...more recent posts
Thursday, Jul 31, 2003
512^2
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rectalinear
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Wednesday, Jul 30, 2003
No Oil Left Behind
We need to take the little children in Iraq and hold their hands and really teach them what freedom is all about.
The decisive G. Dubya Bush, April 28, 2003.
The conditions that I laid out for the Liberian rescue mission still exist. Charles Taylor must go, the cease-fire must be in place, and we will be there to help ECOWAS. And so we're working to get those conditions in place. And we will continue working to get them in place until they are in place ... blah, blah, blah.
The vacillating G. Dubya Bush, July 30, 2003
Beverages in Monrovia
Because most of the US media are lapdogs, I usually choose the BBC when I want some TV news. Today's BBC World News had a revealing report on Monrovia. One segment showed Liberians gathering drinking water from a dirty stream, risking death by bullets, mortars and dysentery. Another segment showed kevlar-vested US Marines guarding a delivery of Heineken to the US embassy compound.
Civilians may be dying in droves, but at least our guys have some beer!
Pity the poor Liberians. If they only had some oil ...
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Sunday, Jul 27, 2003
Tuesday, Jul 22, 2003
Scottish Git
Formula 1 is a racing series which has perhaps the finest cars and drivers in the world. For a variety of reasons, the action isn't always compelling. Too often the races are predictable, and the passing is minimal.
The race at Silverstone this past weekend included an unusual incident. A Christian terrorist in full Scottish regalia (kilt, sporran, tam o'shanter) ran onto the track at a spot where the cars are going in excess of 200 km per hour. He played chicken with one of the Minardi drivers, and almost met his maker.
This resulted in the safety car coming out, and most of the field diving into the pits. The mayhem of the unexpected mass pit stop jumbled the field thoroughly. The racing action after the incident was quite exciting as the field sorted itself out.
The racing was so good that I'm proposing a new competition flag: the Scottish Git Flag. At some random point in the race, this new flag is dropped, and a Scottish git runs out onto the racing surface. All drivers are then compelled to head for the pits, unless they've already pitted within the last couple of laps.
Wednesday, Jul 16, 2003
Dubyariffic!
Verbal comprehension:
Read the passage below, and
answer the question which follows.
The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region. I firmly believe the decisions we made will make America more secure and the world more peaceful.
The President of the United States is:
a) stupidOthers have pointed out that the quotable quote was "darn good intelligence". NPR and the Daily Show picked up on that phrase. The huge gaff just falls by the wayside. (However, Kofi Annan did a double take.)
b) incompetent
c) a liar
d) all of the above
I recommend watching the video at whitehouse.gov. It's low resolution, but the president is visibly flustered. It's a choice, juicy sound bite.
This dude ain't teflon. He's Teflon® Platinum Pro.
Calpundit
Salon
White House transcript, audio and video
Monday, Jul 14, 2003
Defining Phrases
There are certain utterances that taint public figures. Nixon's include "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more" and "I am not a crook." My favorite from the Reagan administration is "Mistakes were made." Clinton has a few, including "definition of the word is."
The concept of defining phrases is part of the underlying methodology of Dr. P, namely to find pithy utterances that a) are clearly out of touch with reality, or b) pull back the veil of civility that obcures true character.
I've got a nomination for a phrase for Rummy. It's the title of Rummy's latest meditation on epistemology.
[Reading guide: When Rumsfeld speaks normally, he's lying. When Rumsfeld stutters, he's spinning a yarn.]
