FSP 1.1

Mouring in America

Reagan described America as a driving force through history, leading to the
empire of liberty. He seemed to regard freedom's triumph as a historical
inevitability. He couldn't look at mainstream American culture as anything other
than the delightful emanation of this venture. He could never feel alienated from
middle American life, or see it succumbing to a spiritual catastrophe.

-- David Brooks.

Dean Speaks

Howard Dean offers his stark, candid appraisal of presidential politics:

No one is going to change America for you.

in Common Sense for a New Century.

Progress. Today, technologies exist that can form the foundation of our
economy for the next century. We should invest aggressively in them.

Dean again, as a Henry Blodget with less exuberance.

But still, I rate Dean a better than most for not basing his campaign
on a ridiculous list of unfulfillable promises.

[x] Howard Dean
[ ] A whore who doesn't put out.

Also noted: Economists For Dean has some good reading.

Frank Rich knows Arts

Rightfully banished from the OpEd pages of the NY Times, Frank Rich has
found his stride in the Arts section. This week he reviews the intersection
of reality reporting shows, cable talking head shows, and exposes films
of corrupt journalists.

What next at the Times ? Perhaps Paul Krugman has a talent for
home and garden commentary.

FRANK RICH
So Much for 'The Front Page'
2003 November 02

ITY, though not too deeply, the American press. Once the wisecracking truth
seekers of "The Front Page" and the brave gumshoes of "All the President's
Men," the fourth estate has fallen into such cultural disfavor that it risks being
renamed the fifth estate, if not the sixth. Hollywood no longer depicts reporters in
ruthless pursuit of criminals, high and low. Now they are the criminals.

In the past month alone, television's reigning dramatic franchise, "Law and
Order," has resourcefully squeezed two shows out of the Jayson Blair scandal. In
one, an African-American reporter on "The New York Sentinel" (not to be
confused with The New York Times because it's on East 43rd Street, not West)
literally commits murder. In last Sunday's "Law and Order: Criminal Intent," it's
another Sentinel reporter who gets caught up in murder, only this time it's his
father who is the killer. The motive? To try to prevent the unmasking of his son
as a plagiarist and fabricator who wrote a story about oyster fishermen in
Louisiana without leaving Brooklyn. How did this reporter get hired by The
Sentinel in the first place? He was the darling of a white, diversity-minded editor
best known for his memoir about the black housekeeper of his childhood.

"You guys are rising to the top of America's most despised list," says Detective
Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) to a Sentinel hack. Hey, Lennie — we're already
there! For further confirmation, there is "Shattered Glass," this weekend's new
movie about The New Republic's own Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, who wrote
dozens of fictionalized stories before being exposed. Anyone searching for an
altruistic reporter on a movie screen had better run instead to "Veronica Guerin,"
a Hollywood project that had to go to Ireland to find a journalist to root for, and
posthumously at that. But run fast. Though the movie's producer, Jerry
Bruckheimer, has a shrewd eye for mass taste, this one proved dead on arrival
at the box office. These days a film about a truth-seeking newshound strikes
audiences as more ridiculous than "Gigli."

"Shattered Glass," a study in smarminess in which even the honest journalists
come across as pretentious brats, is unlikely to draw crowds either. It's
handsomely made and decently acted, especially by Hayden Christensen, who
plays the creepy title character as if he were the smarter kid brother of Anthony
Perkins's obsequiously androgynous Norman Bates in "Psycho." But the movie as
a whole seems an irrelevancy. While the press deserves some of the rancor
coming its way, there's a gaping disconnect between a Hollywood critique like
"Shattered Glass" and the news media's more distressing ailments.

In a production note for the movie, its writer-director, Billy Ray, observes:
"When people can no longer believe what they read, their only choices will be to
either turn to television for their daily news or to stop seeking out news entirely.
Either path, I think, is a very dangerous one for this country." Where has Mr. Ray
been since "Network"? Most people have long ago turned to TV for their daily
news, and many no longer believe what they read. One of the most disturbing
revelations of the Blair scandal was that few subjects of his bogus stories, Jessica
Lynch's family included, called The Times to complain about his fictions. They just
assumed that reporters make stuff up.

