dispensatory rhetoric.

Global event, global marketing

2011-12-19T06:37:00.010-05:00

The World Cup in South Africa is a year and half behind us, but among the hubbub and hullaballoo, one thing stood out from the rest: the event's anthem.

In this season of togetherness, no other song stands out as a more perfect example of our new global economy and how interconnected we are. In the melody, no doubt the feeling everyone shared as they were cheering for their teams was the same. But in the words, there are delightful differences—the translation process provides a window into each artist's culture, given their take on the original theme.

Some background: Somali-born Canadian artist K'naan originally wrote "Waving Flag" about his rough upbringing on the streets of Somalia, and the theme had been appropriated for the World Cup, adding the words "now wave your flag" to invite the listener into the celebration (the original song said "and then it goes back"). But to invite the world into the celebration, it needed to be translated into more languages.

Other languages use more syllables to communicate the same idea. So how did they get it across?

Original English (K'naan - Somalian-Canadian):
When I get older, I will be stronger, they'll call me freedom just like a waving flag/Now wave your flag

David Bisbal (Spanish):
Seremos grandes, seremos fuertes, sonos un pueblo, bandera de liberdad/Que viene y que va
Let's be big, let's be strong; we are one people, a banner of freedom that waves back and forth/back and forth

Féfé (Nigerian-French):
On est des soldats, sans armes au combat, ce soir la mission, c'est de chanter dans l'estade/chanter dans l'estade
We are soldiers, without arms in combat; tonight this is the mission: to sing in the stadium/sing in the stadium

Nancy Arjam (Egyptian Arabic):
Ta'rafla almak, hetla'eii helmak, oum meddi edak, sheg'aa ba'alamak da/ba'alamak da
I will teach you that you will reach your dreams, now give me your hand and let's cheer with this flag/with this flag …

The part after the slash is what gets repeated in the song for emphasis, so it's interesting to think how awkward some of those lyrics would be in English if we chose to sing them. But whatever these versions lack in the chorus, they make up for in the verses (which I might go into in a future post—for now, the Spanish chorus is most representative of that approach).

Even more revealing are the videos, which in the Spanish and Arabic versions show Coca-Cola's involvement in the sponsorship of the event—and melody. Coke's jingle makes an appearance as a soaring vocal anthem between verses. The product placement is most in-your-face in the Arabic version, which shows Nancy Arjam relaxing at the end to partake in the sponsor's beverage.

Contrast that, then, with the French version, where, unlike the English "Coca-Cola Celebration Mix," the anthem has been altered to avoid matching Coke's jingle, and the beverage is nowhere to be found among the scenes.

Which made me wonder: what would sporting events be like without product placements or ads? Would they be as exciting? Should they be?

Social reading and free will

2011-11-14T14:09:00.002-05:00

I love the new social reading feature I'm seeing on Facebook. I get to see what my friends are reading; my friends get to see what I'm reading, and there's no effort required to go through the sharing process. More information = better. What could be better?

Well, here's the problem with social reading as I see it: you're giving up free will. Which isn't necessarily a problem in itself, so much as the fact that you don't get to see an article's contents before clicking on the headline, which generates an automatic share. Your friends see that you've "read" the article whether or not it ended up living up to your expectations. Things spread quickly enough on the Internet that a bunch of your friends could end up "reading" it too, and the chain continues.

So the temptation for journalists, as if it weren't strong enough already, is to write a sensational headline and then back it up poorly with incomplete or contradictory facts.

Take this article for instance: I decided "free will" was the best way to describe what it was about. But it's an exaggeration—of course you can go back and delete an article you've shared. You're not really giving up free will; it just takes a bit of extra effort to exercise it.

But it's not too much of an exaggeration either. So much of Internet use is predicated on what's easier, that an opt-out process for sharing might as well be equated with the use of force. But not really. You get the idea.

It's a challenge for publications to bring in new revenue these days, and if social reading generates more traffic, that has to be a good thing. But I hope journalists don't lose sight of the fact either that their first obligation is to report the facts truthfully and accurately.

Back in the saddle

2011-07-23T01:07:00.006-05:00

After nearly two years of silence, I've moved my blog and I'm ready to reboot. Because Google changed the technology they use to put content on remote servers (like mine), I had to change how the blog appears on my site. The process was relatively simple, but I had to take some time out from real life to figure out how the technical details worked in the background. Now that I have that time, I'm hoping to use it to make a better blog. Who knows, maybe WordPress is in my future? Okay, one step at a time.

More to come. Or not. We'll see.

At least I'm able to publish now.

A Nobel gesture

2009-10-10T14:59:00.015-05:00

The last time a sitting president won a Nobel prize was 90 years ago. Woodrow Wilson won in 1919 at a time when America was rising on the world stage to end a bitter global conflict. His Fourteen Points, especially "peace without victory," set forth the principles that would allow America to carry out the Marshall Plan post-WWII, in sharp contrast to the steep reparations that were levied on Germany for World War I.

Now in 2009, as another president who rocketed to prominence on the world stage seeks to bring the world together after a divisive period, the principal question being debated in the media is what President Obama did to deserve the prize—as if he needed to have fielded an army in Europe or negotiated a groundbreaking treaty to deserve the award. The committee's critics charge that the prize is politically motivated, a cheap shot at the outgoing president, with the nomination having been completed only two weeks after the president was elected.

Tommy De Seno of Fox News put it thusly: How to Win the Nobel Peace Prize In 12 Days. (Mercifully, an editor's note at the beginning explains that the selection process takes a year.) Seen on an Internet forum, one commentator noted, “All you really have to do to qualify as a world-renowned humanitarian is to replace George Bush in office.”

Surprise and sarcasm over, it's time to figure out why the Nobel committee would have made the decision it did. I'm going to operate on the assumption that—understanding that it might face charges of politicization—the committee nevertheless believed that its selection would fulfill its founder's mission of promoting peace. Alfred Nobel, inventor of trinitrotoluene (TNT, or dynamite)—a mild explosive by today's standards—created the foundation that awards the prizes that bear his name as a matter of regret for having brought such a weapon of war to the world. Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the nuclear weapon, died with similar regrets.

So the key fact that's been missing from the discussion over Obama's meriting the prize, the one that has been sorely overlooked, the one that makes the award completely consistent with the committee's founding principles and aims, is Obama's tireless work toward nuclear disarmament. Not only did he dismantle the Bush-era missile defense system that restarted a nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia and partially led to a war in Georgia last summer, but as Senator he worked to pass nonproliferation legislation. Beyond nonproliferation, Obama's explicitly stated goal of zero nuclear arms (nuclear disarmament) creates a bold new framework for agreement as U.S. and Russia enter negotiations on the START I missile reduction treaty that is shortly coming up for renewal. (Obama's predecessor, by contrast, withdrew from the START II treaty agreed in 1997 that explicitly banned missile defense systems.)

So we come to the supposed "cheap shot"—which I would argue, far from cheap, is both a politically and historically important message key to the promotion of peace in the 21st century. Perhaps because of the politically charged nature of the debate, this historical perspective has been most sorely missing from the media coverage of Obama's win.

The doctrine of unilateral preemption espoused by Obama's predecessor represented the most significant threat to international stability since World War II. By taking the bold political stand that the committee has done, it has fulfilled its mission to promote world peace by ensuring that policy does not stand without repudiation. Without that repudiation, it would have stood as valid precedent, a green light with strong temptation for future presidents to repeat.

While it's too early in Obama's term to know what he will or won't accomplish, and we can't know if a peace prize will be enough to stop future presidents with an itchy trigger finger, we can know what the award was trying to do. In response to a policy of pre-emptive war, we have an act of pre-emptive peace—an attempt to help Obama politically in the moment to restore diplomacy as a primary means of resolving international disagreement, and a message to future presidents that this is the right way to go about things.

As ridiculous as it might have been to award Obama with a peace prize less than a year into office, the only thing more ridiculous would be to repeat the eight years of foreign policy that preceded him. And that's a prize-worthy statement.

Democrats' supermajority dilemma

2009-07-07T21:38:00.007-05:00

Al Franken was sworn in today. But now that Democrats have their magic number of 60 Senators, they don't. Power's a funny thing like that. And — by way of the Alanis Morrisette I heard playing on the radio on the way home this evening — so is life:

"Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything's okay and everything's going right"

— Alanis Morrisette, "Ironic"

"Democrats now hold 60 seats, enough to block filibusters — but only if every Democrat and two independents show up, and they all vote together. The chamber's most senior members, Robert Byrd and Edward M. Kennedy, are ill and haven't voted in weeks. Without them there, Democrats need the support of at least two Republicans."

— Associated Press, "Democrats wave Franken as trophy over limping GOP"

It took Franken so long to get seated that two of the Democrats' oldest — and most powerful — Senators aren't even around to help keep the majority together. And Lieberman and Sanders aren't even technically Democrats. So can we really call it a supermajority?

In a body like the Senate where even one senator can keep legislation from passing, the job of majority leader will always be one of herding cats. And thanks to the way our country's founders set it up, there will always be a fragile tension in the balance of power.

Race over, a question of race

2008-11-06T21:22:00.017-05:00

For all the talk of reaching across party lines during the presidential election, I'm sure Democrats in the New York state house didn't have this in mind: four rogue Democratic state senators in Albany are putting Democrats' control of the house in jeopardy by threatening to vote for a Republican majority leader, potentially spoiling the first chance Democrats have had of controlling the state house and governorship since the New Deal (that's about 80 years, give or take a few). So those are the stakes.

Why the mutiny? Three of the four senators are Latino, and the incoming majority leader is African-American. While none of the rebel senators claims to be angling for the majority leader post, in the words of Rubén Díaz (representing the Bronx):

"There’s a concern that we have a black president, a black governor and we have a concern that we have to be sharing power."

Excuse me? I'm all for striving for the ideal of racial balance, but can you honestly say that because there are people in power of one race, the interests of the other won't be represented?

Despite Democrats' best intentions to embrace diversity, this could be one area where the Affirmative Action mentality needs discarding. Especially in an election with this historic scope, people elected Democrats in record numbers to move the country in a different direction. Here four senators are ready to hand power back to the minority party, against the will of the voters, to push a racial agenda.

Why am I talking about a state house in Albany? Because what happens there could happen in Congress. With a woman as Speaker of the House and an African-American in the White House, I'm worried about racial or gender angst hindering the mandate of either of these people, or members of any race in positions of power in the future. (Though I have to admit: compared to where this nation has been, that's a pretty good worry to be having.)

Let's govern a nation of people, not races. There may be a valid argument in business for hiring equally qualified minorities to address lingering economic inequality, but in government everyone is equal before the law.

Obama's victory in traditionally red states is in itself evidence that white voters are moving past race in their voting decisions. So why the hangup among these Latinos? What can one race possibly do in power that the other one wouldn't do? Maybe I need an education here. Help me out.

Comic relief

2008-09-15T20:24:00.004-05:00

What do you get when you cross one YouTube video hit with a controversial moment in a televised interview about a political figure previously unknown to the national stage?

Room for satire.

But of course, SNL does it best:

Hey, Democrats. Let's talk.

2008-09-15T18:54:00.010-05:00

Joe Biden. Really? Joe Biden? I know he's the one that all the analysts were predicting. He's old; he's white; he knows about foreign policy. But look at that Sarah Palin over there, all the cameras on her. That could have been you getting all that attention.

Remember Bill Richardson? No one paid much attention to him in the primaries, but boy would he have been an answer to the GOP talking up Palin's executive experience and energy-cum-national-security cred. So she's been governor of a state for 2 years that has a bunch of oil. Richardson was Secretary of Energy under Clinton and called for an Apollo plan for energy independence before Al Gore got all the attention for it. This is supposed to be your issue.

He's a governor, too. The last pair of Senators to win office on a ticket was half a century ago — JFK and LBJ, 1960. We know them by their initials. What's Biden's middle name?

And oh yeah, he's Hispanic. You had a chance to make history, but instead you repeated it (LBJ was pretty boring too at first). So much for all those voters in New Mexico and Florida that might have been as excited about the Democratic ticket as all those lipstick-wearing pitbull hockey moms are for Palin (did Obama call them pigs?). And you let that Massachusetts guy, Mitt Romney, tell us that the sun will rise in the West against the Eastern elites! Who says regional balance is dead?

Did I mention he was our ambassador to the U.N.? There's your foreign policy experience. Boom, a trifecta: executive, energy, foreign P. Instead we've got old blue eyes over there with a seat on some obscure Senate committee talking about how to divvy up Iraq between the people fighting over there — which is great, except nobody gets it.

You need to jazz him up a bit. Tell his story. What's he been doing in the Senate for 30 years? How will his plan for Iraq mean victory? And didn't he get some bipartisan support for it too?

And Obama, you with the negative ads. What's that about? "Change we can believe in" is suddenly "change we need" — and boy do we need it because we sure can't believe in it anymore, what with the FISA crap and the McCain-bashing. "Vote for me because McCain can't send an e-mail" — there's a message that will get those senior voters in Florida off their walkers.

What you need to do is tell the American people what you can do for them. I know JFK said ask not what you can do, but we weren't heading off an economic cliff in 1960. Tell them how clean energy can get Americans working again, building roads, bridges, schools. How cutting earmarks means cutting jobs, and how 80 percent of Americans will benefit from a hefty Obama tax cut and energy credit to get the economy going again — or at least keep us on our feet. Not to mention all that stuff you did in Illinois.

And you know, the same people who told you to make the safe choice with that white guy are going to tell you to go negative, hit back hard. They love distorting the truth and making the other guy look evil and bad. McCain's got that cartoon character of your face plastered up there next to the slimy messages — why not put your face next to the good stuff about your plans? Images, man. That's how you fight back. People won't read, but they sure do remember those images in the voting booth.

And the thing is you know the negative campaigning doesn't work, that it turns people off politics. It's why we can't sit at a dinner table and have a decent conversation about the country. It's why you won the nomination in a fair fight. Don't let the wonks make you fall for McCain's trap. He's got the positive side of the story. You need to tell yours.

Said it once, I'll say it a thousand times: only a Democrat could lose this election.

Newsy grab bag

2008-08-04T19:43:00.005-05:00

Professional life is full of joys and hardship, one of the latter being that I don't have as much time to keep up with the news as I used to. But I still snatch enough peeks that something catches my eye, so in case you missed it, here goes:

Global warming has a new victim. There were penguins, island natives and seaside residents; now landlubbers have something to worry about: their kidneys. Increasing temperatures will mean people might be more susceptible to getting the painful little buggers – more than 2 million in America alone, but fortunately the cure's easy enough (assuming enough of it will be around given the droughts going on in certain parts of the world): drink more water.

Chavez wants a hug. That evil little Latin American dictator that called Bush the devil (and has the power to shift time)? He's a softy. After a spat last year in which the King of Spain told the Venezuelan leader to "shut up," Chavez offered the guy a hug. And you know what? The guy took him up on it – sort of (The New York Times has the full story). Maybe international relations aren't so complicated after all.

