|
 Sunday, February 23, 2003
|
|
Testing my Javascript redirects
Testing my Javascript redirects. Please excuse the mess. Hopefully this will be the second to last post on Radio. ...
Of course. Radio is choking on the JavaScript that works everywhere else. How typical. This is the number one reason I wanted to get off in the first place. Arg! $%^&XCA
--
After doing a little googling, I find that you can't use standard Javascript comment style with Radio templates, because Radio sees any // as a URL. So typical. Thanks you Mark Paschal for finding the bug (over a year ago). What a giant piece of junk.
--
Now I need to go to bed, but it is clear I need to do slightly different things for the home page and the archives, since they have different urls. But I am in stricking distance.
|
|
| Tuesday, December 03, 2002
|
|
Geodog's New Year's (early) Blogging Resolutions
I am going to do my best to minimize political blogging. Over the next two years, there will clearly be enough exploitation of the terrorism threat for political purposes, destruction of civil liberties and the environment, crony capitalism, and transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 1%, to keep any interested blogger working full time documenting it. It doesn't do me much good to document it unless I can make it change, and it doesn't seem like I can influence it, at least in the short run. Of course, I may not be able to refrain from noting it in passing :-)
I'm going to get this blog moved over to Movable Type ASAP.
I'm going to do much shorter links, a la Instapundit, and I'm going to try to spend most of my energy on original writing, as opposed to commenting or just linking to the writings of others.
I will stop blogging by midnight (already blew that one out of the water).
We will see how it goes.
|
|
|
So why has Geodog started blogging again?
Given all those good reasons for stopping blogging, why am I starting up again?
I like being part of a community that includes people like Cory, Joe, Josh, Jeremy, Phil R, Phil W, Robert, Scott, and Tapped. I have the eerie experience every time I read A Work In Progress of finding my twin in cyberspace. It is very unusual to find somebody with the exact same sensibilities as yourself, and it is even stranger to find them in cyberspace. I like being part of the this community, and to be frank I was flattered by some of the "What happened to your blog I miss it" fan mail that I have received.
Blogging is a way for me to keep in touch with what is happening with technology. When I write, I read more and learn more, and isn't learning what it is all apart?
I almost got my dream job because I was reading someone else's blog (more later).
I like to write, and I'd like to learn how to do a better, faster job of writing. Practicing is the best way that I know to do that.
Finally, I find that I usually spend at least an hour every night reading stuff on the net, and I am constantly sending email to friends, relatives and colleagues with fun, scary and serious stuff that I find. Why not blog it?
|
|
| Sunday, December 01, 2002
|
|
What happened to Geodog?
First of all, thank you everybody for the nice emails inquiring if I was OK, and inquiring as to what was going on. I was surprised and touched that so many people who I only knew online were concerned enough to write, and I apologize for not writing back to everybody. Thanks for your concern and support.
I took a break from blogging at the end of the summer, and said that I would be back after Labor Day, fully intending to do so, but I haven't publicly blogged a word since. So what happened? A bunch of stuff all at the same time. The first thing that happened is that I got really busy. With the start of school for my child and his mother the teacher, I had a lot more responsibility for taking care of our child, and I couldn't stay up late at night blogging without paying (or unfairly making my kid pay) a much bigger price. Also, I decided that it was time to get very serious about job hunting, and to put the hours into contacting old colleagues, scanning job listings and crafting individual cover letters and sending in resumes. I just didn't see where the time to blog would come from, other than sleep, which usually makes me grumpy.
One day I did I fire up Userland's Radio to use the RSS reader, but then it crashed and screwed up my data yet again. That, plus reading yet another attack on someone by Dave Winer, was the last straw for me and Radio. At that point I decided that I had finally had it with Radio's crashes and its megalomaniacal developer, and that I would switch over to Movable Type, where I have had a very stable and pleasant family blog for months. But doing so was a half day project that I never found the time to do.
Another thing that happened was that somebody whose opinion means a lot to me saw my blog for the first time, and reacted negatively and harshly, asking me why I was spending so much time documenting the opinions and the reporting of others, instead of trying to a make a difference myself. I responded defensively, but after thinking it over a bit decided that he had a bit of a point, and resolved to spend more time trying to actually effect change, and less time reporting on the idiocies of the Bush administration. To that end I spent lots of time before the recent election writing congress critters, contacting people I know personally to convince them to do the same, and encouraging people to vote for the right people in the 2002 elections. The end result? Disappointing, to say the least.
