Monthly Archives: November 2006

Who’s Rumsfeld?

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… The sergeant went upstairs to tell his marines, just as he had informed them the day before that the Republican Party had lost control of the House of Representatives and that Congress was in the midst of sweeping change. Mr. Menti had told them that, too.

“Rumsfeld’s out,” he said to five marines sprawled with rifles on the cold floor.

Lance Cpl. James L. Davis Jr. looked up from his cigarette. “Who’s Rumsfeld?” he asked.

If history is any guide, many of the young men who endure the severest hardships and assume the greatest risks in the war in Iraq will become interested in politics and politicians later, when they are older and look back on their combat tours.

But not yet. Marine infantry units have traditionally been nonpolitical, to the point of stubbornly embracing a peculiar detachment from policy currents at home. It is a pillar of the corps’ martial culture: those with the most at stake are among the least involved in the decisions that send them where they go.

From the NYT via Truthdig.

Diplomatic notices

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BRITISH CONSULATE
Basra: Iraq

Opening Times

SUICIDE BOMBINGS
9.30am – 3.30pm
Monday to Friday

Those wishing to bomb the
Consulate outside those hours
must apply in writing at least
two weeks before they hope
to embark on their journey to
paradise.

MORTAR ATTACKS
11.00am – 2.00pm
Monday/Wednesday/Friday

No incoming mortar attacks
will be accepted outside these
times.

From this week’s Private Eye.

Pot-luck supper

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I avoided the Society of Editors’ Grand Gala Dinner by going home. (I had work to do.) But the conscientious Roy Greenslade went — and later wondered why. Here is an excerpt from his report:

It is always difficult to grasp quite what these annual dinners are about, but last year’s in Windermere was relieved by an entertaining speech from Melvyn Bragg. I also remember that there were mercifully short speeches of welcome. Oh, how we ached for Melvyn during last night’s dreary non-event.

The Lord Provost of Glasgow, Liz Cameron, spoke well enough but for so long we were in danger of fainting from hunger because the woman just didn’t know when to stop. I think we got the message. Glasgow has changed and is changing… our newspapers – The Herald and the Evening Times are terrific… this art gallery is a palace of dreams. Indeed it was for the several sensible people who had fallen asleep.

A speech by the Scottish First Minister, Jack McConnell, was so insufferably stilted and stuffy that we wondered how he had ever got elected. (In the cab later a Scottish delegate explained in his defence that he was great behind the scenes. Fine. Let him stay there then). But McConnell was a mere warm-up act for the most stunningly dull “address” I can recall.

Sebastian Coe, chairman of the 2012 Olympics organisation, spoke without imparting a single intelligent thought. I tried to take notes but he said nothing of any consequence whatsoever, and he said it several times over. It was unrelieved by wit or wisdom and was heard in total silence by a now disbelieving crowd…

State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006

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Hooray! Dave Sifri’s latest State of the Blogosphere is online. Highlights:

  • 57 million blogs
  • 3 million blogs created during third quarter of 2006
  • 100,000 blogs created every day
  • 55% of all blogs are ‘active’ — defined as having been updated at least once in the last three months (doesn’t seem very active to me)
  • The blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days
  • About 1.3 million postings every day
  • Most popular languages are English (39%), Japanese (33%), Chinese (10%), Spanish (3%), Italian, Russian, Portuguese, French (all equal on 2%). Farsi (1%) has pushed its way into the top ten for the first time.

    • Joined-up photography

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    I gave a seminar today on “Blogging and the new media ecosystem” at the new Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford. Afterwards, Paddy Coulter, Director of the Reuters Fellowship, entertained us to tea and gossip. As usual, I tried to capture the moment using David Hockney’s ‘joiner’ approach. As usual, I failed. Sigh. Joiners are much more difficult to do than you’d think — or than Hockney makes them appear.

    Microsoft’s earth is flat

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    Hmmm… According to Playfuls.com,

    A comparison between Google Earth and Virtual Earth 3D is inevitable. And the conclusion is that Virtual Earth is so restrictive that it cannot even be considered a Beta version.The first annoying thing that all users outside the US or England will probably encounter is that you are not allowed to install Virtual Earth 3D yet in your native language.