Going boldly where New Media has been before — a recent study shows that online ad campaigns are more effective when they can also be printed out, a new twist on Internet advertising for "old media" print publications that are making the jump online. Don't forget to make those ads printable, guys. Are you listening, Washington Post? (Not to mention — many Internet users will link to printable editions of articles to avoid all the clutter.)

There you go – just a taste. Hopefully more to follow.

Everything’s going to be OK … eventually

2008-05-15T12:21:00.018-05:00

McCain: Keeping hope alive

As our nation's problems continue to mount, it seems Reagan's "morning in America" has reached full noon.

After a speech today that paints a rosy picture of America's future over the next four years, Senator McCain seems to have joined Barack Obama as pretender to the title of the candidate of hope and optimism for the future (Obama has expressed admiration for Reagan's tone in the past).

So now both leading candidates for the presidential nomination are competing to become the focal point of America's optimistic spirit. Obama has "hope"; McCain foresees strong economic growth and troops out of Iraq in four years — or, as one satirical image put it, whatever your heart desires.

It's interesting to note that McCain made his promises in terms of a four-year window, not eight, perhaps a choice that, consciously or otherwise, gives deference to his age (if Obama can be criticized for being too young, then it's only fair to bring up the opposite about McCain).

But McCain was not alone in his optimism today. His sentiment seemed to be echoed by President Bush, who — in Israel marking the nation's 60th anniversary — predicted that in the next 60 years there will be "free and independent societies” across the region. “Iran and Syria will be peaceful nations, where today’s oppression is a distant memory.” Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas “will be defeated.”

White House spokesman Gordon D. Johndroe defended the comments as being realistic, pointing out that "If you don’t set out a goal for what the region should look like, then what’s the point in anyone sitting down to talk at all?"

We all hope flowers will bloom across the Middle East, but they have to be cultivated first.

McCain had a similar response to a reporter who called his speech a "magic carpet ride," saying "I don’t think it has anything to do with fantasy; I think it has everything to do with setting goals and achieving."

Well yes, have lofty goals. But to predict that they will be reached is getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, isn't it? (Along with Hillary Clinton's "Yes we will," that may be a running theme these days.)

If nothing else, we would hope for a detailed explanation of how to get there. We all hope flowers will bloom across the Middle East, but they have to be cultivated first.

McCain speaks out for the poor

2008-04-27T17:37:00.016-05:00

Taxes: Who's getting shafted?

And in the same breath he speaks out for the "100 million Americans" — less than one-third — who would be affected by a capital gains tax increase under Barack Obama's economic proposal. So as the Republican nominee McCain is carrying the mantle of supply-side conservatism (or, as Bush put it in 2000, calling the elites "his base"). That's understood.

But what caught my breath was seeing McCain refer to Obama's stance on the gas tax as being "defined by special interests." (For the record, McCain proposed a summer gas tax holiday, while Obama is against.) Now, it seems to me lower gas taxes might mean more gasoline sales for oil companies, which would mean more profits for them. What special interest could possibly stand to gain from lower gas sales figures?

Obviously Sen. Obama does not understand that this would be a nice thing for Americans, and the special interests should not be dictating this policy.

— Sen. John McCain on a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax, currently fixed at 18.4 cents a gallon

The only "special interest" I could find pushing for a higher gas tax was in Minnesota — home of last summer's I-35W bridge collapse — where the state's association of counties wanted more revenue. But with crumbling infrastructure around the country, tight state budgets and mounting national debt, if government itself has become a special interest in McCain's dictionary, we're in for a more topsy-turvy campaign season than I expected.

And if this is what the national debate looks like, God forbid what might happen if anyone were to suggest increasing the tax.

McCain's economics lesson

2008-04-15T18:23:00.007-05:00

Aptly enough, John McCain chose today, April 15th (tax day), to unveil his economic stimulus package (original speech here) after having been the subject of attack by his two Democratic rivals. Like him, I've never understood economics very well, so my interest is not so much in the substance of his proposals as his style – the way he chose to present them.

Seeking perhaps to reassure us that he understands economics, Sen. McCain had the exceptional insight to point out that "Economic policy is not just some academic exercise, and we in Washington are not just passive spectators. We have a responsibility to act. And if I am elected president, I intend to act quickly and decisively."

Wonderful! So apparently the economy is something the president should do something about. I'm reassured. Do go on.

"In all of this, it will not be enough to simply dust off the economic policies of four, eight, or twenty-eight years ago. We have our own work to do. We have our own challenges to meet."

Now this is interesting, because in one sentence McCain — or his speechwriters — has at once dismissed the approaches of his predecessor (also a Republican), his predecessor's predecessor (President Clinton, the one whose experience the current Senator Clinton is running on), and — here's the kicker — Barack Obama's.

How is Obama's policy one of twenty-eight years ago? Very simply, Obama has been on the campaign trail criticizing the economic policies of Republicans and Democrats over "the last 25, 30 years" — the same policies that he says have made people bitter, and the same policies McCain and Hillary accuse him of being "elitist" and "out of touch" for criticizing.

It's a tantalizing hint as to how McCain will combat Obama's message of "change" as the fall approaches. All he has to do, it seems, is remind voters of who was in office before Reagan. I'm predicting here and now he will try to compare Obama to Jimmy Carter. It will be up to Obama to show how he will be able to do better.

A bitter pill to swallow

2008-04-12T22:50:00.002-05:00

The latest kerfuffle from the campaign trail involves Obama's use of the word "bitter." Not as in the kind of discourse we've seen between the candidates, and no, not to describe Hillary's attitude toward Obama's lead in pledged delegates racked up in "undemocratic" caucuses (and, to be fair, the attitude Obama's supporters will probably have if superdelegates reverse the results of those caucuses).

No, the bitterness in question here is that of working-class Americans who have seen their wages decline and their jobs shipped overseas over the last couple of decades. Because if that happened to me, I know I would be shouting to the hills for joy. Enough irony, though; here's the substance of what Obama said (the offending word highlighted for our benefit):

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them ... And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion ... as a way to explain their frustrations."

And Clinton's response:

I saw in the media that its being reported that my opponent said the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are ‘bitter.’ Well, that’s not my experience as I travel around Pennsylvania I meet people who are resilient, who are optimistic who are positive who are rolling up their sleeves.

So for once, Hillary takes on the role of the wide-eyed optimist, Obama the pragmatic realist (or, if you would believe his opponents, "elitist").

But the difference is that while Obama inspires optimism about the future and our ability to solve problems, it seems Hillary wants people to feel good about themselves even as economic opportunities disappear around them. We'll see which approach wins at the ballot box in the weeks and months ahead.

Surge. Pause. Repeat.

2008-04-08T18:46:00.003-05:00

I was going to write a blog about General Petraeus' testimony before Congress today, but Arianna Huffington did it for me:

Surge, Pause... Surge, Pause... We can't pull out! It's all starting to sound a bit sexual, isn't it? But the American people are the ones getting screwed.

Not that this is news, as The New York Post could have told you back in February. Apparently, some people just don't understand war isn't won on a schedule.

Civility on the campaign trail

2008-04-06T22:04:00.003-05:00

Back in January, President Bill Clinton said that if his wife and Senator John McCain "wound up being the nominees of their party, it would be the most civilized election in American history, and they're afraid they'd put the voters to sleep because they like and respect each other."

"She and John McCain are very close. They always laugh that if they wound up being the nominees of their party, it would be the most civilized election in American history, and they're afraid they'd put the voters to sleep because they like and respect each other."

— President Bill Clinton, January 2008

The most civilized election in American history. Hillary certainly seems to believe that the primary season has been civil thus far, so we can only imagine what flowers are waiting to bloom between whenever the nomination contest is settled and November should she become the nominee.

But you have to wonder about this civility thing. After Hillary tried to revive the scandal surrounding Barack Obama's ties to Reverend Wright, Obama responded by saying that it was "fair game" to do so.

John McCain, on the other hand, recently said Barack Obama would be "absolutely qualified" to be president, while when given the chance to compare herself to McCain, Hillary left Obama out in the cold.

Two points I want to make here: One, it is a good thing that this election season so far is even allowing us to contemplate who is being the most civil (instead of who is reaching lowest in the bag of political tricks). Two, I'm not sure all the candidates are equally displaying the potential for civility that exists. I'd love to be proven wrong.

The cheese stands alone

2008-04-04T20:50:00.004-05:00

"The cheese stands alone. The cheese stands alone!" So says loveable loser Carter Doleman in the 2003 flick Scorched, a movie in which a group of small-town bank employees working dead-end jobs individually decide to take action to improve their lives by robbing their employer. Carter, the only one whose idea of success is to land a job at the bank, yells this realization in a moment of self-empowerment before deciding to get dressed up for his interview.

And so we have President Bush staring blankly into the camera, alone, in the midst of world leaders at Thursday's group photo at the NATO summit in Bucharest. The photo waa seized upon by the German publication Der Spiegel to suggest that he looked like "a defiant child with his head against the wall." Certainly it has echoes of Bush's adventure with a locked door in China in 2005, but perhaps he was just more eager than his counterparts to get the thing over with.

All this serves as pretext, then, for a new New York Times/CBS poll, which has asked since the early 1990s whether Americans believe America is "on the right track." For the first time since the poll was taken, 81 percent of us have said "no," including a majority of Republicans. With all the headlines that have greeted us about the falling Dollar, rising oil prices, job losses, etc. this might sound like a reasonable thing.

But not to a talk show host I found on the radio dial this morning, who mocked The New York Times for declaring that "the sky is falling" and said that "wrong track" is "pretty strange language for a poll" (perhaps it was so strange to him he didn't realize "wrong track" doesn't mean "end of the world" — it's the start of a process). He then took his first caller, who happily declared that he wasn't worse off than he was four years ago, and that people should just "go to a restaurant" (assuming people can afford one these days).

Pessimism such as that displayed by The New York Times, the host argued, "becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," and he declared himself proudly to be one of the one in five Americans who believe everything is going just fine and dandy, thank you very much. The caller told us Ronald Reagan showed us optimism is key to addressing our problems. While it helps to face them with a sense of optimism that we can solve them, it certainly doesn't help to pretend everything is going just fine to the point that it prevents us from identifying problems to be solved.

Caller and host agreed on a bumper sticker slogan — "Annoy a liberal — work hard, raise a family and be happy." I prefer to remember the lesson of Voltaire's Candide, in which the eternal optimist Professor Pangloss refused to make any judgments about his own hanging — or in Sondheim's dramatization, praised the design of the rope even as it was being drawn around his neck.

Has NATO lost its way?

2008-04-03T17:40:00.012-05:00

Uneasy alliance? After today's meeting, NATO's path from West to East seems less certain. To those less in the know, NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization (you might be forgiven for not knowing it exists). The image above is based on the organization's flag, a white four-point compass on a blue field.

It's a question that's stayed in my mind — and indeed many others — since the end of the Cold War. With the threat of Soviet domination gone, why do we need a transatlantic military alliance? To many, the answer is obvious, and they are not necessarily wrong in thinking so: the new global, non-state threat of radical Islamic terrorism has replaced the old totalitarian Soviet bloc.

But as today's meeting of the 60-year-old alliance revealed, there is a larger question at stake in the future of NATO. Though its members are generally supportive of combating terrorism (France has committed new troops to Afghanistan, par exemple), they are less certain about expanding the membership of NATO eastward. In his attempt to bring the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine into the fold, President Bush ran into resistance from France and Germany, who wanted to avoid antagonizing Russia.

“Georgia's and Ukraine's membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.”

— Alexander Grushko, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister

While Albania and Croatia were extended formal invitations — the former of which should be eyebrow-raising as Serbia chafes over the recent independence declaration by majority-Albanian Kosovo — Georgia and Ukraine were put on hold for now, (though they have been promised closer relations of some kind). The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was rejected outright after objections from Greece, who chafed at posters recently on display in Macedonia's capital depicting Greeks as Nazis.

Combined with U.S. plans to install a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe (which NATO backed at the meeting), Russia's skittishness about an American military alliance reaching into its sphere of influence should be understood. It may even be just a point of pride, as former Warsaw Pact members (NATO's old Soviet equivalent) fall away from the old Soviet influence and embrace the West (Bush has been particularly keen to reward Eastern European allies for their participation in Iraq). Perhaps not coincidentally, today's meeting was held in the capital of Romania, a former Warsaw Pact member.

“The Cold War is over and Russia is not our enemy.”

— U.S. President George W. Bush

But as NATO invites each new member into the fold, it invites new possibilities for military intervention in the future — each member of the alliance is pledged to defend the other in the event of an attack. I can't help but recall how the world wars showed us how entangled alliances can be troublesome — something that couldn't have been far from France's and Germany's national memories as they raised their objections.

While it is admirable to seek to bridge the gap that was carved between Europe's East and West during the Cold War, Macedonia, Georgia and Albania each have their own simmering disputes and political baggage to carry with them. As NATO seeks to expand, it should tread carefully, and watch out for the Russian bear in the woods.

A turn of phrase

2008-04-02T17:26:00.014-05:00

Perhaps a sign of the times in which we live, a phrase made popular four years ago seems to be making a comeback. Or "turning a corner," if you will.

Made popular in modern times by President Bush's attempts to describe progress in Iraq, especially on the campaign trail in 2004 (and afterward), the phrase made a surprise appearance more recently when Senator Clinton used it to describe her campaign's fortunes after her (arguably) pyrrhic victories in Texas and Ohio. But since then, I've seen the phrase pop up in a quote from a midwesterner in this BBC article about the world's opinion of America, which told me something must be up.

Maybe it's just me, but I remember more definite turns of phrases, like "light at the end of the tunnel," or "turning things around" (as long as we're going to turn something). But since it's been used to describe American progress in Iraq, however incremental it might be, it can't help but carry a connotation that there's a much longer and involved process afoot. And there are no shortage of problems in America today that might need such an approach for solving them.

And then there are the Yoko Ono lyrics to the song of the same name:

I turned a corner,
It didn't seem that was wrong,
I was just having a laugh.
But suddenly my friends are gone
And I didn't know that life would be so long.

I guess more than a question of how many corners we'll have to turn, it's what's around the corner (or what isn't) when we get there that counts.

In their own words

2008-02-26T22:57:00.005-05:00

Tonight's debate between Senators Clinton and Obama dived deep into substance, and that's a good thing (18 pages' worth of goodness, if you care to read it, over at NYTimes). But I couldn't help but notice one aspect of Hillary's style that confirmed for me the criticism that she represents the old guard of politics:

MR. RUSSERT: I want to ask both of you this question, then. If we — if this scenario plays out and the Americans get out in total and al Qaeda resurges and Iraq goes to hell, do you hold the right, in your mind as American president, to re-invade, to go back into Iraq to stabilize it?

SEN. CLINTON: You know, Tim, you ask a lot of hypotheticals. And I believe that what's —

MR. RUSSERT: But this is reality.

SEN. CLINTON: No — well, it isn't reality. You're — you're — you're making lots of different hypothetical assessments.

Contrast that with the last time I remember hearing a response like that from someone in power when a journalist asked a pretty reasonable question about the consequences of our actions:

JIM LEHRER: Let's cut to the crunch on this question. If in fact this team does not find any weapons of mass destruction, do you believe that would do serious harm to the credibility of the president and this administration and particularly on the… in the long run and when history looks back on this?

