CNN CEO Jonathon Klein didn’t go so far as to publicly call Tucker Carlson a dick, but he did describe himself as “coming down more firmly in the Jon Stewart camp” in announcing the firing of his bow-tied Crossfire shouting head: CNN dumps Tucker Carlson. Klein characterized the dismissal as part of a larger effort to treat the audience with more “respect.”
Yay.
A nice commentary by The New Republic’s Peter Beinert on what US conservatives’ reaction to the tsunami reveals about their view of the world: Distant shores.
To win over global hearts and minds, the United States must show Muslims, and others, that we are benevolent–that we want a better world for them; that we are not just in it for empire and oil. That means financial generosity–giving money for economic and social development rather than only military assistance. But it also means what might be called intellectual generosity–a genuine curiosity about the rest of the world, even when our safety is not directly threatened, even when the dramas aren’t primarily about us.
It is that curiosity that is so profoundly absent from Bush, who tries to see as little as possible of the countries he visits.
Beinert pretty much nails it. The campaign to convince the world of US benevolence is doomed, at least as long as the current team is responsible for US foreign policy, because the current team simply doesn’t do benevolence. Bush doesn’t care, and he doesn’t care who knows it.
The Washington Post has some ugly details on another “rendition” case, in which US authorities caught someone they felt might have information they wanted, then handed him over to an ally that specializes in torture (Egypt, in this case) so his fingernails could be torn out, electroshocks applied, and so on, unhindered by the quaint limitations our Constitution places on such things: Terror suspect alleges torture.
I know I’ve been indulging a bit too much in the pottymouth lately. But I have a really hard time coming up with appropriate language to describe this kind of thing. I guess I should just stop trying. There is no appropriate language to describe this.
Sigh.
I’ve updated my Iraq-Vietnam comparison graphs with the number of US dead for December, 2004. I’ve also reduced the previous month’s number slightly, in keeping with the latest stats at Lunaville. Note that this change makes November not quite the worst month ever, if you’re keeping track of such things.
Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.
The first graph shows the first 22 months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)
Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:
Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:
Disclaimer: I’m aware that we have more troops in-theater in Iraq than we had during the corresponding parts of the Vietnam War graph. Vietnam didn’t get numbers of US troops comparable to the number currently in Iraq until shortly after Johnson won the 1964 election, some three-and-a-half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above.
These graphs are not intended to show the relative lethality of the two conflicts on a per-soldier basis. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. You are free to draw your own conclusions.
You can view more discussion of these charts on the following pages, if you’re interested. The graphs are all the same; I just update them in place when the new numbers become available.
Vanity Fair contributing editor James Wolcott has this interesting weblog posting on the US situation in Iraq: Kind of a shame.
He leads off with an extended quotation from The Economist:
There is only one traffic law in Ramadi these days: when Americans approach, Iraqis scatter. Horns blaring, brakes screaming, the midday traffic skids to the side of the road as a line of Humvee jeeps ferrying American marines rolls the wrong way up the main street. Every vehicle, that is, except one beat-up old taxi. Its elderly driver, flapping his outstretched hands, seems, amazingly, to be trying to turn the convoy back. Gun turrets swivel and lock on to him, as a hefty marine sargeant leaps into the road, levels an assault rifle at his turbanned head, and screams: ‘Back this bitch up, motherfucker!’
Wolcott’s conclusion:
There’s a Peter Cook-Dudley Moore routine, one of their woolgathering dialogues, where Dud asks Pete, “So would you say you’ve learned from your mistakes?” and Pete replies: “Oh yes, I’m certain I could repeat them exactly.”
That seems to have been the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq. Take the mistakes of Vietnam and repeat them exactly.
Elder-Bush national security advisor Brent Scowcroft had words for the younger Bush during his remarks at a centrist think tank luncheon yesterday. From the WaPo: Scowcroft skeptical vote will stabilize Iraq.
According to Scowcroft, the election in Iraq will not make things better. In fact, it could well impel the country into civil war, as the insurgency morphs into an open Sunni rebellion against Shiite rule, with the Kurds then seceding.
I realize we’ve been hearing this “Iraq is on the brink of civil war” stuff for a long time now (basically since the invasion, if you count Steve Gilliard’s frequent predictions). But the predictions carry more weight from someone like Scowcroft, and apparently he’s not alone in thinking that way, at least among people who actually analyze things to determine likely outcomes before choosing a course of action.
Fortunately for the life-expectency of the current US policy (which, yes, would be “unfortunately” if you’re concerned about achieving positive results), Bush isn’t one of those people, so we can expect this hole-digging operation in Iraq to continue uninterrupted, even if (actually, especially if) it fails to deliver any measurable benefits.
Worth a read: Calling for an end to opposite day.
My daughter has started taking Spanish this year at the Middle School. This is fun for me, since it takes me back to Señor Leeds’ class at Center Junior High circa 1974, when I first realized that learning another language isn’t just a question of amassing a big vocabulary and translating word for word from English. Different languages have different rules, different idioms. Things that are easily expressed in one language are harder to express in another. And it’s not just expressing things to other people that can be hard; the limitations of language make it hard to express certain things to yourself. If you can’t put it into words, you can’t really think it. And if your language doesn’t give you the tools to think about something in a particular way, those thoughts remain largely off-limits to you.
