Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
So much is unfolding around us. The whole place is filled with every stripe of people. Yesterday we went to Dag Hammserkold (sp?) Plaza across from the United Nations, where the protest for economic justice was building up to march into Manhattan without a license. Peter Gartrell took the train back to Philadelphia yesterday afternoon. The last I saw of him was in the avenue median in front of the UN, holding his camera. He called later and said that he'd run into Elizabeth Dole and Pat Buchanan on the way back to Penn Station.
Once the protest rolled out, peacekeeper groups marched with their arms locked around the first group of people, between the protesters and the police.
With hundreds of police officers around us we went down into the city as a line of NYPD motorcycles and bicycle cops separated the march from traffic. After a few hours we neared Madison Square Garden, and the whole thing ground to a halt at the barricades across the avenue.
I was around the front of it, and besides the helicopter, snipers and riot police behind barricades all around us, things seemed pretty calm, but about 2 blocks south, the police suddenly cut through the protest with barricades, throwing people out of the way and arresting several. Dan Schned saw much of what happened. A guy with dreadlocks said that "Tonight we saw the face of Babylon, people!"
I took pictures all along the way, but I can't put any up just yet for time and technical reasons.
Sunday evening was a hell of a time. A girl from Iowa showed us her video of the paper mache dragon that some anarchists famously lit on fire in near Madison Square Garden.
I was in the background on MSNBC Hardball, which had an outdoor stage going in a square on Broadway. I discovered that by jumping at precisely the right moment, I could jump above Chris Matthews' shoulder. Later, we were also chased away from the (Fox) News Corporation building.
Last night we found that there is an active movement to hassle Republican delegates as they go about town. There are IndyMedia and text messaging schemes set up, directing the groups of protesters running around. The intention seems peaceful: hollering on the street mainly. We came across an area near Union Square where people had thrown garbage and newspaper boxes all over the street, and then a whole bunch of cops came. Then we found out that Cheney was drinking nearby, and we saw the cops had blocked off the whole street.
So that's how things are going. Obviously it's not too easy to write because we are staying in Brooklyn and the party's in Manhattan.
Now that the heat is easing off, it's time for another round. We are staying safe as possible, but things are moving by their own pattern right now.
Dan Schned, Peter Gartrell and I just got to Bill Potter's apartment in Brooklyn. The trip thus far has gone pretty smoothly. We took the train down from Peter's grandmother Nona's house in Philadelphia to Manhattan's Penn Station, in the shadow of Madison Square Garden.
We staggered outside Penn. To my right was the Empire State Building and to my left, (hundreds of?) thousands of protesters were streaming down the street in front of Madison Square Garden. It was one hell of a sight. Apparently now they are going towards Central Park, or perhaps not, now that their permit got yanked. Ironically above all these protesters was an enormous FOX News billboard. So we went back down to the subway and took the L to Bill's place.
Right now things seem to be going pretty smoothly, not a great deal of disorder from what we could see. There are tons of police everywhere, but the Police State isn't here yet.
Now I think we are going to go back into Manhattan, to Union Square perhaps...
In other news, apparently I leave town for one day and suddenly there's all this crazy news about Douglas Feith and Likud spies in the Pentagon?!?? What can I say, what can I say. Nothing like an espionage investigation to burnish your convention's patriotic veneer... Fantastic, just fantastic.
Get your war on: "Is Operation Iraqi Freedom the most expensive botched thing ever?"
There was a glitch in my email program and anything sent to me in the last 24 hours disappeared, so please resend any messages ya might sent.
I'm going to leave in about an hour, after Dan Schned gets off working at First Ave. Then we are off.
If the last post seemed jumbled and anxious, well, I'm feeling a little jumbled and anxious right now.
The big goal is to get to Peter's grandmother's house by Saturday afternoon, then into New York Saturday night, if it can be done.
Once again, on this trip I can be reached at 651 338 7661 or dfedt01@sprintpcs.com , and by the email addresses at right, but not while I'm on the road.