It is funny -- something in my upbringing as the son of a player in the political arena convinced me that political action is the way to effect positive change, and that being very well informed is crucial to being able to effect change. However, I've come to the conclusion that the evidence doesn't support this belief, or at most that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition. I've found that knowing all the idiotic, selfish and scary things that are going on doesn't make me happier or more effective -- it just creates a sense of powerlessness. So I have been trying to avoid wallowing in the news, and avoiding blogging.
|
|
| Monday, August 26, 2002
|
|
Blogging vacation
Oops, forgot to announce it. Due to family obligations, I am on a vacation from blogging from last week until Labor Day.
For politics, I recommend Tapped, for high energy semi-geek, check out Scott, and for interesting observations on life, see Robert. And there is always Cary to let you know what's happening on the net. Enjoy.
See you after Labor Day,
Thanks,
Tim aka Geodog
|
|
| Sunday, August 18, 2002
|
|
Air Marshal program in disarray
McPaper strikes again. Here is a really scary article on how the federal air marshal program, which operates under all kind of secret provisions, is being terribly run, and is putting people who don't have training on airplanes and running them ragged, so we end up with untrained people with guns falling asleep on planes "protecting" us.
Another example of how the Bush administration's passion for secrecy harms us all.
|
|
| Saturday, August 17, 2002
|
|
Our hero, Judge Doumar, acts again
Judge Doumar, in a beautifully written decision dissecting the 2 page piece of garbage that the government handed him as justification for Hamdi's indefinite detention, has ordered the Bush administration to provide him with some information as to how the decision to detain Hamdi was made, and on what basis. I can't provide provide excerpts, because the decision is a pdf file, but I strongly encourage anybody interested in it to read the decision itself. We have some judges who are patriots capable of poetry -- Doumar is one of them.
Now, back to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, I fear.
|
|
|
How to make friends and influence people
USA Today, which until recently I only knew as McPaper, turns out to have some surprisingly good articles sometimes. I ran across this one, Global warmth for US after 9/11 turns to frost, a couple days ago. The article notes the growing dislike of America and American policies worldwide, and asks why has there been such a growth of anti-american sentiment. Some of the answers they found:
What happened, many Americans are wondering, to that wave of sympathy and stockpile of global goodwill they encountered after Sept. 11?
"It was squandered," says Meghnad Desai ... "America dissipated the goodwill out of its arrogance and incompetence. A lot of people who would never ever have considered themselves anti-American are now very distressed with the United States," he says.
Desai and others blame what seems to be a wave of new U.S. policies that they regard as selfish and unilateral, stretching back to President Bush's refusal last year to support the international treaty on global warming.
Many are enraged by Bush's support for steel tariffs and farm subsidies, his refusal to involve the United States in the new international criminal court and what is widely regarded abroad as one-sided support for Israel and its prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
The rash of corporate malfeasance and blanket arrest of terrorism suspects after Sept. 11 further fuels critics, who say the United States preaches democracy, human rights and free enterprise — but doesn't practice them.
The Council on Foreign Relations ... issued a biting report warning the Bush administration that it urgently needs to upgrade its efforts at public diplomacy to counteract the country's "shaky" image abroad... "Around the world, from Western Europe to the Far East, many see the United States as arrogant, hypocritical, self-absorbed, self-indulgent and contemptuous of others," Peterson says. "This is not a Muslim country issue. It has metastasized to the rest of the world and includes some of our closest European allies."
Quite an indictment, and there is a lot more in the article that I didn't excerpt. I think a lot of it comes down to the Bush administration's frequently expressed view that they don't really care what anybody else thinks, because they know what is right. People like people in power to at least pretend they care what the other people think, especially when the person in power is capable of causing vast changes in their life. When the world's only superpower claims it that has the right to go into any country and do whatever it wants in the name of "The War on Terrorism", that it doesn't really need its allies, and that it plans to ignores multilateral institutions, people are fearful. It is like living next door to the proverbial 800 lb. gorilla. Who knows what it will do next?
I fear for the time when America needs other countries' assistance. Bush is sowing bitter seeds that America will be reaping for a long time.
Tip o the hat to The War in Context, which does an excellent job of pointing to other countries' media coverage of the war.
|
|
| Friday, August 16, 2002
|
|
An alternative view of the war in Afghanistan
Robert Fisk of the Independent has written 2 long articles with a lot of scary details on how American actions in Afghanistan are turning many Afghans against the US. If you are interested in learning more, here are links along with excerpts:
Afghanistan is on the brink of another disaster: The Americans now leave the beatings to Afghan allies, but the CIA are there during the beatings.