Let’s look at a mild example:
Hola, clase.
Hola, Señor Leeds.
Repitan, clase. Aquí. (Pointing to the ground at his feet.)
Aquí.
Allí. (Pointing to the other side of the room.)
Allí.
Allá. (Arching his arm to point somewhere “way over there.”)
Allá.
Spanish and English both have a word for “here” (aquí), but Spanish distinguishes two kinds of “there”: a there that’s relatively close (allí), and a there that’s relatively far away (allá). Similarly, Spanish is more fine-grained than English about “this and that” and “these and those”; Spanish speakers not only distinguish between near and far and singular and plural, but they split up “far” into “far” and “really far,” along with indicating masculine and feminine genders for the thing(s) pointed to. See the Spanish Learning Blog’s Lesson about this & that, here & there for more on all this, if you’re interested.
All of this rambling about near and far (and really far) leads me to what I’m really thinking about today, which is media coverage of disasters. I’ve been thinking about that old newspaper formula for setting headline size and assigning column inches, where 1 death in your hometown equals 10 deaths farther away, or 100 deaths still farther, or 1,000 deaths farther than that, and so on.
I’ve had several object lessons in that particular logic lately. There’s the Asian tsunami, of course; that’s a nasty enough disaster to get coverage pretty much everywhere, even in my son’s first grade class, where yesterday, on the first day back from a long Christmas vacation, he learned that the word “tsunami” begins with a “t”, as he explained to us over dinner.
When I was picking him up from school yesterday I heard from his teacher about another, more local, disaster. An hour or so earlier a mud slide had buried some twenty homes in La Conchita, the tiny beach community about five miles down the road from the somewhat larger beach community of Carpinteria (”Carp” to locals) where I live. At that time there was one confirmed death and a dozen or so people known to be missing, and rescuers were working frantically to try to recover survivors. The confirmed death toll now is up to three, and everyone around here is pretty much holding their breath, hoping for miracles.
I know people who live in La Conchita; everyone in Carp does. There was another big slide there back in 1995, and property values for homes near the slide plummeted. A friend of my daughter’s lived in one of those houses, and I took Julia to a birthday party at his house a few years ago, and talked with his parents about the financial difficulty the situation had put them in. This was several years after the slide, and some of the homes that had been damaged were still in bad shape, their owners and the banks who held the mortgages unwilling to put money into a property that was essentially worthless, given the risk of a big rain bringing a mountain of mud down upon it.
My daughter’s friend’s family eventually walked away from that house, defaulting on their loan. That’s a disaster of a sort, I guess; a financial disaster, at least. Eventually, though, they were able to get some help from relatives in securing a loan to buy another house just a few blocks away from us here in Carp. In looking at a local news stations’ map of where yesterday’s slide went, I think that was one of the smartest things they ever did. I don’t think their old house is there anymore.
An outsider, someone for whom La Conchita isn’t actually “here,” or even “there,” but is “way over there,” might be inclined to observe that the people in the path of that mudslide should have known better, that they’re somehow undeserving of sympathy. A similar sort of moral distance allows people like Michael Williams to observe of the tsunami that it merely doubled the global death toll for a single day (see Lots of people die every day, though maybe I’m reading his post the wrong way; maybe he’s expressing surprise at how bad the daily global death toll is, rather than making light of the tsunami).
Anyway, the La Conchita slide is certain to get much more coverage in the local papers than the ongoing tsunami aftermath, and I can understand that; this disaster is right here, and that one is very much way over there. And since a news crew was on the scene filming when the La Conchita slide happened, such that we have dramatic visuals of the hillside coming down and people running for their lives, I suppose it will get a little more play in the larger media world than it otherwise would. I guess that’s another aspect of the here/there/way over there logic, as it plays out in the age of television: Good visuals automatically make a disaster “closer.”
There’s another local news item relating to the heavy rains we’ve been having, an item that appeared in the local paper last week, and I’ve been wondering if I should write about it here. It was a minor incident compared to these legitimate disasters, but it was a big deal for me personally. I guess the question of whether or not I should write about it comes down to a question of what a weblog really is. Or at least what this weblog really is.
Am I writing about things important enough to interest readers around the world? Am I trying to do big-picture journalism? Writing about politics, and world events, and big ideas? Or am I writing about me?
Is a weblog a kind of journalism? Or is it just a journal? Am I some random authority you’ll never actually meet, or am I someone you know personally, who shares the events of his day by the water cooler at work?
In my pre-election hubris, I was certainly thinking in big-picture terms. I was writing about the presidential campaign and politics as if a big part of the world really, truly cared about my opinions, as if I really had something important to say.
Well, maybe some of what I said actually was important. But there are plenty of other people writing that sort of thing, including lots of paid professionals. I’m thinking in the future I’ll leave more of that writing to them. The reality is, a lot of this site’s regular readers are friends and relatives, people I actually know in real life.
I think in the months ahead I’ll be writing more about things closer to home. As a consumer of weblogs, I often find myself more interested in the individual voices than in the big issues they comment on, anyway. And for me as an individual, this event mentioned in the paper last week was a big deal.
I’ve been riding my mountain bike a fair amount lately. Not off-road, though there are some nice trails around here, but on the street, as exercise. It’s part of what I jokingly refer to as my Penile Visibility Project. (Okay; maybe that’s a little too much personal information.)
