It seems I wasn’t real clear in the previous post. I don’t mean to suggest that the right answer to the Fallujah crisis was starting a major urban campaign and killing lots of civilians. I do mean to say that:
1. If this is the end state, the seige was a blunder.
2. But, because I don’t think the administration is willing to accept the likely consequences of this move — it will be seen as the weakness that it is — I fear even more what this seems likely to lead to, which is bloodier consequences in Fallujah and especially elsewhere. And I suspect that the US administration’s response to those facts — when faced with possible widespread chaos as Iraqis decide the US can be driven out — will end up with more casualties on both sides. Therefore, I think that leaving in these circumstances has very bad side-effects. That doesn’t mean that turning up the violence (“going in” to urban warfar) made any sense either.
3. Putting a Baathist in charge doesn’t seem real smart unless he’s a very unusal one. Is this a calculation that Baathists are better than Islamicists? Is the best-case exit scenario now reduced to a Saddam-like regime without Saddam? Is Saddam lite really the best we can do?
George W. Bush today, defending the famous flight suit speech announcing the end of major combat operation in Iraq:
“we’re making progress, you bet” in bringing stability to Iraq.
What the grunts say about about today’s pullout from Fallujah, turning the town over to a Baathist general (source: UK Daily Telegraph, Saddam’s man takes over in Fallujah )(reg. req.):
Many ordinary marines said they did not believe the initiative would work and it could endanger their lives when they had to revert to the “plan A” of a full-scale offensive to take Fallujah.
“Honestly, I don’t think they’re going to be able to do it,” said Cpl Elias Chavez, 28.
“We had the insurgents cordoned off, they couldn’t go anywhere, we had a chance to get them. Now they can flee wherever they want and we’re still going to have to deal with them.”
He said the new force, largely made up of Fallujah residents, would be unlikely to apprehend or clamp down on anti-coalition fighters.
By leaving without defeating the insurgents, their deployment since April 5, following the killing and mutilation of four US defence contractors, “was a waste of time, of resources and of lives”.
“Everyone feels the same, especially those who know someone who was killed.”
L Cpl Julius Wright, 20, said: “Now it’s going to get worse. We pulled out when we should of gone in.”
I’m with the grunts on this one. This is “progress”?
After a week or two of trying (and failing) to be fair and balanced by finding a flaw in Firefox to match the problems with IE, User Friendly explains why we don’t have Lynx -friendly cartoons.
Not trying to make this an all Google day, but given what a clean reputation google has, and given all the stuff in their IPO about how they plan to Be Good and not be short-termists, it’s a little disturbing to read this Joi Ito item collating various bits of info suggesting that Google colludes in government censorship.
The Venturpreneur is an interesting blog I stumbled on last week. Now I discover that the author is Gordon Smith, someone I met in Tilburg, the Netherlands (not as strange a place as it may sound for two Americans to meet — Tilburg, along with Amsterdam, is an Internet studies powerhouse).
Gordon is now a law professor at Wisconsin, and he’s writting some provocative comments today about the new Google IPO:
The Growth Story: Selling stock in an IPO is not about convincing people that your present performance is stellar. It is about your growth story. People who invest in IPO shares are hoping that your company will become the next Microsoft. A compelling vision is crucial. I have been reading the prospectus for clues about Google’s growth story, and this is what I have found.
…
Bottom line: The prospectus is worse than I imagined it could be. I assumed Google would have a difficult time telling a growth story, but I thought that they would give it the old college try. Instead, their growth story is nothing more than a celebration of past accomplishments. “Don’t you just love our search technology?!”
Yahoo is currently trading at a price/earnings ratio of approximately 125. Google is currently less efficient at servicing the bottom line, and it admits that operating margins will decline. In the face of these realities, it will need to achieve a price/earnings ratio higher than Yahoo’s to obtain the kind of valuations projected over the last few days. While it may reach such lofty heights if retail investors get overly enthusiastic, those prices are not sustainable under any scenario contemplated in the prospectus.
I hope this is pessimistic, although it certainly seems right as far as I can tell. I’d like the first major IPO which is run on a pure public auction, without huge margins to the parasites investment banks, to be a stunning success.
Update: John Battele’s take on the IPO
It’s good to know that those alert authorities at JFK are taking no chances with dangerous visiting British accountants. You never know what they might do in New York — maybe go shopping and reduce the trade deficit a little.
Briton ‘in chains at JFK airport over bogus debt’ (UK Telegraph, reg. required): An accountant claims that he was kept for more than 24 hours in “leg chains” and denied food and water after flying into New York’s JFK airport with his wife.
David Pattison, 52, of Beeston, Norfolk, was held by US security officials because an Interpol notice alleged that he was wanted in Qatar for debts of up to $10,000 (£5,800).
He was deported on Monday night without having been allowed to enter America.
Mr Pattison, who disputes the alleged debt, said he was subjected to “inhumane and degrading” treatment by the US authorities and a “lack of assistance” by the Foreign Office.
He arrived at the airport’s immigration control on Sunday afternoon, at what was to have been the start of a two-week holiday with his wife, Janice, 49, the mother of their six children.
There he was told of the Interpol notice. Mr Pattison worked for an oil company in the Gulf state in 1999 but denies that he left behind any debts. Although about $5,000 (£2,900) had been outstanding on a car he used for work, this was settled after the agreed sale of the vehicle in 2000.
“This was the first I had heard of any warrant against me, and I have travelled all over Europe since 1999,” said Mr Pattison.
“I told the US officials I had a letter at home to prove all matters in Qatar had been settled but they were not interested.”
Mr Pattison was then told he would not be allowed into the country and would be deported. “I requested a call to the British consulate in New York and I spoke to a man who refused to give his surname. He said he couldn’t help because I hadn’t been admitted to the country and I was in limbo.
“But that is exactly when British subjects in a situation such as mine need assistance. God knows what it would have been like had we been travelling with our children.”
Mr Pattison claims his wife was then escorted out of the room in tears and left to fend for herself. He said cuffs were placed on his hands and ankles and that a wooden restraint was put across his chest.
“I was escorted to a facility with no food or drink and my angina medication was locked away from me. I was placed with eight other unfortunates, two of whom were also British, but we weren’t allowed to speak to each other.
“We begged for water but the [Department for Homeland Security] staff just sat there eating hamburgers. There was nowhere to wash or sleep and I observed verbal abuse by US immigration personnel to most of these people.”
It’s especially important to be tough on Britons as we would not want them to think that their government’s supporting the Administration in Iraq should give them any right to the decent treatment we deny to foreigners from other countries. And you certainly wouldn’t want to let in people with debts, especially not big debts like up to $10,000. Especially not an accountant who racked up debts like that. Why, it’s not as if Americans were ever in debt!
It’s also important to discourage tourism to New York, as there will soon be a Republican convention there and we’ll need all the hotel rooms and lots of space for drunken parties on the streets.
Oddly, the government of Quatar claimed to have no knowledge of the warrant for Mr. Patterson, but they’re from the Middle East, so why believe them?
No, it’s not a typo: Patriot Act Suppresses News Of Challenge to Patriot Act:
“It is remarkable that a gag provision in the Patriot Act kept the public in the dark about the mere fact that a constitutional challenge had been filed in court,” Ann Beeson, the ACLU’s associate legal director, said in a statement. “President Bush can talk about extending the life of the Patriot Act, but the ACLU is still gagged from discussing details of our challenge to it.”