DONALD RUMSFELD: I mean, the intelligence that our country had— has— was over a sustained period of time, it was validated by other intelligence services. I have to believe it was reasonably correct— obviously not perfect. No intelligence is ever perfect. And that as the reports come out, they will find evidence of the kinds of programs that Secretary Powell presented to the United Nations. That's my… yes, I mean that's what I believe.

JIM LEHRER: But if they don't? Is that a problem?

DONALD RUMSFELD: I don't do hypotheticals.

JIM LEHRER: You don't do politics; you don't do hypotheticals.

DONALD RUMSFELD: I don't. I don't. Why? I can't speculate.

One of the necessary qualities of leadership is looking ahead to the possibility that plan A may not work as you thought it would. I don't know about you, but when someone running for president today, knowing what we know now, refuses to engage in hypotheticals, I'm a little bit worried.

~~But maybe I'm wrong. Can anyone out there on the Internets think of a time where it would be a good thing to avoid hypothetical questions?~~

Scratch that. I think I found one …

Victory of reason (redux)

2008-01-03T23:15:00.000-05:00

Sanity prevailed over fear in the midterm elections. This time idealism is king. The come-from-behind victories of the aw-shucks governor from Arkansas and the skinny kid with Kenyan roots (not to mention the second-place finish of the son of a millworker) are signs that the country is ready not only for change, but for humble leadership. For the first time in about seven years, I have hope for the country.

Thanksgiving at war

2007-11-24T00:07:00.000-05:00

As much as we have to be thankful for as Thanksgiving draws to a close, it's important to remember those who aren't here to be thankful with us. And while I admire the sentiment expressed in this cartoon — those serving abroad in our place certainly deserve our thanks — let us hope as well that the soldiers themselves will be equally able to thank us for the support they deserve — before, during and after the war; at home and abroad.

Fired up about Amazon's Kindle

2007-11-23T20:58:00.001-05:00

Poster child: Bezos' new toy

Leave it to Newsweek to try to get out in front of a technology trend. But this time they may have gone too far.

It began innocently enough — without notice or a buildup of anticipation that normally accompanies the introduction of such gadgets, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled a new eBook reader at an Apple-like special event Monday. What followed was predictable — gadget sites online got their hands on one ASAP to give their take on the device. The verdict? A great leap forward, but not the be-all end-all of eBook readers. (Sony, after all, has had theirs out for a while now; Microsoft took a crack at it with their Reader software nearly a decade ago).

So I walk into a drugstore today, and see this on the cover of Newsweek: "Five centuries after Gutenberg—" stop right there. If anything should be compared to the invention of the printing press, it's the digital word, a phenomenon that goes way beyond any one device. The hyperbole left me wondering whether Newsweek was incapable of making a good analogy at best, or allowing themselves to be used as a free advertisement at worst (c|net's Amy Tiemann "had to check twice to make sure the article wasn't a paid product placement").

I can't be sure how the Kindle will fare, but my guess is that it will remain a niche product for the following reasons:

One screen is not enough. You read a book two pages at a time; an electronic reader should have two screens (or at least a wide screen that folds in the middle) with opposing faces.

It should be familiar. Open the cover of a Kindle, and it doesn't feel like a book. It feels like a PDA. People like the way the weight of a book feels in their hands. They like to take the book in their hands and flip through the pages. Until a reader mimics these existing ways of interacting with the medium, I don't think it will have mass appeal.

Ditch the keyboard. Like Apple's brilliant stroke with the iPhone did to the smartphone, an e-reader should not have a keyboard that distracts you when you're trying to focus on reading the screen. It should just be you and the words. Even Bezos said he wanted the Kindle "to disappear in your hands — to get out of the way — so you can enjoy your reading." It's hard to do that with a keyboard staring back at you at the bottom — and what about accidental taps? Like the iPhone, fixing this will require a touchscreen replacement (all the better to simulate flipping pages with?) — Apple's approach in a recent patent filing is one way.

The X factor in all this is Apple's response. The Kindle's launch has inspired comparisons to the iPod, and reviewers have mentioned the iPod and iPhone's potential to be used as an eReading display. I, for one, wouldn't mind using a click wheel to scroll down a chapter of text after selecting it from a playlist-like selection menu (are you listening, Apple?).

Whatever the case, the Kindle did get two things right: wireless downloads wherever you are, and page-turn buttons that don't leave you feeling all thumbs. Is that enough to spend $400 on a device that looks like it would have been at home next to a 1980s PC? Time will tell. But at least for now, it seems the reports of the book's death at the hands of the Kindle are greatly exaggerated.

GOP Congressmen demand withdrawal

2007-11-16T13:10:00.002-05:00

Democrats' report: Inconvenient truths?

— not from Iraq, but of a report issued by the Democratic members of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee seeking to estimate the "hidden costs" of the Iraq war.

The call comes from Senator Sam Brownback and Representative Jim Saxton, the ranking Republican members of the Joint Economic Committee, who claim that the report is "defective" and riddled with "factual errors," though the specific examples they gave have been corrected in the online version of the report.

It's all well and good to demand accuracy, but calling for the report's withdrawal?

While telling us to stand strong in the face of hardship in Iraq and asking our soldiers to continue to shoulder the necessary sacrifices, it seems to me these Republicans have found an enemy more formidable than the terrorists in Afghanistan or the insurgents in Iraq — a differing point of view.

Go ahead and call the report "defective," go ahead and tell us where the Democrats erred — even better, issue your own report in response. That's the beauty of open academic debate. But to tell the opposing side to take back what they said is the intellectual equivalent of cut and run.

Read the report for yourself (PDF, 400KB) and decide whether it makes a rhetorical leap too far.

But as for the Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is opposing any talk of a timetable — for charging Bush administration officials with contempt of Congress.

Too easy to be green?

2007-11-15T19:20:00.000-05:00

Ecstasy is all you need
Living in the big machine now …
Now your world is way too fast
Nothing's real and nothing lasts

These lyrics from the Goo Goo Dolls' 2002 release, Gutterflower, serve as pretext to a larger point about the state of the auto industry ahead of this week's Los Angeles Auto Show, not just in America but abroad as well. As German automakers struggle to increase fuel efficiency, America's largest, GM, is celebrating today's pronouncement of its 2007 Chevy Tahoe Hybrid — using a hybrid drive co-developed with its German counterparts — as Green Car of the Year.

Excuse me. Chevy Tahoe? Green? Car?

This effusive article from Reuters praises the Tahoe as "the first full-size hybrid SUV" that gets "21 miles per gallon in the city, the same as a Toyota Camry sedan." 21 miles per gallon? Break out the champagne! We can all go home now.

Even more galling is this gem from GM spokesman Dave Barthmuss:

When you think of a hybrid, you think of a small car that has been built from the ground up to eke out the most miles, but now you can have that kind of system in a large vehicle.

Yes, by all means! Let's throw away any mileage gains that could come from designing a new kind of SUV with efficiency in mind and just throw an electric motor on the existing one. That's progress! (To be fair, GM did make the doors out of aluminum, but most likely only to offset the added weight from the hybrid drive train.)

GM's mild Malibu and Aura hybrids, meanwhile, eke out only small mileage gains (perhaps why GM is advertising them as America's "most affordable" hybrids — they can't win on engineering).

Honda, for its part, is rolling out the first hydrogen fuel cell production car in the middle of next year to a "limited" number of customers in southern California for a bargain $600 per month ("affordable," according to MSNBC — we can only hope they took "relatively speaking" as granted). Good luck finding a filling station!

The Los Angeles Times' Dan Neil takes a longer view, saying that automakers cannot "throw a switch" and turn all their cars into hybrids at once — though that's exactly what GM seems to have done with its Tahoe. And, again according to Neil, automakers have more reason to appear green than just good PR:

Consider the context of this year's auto show. The price of oil is flirting with $100 a barrel. Recent studies suggest that, as the energy demands of emerging giants India and China increase, world oil consumption could rise 55% by 2030. Even oil executives concede we cannot drill or mine enough to satisfy that kind of energy appetite.

Two automakers seem to be headed in the right direction. Ford's CEO, Alan Mulally, talked about reducing vehicle weight as a means to increase fuel efficiency. Toyota, meanwhile, has a concept car with reduced weight instead of added batteries (though its larger image as a green company may be faltering).

On the plus side, automakers are finally waking up to the reality that oil is a finite resource. Their attempts at introducing greener technologies, if self-serving, are about as much as survival as social responsibility. But as they fight higher fuel economy standards at the same time, by and large their green effrontery remains a façade.

Liveblogging* Leopard: First impressions

2007-10-26T17:17:00.000-05:00

Rite of initiation: Getting a free T-shirt for being one of the first to show up. And Photo Booth doesn't look half bad, either.

Okay, so now that I'm an Apple geek I get to take part in one of the Apple fanboy's time-honored transitions: slavishly whoring oneself out for Apple's marketing purposes the day they launch their new operating system (or is that just all the time?).

In other words, I waited in line. In front of people. Showing up at an Apple Store the day of a software release announces to the world either that their latest release was really worth waiting that long for – or that you're a hopelessly devoted nerd devoid of friends, girlfriends, social skills, or all of the above (there were a few of those in line, no doubt).

But it wasn't all geekiness. Or maybe it was, but it was geek chic.

Apple's stores were closed Friday, presumably to upgrade their machines to Leopard, the latest release of Apple's flagship Mac OS (or Macintosh Operating System, in 1980s speak – this is version 10.5 for those of you who are counting). The 6 p.m. Friday release echoed a similar event this past summer when Apple chose the time and day of the week to release its much-hyped iPhone (and given the iPhone's strong numbers, the hype appears to have been deserved).

As the premiere event approached, a roped-off line snaked halfway down the plaza, cameras snapped, and Apple Store associates served Starbucks coffee to those waiting in line. And at the grand moment, the opening of the door, store associates clapped and cheered, I grabbed my T-shirt and promptly exited the line for those waiting to buy the new software. I headed instead straight for the bank of computers awaiting an OS that I had been waiting for since I got my first Apple in 2005.

Did it live up to the hype? Well, as much as I love Apple, I have to say it doesn't match the groundbreaking release of the iPhone. Instead, Leopard is just a nice refresh to keep the OS as useful as ever and shiny and new. I'll go over the main features here:

Time Machine. This is the biggie. Basically, your computer is now able to backup every change you ever make in real time, and you can go back in time whenever you want. Pretty cool, but get the largest hard drive you can if you want this feature to work the way it should. A terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) no longer sounds quite so large.
Spaces. If you hear something about Leopard "conquering time and spaces," this is why. You can now have multiple desktop spaces to keep windows open in, a handy way for a chronic multitasker like me to stay organized. As you can see, I have my movies playing in one window; working on photos in another; my calendar in notes in one … let's just say I could get used to this. Oh, and one more thing: you can make more than 4 spaces if you want – up to 16.
Quick Look. Not revolutionary, but potentially incredibly handy. For applications that support it (Microsoft Office excluded at the moment), you can see what a document looks like without having to open a separate program. It saves time and keystrokes.
Grid and Fan. It seems simple enough, but it's probably one of the greatest leaps forward in Mac OS usability yet. It would be even better if Applications were one of the default icons in the dock so you could use it like a faux Start button (something to help the switching Windows users out there). But when you add it, you have instant access to your programs. Cool beans.

Finally, Cover Flow. Now you can look at the files on your hard drive like you can browse album covers in iTunes. This is especially useful for photos, and as more applications support Quick Look, can get really exciting. But I'll try to contain my enthusiasm for now (Apple has spoiled me into thinking that features like this are something to be taken for granted).

So that's a "Quick Look" at the features of Leopard – I didn't even get into the add-on software that comes with the OS, and there are more features that can't be captured in one photo. Aside from having the first computer I tried crash on me twice when I tried to use Photo Booth's more advanced effects (hopefully not an omen), everything was surprisingly slick and smooth. Computing has definitely been vaulted into the next generation, at least until Apple releases its next update in 12-18 months.

* The asterisk in the title? It would have been liveblogging, but I had to yield my computer for about an hour while an Apple Store associate gave some pretty impressive demos of Leopard features (thank goodness for Blogger's autosave feature; I almost lost this post). So while I may not have been impressed with Leopard's features on my first go around, it just goes to show that if you take some time to sit down with it, you might be surprised by what you'll find. In other words: there's more than one way to skin a cat.

AT&T cuts the cord

2007-09-11T13:06:00.000-05:00

Pity the reader who didn't read beyond the headline of this USA Today story about AT&T's new chairman and CEO, Randall Stephenson. Their choice for a headline? "AT&T shifts to wireless focus with new ads and color" (yawn). The color orange isn't new for AT&T, which has kept the color during its transition away from the Cingular brand. What is new is that AT&T is no longer going to require landline phone service to benefit from package pricing for its broadband Internet service. Now there's a story.

Also of note (at the very end of the story):

AT&T is beefing up its global profile and trying to cut better "roaming" deals with international wireless carriers to carry calls from iPhones and its other devices.

"We pretty much cover the globe now," Stephenson says. "We just want to cover it cheaper."

Last time I checked, AT&T's roaming plan requires charges of at least $1 a minute. That their CEO is focused on making that price lower, along with his willingness to end the requirement of landline phone service for broadband, is a good sign that AT&T may finally be grasping the potential for wireless communication in the global age. My one criticism: the tagline. "Your seamless world"? I suppose it's a start.

Apple's 'beat' falls flat

2007-09-08T21:03:00.000-05:00

Whither the 16GB iPhone? That was the question I was left with last week as Apple's much-anticipated special event left me wondering, "Huh?"

Blame the rumor mill. Unlike previous Apple events where people were left largely in the dark, this time the analysts got it mostly right. Maybe too much right. So much right, that by the time the event was over, it was what they didn't get right that left me distinctly unsatisfied.

Okay, so nobody predicted a 16GB iPhone (except me), but it's gotta be coming. Apple can't let iPod touch go too long having more storage capacity than its phone-enabled cousin, though I can understand that, large flash drives being a relatively new technology, it would make sense to use the limited supply there first.

But that's not even what has me most riled up. What's got me stinking mad at Apple is for toying with our expectations by using "The beat goes on" as their tag line for the special event. Used in the Beatles' final press release, the phrase got the rumor mill guessing, yet again, that Beatles would be available on iTunes. So when Jobs got to his "one more thing" announcement, downloading music wirelessly at Starbucks wasn't all that fantastic.

"A ship that leaks from the top." It has been said of the ship of state, and of Apple, which has been notorious for acting to squelch rumors (though recently it seems to confirm them). After this year's spoiler, I can understand why.

