Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

The Washington Post has an article today that ostensibly focuses on Rumsfeld’s changes in language (via Explananda’s del.icio.us feed). He decides he doesn’t like to call insurgents “insurgents,” because that gives them too much respect. That alone wouldn’t be worth a newspaper article. What is worth the article is this passage:

When UPI’s Pam Hess asked about torture by Iraqi authorities, Rumsfeld replied that “obviously, the United States does not have a responsibility” other than to voice disapproval.

But Pace had a different view. “It is the absolute responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it,” the general said.

Rumsfeld interjected: “I don’t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it’s to report it.”

But Pace meant what he said. “If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it,” he said, firmly.

So there you have it. Our government

1. Authorizes torture by the CIA against insurgents, even going as far as to sic Vice-President Cheney on the Congress when it tries to ban torture;

2. Has thrown out a policy that Bush himself advocated of not engaging in nation-building so that it could

3. Invade and destroy a country, then

4. Create a puppet government and assemble a cargo-cult democracy. Meanwhile President Bush

5. Presents a vision of the world in which there’s a clear battle between good and evil, and yet

6. His Secretary of Defense refuses to fight that evil in the most obvious place where it appears. We shouldn’t forget

7. That this is the same Secretary of Defense who clung to legalistic definitions of torture when abu Ghraib first surfaced.

There is no moral clarity from this administration. What clarity there is clearly suggests that our government is immoral. I don’t understand how this is even in question anymore.

(Article included below the fold.)

(more…)

ThinkProgress just made me giggle.

So  . . .  wait. It’s currently illegal for cable and satellite TV companies to use à la carte pricing, where people are allowed to subscribe to individual channels rather than to multi-channel packages? I realize that all cable companies require you to subscribe to packages, but I didn’t realize that they needed FCC approval to do otherwise. (Via Slashdot.)

The cable companies do make a potentially good point, which is that if people are able to subscribe to individual channels, the cable companies will no longer be able to subsidize the less popular channels, and consumers will likely subscribe to those channels less often. I’m inclined to doubt the logic here, out of some variant of the long-tail argument: depending upon the way it’s distributed, I’d imagine that you could get more people subscribing to such channels. I read a while ago that Netflix and Amazon each sell at least one copy of every single item in their inventories every month, because they can distribute products without using physical stores. When you have a national audience, you have much more room to accommodate outlier tastes; if you’re running a local video store, on the other hand, your inventory must match the much more narrow tastes of a local audience. I imagine some argument analogous to this could show that the prospects of à la carte pricing are better than the cable companies let on.

And in any case, those companies are looking out for their own best interests rather than those of the consumer; I strongly doubt that they actually care about providing diverse programming to customers. Presumably if they were required to allow à la carte programming, people would pay less than they’re paying now. That’s probably a decent first guess, in any case.

It seems like it may be kind of moot, also. The granularity ought to be much finer: I ought to be able to buy individual episodes of The Simpsons, and not buy any episodes at all during weeks when I’m not in my house. In fact I ought to be able to buy episodes for delivery to my laptop, so that my “TV” subscription remains valuable even when I’m traveling. Delivery of TV programs over the net would end this à la carte debate fairly quickly.

But presumably the cable companies are stuck in their particular model, and will have a hard time switching to alternate modes of delivery. It will probably take a new kind of competitor — or an existing TV production company distributing directly to the net — before anything really innovative happens.

I went to sleep last night after reading an essay of Joan Didion’s in which she describes the 1988 presidential campaign as a perfectly closed loop: media events are staged for the benefit of the media (not for the benefit of the people who are ostensibly in the audience for those events), and heartwarming stories about the candidates get “leaked” so that the media can then put together a consensus photo of the candidate: Dukakis was “becoming tough,” the elder Bush was someone who had cast off the privilege of growing up wealthy in Connecticut and had remade himself in Texas, which now made him “tough,” etc. The whole process was entirely artificial, and the media-political axis formed its own insular world that only occasionally touched on the people out here in the United States.

I woke up this morning, and NPR was playing a story about how parts of President Bush’s speech on withdrawal from Iraq had been “leaked.” I started thinking about Bob Woodward and Judy Miller, both of whom were apparently in some kind of incestuous relationship with members of the Executive Branch. I thought about how the “Dean Scream” was sufficient to kill him, because the media story immediately turned to questions of his mental health, and then quickly into “Americans tonight are discussing only one thing: Howard Dean’s mental health.” The process of reporting on Dean had almost nothing to do with the campaign itself; it had to do with the storyline that the media decided to adopt.