It was the Special Forces man in the south who saw things a little more globally. "Perhaps the Americans can start withdrawing if there's another war – if they go to war in Iraq. But the US can't handle two wars at the same time. They would be overstretched." So to end America's "war against terror" in Afghanistan – a war that has left the drug-dealers of the Northern Alliance in disproportionate control of the Afghan government, many al-Qa'ida men on the loose and absolutely no peace in the country – we have to have another war in Iraq.
Return to Afghanistan: Americans begin to suffer grim and bloody backlash:
"The Afghan people will wait a little longer for all the help they have been promised," the local district officer in Maiwind muttered to me a few hours later. "We believe the Americans want to help us. They promised us help. They have a little longer to prove they mean this. After that ..." He didn't need to say more. Out at Maiwind, in the oven-like grey desert west of Kandahar, the Americans do raids, not aid.... As long as Washington goes on paying the private salaries of local warlords, including some who oppose President Hamid Karzai, a kind of truce will continue to exist, but Afghans take a shrewd interest in America's activities here and their anger has been stoked by US bombing raids that left hundreds of innocent Afghans dead.
It is starting to sound a lot like a place in Asia that America got involved in trying to pick winners and losers in the 1960's, notably a place where today's most aggressive hawks found ways to avoid serving.
|
|
|
The war in Afghanistan in not going well
Newsweek had a cover article this week about how Al-Quaeda fighters slipped away from pursuing US troops. Buried in the article is the revelation that the war in Afghanistan is not going very well, and that we have achieved few of our objectives:
Our operational evaluation today is that the threat is a lot greater than it was in December. That is to say, the worst is ahead of us, not behind us.
At a time when leaders in Washington are agitating to move on to the next war—to remove Saddam Hussein—it’s perhaps surprising that few if any are critiquing the Afghan campaign. Criticism is deemed to be almost unpatriotic. But the Afghan war is not over, and the primary mission is not accomplished. The fledgling regime of Hamid Karzai has little power beyond the capital, and Karzai himself needs U.S. Special Forces to ensure his safety...
It surprised me to see this evaluation in the mainstream media -- it seemed the media concluded "the war is over" after the bombing of Tora Bora and the installation of American candidate Hamid Karzai as president. And it scares me that this Bush administration may well turn out to be The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight, incompetent as it is secretive. It's our lives, and the lives of our children they are playing with. What do they think the long term legitimacy of president installed by America, guarded by American soldiers, is going to be in an Islamic country? What would we have said twenty years ago about an Afghan president guarded by Russian troops? This administration really is clueless.
|
|
|
Richard Perle, the Prince of Darkness, is evil
In a story in today's NYT, Richard Perle, late of the Let's invade Saudi Arabia briefing flap, and currently head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, is quoted as saying:
"The failure to take on Saddam after what the president said would produce such a collapse of confidence in the president that it would set back the war on terrorism."
So now we need to invade Iraq so that the world doesn't lose faith that George W. Bush means what he says? This kind of thinking is what kept us in Vietnam for years after it was clear that no good was going to be accomplished there. Perle's statement is an evil attempt at creating a self fulfilling prophecy, by subtly attacking George W's manhood. Excuse the language, but in Junior High I heard this kind of thing all the time, expressed as "You said you'd fight him, if you don't you are a p##sy". Anybody but a moron outgrew this kind of logic, but I fear our moronic president is probably very susceptible to it. And who better to push that button but an elder from the Reagan administration.
Richard Perle is evil and scary. No wonder he is referred to as the Prince of Darkness.
|
|
|
And I thought that William Saletan was funny about the Bush "economic summit"
Arianna Huffington's latest column, "The Wacko in Waco" is hilarous. It starts off:
At the behest of their charismatic leader, the cult members gathered in Waco, a hot, dusty town on the flat, featureless central Texas plain. They had been summoned to hear an endless series of droning sermons from the leader himself and his fellow fanatics.
Thunderously denouncing all doubters, all those who didn't believe as the cult members did, the speakers put forward a bizarre religious vision, one that no sane person could accept. As the hours passed, the group became more and more isolated from the real world until it was incapable of dealing with it.
The only thing missing was Janet Reno and her flamethrower.
George W. Bush's economic forum ended with the steady whoosh of departing corporate jets instead of a fiery apocalypse ...
and it just gets better from there. Highly Recommended.
|
|
|
Count on Molly Ivans to tell it like it is
Molly Ivan's latest column addresses the Shrub solution to our economic problems, cutting capital gains taxes again, with some frightful statistics from Kevin Phillips' book, Wealth and Democracy:
- In 1999, the average after-tax income of the middle 60 percent of Americans was lower than in 1977.
- The 400 richest Americans between 1982 and 1999 increased their average net worth from $230 million to $2.6 billion, over 500 percent in constant dollars.