Yes, it’s still a free country. Just not as free as last year. (spotted via boingboing)
David Farber writes to the Interesting People list,
I gather that there is a report that Sinclair Broadcast ordered its ABC affiliates to preempt tomorrow’s broadcast of Nightline which will air the names and photos of U.S. military personnel who have died in combat in Iraq, saying the move is politically motivated designed to undermine the efforts of the US in Iraq.
Sinclair owns 62 US TV stations.
And so there is.
Is it legal? Probably — we impose only the loosest public interest requirements on the beneficiaries of the publicly created broadcast oligopoly, and what little I know of broadcast law this doesn’t come close to violating it.
Is it in good taste? I think reasonable people might differ about the good taste involved in refusing to broadcast the show, especially if those people didn’t see it as honoring the dead. (Not my view at all, but people differ.) I do think that accusing ABC (of all bodies!) of what amounts to treason (in effect the old accusing them of giving aid and comfort to the enemy) is not only not in good taste, but contemptible.
Are we not allowed to talk about the costs of this war project? Especially as the goals diminish from a free and democratic Middle East, to a free Iraq, to less violence, to getting out without humiliation?
Apparently not on Sinclair stations.
This is surprising:
=< Halavais: News>=: Where have all the bloggers gone? Well, basically the places you would expect. Lots in Boston, lots in Austin, lots on the coast, and a surprising dispersal in Florida (?)
See the cool map too (albeit only for blogs hosted by Livejournal and Diaryland).
If he said what is reported at Bush Aide on Court Nominees Faces Fire as Nominee Himself, Brett Kavanaugh as much as perjured himself yesterday in front of a Senate committee when he stated that the White House had no ideological considerations in choosing judicial nominees. That obviously isn’t true of this administration, just as it hasn’t been true of many in my adult life (the exception that comes to mind is Jerry Ford, who seemed to care more about party affiliation than ideology per se).
I look forward to the same forces who explained, with some justice, that a person who lied to a grand jury was a poor choice to be President, now coming forward and explaining that a person who tells transparent porky pies to the Senate is unfit to be a DC circuit judge. (He’s sorta young too. Judicial temperment, especially for federal appellate judges, does seem to tend to be a function of a certain age and experience much more often than not.) But I’m not holding my breath. Well worth a fillibuster. And I don’t care how nice he is, how smart he is, or that he went to the right law school.
I always sort of suspected that the world might be better off with fewer kinds of toothpaste — an intuition that flies directly in the face of all the free-market stuff I usually believe. Now comes Ben Hyde, summarizing Barry Schwartz’s book Paradox of Choice, to explain why this intuition might actually be right:
The punch line of Paradox of Choice is made in a simple cartoon. Partition the world into two kinds of people. The maximizers and the satisfiers. Maximizers spend more resources on getting the best possible outcome while satisfiers don’t.
The joke? Maximizers do tend to achieve their goals. They do accumulate more than the satisficers. The ironic revenge of the Gods? They are never satisfied.
He reports that depression is highly correlated with maximizing behavior. Then he lays down the cornerstone of the entire book.
Can you conspire to change a person’s behavior? Convert them into a maximizer? How? Yes - you just present them with more choices. That increases the chances their behavior will switch from happy satisfier to depressed maximizer. It’s a denial of service attack on the problem solver. It’s restructuring the game so that the search algorithms are no longer effective. It’s the old chestnut that marketing is war. It’s the cliche that planning is what you do to avoid action.
In other words, marketers make more choices to turn rational people into shoppers. But these choices make people less happy than they would otherwise be (the paradox).
But wait. This (as opposed to, say, the quest for shelf space) doesn’t alone explain why firms make so many different varieties of what’s more or less the same product. What’s in it for the firm, which presumably forgoes some small economy of scale? Do unhappy consumers spend more money in a quest for more happiness (either in product quantity or quality or price), or do they just spend more time searching? Do they buy eight kinds of toothpaste to try them out? Does the increased search time expose them to more goods that would have chosen to buy had they but known of them, in which case search makes you happier but poorer? Or do the consumers spend so much time searching they buy less? Or is the depressed consumer an impulse buyer? There has to be some mechanism by which the ‘more search, less joy’ mentality gets translated into goods or this fails to explain the marketers’ incentives. And even if a greater variety of toothpaste on offer makes you generally unhappier it’s not at all obvious to me how this translates into toothpaste sales given the fixed quantity of mouths per person.
On a related note, the suggestion that there may be an economic grounding for my suspicions about toothpaste makes me hope that someone will be able to confirm my claim of an economic justification for another of my other potentially irrational beliefs. I have a tendency towards comparison shopping for the lowest price, a maximization behavior that my wife likes to laugh at as obsessive (while no doubt enjoying the savings). I like to rationalize this tendency as a public-spirited behavior with positive externalities: by doing my best to embody Rational Economic Man, and finding the low-cost supplier I am rewarding the low-price supplier (and, especially, failing to reward the price gougers) and thus helping the market be efficient, which contributes to lower prices for everyone. Any truth to that in a world of sensible satisficers?
This is one of the strangest and most disturbing things I’ve seen on the Internet: KIDDofSPEED - GHOST TOWN - Chernobyl Images. The daughter of a scientist who does testing in the devastated Chernobyl area has wangled a permit that allows her to ride her motorcycle through dangerous radioactive areas. Despite the attention she pays to her geiger counter, I can’t help but think this is a really stupid thing to be doing.
The pictures she publishes of what the land and buildings and remains look like in the contaminated area are simply horrific.
In a comment to an item below, John Quiggen gently and correctly points out that the insight for which I credited Brad is at least as much his:
If the Internet continues to grow in economic importance, the central role of public goods in its formation will pose big problems for capitalism, though not necessarily to the benefit of traditional forms of socialism.
What’s more, he’s already working on an article about it. So that’s one less project I have to worry about — I can wait for him. The provision of public goods is already one of the major challenges for modern society, one that the US at least responds to fairly badly (see, e.g. the lack public transport in Miami and the really clogged roads) and it’s really interesting to speculate about what we should do if the increase in importance of digitized information and tools to play with it makes this problem worse.
Brad and I have written one article which cataloged some of the issues, but it doesn’t offer very much in the way of solutions. Much remains to be done here.
The site was down for several hours this evening as the apache server decided to go on strike. Dreamhost Support reports it “had a bad user” and fixed it. I hope that’s not a moral judgement.
Meanwhile I had a tour through my http logs, always a fun way to spend time, and noticed many entries of the form
junk after document element at line 2, column 0
I have no idea what that means.
Plus I found substantial evidence that a machine hosted at Brown has been trying to hack in here. And failing. But I sent a note with a log extract to the tech contact for the IP number on the off chance it might do some good.
In an otherwise normal science look at Valuing Google, Brad writes a sentence that deserves an article:
Social value is drifting away from potential profitability, and this threatens to become a huge problem in our collective social resource allocation mechanisms.
Hey Brad, maybe that should be our next collaborative project (after the one I already suggested we do this summer…)? I have ideas floating around about how you organize efficient state ownership of (some) things.