I will try really hard to get something up here every day, but it will probably be impossible to do that. Wish me luck!
Right now it's about 22 hours from departure. Dan Schned and I are cruising to Philadelphia, leaving early Friday morning. Then we get on the train. Wednesday was filled with the last tasks.
Fortunately, I just got a new cell phone from Sprint. This will probably be essential among the concrete canyons of the delirious city. My new number is 651 338 7661. The phone also gets email @ dfedt01@sprintpcs.com . Why dfedt? They made a typo. So maybe I will get that fixed later.
So now comes the difficult part. How do I justify this trip? What do I expect?
I am not traveling to New York City to carry a sign. I have felt irresistibly drawn to the site ever since the Republicans made their disgusting announcement so many months ago. How could they dare to convene in this scarred landscape? What were they trying to prove?
The course of the trip will take me to Ground Zero. This will surely seem redundant, as anything you say about the place sounds worn, shitty, generally repackaged to sell something else. Where the curtain fell on the modern era. Where Sentiments Acquired Capital Letters and Histrionic Importance. This plot opened with the destruction of the symbols, and three years later, the government has answered by attacking, destroying and abetting the obliteration of a whole swath of important symbols in the Muslim world, up to this very hour.
The war on terror is all about symbols, obviously, but the tricky part is that every person assigns each symbol a different value. When the towers fell, the symbol of destruction was manipulated into a symbol of vengeance. But who ever thought that the wreckage would get us to hell so quickly? Who would have thought the symbols could call the bombs so easily? How did these symbols make all the violence look cathartic and redemptive to us?
What black magic performed there caused Abu Ghraib to happen?
I'll go with one goal in mind: to seize control of the deep sense of fear and dread that has chilled my soul for the last three years. There's no more useful way to say it. I have to attack my problem by driving straight to the core. Blitz the situation. Turn it back on itself. Find the symbols that finally unlock it for me. Come back better.
So, am I worried about a terrorist attack?
Yes, obviously. I have a tinge of mortal fear about me, but I'm trying to rationalize by pegging numbers to the imaginary horrors (and let it never be said that I have a lack of imagination) of attacks here. I feel there is a 5% chance of nuclear or radioactive material getting all over, 10% biological or chemical materials. Less than that for modern bombs. That is, the dirty bomb is a lot more likely than a nuclear weapon.
However, if the Air Force manages to level the holiest site in all of Shi'ism during the convention, or even cause a nice gaping hole in the wall, or better yet the dome, then these bets are off. And then the Israeli settlers or the Syrians will make their move...
These are some hypothetical situations... but with narrow odds. With regards to the DanMN team's ability to survive the situation without injury, we are not planning to charge into clouds of tear gas. But that doesn't mean we won't end up in proximity to madness. Oh, there will be madness.
I'm wondering what the tenor of the protesters will really be like. I think it will be different than Chicago '68 in the sense that most of the folks I've seen protesting the war in the twin cities, for example, were relatively mainstream-looking mom and pop types.
The networks say that the 'vast left wing of dissent' exists as some unexplained solid bloc, slowly drifting between San Francisco and Cincinnati, made of radicals, disgruntled Dean enthusiasts, people only worth quoting for fractions of a sentence. Yet the sober reality is that President Bush is easily the most unpopular national leader we have seen in a long time. The strains that will appear in New York will reflect the breadth of that fear and loathing from across the land, I'm sure.
I will say this, to the President's credit. I saw him with my own two eyes, not one week ago, in my hometown. His speech was at the landmark Hudson arch (by the old bridge that formerly went into Minnesota). So that symbol has been permanently perverted for me. And it made me angry.
But I saw the President. And I could see that he was just one man. I could see that a lone soul couldn't have caused all the mess, couldn't have been the one to level such destruction all around.
The buck stops at Bush's desk, it's true, but these days it's more clear to me than ever that the problem is so deep and complex that there's not a chance in hell he's figured out all the levers.
We are led to believe that his power is natural and complete, but in reality it is the opposite. The pity is that he doesn't seem to know it.
