zoot

My dad's flying me out to LA next month (date tbd) and I'm going to try to figure out a way to make a quick hop up to SF.

Any dates that are particularly good for seeing and hanging out with folks? Any dates that are particularly bad?
Anyone going to be in LA in June?

Get registered, dammit:
Friday April 4, 10am-3pm
San Francisco Hall of Justice
850 Bryant Street

Go!

Hey all -

Looking for some easy karma? Next week there are going to be bone marrow donor drives in SF and Boston. Head down to the San Francisco Hall of Justice on April 4th or the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy on the Tufts campus on April 2nd and get screened, or just help spread the word.



The backstory: Erica Murray, a classmate of mine, was forced to leave Fletcher and return to SF when her leukemia came out of remission late last year. Her family and friends have organized a drive at the San Francisco, and her classmates have organized a drive at Fletcher. Obviously, we're hoping to find Erica a donor, but the drives are intended to get as many people on to the general registry as possible.

More info here.
Fundraising info here.

...or they'll rappel down a building and kick your ass:

1) In one of my fall semester classes, I got to write my final research paper about pirates. Not policy issues surrounding modern piracy (which would have still been a really cool paper to write), but actual "Pirates of the Caribbean" pirates. Many of whom were, in fact, in the Caribbean.

2) Mostly just to see what would happen, I put a short section in the conclusion about Burning Man. It was relevant to the paper and written to the appropriate academic standard, but still...

3) The professor, who's particularly well known for being a tough grader and demanding as far as academic research and writing, gave me an A on my paper about pirates and Burning Man.

I wonder if it's too late to convince my thesis advisor to let me change my topic...

Little Papua New Guinea stands up to the Bush administration's delegate at the Bali summit, and who do you think blinks?

Watch the video--it's worth it.

Wouldn't it be nice if, say, the majority party in both houses of Congress could show that much backbone?

Dear Apple:

If you're going to include a significant security feature in your OS with the capacity to hork any and all user data, you should at an absolute minimum:

• make sure the feature is as secure as advertised,
• make sure the feature fails gracefully when the machine crashes for some other reason (i.e. doesn't corrupt key files that happen to be open at the time), and
• don't create a upgrade procedure that corrupts all of a user's data if they happen to be using the feature.

The fact that you can't seem to do these things with File Vault is the sort of thing you should consider a major embarrassment. The last point, in particular, really should cost the responsible parties their job (the QA manager, if no one else). Together, they give the distinct impression that you're not really concerned about customer support in general or security in particular.

Just my $.02.
sploof

IF YOU USE FILEVAULT, DISABLE IT BEFORE UPGRADING TO LEOPARD. I'm really happy today that I do regular backups, but I'd be happier if the Leopard upgrade mechanism didn't suck so hard.

Dear Senator Feinstein:

I'm writing because I've read media reports indicating that you intend to vote in favor of Michael Mukasey's nomination for Attorney General in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I wish to express my sincere hope that such reports are incorrect. Certainly, if we cannot recognize that forcibly flooding a person's sinuses with water constitutes torture, than we have utterly lost our way as a people and a nation. Certainly, any individual who does not recognize this or lacks the courage to state it publicly is unqualified for the office of Attorney General.

Certainly, any of the people's representatives who votes to confirm such a person to that high office deserves to lose the people's support.

Thank you,

sploof

This is probably yet another lost fight. Getting the Democrats (particularly Feinstein) to do their jobs and actually stand up to Bush is always a long shot these days. Nevertheless, if you have a moment before the vote this coming Tuesday, contact your senators and urge them to oppose Mukasey, especially if you live in California or New York. If you agree with what I've said above but can't think of anything to write, feel free to cut and paste, or shoot me a note and I'll write something for you.

My schedule over the last 48 hours has gone something like this:

Tuesday Evening:
Dinner talk by Justice Richard Goldstone on the ICC and the role of the international prosecutor

Wednesday Morning:
Class: Oceanic History
Topic: Iberia and the first global maritime revolution

Wednesday Lunch:
Lecture by Andrea Dew from the Naval War College:
“Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias: Bloody Tactics, Unlimited Targets?"

Wednesday Afternoon/Evening
Class: Rule of Law in Post Conflict Societies
Topic: Constitutional development in the aftermath of conflict

Thursday Morning
Class: History, Politics, and Culture of Southwest and Central Asia
Topic: The impact of information technology on Islamic societies

Thursday Afternoon/Evening
Class: Petroleum in the Global Economy
Topic: Downstream production and marketing business models

I'm basically going to spend all of this weekend reviewing an international law case on terrorism and human rights for a presentation on Monday, doing some initial planning for my thesis, and vainly trying to catch up on my reading.

I'm seriously busy, but for me, this is pretty much awesome. It's not like I want to spend my life in academia, but this is definitely crazy fun.

My biggest complaint is that the other people here who get into this as much as I do are too normal. Everyone's a policy freak like me, but there's a major shortage of San Francisco-style freaks like me. If I could find a way to combine the two, I'd be in heaven.

Words fail me:

The White House accuses Barack Obama of intellectual laziness.

I went to see No End In Sight this weekend. It's a good documentary, and if you're at all interested in Iraq or post-conflict reconstruction more generally, definitely go see it. It doesn't contain any new earth-shattering revelations, but it does present a compelling narrative spelling out just how incredibly bad the occupation planning and decision-make processes were.