First we put half our stuff in storage. Then we moved into the front half of the house, about the size of a NY two-bedroom apartment, putting the kids into a bunk bed. The idea was to start the project in the fall, and finish by about, well, May or June. Then we had permit delays. Then, finally, in January we knocked down the empty half of our house — including a piece of the kitchen — so we could rebuild it better and bigger. Then they started to build, poured a foundation, built some walls, and almost a month ago got ready to pour the beam and install the trusses.
But wait! We failed inspection! The city of Coral Gables has tougher requirements than the County and even though these were noted on the plans, the engineer just did the routine calculations. Three week delay to recalculate, get twice as many trusses, re-inspect. Ok, that takes us to last week. Good to go to pour some beams, right?
Oops. Seems there’s a cement shortage. As the contractor tells it, there were three local plants that supplied about 60% of south Florida’s needs with the rest coming from abroad. Most of the imported stuff is being diverted to other places, like China, that are willing to pay higher prices than Florida (!). And all three of the local plants are having mechanical problems. The biggest plant has problems so severe that the owners have decided not to repair it, but just to wait for the new plant to come on stream in about a month.
So after a few days extra delay we managed to get a truck to come and bring some of this precious commodity, and we poured yesterday. Except we ran out.
Question: Is it more reasonable to imagine we’ll finish in August (contractor’s current estimate), December (my guess), or some time after next March….
One of the marks of a free country is that you can criticize the Maximum Leader without fear of investigations or reprisals.
Not in Seattle Prosser, Washington State, USA, where a boy was Investigated by the Secret Service, then disciplined by his School, for drawing Bush as the devil in an art class assignment on the Iraq war.
Art students at Prosser High School were told to keep a notebook of drawings depicting the war in Iraq.
One 15-year-old turned in a sketch showing President Bush, dressed as a devil, launching a missile.
Another of his drawings was of a Middle Eastern-looking guy holding a rifle in one hand, while in the other hand was a pole with an oversized head of President Bush stuck on it.
The art teacher found the drawings troubling.
Maybe it was the caption that said: “End the War.”
Anyway, the drawings were turned over to school administrators.
School administrators took a look and tossed this political hot potato to police, who took one look at the “Vote For Ralph Nader” slogan and called in the Secret Service.
Last week, Secret Service agents trekked out to Prosser and grilled the 15-year-old artist.
They left without charging him with anything, but that didn’t stop the school district from punishing the kid anyway.
(emphasis added) AP version of the story. And this hyperactive tendency to investigate people is not a fluke but is now shared by many law enforcement bodies: Recall this previous incident? Or this one? All of which leads to self-censorship
Teach the children well, indeed.
[Corrected to remove slur on Seattle, per comment by froz]
Finally. The Bush records story is getting new traction, probably because Kerry himself is making an issue of it. Helpfully, Salon has published a child’s guide (suitable for busy reporters) to some (only some) of the major gaps in the record. And the thoughtful and much-read Joshua Micah Marshall has endorsed this as an issue, going so far as to say that, aw shucks, he doesn’t quite follow all the complicated details, but, it sounds important:
I just don’t know the details of all this well enough any more to make a judgment about these various claims and accusations.
But why exactly can’t the president just release his records the way McCain did?
And, is that story about [Maj. Gen. Danny] James[, commander of the Air National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Va.] getting a chance to go over these files true? If it is, I’d say some scribblers in town got suckered.
Big time, as the vice president would say.
So maybe the issue is not dead yet. When will a reporter stand up the press gaggle with a release from and ask if the President will sign it? Or, how about at a press conference if there ever is another one?
How absolutely amazing to find that two of the more interesting people I know from such different parts of my life are almost related. It turns out that Ed Hasbrouk, the Practical Nomad, whom I know virtually and from conference calls, is partnered with the cousin of Eric Muller, a law school classmate and now fellow law prof. The occasion for this discovery is that both of them are participants in a great NPR segment called Making Contact.
The show is not being played on either of the NPR stations I can get on my radio, but Ed notes that it can be heard online “from the National Radio Project. You can listen to streaming Real Audio or download a high or low bandwidth MP3.”
For the very interesting details as to how Ed and Eric met, and what they have in common and what they argue about, see Eric’s blog entry and Ed’s.
The host for this blog, Dreamhost, has just sent out an email reporting that it has been under attack but is coping better than last time,
Starting at around 2:45 PDT this afternoon, we experienced yet another Denial of Service attack launched at a completely different target from the previous attacks. Within 15 minutes, we had established the destination of the attacks and had them blocked at our network’s edge. We’re currently waiting for our upstream providers to provide us with more global protection from the attacks, but for now network performance is running at only a slightly degraded state. We hope to have full service restored within the hour.
I’ve made some stylesheet and template changes in order to make user-inputted type bigger. In addition I added some links to recent related stories to fill up what seemed like a large empty spaces in the comment pages.
If you encounter any ugliness or surprises due to either change (or anything else), please let me know via a comment here.
I’ve also thrown in an experimental style-switcher. Of the styles I’ve swiped from the public domain, so far the only alternative style I’ve been able to make work (in the sense of 3 columns looking ok) is quite lurid, and extends just a bit too wide for reasons that escape me. If you want to try it, you can find the switcher part way down the right hand column. Be prepared to reload the page if it all goes wrong…
My colleagues at UM Law endure a hyper-centralized information technology regime. Unless they raise a great ruckus, faculty members here get issued a Windows XP computer in “lockdown” mode, which prevents the installation of new programs on the desktop. (I raised a ruckus.) What’s worse, the suite of programs offered to faculty has actually shrunk in the last few years, as the IT dept discovered that if you hand out fewer programs, they are easier to support.
The faculty has finally rebelled, although the actual flashpoint was lousy network performance and downtime. As part of an effort designed to head off what might otherwise become a pitchfork-wielding mob, the administration has asked for suggestions as to what programs should be part of the default faculty suite. Of course, since most of us haven’t much experience with other office environments recently, we’re not that well placed to know what’s out there or what we might find enhances our productivity or makes new things possible or even easy..
I’ve made my own little list, but I’m sure it’s deficient in imagination if not necessarily length. Suggestions needed and welcome. Please assume that the desktop will be a PC with XP as the OS—I think the odds of getting anything else on the faculty desktop in this iteration are about zero. And the network itself will probably stay Novell. You’ll see from my list, though, that I have assumed the existence of a *nix internet server as we currently have one, even if it’s not that well maintained.
So, what should be on my list?
Here’s my first draft. Needless to say, it’s somewhat different from the current default.
Basic Tools
Advanced Tools I’d Like But Most People Won’t Want Yet
Server-side tools
Larry Solum’s list of new hires reminds me that I failed to blog the fact that we’ve hired one new tenure-track faculty member for next year. He wowed us with his faculty presentation, and with the paper he has ready for publication, and I think he’s going to be great.
Mario L. Barnes, Associate Professor of Law. A graduate of the University of California Law School at Berkeley, where he was the Co-editor-in-Chief for the law review, African-American Law & Policy Report, Professor Barnes is a twelve year veteran of the U.S. Navy. Prior to receiving his honorable discharge in 2002, he served as Admiralty Counsel in the Office of the Judge Advocate General where he was involved in the investigations of the 2001 sinking of the Japanese vessel Ehime Maru by a U.S. submarine and the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole. Currently a Hastie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School, he is in the process of completing his thesis, The Stories They Did Not Tell: Race, Family Silence and the Legal Recreation of Inequality. He will join the faculty this fall. He will teach Substantive Criminal Law and Constitutional Law I. In future years he will teach an additional course, most likely in the areas of military operations law, race and the law, or national security law.