Will the hoopla around the convention be covered on this website? Yeah, when I get the chance, but I have no idea how often that will be. Bill Potter, i.e. Jiriki5 on AIM, will be our gracious host, and he might make some posts as things are going on. But at this point nothing is assured.
Packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been
A place that has to be believed to be seen - U2
Ok, now is the run-up time for the big venture to New York City. Have to plan things...
Something has gone odd with the style sheets here. I will fix that later.
The Counter Convention. Anyone need to hitch a ride east? (I don't think there will be extra space beyond the folks I'm with, but the local anti-war folks are going)
The identity of CIA agent Anonymous has found its way into print, evidently a little while ago in the Guardian. This story talks all about where Imperial Hubris came from and the CIA anonymity rules. Anonymous is actually CIA analyst Michael Scheuer.
Among some in the intelligence community who have either obtained copies of the Imperial Hubris manuscript or heard about certain passages, the rough consensus is that a not-long-for-his-job George Tenet indicated to the [CIA Publication Review Board] that the book’s publication should be allowed, as it might blunt or contextualize some of the scathing criticism likely to assail the agency in forthcoming 9/11 Commission and Senate Select Intelligence Committee reports — and also might aid the cause of intelligence reform. According to several intelligence-community sources, the manuscript was in limbo at least three months past the Review Board’s 30-day deadline earlier this year. Says one CIA veteran: "I think it’s possible that it got the approval around the time Tenet decided for himself that he was leaving."Pat Buchanan has a new book out and Raimondo thinks its awesome. He threw a couple links in: an insane piece by Office of Special Plans conspirator David Wurmser and a rambling declaration of World War IV from Norman Podhoretz.
Meanwhile Blackwater (yes, that blackwater has an email list) sent me a link about fourth-generation warfare. Interesting.
In Israel, Akiva Eldar demands that the Labor party drop all prior restraints on joining the government. YES. Ugly, tho.
Last Wednesday, in full public view, the supreme forum of the Likud tightened the handcuffs around its leader's wrists. The masses who believed that Sharon is prepared to offer "painful concessions" in return for peace found out that his students in the academy of shackling are not allowing him to pull several hundred Jews out of the Gaza Strip.
[....]
If the disengagement plan and peace are so important to the state and to the party, the architect of Oslo should teach his colleagues a lesson in self-sacrifice; he should inform Sharon that the party is interested in fair representation in the foreign policy-security cabinet and the important ministerial committees of an ad hoc emergency government for a period of one year. The Likud must decide - there are no more excuses.
I have set up MovableType on the new machine, and it's humming along nicely. I'm quite relieved to stop web serving from this computer and move it onto another server.
Once again, big ups to Dan Schned for finding this machine. Gotta keep plugging now... Please let me know if you find missing files, but I know there's still a big batch of them.
Now all functions should be quite a bit faster, including searches. Hurray!!
Of course, David has the AIM handle Chairman0mao, but he may have to offer it to Arthur... Also right above his head is a drawing of a Chinese dragon unfolding from a missile...
Just got back from the Cheng residence, watching pirated DVDs, some good, some fakes. Zzzzz....
Ok, ok, ok, I have to post some things around the ideological spectrum. Starting around the right-wing anti-war libertarian pole, Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo had three interesting pieces, but as always I take him with a grain of salt. First, the Democrats may have flipped around, and become the more militarily interventionist party. Is this too hard to believe?
[Chalmers] Johnson cuts right to the essential issue, which is not just the plethora of bases, but certain recently-established military installations:The idea of permanent military bases in Iraq is simply ghastly, as most Americans can intuit by this point. Every permanent base there, established and maintained in such a bloody fashion, would irresistably attract every militant in the middle east."At the same time, they don't say anything about 14 permanent bases being built in Iraq. Four are already built: Tallil Air Base, Baghdad, the one in the north near Mosul and the one over on the border with Syria. They don't say anything about the bases in Jabuti, in the Saharan Desert, in Mali and places like that."
