Defective Yeti with punctuation-related Bushisms… and spinoffs:
“I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, [the current violence] will look like just a comma.” (cf. original comma quote)
“The only way to stop the sectarian violence is to find a bridge between the Sunnis and Shiites, a hyphen that will join the two separate parties into one compound nation.”
“Victory is still possible in Iraq — albeit a victory enclosed in scare quotes and followed by an asterisk.”
In the run-up to the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the overall cost would be under $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz argued that Iraq could use its oil to “finance its own reconstruction.” But now several careful studies have attempted to tote up various costs, and they suggest that the tab will be more than $1 trillion — perhaps more than $2 trillion. … Just to put that $2 trillion in perspective, it is four times the additional cost needed to provide health insurance for all uninsured Americans for the next decade. It is 1,600 times Mr. Bush’s financing for his vaunted hydrogen energy project…
Not to beat a dead horse, but this horse ain’t dead. Every minute we spend losing a war that not even the generals think we can win is costing us $380,000.
Princeton researchers have successfully cracked a Diebold electronic voting machine and produced a clear – and extremely chilling – demonstration video.
Any voter can insert an altered memory card containing vote manipulation software.
The lock protecting the card can be picked without a key in under 10 seconds.
The crack can delete itself from memory when the election is over, leaving no trace it was ever resident in memory (but with the altered votes intact).
It’s not about what John Q. Public might do in a voting booth – it’s about what a corrupt candidate or PAC with a bunch of money and lots of motivation might do. This is what we get when we build public policy atop closed / proprietary / corporate processes.
Diplomats from other countries living in the U.S. enjoy a certain level of immunity from local laws, e.g. they can park wherever they want, damn the tickets. Whether diplomats choose to use the privilege seems to have a direct correlation to corruption levels in their home countries. The Economist on parking tickets issued to U.N. diplomats living in New York:
For instance, between 1997 and 2002 diplomats from Chad averaged 124 unpaid parking violations; diplomats from Canada and the United Kingdom had none. The results from 146 countries were strikingly similar to the Transparency International corruption index, which rates countries by their level of perceived sleaze. In the case of parking violations, diplomats from countries with low levels of corruption behaved well, even when they could get away with breaking the rules. The culture of their home country was imported to New York, and they acted accordingly.
But the sword of immunity cuts both ways – American diplomats in London have apparently stopped paying the congestion charge for bringing a car into central London, racking up unpaid charges of $.75 million as of August. If the “corruption levels of home country” theory/pattern holds, what does that say?
Amid the coming week of 9/11 tributes, ABC is preparing to air a piece slamming the Clinton administration for his role in the years prior. “Path to 9/11” is created by “an avowed conservative who has spoken on a panel entitled ‘How Conservatives Can Lead Hollywood’s Next Paradigm Shift.'” Remember, we’re heading up to mid-term elections here.
According to reports from those who have seen it, the “docu-drama” is also riddled with factual errors. Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has already debunked one of the film’s central scenes — involving Sandy Berger — as completely false.
Apparently Rush Limbaugh likes it — the film was screened in advance only to conservative bloggers and journalists. ActForChange is running a petition to get the documentary pulled before it airs on national TV.
Music: National Health :: The Bryden 2-Step (For Amphibians) [Part 2]
Families with loved ones serving in Iraq or Afghanistan and who miss their deployed Mommies and Daddies — and who aren’t of a mind to protest the whole stinking mess — can just order up a 2-D Daddy. Healthy therapy for families? Or has America completely lost its mind?
Cheerful stuff for a gloomy Friday. Christian Science Monitor: “The United States is the world’s only military superpower and has the globe’s largest economy. Yet, by some measures, the US is a second-rate industrial nation – at best.” Quoting CSM via plastic.com:
Most Americans take it as a given that the US economic model is the best in the world, way better than the interventionist models offered by European social democrats or by Chinese Communists. Many non-Americans disagree, and they argue that by some measures, the US is a second-rate industrial nation at best. 17% of Americans, and 21.9% of US children, live below the poverty line, the worst showing among 16 wealthy nations in a recent study. In life expectancy, the US shared the bottom rung of the study with Denmark, even though Denmark spends half what the US spends on medical care per person. Even in areas like productivity and employment, where the US considers itself a world-beater, it came in at number 5, even as Americans work the most hours. But in certain respects, the US is truly unequaled. For example, the US’ Defense Dept. budget is responsible for 47% of world military spending, with no other nation or combination of likely adversaries coming anywhere close. It spends 57 times more than all “rogue” nations combined.
So where does the perception that Americans live better than anyone in the world come from? Is it a left-over mystique from the 1950s that seldom gets re-examined? A lie we tell ourselves to reinforce the status quo? An artifact of hubris? Or are we just not paying attention?
When I was young, Dad used to tell the story of the first time he crossed the International Date Line with the Coast Guard, aboard the U.S.S. Chautauqua. Sailors who had never crossed before were called “pollywogs” and had to go through what amounts to a hazing ritual, though they didn’t call it that.
Pollywogs would have to climb through a bag of ship’s garbage, have their faces pushed into another man’s belly covered in used motor oil from the engine room, get sprayed with fire hoses while trying to retrieve their clothes, and become the slave of a “shellback” for a day (a shellback being a sailor who had crossed the IDL before). Officers were not exempt.
Dad and I recently had hours of old 8mm and Super8 family film digitized, and have been working on a DVD, preserving a bunch of family footage before the film completely rots. Amazingly, he had an 8mm camera on board with him during a 1957 crossing, and shot several minutes of footage. Decided this would be a good opportunity to experiment with YouTube, and loaded up the clip.
The military has cracked down on hazing rituals quite a bit over the decades; I wonder how much of this kind of thing still goes on.
Note: This clip was hosted on YouTube for more than a year, then was mysteriously removed from the service for “Terms of Service” violation. I was never informed about the removal, and all attempts to reach YouTube for an explanation went unanswered. Since there is positively no copyright violation involved in the clip, I have to assume that it was removed after complaints from one or more viewers. My suspicion is that complaints may have come from military personnel not wanting to see the Coast Guard shown in a bad light; but that’s conjecture. Let’s hope it has better luck on Vimeo.
After Lieberman’s campaign web site went down yesterday, there was some suggestion that it might have been hacked by the opposition. Not so fast… turns out Lieberman’s $12 million campaign was running its site off a common $15/month hosting plan at a generic provider. I can just see how it all unfolded: Campaign director asks a friend who knows “a web guy I like” to build a site for the campaign. Web dude sets it up where he sets up all of his clients, never thinks to ask Day 1 questions like “So how much traffic do we expect here?” And neither does a single soul in the entire campaign staff.
Not saying Birdhouse could handle that kind of traffic, but I would certainly have the sense to make sure a site reaching out to a population this large had a dedicated server. Or two. Twist: The Lamont campaign offered midway through the day to take over hosting for their opponent — a gracious gesture — but never heard back.
Also interesting is that the gross underestimation wasn’t discovered until election day — evidence of how many people wait until the very last minute to start scrabbling together a bit of voting information.