The likes of a Glass and a Blair are true embarrassments to their peers. But the
larger culture in which they thrived has done more longterm damage to the press
than these individual transgressors, however notorious. "The standard for
journalism used to be, `What's the best obtainable version of the truth?' " Carl
Bernstein said when I asked him how the profession has changed since the
Watergate era. "Now we're living in a celebrity culture that no longer values truth
more than hype. You have to go back to what was great about the movie of `All
the President's Men.' It was not about the characters of Bob and me. There's not
a woman in our lives in it; it's not about us at all. It's about the process of good
journalism: methodical, empirical, not very glamorous, hard-slogging reporting.
Now journalism is as infected by the celebrity culture as every other institution."

"Shattered Glass" does show that its ambitious villain was less turned on by
being a reporter than by being a Somebody worthy of a Pulitzer (though
apparently no one told him that Pulitzers are not awarded to magazine writers).
But more often the movie doesn't puncture so much as perpetuate the
star-worshipping celebrity culture that attracts a Glass. "Shattered Glass" is as
pompous about The New Republic as its fictionalized New Republic staffers are,
portraying the publication as the biggest thing to be handed down from on high
since the Ten Commandments. As one oft-repeated line of dialogue has it, The
New Republic is "the in-flight magazine of Air Force One," an inflated claim to
glamour that the magazine has never made for itself. The movie even
opportunistically wraps itself in the tragic celebrity of the former New Republic
editor Michael Kelly, by invoking his death in the war in Iraq in the final credits.
Mr. Kelly was covering the war for The Atlantic; in the movie proper, his actual
role in the Glass saga, while still at The New Republic in the 1990's, is
substantially fictionalized and downsized.

The atmosphere that pervades high-end journalism now can be better seen in an
incident that occurred while the movie was being completed than in the movie
itself. When the real Stephen Glass went on "60 Minutes" this year to push his
own autobiographical novel about the scandal, Charles Lane, the New Republic
editor who published a number of his fictions before finally nailing him, criticized
him for cashing in. "I guess that's the way America works these days," he said.
He knew whereof he spoke. Days later Variety reported that Mr. Lane was
working as a paid consultant to "Shattered Glass."

Funnier than "Shattered Glass," though just as indicative of how embedded the
news media have become in the celebrity whirl, is "K Street," the Steven
Soderbergh fiction-meets-reality series that really must be seen before HBO puts
it out of its misery. It should be seen not because it succeeds in its stated
purpose, which is to dramatize the Washington "process," but because with Andy
Warhol-like candor it shows you a bit more than you want to know in its
snapshots of the capital's players.

Though the program's most substantive story line seems to be the charting of
Mary Matalin's escalating display of fashion-victim couture, Washington reporters
cannot resist going on camera to play "themselves." In one installment, a
character dismisses Time as a magazine that "nobody reads beyond the cover"
not long before an actual Time columnist, Joe Klein, shows up in a cameo. He
embraces Ms. Matalin on the street and offers her private p.r. advice — a
vignette that mainly lends credence to the show's insulting characterization of
Time while simultaneously reinforcing the public's impression that reporters have
been co-opted by rubbing too many shoulders at the Palm.

Almost as weird was the "K Street" appearance by Howard Kurtz, the Washington
Post media critic, who then invited the show's executive producer, George
Clooney, to be a guest last Sunday on his own CNN show, "Reliable Sources."
(Both HBO and CNN are owned by Time Warner.) In their conversation, Mr.
Clooney complimented Mr. Kurtz's acting; then both men expressed their
bemusement that Matt Drudge had had the audacity to refuse to appear on "K
Street." I never thought I'd say this, but could Drudge be the last guy covering
Washington who has any sense of dignity?

The antics on "K Street" are innocuous, heaven knows, but the show's
recruitment of reputable, even distinguished journalists as actors tells us more
about the news media than the case studies of the rookie malefactors in "Law
and Order" and "Shattered Glass." Young con men like Jayson Blair and Stephen
Glass are not the primary cause of the public's disenchantment with the news
media. Their fictionalized stories, largely features, did not cause any lasting
damage to the world beyond that inflicted on the credibility of the publications for
which they worked.

If anything, history may judge that a far bigger blot on The Times's reputation
than Mr. Blair is Walter Duranty, who won a 1932 Pulitzer Prize as a foreign
correspondent in the Soviet Union. His willful shilling for Stalin went uncorrected
for years. (He is also a blot on the history of the Pulitzer Board itself, which, in
keeping with journalism's new haste to rectify even its old sins, is now weighing a
belated revocation of Duranty's prize.) By all accounts, Duranty, like Mr. Glass
and Mr. Blair, was an ambitious self-promoter infatuated with the limelight. But
his capital journalistic crime, hiding the truth about a Ukraine famine that killed
millions, offers a much darker picture of where this corruption can lead than the
relative misdemeanors of his successors.