Neither Kerry nor Bush wants to talk about those particular bases, or what they imply. Whatever their disagreements over particular nuances, both "major" party candidates support the concept of a semi-permanent American military presence in Iraq.
Beyond that, this mutual nonaggression pact underscores the role of the two parties as twin pillars of a foreign policy based on hubris, and rooted in the grating, militant self-righteousness of our ruling elites that has – rightly – made us the objects of worldwide opprobrium.
"Good!" they say. "Bring the Terrorists out to fight!!! Bring em on, hash it out over there, stay on offense!"
Yeah. That's working out smoothly. Such a strategy is BASED on abusing and disrespecting the occupied nation, because then the goal is to turn into a bloody wasteland, you cannot but reach disaster.
Next story: the improbable tale of Israeli counterterror expert and sexual harrassment victim Golan Cipel. Now, some might say that it's a little odd to have an Israeli citizen acting as the main counter-terror czar in a crucial place like New Jersey. But wait, there's more! Evidently Cipel—or someone else named Golan Cipel—worked at the Israeli Consulate General in New York City, handling the public relations side of government activities. Raimondo's column has all sorts of interesting links to Internet search archives, such as the Google USENET archives that include a ton of the "Israel Line" government press releases that Cipel helped write. And, according to Raimondo, he's made a few interesting statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here and there.
Also, Raimondo cites one hell of an odd posting from the right-wing FreeRepublic.com news site from November 2002 that says:
Perfect accuracy nearly two years ago, filched away on this madcap right-wing site. I find that rather stunning... In any case, Cipel sounds like he was fairly close to the Israeli intelligence services. Oh well.... besides this the neo-cons are lining up to sneak into the opposition. Check the door for sweaty, militant old bureaucrats, please. In a column about the late libertarian Mike Mayakis he referred to an old piece about how Superman was anti-war...and Captain America saw Nixon hang himself? Meanwhile this cheesy piece asserts that comics suddenly got political out of nowhere. Right.
NJ has within its borders a scandal which makes the Clinton/Lewinsky matter a walk in the park. The press has danced around the real issue. It will be revealed that what has occured in the Garden State is a scandal of the greatest importance. It will lead to the resignation of its current Governor James McGreevey due to his abuse of office and the NJ tax payers to prop up Golan Cipel. The nature of their real relationship is on the verge of breaking into the spotlight. This will be earth shattering.To: deepthroatnnj
I know what it is. That Isreali friend of McGreevy's who was on the payroll is really his gay lover.
2 posted on 11/03/2002 2:26:41 PM PST by Rodney King
There are some sweet political ads that Errol Morris is making for MoveOn.org. Seemingly modeled on the Apple Switch ads, that Morris also made, these are pretty sweet, and remind me of Fog of War because of the "Interrotron," a teleprompter-based interview device that Morris put together to really extract a directness from people. See the ads on this delightful PAC donation page.
Christopher Hitchens is such an idiot, I can't believe he got suckered into defending Ahmed Chalabi. What the hell?
I will summarize a few nice bits from Billmon, who has gone fishin' for a while. On the Valerie Plame/Get Scooter front, the prosecution zeroes in, but will Libby defend himself by claiming that other reporters already knew Plame was an agent? An older story asks if it will end at the Supreme Court.
To flip to the right, we have some columns from SoldiersForTheTruth.com, a really interesting source for perspectives on the strange mush of tortured politics of today's U.S. military. John Lehman from the 9/11 Commission says, damn right we are after the Islamic fundamentalists, so where's the leadership? The editor of DefenseWatch, Ed Offley, says we need to get more alert about Muslim soldiers as "the enemy within" acting for Al-Qaeda. I liked the bit by the site's main editor, David Hackworth, about a nation, divided again:
...Kerry’s campaign push on how he Ramboed his way through the war – for four months – rubs a lot of vets the wrong way. And it does take its toll on those of us who prefer our heroes to be modest, unassuming types like Alvin York – who stayed the course until it was “Over, over there.”But politics and style aside, Kerry did serve with distinction in Vietnam when he easily could have avoided that killing field. His service to his country shouldn’t be diminished by the same despicable, politically motivated tactics visited upon Sens. John McCain in South Carolina and Max Cleland in Georgia, also Viet vets. This kind of gutter-bashing doesn’t belong in American politics, and vets shouldn’t allow themselves to be used as ammo for cheap shots at one of their own.