Anyway, I’ve recently begun doing some rides with my daughter, as a way to help her get in shape for an upcoming school backpacking trip. And so we were out biking on the last day of the year, enjoying a brief break in the rain we’d been having (and continue to have). And because we were going kind of slow, I was sightseeing more than I usually would, and on a fairly isolated stretch of Casitas Pass Road I happened to glance down a driveway, to where there’s a concrete crossing over Carpinteria Creek.
And there was a car in the middle of the creek.
Normally the crossing only has a few inches of water flowing over it, and the people who live in the farms on the far side can drive over and back with no problem. But at this point, with all the rain we’d been having, there was easily three feet of fast-moving water. The car had been pushed sideways off the crossing, such that its back end was down in the deeper water on the downstream side, with the front of the car facing upstream, sticking up out of the creek with water rushing by on either side.
And I thought, huh. That’s something you don’t see every day. Someone must have gotten stuck trying to cross, and had to abandon his car there. And since I wasn’t pushing myself hard, just having a leisurely ride with Julia, I thought I’d stop and take a look. So I leaned my bike against a fencepost and walked down toward the creek.
And that’s when I realized that the car hadn’t been abandoned. An elderly man (I judged him to be about 60 at the time, but learned later he was 82) was standing, his body half out of the open passenger-side door, looking at the water tumbling by on either side.
I shouted, “Are you okay?” Which I realize was kind of a dumb question. He obviously wasn’t injured. But there was no way for him to reach the shore on either side; he was a good 15 feet from my side of the creek, and 10 feet from the far side, and not only was the water rushing by him at about 35 miles per hour, but immediately downstream of him was a nasty-looking rapids, with lots of whitewater and boulders and foam.
He just looked back at me and shrugged, helpless. He looked embarrassed, and maybe a little scared. But mostly he just looked really, really annoyed with himself. I found out later that when I arrived he’d been stuck there for about 10 minutes, kicking himself mentally over his decision to try to cross the stream, and trying, and failing, to come up with a plan for what to do next.
I stared back at him for a few seconds, and as I was doing so, Julia walked up beside me.
“Wow,” she said.
There didn’t seem to be anything else to do, so I opened up my fanny pack and took out my cellphone. “I’m going to call 911!” I shouted at the man. I wasn’t sure he could hear me (the water was really loud), but he could see what I was doing.
A few seconds later I was talking to the 911 operator. Having worked my way through college as a police dispatcher, and later as a training coordinator for the student-run Community Service Officer program, I’m pained by the memory of how badly I described my location. I was on Casitas Pass Road, but I thought I was actually on Foothill (the name the road acquires a few miles west of there). So there were a few minutes of confusion as I attempted to describe to the operator where I was, and she told me that the cross streets I was giving her, and the number I eventually read to her off a nearby mailbox, weren’t coming up on her system.
I was somewhat the victim of Carp localism here. To anyone from Carp, I could say, “I’m right next to the Lion’s Club picnic ground, by the Forest Service station” (which I did say to her, a couple of times), and they’d know exactly where I was. But the 911 operator wasn’t from Carp.
We went back and forth like this for what seemed like a long time, but it was probably only a couple of minutes. During this time, a man in his twenties, a Latino who spoke no English, walked up beside us; apparently he’d been riding by on his own bike. The man stuck in the creek climbed back inside his car and closed the passenger-side door. The 911 operator asked me some more questions (I don’t know what kind of car it is; it’ll be the one in the middle of the creek, I wanted to say, but I stuck with my training and just answered her by saying it was a white, four-door sedan). It was hard to hear what she was saying, what with all the water noise, so I had my finger jammed in my other ear, and was having to ask her to repeat herself, and was standing there, nodding and yelling into the phone, not really paying attention to the scene in front of me.
And then the car suddenly fell back off the crossing, and became almost completely submerged, with tons of water pounding onto its hood, its windshield, its roof.
Up to that point I’d been feeling pretty calm. The situation had seemed more or less under control. Eventually I’d be able to explain where I was, the Fire Department would come, and everything would be fine. But now, suddenly, things were very much not okay. The car was under the water. The man was inside the car, which probably was rapidly filling up. He was quite possibly trapped in there, prevented from opening the doors by the force of the water rushing past.
“The car’s fallen down into the creek!” I shouted into the phone. “It’s mostly underwater, and it’s really getting pounded!”
I thrust the cellphone into Julia’s hands. “Stay on the phone with them,” I told her. “Answer their questions. Do what they say.” Without waiting for her response, I started scrambling down the bank of the creek, working my way downstream to just below where the car was.
There was no way to reach it. Oh, I could have tried jumping in upstream, and might have been able to get swept into it, if I was lucky. But I would just have bounced off it. The water was too strong.
Looking downstream, I could see that the water slowed some. If the man could get himself out of the car, he was going to be swept down through there. I’m a lifelong sailor, and a strong swimmer, but that water was nasty-looking. I needed something I could use to reach him. A stick, maybe.
The Latino guy was standing next to me, and I babbled at him in English, my 7th-grade Spanish forgotten. “A stick,” I said, gesturing. “We need a big stick!” I scrambled up the bank, and found a dead sapling that looked like it might be long enough. I broke it off, jumped back down next to the water and started stripping off branches.