Didion goes into much better detail and says all of this much more eloquently. You should read her essay “Insider Baseball,” in the collection called After Henry. Suddenly the way that the media work makes so much more sense.

(“Insider Baseball” is apparently available through the New York Review of Books — where Didion has published most of her stuff, I take it — but it’s behind a paywall.)

If you’re looking for a movie that is basically the opposite of a television news report, check out Capturing The Friedmans. It’s the story of a family torn apart by criminal charges of sexual abuse against the father and one of the three sons. The documentary interviews two out of the three brothers, the mother, the father’s brother, police, those boys who testified that they were abused, and their parents. Most strikingly, it includes home videos taken during the family’s crisis. It’s fascinating to hear both sides of the story — the police telling you that there were foot-high stacks of child porn at home, while the photographic evidence suggests otherwise; letters from the father himself describing his experiences with child sodomy or something near it; adults describing how hypnosis helped them remember events from their childhood, then pulling out virtually no details from what they supposedly remember; the accused’s son hearing the documentarian read a letter from the father describing his arousal at the sight of a five-year-old boy on the beach and expressing outrage that anyone could construe this as inculpatory.

It’s probably the best documentary that could have been made out of this case, and makes me wonder what’s happening behind the scenes when the press are butchering people’s characters. Highly recommended.

I wonder if anyone’s written any good works about the essential comedy of a police state. Because the material is right there for the taking. I guess Brazil would count as this kind of comedy.

Seriously, I can imagine Bush-administration policies (and the policies of those who follow them) leading us to a police state run by the Keystone Kops. Which is at least a small glimmer of light.

I’m sitting at my desk in my office, connected to the wired network. I have a bunch of network apps open, all of which are bound to that particular wired network interface. If I disconnect from the wired network and pick my laptop up to use it in another room, I want all those processes to stay connected. But as it is, I’m going to have to shut all of them down and reopen them when I move to the new (wireless) network.

It seems like it should be possible to shift a socket from one NIC to another. Is it?

Is there any reason that Joe Lieberman doesn’t just switch to the GOP? I’m just asking.

P.S. (30 Nov 2005): Manual trackback to Jason Smith.

 . . . would be hells of cool. The Mini (right) is just aesthetically damned pleasing.

Really, Apple products in general are just aesthetically pleasing. My boss has for some reason been pushing for us to get Apple laptops, and I was tempted. I could hack the thing to run Linux, but really I’d just prefer to have a machine that runs Linux without special manipulation.

Likewise, I’m thinking about getting a portable MP3 player at some point, and the iPod is certainly the prettiest. It may win on other fronts, e.g., that it has the highest capacity and I could fit my entire music collection on it. But again, it’s an ethical choice, and I’d prefer something that could run Linux or at least could play Oggs. My entire collection is Oggified (or  . . .  “Oggy”?), and converting it all to MP3 would be a nuisance.

If only the commodity-hardware manufacturers like Dell would rip off the Mac’s design. But somehow no one outside of Apple has ever been able to make hardware that’s as pretty as Apple’s.

Further proving that it employs the funniest people in the world, the Daily Show reports on Massachusetts and gay marriage, one year later.

(I’ve cached it also; should that link disappear, email me for the link.)

Their report has made me miss Boston terribly; they reported from Boston Common, Harvard Square, Downtown Crossing and the Cambridge City Hall. Oh well; I’ll be back soon enough.

Now might also be the place to congratulate my friend Jason and his partner James on their marriage, which they’ll be celebrating in January. I’m so, so happy for them.

P.S. (30 Nov 2005): Manual TrackBack to Adam Rosi-Kessel.

This is an eminently sensible point about today’s indictment of Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA):

This Duke Cunningham story, I’m guessing, will mostly focus on the corruption angle. Here you have a congressman on the Appropriation Committee’s defense subcommittee taking bribes in exchange for helping a defense contractor win contracts. What a sleazeball, etc. For shame, etc. In an ideal world, though, the attention would focus on the much larger problem of the defense appropriations process in general, which makes this sort of thing inevitable.

Defense contractors literally live or die on the contracts that Congress decides to hand out. Most of them have grown up under the mini-command economy that is the annual defense appropriations bill, and wouldn’t know how to survive in the free market. Not surprisingly, contractors tend to put a lot of effort into lobbying and influencing legislators. Between 1997 and 2004, the top 20 defense contractors made $46 million in campaign contributions, and spent $390 million on lobbyists—and were rewarded for their efforts with $560 billion in contracts. Then there’s a permanent revolving door between government and the defense industry, which is laid out in gory detail by the Project on Government Oversight. A lot of money gets sloshed around. Under the circumstances, what happened with Cunningham was bad and illegal, but not completely out of step with the larger trend here.