The stalwart Brown Water Navy warriors who fought at Kerry’s side say he was A-OK, which is good enough for me. The muckrakers such as John O’Neill and his Swiftboat snipers – who didn’t sail on his boat but served anywhere from 100 meters to 300 miles away – are now coming off like eyewitnesses when in fact not one of their testimonies would hold up in a court of law. A judge would call these men liars and disallow their biased statements.
I’ve been in a fair number of battles in my lifetime, first fighting for my country in several hot wars, then covering a dozen conflicts as a correspondent. And I’ve learned that if you can’t see the fight right up close, smell it, hear it and touch it, you can’t possibly bear witness.
[......]
[John] O’Neill and his chorus of haters are still in their get-Kerry mode. I suspect the decades-long fury is still fueled by Kerry’s high-profile anti-war stance when he returned home. That was a position that was taken by hundreds of thousands of other Viet vets, including myself in 1971 – which, according to Joe Califono's recent book, Inside: A Public Life, almost cost me my life.
Not just Ted Kennedy, but hundreds of people are being screwed by airline watch lists. Ught.
Now it's official: Arthur Cheng is returning from his circuit around Asia and will be in the twin cities until this Thursday, when he will jet back to University of Puget Sound. He's been on the tour of Hong Kong, Beijing and Thailand, and will no doubt regale us with tales of the Orient. There shall have to be a party.
In a very fortunate turn, the Linux kernel compiling, bootloadery and installation all went off with only a few hitches, so now we are good to go with....
Bumm Bumm Bummmm...
That's right folks, Tarfin is a Dell Dimension 4400, a Pentium 4 operating at 1.60 gigahertz. The operating system is Gentoo Linux, development branch with the Linux 2.6.8-gentoo-r1 kernel.
The basic plan is to get PHP, MySQL and Apache 2 going, and we should be ready to roll. My associates are looking at which new types of content management/portal software we should use...
For those of you keeping score, you might recall that the much slower server was also called Tarfin. Well, for historical reasons, I am sticking with the name until I get a good fast server going. Which evidently happened this morning. YAY!
Ok, ok, ok... right now I am in front of the computer rather than getting social on my last Friday before the big trip east. Lame?? Yeah.... but I have a lot of stuff to do, and little time to do it in.
Essentially everything hinges on getting the Indian plumbing fixture catalog done before the end of the weekend, and there's about 300 images left to be placed, one way or another. That should take much of the weekend.
However, in a positive turn, I was ultimately able to procure the Dell Pentium 4 desktop machine that Dan Schned's brother had replaced with a shiny new Apple iBook G4. (There are a lot of Apple converts among the Schneds lately.)
This will cost me some money, however, as the cash is ultimately for Dan's new Apple laptop he's trying to get on Saturday. This Dell will cost me $80 to $100, depending on how reliable the hardware turns out to be. I already had to yank out the busted CD-RW drive because it was made by some horrible Taiwanese manufacturer called "Lite-On It Corp." However, another drive that I swapped in worked all right.
The aim of this flurry of technical activity is to get a new web server set up. After having installed Gentoo Linux on a crappy Pentium 2 borrowed from my upstairs neighbor Eric, I've decided that Gentoo is damn sweet, and the best thing to set up a good server on.
Now that we have a Pentium 4 @ 1.6 GHz, the Plot Can Advance.
But in truth, I can't spend all weekend fiddling with this machine, no matter how appealing to my geek tendencies it might be. Instead the everlasting plumbing catalog must be finished.
However, I might spend a good chunk of Saturday helping Nick Petersen move to his new digs in Minneapolis, on Huron Avenue by Interstate 94. BEATS THE HELL OUT OF WOODBURY, THAT'S FER SHERRR!