The public, like Lennie Briscoe on "Law and Order," gets the drift. It sees too
many reporters showboating Geraldo-style on camera, whether on "K Street" or
in the middle of hurricanes, catastrophic fires and wars. They see a famous
columnist reveal the name of a C.I.A. agent and never say he's sorry. They see
news media less preoccupied with the news than with boosting their own status in
the entertainment firmament that now literally owns most of them.

In this vein, CNN's Christiane Amanpour recently criticized the wartime press, her
own network included, for muzzling itself during the war in Iraq and not asking
"enough questions, for instance, about weapons of mass destruction." She
attributes this lapse in part to the need to compete with the ostentatiously
gung-ho Fox in a more important war — for ratings. In the book "Embedded," a
new oral history of journalists in Iraq, the Times correspondent John Burns talks
about the "corruption in our business" when describing how fellow reporters
cozied up to Saddam Hussein, minimizing his regime's atrocities before the war
much as Duranty did Stalin's. Next to these real-life scenarios, an exposé of
journalistic sins like "Shattered Glass" seems like a valentine. No wonder The
New Republic itself co-sponsored a celebrity screening last week to promote it in
Washington.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Sound byte on executive multitasking

Better than a tarball in the head.

While 200 top telecommunications executives and analysts met last week in
Dana Point (outside Los Angeles, Calif.), at the Vortex Conference, speakers
and panelists made their presentations on stage during the two-day affair,
outside Los Angeles, many of the audience members were, quite glaringly, doing
their own thing. Armed with laptop computers equipped with wireless Internet
connections, many executives had only one ear on the speakers but both hands
on the keyboard, checking e-mail and stock prices, surfing the Internet and
otherwise whiling away their time wirelessly.

The problem may be genetic, joked one participant, Charles R. Lax, who said it
was simply reflexes that kept him continually monitoring e-mail on both his
laptop computer and his personal digital assistant. "I have a multitasking Linux
kernel in my head," said Mr. Lax, a general partner with GrandBanks Capital, a
venture capital firm in Newton Center, Mass.

-- NYT.

Today Jayson Blair, tomorrow Paul Krugman

Today Jayson Blair, tomorrow Paul Krugman ? asks Donald Luskin.
But the NYT is still a top notch paper, offers Michael Kinsley.

Captions: subject or author

The top picture is Paul Krugman, but is lower picture that of Floyd Norris ?
Regular readers of NYT Business page would know.

And is this a picture of Saddam Hussein ?

Again.

It's Sherron S. Watkins, the Enron vice president .

SARS vs Masked

It may be illegal to wear a mask in public, unless you're a welder, fencer, hockey goalie,
or burka wearing orthodox muslim.

Will SARS change this ? Ask Eugene Volokh.

SARS in Hong Kong Report by an SUV driver.

SARS in Hong Kong.

Lady Madonna

I searched for sex worker in the NYT, and the first
match was Madonna. Why search for sex worker ?

Excerpts from the review of the Material girl:

As she blankets the media yet again, Madonna is the exact opposite of a
politician striving to stay "on message." Madonna's priority is to keep people
watching whatever she does; she maintains a presence, not a message.

...

A few weeks ago, Madonna withdrew her original "American Life" video
because, she said, she was worried that it might be misinterpreted during
wartime. It had intercut a fashion show of camouflage fantasies with images of
bombs and destruction, and it ended with Madonna tossing a grenade that was
caught by a George W. Bush look-alike. He opened the top — it turned out to be
a cigarette lighter — and nonchalantly lighted a cigar.

Madonna told VH1 that the video, made before the war with Iraq, was meant
to insist that viewers should "stop being distracted by all of your entertainment"
and try to avert a war. Having the grenade turn out to be harmless was, she
said, "wishful thinking, symbolically, that we could find a different way to deal
with our conflicts with Iraq." But the video could also have been seen as a Bush
endorsement (he could bravely defuse a grenade) or a callous equation of
dancing and preening with bombings.

...

The music of "American Life" continues Madonna's collaboration with the
ingenious French producer Mirwais Ahmadzai, who produced the album "Music"
in 2000. It uses a similar mixture of acoustic guitar-picking, ticking drum
machines and swooping, buzzing synthesizer lines. The guitar signals the
sincerity of a singer-songwriter, while all the gizmos add the retro catchiness of
the synth-pop music now being revived under the name electroclash.