Even more interesting than Cunningham, perhaps, is MZM Inc., the company that bribed the Duke. The Los Angeles Times reports that the company has received “$163 million in federal contracts, mostly for classified defense projects involving the gathering and analysis of intelligence.” Just to be clear, a firm that bought a house for a corrupt Congressman is doing “classified” intelligence work. Okay, then.

(Via Explananda’s del.icio.us feed)

Seems strange to blame the Net for a decline in book readership, when at least the Net is encouraging people to read something. Why not blame television first?

An op-ed piece in today’s New York Times says, “Google  . . .  unbeknownst to many users  . . .  keeps records of every search on its site, in ways that can be traced back to individuals.”

I’m not sure that this is really true, in practice. It may be true if Google puts a unique session identifier in its cookies, which it then maps on the server end back to a database that connects session IDs with search strings and so forth.

If you have cookies turned off, I’m pretty sure that what Google can track about you is just your hostname. Hostnames are notoriously bad indicators of users. If you’re using something like DSL, your hostname is likely to change fairly regularly — quite often every few days. If you’re at a corporation, odds are that your Net connections go out through a gateway; the outside world can see the gateway, but cannot see the individual computers sitting behind it.

In principle, your ISP and your corporation could keep track of these things. Your ISP could know, for instance, that it gave a specific IP address to the customer residing at 123 Smith Street at a specific time. Then Google will have a record of IP addresses on hand, and could coordinate with your ISP to work out that your computer searched for a specific string at a specific time.

It’s not that easy, though. Quite a lot of people have open wireless access points, such that anyone on the street could connect to the Internet through them. If the authorities could prove in court that you didn’t have a router at the time that the particular search string went to Google from your IP address, then they could probably convince a jury that you are the one who performed that search. Otherwise, I think defense attorneys could introduce reasonable doubt about whether it was you or someone else.

If you want more privacy right now, you can turn off Google’s cookies. You can use something like The Anonymizer (the general class of services in which The Anonymizer falls is called an “anonymizing proxy”). I’m not sure what The Anoynmizer’s logging policy is, but I’d hope that they don’t log much. You can install a router, which would — I think — introduce reasonable doubt as to whether the traffic coming from your Net connection belongs to you. If you’re really concerned, you can switch from cable (where IP addresses hang around for a fairly long time) to DSL (where they change frequently).

The point is that we shouldn’t be waiting on Google to give us what we need. We can get it for ourselves now.

Perhaps more to the point, the responsibility doesn’t lay entirely on Google’s shoulders. We should be pestering our ISPs to log less data. If the ISPs can’t show law enforcement that a given IP address belonged to a specific customer at a specific time, then all of Google’s logging is for nought. Law enforcement could ask, “How long has this IP address belonged to this customer?” and the ISPs could legitimately answer, “We don’t know.”

Via Adam Rosi-Kessel: Canadian musician Jane Siberry has set up an online music-distribution site that is a model for how such things ought to work.

What I’ve been curious about for quite a while, and what I’m even more curious about now that I live in D.C., is why some cities thrive and others don’t. In particular, why do some cities rebound from economic downturns, while others do not? And can we predict which cities will and which won’t?

I’m thinking of places like Roxbury in Boston, or maybe Chelsea. I’ve seen hints that the latter is on the mend, mostly because it’s cheap and because it’s right on the commuter rail and just outside of the city proper. Friends of mine have considered buying cheap lofts there, which looks to be the first step on the road back from poverty in a city: artists and suchlike move into refurbished warehouses, which leads to some kind of bohemian scene developing, which leads to little coffeeshops and art galleries, and so on to gentrification. It doesn’t always happen, but it happens often enough.

But then there are places like Roxbury, which seem to be stuck. I’d be willing to walk anywhere in Boston at any time of the day or night, except possibly Roxbury. But then move slightly south of Roxbury to Jamaica Plain, and it’s the place that everyone wants to live now — with correspondingly inflated real-estate prices. The areas near JP, like Roslindale, are becoming popular, because people want to live near JP and they can’t quite afford it. (Such, at least, is what I take to be the reason.)

The area around my new house was bombed out as of 10 years ago, from everything I’ve read and heard. After the riots, people left U Street if they had any choice in the matter. Logan Circle used to be a place that you’d stay away from. Now it’s the home of D.C.’s largest Whole Foods (an indicator of yuppiness if I’ve ever seen one), and I ran into apartments that declared themselves to be “near Logan Circle” when they manifestly were not. U Street is hip now. The whole area around my house is booming  . . .  except for the area just slightly to the north, in Columbia Heights, which is still scary to walk through at night; there have been a few times when I’ve gotten a little lost on the way back from Dupont to my place, and have walked more quickly than normal through Columbia Heights. While I was looking for apartments around D.C., my friends told me that quite a number of neighborhoods are good and bad in patches: it may be fine to live in one house, but move a block over and things get questionable.