Ok, this is the last round of stories to throw up before I clean up the computer for some hard-core graphics stuff, so....
Chalmers Johnson, the author of Sorrows of Empire and an all-around interesting analyst, says that the troop realignment is a weird gesture, but then again, nothing that the Bush Administration does makes any sense.
In Iraq, Sadr wants to talk. Or not. He is so damn twitchy, it's ridiculous. The 8-day battle grinds to a stalemate. So is Sadr actually a unifying factor? This Pepe Escobar piece says it is... Pepe is one of those anti-Bush folks who always has something interesting going on, but I'm not sure if I find it as credible, as, say, Robert Fisk or Jim Lobe, two other journalists in funky territory.
Meanwhile arms inspector David Kay faults the pre-war intelligence.
Some atoms flew in formation. Wow. I don't get the science involved, but hey, why not?
Two things: firstly, Porter Goss is part and parcel one of Dick Cheney's evil congressional badger brigades, as a Congresscritter acting to cover up investigations into the intelligence distortions that unfolded into the invasion of Iraq. Like Cheney's little finger, said Billmon:
Goss - last seen in Farenheit 9/11 giving out the number to an entirely ficticious civil liberties complaint hotline - is a former CIA operative turned Florida hack congressman who has made himself useful to the administration in ways both large and small, not least by savaging the reputation of the agency he once worked for and now hopes to lead.Billmon referred to an excellent piece in CounterPunch by Ray McGovern, retired CIA dude and a representative of the "sane" intelligence analysts around Washington, ripping Goss apart as a horrible Republican piece of garbage:In other words, picking Porter Goss to be CIA director is roughly the same as nominating Dick Cheney's little finger...
...There are plenty of Mexicans dying for the War on Terror... David Ignatius says that the GWOT (military acronym for take over the world global war on terror) shouldn't get politicized, but of course it already has, shamelessly:
That possibility conjures up a painful flashback for those of us who served as CIA analysts when Richard Nixon was president. Chalk it up to our naivete, but we were taken aback when swashbuckling James Schlesinger, who followed Richard Helms as CIA director, announced on arrival, "I am here to see that you guys don't screw Richard Nixon!" To underscore his point, Schlesinger told us he would be reporting directly to White House political adviser Bob Haldeman (Nixon's Karl Rove) and not to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.No doubt Goss would be more discreet in showing his hand, but his appointment as director would be the ultimate in politicization. He has long shown himself to be under the spell of Vice President Dick Cheney, and would likely report primarily to him and to White House political adviser Karl Rove rather than to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Goss would almost certainly follow lame-duck director George Tenet's practice of reading to the president in the morning and become an integral part of the "White House team." The team-membership phenomenon is particularly disquieting.
If the failure-prone experience of the past few years has told us anything, it is that being a "team member" in good standing is the kiss of death for the CIA director's primary role of "telling it like it is" to the president and his senior advisers. It was a painful moment of truth when former Speaker Newt Gingrich--like Cheney, a frequent visitor to CIA headquarters--told the press that Tenet was "so grateful to the president that he would do anything for him."
But now to delightful Pakistan, where nothing makes sense. This Salon piece, "Subcontracting the hunt for Bin Laden," by a former bigshot of the deposed civilian government was quite unnerving:
A government has no asset more precious than public trust. That's especially true for a nation threatened by a terrorist adversary, where good intelligence and reliable warnings can save lives. By linking its reelection campaign so closely to the war on terrorism, the Bush administration has eroded its credibility -- to the point that some members of the public are beginning to wonder whether terrorism warnings are all just politics. The administration risks compounding that climate of politicization by nominating a sitting Republican member of Congress, Porter Goss, to be the next CIA director.