A few seconds later the Latino guy jumped down next to me with his own stick. It was longer, and a bit stronger-looking. (This would be a good place for a joke about the moment of Freudian envy this inspired in me, but I can honestly report that at the time the only thing I felt was concern, because it looked to me like neither stick was going to be long enough.)
We were both watching the car for any signs of movement. After a very long ten or fifteen seconds, the passenger door, which was slightly sheltered from the current by the angle of the car, started to open, and suddenly the man was out, being tumbled down the creek. We held our sticks out as far as we could, but they weren’t long enough; he was swept past them in an instant.
And he went under. I was thinking to myself, okay; this is the part of the TV show where the announcer cuts to the commercial, teasing viewers with the comment that for the people caught up in the events of that day, things were about to take a tragic turn for the worse. Because I was thinking to myself, very rapidly, what’s going to happen if I jump into the creek to try to help him?
I still had my bike helmet on, my shoes, and my biking gloves. I figured those would be good for a certain amount of protection. But I also knew that for me to enter the water was an extremely risky proposition, one that threatened to make the situation worse, not better. I had to make the right decision, and I had to make it fast. What I thought at that moment was, well, if he looks like he’s doing okay on his own, I shouldn’t jump in. It should very much be a last resort.
While I was thinking this, his head popped up again. The current was carrying him toward the far side of the creek, where there was an eddy of slower water, and just as I thought he was going to reach the shore, he went under again, disappearing from view.
I said to myself, the water’s slower here. I’ve got a pretty good chance of getting in, and across the creek to his vicinity, without injuring myself. And I was screwing myself up to do that, ticking down the last few seconds before making what I knew would be an irrevocable decision, when his head came up again, right next to the far shore, and he reached out and grabbed a boulder, and managed to haul himself halfway out of the water.
He lay there, face down, hugging the boulder, his chest heaving. I shouted across to him, “Are you okay?” but he either couldn’t hear or was too exhausted to respond (in retrospect, probably both).
We still couldn’t reach him, but at least he appeared to be out of immediate danger. After a few minutes he managed to crawl a little further up the bank, such that he was completely out of the water. Julia, working her way down toward our position, shouted that the Fire Department was on the way, and a few minutes later we started to hear the sound of a helicopter, followed quickly by sirens.
And I was standing there, looking at the man, and looking upstream at the little bit of his car that was still visible, thinking about what I’d tell the rescue people when they arrived, and I realized that I didn’t know for sure that the man had been alone in the car. I hadn’t seen anyone else when I’d first arrived, but I hadn’t really been looking for anyone else.
At this point the first few authorities started to arrive. I actually don’t remember who was first on the scene; over the next few minutes the near bank filled up with a large assortment of county sheriffs, firefighters, paramedics, ambulance drivers, and, surprisingly quickly, a local reporter and cameraman from the Santa Barbara TV station. I gave the first person to arrive (I think it was a sheriff) a quick summary of the situation, including the fact that I believed, but wasn’t sure, that there was no one else in the car. We tried shouting across the creek to the man to confirm that, but although he was now sitting up and looking at us, he couldn’t understand us over the sound of the creek, especially when the rescue helicopter arrived and started circling overhead.
A few minutes later, as the first authorities to arrive had moved back up the creek to the crossing to coordinate the efforts to travel around to the other side and reach the man, and the helicopter had momentarily moved off, I took advantage of the lull to cup my hands around my mouth and shout at the man as loud as I could, “Was… there… anybody… else… besides.. you… in… the… car?” And you know, I’m kind of a quiet person normally (in real life, I mean; obviously I’m noisy and obnoxious online, as many readers of this site know), and it was really very frustrating to want to make more noise, and be unable to do so. But he finally was able to hear me, and he shouted back, “You want to know if anyone else was in the car?” and I nodded, and he shook his head and shouted, “No.” And I pointed back at him and shouted, “Just you, right?” and he nodded back to me.
So as the influx of sheriffs and paramedics and whatnot continued, I was able to tell the next guy to come down the creek bank that I had managed to communicate with the man, and that he’d confirmed there was no one else in the car.
The in-charge-seeming guy I told this to gave me his complete, undivided attention for a few seconds. He wanted to make sure that I really had heard the man say that, and that he’d seemed rational when he said it, and that there was no possibility of confusion or misunderstanding. And I was able to assure him that I had, and he had, and there wasn’t. At which point the level of tension on our side of the creek visibly eased. People were still working hard and doing their jobs, but it became more methodical, with less running and shouting going on. So I felt good about being able to help out by letting the rescuers know that no, they didn’t need to try to figure out a way to get to the car right away.
It took a surprisingly long time for them to reach the man. They had to go around a fair distance to a bridge upstream, and then through an adjoining ranch, and eventually down a steep embankment to his location. Julia and I remained on the scene until they reached him, and began strapping him into a litter for hoisting back up and out. During that time I was interviewed by the aforementioned local cameraman and reporter, with the latter snapping a photo of Julia and me, and later writing up his account of the event in the local paper.