My one quibble is really a matter of nuance. The U.S. getting the Iraqi recovery right would have been something like throwing a dart and hitting a bulls-eye 50 feet away: possible, but requiring extraordinary skill, talent, and luck just to move it from the "almost impossible" column into the "extremely unlikely" one. As the movie makes clear, not only did the Bush administration commit to throwing that dart, it then, for no apparent reason, filled up the 50 foot gap with a big milling crowd of people, blindfolded itself, and spun around really fast 10 times before hurling two fistfuls of darts backwards over its head in one go.

It's certainly valid to examine the depths of the incompetence with which the occupation was carried out, and why it was so. In doing so, however, I thought the movie tended to create a sense that the occupation could have gone well if only the White House hadn't made so many stupid mistakes. (Not that the filmmakers necessarily meant to do so; I have no idea if this was intentional.) In other words, maybe, if we had just stood still and took the time to aim well, the dart would have nailed the bulls-eye.

Yeah, maybe, but I wouldn't have bet on it.

It may seem like a minor point, but one of the reasons the White House so blithely stumbled into Iraq was because it didn't understand (or refused to accept) the extremely long odds of the aftermath turning out well. On top of all of the other reasons the invasion was a bad move, it would have been reckless even if the occupation had been competently planned and flawlessly executed.

Vandalizing the man wasn't funny.*
This is funny:


*No, it's not that I fail to see the humor because I'm offended. There are lots of hysterical things I find offensive; burning all of Paul Addis' possessions would be simultaneously cruel, offensive, and funny, for example.

It's tasty.

OK, who didn't see this coming?

Updated, below.

So, I'm actually not particularly mad about the Libby commutation-that-looks-a-lot-like-a-pardon. It's not that it's not a corrupt, gross abuse of power, it's just that given all the other abuses of power going on, it's not really at the top of my list.

On the other hand, certain variations of the Libby apologists' arguments do piss me off. The "he's already suffered enough" argument's a big one, mostly because it's stems from the notion that prison's not meant for rich white guys who are friendly with lots of journalists.

The Clinton comparison argument's another big one, because it takes immense mental gymnastics to twist those two cases into a pretzel that justifies letting Libby off. I have all kinds of problems with Clinton, and I do think what he did was wrong, but the sheer amount of work needed to make the Clinton-Libby argument suggests a really impressive degree of bad faith on the part of the arguer.

Take Timothy Noah, for example. I don't read him much, but in this column, frankly, I think he comes off as something of an ass. Leave aside, for the moment, the fact that he's trying to justify lying about a national security breach by pointing at lying about a consensual affair. He says:

No fair-minded person can deny that the previous president committed perjury about Monica Lewinsky while serving in the Oval Office. The country knew it, and it let him get away with it.

What's wrong with this? In addition to smug and condescending, it's demonstrably untrue. Clinton was never charged with perjury because he never committed perjury as the law defines it. A judge did hold Clinton in contempt of court for lying under oath, but that lie did not constitute perjury.

A lie under oath only amounts to perjury if it is material to the proceedings under which the oath was administered. In other words, the lie has to have some potential to influence the legal outcome. The notion that Clinton's lie about a consensual affair was somehow material to Paula Jones' allegations of sexual harassment years before is at best an extreme stretch. Even if you want to argue that point, however, you can't get around the fact that the judge summarily dismissed the Jones case; she found that even if everything Jones claimed were true, she would still lose. Clinton's lie could not have had an impact on that outcome.

This might be a nitpicky thing. Not many care about the distinction between lying under oath and perjury, and clearly what Clinton did was unethical. The difference is that Clinton did not somehow skip out on jail time he legally had coming. The judge hit him with as much as the law called for; it just so happens that the law recognizes the difference between Clinton's lie and Libby's.

Too bad Noah's not as perceptive.

Update 1:
Kate O'Beirne's version of the Clinton comparison argument ("Clinton was worse because he admitted it") is so ridiculous she ends up with a kind of deer-in-the-headlights look when she actually has to make it. Matthews kind of smacks her down, but ends up missing the point. They're both still wildly off on the definition of perjury.

Update 2:
Not a big shocker, but Neal Boortz is so utterly clueless that he had to invent a criminal trial and conviction for Clinton to make his version of the argument. I generally avoid thinking too much about the likes of Boortz, but I wonder if he actually believed what he was saying, or just assumed no one would notice?

So, yeah, I haven't been writing much. I have no real excuse, except to say that writing at work has been so much fun that it's left me less than motivated to do so outside of work.

Yeah, I suck.

I've got a few things up, though. I just posted some (relatively) new pics, including some from the Big Wheel Races, the One Crawl, and Easter Sunday in Dolores Park. I'm holding back some pics from NYC and the last BBQ atdeathraypony's for potential blackmail value. (Hear that velvetsiren?)

I've also been tumbling a trickle of stuff, mostly random trivial things I find online that amuse me.

Seymour Hersh's New Yorker piece on Major General Antonio Taguba and his report on Abu Ghraib should be a must-read for, well, just about everyone. There's some bits of explicit detail about the abuse, but not much. The story's really about Taguba and his role in exposing what happened at Abu Ghraib, how he was penalized for doing a difficult job as well and honestly as he could, and what that tells us about the Bush administration's policies on detention and torture. Was just one piece of an ongoing policy that is only any less gut-wrenching because the administration has figured out to be more careful about letting people wander around with cameras.

Yes, it'll make you angry and frustrated, or at least I hope it will. One of the most frightening things about the whole issue is the extent to which Americans seem not to care any more what might be done in our names. It's kind of difficult to imagine what it will actually take to get people really riled at this point.

"I would start my investigation into the detainee abuse issue, which constitutes, I think, a defilement of everything America stands for, and has done irreparable damage to our reputation, and thus to our power around the world. If that doesn't rate a 'high crime' definition, I don't know what does."

-Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell