Qaeda. Kevin Drum expressed this as well as anyone and while he has subsequently changed his mind, many on the right have not. I think, however, The New York Times comes pretty close to my own position:

It is possible to support the battle against terrorism wholeheartedly and still oppose a political party that embraces the same cause. The Spanish people, who have suffered under the violence of Basque terrorists for years, undoubtedly feel a redoubled commitment to fight on and avenge the innocents who died in Madrid. That did not make them obliged to keep Prime Minister Aznar's party in power. Here in the United States, as much as the White House would like the elections to be about fear and national insecurity, they are a choice between two men and two political philosophies — not a referendum on terrorism.

Yes. Certainly, the terrorist attacks last week influenced the elections, as al Qaeda influenced the 2002 elections. Just as Bush hopes that al Qaeda (the fear of, that is) will influence 2004.

But there is nothing to indicate that the toppling of Aznar means that Spain is interested in appeasing terrorists. Rather, it was clear that while the Aznar government may have been opposed to terrorism, they weren't going about resisting terrorism in an effective way. Not the least of their incompetencies was support, largely symbolic, for Bush's little Iraqi adventure. Hopefully, the Zapatero government will do a better job.

Amazingly, however, folks still persist in the delusion that somehow an event as horrific as the Madrid train attack, followed by regime change in Spain, will bring Bush to his senses, that he will now understand the importance of multilateralism.

Heh. Just the opposite. Bush will simply read this incident as an indication of how right he was all along and how cowardly the people of Europe are.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:50 AM

Monday, March 15, 2004

Big Ass Science

Kieran Healy points us to one of the more significant scientific papers of the third millenium's first decade, available here.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:20 PM

Seraphiel's Daily Cartoon Roundup

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posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:47 AM