Hit and miss

Rumor	Result
Touchscreen, wireless, flash-based iPod	iPod Touch
OS X-based iPod with Cover Flow	iPod Touch, iPod Classic, iPod Nano

"Fatty"	iPod Nano
iPod Touch	iPod Touch
Ringtones for iPhone	Ringtones for iPhone
Wireless iTunes downloads	iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store
Beatles on iTunes	—
—	Free downloads at Starbucks
—	$200 iPhone price cut

In other news

2007-08-28T22:09:00.000-05:00

Holy seats for the holy set — The Vatican has launched its own low-fare airline to ferry pilgrims to holy sites throughout Europe — and possibly beyond. Operated by Italy's Air Mistral (Vatican City proper has no airport to call its own), the airline features seats engraved with the Vatican's seal and décor featuring spiritual slogans such as "I am searching for your face, Lord." Headline writers at various news agencies had fun with this story — the Tampa Bay Times chose "On a wing and a prayer," while Reuters decided to begin their story with the following gem:

While some passengers only turn to prayer when jolted by turbulence, the Vatican made it standard on Monday by launching the world's first airline for Catholic pilgrims.

There's more in the article. Don't read on if contrived puns make you grimace.
Digging himself deeper — U.S. Senator Larry Craig is at it again, this time coming out swinging with a shocking defense:

I am not gay, I never have been gay.

As any media consultant could tell you, speaking from the negative is not the best way to get people on your side. This one ranks right up there with Nixon's "I am not a crook." And we believed him, didn't we?

The story has been picked up abroad by the BBC, and Reuters, right there with the pithy details, had a particularly punchy headline to describe the situation. Didn't they outsource their headline writers to India?
A second chance at failure — Seeking to allay the fears raised about "U.S. American" education since her questionable answer at the Teen Miss USA pageant last week, Miss Teen South Carolina appeared on the Today show to try to answer the question the right way, and she did mostly well. Her defense only raised more questions, though:

Everybody makes a mistake. I'm human.

Yes, everybody makes mistakes.

What I learned in Florida

2007-08-28T19:46:00.000-05:00

Expect the amazing. At just about any time if you're in Florida and you don't look at the sky at least once, you're missing out. The name "Sunshine State" belies the number of thunderstorms that pass through in this tropical climate, but even in those there is a silver lining — or pink, or orange, or cyan. One day as I drove across the Howard Frankland Bridge over Tampa Bay, a fire-red sunset splashed the dark clouds of a storm front to the east with its hues, which were then reflected on the water below. No single photograph could have captured that immersion of color.

Use hyphens liberally. Common phrases such as "thank-you" and "buckle-up" require hyphens to make them … readable? I never got a reason for that. I did learn, though, that one newspaper here hyphenates dollar figures (e.g. $1-million) because they once did it to prevent the figure from breaking across lines. It just stayed that way.

Move to higher ground. Between hurricane storm surges and the predicted rise in sea levels from global warming, and with insurers abandoning the coastlines, it's a good idea to check hurricane evacuation maps before finding a place to live. But then again, Florida's beauty is such a powerful siren that any self-respecting sailor would be all too glad to be lured into her grasp.

In the Earth's shadow

2007-08-28T19:39:00.000-05:00

When public isn't private

2007-08-27T23:34:00.000-05:00

Craig and Allen: In bad company

It should sound obvious, but I've heard too many stories of politicans getting caught trying to solicit sex (or at least appearing to try to do so) in public restrooms — and yes, two is too many. First it was State Representative Bob Allen of Florida, a co-chair of John McCain's presidential campaign, who was caught trying to offer an undercover police officer $20 for oral sex. Now we hear that Idaho's U.S. Senator Larry Craig, also a Republican, was caught playing footsie in an airport bathroom stall, and he had to leave the Romney campaign.

Look, I don't care if politicians look for some fun on the side; that's part of their private life (a big point of contention during the Clinton impeachment proceedings was that pretty much all politicians have had mistresses; it's only recently that the press started caring about it). But please, senators, representatives, (presidents?) if you need somewhere to look for casual sex, don't do it in a public restroom.

But even better, if you're going to get married, why not just keep the oath you took in the first place?

Equal distribution of ...

2007-08-25T22:38:00.000-05:00

Chavez: Timeless?

Fill in the blank. I'll give you a hint: one word, it's what Venezuela's socialist leader Hugo Chavez is attempting to achieve for his citizens, and it's something we all wish we had more of. Give up?

Sunlight.

You were thinking wealth, right? Well, technically equal wealth is only achieved with a communist system, and even then, as Geroge Orwell pointed out in Animal Farm, some are more equal than others. What a government can do, apparently, is to ensure equal distribution of sunlight among its citizens.

Venezuela standard time?

In moving Venezuela's time zone back 30 minutes, Chavez says he wants "a more fair distribution of the sunrise," which he believes will help poor children go to school as they now wake up before dawn. And, according to the New York Times, it reverses a decision made in the mid-1960s to move Venezuela's time 30 minutes ahead to fall in line with its neighbors.

The decision places Venezuela in a small club of countries that place their time zones in fractional increments away from Greenwich Mean Time. That list, again according to the Times, is Afghanistan, India, Iran, Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Nepal.

A little bit of history repeating

The Times article in question casts Chavez's time zone decision, together with his recent attempt to change the country's constitution, in both historical and symbolic lights — symbolic of Chavez's growing reach and influence, historical because it has happened before.

Chavez is close to Fidel Castro today, but at one time Venezuela was ruled by another Castro called Cipriano. From the beginning of his rule in 1899, there are many parallels to the types of changes Chavez is trying to bring to Venezuela key parallels between what Cipriano Castro did then and what Chavez is trying to do now: eliminate term limits, restore the Bolivarian unity between South American republics, and so on. For this pithy quote, the Times called on a professor of Latin American studies at Wesleyan University:

The good news for anti-Chavistas is that Castro stayed in power only until 1908. The bad news is that he was replaced by his vice president, Juan Vicente Gómez, who remained in power until 1935.

The Times also accuses Chavez of lobbying OPEC to cut production, contributing to today's higher oil prices. But as long as we are dependent on oil imports to fuel our cars, Venezuelan-owned Citgo stations remain neighborhood fixtures all over America.

The Internet is dead. Long live the Internet.

2007-08-25T01:45:00.000-05:00

… so says Mark Cuban, the somewhat reclusive billionaire investor who made his fortune selling his Web 1.0 enterprise, Broadcast.com (formerly known as Audionet) to Yahoo! in 1999 for $5.6 billion in Yahoo! stock. His best-known venture since then, besides owning the Dallas Mavericks, is HD Net, which has hired on former CBS anchor Dan Rather to do some reporting on the side.

Anyway, all this just serves as prelude to what Cuban is trying to say. When Condé Nast Portfolio asked him what he meant by saying "the Internet is dead" and "for old people" in a Senate hearing, he explained it this way. In his own words:

Think of it this way. Way back when, electricity changed the world. … Do you get excited about electricity or is it just a utility? … The internet is in the same position today. It’s no longer an exciting platform for societal and business change. It’s a utility. It’s something that is exciting to people who remember the old days of the internet. The only way to change that is to upgrade the platform for bandwidth transport across the country to a minimum of 1 gigabyte per second throughout (sic)* to every home. At that point kids will come up with new and unique applications that we can’t imagine today. That’s when it becomes exciting. Until then, it’s dead and boring.

Comments on one technology news site disparaged Cuban as a "dead and boring" attention whore, turning his own words against him. Perhaps, but it's not too often that I'm prompted to think of the Internet on such a grand scale.

Thinking of Cuban's background in streaming multimedia content online, I'd be disappointed with today's Internet too. At one point I had expected television programs and radio stations to become readily available online. To a large extent, that never happened, and limited bandwidth is one reason why. What video we do have comes in small, digestible bits (though that may be the result of our short attention spans rather than technical limitations). But I can't fault Cuban for trying to get people to think beyond today's Internet. Processors improve exponentially, doubling their power every 18 months according to Moore's Law. Why not broadband speeds to match?

* The (sic) is to point out that Portfolio editors probably don't know the difference between a gigabit and a gigabyte, as one Digg commenter pointed out, and that Cuban had probably meant to say "1 gigabit per second throughput." There are eight bits in every byte.

Chinese toy recall claims new victim

2007-08-19T04:49:00.000-05:00

The lead paint epidemic is worse than we thought.

Rove’s departure

2007-08-15T13:36:00.000-05:00

So Rove left the White House. What does it all mean? One analyst called it "the end of the Bush presidency," but that sounded like a bit much, so I looked to what I had hoped would be a more reliable source: Rove himself. His reason, according to the New York Times:

Mr. Rove cited a desire to 'start thinking about the next chapter in our family’s life.'

— which only served to bring me back to another NYT article from December 2006, in which executives at large companies say they are leaving to "spend more time with family," only to take jobs a few months later with just as many, if not more, responsibilities. Only time will tell what happens in Mr. Rove's case.

The new face of Death

2007-08-13T15:05:00.000-05:00

Extreme makeover: Before and after

Something of a cult figure in Mexico, Santa Muerte, or the Angel of Death, has eschewed the usual scythe and globe for something a bit more accessible: a crown and veil. Venerating the saint of death is controversial in the Catholic Church, which frowns upon it as a sort of pseudo-Satanism linked with black magic. Still, as this one Mother Jones article on immigration showed in 2006, she plays a central role in the dangerous life on the Mexican border, and this military researcher calls her "Mexico's patron saint of crime."

At least now she's a little easier on the eyes.

A trip down memory lane

2007-08-13T13:36:00.000-05:00

How many of you remember what you were doing in 1994? For these two Republican political figures, it was saying things that could be used against them later. Consider these:

If we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone … There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq … Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? … It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

— Vice President Dick Cheney explaining why the first President Bush decided not to go on to Baghdad in 1991

That one made it into a YouTube video that went from 100 to over 200 thousand views in the same day. Now this second quote is a bit more interesting because it involves a current presidential candidate. At the time, mayor Rudy Giuliani was talking about getting tough on crime in New York. But now, some are afraid the same philosophy could apply to terrorism and the debate over civil liberties. If you Google freedom and Giuliani, here's what you'll find:

What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

For this latter quote, one creative Digger rephrased that sentiment as "Freedom is slavery," a reference to part of the slogan of the English Socialist Party in George Orwell's 1984. But we don't know if that's a fair interpretation unless we get an answer from Giuliani himself how he feels today. And in Cheney's case, certainly there must have been some kind of evolution in his philosophy that caused him to take a different tack on the Iraq war today.

Hopefully some journalist out there reading this now has an idea of what question he needs to ask when he next sits down for an interview with either of these politicians — assuming he can get a straight answer.

iPod to iPhone: The War on Terror

2007-08-11T20:56:00.000-05:00

In an example of how print doesn't always translate well online, one alternative weekly columnist's look at the “War on Terror™” lacked a direct link with the sidebar that did a better job (in my view) of putting into perspective how long we've been at war: the distance of time between the release of two seminal Apple products. Even the online version of the sidebar lacked the graphics of Apple technology that — especially for an Apple fanboy like me — gave a sense of progression to the story. Compare what you see online with this photo from the print version below:

In case you missed it ...

2007-08-11T18:42:00.000-05:00

Yugoslavia: History, like the car.

… and I know I did, which is unusual for me because I consider myself a follower of world affairs — Yugoslavia no longer exists.

Already worn down by the intense conflict of the 1990s, Yugoslavia had been hanging on to a thread as a federation of two of the country’s former remaining states — Serbia and Montenegro. In 2003, the name “Yugoslavia” was dropped altogether, leaving the country named after its two remaining constituents. Finally, in June 2006 (while I was on vacation, so that’s probably how I missed it), Montenegro declared its independence. Serbia followed suit, and the last union remaining from the former Yugoslavia disappeared off the map.

Sad, because elsewhere in Europe unions are growing stronger under the European Union — or at least they’re supposed to be. An anthropology professor I had for a couple of courses at VCU described the situation as paradoxical and hopeless — an attempt to achieve international integration while disintegration is happening within the member nations’ own countries (see Kosovo, Basque country, Muslim immigration, etc.). The only successful unification in Europe, it seems, was that of East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and even the wounds from that haven’t completely healed yet.

So, as Europe loses another of its federations (the last being Czechoslovakia, gone in 1994), and even Scotland may be on the verge of withdrawing from the United Kingdom, I can’t help but wonder how many more times the list of countries in this world will continue to grow in the decades ahead (East Timor comes to mind). And instead of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, we now have the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia (but not Serbia and Montenegro). Did I miss one? If so, that’s just one more reason I miss the old federations.

So, here’s a riddle for you: If even Europe can’t hold its countries together, what makes us think we can keep the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites together in Iraq?

Let the LOLcat jokes begin

2007-08-09T15:35:00.000-05:00

(They already have in at least one Internet forum.) While some U.S. communities have considered bans on feeding strays, this Moscow woman may just be the archetypal reason to do so. One hundred thirty cats flood her apartment. She says she loves homeless pets and just wants to help them. English Russia has the photos — and the incredible video.

Anorexics protest new iMac slogan

2007-08-07T15:49:00.000-05:00

Okay, not quite. But Apple is definitely relying on sex appeal to sell these new, thinner iMacs. When they introduced the 3rd-generation iMac in 2005, they looked to the iPod for design cues. Is it any coincidence, then, that this new iMac looks more like an iPhone? I don't know what Apple had in mind — that the new iMac was supposed to sell more iPhones or vice-versa, but the effect is clear: I want one.

In the days leading up to the iMac's release, a fake article made it to the front page of Digg.com promoting "leaked" pictures of the "new iMac." It was just a photoshopped version of the Apple Cinema Display, but darn if I don't want the next iMac to look more like that. Perhaps the faker of the photos achieved an insidious alternative effect: spoiling the release of Apple's new product by creating unreachable expectations. Cointelpro from one of Apple's competitors? Say it ain't so.

Chasing rainbows

2007-07-19T20:23:00.001-05:00

Between the lines

2007-07-14T04:40:00.000-05:00

Do I have this right?

From an Associated Press article:

At the Pentagon, meanwhile, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that the number of battle-ready Iraqi battalions able to fight on their own has dropped to a half-dozen from 10 in recent months despite heightened American training efforts ...

Pace, however, also said the readiness of the Iraqi fighting units was not an issue to be ‘overly concerned’ about because the problem is partly attributable to the fact that the Iraq units are out operating in the field.

Appearing at a news conference with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Pace said that ‘as units operate in the field, they have casualties, they consume vehicles and equipment.’

Is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff telling us not to worry about the fact that two fewer battalions in Iraq are ready for battle because they're getting blown up?

Written on the subway wall

2007-06-02T20:47:00.000-05:00

In what I can only assume is a PR battle ahead of a scheduled pro-Palestinian rally in Washington, DC, while entering the Metro I found one ad communicating the Palestinian perspective (advertising the rally, of course), as well as two pro-Israel ads seemingly posted in response (pictures below). One, fair enough, says that teaching children to hate will never lead to peace. But the other, more tenuous, says that Palestine, "a society that targets Israel" does so "because Israel shares America's values." This sounds eerily similar to the "they hate our freedom" argument that the Bush acolytes raised in the aftermath of 9/11.

Now I am not delusional; I know that there are Muslim extremists out there that believe it is necessary to kill innocent people to fight for a society where, among other things, women cannot expose any part of their body in public. But to paint the Palestinian people with the same brush seems more than a little suspect. The war there has been going on for so long now, and there are so many grievances, that I don't think either side can claim an absolute footing on moral high ground. Israel needs our support to remain a free state, but I'm not sure how we can keep every last Palestinian from preaching hate as long as they have no hope of achieving the same.