    In order to be able to install Microsoft’s VE3D you’ll have to change your settings (if you are in Windows XP) from Control Panel-Regional Settings and make your computer have a default English language. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to test the program on Linux, Solaris or Mac, but I am not that naïve to think it will work on those operating systems…

    My apologies to Microsoft if that is not the case…The second annoying thing makes me again remember why everybody considers MS’s policy as arrogant, tyrannical and often stupid. You will not be able to view 3D maps if you don’t have Internet Explorer 6 or 7. To tell you the truth I do have IE7 installed on my computer but I don’t use it because I am a FireFox and Opera user. Well, Microsoft thought at that and made me cry in anger when I first tried to download the .msi installer for VE3D: nothing budged!… I asked through Skype a friend and he told me the same thing about FF: no pop-up, no warning, nothing! He eventually gave up but I had more patience and in the end I discovered that only IE is available (for now, I hope…) for this option…

    If only it didn’t run under Windows.

    Election news: machines are faulty!

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    Er, why are we not surprised? Here’s a Forbes.com report…

    A lawyer stood with a cellphone in one ear, a landline connected to the other, all while typing on his BlackBerry. Twenty phones weren’t enough to handle the calls streaming into the election protection center monitoring Ohio.The lawyer was one of 20 volunteers manning calls from Ohio voters in a conference room at the New York offices of law firm of Proskauer Rose. By early afternoon the hotline had received over 500 calls reporting problems in Ohio alone, according to coordinating lawyer Jennifer Scullion.

    Ohio wasn’t the only state facing voting difficulties in the most fully automated election in the nation’s history. Electronic or optical scan systems, operating in about 90% of precincts, caused problems across the country. The new voting machines often froze or failed to turn on. In multiple states, voters faced long lines as poll workers scrambled to find extra paper ballots. New laws requiring voters to show their ID also caused confusion…

    Krugman: Limiting the Damage

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    From Paul Krugman’s NYT column…

    At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all of his officials are doing a heckuva job. Just last week he declared himself “pleased with the progress we’re making” in Iraq.

    In other words, he’s the sort of man who should never have been put in a position of authority, let alone been given the kind of unquestioned power, free from normal checks and balances, that he was granted after 9/11. But he was, alas, given that power, as well as a prolonged free ride from much of the news media.

    The results have been predictably disastrous. The nightmare in Iraq is only part of the story. In time, the degradation of the federal government by rampant cronyism — almost every part of the executive branch I know anything about, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been FEMAfied — may come to be seen as an equally serious blow to America’s future…

    It’s a good piece. It concludes:

    But here’s the thing: no matter how hard the Bush administration may try to ignore the constitutional division of power, Mr. Bush’s ability to make deadly mistakes has rested in part on G.O.P. control of Congress. That’s why many Americans, myself included, will breathe a lot easier if one-party rule ends tomorrow.

    Saddam’s trial

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    From Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard…

    I don’t think the White House needed any “scheming.” The Iraqi court knows exactly what its “mission” is without being explicitly ordered. Coordination doesn’t require command.

    The simple fact remains: this verdict represents a last-minute spasm of the GOP’s desperate hang-on-to-power campaign. And the White House is doing its Orwellian part in loudly denying the fact and protesting the Iraqis’ independence.

    Sadly for them, the election’s outcome won’t really make a difference to the bloodshed in Iraq, the dynamics of which long ago spun out of American control. And once U.S. forces have abandoned the wreckage of the occupation, how long do you think Saddam’s judges have left to live?

    The Wealth of Networks

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    Paul Miller has a nice, succinct review in the Financial Times. Sample:

    What Benkler sees is an emerging pattern in the way we use network technologies which he thinks is positive for democracy and innovation, but not without its downsides. He argues that the internet is making obvious an existing form of exchange – social sharing – and taking it from the periphery to the mainstream of the economy. Conventional economics can’t explain why volunteer-generated projects such as Wikipedia or open-source software, which are given away for free, have been so successful. He proposes his own theory of “social production” – “commons-based peer production” – to fill the gap.

    It’s a counterpoint to the received wisdom that creating and exploiting intellectual property (patents and copyright) is the only way to do business in the 21st century. He points out that in 2003 IBM made twice as much money from providing open-source services as it did from intellectual property – despite the fact that between 1999 and 2004 it created more patents than any other US company. Benkler proposes that this is a pattern we will see repeated. The thesis is unsettling for those businesses, particularly entertainment ones, that have relied on controlling distribution of copyrighted material. He says not that they will disappear overnight but that social production is more than a fad. It is no surprise to Benkler that: “We find ourselves in the midst of a battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment.”