That’s reporter John Palminteri’s photo. The car is just out of the frame to the left of Julia; that plume of water over her shoulder is pretty much right where the man was swept when he exited the car. And in fact, you can actually see him, sitting on the far bank a little above Julia’s head and to the left, through a gap in the branches. He’s wearing a tan windbreaker, and you can just make out the yellow-clad legs of the fireman standing between him and the creek. Or at least, you can if you were there, and know what to look for. Here’s a cropped and magnified portion of the image that shows him a little better:
Small town that Carp is, it turns out that we know somebody (actually, a couple of different somebodies) who know the man, whose name is Lorenzo Dall’Armi, and after a few days we got in touch with each other, and last Sunday Julia and I had breakfast with him, along with his wife and one of his daughters, at a local breakfast place. It was great to meet him in person, and chat with him without the need to shout over rushing water. He’s a really nice guy, and I’m very happy that I was able to help him out, even if the extent of my help was mostly just punching three numbers on my cellphone and answering (ineptly) the questions the operator asked me. He paid for our breakfast, and gave us a very nice gift certificate to a local restaurant, and Julia gave him a pretty drawing that she’d made for him of some flowers.
Anyway, that story’s pretty much old news now, even in Carp, what with the tragic events at La Conchita. But it was a big deal to me, and I’m sure I’ll always remember it.
I like living in a small community. People are at their best, some ways, when they’re relating to each other as individuals, helping each other out, sharing life’s joys and troubles. You can only comprehend so much of the human dimension when a disaster strikes far away. But it becomes more real, more signifcant, when it happens closer to you. Or when it happens very close indeed.
Inaugurating a mess of brief postings to make up for yesterday’s 4,000-word opus, here’s ganns.com’s Winners of the “I Look Like My Dog” Contest.
Weblogger Joe of the Woolamaloo Gazette loses his job of 11 years for weblogging about things that happened at work: Over the course of the Woolamaloo Gazette I have posted on a wide variety of subjects…
Here’s a pair of perspectives on the role that the Bush administration has, or hasn’t, played in fostering torture. First up, from Heather MacDonald: How to interrogate terrorists. And from Balkanization’s Marty Lederman, a response: Heather MacDonald’s dubious counter-”narrative” on torture.
I really hate thinking about this issue. But I feel compelled to do so, as long as the people running my country are making it necessary by their actions.
Attention wingers: This is the point where my (and a lot of other people’s) assertions, back in the spring of 2003, that Saddam did not, in fact, have WMD, and your response that well, we’d just have to wait and see, gets (briefly) resurrected for an accounting. The Iraq Survey Group, the official operation charged with finding said WMD, has been quietly disbanded. The weapons hunters from the CIA are back home in Virginia, and the preliminary report from Charles Duelfer of a few months ago, in which he said that nope, there weren’t any WMD, is going to become the official report. Anyway, from the WaPo: Search for banned arms in Iraq ended last month.
The right-wing webloggers are no doubt taking their cue from their fellow travellers in the echo chamber and in the Bush administration itself, and simply ignoring this. WMD? What WMD? Oh, those WMD. Well, of course we know there weren’t any. Everybody knows that. We’ve known that for quite some time. It was Bill Clinton who said they were there to begin with, you know, and frankly, we always had our doubts.
I’m reminded of the comment by actress Gemma Jones as Mrs. Dashwood in the 1995 Sense and Sensibility, the one for which Emma Thompson won her richly deserved Best Adapated Screenplay Oscar: “He is certainly not so dashing as Willoughby. But he has a far more pleasing countenance. There was, at times, if you’ll remember, something in Willoughby’s eyes that I did not like.”
We who displayed greater sensibility back in the day about Iraq’s WMD are hereby taking a moment to smile to ourselves, before returning to our needlework.
From Wired News, a fun story of a woman who spent a wee bit too much time rolling things up in Katamari Damacy: Real world doesn’t use a joystick.
(Santa brought William a Playstation2 for Christmas, and Uncle Bravo gave him a Katamari Damacy game. Uncle Bravo is so cool.)
David Corn muses about the next phase of the Iraq war, in which we quietly set up teams of El Salvador-style death squads to do our dirty work for us: Did the White House confirm it’s considering using “death squads” in Iraq?
So, if all goes well, by this time tomorrow we should be starting to know a whole lot more about the atmosphere and surface of Saturn’s smog-shrouded moon, Titan: Huygens at Titan’s doorstep.
I actually came down on the Luddite side on the question of Huygens’ parent Cassini probe’s 1999 flyby of Earth. I’m all for space exploration and science. But I resented the way some of the Cassini defenders deliberately obscured the nature of the risk associated with the flyby, focusing instead on the relative safety of the launch, as if that were really the issue. A launch disaster, you see, would have been unlikely to release plutonium into the atmosphere from Cassini’s radioactive-decay-powered batteries. But a mistaken trajectory during the near-Earth flyby would have been a very different story.
Anyway, the (admittedly low) possibility of a radiation release during the Cassini flyby didn’t come to pass, so we don’t have to second-guess the public relations effort that deflected public attention from the possibility. And now I’m just very excited about the chance that we’ll be getting a great big chunk of previously unknown data, all at once.
Good luck, little robot.
We have a reasonably complete collection of Calvin and Hobbes books. Our ownership of them dates to the time when Julia was eight, and had surgery to correct a congenital defect of her aorta. What with the surgery and the ensuing complications, she (and we, her parents) ended up spending most of 10 days in the cardiac care unit at the UCLA Medical Center, an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone, least of all a fun-loving, energetic, constantly-in-motion eight-year-old.