Instead of demonizing the other side, let's look at ways to build bridges of understanding. Instead of looking for the "partner for peace" that may or may not come along, Israel should find ways to engage in diplomatic dialogue with the democratically elected Palestinian government. Impossible, you say? Even the Bush administration has begun dialogue with Iran. Both sides have suffered enough without looking for excuses to continue the cycle of violence that has continued for too long.

When crashing can be a pleasant surprise

2007-05-31T20:44:00.000-05:00

My PowerBook G4 has served me faithfully for nearly two years now, and for the first time I had reason to bring it into the Apple Store for a potentially perplexing problem – when I selected a certain font in Fireworks MX 2004, the whole program came crashing down, and sometimes it brought down other applications with it. One incident caused a systemwide crash.

But even as I was experiencing these problems, I was still impressed with some of the recovery features of Mac OS X. For one, the systemwide crash I mentioned simply closed all my programs and logged me out instead of giving me a blue screen of death – no restart necessary. But the biggest surprise came after I took my computer in for repair.

I was told I was going to have to reinstall the operating system. Instantly I had painful flashbacks of sitting in front of a screen for hours watching a progress indicator while backing up important files before having to go through the laborious process of changing all my settings in every application. But this is Mac – they have something better.

By selecting an option during the reinstall process, Mac OS saved all my settings and applications exactly the way they were. After the process was complete, everything was preserved so perfectly that even my Firefox browser remembered the page I had been looking at when I last used it. I encountered only two minor glitches – I lost my user account picture, and I had to reinstall Flip4Mac, a program that lets me see Windows Media in QuickTime on Mac OS. But other than that, the process was painless and flawless. And most importantly, my problem was fixed.

So now though I can't say my Mac hasn't crashed, I can say that when it does, it does so more gracefully than Windows, and with a lot less time and effort lost. Kudos to the designers at Apple, and I look forward to their next release of Mac OS (10.5 "Leopard") in the fall.

A republic, if you can keep it

2007-05-16T19:19:00.000-05:00

With the revelation yesterday that the president may have intervened directly to keep a domestic surveillance program going despite threats of resignation from two top administration officials – then-Attorney General John Ashcroft of the Justice Department and director Robert Mueller of the FBI – we now have a basis for impeachment, a sentiment echoed by constitutional scholar John Turley in the video below:

It's not just the high officials invovled; it's the fact that the president knew what he was doing when he ordered the program to continue, and that the law involved is so clear.

This isn't the first time that the executive branch has tried to make an end run around the law. We last saw this in the Iran-Contra scandal, when the defense then that allowed Reagan off the hook was ignorance. Supposedly, he had no knowledge of the illegal actions that were taking place, a strategy called "plausible deniability" (a far cry from "The buck stops here"). The testimony offered by the Bush administration's own former deputy attorney general yesterday dashes even that defense to bits.

Unlike other critics of the Bush administration (and some Republicans in the Clinton era), I don't take impeachment lightly, and I don't believe it should be used as a political tool. As much as I disagreed with the president's decision to go to war in Iraq, and as much as his administration bungled the occupation afterwards, I don't believe that being quick on the trigger or the monumental mismanagement of a war alone makes for an impeachable offense.

I do believe, though, that if Congress allows a program that exists outside the law to continue to exist without consequences for the administration and its officials, we have a template for future presidents to follow with impunity. I do not consider this a partisan issue; I consider it a patriotic issue. The rule of law is what distinguishes a democracy from a dictatorship, a republic from the reign of royalty. Our very system of government is at stake.

Benjamin Franklin, when asked what form of government the founders had come up with at the end of the constitutional convention, said, "A republic – if you can keep it." These are trying times, and our republican form of government needs defending now more than ever.

Frontline: Spying on the Home Front

2007-05-15T22:18:00.000-05:00

How far is the government going in spying on its own citizens? That's the question posed by Frontline's latest insightful documentary on our government's inner workings. But the bigger question should be: how far is the government allowed to go, constitutionally speaking? The issue centers over two possible readings of the Fourth Amendment, which states rather simply:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Under one reading (mine included), the government cannot violate a person's privacy without getting a warrant first. But a new, more interpretive reading advanced by the Bush administration and its supporters says that any search can be conducted without a warrant as long as it's reasonable. Not only that, but a former Bush administration lawyer argued that the president's constitutional duties as commander-in-chief can override acts of Congress (i.e. the law).

This insidious shift in how our governing document is interpreted is not only risking our privacy. It seems a minor consideration compared to the even greater – and graver – risk to our fundamental system of checks and balances. Instead of going to Congress to authorize a new surveillance system after September 11 (and remember, this was when Congress and the president were of the same political party), the president decided he could change the status quo at will. If we were at war it would be one thing, but Congress only authorized the use of force when we went into Afghanistan after 9/11. Legally speaking, we are not in a state of war.

These are uncharted legal territories. Not only are we fighting a different kind of enemy, but we have unprecedented potential to use technology to pry into various aspects of people's lives. What is privacy, if it exists, and to what degree can the government violate it, how, and when? The answer to these questions will determine our future as a constitutional republic. Without appropriate safeguards against abuse, our rights are in danger.

Whatever is decided, precedent is already being written, and court decisions may end up defining the answers where Congress has remained silent. What's missing from all this is the voice of the people, a vigorous public debate about the balance between liberty and safety we will strike in a new age of terror. It's up to us to help change that by writing letters to newspapers and our members of Congress.

Benjamin Franklin said that those who would give up essential liberty for even a little temporary safety deserve neither. Let's hope that in the coming days, weeks and years that our country can live up to the better part of those words.

Gonzo v. Gonzo

2007-05-11T19:11:00.001-05:00

What happens when you take the House and Senate testimony of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales from this month and last and play them side-by-side? TV magic, that's what happens. (From Countdown with Keith Olbermann – 5/10/07)

Delta's new design

2007-05-01T23:52:00.000-05:00

Delta unveiled a new logo and Web site after emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy Monday, a design that aims at enhancing Delta's new international stance.

Over the past two years the airline has cut jobs and cut domestic routes, which are facing intense competition from low-fare airlines, in favor of more lucrative international destinations, which have yet to face the same competitive pressure.

The new logo, with a more sophisticated typeface and colors, seems to be aimed at gaining that type of clientèle. United has pursued a similar approach with its "It's time to fly" campaign that uses its classic Rhapsody in Blue theme in conjunction with artistic animations.

But what stood out to me wasn't just the sparse design of Delta's new livery (which incidentally saves Delta money because it uses less paint), but the bad puns on the site's home page and the press release announcing their emergence and rebranding. "'Brand' new era," "chapter of success." Who works for these guys?

Retro cool

2007-05-01T03:18:00.000-05:00

Did you know that you could telephone anywhere in the world for just $12 for the first 3 minutes? Apparently it's the next best thing to being there (ad in National Geographic c.1960s).

Facing down the GOP attack machine

2007-04-24T15:15:00.000-05:00

Have Democrats learned nothing from Kerry's 2004 swiftboat debacle? As Democrats try to do what they were elected to do and bring the Iraq war to a close, they are letting the Republicans once again set the tone of the debate. In remarks made after a GOP policy meeting, Cheney accused the Senate majority leader of (gasp!) playing politics.

Sen. Reid himself has said that the war in Iraq will bring his party more seats in the next election. It is cynical to declare that the war is lost because you believe it gives you political advantage.

The fact that Cheney himself is exercising the definition of cycnicism in his comment aside, what about the fact that what gets you votes is in fact the will of the people? You know, a government that's of the people, by the people, for the people? Or at least it's supposed to be.

Even more depressing than Cheney's comment is that it went unchallenged by Democrats, at least in this Associated Press article. Senator Reid's response (if it could be called one):

I'm not going to get into a name calling match with the administration's chief attack dog.

That's a response? It's not enough to say you're being attacked; you have to fight back.

Democrats seem to remain unfamiliar with the new media-driven environment of soundbites, sticking with the old demure way of dealing with things when every article published is a fight for Americans' hearts and minds. And when they do try to go on the attack (calling the Iraq war "lost"), they end up letting themselves be the subject of further attacks (note to Democrats: if Republicans have been using the troops as a political platform for four years, it's time to get out in front of that debate).

Even policy analysts have begun using colorful metaphors in their interviews to capture the country's attention. Democrats need to take a page from their book, or else we're going to let swiftboating continue to define this country's political debate. And surprise, surprise, the GOP is readying radio ads that are going to accuse Democrats of using the troops as a "political football." They would know a little something about that.

Victory of reason

2006-11-08T04:29:00.000-05:00

This is a day that will be remembered for when reason triumphed over fear, moderation over extremism, democracy over tyranny. It will be up to the president and the new Democratic majority to find a way to work together over the next two years. The future is full of possibility.

A more pragmatic apporach to immigration

2006-10-06T22:54:00.000-05:00

Sure, I hate hearing "press 1 for English" as much as anyone else. And the quixotic mission of the Minutemen to guard what parts of the Mexican border they can is, in a word, adorable. But no matter how much we dislike it or how much we complain to our elected officials, the flow of migrants across the border is inexorable. This became clear to me as I was reading a feature article in this month's Mother Jones magazine about the struggles faced by illegal immigrants as they make their way north.

Before you make any assumptions – even I did because M. Jones is a liberal publication – the article I read was not a passionate defense of migrant rights. It was not full of rhetoric and propaganda. Far from it, it was a dispassionate analysis of both sides of the immigration struggle. The only purpose this article served was to awaken me to the reality on the ground. It put together bits and pieces of information I've heard over the years into one complete portrait.

Basically, the situation as it now stands is something like this: originally from Mexico, immigrants are increasingly coming from points further south in Central and South America. They hitch rides on so-called "death trains," clinging to the tops of freight trains and sometimes falling to certain injury – or death. After taking whatever transportation they can to the border, they face a miles-long journey through searing desert and punishing landscape. Getting caught by the border patrol is the least of their worries. It is a matter of sheer survival.

What went through my mind after seeing what these people have to go through to get here is this: if they can travel thousands of miles from home and risk their lives in a barren landscape, what difference will a wall on the border make? This is not to say that we shouldn't try to secure our border. I think that it is worth the effort to do so. But I think that even despite our best efforts, people will still find way to get through. In computer terminology, it is the ultimate firewall hack. You have a border thousands of miles long with millions of people trying to get through. It's like putting your finger in an open water spigot: some will still leak out on the sides.

So what do we do? We must face reality. Any immigration reform this nation undertakes must take this reality into account to be effective. While focusing on feel-good measures like walling off the border may be politically popular, we ignore the reality behind illegal immigration at our peril. One of the primary complaints of those who oppose illegal immigration (a complaint I share) is that they don't learn to speak English. Unlike previous immigrants to our country, they are not assimilating; they are maintaining their native culture.

Many people who criticize the migrants' insistence on their own culture, however, forget one key aspect about previous immigrants: they were forced to assimilate by "Americanization" classes, a predominant anti-immigrant atmosphere, and more recently under legal immigration the requirement to learn English and American history to become U.S. citizens. As a country that recognizes multiculturalism, I don't think we should "Americanize" immigrants necessarily, but it does seem that as long as we do nothing, these immigrants will continue to remain largely isolated and hold to themselves as a separate community.

In writing this, it seems to me that the "path to citizenship" argument makes the most sense in this regard. By providing the incentive of achieving U.S. citizenship status, we will provide a way for people to choose to assimilate without discriminating. They will learn English; they will learn about our history as a nation. Otherwise, I can see no way that the immigration problem will be solved. It is neither practical nor humane to round of 30 million plus migrants for deportation. It is not practical to rely on securing the border alone. It is practical, however, to provide migrants with an opportunity to participate in the American landscape as true Americans. This way we get to keep our country; English will continue to unify our nation; and migrants get the economic opportunity they've been looking for.

Fight Global Warming

2006-06-29T12:49:00.000-05:00

http://www.fightglobalwarming.com

Road Trip - Day 1

2006-06-23T03:53:00.000-05:00

Finally got around to uploading my road trip pics. Here are the first batch from Day 1 of my adventure, starting out from Las Vegas June 3. I headed north on I-15 and took a detour through State Route 169 to visit the Valley of Fire State Park and check out the edge of Lake Mead National Recreation Area, the lake formed by the Hoover Dam. I managed to make it to Overton Beach and thought I would go for a swim, but the water was low from drought, muddy and too close to the boats that were docked at the Marina. Oh well.

	Unfortunately this one came out at half resolution, but it's a picture of people having their picture taken in front of the famous Welcome to Las Vegas sign at the end of the Las Vegas strip. The hotel in the background is Mandalay Bay.
	A mountain view approaching Valley of Fire State Park
	The rock formation here is apparently called a beehive.
	One of the rock formations approaching Atlatl Rock.
	Atlatl Rock. Apparently it was too hot for me to get out of the car to take a better picture. On second thought, I think Atlatl Rock itself was too big to fit in my camera. This may be another one of the rock formations off to the side.
	Interesting rocky crest on the roadway with a historical marker talking about the effort to build the Overton-Las Vegas highway (see this may look ordinary but there's nothing like this in Virginia – that's in the end what makes us tourists, I suppose, taking pictures of ordinary things).
	A single petrified log. The first I saw, but not the last. One of my last stops will be in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.
	This was the best picture I could get of the Seven Sisters rock formation. There were some amazing sweeping views from this point, but my camera has no zoom, and it's not panoramic, so I decided to stick to what I could see close up.
	And of course, how I could forget, the beautiful Wynn Las Vegas. Simply stunning. I had better pictures but accidentally erased them. This was taken from the car while I was sitting in strip traffic.

The hatchback is back

2006-05-13T07:20:00.000-05:00

Just in time for record-high gas prices, small cars are making a comeback. Derided as ugly in the 1970s and 80s, today's hatchbacks are slim, sleek and begging for attention. The new 2007 Toyota Yaris (pictured above, in blue) gets 40 mpg highway, more than any gasoline-only car I know of. It definitely has my attention – normally I wouldn't care about gas mileage, but with gas prices so high and the road trip I'm taking this summer, I did a little research. For people who can't afford hybrids (like me when I get my first car, most likely), the Yaris is an excellent choice.

On the other hand, the Volkswagen Rabbit is making a comeback. After 22 years of being sold under the worldwide "Golf" nameplate, VW is betting that a little nostalgia, a lower starting price and a fresh redesign will make the vehicle competitive in the small car once again. It comes with loads of standard features, and it has a 5-cylinder engine (makes me wonder what the mileage will be). Still, it will be on my radar. Lots of great hatchbacks out there (or as Toyota calls their Yaris model, a "liftback") – lower starting price and great gas mileage to boot.

Finished!

2006-05-13T07:13:00.000-05:00

Finally, exams are over, and I'm ready to get back to real life. I'll be taking a trip this summer to Las Vegas and from there drive around Northern Arizona through to Tucson and Phoenix to visit some friends. I thought I could be really high-tech and blog from my mobile phone, but it turns out Cingular coverage is a bit spotty in Northern Arizona since GSM is still a new technology. We'll see.

