Daily Archives: December 16, 2006

Digging a deeper hole

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From today’s New York Times…

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 — Military planners and White House budget analysts have been asked to provide President Bush with options for increasing American forces in Iraq by 20,000 or more. The request indicates that the option of a major “surge” in troop strength is gaining ground as part of a White House strategy review, senior administration officials said Friday.

Discussion of increasing the number of American troops, at least temporarily, has coursed through Washington for two months, as a possible way to reverse the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad. But the decision to ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff to specify where the additional forces could be found among overstretched Army, Marine and National Guard units, and to seek a cost estimate from the White House Office of Management and Budget, signifies a turn in the debate.

Officials said that the options being considered included the deployment of upwards of 50,000 additional troops, but that the political, training and recruiting obstacles to an increase larger than 20,000 to 30,000 troops would be prohibitive.

At present, only about 17,000 American soldiers are actively involved in the effort to secure Baghdad, so even the low end of the proposals being considered by military and budget officials could more than double the size of that force. If adopted, such an increase would be a major departure from the current strategy advocated by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., which has stressed stepping up the training of Iraqi forces and handing off to them as soon as possible…

What’s interesting about this (apart from the echoes of Vietnam) is that it’s not so long ago that we were told that US military planning and budgeting was predicated on ensuring that the US would always be able to fight two major wars simultaneously. I was always incredulous about that — but, hell, what do I know about war-fighting. Now it seems that the mighty US war-machine is stretched beyond endurance by a raggle-taggle crowd of turbanned and balaclava’d insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A place of greater safety

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My friend Nicci Gerrard has written a perceptive piece about the Suffolk murders. Excerpt:

Hintlesham is a small, attractive village scattered along a main road (it’s just a couple of miles from where I live, and my husband, Sean, and I named one of our characters Jenny Hintlesham in the Nicci French thriller that we wrote when we arrived here). Now it is the place where Gemma Adams was left, in a swollen ditch off the road to Ipswich.

Copdock lies nondescriptly just beyond the noise of traffic, a village squashed between the A12 and A14 and almost swallowed up by the town; now it’s the site where Tania Nicol’s body was discovered in the same stretch of water as Gemma Adams. The ditch has become a churned-up stream here; on the bridge there are already several bouquets of flowers bearing messages from friends and from strangers. One of them – with a touchingly formal courtesy – addresses her as Ms Nicol…

It’s a typical Nicci piece — soft and intuitive one minute, detached and analytical the next.

The victims were beloved daughters, sisters, mothers, friends. Gemma Adams’ father spoke movingly of his “wonderful, beautiful” dead daughter, who was secure and happy as a child; she was a Brownie, loved horse-riding, played the piano, was “good”. Her addiction sucked her into a world from which the continued efforts of her parents couldn’t rescue her. Which parent, hearing this, wouldn’t feel a shudder of dread? We like to think we deserve our luck and are in control of our lives; actually we are forever walking on thin ice. And sometimes we are made more aware of this precariousness.

Most believe that the murderer has changed something about the way we feel about our community. We are not living through an Agatha Christie whodunnit in which a fiendish criminal, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, will be discovered and ejected, and everything will return to tidy normality; it’s a creepy psychological thriller in which the sheer horror of what has happened unsettles how we think about the world in which we live…

The (tiny) local police force is clearly overwhelmed by what it now has to deal with. The government, for its part, will respond with its usual duplicity. The Home Secretary will solemnly promise in front of TV cameras to provide any extra resources that are needed; while behind the scenes he will be gleefully pointing out to the Suffolk Constabulary that this is exactly why the government was trying to amalgamate local police forces into larger, less accountable, units.

The Rule of Law (contd.)

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From today’s Guardian Unlimited…

The government should be stripped of its power to stop prosecutions in the national interest, a professor of law at Cambridge University said yesterday.

John Spencer called the power to halt cases “the sort of thing you find in countries where the rule of law is not respected, and where criminal justice is instrumentalised [used by] the government as a stick with which to beat its political enemies, while its friends are allowed to flout the law with impunity.”