Despite this great hire we still have a large number of openings. Next year’s appointment committee will be busy, although we also have some specific subject area needs which may narrow our search. I don’t know which ones the Dean will choose to make a priority next year, but if I had to guess I would say Health Law, Commercial Law, maybe Family Law, and general business subjects, especially international business transactions. And of course even though we have some strength in the subject already, we have a perennial interest in persons who are interested in Latin American private law, ideally people familiar both with the US legal system and at least one South (or maybe Central) American legal system.
It’s always possible that some of these openings might be filled by lateral as well as entry level appointments. But that’s next year’s problem…
When an academic says s/he is looking for a chair, you might naturally assume that s/he seeks promotion. Once you become a full professor, there is no promotion other than administration, perks, money or prestige. A desire to avoid administration being one of the things that often attracts people to the Ivory Tower, academics who are not content with their lot and don’t want to be Deans usually go hunting for perks, money, or prestige. And the thing in academe that wraps them up in one package is a “Chair” — a title and usually some perks or money.
As it happens, however, I’m not looking for that sort of chair (not that I’d reject it if it came looking for me) — and a good thing it is too, as we only have two chairs here at UM and they are earmarked for lateral hires. No, I’m looking for the sort of chair you sit in.
I have a very nice desk chair. Or rather I had one. One day I came home and the back was broken. (Not broken as in in two pieces, but broken in that the main support snapped and it no longer stays upright when you lean back.) The children deny everything. There is no dog or other large pet. It is vaguely conceivable that I leaned back once too hard or once too often and broke it myself, although I sort of think this is the kind of thing even I might notice about my environment. In any case, there seems no point finding anyone to blame. The chair is broken. I need a new one.
Due to past bouts with carpal tunnel, I have fairly particular ergonomic requirements. I suppose I could get another chair like the one I had before, but it isn’t sold in stores, being marketed by mildly sleazy salespeople who sell to the ‘physically challenged’. I’d prefer not to deal with them. And the back wasn’t the first part to fail; various knobs and stuff whose purpose I never fully understood have fallen off over the years. It was a nice chair, but didn’t seem worth the huge sum I paid for it.
So, in the next day or two, I’m going downtown to do some trial sitting.
If any law students from UM are reading this, I need a research assistant for the summer. Contact me by e-mail, or drop off a copy of your transcript (unofficial copy is fine), a c.v. and a short writing sample (non-legal is fine). Ideally I’d want 10-20 hours of your time per week (the exact amount is negotiable). If you need more hours, I might be able to put a package together with another professor.
The miserly wage rate is set by the University, but some of the tasks, primarily research, may be interesting; there’s also some blue booking, but not too much. If you have computer skills, that’s a plus but not a requirement. You could probably do a fair amount of the work from home, but you should expect to be on campus at least once a week.
If it works out, we might continue the arrangement into next year. First year students are especially encouraged to apply.
(If students from elsewhere are reading this, I’m sorry but our RA money is earmarked for our own students.)
Here’s an interesting controversy. In I Don’t Like Your Examples! Steven Feuerstein explains why he used controversial political examples in a technical O’Reilly book on Oracle PL/SQL Programming and shares some reader reaction.
Obviously there’s no legal issue here: in a free country an author can be political even in a technical reference book. And, equally obviously, political examples pose a commercial issue for a publisher: will a reference/instruction book with ‘interesting’ examples sell better because the reader stays awake (or because people buy it for the notoriety), or sell worse because those who find the examples distasteful will avoid it? (There’s also a question of editorial principle—how much freedom should authors be entitled to have? It’s not obvious to me that the answer is the same for technical books in a series as for a novelist or a polemicist, although in the hands of an enlightened and brave publisher it might be. I wonder what Theresa Nielsen Hayden thinks about this…)
But there’s also a moral, or at least aesthetic, issue as to whether it’s meet to introduce suggestions that Henery Kissinger is a war criminal for bombing Cambodia, CEOs are paid too much, or the gun lobby is too strong. And that’s the question which really interests me. In his article Mr. Feuerstein quotes feedback from readers, or might-have-been readers, who think inserting politics into programming examples is at least icky, maybe gross.
Having thought hard about it for several seconds, it turns out that on this last question I have no doubt at all: it is proper, even admirable, to witness one’s strongly held beliefs about the society we share in any book you write, and in most (but not all1) daily activities, especially in circumstances where your listener/reader is able to walk away or put down the tome. If this hurts your sales, that’s your problem. In general though, I prefer my fellow citizens to be engaged, not passive, committed not apathetic, even if it should happen we don’t agree.
1 Which activities? Depends. Class is a bad time for students (or professors) to stand up and read agitprop, but a good time for students to wear political t-shirts. See also More on Civility.
The White House’s overriding goal for Iraq is to keep the lid on it until after the election. This is not easy. Cutting and running would, in the best case, leave Islamic fundamentalists in charge (bad TV), and in the worst case lead quickly to civil war (very bad TV if reporters are brave).
Staying in charge leads to casualties like we are seeing. They can keep the images off TV, but probably not the newspapers. Staying in charge incites the militants.
The original plan was to transfer sovereignty on June 30, declare victory, and bring a few thousand troops home. This would allow Bush to say that the rest would be home soon — see the downpayment. Meanwhile, in the background, there would be a Status of Forces agreement with the new Chalabi government in which the US got to have nice forward bases well suited for defending or quietly (or not quietly) menacing strategic oil reserves. [The very original plan had been to sign the SoF agreement with the current Governing Council, but that proved too raw for everyone.]
That’s all gone pear shaped. The administration is now reduced to forlornly chanting that it is staying on schedule for a handover of sovereignty, although it no longer has control over to whom that will be, the initiative having passed either to the UN or to the arab street (funny we don’t hear about that street these days, isn’t it? that meme was all over the papers a year ago).
One obvious consequence of handing over sovereignty in ten weeks to unknown parties is that it’s no longer certain they will be the tame poodle that the administration persists in believing it has in Chalabi (despite the contrary evidence). If serious Islamicists are going to be in charge, or even in partial charge, they are not going to sign a status of forces agreement, and they are not going to do what the US tells them.
The writing being on the wall, it is being read. And folks in the administration don’t like what it says. Thus, the logical next move is to float the trial balloon that maybe the handover — still on schedule, you understand — will be somewhat more formal and less substantive than in version 1.0.
White House Says Iraq Sovereignty Could Be Limited. The Bush administration’s plans for a new caretaker government in Iraq would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new laws, administration officials said Thursday.
Sovereignty without meaningful control. A ‘sovereign’ government that can neither change existing laws nor command the armed forces. Sounds like Cuba in Guantanamo to me. The administration’s position in front of the Supreme Court this week was that the Cubans have ‘sovereignty’ over the base, but the US has control. In this view, as a result of the lack of this metaphysical ‘sovereignty’ the US courts have no power there … but neither do the Cubans.
It appears that the administration now proposes a transfer of ‘sovereignty’ for Iraq that will give the recipients the same great powers over their country that Castro enjoys over Guantanamo—and for the same sorts of reasons. The locals cannot be trusted to do what they are told.