The new look of CNN.com

2006-04-10T19:04:00.000-05:00

Lookin' sharp

Probably the best change is getting rid of the banner ad at the top. The down side is that a giant ad has been added at the side, making the site left-heavy, and the site is now 1024 pixels wide, where most sites are closer to 800 (which is how wide my browser is, even though I have a bigger scren), meaning I have to scroll sideways to see all the site's content. Still, though, a nice, clean improvement over the old design, which can still be found (for now) at CNN International.

Watergate redux

2006-04-10T18:54:00.000-05:00

The latest dispatches from the Republican culture of corruption...

Phone-Jamming Records Point to White House

WASHINGTON (AP) - Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show.

The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 — as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down.

Repeated hang-up calls that jammed telephone lines at a Democratic get-out-the-vote center occurred in a Senate race in which Republican John Sununu defeated Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, 51 percent to 46 percent, on Nov. 5, 2002.

Virtually all the calls to the White House went to the same number, which currently rings inside the political affairs office. In 2002, White House political affairs was led by now-RNC chairman Ken Mehlman. The White House declined to say which staffer was assigned that phone number in 2002.

Bush acknowledges declassifying intelligence

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush said Monday that he had declassified intelligence documents in 2003 to help explain his administration's reasons for going to war in Iraq.

Court papers released last week said that a former aide to Dick Cheney, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, testified before a grand jury that the vice president told him in 2003 Bush had authorized the release of portions in the National Intelligence Estimate.

Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, is charged with perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to FBI agents investigating the exposure of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame Wilson. Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a critic of the Iraq war.

Patrick Fitzgerald, prosecutor in the Libby case, wrote in the court papers that there was an effort by "multiple" White House officials to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of the Iraq war -- a reference to Wilson.

The court documents do not suggest Bush approved the leaking of the agent's identity.

In 2003, Wilson publicly questioned Bush's assertion in a State of the Union address that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons program.

The administration later acknowledged that U.S. intelligence did not back up the assertion and that it should not have been included in the president's speech.

Some U.S. intelligence at the time bolstered Wilson's position that the uranium claim was not supported by evidence. But the information that the White House released, selected from the National Intelligence Estimate, supported the administration's stance.

Some Democratic critics have said the president approved leaking sensitive intelligence for political reasons despite repeated public pronouncements that he would punish anyone in his administration found to have leaked classified information.

Merger Mania: AT&T's bid for Bell South

2006-03-06T05:06:00.000-05:00

Wow. We've come a long way from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was designed to increase competition between local and long-distance telephone providers. Here is a list of the major companies that existed then:

- Bell Atlantic
- Nynex
- Ameritech
- Southwestern Bell (SBC)
- Pacific Telesis
- Bell South
- U.S. West (Qwest)
- GTE

Now, Bell Atlantic, NYNEX and GTE are Verizon.

Pacific Tel, Ameritech and Southwestern Bell, once merged to form SBC, are now part of "the new AT&T" since SBC acquired AT&T within the last few months. Verizon has acquired MCI as well. The point of the 1996 act was to foster competition between long-distance and local companies for each others' access, but now they have merged.

Why? A regulatory ruling by the Bush administration's Federal Communications Commissions ruled that local companies no longer had to lease their lines to competitors at reduced rates; a key measure of the 1996 act that made competition possible. After this ruling was issued, AT&T exited the local telephone market, and the merger between SBC and AT&T happened. It's interesting because these companies were once mortal enemies – SBC arguing for higher line lease rates and AT&T joining a coalition called Voices for Choices that argued for the 1996 subsidies. A television advertising battle in the nation's capital ensued. But now that the merger is closed, voicesforchocies.com is most certainly offline.

The only untouched companies are Qwest and Bell South, companies with a strong regional interest. No longer.

SBC, the new AT&T, has made a $67 billion bid to acquire Bell South. The country's local telephone companies would go from four to three. Also interesting is how Cingular is involved, as it was a joint venture between Bell South and SBC, but would now become part of the new AT&T. AT&T Wireless, a spinoff of the old AT&T, was just acquired by Cingular last year.

Where does this leave the consumer? Well, it does leave Qwest as the country's only independent local telephone provider. But competition from cable, and perhaps power companies in the future, may make telephone competition a thing of the past as companies act to consolidate infrastructure. As one Associated Press article put it, it's one step away from recreating the "Ma Bell" monopoly of the 1980s.

I don't know what to think. I know I do like the idea of SBC and Bell South coming together to provide Cingular wireless services under the AT&T brand. But I wonder what the prognosis is for long-term communications competition, especially since it seems the mergers are far from over. If Bell South can be bought, it's just going to be a question of who will pay for Qwest – it already sold of its wireless assets to Verizon within the past year or so. We'll be left with only two regional providers – AT&T and Verizon. How can that be good for the consumer?

Wal-Mart needs our help!

2006-02-27T14:31:00.000-05:00

Apparently the world's largest retailer, a company with somewhere on the order of $10 billion in profits a year, can't afford to pay for health care for its employees! States already pick up the slack for Wal-Mart's low wages and benefits by providing affordable housing and Medicaid benefits, but Wal-Mart's CEO is asking governors to do more. If Wal-Mart can't afford to pay for its employees' health care, who can afford health care anymore?

Checks and balances, baby

2006-02-17T04:18:00.000-05:00

White House Ordered to Release Spy Papers

WASHINGTON - A federal judge ordered the Bush administration on Thursday to release documents about its warrantless surveillance program or spell out what it is withholding, a setback to efforts to keep the program under wraps.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060217/ap_on_go_co/eavesdropping

Accountability's a bitch, ain't it? Maybe there is hope after all.

It's snowing

2006-02-12T03:05:00.000-05:00

Priorities

2006-02-06T21:20:00.000-05:00

The new Bush budget: While giving no new aid to Katrina survivors, it seeks to keep in place the huge tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy.

Update (2/10/2006): Apparently, tax cuts are also more important than feeding the elderly poor, among 140 other programs.

Update (2/17/2006): After a conversation with a friend, I realized that – along with the elimination of the Social Security survivors' death benefit – this can quite literally be called stealing money out of the hands of widows. Social Security is supposed to be a guarantee, and President Bush is betraying that promise.

New, Improved Democrats – Now with backbone

2006-02-04T02:03:00.000-05:00

One of the aspects about President Bush's State of the Union address earlier this week that bothered me most was how he decided to cast his opponents as being of a "pre-9/11 mentality." I wasn't the only one who noticed.

In this Daily Kos guest post, Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin (D) relates his shock and dismay that so many of his colleagues in Congress would stand and applaud the president for going around Congress and exceeding his authority. Instead of a pre-9/11 mentality, Feingold boldly proposes that these members of Congress have a "pre-1776 mentality" and don't understand why we have the Bill of Rights to protect American citizens. Definitely worth reading no matter what side you're on in this issue.

More notable than the arguments in the post, however, is how this Senator was able to boil down a complex argument into what is basically a two-word phrase. Well done, Senator. Well done.

Checks and balances – remember those?

2006-02-03T17:01:00.000-05:00

Gearing up for November's Congressional mid-term elections, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has put together an excellent (though admittedly highly partisan) Web site explaining why checks and balances are a good thing in our system of government. When President Bush announced in his State of the Union Tuesday that he was going to continue ordering wiretaps without any sort of Congressional oversight, the majority party stood up in unison to applaud him. We need to have a group of lawmakers in Congress who are going to enforce the rule of law and hold the president to account.

Time and time again this Republican Congress has put loyalty to the president above the nation's best interests. In one case, the now notoriously confusing, expensive and ineffective Medicare prescription drug plan was passed by one vote because the House Majority Leader (pictured above, who is now facing money laundering charges in his home state of Texas) held open the vote by 15 minutes while promising the last swing vote to do some political favors for his son. This is what our government has been reduced to. In the ten years since Republicans first took office and promised reform, they have brought themselves to the point it took Democrats 70 years to reach.

We need some real change and real reform this November. As a former independent, I will tell you first: always vote for the best candidate. There are (be they few) reform-minded Republicans out there. But if it's a split decision, vote Democrat. A Democratic majority in just one house of Congress will bring the system of checks and balances back to our government that has been the pillar of our democracy since its founding.

Grading the State of the Union

2006-02-01T00:43:00.000-05:00

I'm no fan of Bush, but I have to admit, his speech was pretty good. Though I disagreed with half of what it had to say, Bush stayed on message, and his intended theme of optimism was resnonant. I was pleased to see him concede the issue of dependence on Middle East oil, though his emphasis on "technology" seems to lack environmental considerations (the issue of hydrogen, for example is promising, but the issue of hydrogen leakage is a problem that will need to be addressed up front).

My one problem with the speech was how he painted positions in the war on terror in stark terms (as he tends to do – remember "with us or against us"?), a black-and-white view of the world that doesn't reflect the reality on the ground. When he said there is a force in Iraq that grows every day more capable of defeating the enemy, I wasn't sure if he was talking about the American-trained Iraqi security forces or the insurgents. And "second-guessing is not a strategy?" – maybe if he had listened to people who had guessed correctly the first time that Iraq didn't have WMDs we wouldn't be in this mess.

Bush also failed to address many domestic issues, including healthcare (sorry, folks, but lawsuits aren't the reason the cost of healthcare is going up, and it's not the reason rural areas are having a hard time recruiting doctors). The priceless moment of this year's speech was when Democrats stood and applauded President Bush's statement that Congress didn't pass his Social Security "reform." His response was equally priceless – that spending on entitlement programs was "is not is a problem that is not going to go away." Apparently, so are his English skills.

But despite my problems with the speech (and Bush's problem with the English language), the speech overall left me reassured that, even if I disagree with him, we have a leader who's at least able to tell us what he thinks is going on (even if he does do it with a teleprompter). So, here are my grades:

Foreign Policy	C+
Domestic Policy	D
Optimism	A
Quality of speech	B+
Overall	B+

About time

2006-01-26T20:42:00.000-05:00

California has decided that secondhand smoke is a pollutant, no different from diesel exhaust or Benzene, for example. I say it's about time. While the panel that made the unanimous decision cited a "seminal" study linking secondhand smoke to breast cancer, this New Scientist article from 2004 reported that cigarettes are more polluting than diesel exhaust. Considering, too, all the toxic chemicals found in cigarette smoke, as well as studies linking secondhand smoke to all sorts of other health problems, it should have taken more than just a breast cancer study for a decision like this to be made. Next will have to come all the public smoking bans that people will no doubt gripe about, saying it's their own right to kill themselves (euthanasia aside, of course). But what people don't think about it the smoke that isn't filtered that people around them have to breathe. Smoking isn't just unhealthy, it's downright dangerous – to yourself and to others.

Podcast no. 1

2006-01-22T02:50:00.000-05:00

Okay, so it's not really a podcast in the technical sense, but you can download it to your iPod (or other portable media player) if you like. I took some songs I like and put them together in a brief broadcast. Check it out:

Click to hear my music

Links:

Bent Fabric

Mocean Worker

Update (1/26/06): I wrote the artist who contacted the music company who owns the rights to the CD, and Bent Fabric's "Jukebox" album is now available on iTunes. Still waiting on the single that has an extended, though.

The end of Independence Air

2006-01-20T04:44:00.000-05:00

Update: As of 1/22/06, it appears the Independence Air Web site is no longer online.

I flew Independence Air once in 2000 when it was still known as Atlantic Coast Airways, a feeder for United Express service on the East Coast. I flew from Dulles to Indianapolis, and it was one of the best domestic flight experiences I ever had on a small plane. It was a regional jet, not a turboprop, so the cabin was quiet, and the flight was very smooth, and most importantly, non-stop. This is the kind of freedom Independence Air offered when it broke away from United in 2004 to start its own (independent) service – plenty of non-stop flights from Dulles, but with lower fares.

Now that independence is gone, and the giants of the Washington market like United are free to raise fares again. Under bankruptcy United has largely restructured itself in the model of a low-fare airline. With the exception of "Economy Plus" seats added for more legroom, seats have become narrower and the same planes are carrying fewer passengers, a model pioneered by Southwest Airlines, the original low-fare carrier in the 80s. Legroom is fine, but it's difficult to navigate eating a meal or typing on a laptop without the necessary elbow room.

In any case, the collapse of Independence Air shows the final result of airline deregulation begun in the 1980s: a decline in the quality of airline service in a race to the bottom to provide the lowest fares. That is the inevitable result of laissez faire capitalism, as we have seen with Wal-Mart and the like providing lower prices, but inferior goods.

The middle class is disappearing in this country as cheap Chinese TV sets flood the market, but the quality sets sell for more than the average American can afford. The same principle applies to airline seats: narrower seats for the coach class, and ever-increasing amenities for those who are willing to pay a premium by flying first class.

Not only that, but airlines have stopped offering meals on board. People always used to complain about airline food, but for a while in the 90s United was using gourmet chefs. In a campaign called "United Airlines rising," it admitted the bad state of airline food and showed what it was doing to improve. Now all that's gone, meals replaced with "snack packs," sandwiches and wraps. The flying experience has been reduced to a lunch line, all for the sake of deregulation and the resulting race to the bottom for the lowest fare.

On cheap Chinese TV sets:

On the race to the bottom for low fares:

With the departure of Independence Air, though, opportunites have opened up for competitor JetBlue, which is going to start offering service to Boston, a small consolation prize. Better service is actually available from Richmond because it files from there to JFK, the airline's hub, allowing connections to more destinations on par with what Independence Air was able to offer.

So why did Independence Air fail? As I mentioned in the first paragraph, it used smaller planes. These smaller planes, the majority of FlyI's fleet, presented a significantly higher cost per mile per passenger than the rest of the industry, and it couldn't sustain its low-fare business without switching to bigger planes. It never quite made the switch, and so it went bust. As it turns out, FlyI ended its service to the West Coast in November 2005 before it went out of business completely this year. I didn't know when I visited San Francisco this summer that it would be the last time I would see a D.C.-based airline on the West Coast.

Alas, poor Independence Air, I knew ye well.

Don't spy on me

2006-01-19T22:58:00.000-05:00

So let’s put this all together. You probably heard over the last few weeks that the government has been spying on its citizens – without warrants.

That might sound bad enough on its own, but it isn’t just that this was going on without our knowing it; it’s that our president lied to us about it not just once or twice, but on several occasions. Not only that, but he misled the American public at a time when he was trying to get re-elected. (“That woman” from the Clinton years doesn’t seem like such a breach of trust in the executive anymore.)

The story

In defending the Patriot Act in 2004, President Bush said repeatedly on the campaign trail that wiretaps under the act require a court order. “Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order,” he said on Apr. 20, 2004 in Buffalo, New York. “Nothing has changed, by the way,” he continued. “When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so.”

Bush seemed to go out of his way to reassure the public that things were always what they were before. But in fact he had signed a secret executive order in 2001, still in effect, that bypassed these court requirements entirely. Not only that, but he authorized the program personally, according to one Associated Press article, more than three dozen times since then.

