2007 archive
Peeve 2
After all these years, you’d think engineers would be able to design a coffee carafe that wouldn’t leak when you were pouring from it.
But, nooooooooooooo.
Guiliani–er–Errs 3
From FactCheck dot org:
The actual increase in the size of the force was about 3,660, or about 10 percent, during the period Giuliani pinpoints. And Giuliani doesn’t mention that the cost of hiring about 3,500 of the officers was partially covered by the federal government under President Bill Clinton.
On another matter, we question Giuliani’s claim that on Sept. 11, 2001, he had a new command center “up and running within half an hour” of being forced to evacuate his primary center near the World Trade Center. In his 2002 book, “Leadership,” he says that “we arrived about noon” at the backup site, which was two-and-a-half hours after the evacuation.
Awwww, forget it.
He doesn’t err. He lies. (That’s an honest word for “spin.”)
He would be a fitting successor to the Current Federal Administrator.
Tradition and all that, you know.
Exit, Stage Right 0
The Washington Post recently explored the exit of top aides from the Current Federal Administration:
All the more so in a White House beset by an intractable war, a hostile Congress, a shipwrecked domestic agenda and near-historic-low approval ratings. The long-term ideals that many of them came to the White House to pursue appear jeopardized, even discredited to many. They tell themselves that they have acted on principle, that the decisions they helped make will be vindicated. But they cannot be sure.
A number of the persons quoted in the article expressed regrets of various kinds.
But nowhere did they express regret for betraying the ideals of the founders and dragging the sacred honor of this nation in the dirt.
Drumbeats: Buried Lead Department 0
Deep inside the story about Swampwater, General Pollyanna Speaks:
He asserted that the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, was a member of the al-Quds Force of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Reuters news agency reported. U.S. commanders have accused al-Quds of funneling roadside bombs and other weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq.
When asked whether the Iranian government was responsible for killing American soldiers, Petraeus told a small group of reporters: “They are responsible for providing the weapons, the training, the funding and in some cases the direction for operations that have indeed killed U.S. soldiers,” according to Reuters.
Phillybits has more.
And the drums beat: More war, more war, more war. Make up a reason, make up a reason, make up a reason.
DL Tomorrow 0
Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Center City Philadelphia.
The hamburgers won honorable mention at the the Inky, but I like the Fish and Chips.
Adventures in Linux: Podcast Edition (Geek Alert!) 1
Many times, when I’m at the cooling tower place, I don’t spend all my time on the floor. Sometimes, I just sit in an office and write.
Friday, I dropped into the local Milford Radio Slum looking for a portable radio so I could listen to WSDL when I’m doing the writing thing.
Now, I already have a couple of portable radios. One I keep in the church office so I can listen to WHYY while I’m doing the Treasurer thing. One is in no shape to travel because the antenna no longer telescopes and it cannot be safely put in my travel bag.
And I came out of Radio Slum with an MP3 player which also contains an FM radio. It was on clearance and cost only $40.00.
The radio was not strong enough to pull the station that I wanted. (No surprise in a big steel building 70 miles from the station.)
So I decided to enter the wonderful world of podcasts.
The MP3 player has a USB connection.
I connected it to the box and, after a bit of mucking about, I realized that Slackware was seeing the MP3 Player as a SCSI drive and calling it “sdc1” (Linux seems to see everying except an IDE device as a SCSI device).
I got it to mount by entering the following line in my FSTAB.
/dev/sdc1 /media/player auto auto,user 0 0
(Instead of mounting to /mnt, like most other drives, including the CDROM and the DVD writer, it mounts to /media, because it is a media player).
I was then able to manipulate the player like any other drive.
I started nosing around for an aggregator that I could use to automate the downloading of podcasts, and I found Podracer. It works like a charm.
One hint, though: Podracer, like most other *nix programs, must be installed by root (for those poor folks who still use Windows, root is sort of like the Windows “Administrator,” only secure). Howsomever, when it’s run for the first time, it should be run by the user name of that you wish to use to run the program. If you run it the first time as “root,” it will not work for other users. The programmer advertises it as a very simple program, and that, my friends, is truth in packaging.
Right now, Podracer is running and happily downloading podcasts that I will listen to later.
You list the rss links to the podcasts you wish to download in a simple text file in this format (the number sign means that line is “remarked out,” that is, ignored:
# ChuckChat Freestyle
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChuckChat
The next step is to identify podcasts I want and to set up podracer as a cron job.
(I’ll leave out the part about calling Opie and having him point out the obvious to me, but my geek license is officially rescinded.)
Torture in the News–Not 0
This week’s On the Media explores the (lack of) coverage of the torture memos on the big three TV network news shows.