Her doctors and nurses were wonderful. My wife, Linda, and the members of our family who helped her through that time, were wonderful. But ultimately, nothing could relieve the stress (and boredom) of being trapped in that unit for that long. By the time Julia had been there for a week, she was showing signs of what the nursing staff referred to as “ICU psychosis,” in which she’d wake up in the middle of the night to the pain and noise and needles and tubes and blinking lights, and not know where she was, locked in an open-eyed nightmare, sobbing and clutching at us and talking frantically about things we couldn’t see.
Those were among the worst of times. But there were also better times, when we could help her find a brief escape to a happier place. And the thing that worked better than anything else for that was Calvin and Hobbes.
Anyway, I know Bill Watterson values his privacy, and has had enough of gushing fans to last him a lifetime. So I’ll just express this thought here, where he probably will never see it: Thank you. You made a huge difference to a little girl at a time when she really needed it, and I owe you a debt of gratitude I can never repay.
Anyway, here’s a little Calvin and Hobbes on the Web. Catch it fast, before the copyright police at Universal Press Syndicate shut it down, as they’ve done with so many other sites:
Management consultant William Fried has given a presentation entitled “The Secret of a Happy Life” to the same CA middle school for three years straight on eighth-grade career day. In it, he “counsels students to experiment with a variety of interests until they discover something they love and excel in.” This year, in response to some followup questions from the students, he acknowledged that it was possible to make lots of money as an exotic dancer — and that the bigger your bust size, the bigger the pay check.
Aparently the principal wasn’t very happy about this.
None of this really surprises me.
What really ticks me off is the last comment in the article: “one mother said she was outraged when her son announced that he was forgoing college for a field he loves: fishing.” Maybe it’s just me, but if you’re going to have a speaker come to the school to talk about having a happy life, you shouldn’t bitch that he encourages your kids to pursue whatever makes them happy. I have a lot of friends who have taken good jobs for good money and burned out in only a few years — because they didn’t love it.
So let me just put this plea out to all the parents out there: Don’t worry about how much money your kids will grow up to make, worry about whether or not they will be miserable.
I’m trying to figure out how you fail to notice something like this happening to you: Nail found embedded in construction worker’s skull.
This interview that WaPo reporters Michael A. Fletcher and Jim VandeHei got with Fearless Leader aboard Air Force One last Friday is interesting to me in a number of ways: Transcript of Bush interview.
The main way in which it’s interesting to me, though, is that it amounts to the closest thing to an unfiltered insight into Bush’s views that I think we’re going to get these days. Famously press-conference-averse, and given the way he approaches those events defensively, with an eye to a pre-screened list of questioners and the implied threat of access-reduction for anyone who gets too aggressive, we just don’t get much of a view of Bush at those anymore.
But in this setting, letting his hair down and being chummy with a couple of his pals, there’s a better chance that Bush will let his guard down for a minute and just talk, letting you see what’s really going on in his head.
And so he did in this talk, which I guess I’ll quote from extensively, to protect the following from link rot. Here’s the part at the beginning that dealt with Iraq, though I encourage you to read the whole thing, if this sort of thing interests you:
The Post: There was this report — it was reported in the papers this morning — from the National Intelligence Council. Always by our front-page stories. (Laughter.) Right there. And it essentially says that Iraq has become a terrorist breeding ground, it’s created terrorists who are going to take those new terrorist talents and go elsewhere after the war. Is this at all contradicting your assertion that you’re always making America safer from terrorists?
THE PRESIDENT: The report — and I welcome these studies — basically says America must stay on the offense. And there are two ways to stay on the offense. One, use our intelligence services, as well as the intelligence services of friends and allies, to find people and bring them to justice before they hurt us, and secondly, to spread freedom. And it’s a — I think the report was somewhat speculative; this could happen. And I agree. If we’re not diligent and firm, there will be pockets of — parts of the world that become pockets for terrorists to find safe haven and to train. And we have a duty to disrupt that. I firmly believe that a free Iraq will be a major defeat for the Salafist movement and the extremist movement, those who want to use terror as a weapon to impose their will on millions of people throughout the world.
The Post: Secretary Powell said this week that American troops will begin leaving Iraq this year. Is that true?
THE PRESIDENT: The way I would put it is, American troops will be leaving as quickly as possible, but they won’t be leaving until we have completed our mission. And part of the mission is to train Iraqis so they can fight the terrorists. And the sooner the Iraqis are prepared — better prepared, better equipped to fight — the sooner our troops will start coming home.
The Post: Can you be sure that by the end of your second term, that there will be a significant reduction?
THE PRESIDENT: I’m still on the, as quick as possible.
The Post: Do you disagree with Colin Powell’s assessment, then, that he thinks it can be done?
THE PRESIDENT: My assessment is, is that we will — one of the reasons why the military sent an assessment team to Iraq recently was to assess our training mission, because success in Iraq will depend upon the Iraqis defeating the enemy. And so we’re constantly assessing to see whether — where we can improve training, how we can do things better, and what the Iraqis think they need, in order to do their job.
And so the troops have been helping to provide as much security as possible for the elections. The political process is going on. And at the same time, doing their job and training these Iraqis. So we’re constantly assessing, and that’s what this is. The panel will report back to determine how best to train the Iraqis. My answer to your question is, as soon as possible, based upon fulfilling the mission.