I don’t know. It appears – there’s discussion about that inside the government. … But it’s possible. But uh I just don’t know the answer. … I dunno. Call it what you want. … I don’t know that that’s necessarily the correct definition of organized resistance … I don’t know much more than what’s been said. … But it’s not clear that i-i-i – it’s not known that it’s inaccurate, in fact people think it’s accurate … Look, you’re gonna have to ask George Tennet or the people involved in that. I-I was not involved. I do not know. All I know is what the president said, what George Tennet said. And, and it seems to me that George Tennet’s statement e-e-explains the whole thing. … That I don’t know. I have no knowledge of that. … Not to my knowledge. … I mean, I don’t know what else one can say. The president said (swallow) that uuuuh (swallow) in retrospect those words didn’t ah wouldn’t should not have been in the speech, not that they’re known be inaccurate. ... The way he phrased it was accurate. ... I probably should have said we know where they were instead of we know where they are. …Exactly. We did believe that. And they may have been there. Eh we’ve been out looking at those sites and (swallow) some of those sites and have gone through some fraction of them. … I wouldn’t say that. … They have found things. Um the – they have not found things that that when one aggregates them and looks at them that they would say "a-ha there it is". But they are – they are finding things. And then what they do is they take the materials and they send to several different laboratories to be tested, then it comes back and it’s not what you thought it might be … Uh, I’m not gonna say that … But basically we don’t know. And we intend to find out. And I believe we will find out … I dih – I didn’t say that. I said we found (full-on carp-faced pause) the uh (pause) ‘suits’ that one – Iraqi would wear were they going to use those weapons … I don’t know. I-I-I I’m sure there were a lot of scientists a lot of interrogations. I don’t doubt for a minute that some people are saying that. … Now. Um. Where’s the truth? Maybe they’re both true. … Mmm eh uh you could have one person told one thing and another … I think it’s unlikely … we won’t know precisely what we’ll find … I don’t dismiss them, uh wha wha how’d you phase that they said there was no what? … Well that may be. Well there were pieces of indications of cooperation. I don’t know what “significant pattern” – in other words, I’m not gonna say that they’re incorrect. Um nor-nor can anyone say what I said was incorrect. … We ah – we have said we don’t know what it will cost (laugh). Uh we have said it’s not knowable how long it will last – the war. We never said it would be fast or slow. We didn’t know. Ah we also ehm indicated that we could not know about whether a lot of very harmful things could happen. … We never said that we knew what it would cost. We said that because it’s the truth. It wasn’t known. … I don’t know! I have said I don’t know. … Wuh-wuh-well if we knew we would say. We have avoided saying x number of years or x billions of dollars because it would be deceptive. … If it’s not knowable isn’t it a bigger s-s-s disservice to the American people to guess than to say the truth “you don’t know.” … It was a mistake to have those words in there – not that they were inaccurate. Not that they even may not be true. … if we knew, we would dearly love to tell people … Instead of stating anything, we’ve said we don’t know. … I never ever made a conclusion as to how many forces it would take because I didn’t know what Iraq was going to look like at the end of the war. Why would I think I was wise enough to look into the future and know an answer like that. I never did. … I have no idea. You don’t listen! I’ve said I don’t know the answers to those questions.
Disclaimer: This is not an official ABC NEWS transcript, nor is it a official US DOD transcript. It is not outside the realm of possibility that this transcript may not be unabridged.
Sunday, Jul 13, 2003
Je pas, je pas, je pas
Stephanopoulos attempted to pin down Rumsfeld on the dodgy dossier today. George wasn't fully prepared, in my humble opinion. While he had some of the WMD paper-trail (and video trail) lined up, he clearly didn't have the index cards in his debate file ready to handle Rummy's creative scramble. If ABC can't do their own research on the administration's historical record, then George needs to spend some time in the blogosphere. I would have loved to have seen George read Billmon's WMD quotes to Rummy's face.
Check your Tivo, because Rumsfeld's performance is truly spectacular. Once the transcript is available, I'm going to count up the repetition of "I don't know/We don't know/Not to my knowledge/Your aren't listening I said I don't know". That man is truly a marvel of shameless double speak.
DTV
Since I work with high definition television, I need to train my eyes for this new medium. So I've upgraded to HD at home. It's still about a $2000 proposition. An entry level set costs about a grand. An out-of-box unit might run as little as $800. Including shipping, I paid $1200 for a Samsung 30" 16 x 9 unit with 1080i resolution (TXN 3098 WHF for those taking notes).