I can think of a few reasons why one city or area thrives (or rebounds) while another does not. Police protection in one area may be strong, whereas it’s not in another. One area may be on a subway line, while another may not (though this alone doesn’t explain JP’s success and Roxbury’s struggle — Roxbury’s actually closer to downtown Boston on the orange line than is JP). Maybe there are anchor stores — like a Whole Foods — that draw people near.

I wonder whether anyone’s done a thorough economic analysis of why one city — or area in a city — thrives while one near it does not. And what policies can cities put in place to make a neighborhood thrive? Encourage risky investments by banks or stores? Provide more police protection? Provide tax incentives for people to reclaim abandoned buildings? What works?

P.S. (30 Nov 2005): DCist touches on a lot of the same questions.

My friend Joe emailed me to say that Sy Hersh’s book The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House is really riveting. I’ve wanted to read Hersh’s book Chain Of Command: The Road From 9/11 To Abu Ghraib for a long while, and I’m sure that whatever book came out of his Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of My Lai is worth the read. So maybe he’ll be the next author whom I read in his entirety. By my count I have 10.5 more books by Joan Didion to read, so it’ll be a while.

 . . . to my friend Adam Rosi-Kessel, who will soon be starting a new life as a Greyhound “kiosk helper”. We’re all proud of him, and we know that this new step in his life will use his law-school talents to the fullest. Go forth, Adam, and make us proud.

That’s my average so far this year, with 38 completed in the 331 days that have passed. Unless I read 14 books in 34 days, or one every 2-odd days (which is  . . .  um  . . .  unlikely), I will not have read a book a week this year. Alas.

I blame Ulysses. Next time I am near James Joyce’s grave — which won’t happen until I go to Zurich, apparently (my trip to Dublin in June of ‘06 is for nought) — I will urinate on it. I suspect this is a common thing to do with Joyce’s grave. In some sense it honors Bloom.

I just had an exceedingly great encounter with a local barber shop, and it definitely deserves to be recorded here.

I bought a pair of professional hair clippers (the Oster Classic 76) off eBay a little while ago. They were expensive — on the order of $100 — but

1. a haircut is at least $10 plus tip; and
2. the cheap hair clippers that one buys in a drugstore always stop working for me after a few uses.

So I splurged and got the professional ones. (This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, generally: buy few and high-quality, rather than many and cheap.) The trouble is that they didn’t come with the little black plastic guards that you use to set the length at which your hair will be cut. So I’ve been calling around trying to find a beauty-supply store that carries them. Eventually I started calling barbershops, thinking that they would know where to find such supplies. I felt a little awkward doing so; it felt like walking into a restaurant and asking for the address of one of their competitors.

But I called the Mills Building Barbershop and spoke with Rocky, who was more accommodating than I had any right to expect. He looked in his supply catalogue, told me that he’d be putting in an order tomorrow, and offered to order a set of guards for the Classic 76 for me. He told me to give him a call back tomorrow to check whether his supplier has some on hand. If the supplier does, I’ll come in around Friday or so to pick them up.

This is the kind of customer service that everyone should expect. I tip my hat to Rocky.

P.S. (2 Dec 2005): Rocky dropped the ball after that initial happy encounter. We traded phone calls for days, until finally he said that he’d call me back the next day. He never did. I think I may have to buy my plastic guard dealies off the interweb.

You have to love someone who is this straightforward about her reasons for not being 100% libertarian:

I read somewhere that you identified yourself as a libertarian.

I was explaining to somebody what kind of Republican I had been. That was essentially why I had been feeling estranged from the Republican Party per se, because my whole point of view had been libertarian. I mean, I wouldn’t call it totally “on the program” libertarian.

You don’t vote the ticket?

No  . . .  I think the attraction was that it was totally free. It was totally based on individual rights, which, as a Westerner, I was responsive to. Then I started realizing there was a lot of ambiguity in the West’s belief that it had a stronghold on rugged individualism, since basically it was created by the federal government. So I haven’t come to any hard conclusion, here.

P.S.: I didn’t realize until the end that it was Dave Eggers interviewing her.

P.P.S.: Apparently there is now a “populist” alternative to the National Book Awards, called the Quill Award. J.K. Rowling won it last month. I’m glad the underappreciated author of Harry Potter is finally getting some recognition.