The elections — I am pleased that the elections are going forward. I recognize that there are a group of terrorists trying to stop the election process. I have been amazed by the spirit of the Iraqi people. There’s a big front-page story; I’m sure you read that. Please don’t tell me you haven’t.
The Post: I read them all.
THE PRESIDENT: Please don’t tell me you haven’t.
The Post: Read them all.
THE PRESIDENT: But there is a spirit there that I appreciate. And I talked to President Yawar today. I talked to Prime Minister Allawi earlier in the week. And they recognize that the terrorists are mean and tough, but they also are focused and determined that these elections go forward. And it is that determination which impresses me.
So the political process is unfolding. And it is a process. In other words, this is the election of an assembly, which will choose leadership. And out of that leadership will, obviously, become — we’ll work to develop — further refine the security strategy, as well as watch a process unfold that will write a constitution. And it’s important for people to understand that. Unlike our system, that has “the election,” and it defines what America — how America will be governed for four years, this is a process.
The Post: In Iraq, there’s been a steady stream of surprises. We weren’t welcomed as liberators, as Vice President Cheney had talked about. We haven’t found the weapons of mass destruction as predicted. The postwar process hasn’t gone as well as some had hoped. Why hasn’t anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, we had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me, for which I’m grateful.
Listen, in times of war, things don’t go exactly as planned. Some were saying there was no way that Saddam Hussein would be toppled as quickly as we toppled him. Some were saying there would be mass refugee flows and starvation, which didn’t happen. My only point is, is that, on a complicated matter such as removing a dictator from power and trying to help achieve democracy, sometimes the unexpected will happen, both good and bad.
And the point is, there has to be a flexible strategy that will enable our commanders on the ground and our diplomats to be able to adjust strategy to meet the needs on the ground, all aiming at an eventual goal, which is a free and democratic Iraq, not in our image, in their image, according to their customs. See, we haven’t been — we’ve been there — sovereignty was transferred in June of 2004. So this has been a sovereign nation in its new form for less than a year. I’m optimistic about it, and so are a lot of other people who were there in Iraq –optimistic about that, being optimistic about the emergence of a free government.
I’m also mindful that it takes a while for democracy to take hold. Witness our own history. We weren’t — we certainly were not the perfect democracy and are yet the perfect democracy. Ours is a constitution that said every man — a system that said every man was equal, but in fact, every man wasn’t equal for a long period of time in our history. The Articles of Confederation were a bumpy period of time. And my only point is, is that I am realistic about how quickly a society that has been dominated by a tyrant can become a democracy. And therefore, I am more patient than some, but also mindful that we’ve got to get the Iraqis up and running as quickly as possible, so they can defeat these terrorists.
There’s no big OhMyGod moment in there. But what there is, at least for me, is a steady drip, drip, drip of confirmation that Bush really deals with this Iraq question on a very simplistic level. He has no clear strategy for how to exit the current quagmire, and will predictably just keep travelling down the same path.
Look for a pro-US proxy government to be installed in Iraq over the next four years. It won’t be particularly democratic, since true democracy in Iraq would require kicking out the increasingly hated Americans. We’ll probably get to start bringing some troops home, having outsourced the war of attrition with the insurgency to our Iraqi hirelings, but the insurgency will still be going strong.
The two things I love the most in the interview are the part where non-news-reader Bush admonishes the reporters about reading the front page, and of course, the part where he interprets the 2004 election as an “accountability moment,” which at once validated his every decision during his first term and gave him carte blanche to make whatever mistakes he wants to in his second. Which is true, from a certain point of view, I’ll grant you. But it’s still pretty breathtaking to see him assert it like that.
This is how the guy views himself: Infallible, accountable to no one, entitled. And yeah, in someone so demonstrably incompetent, it really bugs me. And I realize that those of you with Red State values don’t see it that way, and that at least for the moment, your views hold sway in the land.
But it still bugs me.
Via monkey methods, (via BoingBoing): Bill Gates Strikes a Pose for Teen Beat Photospread, 1983.
Again with the via-BoingBoing links: Postal experiments.
RFK, Jr. has laryngitis in this video clip, which makes him sound a lot like Bobcat Goldthwait. So go listen for the laughs. And about eight or nine minutes in, if you’re paying any attention at all, you’ll start to feel really sick to your stomach at what the Bush administration is doing to the environment in this country. By which I mean, what he’s doing to the people in this country, via the environment.
I’m not just being a Bush hater here. It’s really just shockingly awful. He’s taking money from his buddies in the energy business to look the other way while they poison our children.
Maybe some of you in the red states could explain to me how that fits in with your belief that a vote for Bush is a vote for Christian values. Which verse was it where Jesus said we should let fat cats profit by putting mercury in the water supply?
Anyway: 2004 Nicholas School Graduation - Robert F. Kennedy Jr., guest speaker.
Via Jerome Doolittle at Bad Attitudes comes this interesting op-ed piece by filmmaker Errol Morris: Where’s the rest of him?
John Kerry lost because he concealed something that was completely honorable, even heroic: his opposition to Vietnam. George W. Bush told the truth about something that, to my mind, was not honorable: he supported that war but found a way to stay home. Mr. Kerry was forthright about almost everything except himself - and in this election that was not enough.