Bigger screenshot:

Home front

Bay Arean protest marches range from sombre to comical.
Recent peace/anti-war gatherings have been mostly calm affairs.
But there are participants who are intent of getting themselves
arrested, only later to protest their own arrest.

Sitting down and blocking railways, highways is a sure way of
getting yourself arrested. Media coverage of these should
include the impact on bystanders and reasons for arrest.

In Oakland, Calif., local police arrested dozens of antiwar activists who flouted
their free-speech rights in a treacherous attempt to shut down a port involved in
shipping military supplies to soldiers during wartime. Elsewhere in the Bay Area,
several others were cited for crossing a police line outside the Concord Naval
Weapons Station; seven more face felony charges for stopping traffic nearby on
Interstate 680. Michelle Malkin's When antiwar speech turns seditious.

Correction: liberal weenies

An article in Business Day yesterday about the influence of Rupert Murdoch on the
News Corporation's properties misidentified the Fox News Channel commentator
who accused competitors of dwelling on casualties in Iraq and misstated the term
he used for them. He was Fred Barnes, not Bill O'Reilly; he called the competitors
"weenies," not "liberal weenies". New York Times 2003 April 08.

Pulitzer Prizes for Information Graphics

There is no Pulitzer Prizes for Information Graphics, although the
competition recognizes various forms of writing, reporting,
editorial cartooning and photography.

My goal is to compile information from journalists nationwide
to assess how informational graphics are presently used, and how
they were used to help deliver the information in 10 years of
award-winning work.

[From Hili Banjo and Susan Mango Curtis, by way of Edward Tufte]

What's smart about this campaign is that it seeks to involve
leading, Pulitzer-calibre, journalists. A lesser undtertaking
would have just said,

Let there be a prize, donate here.

By involving Puliterian journalists, we avoid launching some marginal
unrecognized award.

Update 2003 April 27: The Webby awards are really marginal --
the gala event is cancelled.

Theater of War

When space is filled with satellites, all the world becomes a proscenium arch, the
narrator of the Marshall McLuhan movie suggested. The phrase "theater of war" becomes
literal. -- Sarah Boxer.

Growing Corolla

While Toyota claims its 2003 Corolla sedan has been designed to attract
younger buyers, it actually looks like a shrunken Camry. Available as a base CE,
luxury LE or somewhat sporty S, the new Corolla rides on a 102.4-inch wheelbase,
which is more than five inches longer than the Corolla it replaces, and just 0.7 inch
shorter than the current Honda Civic sedan. But 178.3 inches in overall length, it's
3.7 inches longer than the Civic. In fact, this new Corolla has exactly the same
wheelbase as the original 1983 Camry and stretches out 2.7 inches longer than that car.
-- NYT/Edmonds.

The rear wheel drive GT-S of 1984-1986 [*] (aka Trueno AE86) remains the one to own.
[*] Or 1985-1987.

Interstate bugs

A few species of rare bugs are found only within two counties in Texas.
Therefore, they are regulated as interstate commerce. A nice way to
start a career.

The Bee Creek Cave Harvestman, the Bone Creek Harvestman, and the Tooth
Cave Pseudoscorpion are subterranean, eyeless arachnids (arthropods bearing four
pairs of legs and no antennae); they range in size from 1.4 to 4 mm. The Tooth
Cave Spider, a subterranean arachnid with eyes, measures 1.6 mm in length. The
Tooth Cave Ground Beetle and the Kretschmarr Cave Mold Beetle are subterranean
insects, the latter being eyeless; they vary in size from 3 to 8 mm..

Noted in appellateblog, and Greenlaw.

Data mining by Poindexter

The system would look only for certain patterns in commercial databases — not
create any centralized record-keeping system of American citizens' activities — it
would not violate civil liberties.

Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, PhD. in the New York Times.

None of the power, all the corruption

If the adage is true that power corrupts, the federal NDP
reveals the opposite: that sustained lack of power also corrupts.

It corrupts, not in the power-wielding sense of encouraging
arrogance and venality, but by leading to a cast of mind whereby
the complexities and compromises necessary for serious governing
are overwhelmed by slogans, bombast, extravagant rhetoric and
ideological nostrums that work up the faithful and turn off everybody
else.
-- commentator Jeffrey Simpson in the Globe and Mail newspaper.