I already have DIRECTV so I bought an HD reciever to work with that system. These run $500 to $800 depending on brand. I got an out-of-box Samsung (with DVI output to match the TV) for $510.
The satellite receiver also accepts over-the-air digital television from a conventional antenna (these channels are not carried at full HD resolution by satellite or cable companies at this point). In order to get HD signals from PBS, CBS, etc. I strapped an improbably large antenna to my chimney and pointed it roughly in the direction of Mount Suto in San Francisco.
I'm sad to say that hooking up HD TV is still too hard. I ran into a few technical difficulties along the way, and continually found that I knew more than the DIRECTV, Circuit City, Radio Shack and Samsung people I spoke with.
I had trouble getting techs to understand things like "I need a single output LNB because the satellite at 110 degrees uses only one polarization", and had to resort to statements like "it has two things sticking out, but there's only one hole."
Once I finally got it working, the first movie on HBO HD was a forgettable Jim Belushi film with a poor quality transfer to video. This was followed up by Ishtar.
It's gonna get better. It has too.
HD Net is the shining hope at this point, at least in terms of production quality. They just need to get the right content. I watched some horse racing simply because I was impressed by the stunning video quality. They nailed the video in situation after situation -- the announcers booth, the post race interviews, the post race close-ups of the horses, the actual race footage, the establishing shot of the facility with an unsettled sky as the backdrop. All the video was clear, crisp and nuanced. Too bad I don't really like horse racing.
Rating the Kool-Aid of the Savage Weiners
In a rant of epic proportions Digby describes an experience sampling the cabal of savage weiners. Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, et al, spew forth for several hours each day, using sheer repetition to drive messages into the minds of their subjects.
I also sample the products of the right wing's propaganda corps, but it's a dangerous thing, best done in moderation. The juice is toxic.
Often Rush tries to be logical. He's not the screaming ranter type. Rush is a pontificator, and feels the need to wrap his arguments in psuedo-logic. He contructs morality plays between the god-fearing and the liberal cultural warriors, then explains why the god-fearing are right, right, right, and why the liberals are evil, irrational, or just plain wrong.
This morning Rush was struggling. He attempted to formulate arguments against homosexual marriage on the basis of tradition, and was clearly winging it. Rush meandered, so he put emphasis on basso profundo elecution to hide the vacancy of his words. Rush found himself harkening back to days of pre-civilization, and cited the primordial drive to preserve genetic lineages as the basis for the marriage contract -- which, as we all know, has since time immemorial been a male-female pair-bond based on romantic love.
At some point, he realized he was waxing nostalgic about the days when women were chattle. Thinking quickly, he said "of course we don't want to go back to that", and changed the subject with a well-worn annecdote about feminazis.
I'd say Rush put in a tired weiner performance rather than a savage weiner. The feminazi rant was well executed, but it's shopworn, and wasn't enough to counter the tedious attempts to form a coherent argument.
Hannity is on the tube (FNC) and the radio. On Fox he has a liberal cohort whom he flogs nightly. Colmes is largely ineffective, but can counter the most extreme excesses. This morning I caught Hannity's radio show for the first time.
He seems to have a cohort on the radio, but she's far more subservient than Colmes, so Hannity's rants are unchecked.
The guy was doing a "Fun with Real Audio" with clips from Hillary, Bill, Monica, et al. And having a blast at it. He was just as outraged about the DNA on the dress as ever.
Hannity played clip of an angry moment in a Hillary speech over and over to demonize her. He completely ignored the content of Hillary's statement -- that debate is patriotic -- and focused on the theatrics of her delivery.
I have to give Hannity a rating of all-savage and all-weiner. His show is filled with rants, histrionics, and venom, yet has the most tenuous relationship with rational thought. If Hannity says "What lies? Clinton was the liar! He spooged in the White House!", then the miasma of questions about Bush simply waft away.
That's some kind of Kool-Aid.