- By 1999, over one decade the average work year had expanded by 184 hours
- Less than half of all Americans have any pension plan other than Social Security.
She goes on to point out, in her indomitable style: "The health care system is falling apart in front of our eyes; schoolteachers should be paid at least twice what they make now; lack of low-income housing is making life hell for the working class; and now the right wing wants to cut taxes for the rich yet again? That's class warfare."
I wonder why Molly Ivans isn't more widely syndicated. She writes well, she is funny, and she is usually right. If you see her in person, she is even funnier than in print. She tells a great story. This column is recommended.
Thanks as usual to Tapped for the link.
|
|
| Thursday, August 15, 2002
|
|
Subscribed to The American Prospect
Regular readers of this blog (Hi Mom) know that since discovering Tapped a few months ago (in a link from Eugene Volokh, praising them for their intellectual honesty), I have turned to Tapped more and more often for links and stories. It is now first on my daily reading list. It is like reading The New Republic before Andrew Sullivan, when TNR was actually a liberal magazine, and TRB made sense.
Today I decided to put my money where my mouth was and to support Tapped by subscribing to its parent magazine, The American Prospect. At $14.95 for a year, it is affordable, even for the marginally employed. Chances are that it will join the backlog in the bathroom, along with old copies of Wired, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and countless freebie Tech trade rags, but maybe I'll read every issue in paper. Maybe.
|
|
|
The Ministry of Homeland Security
Micah Wright has put up this wonderful site with posters done in the style of US WWII propganda posters. Here are reduced versions of two of my favorites that he did. Go to his site to see the full size versions. Recommended (although he says that the site, hosted on Apple's iMac service, is frequently taken down towards the afternoon as it exceeds bandwidth limitations).  
|
|
|
The Economic Summit
This is William Saletan's take on Bush's so-called economic forum:
This afternoon at the President's Economic Forum in Waco, Texas, President Bush and Vice President Cheney sat side by side on the stage of a packed auditorium for more than an hour. That's the first time they've been that close together for that long in public since Sept. 11. Evidently they're no longer afraid of terrorists. What they're afraid of is Americans.
Like plantation owners, the employers on hand spoke for their employees." One CEO told Bush, "they are so happy to have jobs."
I wish I could write like that, funny, with an edge, and concise.
Tip o the hat again to Tapped, who has some good coverage of the summit.
|
|
|
Quote of the Day: Bring out your dead
Today was the deadline for many companies for their CEO's to certify the books. Here was my favorite take on it:
"This is the government's way of walking through the business community and saying, 'Bring out your dead,' " said Patrick McGurn, vice president of Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. of Rockville.
Source: Washington Post article, CEO Deadline Brings Some Restatements
|
|
|
Scooped by Tapped
I had the experience tonight of spending about an hour writing up my thoughts about Judge Doumar and the Hamdi case, because I feel strongly about it. Then I start my nightly troll through news sources, and what's the first thing I run accross? A write-up on the same subject, but better written, exceprting even more of the Post article, and calling Doumar a hero, by Tapped. Today's issue of Tapped is really good.
What does this mean:
- Great minds think alike?
- I should apply for a job with Tapped?
or
- I should just go to bed earlier and leave the journalism to professionals?
Feedback (email is fine) wanted.
|
|
|
Some other people get it too
It is nice to see the broader segments of our society opposing Bush's war on civil liberties.
The Washington Post, in an editorial today, Two Pages Are Not Enough, asked "What burden does the government have to shoulder before it can lock away an American citizen indefinitely without charge as an enemy combatant?" and concluded that it was certainly more than a two page declaration consisting entirely of assertions by a government official who does not purport to be offering firsthand information.
The American Bar Association voted yesterday to oppose the Bush administration's secret detention of foreign nationals after the Sept. 11 attacks, urging that their names be disclosed and they be given immediate access to lawyers and family members.
And there was the previously blogged Newsweek story about the paucity of evidence that Jose Padilla was up to anything besides coming to the US to see his kid.
Update: and there is this LA times Op-Ed piece, Camps for Citizens: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision by somebody who evidently feels even stronger than I do. Tip o the hat to Tapped.
While I don't labor under the misapprehension that the Bush administration pays a lot of attention to what the Washington Post or Newsweek or the ABA say, it seems like wider and more mainstream groups are starting to see the danger in the usurpation of legislative and judicial power by the Bush administration. That's gotta be good.
|
|
| Wednesday, August 14, 2002
|
|
A judge who gets it
Three cheers for U.S. District Judge Robert G. Doumar, who is currently hearing the petition by the father of American citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi to let his son see a lawyer. While I think the government has some legal ground to declare Hamdi an enemy combatant (he was apparently captured in Afghanistan - the government says as part of Taliban, his father said that he was a charitable worker who got caught up in the conflict,) I don't think that any US citizen can be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant" and held incommunicado forever, as the Bush administration claims the right to do.