Brinworld

Brinword, noun.
Mesotopian environment where subjects monitor authorities, typically as
systematically and as technologically adept as authorities monitor subjects.

Reference to David Brin's
The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between
Privacy and Freedom?.

Top 1 %

My favorite polling result of the 2000 election was a Time magazine survey that revealed that 19 percent of Americans believe that they have incomes in the top 1 percent, and a further 20 percent believe they will someday. A large majority of us regard ourselves as pretty far above average.

David Brooks, a senior editor of The Weekly Standard, and the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.

[Quoted in the NYT]

Sunday Papers

A couple of stories caught my eye:

Science
Is even nurture an outgrowth of nature, then? Is all of it,
even culture itself, reducible to evolutionary biology?

I prefer the word unification to reduction.
Steven Pinker.

Culture and Music

I had a whole new tool chest of things that no one had ruined yet
explains Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. [salon.com]

Culture and Politics

Democratic candidates face a cultural problem in these
[rural, southern] districts; they must overcome the perception
that they're in league with effete urban liberals.

'Rural white guys think we're all a bunch of wusses', complains
self-described Bubba Coordinator David Mudcat Saunders.
[NYT.com]

Weekend cocoon

Holiday weekends are crowded and expensive times to travel.

I'm catching up with housekeeping and Sunday Papers:

A hysterical review of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987).

Have mobile phone, don't need home phone [NYT]

(I gave up my home phone in 1999 and survive by PCS phone
and cable modem);

Cruised LiveJournal and posted comment on a social Metcalf's Law

(See Linked: The New Science of Networks, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi for more
background).

Now playing:

chemlab.org:
Meat Beat Manifesto: Prime Audio Soup

DetroitIndustrial:

Radio Active - A concert to promote the Internet Radio Fairness Act.

Ministry: Every Day is Halloween (Twelve Inch Singles)
BOSHETUNMAY : Vote for The Black
Meg Lee Chin Just One Fix
Lords of Acid: Farstucker

ObNerd:
liquid cooled over-clocking

It is lovely to recycle old boxen for learning/demo purposes, but it is
also important to be aware of a couple of gotcha's. One is that it gets
harder and harder to run modern kernels on really old boxes, as they
tend to need a fair chunk of resources to run at all. A second one is
related to a mix of Moore's Law and the cost of electricity.

Old boxes or new -- they tend to burn somewhere between 60 and 100 watts
(presuming we're not talking about bleeding edge duals, and depending on
just how loaded they are. 100 Watts running 24x7 for a year costs $70
at $0.08/KW-hour. Running them inside a building (where we have to
remove the heat) is likely to add somewhere between 1/6 (if one can use
the heat during part of the year, as in a home during the winter) and
1/2 this cost, plus the space they occupy is a cost, plus the
maintenance and admin is a cost (which we'd better neglect or it would
REALLY skew this argument:-) -- call non-labor cost of operation
$100/year just to make the arithmetic easy -- a dollar a watt in round
numbers.

Now, let's assume that a 486 running at 66 MHz can on a good day execute
one instruction per cycle, without worrying too much about what an
"instruction" is. Maybe a float, maybe an int. Let's assume also that
the ones we are using are only burning 50 W (and so cost only $50/year
to operate). Thus our 486 can run at "66 (bogo)MIPS".

A current 2 GHz P4 system (in addition to coming with more disk and
memory, and supporting a far faster network) costs (say) $700 up front
and runs roughly 2000 (bogo)MIPS, or 30x as much. It draws about 100W
(to be generous) and hence costs about $100/year to operate.
Hmmm. A 30 node 486 cluster has about the same aggregate bogoMIPS as a
single P4. It costs $1500/year to operate in electricity and cooling
and shelf/floor space. Even allowing for the cost of buying the P4, it
is twice as cheap and we haven't even discussed Amdahl's Law with NICs
on the old 486 ISA bus yet.

To me it isn't at all clear that recycling old computers this way is
really "green" -- good for the environment in aggregate. Yes, you find
a home for many computers that might otherwise make it to the landfill
(or might better be properly recycled to recover their toxic metals).
OTOH, you burn a lot more free energy to get anything done. This latter
argument is even stronger if you compare the energy costs of tower 486's
to the energy costs of a laptop, which might burn only 25W even running
at > GHz speeds. One of the motivations cited for Transmeta/Blade
computers -- they don't run the highest possible clock, but they are
VASTLY cooler and cheaper to operate than my stack of dual Athlons.