Go to the website or listen here:
What Digby Said 0
This is another edition of What Digby Said.
The Second Silent Debate 0
Aren’t they the best kind? Harry Shearer:
Jon Swift Brings Conservative Clarity to the Torture Race 0
Check it out:
If we do win this war and Western Civilization survives, no doubt future generations will look back on this debate and wonder what all the fuss was about. “That’s not so bad at all,” they’ll say, “compared with what we do today.”
Support the Troops, Bushie Style 0
Yeah, I know it’s an oxymoron.
In this post, I linked to a post by Phillybits about an American soldier’s wife who faces deportation because, by God, she got married.
Check out the follow-up, in which Phillybits discusses the reaction he’s gotten from red-blooded American bigots commenters.
Now it’s time for the Maalox.
“We Don’t Torture,” Says He 0
Dan Froomkin searches for the truth (emphasis added, because it echoes what I’ve been saying). Follow the link, read the whole thing, and wonder what have we allowed to happen in our names.
How the United States became associated with torture is not just a matter of historical interest. And that’s all the more clear today, with the publication of a major New York Times story describing the Bush administration’s ongoing circumvention of national and international prohibitions against barbaric interrogation practices.
In other words: It continues.
Finding out what our government has been doing in our name, and openly debating our interrogation policies, should have been high on the national agenda since the disclosure of the shockingly inhumane treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Few other issues speak so clearly to how we see ourselves as a people — and how others see us.
But the White House’s non-denial denials, disingenuous euphemisms and oppressive secrecy have repeatedly stifled any genuine discourse. Bush shuts down discussion by declaring that “we don’t torture” — yet he won’t even say how he defines the term.
Shame on us all for tolerating this, this, this vile gaming.
SCHIP, Reprise 0
Eugene Robinson on the lies (emphasis added):
(snip)
Bush’s stated reasons for vetoing the SCHIP bill left even reliable congressional allies — such as Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Charles Grassley of Iowa, both of whom supported the legislation — sputtering in incomprehension. As for me, I don’t know what to call the president’s rationale but a pack of flat-out lies.
Gamers 1
It came to me this morning as I was cooking breakfast.
It’s a game.
They sit there in their easy chairs, punching buttons.
Avatars move about the screen. It doesn’t matter what happens to the avatars because, you see, they are inexhaustible. New ones leap up when old ones are gone.
The power pills give the gamer eternal life.
And the avatars, well, they have no personal lives. They exist only to be manipulated.
There need be no reason for the game.
The game exists for its own sake.
It exists only to give the gamers the thrill of control, the illusion of mastery.
And, as it is fantasy, rules and laws don’t mattter. The gamer can do whatever he wants, because, after all, it’s his game.
Any hack or cheat he can get away with is okay, because, you see, he is in charge and no one and nothing else matters–not lives, not laws, not right and wrong.
Here’s where they hang out.
My friends, we are being gamed every day.
Dishonor (Updated) 1
I could probably improve on the essay below, but it’s not worth the effort.
I’m so disgusted I could spit.
But I’m not surprised.
On second thought, I don’t feel disgusted.
I feel soiled.
Soiled by what these thugs have done in your name, in my name, in our name.
The New York Times stops just short of using the “T word,” preferring to call it “severe interrogations.” But let’s not beat around the bush: Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department secretly approved torture — even as it told the rest of the world it didn’t, and as Congress was passing laws to ban torture
In a long investigative piece, the Times digs up two classified opinions issued by the department under Gonzales’ reign to prove it.
The first, issued soon after Gonzales’ arrival as attorney general in 2005, for the first time provided “explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including headslapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.”
(That “simulated drowning,” by the way, is the technique known as waterboarding: “pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.”)
Meanwhile, the department’s official stand to the public was the one it issued in 2004, calling torture “abhorrent.”
Later in 2005, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion declaring that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
If they didn’t violate that standard, they at least produced some of the tainted results torture often yields: confessions to crimes the confessor probably didn’t commit.
When the C.I.A. caught Khaid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were “haunted by uncertainty.” They used a variety of “tough interrogation tactics” about 100 times over two weeks on the man known as K.S.M., and got all kinds of confessions. The problem is, intelligence officers say that “many of Mr. Mohammed’s statements proved exaggerated or false.”
Reacting to the Times story, a White House spokeswoman said: “Our intelligence agencies legally obtain information. This country does not torture.”
The only way they can say “This country does not torture” is that they call it something else. Like Ralph or Fred or Betty.
That’s it. “Let’s take them to the Ralph room.”
Addendum, Later That Same Evening:
ASZ.