How nice that we are instructing the Middle East on the finer points of democracy. What a shame that the lesson is so expensive, especially in lives, both for us and for them.
Ten weeks is a long time in warfare, and the situation remains very fluid on the ground. The diplomatic position, however, may be less fluid, and the administration’s trial balloon is likely to be shot at by numerous foreign governments—and even our own. As the NYT describes it,
These restrictions to the plan negotiated with Lakhdar Brahimi, the special United Nations envoy, were presented in detail for the first time by top administration officials at Congressional hearings this week, culminating in long and intense questioning on Thursday at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearing on the goal of returning Iraq to self-rule on June 30.
…The administration’s plans seem likely to face objections on several fronts. Several European and United Nations diplomats have said in interviews that they do not think the United Nations will approve a Security Council resolution sought by Washington that handcuffs the new Iraq government in its authority over its own armed forces, let alone foreign forces on its soil.
These diplomats, and some American officials, said that if the American military command ordered a siege of an Iraqi city, for example, and there was no language calling for an Iraqi government to participate in the decision, the government might not be able to survive protests that could follow.
The diplomats added that it might be unrealistic to expect the new Iraqi government not to demand the right to change Iraqi laws put in place by the American occupation under L. Paul Bremer III, including provisions limiting the influence of Islamic religious law.
Democratic and Republican senators appeared frustrated on Thursday that so few details were known at this late stage in the transition process, and several senators focused on the question of who would be in charge of Iraq’s security.
Asked whether the new Iraqi government would have a chance to approve military operations led by American commanders, who would be in charge of both foreign and Iraqi forces, a senior official said Americans would have the final say.
“The arrangement would be, I think as we are doing today, that we would do our very best to consult with that interim government and take their views into account,” said Marc Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs. But he added that American commanders will “have the right, and the power, and the obligation” to decide.
That formulation is especially sensitive at a time when American and Iraqi forces are poised to fight for control of Falluja.
In another sphere, Mr. Grossman said there would be curbs on the powers of the National Conference of Iraqis that Mr. Brahimi envisions as a consultative body. The conference, he said, is not expected to pass new laws or revise the laws adopted under the American occupation.
Sovereignty, but no control over the major military force in-country, and no power to pass laws or revise old ones. At least it should make the Iraqi interim government’s task of ‘governing’ quite easy…
French ‘lobster’ alarms US troops: A seemingly innocuous codename chosen by French special forces in south-east Afghanistan caused alarm among US troops searching for Osama Bin Laden.
A newly arrived French commander picked “homard”, meaning lobster, as an alias, the newspaper Liberation reports.
He did not realise that it sounds like Omar, the first name of the Mullah who led the Taleban and is now on the run.
Concerned US intelligence services monitoring French communications raised the alarm and the codename was changed.
Of course, those of us in the know realized immediately that this fish story was just a cover to explain why the US spies on the perfidious French! And the great thing about the story is that Europeans immediately believe it!
What’s even stranger is that the BBC buries the really interesting part of this story:
The incident, said to have happened in July 2003, marked the start of French special forces’ involvement in operation Enduring Freedom, the US-led action to find the al-Qaeda leader.
The presence of more than 200 French troops in the area has only just been acknowledged by Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie.
So the French have been helping hunt Osama all the time the Republicans have been jumping up and down about them? Such great diplomacy on the part of the US!
NOTE: ‘Homard’ is no relation to the Medium Lobster
Ex-N.H. Senator Ends Bid for Fla. Seat: MIAMI - Former New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith on Thursday ended his campaign for a Senate seat in his new home of Florida, citing a poor start to fund-raising.
Darn. I didn’t even know he was running, and now we don’t have Bob Smith to kick around any more. Oh well, plenty left:
Several Republicans are seeking the Republican nomination to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, including former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez, attorney Larry Klayman, House Speaker Johnnie Byrd, former Rep. Bill McCollum and businessman Doug Gallagher.
Better Angels of our Nature: Notations argues that “The first great negative ad of this campaign has surfaced.” and provides links to the Windows Media Player version, and the Real Player version.
I don’t claim to have my pulse on the finger of the American television-watching people, but is this ad really that good? Or shouldn’t someone at least jazz it up a bit with visuals: the flight suit, for example? One of the stills of the flag-draped coffins that just got Tami Silicio—and her husband—fired?
More generally, does Kerry win by going negative or by going positive? The John Edwards campaign (and early Dean) suggests this is a year for positive. On the other hand, Edwards didn’t win.
High-octane commentary from Giblets at Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.
Now and then I see something intelligent on the internet like this piece of reporting from Iraq from Andrew Sullivan. You know it is true because it comes from a military chaplain (he’s from the military and the church - two great flavors that go great together). He explains for all the stupid people why it looks like things are getting worse in Iraq when they are actually getting not-worse:“This country became a welfare state under Saddam. If you cared about your well-fare, you towed the line or died. The state did your thinking and your bidding. Want a job? Pledge allegiance to the Ba’ath party. Want an apartment, a car, etc? Show loyalty. …“So, we come along and lock up sugar daddy and give these people the toughest challenge in the world, FREEDOM. You want a job? Earn it! A house? Buy it or build it! Security? Build a police force, army and militia and give it to yourself. Risk your lives and earn freedom. … they want a sugar daddy, the U.S.A., to do it all. We refuse.”Damn straight! Giblets for one is sick of these pampered Iraqi welfare moms and their “ohhh feed my family” and their “ohhh rebuild the infrastructure you blew up.” Learn some gratitude, Iraqis! We come halfway around the world and take the time to give weapons to your dictator, start a war with him, crush your economy with sanctions, start another war, blow up your power plants and your cities and disband your police, and we did it all for you, so you could grow up to be as mature and developed a nation as we have become. And this is the thanks we get! Freedom is not free, Iraqis! It has a price. And that price is being invaded crippled and occupied by a foreign military. If you cannot handle freedom we’ll just have to hand you over to a “democracy-minded strongman.” And this one might not be the sugar daddy that Saddam was.
Cheer or cry?
The biggest trouble with national ID cards is that if you have an evil government, they make bad things easier.
Shanghai monitors Internet cafes: SHANGHAI’S INTERNET cafes and bars are being plagued with video cameras and hi-tech logging software, put in place by authorities to make absolutely certain no “forbidden sites” are viewed.
According to yahoo.com and the Shanghai Daily newspaper, Yu Wenchang from the Shanghai Culture, Radio and TV Administration said monitoring will begin in all 1,325 of Shanghai’s geek centres by the end of June.
Banned websites include both pornographic sites and sites with “superstitious content,” such as Falun Gong, the site of a spiritual group.
A number of people have already been sent to prison for downloading and uploading banned material, and it looks like with the new system in place even more will get busted.
The newspaper report also says that all people in Internet cafes will now have to enter the number on an identification card, as proof that they are over 16 years of age. Cafes allowing underage users to surf the web will be fined at first, and if caught again they will have their licenses revoked.
It doesn’t follow from this, necessarily, that ID cards make bad government more likely, or that they necessarily have the same bad effects under decent governments.