So, for fun, 486's are fine if you can afford to feed them. As a
learning exercise (in perhaps a school), they are also just lovely,
especially if you can foist/hide their real cost of operation in the
building's electricity budget, which is often a lot easier than trying
to get money to buy a single modern computer. However, they are NOT
efficient ways to get any sort of useful work done. Neither are 133 MHz
586/Pentia or 200 MHz P6 class CPUs. Even a free 400 MHz/bogoMIP PIII
costs $500/year to operate (they tend to burn more like 100 W instead of
50) vs $100 to get the same aggregate MIPS as a P4, making them a break
even proposition on perfectly scalable code over 2 years, NEGLECTING
admin costs. This is pretty much the oldest speed class that it makes
sense to operate for production in an administratively efficient
environment, and even these are pretty much ready to retire.

For more, see the Beowulf project.

Obviously a plan would be to get a cluster of 1000 '486 tower PCs
for ~free, then apply for an energy and environment grant
to replace them with 100 p4 rackmount systems.

Sunday papers

Catching up on Sunday papers, I see the LA Times has a story
on recent proliferation of the English flag in England:

Columnists have attributed the flag-waving--even, surprisingly, by standard-bearers of the left--as a sign of resurgent patriotism in a land usually reticent about expressions of nationalist sentiment.

"The English have come slowly, shyly to their national identity," Tony Parsons wrote
in the Mirror newspaper recently. "It looks as if the English are finally allowed to start
loving themselves. The sting has been drawn out of the flag of St. George. All the old
connotations, that a red cross on a white background meant a mind-set that was white,
racist, boozy, xenophobic, exclusive, have gone out the window."

"I think the Union Jack has connotations to do with Britain's past," Billy Bragg said.

"I think of British culture as being rather monocultural and that monoculture as centering
around the monarchy, the flag and the British empire. The English flag doesn't really
have those imperial connotations."

Also in the papers, Florida debuts a confusing ballot [NYT].

...the unified statewide ballot created to avoid a repeat of the disastrous 2000
presidential election. The Democrats say it is confusing, and could mislead voters
into choosing two candidates for governor instead of just one. The top of the ballot
instructs people to "vote for one pair," meaning one pair of candidates —
a governor and a lieutenant governor.

In a perfect world, the ballot would then list three pairs of candidates. But it
does not because none of the three Democratic candidates for governor has chosen
a running mate yet. (They have until a week after the primary to do so.)

The ballot lists only the names of the three candidates for governor —
Daryl L. Jones, Bill McBride and Janet Reno — with a bubble beside each for
marking a vote. Beneath each name is the phrase "Not Yet Designated."

State Democratic officials say voters may not understand that "Not Yet Designated"
is a person. They fear, for example, that voters may fill in two bubbles and
join Ms. Reno, the former United States attorney general, with Mr. McBride,
a Tampa lawyer who is her main challenger, in a Reno-McBride ticket.

wired: militainment -- tired: Infotainment

New word: militainment

Orgiastic television coverage of militant s across the globe.
Example [npr.org]

NPR National Political Correspondent Mara Liasson reports that

President Bush says he's considering an precedent-setting
invasion of Iraq to knock out Saddam Hussein. But there's
little argument in the halls of Congress over a march on
Baghdad, ...

Sunday Papers

Catching up with leisure reading, I see MJK has a another

new columnist gig; the Boston Globe reflects on who leads
civil rights campaigns nowdays.

Thursday's Wall Street Journal had a long article on the first page
How FBI's Antiquated Filing System Hinders Fight on Terrorism.

The last paragrapg offered an interesting tidbit:

The bureau's case-numbering system, for example, dates back to the
days of J. Edgar Hoover, who worked at the Library of Congress before
joining the FBI in 1921 and imposed a kind of Dewey Decimal System on
the bureau for classifying criminal acts. The system, which is issued to
each FBI agent in a little blue or yellow booklet, still includes offenses
related to Prohibition, white slavery and sedition.

Is this is all disinformation, is the FBI is just trying to get money from
the Congress, is this is just pre-emptive blame deflection ?

How much ya bench ?

Mr. Bush seems determined to be the poster president for working out.

His personal best is a 6:45 mile for three , a record he set last
Thanksgiving at Camp David. He runs four to five days a week, uses
an elliptical trainer about twice a week and lifts weights at least
twice a week. He can bench press 185 pounds, for five repetitions.