Even in December, when Bush was forced to admit the existence of the eavesdropping program, he called it “limited, and I repeat limited,” saying it only affected overseas calls between known or suspected al-Qaeda members. Wrong again, as a New York Times article Dec. 24 reported the surveillance affected all Americans, with the cooperation of America’s telecommunications companies. Worse yet, Bush has said he doesn’t intend to end the program, or at least suspend it while there are questions over its legality.

Only after the fact are we hearing arguments that bypassing courts and Congress in conducting searches on American citizens is OK. It makes you wonder why the New York Times, which sat on the story for more than a year, waited to break this news to us until long after the 2004 election. Even now, the media has merely questioned whether it is an “overreach of executive power.” That’s putting it mildly.

Since the founding of our republic, warrants have been a textbook example of the system of checks and balances between our branches of government. The executive branch, which enforces the law, always had to seek approval from the judicial branch, which issues warrants, before being able to search people’s homes, tap their telephone calls or otherwise invade the privacy that is guaranteed them under the Fourth Amendment.

No defense

Defenses of the president’s actions have ranged from self-serving and fear-mongering to the utterly absurd. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on Dec. 19, for example, that “speed” was an issue in bypassing the courts. But the fact is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of Congress of 1978 set up a court specifically for approving foreign intelligence requests. The court, in a reflection of its specialized purpose, rejects very few requests and approves them with deliberate speed.

Another defense of President Bush is that in a time of war, he has powers as commander-in-chief that allow him to go outside the law. Abraham Lincoln, for example, once suspended the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War. But this is the first time such a wide breach of law has been conducted behind the scenes – without public pronouncement or a chance for debate. It is the very definition of unchecked power, a situation that goes completely against the kind of government our founders intended.

In a Dec. 23 article, Washington Post Op-Ed columnist Charles Krauthammer tried to defend the administration’s actions by pointing out that “In 1972 the Supreme Court required the president to obtain warrants to eavesdrop on domestic groups but specifically declined to apply this requirement to snooping on foreign agents.” While that may be true, Bush’s program treats all American citizens as foreign agents, a presumption of guilt that also goes against our nation’s tradition of the rule of law.

It doesn't work

Finally, there is a more practical argument against mass surveillance. An article by Jennifer Granick for Wired News argues that “People with something to hide are adept at speaking in codes. Teenagers tell their parents they are ‘going to the movies’ when they are going to drink beer.” Criminals also know to misspell victims’ names to avoid detection.

Even when spying technologies work, Granick notes, they “inevitably produce an unacceptably high number of false positives” and catch innocent people in their snare. Remember when Yusuf Islam, the former Cat Stevens, was blocked from flying to the U.S. because his name was found in the no-fly database (it was later found to be a typo)?

The question

We are in a time of war, but it is an undeclared war with an indefinite objective and an unknowable end. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether we are willing to surrender our basic civil liberties until a time in the future that we may or may not live to see, and whether the power to suspend those liberties should lie in one man.

Most Americans understand the values their country stands for and have sided with the law. An AP-Ipsos poll released Jan. 7 showed that 56 percent of Americans believe wiretaps, even for suspected terrorists, require a warrant. A Jan. 16 poll shows that Americans may even favor the “I” word – impeachment – by a margin of 52-43 percent (a similar poll six months ago found a reverse result at 42-50).

On Dec. 18, 2000, Bush once joked after a meeting with congressional leaders that “If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.”

No one’s laughing now.

Click here to hear my reasoning behind this article:

Making a list, checking it twice

2005-12-26T02:25:00.000-05:00

Let's see, what has Bush done to put him on the naughty list this year?

Lying to the American people. In 2004 ("for years," according to this AFP article) Bush said that in fighting the war on terror, when it came to wiretaps, they were not performed without warrants. He insists today that he is protecting American civil liberties, but suddenly warrants (and the Fourth Amendment) aren't necessary anymore. Charles Krauthammer argued in a Dec. 23 Washington Post Op-Ed that the Supreme Court in a 1972 ruling effectively allowed monitoring of "foreign agents" without a warrant. Yet what he doesn't address is that the monitoring the Bush administration has done is on U.S. citizens. This isn't to say monitoring isn't necessary. But even Bush's defenders have admitted getting a warrant isn't exactly difficult.
Making propaganda. In January 2005, we learned that Bush paid a conservative commentator using taxpayer dollars to spread his conservative "No Child Left Behind" agenda. This came after 2004 revelations that Bush's Department of Health and Human Services also illegaly used taxpayer dollars to fund a public relations campaign promoting the Bush Medicare agenda in an election year.
Waiting to provide aid. In the January 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami, we only raised our amount of aid to stricken countries after we saw other countries surpassing our contribution. With Hurricane Katrina in August, aid came only after we saw unnecessary suffering at the hands of a crippled FEMA in the wake of a Homeland Security reorganization that was supposed to make Americans safer. Say what you want about state and local responsibility; in the past FEMA was there with support.
Still more lying – Bush promised to fire anyone involved in the Valerie Plame scandal. Karl Rove still has his position, and only Scooter Libby resigned after being indicted.

And all this is on top of how America was misled into war in 2003. Another year, another list of misdeeds. Hopefully the Bush administration can turn itself around for the sake of the American people, but from my standpoint it seems high time for new leadership. For the sake of improved checks and balances, I'm hoping for a Democratic majority in at least one house of Congress in 2006. Any change in Washington – from either party – cannot come too soon.

The color of temptation

2005-12-26T00:17:00.000-05:00

"What is the color of temptation?" is the question posed by a recent Panasonic ad for high-definition TVs. For me, the color of temptation is black and yellow (incidentally, yellow was the color of the fire hydrant in the Panasonic commercial eyed by a small dog – it's also one of my school colors). These are the colors of the new Sprint, and this snazzy new phone that's currently available buy one get one free for $49.

I'm tired of Cingular's two-year agreement (I'm currently one year through), and I'm so unhappy with my phone that I'm going to pay the $150 termination fee just so I can take advantage of Sprint's offer. They have fairer terms, and only a one-year commitment. I'm going to the store tomorrow to try out the phone in person, but from what I know of Samsung before, it's a sweet phone (my current Motorola loses its charge in a day and locks up every now and then, less than a year out).

Update (12/27/05): I went to go try out the phone at the Sprint store the other day, and it's not so great after all. Though the prospect of greater network coverage (at least in Va.) is tempting, the voice quality is not as good as Cingular. The phone was also cheap and plasticky just like the current Motorola I despise so much. There just are no good cell phones anymore. I might get a Nokia 1100 because at least I know it won't fall apart.

Praying for the President

2005-12-21T02:42:00.000-05:00

Pray for the President. Seriously. If, as he claims, Bush is a man of faith, as I am, he needs our prayers. Many of my faith support the president blindly, as if he were God's representative on Earth and we must follow what he says. I, on the other hand, understand that he is human and is just as capable of making mistakes as we are. Regardless of your political affiliation, even if you believe Bush is a hopeless cause, pray for him. I urge you. His failings and human fallibility only means he needs our prayers just that much more.

I was originally going to launch on a rant about how supporters of the President who claim to have faith can't have true faith since much of what he does (tax breaks for the rich at the expense of the poor, invading countries as the initiator of violence) doesn't match what I believe are the true values of the Christian religion. But then I found this Web site, and I realized: one thing all Christians, and possibly even non-Christians can agree upon this Christmas is that the president needs our prayer.

And right at this moment, what I'm praying to God that Bush understands most are these words from our Constitution, our sacred ruling document that no man claim himself above:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This isn't just about upholding two centuries of human progress, individual liberties and making sure our government reflects the values of the country we've come to know and love. And it isn't just about Bush's personal political career or legacy, which would greatly be improved if he recognized the error of his ways. It's about Christmas, a time of coming together despite our differences in a spirit of reconiciliation, peace and love. Pray that Bush receives this Christmas message, and Merry Christmas to all. To all a good night.

Wake up! Global warming is real

2005-12-18T02:14:00.000-05:00

The atmosphere now holds more than one-third more carbon dioxide than it did before the Industrial Revolution. In fact, European scientists reported last month that analysis of ice cores from Antarctica shows that today's level is 27 percent higher than any previous peak looking back 650,000 years.

As temperatures rise and global warming talks stall, it seems global warming is increasingly becoming an inescapble fact. Inescapable that is, for all but the U.S., who staunchly refuses to participate in any forced reduction of carbon emissions. China and India, rising giants whose economies still hover somewhere between developing and industrialized, sit on the sidelines as well.

The problem with modern environmental regulation is that countries that have already polluted to build up their economies (or in our case, still want to pollute) have to contend with developing economies that want to be able to waste their environment just as much as the industrialized nations have. Between these two factions we could find a balance if we had a leader willing to work out the compromises. But the U.S. under the Bush administration, as it does on other matters, continues to hold its head in the sand.

Bush once escaped the problem by saying "we need more study." But the facts are in, even in a report released by his own administration last year. Global warming is real, and between tons of emissions on a daily basis and rampant deforestation (trees, if you recall, convert carbon dioxide into oxygen), we are at least partially to blame.

Bush: 'I'm violating your rights for your own good'

2005-12-17T19:50:00.000-05:00

The cowboy in the background is appropriate for describing the attitude Bush takes toward every civilized precedent in the world. From international law to civil liberties here at home, Bush isn't interested in letting silly little rules or – say, the Constitution – get in his way. He once joked that his job would be "a lot easier if this were a dictatorship." No one's laughing.

In the News

2005-12-14T18:53:00.000-05:00

Bush finally takes responsibility for Iraq invasion, but not without insisting it was the right decision. Elsewhere in the Bush administration, the EPA wants to reduce industry's "regulatory burden" by relaxing pollution reporting rules, making it harder to keep track of exactly what toxic chemicals we're drinking in our water or breathing in the air. And last but not least, more than 100 religious protesters were arrested outside a Congressional office building, but not for the cause you might think.

No Christmas for Tookie

2005-12-13T19:11:00.000-05:00

I don't usually have sympathy for gang co-founders, but Mr. Williams has dedicated his life to anti-gang activism, writing a number of books denouncing his former ways. Critics complain that he never apologized for the crimes he was convicted of, but I ask how it is possible to apologize for a crime you say you never committed. Some have said that admitting to the crime would have saved his life, but I wonder what that says about our justice system. Does a person deserve to die for maintaining his innocence?

I think Williams' attempts to make amends through his anti-gang activism were enough to grant the mercy of clemency – and even then only life without parole. Williams, now an old man, could have lived the rest of his days in confinement and continued his activism against gang violence.

I think our society has moved too far from a corrections and punishment mentaility toward a revenge mentality when it comes to the death penalty. In the Bible, Jesus saved the life of the adulterer, saying "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Granted, more of us have struggled with sexual sin than committing the high crime of murder, but I think Jesus' mercy and forgiveness are aspects sorely missing from our justice system today.

This is not to say that we should let criminals out on the streets. Crimes, like sins, have their consequences, and people have to live with them. But the key word is live: death provides an escape for some people while prematurely cutting off a chance of reform for others. In this case, I think we lost a powerful voice against gang violence. And all this after the 1,000th execution in the United States since the death penalty was resumed in 1977, while questions are surrounding the exoneration of many death row inmates after review of DNA evidence. A message to think about this Christmas, what is supposed to be a time of peace and reconciliation.

I've got the Verve

2005-12-13T12:21:00.000-05:00

Check out The Verve Remixed Complete Box Set on Amazon.com. A friend recently introduced me to the collection via (legally purchased) CD. iTunes also has a version that costs $10 more but comes with bonus tracks. It's an eclectic collection of some old jazz standards electrified with some funky fresh beats. Here are my favorite (non-bonus) tracks from the collection:

Spanish Grease 7:26
Willie Bobo (Dorfmeister con madrid de los austrias muga reserva mix)

How Long Has This Been Going On 4:57
Carmen McRae (MJ Cole Remix)

Return To Paradise 5:52
Shirley Horn (Mark De Clive-Lowe Remix)

Strange Fruit 3:19
Billie Holiday (Tricky Remix)

Hare Krishna 6:57
Tony Scott (King Britt Remix)

Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby? 4:58
Dinah Washington (Rae and Christian Remix)

Summertime 6:50
Sarah Vaughan (UFO Remix)

Manteca 6:53
Dizzy Gillespie (Funky Lowlives Remix)

Sinnerman 4:35
Nina Simone (Felix Da Housecat's Heavenly House Mix)

Whatever Lola Wants 4:40
Sarah Vaughan (Gotan Project Remix)

Blues From Brother George Jackson 5:11
Archie Shepp (Mondo Grosso Next Wave Mix)

Do What You Wanna 5:24
Ramsey Lewis (Mr. Scruff's Soul Party Mix)

Soul Sauce 4:16
Cal Tjader (Fila Brazillia Remix)

Fried Neckbones And Some Home Fries 4:30
Willie Bobo (Dan The Automator Remix)

Just One of Those Things 4:48
Blossom Dearie (Brazilian Girls Remix)

Little Girl Blue 5:18
Nina Simone (Postal Service Remix)

Sing, Sing, Sing 6:07
Anita O'Day (RSL Remix)

Fever 4:38
Sarah Vaughan (Adam Freeland Remix)

The Gentle Rain 6:01
Astrud Gilberto (RJD2 Remix)

Peter Gunn 5:08
Sarah Vaughan (Max Sedgley Remix)

Stay Loose 3:20
Jimmy Smith (Lyrics Born Remix)

There's also a parallel set of albums called Verve Unmixed – the old jazz standards without the funky fresh beats. The best ones of these worth downloading are "Strange Fruit" and "Do What You Wanna."

Design achievement

2005-12-13T12:15:00.000-05:00

I finished the last project of my media graphics class today. The assignment was to design the front page of a newspaper with five assigned headlines. It's called the "Richmond Reporter," and it focuses on Richmond stories with a section highlighted in yellow called the "National Beat." I didn't like the name of the paper at first, but in the end I'm really happy with the way the layout turned out (the "National Beat" part was my idea). If you want to see it in all its full-size glory, e-mail me and I'll send you a high-resolution copy.

Update (12/17/05): Better image uploaded. I also now have a PDF available.

New Dem buzz word: 'community'

2005-12-12T01:30:00.000-05:00

A sense of community. What better non-partisan way of communicating what's wrong with America today. Or as Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois put it, "striking a balance between individual and collective responsibility." He equated the GOP's plans for privatizing Social Security and an "ownership society" as "social Darwinism," probably the most stinging indictment I've yet heard of the GOP's policies – and not a moment too soon.

Really that's what it's all about: leaving people to fend for themselves. Social conservatives, who subscribe to the rags-to-riches gospel of laissez-faire capitalism, have been yearning for decades to end the semi-socialist policies of FDR's New Deal, Social Security among them. The code words of "ownership society" and "personal accounts" are just lipstick on a pig, "reform" intended to disguise the policy for what it really is: turning the clock back on a century of social progress.

It's interesting that, in searching for a message, Democrats have settled on the idea of community. After George Lakoff's call for progressives to frame their issues, progressives have been calling for a community or "strong community" theme. In this time when most Americans believe America is on the wrong track and 40 percent of children no longer believe in the American dream (I could be counted among those), maybe a sense of community is just the thing we need.