I’m certainly prepared to believe that if you have a government that wants to engage in thought control, you have much bigger problems than a little card. On the other hand, governments and indeed everyone, tend to go for what’s cheap and easy. If an ID card regime makes some choices cheaper and easier than they were formerly, surely it increases the odds that people will advocate them?
Long ago I asked why on earth no one seemed to care any more about the missing Bush Military records. Now comes CJR Campaign Desk: Spin Buster to ask that question again.
Campaign Desk has been curious for a while now about what happened to the story of President Bush’s Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard. After the White House’s February 13 Friday night data dump of all assembled records, there was little press follow-up. We never read anything that sorted through the details of the over 300 documents released to figure out what, exactly, happened back then; all we ever got was a few pieces noting that little of the information was new, and listing still-unanswered questions.
Why, exactly, did the media drop the matter?
Campaign Desk thinks it has part of the answer,
In part, no doubt, it’s because some of the details seem to come down to personal memories. But that doesn’t strike us as an excuse for throwing in the towel and failing to clarify a controversial story that the press had resuscitated itself (largely courtesy of Bush’s “Meet the Press” interview on February 8).
In other words, Campaign Desk is mystified.
I’m not mystified. Stupefied. Incredulous. But not mystified. See, there’s no Democrat banging the gong on this (and if there were s/he’d be attacked by the press for being shrill). And the press is just not up to doing the hard work itself. Haven’t been since they became ‘professionals’ instead of working stiffs.
Plus, who’s got the story for the agenda-setting New York Times? Why none other than Katherine Seeyle.
Thanks to special contacts who do not wish to be named, I have secured an exclusive copy of a key Presidential Daily Briefing, complete with GW Bush’s own marginal notations. Click here to pop up a full size copy!. I think this document puts to rest any question of what Bush knew and when he knew it!
Prompted by discussions on various law professor mailings lists of abusive copyright demands by law reviews and legal publishers, I’ve set up a quick wiki for legal writers to document their copyright experiences.
I don’t know if law professors — many of whom will have never seen a wiki before — can be persuaded to contribute to this, especially as the instructions I’ve provided are pretty light weight. But it would be nice if this caught on.
So if you have ever published in a law review or a book with an academic press that does legal topics, please consider adding your copyright experience to this database.
I spent three years as an associate in the London office of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and still have warm feelings towards the firm, even though it has grown a lot in the decade plus since I was there, and there are fewer and fewer of the folks I knew. Now it’s going to change (with the times?) by merging with Hale & Dorr, a Boston-based law firm, according to an email to firm alumni from WC&P managing chairman William Perlstein.
The initial word from the trade press seems positive, e.g. this item in the Washington Business Journal:
On the surface, the firms’ practices mesh well: Both have strong litigation departments, and Wilmer’s regulatory expertise combined with Hale and Dorr’s corporate work would complement each other.
The firms’ cultures also match, according to former attorneys at both firms.
“I would say that most law firm mergers are two dinosaurs mating, hoping to get a gazelle. That would not be the case here,” says Bill Flannery, president of WJF Institute, an Austin, Texas-based law firm marketing consultant. “Here you have two superior, cutting-edge, strong law firms. I’m very impressed by this merger, if in fact this is going to happen.”
Firm mergers tend to be difficult; for the sake of the folks I know at WC&P, I hope this one works out.
When I was there WC&P had a very intellectual and public-spirited culture, even in the branch offices (albeit slightly attenuated by distance); my sense is that this ethic has so far survived despite being under pressure from the exigencies of law firm economics. It’s even possible, given the economies of scale in legal practice (which seems to push firms to being small boutiques or megafirms, with little room for midsize), that growth of this sort may be the only way to preserve that culture. It would be interesting, though, to hear from more recent and more senior WC&P alumni (hint).
We are proud to announce some exciting news about WCP. The firm has agreed in principle to combine with Hale and Dorr LLP, effective by the end of May, to form Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP.
We will be combining two great firms at a time when each standing alone is stronger than it has ever been. Each firm has several practices with unsurpassed reputations, and no single law firm now provides the same level of excellence in so many practice areas. We also share core values of professional excellence, exceptionally cordial work relationships, an emphasis on training and development, and a strong commitment to pro bono and the public interest. This is the first combination of two firms on The American Lawyer’s “A List” of elite firms, a ranking based not only on financial performance, but also on pro bono service, the treatment and development of associates, and diversity.
The combination will be a true merger of equals between firms of roughly equivalent size. When the combination takes effect, we will be a firm of about 1000 lawyers, with offices in Washington D.C., Boston, Baltimore, McLean VA, New York, Princeton NJ, Waltham MA, Berlin, Brussels, London, Munich, and Oxford.
For law students and lawyers joining us in the coming years, the combination will be very good news. It creates an even richer mix of the highest-level work, gives our lawyers a broader range of professional opportunities, and ensures the continued growth of our professional development and training programs. Both firms have historically provided superb professional development programs for their associates. In the 2003-4 Vault Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms, Hale and Dorr was ranked third in the country for training. Together, we expect to make our programs the best in the country. In addition, both firms share a long-standing commitment to individual mentoring that we fully expect to continue and build on.
In a world that is increasingly competitive globally as well as nationally, and in which the scale and breadth of a firm’s practice matters, we look upon this opportunity as a tremendously exciting platform for continuing to build our practice — while enhancing our reputation for excellence and the culture in which we take so much pride. We are looking forward to the new paths that the combination will open up for the firm and all of its lawyers.
Sincerely yours,
William J. Perlstein Managing Partner
The New York Times has an article today, Bush Nominee for Archivist Is Criticized for His Secrecy, on the controversy over the Bush administration’s attempt to replace the Archivist of the US before he is willing to go.
The NYT item has lots about the prospective nominee, some positive, some not so positive. What it lacks is discussion of the timing issues that might motivate an administration to want to have its tame Archivist in office quickly. For those, please see last Saturday’s blog item, Politicizing the Archives.
Unless there’s something we’re not being told here, this is a sign that some people have lost all sense of morality. Can it really be a CRIME to share your picnic with homeless people? Even if the sharing is premeditated and the picnic somewhat pretextual?
It’s legal to feed stray dogs but not hungry people? The ants can have their picnic but not the homeless? You need a FEEDING LICENSE TO GIVE FOOD TO THE HOMELESS IN TAMPA?
3 Arrested During ‘Picnic’ With Homeless In Park: The feud between the group Food Not Bombs and the police has been going on since at least March 21. Group members, many of whom are students at the University of South Florida, say it is their right to feed anyone, anywhere they see the need.
City officials say any group wanting to gather in the park must pay an application fee and buy insurance. Mayor Pam Iorio has said Massey Park does not have the facilities necessary for feeding the homeless.
Durkin said the group could also affiliate with a recognized feeding organization.
Members of Food Not Bombs, including Anthony Schmidt, say they do not feel they should have to do that.
“It’s a contradiction to say we can’t have a picnic and share with our friends,” he said.
(spotted via the aptly-named The American Street)
We should be giving awards to people who feed the hungry, not arresting them.
How low can we go?
Alexander Halavais has started a wiki list of Scholars Who Blog. So far he has about 400, and invites those missing to add their names.
Lots of people are suggesting that the ever-increasing wave of spam may bring e-mail as utility to its knees. Others are saying that when something is threatened, it fights back.