Mr. Bush had lost weight as well, down to 189 pounds from the
194 pounds he had carried on his six-foot frame on the campaign
trail. His body fat had declined, to 14.5 percent from 19.94 percent.

[NYT].

Ari

Ari Fleischer is a great evasive bore. Fleischer speaks a sort of
imperial court English, in which any question, no matter how specific, is parried with
general assurances that the emperor is keenly aware and deeply
concerned and firmly resolved and infallibly right and the people are
fully supportive and further information should be sought elsewhere.

-- Michael Kinsley.

Chattering classes, UK

"There's a new political divide," said Richard Sambrook, director of BBC News. "It's no longer `left and right.' It's now `us and them.' With `them' being politicians, the establishment and the broadcasters and media. Our research says they see politicians as dull people more interested in careers than constituents. And they see broadcasters and journalists colluding with them." -- [NYT]

Easy listening

The fcc published the lyrics and their evaluation of Nuyorican Poetess
Sarah Jones's [flash] Your Revolution.

For the smell of it

Smells like teen spirit ?
No, smells like K-Mart [NYT].

meannie

It is tempting to excuse them, in their twilight, for at least having made the place
more colorful. Mr. Helms affected a theatrically courtly demeanor, sirring and
ma'aming witnesses he regarded as infidels.

(His manners were selective; it was the courtly Mr. Helms who once remarked
that if President Clinton visited North Carolina he'd "better have a bodyguard.")
Mr. Gramm pokes witty fun at his own orneriness. "People say I don't have a
heart," he once joked. "I do. I keep it in a quart jar on my desk."

As David Plotz wrote in Slate, Senator Gramm is a mean, bitter pessimist, but
"he has benefited from one of the strangest prejudices of politics: that
meanness is a synonym for integrity." Mr. Thurmond benefits from
another prejudice, our instinctive American admiration for those who correct
themselves. He abandoned his ardent segregationist views when the
demographics of his state made that expedient, and even hired actual black
people to work on his Senate staff, a fact sometimes reported with such awe that
you'd think he'd marched with Dr. King in Selma. -- Bill Keller, January 12, 2002
(Mr. T., Mr. G. and Mr. H)

Findlaw vs Salon

Findlaw's arguments could kick Salon's opinions down
several flights of stairs.

In an article relating law against discriminatory intent
-- the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- and law against
discriminatory effect -- Americans With Disabilities Act,

note that the criminal law frequently treats a defendant
who commits an act knowing its likely effects no differently
from one who commits the act intending those effects.

THE YEAR IN ARCHITECTURE

The city's leading corporate architecture firms linked arms with their developer-clients to devise strategies for turning a catastrophe into a business opportunity. An ad hoc group, the N.Y.C. Rebuild Infrastructure Task Force, convinced its members that they had earned the moral stature
of firefighters, medical personnel, emergency volunteers.

-- HERBERT MUSCHAMP

THE YEAR IN ARCHITECTURE: The Deadly Importance of Making Distinctions,
NYT, 2001 December 30.

Comedy noir

And why are there no comedy noir ?
"It used to be the common wisdom that you lit a comedy differently from the way you lit a drama,"
Mr. Grazer said. "That's why so many older comedies look overlit. It was a way of signaling the audience that it was a comedy. But this one is lit so richly it looks just like you'd expect from a real, traditional western. This is just a distillation of the kind of look audiences had become accustomed to after so many years of John Ford and Howard Hawks movies. The audience back then was aware of
this, subliminally, and it added to the comedy." -- prodcuer Brian Grazer, in
WATCHING MOVIES WITH BRIAN GRAZER: Inducing Hilarity by Doses of Shock,
by RICK LYMAN NYT, December 14, 2001.