Update (12/13/05): Obama's description of the GOP's policies as "Social Darwinism" has earned its own headline.

Air marshal shooting: bait and switch?

2005-12-07T19:12:00.000-05:00

When the U.S. was first pressing for air marshals on international flights in 2003, the issue was painted as one needed to prevent the hijacking of airplanes, which would be an in-flight proposition. Why, then, did this latest shooting happen not in the plane, but in the gate leading to the airport? My understanding of the air marshal program was that it was supposed to prevent a plane in the air from being used in 9/11-style hijackings, or maybe even keep it from blowing up. But killing a person in an airport gate? This isn't what we signed up for. According to this BBC News article, 'Sky marhsals should be the last option', the last resort to protect people in the air. The article also mentions how Israel's air marshals use secret buttons to signal the pilot to dive and throw anyone standing off balance – certainly not a shoot-to-kill policy. We need to reconsider what we're using our air marshals for, and if people's rights aren't being violated in the process.

Déjà vu

2005-12-07T18:04:00.000-05:00

After a similar shooting in London earlier this year, U.S. air marshals have opened fire on a bombing suspect at the Miami airport. Not only was the man they shot not on the plane, but he obeyed their order to leave the plane.

I don't want to jump to conclusions – the media was rife with speculation that if a Marshal had opened fire there "must have been a grave threat." I don't want to say that there wasn't. But this latest incident raises the question of whether a shoot-to-kill policy is the best to follow in protecting people from terrorist attacks

Why isn't it possible, for example, for non-lethal rubber bullets or tasers to be used? In fact I had assumed up until this point that marshals were armed with tasers. It's disturbing to me that these people can fire live rounds on an airplane.

While it can be argued that these measures are necessary for our safety, I wonder how much further we will be willing to tolerate the loss of innocent life at the hands of policies like these. In the London case the man was posthumously exonerated and found to be an innocent victim of misunderstanding – it was also later revealed that he didn't jump a subway turnstile as police had claimed. All signs seem to point that a similar misunderstanding may have taken place here.

I was especially disturbed by the appearance of a Florida Congressman on CNN (presumably a Republican) who said he didn't "really care" about the fact that the shooting victim might have been a victim of bipolar disorder. He called the death "unfortunate" and cited the billions of passengers who have flown with air marshals who hadn't been shot. As if that were some sort of comfort.

Record lows

2005-12-07T11:30:00.000-05:00

I wonder... does this recent spate of record cold weather have anything to do with the 30 percent drop in the Gulf stream current reported last week? May be coincidence, maybe not.

Global warming: U.S. snubs Canada, senators ask, mayors act

2005-12-06T20:35:00.000-05:00

As global warming talks continue in Canada and the first Pacific islanders move to escape the effects of global warming, the United States has taken a specifically stubborn approach to the talks: no compromise. It's a wonder we're even there at all, considering we refuse to recognize the 1998 Kyoto agreement that led to the world's first measures to reduce carbon emissions. Canada tried to make a compromise and have talks with the U.S., China and India under a 1992 agreement, but no dice. We remain the world's number one source of carbon dioxide, providing a full 25 percent of the world's total emissions.

Meanwhile, a group of 24 U.S. Senators has asked Bush to participate in the discussions in a constructive way, arctic and tropical indigenous peoples are uniting in the fight against climate change, and 192 U.S. cities, along with a few states, are moving ahead with their own measures. It seems the only people being left behind in all of this is the Bush administration and their stubborn insistence that we do nothing to solve the problem.

Bush's complaint about Kyoto was a good point: exempting India, China and other developing nations from any final agreement on global warming is not an option. But Bush doesn't understand the patience and time needed to work out diplomatic agreements (hence our virtual silence at the global warming talks, and our overly single-minded attempts to bring in more allies in the Iraq invasion). Rather than put pressure on China, India and others to join the agreement and cut emissions, Bush has used the exemptions, along with his continued (and possibly feigned) doubt that global warming exists, to excuse the U.S. from any action entirely. It's like a child throwing up his hands when he doesn't get his way. I wish it weren't possible to make a comparison like that to our own president, but I don't know how else to describe it.

Iraqification

2005-12-03T22:51:00.000-05:00

Senior Daily Show Correspondent Rob Corddry presents a hilarious analysis of the situation in Iraq, citing President Bush's oft-repeated quote, "As the Iraqi army stands up, America will stand down" -- the goal being to train Iraq's army to defend itself (much as we tried with Vietnamization in another era). The picture to the left, according to Corddry's report, is the system the Defense Department has come up with to track the progress of freedom in Iraq, with the western provinces "still a little kidnappy." Definitely a clip worth checking out. The most priceless quote comes at the end, in response to Jon Stewart's question about how we will know when we've won the war:

"This war will be won when we leave Iraq not as a failed nation-state eviscerated by a quarter-century of a tyrant's rule, but as a military and economic superpower, ruled by islamists with an enormous grudge against the United States."

Corddry explains earlier that we "botched" the end of World War II by pulling out as early as we did, leaving Germany and Japan "without a military-industrial complex to drain its resources," allowing them to become economic powerhouses. Apparently we won't let that become the case in Iraq. To watch the clip in full, click this link and then click on Corddry's piece, called "De-Weakening Iraq."

Update (5/16/07): New video link

Political commentary

2005-12-03T22:24:00.000-05:00

Global warming 'worst-case scenario' realized

2005-12-02T12:10:00.000-05:00

This NASA photo shows the minimum extent of the arctic ice cap in September 2005. The yellow line shows the cap's normal size.

As Tropical Storm Epsilon, the season's record 26th named storm, reached hurricane strength today (a hurricane in December?), another effect of global warming is being realized further to the North. Meet Canada's arctic waters, which are steadily being melted by rising arctic temperatures that are rising twice as fast as the average in the rest of the world. Together with the New Scientist report that the Gulf Stream current is slowing due to melting glacial waters, it's clear that the effects of global warming are upon us.

Arctic temperatures are expected to rise significantly by the end of the century, according to experts, which will melt even more glaciers.

"What we are seeing in the Arctic, and what we are seeing further south with the hurricanes, are the most pessimistic models of global warming," said Louis Fortier, an oceanographer who has just returned from an expedition to the region on the Canadian research vessel Amundsen.

Lasserre predicted that within 30 years it would probably be possible for ships not normally equipped for the Arctic to tackle the Northwest passage.

About 20-30 ships currently take it each summer now.

Melting in the Arctic is getting so bad that, according to this same article, the U.S. and Canada may be about to enter into a territorial dispute. Canada wants, and has claimed since 1986, jurisdiction over its northern waters to be able to enforce shipping regulations like environmental protections and safety training. The U.S., on the other hand, argues that any waters between two oceans are international waters.

Ironically, the melting of ice in the arctic will make it easer to access oil reserves in the Arctic Ocean, so we'll be able to burn even more oil to raise global temepratures even further to be able to melt more ice and find... more oil. There's also one reserve in the Arctic that is split by the Yukon-Alaska border between the U.S. and Canada, setting up the scene for yet another territorial dispute. Canada had better get its hands on a decent military, and fast.

Update (12/5/05): Arctic feels the heat from climate change – Reuters article on roughly the same subject, with a Canadian biologist pointing out a sharper than expected decrease in the extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap.

Interesting poetry

2005-12-01T23:05:00.000-05:00

Be prepared; this stuff is explicit and downright sacreligious. But it's fun, and it shows the power of poetry to expose truth where words (or, gasp!, pictures) might otherwise fail.

The Pope's Penis
Sharon Olds

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver sweaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat — and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

The Solution
Sharon Olds

Finally they got the Singles problem under
control, they made it scientific. They opened huge
Sex Centers – you could simply go and state what you
want and they would find you someone who wanted that
too. You would stand under a sign saying I Like to
Be Touched and Held and when someone came and
stood under the sign saying I Like to Touch and
Hold they would send the two of you off
together.

At first it went great. A steady stream of
people under the sign I Like to Give Pain
paired up with a steady stream of people from under
I Like to Receive Pain. Foreplay Only – No
Orgasm found its adherents, and Orgasm Only – No
Foreplay matched up its believers. A loyal
Berkeley, California, policeman stood under the sign
Married Adults, Lights Out, Face to Face, Under a
Sheet, because that's the only way it was legal in
Berkeley – but he stood there a long time in his lonely
blue law coat. And the man under I Like to Be Sung
to While Bread Is Kneaded on My Stomach had been
there weeks without a reply.

Things began to get strange. The Love
Only – No Sex was doing fine; the Sex Only – No
Love was doing well, pair after pair walking out
together like wooden animals off a child's ark, but
the line for 38D or Bigger was getting unruly,
shouting insults at the line for 8 Inches or
Longer, and odd isolated signs were springing up
everywhere, Retired Schoolteacher and Parakeet – No
Leather; One Rm/No Bath/View of Sausage Factory.

The din rose in the vast room. The line
under I Want to Be Fucked Senseless was so long
that portable toilets had to be added and a minister
brought for deaths, births, and marriages on the
line. Over under I Want to Fuck Senseless – no
one, a pile of guns. A hollow roaring filled the
enormous gym. More and more people began to move over
to Want to Be Fucked Senseless. The line snaked
around the gym, the stadium, the whole town, out into
the fields. More and more people joined it, until
Fucked Senseless stretched across the nation in
a huge wide belt like the Milky Way, and since they
had to name it they named it, they called it the
American Way.

Thinking about a new PC this Christmas?

2005-11-30T14:51:00.000-05:00

This year there's no way to go but Apple, at least if you believe the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg. Not only does Apple's Tiger operating system already have the features that Microsoft is promising for Windows next year, but it is more secure, easier to use, better integrated, and all-around hassle-free. These are all the same reasons I got my Powerbook earlier this summer. And combined with Apple's student discounts of up to $200, Apple can be the affordable choice for even the most budget-minded student.

But Tiger isn't just better because it's more secure. It has one feature in particular that Windows just doesn't have, and may not even have in its next version, due out this time this year. It's called Exposé, and it allows you to see all the windows you have open within any one program, or in all programs at once. And as this Apple pro tip of the week shows you, you can even use the feature while videos are playing, and the videos will continue to play.

No other computer offers this robust set of features, and none is as much of a joy to use. I will continue to be glad I got an Apple at least until the end of 2006, and possibly beyond. You should consider getting one too.

The real-life 'Day After Tomorrow'

2005-11-30T14:19:00.000-05:00

For those of you who didn't see the 2004 movie, The Day After Tomorrow is a dramatic fictional account of what might happen if global warming causes the Gulf Stream current, which carries warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Atlantic, ever to fail. In such a scenario, the world enters a second ice age because the warm water that had kept the North Atlantic climate moderate gives way to the cold arctic. Some have dismissed the notion as science fiction, and it may be, but scientists have now found that the waters of the Gulf Stream current have slowed by about 30 percent, leading us down a path of unknown consequences. (And yes, this is due to global warming that is happening, but the Bush administration continues to refuse to do anything about.)

Critics have said that average temperatures in Europe have gone up, but the increase can be attributed to overall global warming due to increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the UK, whose climate is most directly affected by the Gulf Stream, has just had an unseasonably cold winter. The misnomer of "global warming" makes people forget that climate change can cause not just warmer average temperatures, but greater extremes between the temperatures. As the average temperature increases, the extremes will increase as well.

The end of Blackberry?

2005-11-30T14:00:00.000-05:00

It just doesn't seem fair. While NTP certainly deserves damages for Blackberry's alleged infringement, it just doesn't seem fair that millions of customers will have to suffer as the result of enforcement of patent law. Many other cases have been settled out of court. Even in this case, where a punishment must be rendered, why not levy Blackberry with a fine or force it to pay royalties to the patent holder?

Best Firefox promotion ever

2005-11-29T18:45:00.000-05:00

Found this in a Google image search. The caption says: "Firefox is the free web browser that offers greater privacy and prevents pop-ups, spyware and viruses."

The Web can be a dangerous place. Be careful out there.

Firefox 1.5 unleashed

2005-11-29T18:33:00.000-05:00

New browser, new Web site. Mozilla.com officially launched today, the online home of the newly formed Mozilla Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the non-profit foundation that first spawned its namesake browsing suite and now the browser that goes by the Firefox name. Key to Firefox's success has been its corporate branding, and with today's launch of Mozilla.com the open-source organization takes it a step further by making themselves more accessible to the public with a dot-com address. Go them.

Meanwhile, you should really download the latest version of the Mozilla Firefox browser. It's faster and better than ever, with built-in support for some surprising features, all with still under a 5 MB download for Windows users. If you're still using IE, which still goes basically unchanged since 2000, it's time to try something new.

Tropical Storm Epsilon

2005-11-29T18:30:00.000-05:00

Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta... Epsilon. We are now up to the 26th named storm on record this season, still the busiest ever since the naming conventions had to switch to Greek letters for the pure reason we ran out of names. That, and it's 70 degrees outside right now a couple of days before December. If this isn't global warming I'd like to know what is.

GOP's culture of corruption: latest dispatch

2005-11-28T15:50:00.000-05:00

A Republican congressman from California has "resigned in disgrace" after admitting to accepting $2.4 million in bribes to influence Congress in favor of certain defense contractors. In addition to recalling President Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex, it's just another in a long line of GOP scandals that have emerged from the party's misplaced sense of self-confidence and, in some cases, outright arrogance.

It's beautiful outside

2005-11-28T15:05:00.000-05:00

It's cloudy and overcast, but I can't help but notice the beauty of the individually formed clouds of different shades of gray as they drift by my window. The sun must be partially out, since the bottoms of the clouds appear gray as they fade up to white towards the top.

I'm sitting here in a lounge area of the VCU Student Commons, and someone is playing the piano next door. It's nice to be able to sit here and relax for a bit. I've also had some time to catch up on my Internet presence at Spread Firefox and elsewhere. It helps me remember what being online is all about: connecting with other people. And I get to enjoy a view of nature and the sound of music to boot. I just wish I had a digital camera to share the experience.

Fun

2005-11-24T08:56:00.000-05:00

If this doesn't make you dance, laugh and/or smile at at least one point in the video, then I don't know what will (RealPlayer required).

I'm allergic to Global Warming

2005-11-23T20:43:00.000-05:00

We all could be in the next few decades if current trends continue – this Space.com/LiveScience article explains why.

Lugz to Apple: 'Cease and Desist'

2005-11-23T00:17:00.000-05:00

Seen that new Apple ad with Eminem lately? It might have looked familiar for a reason:

Lugz (2002)	Apple (2005)

Plagiarism? You be the judge. I love Apple, but it does seem like their ad agency used the Lugz commercial as a jumping off point for theirs. I remember the ad seemed familiar when I saw it, but I couldn't quite place it. This definitely explains it. But then again, who's going to confuse an iPod ad with an ad for shoes? Apple's ad clearly follows the silhouette covnention used in previous ads, and there enough differences that copyright may not be an issue. Still, it shows that when people use ideas they should try to ask permission first.