Paul Vixie is a genuine Internet pioneer, and a (the?) DNS guru. He was behind one of the big — and somewhat controversial — projects to ‘blackhole’ ISPs whose equipment was used by spammers. But although those projects did block some spam — and also caused harm to innocent bystanders — they proved insufficient to stem the spam tide.
Yesterday, Vixie (on the Nanog mailing list) delivered a prophesy about where this is leading. It deserves to be taken seriously. It is not pretty. In Vixie’s view, if blackholing fails, the next step is a whitelist Internet—at the service provider level.
… you’d better prepare for the inevitability of widespread filtering against your DSL/Cable blocks
[…]
DSL/Cable is a fine access product, it’s better than a phone line & modem because it allows faster web surfing, movies/mp3/etc on demand, and soon VoIP. but no e-mail server anywhere can afford the risk of accepting e-mail or any other push-data from them. risk management, in this case, is going to come in the form of widespread e-mail rejection from all DSL/ Cable blocks. “talk to the hand.”
[Then, in response to an earlier poster’s suggestion that the solution to spam is “better ways to identify the specific sources of the unwanted traffic, even if they change IP addresses”]
my informal survey says the bad guys are better at this stuff than we are,
and they’re getting better every day, and we’re not. the trend isn’t good.
As a DSL user I find the idea that my email will be seen as ‘high risk’ to be very ominous.
Dream about an application, and someone is already building it!
Back in November I wrote,
It’s true that linkrot is a serious problem. It’s also true that archive.org is only a partial solution since it doesn’t get anything and some big content providers — like the Washington Post — block it.
Is the only solution to make (copyright busting?) offline copies of everything? If so, where’s the tool that will automate that for me, and — more importantly — index all that content on my drive, disk, or tape?
Maximillian Dornseif wrote in the comments section that,
I have build such a beast. Basically it snatches your browsers browsers history and downloads the pages you have visited. Its running on a server because my notebook hasn’t enough harddisk space for such experiments. Searching in this Archive is possible although at the moment only via the command line.
I share that installation with a few friends and we are looking at it as an research project. We would love to make it available to others but on thee other hand we have no desire to to though evaluation of the restrictions based upon us by the various laws governing immaterial goods.
See http://blogs.23.nu/disLEXia/stories/1412/ and http://blogs.23.nu/c0re/stories/1928/
That project looked a little experimental for me…but now it seems that someone else is trying to make a commercial version of a web memory/personal history full text search tool, and he calls it Furl:
John Battelle’s Searchblog, Grokking Furl: Storage, Search, And The Personalweb: Mike [Giles] started Furl about a year ago to solve a problem he - and a lot of us - had with bookmarks. Namely, bookmarking is a lame, half-assed, unsearchable, flat, linkrotten approach to recalling that which you’ve seen and care to recall on the web. Now, a lot of folks have made stabs at solving this particular problem, but Mike’s got a lot of very cool features built into his beta, and more on the way.
And from my conversation with him, he’s got one more thing that others might be missing: a clear sense of what Furl could do if it were part of a massively scaled platform like AOL, Yahoo, Google, or MSN. If I’m reading him right, he’s smart enough to realize that what he’s built will probably be a feature set on everyone of those platforms before the end of 2005, and he’s also smart enough to know that by launching Furl, he’s forced all of them to consider him as the person to watch in the space.
So what is it about Furl that made me write that past paragraph? After all, it’s just a web page-saving application. Right? Well, yes and no. Furl does a good job of helping you manage your web browsing. It adds several features that others don’ t have - full text search on your saved pages, for example. But Furl saves the entire web page you’ve “furled”, not just the URL, which prevents link rot, on the one hand, and creates what I’ll call a “PersonalWeb,” on the other.
Now, having your own PersonalWeb is a very cool thing. Every page you care about is now saved forever, and is searchable. How I wish I had Furl while I was researching my book for the past year. This application was inconceivable before the cost of storage and bandwidth began to fall toward zero.
But wait…there’s more. You can share your PersonalWeb with others. And Mike just added a recommendation engine, so you can see links the service thinks will be interesting to you, based on what you’ve already Furl’d. Now, let’s play this out. Imagine Furl on, oh, Yahoo, for example. Or Google. You now have a massively scaled application where millions of people are creating their own personal versions of the web, and then sharing them with each other, driving massively statistically significant recommendations, and…some pretty damn useful metadata that can be fed into search engine algorithms, resulting in…yup, far better search (and…far better SFO (Search Find Obtain) opportunities).
Another nice thing about the Internet is all the smart people who kindly act as filters for us.
Mark A. R. Kleiman: Woodward so far: Two dynamite political issues and one impeachable offense
1. The President told the Saudi Ambassador about our war plans two days before he told his Secretary of State.2. The Saudi Ambassador promised to knock down oil prices in time to help the President get re-elected.
Well, it’s a start.
Absolutely one of the best things about the Internet is how easy it makes it to get unfiltered perspectives from people unlike (or far away from) the ones you run into every day. And then there are nice people like Rafe Colburn who want to help you find them…
rc3.org | Surveying Iraqi weblogs: I’ve been reading Iraqi weblogs lately, and I thought I’d give a brief survey of the ones I follow, in case anyone else is interested. They come from varying perspectives, and I find all of them fascinating. Some of them I find more depressing than others. One thing you’ll find is that the Iraqis who write these weblogs have mistaken impressions about America. I find them illuminating as well, because the impressions of America that Iraqis have are far more important than the truth in terms of whether or not we have any hope of leaving Iraq better off than we found it.
We went to the Kerry rally on Sunday. We arrived about the time the seating was supposed to open, that is about an hour and quarter before Kerry was to speak. The line was already enormous, and it doubled at least while we were waiting. Everyone had to pass through metal detectors before being admitted to the outdoor seating/standing area, which took a very very long time and which made me sad and nostalgic for the days when politics was less paranoid.
We were among the last admitted to the roped-off area, and had a very obstructed view. Standing on a small stone wall, I could just see Kerry from the neck up.
Kerry spoke surprisingly well — especially given what I had heard about him as a lackluster stump speaker. He was by no means the best I ever heard, but he was good.
Kerry began by noting that after 9/11 Bush had an opportunity to unify the nation; instead he divided it. The speech had a little more pandering than I would ideally like — especially the trade stuff about his plan to stop subsidizing the export of jobs, and the lengthy list of promises to make college more affordable (which, if I heard it right, actually doesn’t amount to that much per person unless the student spends two years in a domestic peace corps-like job either before or after college). It did have more detail and Senatorial reference to programs and such than you would find in the most classic stemwinder, but it never had so much detail that it got boring
The top applause lines were
All these got a lot more applause than the trade stuff or even the college-costs stuff.
The crowd loved him. I left feeling more cheerful about the Democratic nominee then when I arrived, and the whole family clanked a little due to the several nice Kerry buttons we acquired.
Spanish PM Jose Zapatero announced today he’s pulling Spain’s militarily small but politically significant contingent out of Iraq.
BBC—Full text: Spain’s PM calls troops back: Good evening. This morning, once the defence minister [Jose Bono] was sworn in, I gave him the order to make the necessary arrangements for the Spanish troops stationed in Iraq to return home in the shortest time, and with the greatest security possible.