Frank Johnson

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Frank Johnson, a former editor of the Spectator and one of Britain’s funniest newspaper columnists, has died of cancer at the age of 63. Among his badges of honour was the distinction of having been fired by Conrad ‘Lord’ Black. There’s a nice obit in today’s Telegraph, for which he wrote every Saturday. It ends thus:

Johnson endured cancer with exemplary courage for seven years. Last Sunday, just before he went into hospital for the final time, he attended the performance of Aida at La Scala in which the tenor Roberto Alagna (as Radames) walked off the stage in a fit of pique after being booed; Johnson immediately filed the story to The Daily Telegraph.

He once drafted his epitaph as a cod footnote:

“Johnson, Frank (dates unknown). Journalist. No relation to Paul (qv). Claimed to have been one of the last lovers of Maria Callas (1923-77), although his testimony in such matters was said to be unreliable. Published a distasteful memoir of the relationship.”

The Callas reference needs explanation. He was an opera fanatic from early on and at the age of 14 appeared on stage at Covent Garden in Norma alongside Maria Callas. [Children’s parts at the Royal Opera House were taken by pupils at Frank’s school, and he and a classmate were recruited to perform as Norma’s two sons.] Johnson recalled the experience 25 years later:

“I could not forget that when Callas bore down on us with the knife, her nostrils flared; that when, dropping the knife, she repentantly clasped us to her bosom, her perfume smelt like that of an aunt who was always kissing me; and that at the first performance on February 2 there penetrated, into my left eye, the tip of the diva’s right breast, which partnership remained throughout the subsequent duet with [Ebe] Stignani… there are few men who can truthfully say that their eye made contact with the right nipple of Maria Callas.”

Amen.

Quote of the day

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“The clue to surviving that party,” Ruth said, “is never drink anything they can top up. Stick to the Guinness, or some obscure spirit, because you have to make a conscious decision to go back to the bar each time.”

Historian Ruth Dudley Edwards on the Irish Embassy’s pre-Christmas party, quoted by Simon Hoggart.

She’s right. I’ve been to parties in that establishment.

A Wii concession

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Every Christmas there is a Must-Have gadget. It’s the thing that kids put on their Santa lists and has always sold out just before their addled parents get to the stores.

This year’s gadget is the Nintendo Wii — which (I can personally testify) is a fascinating device. Its USP is a controller fitted with accelerometers that you wave about — like so:

And therein lies a tale…

Today’s NYT is reporting that,

Nintendo said Friday that it was taking steps to keep energetic users of its new Wii video game console from breaking their televisions and ceiling fans.

[…] The trouble is that some players have grown so enthusiastic that the controller has slipped from their hands and taken brief flight. Players are supposed to use wrist straps attached to the controllers, but in some cases these have snapped.

Nintendo said it had begun a voluntary replacement program for the wrist straps. Thicker straps should mean fewer flying controllers, said Beth Llewelyn, a spokeswoman for Nintendo of America.

The new straps are free, Ms. Llewelyn said, but the company is not committing to replacing other household items — like the handful of televisions that have reportedly been smashed by unleashed controllers…

Waste not, want not

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Bill Thompson has been doing some calculations…

According to research carried out by office equipment supplier Canon, based on figures from the National Energy Foundation and Infosource, more than six million PCs will be left on over Christmas, consuming nearly forty million kilowatt hours of electricity.

Together with the printers and other hardware they will waste enough electricity to microwave 268 million mince pies, pumping 19,000 unnecessary tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, at a cost of around £8.6m…

He goes on to finger some unexpected power-wasting culprits:

As well as the computers in our homes and offices, it is also important to think about the energy we are using – and the carbon we are producing – by creating and maintaining a presence online.

The virtual server that hosts my weblog is on all the time, even when nobody is viewing my pages, and although its energy use is negligible, multiply that by 55 million or more blogs or 100 million MySpace profiles and you get some significant numbers.

It gets even worse with avatars. At the moment Linden Labs, who host the popular Second Life virtual world, has around 4,000 servers. Although they have two million signed up users, at any one time only around 15,000 people are logged on.

Blogger and technology writer Nicholas Carr did some rough calculations, based on the power consumption of each server being 200 watts and the power consumption of the logged-on user’s own PC being 120 watts, and reckons that each avatar uses 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity – or about the same amount as an average person living in Brazil.

This works out at 1.17 tons of carbon dioxide per year, per avatar, or the same as driving a large car 2,300 miles.

Well, that’s decided it. No avatar for me, then!

And of course, all of this adds to the case for doing networking the Ndiyo way