The Washington Post reports that Judge Doumar has been presented with a 2 page declaration by an undersecretary of defense, Michael H. Mobbs, explaining how Hamdi was determined to be enemy combatant, and the Government's position is that once the declaration was presented, the Judge is foreclosed from asking any more questions or getting any more involved. Fortunately, Judge Doumar seems to be made of sterner stuff. He has been asking questions like:
"Can the military do anything they want with him, without a tribunal?"
and he has been getting answers like: "The present detention is lawful,"
The best quote in the article was the final one:
"I have no desire to have an enemy combatant get out of any status," Doumar said. "However, I do think that due process requires something other than a basic assertion by someone named Mobbs that they have looked at some papers and therefore they have determined he should be held incommunicado. Just think of the impact of that. Is that what we're fighting for?"
A judge who gets it. Unfortunately, the 4th Circuit has ruled against Judge Doumar every time he has ruled that Hamdi is entitled to see a lawyer, and they will probably do so again.
|
|
|
An evening with Regis McKenna
Tonight I went to an event put on by The Entrepreneurs Resource Network, where Regis McKenna was the featured speaker, promoting his new book, Total Access. He is a good speaker, funny, and and a good storyteller. He also comes across as being very smart. I don't think that I can do justice to his ideas in a late night blog post, but suffice it to say that I had a new perspective on marketing after the night was over. Part of that is the history of marketing that he carries around in his head -- he spent a long time talking about what marketing was all about in the early 1900's -- distribution and enabling the consumer to buy. He also talked about how many more choices consumers have today than they had even 15 years ago. The statistic that stuck in my head was that WalMart now has 300,000 SKU's that they carry, and that WalMart updates the database of what people have purchased nationwide every 90 minutes. Holey Moley!
Regis McKenna closed with a funny story to illustrate how different the buying experience is today from the past, and what assumptions our kids are growing up with. He was driving somewhere with his two granddaughters, 7 and 9, and his father-in-law. His granddaughters were lobbying to have him buy them an iMac. McKenna said to his grandchildren, "but does the iMac come with enough software? - Maybe we should look into computers that have more software bundled in with them." The 7 year old replied, "But if I need more software, I can always get it over the internet", and the father-in-law chimed in with "Yeah, Dummy".
I don't know enough to recommend buying the book Total Access, at this point, although I plan to, but I can highly recommend going to see him talk while he is on the book tour circuit. Hearing him speak reminded me of what I miss most about not having a full-time job -- not getting to spend the day interacting in person with really smart people. Also, I was reminded how everybody is connected, especially towards the top of social and financial networks. While chatting with him after the talk, I discovered that he is having dinner tomorrow night with my old boss at GO Corporation, Bill Campbell aka "Coach", currently chairman of Intuit. They worked together at Apple almost 20 years ago. Small World.
|
|
| Tuesday, August 13, 2002
|
|
More American citizens to be held without charges
Newsweek is reporting that US citizen Jose Padilla has been in an "isolation cell with a lamp burning 24 hours a day and a phalanx of guards around the clock" since the beginning of June, and he still isn't charged with any crime and the government has no plans to charge him with a crime. In what Newsweek called "a hastily signed finding" by Bush, he has been declared an enemy combatants, even though there were high-level doubts inside the U.S. intelligence community about Ashcroft’s dramatic announcement of an ongoing plot from the very beginning. Newsweek reports that much of the evidence against Padilla comes from a single, less-than-reliable informant: Abu Zubaydah, a former chief of Qaeda training camps who was picked up in Pakistan last fall.
I can't believe that a US citizen has now been in prison without charges for almost three months on one losing politician's and one informer's say-so, and that Bush is denying that the courts have any right to inquire into the circumstances of his detention. 600 years civil liberties progress out the window. It is going to be a little hard for us to criticize another country's human rights after this, even assuming that we come to our senses before too much more damage is done.
And now Newsweek reports that last week administration officials confirmed they were talking about creating a panel to review whether others should join the list [of confined US citizen detainees].
|
|
|
The Cheney Factor
A nice quote from the Grey Lady:
"At a moment when Americans are looking to the government to help remedy the nation's economic ills, Mr. Cheney looks more like part of the problem than the solution."
From The Cheney Factor, an editorial in today's NYT.
|
|
© Copyright 2003 Tim Bishop aka Geodog.
|
|
|