Combine this with the British commander in southern Iraq saying The moment that Sayid Ali says, ‘We don’t want the Coalition here’, we might as well go home, plus the very confused reports as to whether negotiations are going well, poorly, or not at all, and it doesn’t look good.
It now appears that the Bush ‘strategy’ is to hand off the whole mess to anyone who will take it and cut and run on June 30. The theory being that no amount of Islamic zealotry on TV from Iraq (a three day wonder at best) could be as bad as the endless casualty news. The original plan was to keep bases in country after June 30 under a status of forces agreement, but it looks certain there will be none — so the only fig leaf left would be protecting whatever international contingent stepped in for the US. If one does.
This sort of tail-between-the-legs defeat—which although not inevitable looks more likely today than it ever has yet—would be an international political disaster for the US, and I would say a domestic disaster for the Iraqis who would most likely end up with civil war or theocracy. What’s so awful to contemplate is the real possibility that this disaster would be better than any of the alternatives (for the US) that may be on offer next as soon as next week if the simmering civil war boils over. (Optimistic fact: the Iraqi community leaders appear to understand how much they all have to lose if this happens.)
Perhaps it’s more fair to say that if the US suffers a political defeat it will be the realization — in the economic sense of the term — of the political disaster that Iraq has been for the US since the decision was made to invade without UN backing. It has also in some sense been a military disaster, not in terms of military defeat, but in counting the cost in lives, resources, and attention better spent elsewhere.
More from Zapatero’s speech:
In March 2003, more than a year ago, I made a public commitment, which I repeated in February.
I said then that in the event of my being elected prime minister by citizens, I would order the return of the Spanish troops from Iraq if the UN did not take charge of the political and military situation.
With the information we have available and which we have gathered in the course of recent weeks, it is not foreseeable that a UN resolution will be adopted that matches the content [as heard] on which our presence in Iraq was made conditional.
Neither the public statements of the main players involved in this conflict nor the contacts held by the defence minister at my request in the course of the last month provide any evidence allowing one to foresee a substantial variation in the political and military situation existing in Iraq within the period envisaged, and in the manner demanded by the Spanish people.
These circumstances have led me to take the decision to order the return of our soldiers with the maximum security and consequently in the shortest possible time.
I would dearly love this to be true: WPU Forums - Breaking News: WP12 Runs Under WINE (Linux)
A long history with WordPerfect…going back to version 4.1…is by far the most significant reason why I don’t switch to a Linux desktop. But before I do anything rash, I’d need to see a report by someone who had really used WP12, exercising lots of features on long heavily footnoted documents, for a period of weeks, not just someone who fired it up and ‘gave it a shot.’
I also see that Corel is reviving the long-lost WP8 for Unix (is that 8.0 or the better 8.1PE [not 8.1LE]? I hope and trust it’s the hard-to-find 8.1PE, not one of the inferior and easier-to-find versions). That’s an alternate solution, I guess, although I’d really rather not regress two versions from WP10. And I recall reading that it had some issues (printers? fonts?).
Update: Looks like it is an 8.1 version, at least, and that the ugliest usability issues have been mitigated. Hmm…
Politics as usual? Or just another minor perversion of democracy — keeping facts from the people not because they need to be secret, but because their release might embarrass Republicans? It’s unclear, but it doesn’t look good.
National Coalition for History Washington Update Concern is growing within the archival and historical communities regarding the Bush administration’s hoped for “fast-track” process to replace Archivist of the United States John Carlin with one of its own choosing — historian Allen Weinstein. According to informed sources, the administration hopes to short-circuit the normal confirmation process and see Weinstein confirmed through an “expedited” process. Their goal — place Weinstein in the position prior to the November election.
According to Hill insiders, the effort to replace Carlin is coming from the highest levels of the White House. Reportedly, Karl Rove who is widely viewed as one of the president’s chief political advisors, if not his political mastermind and, Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, want their own archivist in place for two overarching reasons: first, because of the sensitive nature of certain presidential and executive department records likely to be opened in the near future, and second, because there is genuine concern in the White House that the president may not be re-elected.
Indeed, the Society of American Archivists says it’s concerned:
We are concerned about the sudden announcement on April 8, 2004, that the White House has nominated Allen Weinstein to become the next Archivist of the United States. Prior to the announcement, there was no consultation with professional organizations of archivists or historians. This is the first time since the National Archives and Records Administration was established as an independent agency that the process of nominating an Archivist of the United States has not been open for public discussion and input. We believe that Professor Weinstein must—through appropriate and public discussions and hearings—demonstrate his ability to meet the criteria that will qualify him to serve as Archivist of the United States.
When former President Ronald Reagan signed the National Archives and Records Administration Act of 1984 (Public Law 98-497), he said that, “the materials that the Archives safeguards are precious and irreplaceable national treasures and the agency that looks after the historical records of the Federal Government should be accorded a status that is commensurate with its important responsibilities.” Earlier in 1984, when the National Archives Act was being discussed, Senate Report 98-373 cautioned that if the Archivist was appointed “arbitrarily, or motivated by political considerations, the historical records could be impoverished [or] even distorted.”
OK, this may be small beer compared to secretly taking money from appropriations to help the Afghanistani people and spending it to do planning for the Iraq campaign. But it looks ugly none the less.
For an example of what is at stake, see this item about the Nixon documents [link fixed to remove superfluous “.”]
More from the article at the National Coalition for History
Though it is not widely known, in January 2005, the first batch of records (the mandatory 12 years of closure having passed) relating to the president’s father’s administration will be subject to the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and could be opened. Another area of concern to presidential officials relates to the 9-11 Commission records. Because there is no mandatory 30-year closure rule (except for highly classified White House and Executive Department records and documents), all materials relating to the commission are scheduled to be transferred to the National Archives upon termination of the Commission later this year. These records could be made available to researchers and journalists as soon as they are processed by NARA.
Note that as these records are coming on stream this year, the line quoted above about how this is a contingency plan for losing the election is probably wrong. If the article’s basic hypothesis is correct, then the administration needs its archivist in place sooner than the next inauguration.
In what appears to be a calculated move by administration officials, Rove and Gonzales have advanced the nomination of Weinstein fully aware that according to the “National Archives and Records Administration Act of 1984 (P.L. 98-497) the Archivist of the United States position is to be an appointment based “without regard to political affiliations and solely on the basis of the professional qualifications required to perform the duties and responsibilities of the office of the Archivist.” If Weinstein is confirmed and if President Bush is not elected, then President Kerry could be accused of “politicizing” the position should he try to replace Weinstein. In fact, though, the president’s strategy in seeking to replace Carlin at this time rather than later injects an element of partisanship that could give John Kerry, should he be elected president in November, ample justification to replace Weinstein in the same manner that the White House is seeking to replace Carlin.
Carlin has made it widely known that he anticipated stepping down from the Archivist position in July 2005, upon his 65th birthday, upon the tenth anniversary of his appointment to the position, and upon the completion of his ten-year strategic plan for NARA. His intention not to step down until then has been stated in several public interviews including (reportedly), in a recent interview with CNN’s Brian Lamb (26 November 2003 broadcast of “National Journal”). Months back, recognizing that Carlin intended to step down next year, archival organizations had begun to pull together qualification statements and a “highly qualified” list of names for the White House to consider in finding Carlin’s replacement. What appeared to be an orderly procedure to pass power from Carlin to a new archivist in summer