Obusable:

From the same interview:

A cassette ... had been slipped into a VCR attached to the big-screen television set at one end of the conference room, and Mr. Grazer was staring at the buttons on one of the various remotes arrayed around him, trying to figure out how to fire up the movie. The offices of Imagine, the film and television production company that Mr. Grazer founded with the director Ron Howard in 1986, are on the sh floor of a modern office building in the middle of downtown Beverly Hills, and the distant groan of traffic could be heard below along Wilshire Boulevard.

taliban man

		Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, co-equal on America's most-wanted list with Osama bin Laden, is partial to Chevrolet Suburbans with darkened windows. Mr. bin Laden, like many of the sheiks and princes of Saudi Arabia among whom he grew up, likes Toyota Land Cruisers, as did his military commander, Muhammad Atef, a former Egyptian policeman who is believed to have been killed by American bombing last week.
There is a hierarchy of vehicles among the more important lieutenants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Mr. bin Laden's terrorist organization. Not for them anything discreet and durable, to go with the austerity of their faith: nothing but a Land Cruiser will serve. For ordinary fighters, men with long beards and longer barrels on their ubiquitous Kalashnikovs, the vehicle of choice is the Toyota Hilux, a compact pickup truck popular throughout the developing world. The presence of these vehicles raises questions, given that the Taliban have been subjected for three years to one of the strictest economic sanctions ever applied by the United Nations. And Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries. How can thousands of men who produce nothing of economic value afford vehicles that cost $50,000 or, in the case of luxuriously equipped Land Cruisers, significantly more? Wade Hoyt, Toyota's spokesman in New York, who put the best corporate spin on the situation this week. "It is not our proudest product placement," he said. "But it shows that the Taliban are looking for the same qualities as any truck buyer: durability and reliability.". Trucks of the Taliban: Durable, Not Discreet, By JOHN F. BURNS from AUTOS ON FRIDAY, NYTimes, 2001 November 23.

I don't want to be believed in by delusional people

So, according to the WTO and to an incompetent journalist
at Computerworld establishing an anti-WTO site
that shows up fifth in search engines is tantamount to
site-jacking.

We need more research

"The emergence of new technologies has called into question whether we might have gone too far in strengthening the rights of property holders against consumers," said Richard C. Levin, the president of Yale University, who is
heading an investigation by the National Academy of Sciences into the nation's intellectual property policy. "The key question is, are we getting the balance right?"

By AMY HARMON

two thumbs up

Movie reviews optimized for purience.

the Onion is news, not satire.

Now, which is more informative:
an hour of TV news every day for a month, or five minutes
to read the three Onion paragraphs below:

The whole damn country's been paranoid about terrorism ever since the whole damn country was devastated by terrorism.

Terrorism Storylines Being Added To TV Shows As Quickly As They Were Dropped

LOS ANGELES— Less than two months after frantically excising any allusions to
terrorism, network executives are scrambling to add terror-related storylines to TV shows, sources reported Monday. "We're working around the clock to squeeze in a special episode where a Libyan with ties to Al Qaeda threatens to blow up the D.A.'s office," said Law & Order producer Dick Wolf, who on Sept. 15 scrapped an episode of the NBC drama in which a character utters the word "bomb." "We've got to stay on top of this thing." Next week, Spin City, which last month pulled an episode featuring a shot of the World Trade Center, will air a "very special" one-hour episode in which Mayor Winston is infected with anthrax.

"But just collecting your basic data about who's up to what in the U.S. and whatnot, that's not our strong suit." Tenet added that if the U.S. needed to "swoop in
and take out Colombia's current government, man, we could have that done by the weekend."

belletrist

Word of the day: belletrist .

Rebel yell

ROCK REVIEW | PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE TOUR

Warlike Aggressors, But in Fantasy Only

The affluent, self-satisfied 1990's spawned a paradoxical response: hard rock that inflates
private feelings of victimization into a self-pitying rage. The songs are tantrums in search of a
target, lashing out at family, ex-girlfriends and general human duplicity.

-- JON PARELES

news of the day

Pravda story

America's Southerners aren't the only regional-ethnic groups seeking
independence from the cosmopolitan internationalism of the nations'
elite. Rural New Englanders have launched a "blood and soil"
separatist movement of their own.

AntiGlobalist Protestor or Militiaman:

"Behind all those urban killings are people created by the Great
Progressive Society. These people are not revolting against the Great
Progressive Society. They are raw imitations of the Great Progressive
Society. We are led to believe that the professional middle class are
the winners, the working class are the losers. \212 As I see it, class
is about values, dependence and ways of communicating. The working
class person values place, interdependence, cooperation, the
tribe. Rural working class especially values land. Many of us would
kill to keep our land, our home, which for thousands of years was not
considered a crazy thing to do. Middle-class professionals are into
"success" and they are a dependent people, happily dependent on the
consumer system for everything. You call it independence. But if you
lost your electricity, your service people, your access to stores,
you'd see how independent you are! Working-class people have become
dependent on these things, too, but working-class values resent this
dependency."