Jeanne of Body and Soul reminds those willing to be reminded why the death penalty is wrong: Justice in California.
While we’re on the subject of our national obsession with killing people, look at the company we’re in: Thai jail plans death-row webcam.
A prison in the Thai capital, Bangkok, is planning to broadcast inmates’ daily lives, as well as their final moments before execution, live on the internet.
Rights group Amnesty International has criticised the plan, which prison officials say will deter criminals.
A spokesman for the Bangkwang prison said the scheme will highlight the risks of drug dealing, which carries the death sentence in Thailand.
Almost 1,000 of Bangkwang’s 6,000 inmates are on death row.
Thai authorities have mounted an aggressive campaign against drugs in recent years.
Thousands of people suspected of drugs offences have been killed during the crackdown, sparking criticism from human rights groups.
Thank God we have at least one senator from California with the balls to stand up to Condoleeza Rice. Jonathan Weiler of Fly Trap has some excerpts from Barbara Boxer’s questioning of the presumptive Secretary of State-to-be: In a clearing stands a Boxer.
He also links to the full transcript at the NYT, if you prefer your principled stands with their spineless context: Confirmation hearing of Condoleeza Rice.
From Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin: Desperately seeking Lily. It concerns a 1950’s-era toy that shows a little rubber model of a naked woman gyrating seductively. And it’s kind of interesting to me, and not just for the obvious reason; I’m curious about the thing’s actual backstory (as is Xeni Jardin), and I’m also amused by the meta-idea of a popular weblog using the bully pulpit of its network effects to try to tease out this particular truth.
One cool thing about the Internet is that stuff hangs around. Jokes that made the rounds years ago eventually get to be retold to a new audience, with the same amusing results. Like just happened with my daughter, who, when I asked what she was looking at on the computer on the other side of my desk when she should be getting ready for school, started giving me an outraged account of an email she’d just received about Bonsai Kitten.
Me: Uh, Julia, let me tell you about this extremely important web site called snopes.com…
Joshua Holland offers an agitator’s-eye-view of the inauguration: A quick post from the inaugural protests.
Say, has anyone seen my country? It’s got amber waves of grain, purple mountains, and a Constitution that guarantees the right to peaceably assemble. If you happen to come across it, let me know, okay? Thanks.
Just a heads up for those of you who post to the site: I’m playing around with different tools to block comment spam, and unfortunately the latest one I’ve tried is having the effect of blocking some legitimate comments.
Currently, the spam-blocking code is silently discarding any comments posted by a browser that doesn’t have javascript enabled. That has succeeded (for the moment) where nothing else had in stopping the steady drip, drip, drip of comment spams we’d been getting, at a rate of about one every 90 seconds for the past week or so. But I see from the report the anti-spam tool just emailed me that a number of people have tried posting legitimate comments, and had that process fail.
This isn’t acceptable to me. So I’ll be heading back to the drawing board to come up with a solution. In the meantime, if you are using a funky browser, or have javascript disabled, I apologize for the inconvenience, but at the moment, you can’t post comments.
Grr.
Read this account of yet another gunning down by US troops of a carload of civilians in Iraq - or better yet, look at the photos of the blood-spattered, suddenly orphaned little Iraqi girl - and explain to me again how Bush’s war is making the world a freer place. Because I don’t see it.
Anyway: A shooting after nightfall.
Let’s say you are driving to work, and eating an apple in your right hand. Now let’s say, that at some point during your drive, you make a turn — maybe you can hold the apple while turning the wheel with both hands, maybe you only use one hand, let’s not speculate. Now let’s consider some questions…
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Northumbria Police.
The taxpayers of Northumbria are lucky that someone has some common sense: the woman being prosecuted stoped contesting the charges when she found out the public had already footed an estimated court cost of £10,000, and that her appeal would cost another £10,000 … all to collect £160 in fines.
I’ve had harsh words for the senior senator from California more than once in the past. But today is a day for acknowledging that Diane Feinstein apparently still has a conscience, and the will to use it. I just phoned her office, and spoke to a helpful staffer named Mike. And he told me that the vote had not yet taken place, that the Judiciary Committee was still debating the Gonzales confirmation, but that he understood that the senator had indicated she wouldn’t be voting for confirmation.
I had to double-check to make sure I’d heard correctly. “That she will not be voting for confirmation?”
“That’s correct. She will not be voting for confirmation.”
I told Mike that made me profoundly happy, and he said he’d pass my sentiments on to the senator. Though in thinking about it afterwards, I don’t think “profoundly happy” really expresses it properly. It’s not happiness to find myself in a United States that uses torture as an instrument of policy, or where the chief architect of the legal arguments justifying that torture can be nominated for Attorney General, and (in all likelihood) win confirmation. That’s just… horrifying.
But Senator Feinstein has chosen to take a stand against such horrors, and bully for her. Yeah, it’s mainly a symbolic victory in the midst of a larger defeat, but I’ll take it.
Your Bible verse for the day: Luke 15:4-6.
What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?
And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing.
And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost.
Diane Feinstein is the hundredth sheep. Rejoice with me.
The kind of thing I reliably fall for on the Web: PostSecret.
Seymour Hersh is absolutely right: We’ve been taken over by a cult.