The relative transparency of the U.S. political system should make it difficult for U.S. officials to be blatant about linking political agendas to a national security issue such as the war against terrorism. In an article titled "July Surprise?" in the New Republic, published several weeks before the Democratic Convention, John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman and Massoud Ansari wrote of pressure on Pakistan by the Bush administration to produce a "high-value target" around the time of the convention to steal Kerry's thunder. The suggestion was rejected by some as a conspiracy theory at the time, but when Pakistan announced the arrest of Ghailani, a Tanzanian, in Gujarat, Pakistan, hours before Kerry's acceptance speech, eyebrows were raised even among those Americans who normally dismiss such conspiracy theories.Meanwhile the Paki government is now going to go after the grandaddy of all Islamic fundamentalist organizations, Jamaat-e-Islami, and the results won't be predictable:For the Bush administration to have risked playing politics with the timing of arrest of terror suspects is a disturbing enough possibility. More disturbing is the prospect that the initiative to gain political advantage from these arrests came not from the Bush administration but from the Musharraf regime. By subcontracting the hunt for bin Laden to an authoritarian ally who has a special interest in the flow of economic and military benefits resulting from this contract, the administration may be giving that ally a powerful say in America's political agenda whose effect is to undermine the war against al-Qaida.
Musharraf's enlistment in the war on terrorism is an extension of Pakistan's long-established willingness to be useful to the United States for the "right price." Pakistan's first military ruler, Gen. (later Field Marshal) Ayub Khan (who ruled from 1958 to 1969), told U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Henry Byroade as early as 1953, "Our army can be your army if you want us." Ever since, Pakistan's military leadership has seen its alliance with America as its meal ticket.
[.....]
As long as the U.S.-Pakistan relationship remains a single-issue alliance based on the quid pro quo of changes in Pakistani policy for U.S. money, the regime in Islamabad will continue to be tempted to take its time in finding all the terrorists at large in Pakistan. After all, most subcontractors who are paid by the hour take longer to get the job done. And while this may seem like a risky scheme for Musharraf, it conforms to the past pattern of Pakistani military regimes collecting rent from the United States for providing strategic services.
Under immense pressure from the United States, a slow and gradual operation has begun in Pakistan against the strongest political voice of Islamists and the real mother of international Islamic movements, of which Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front is the spoiled child.From that new blog of Steve Clemons, "Who are the real neo-cons?" looking at a new book, "America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order" by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke. Sounds excellent, but how much have I heard before? Old David Broder says that Bush has Two Albatrosses: going into the war, and not paying for it.In a surprise move this week, Pakistan's federal minister of the interior, Faisal Saleh Hayat, listed a number of incidences in which members of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), the premier fundamentalist party in the country, had been tied to al-Qaeda, and called on it to "explain these links".
"It is a matter of concern that Jamaat-e-Islami, which is a main faction of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal [MMA], has neither dissociated itself from its activists having links with the al-Qaeda network nor condemned their activities," Faisal said, adding that "one could derive a meaning out of its silence".
The MMA is an alliance of six religious parties that gained unprecedented electoral victories in national elections in 2002. One of its members is the leader of the opposition in the Lower House, while the MMA controls the provincial government in North West Frontier Province. It also forms part of a coalition government in Balochistan province. The MMA has 67 seats in the 342-seat National Assembly, with just under a third of them held by the JI.
[.....]
Intelligence insiders tell Asia Times Online that initial operations are not targeted against the main JI structure, but at lower-rank workers suspected of involvement in underground militant activities. At the same time, once this operation starts, it will be inevitable that it extends to the highest level. Further, every JI leader is involved with senior army officers, both serving and retired, and they will not be spared in the process.The JI is not only the largest, most organized and most resourceful organization in the country, it has deeper roots in the establishment than any other outfit. Tackling it will surely open a Pandora's box, and at the same time create a vicious backlash.
In the tit for tat realm of punditry, I say that this actually defines Kerry's position on the war, and Cheney accuses himself of sensitivity in the war on terror. Then the Daily Howler says: Cheney, thou have flipped and flopped!
The prospects for Israel's Likud-led government to become another national unity government with the Shimon Peres and the Labor party were narrowly squashed by the Likud central committee, one of the most obnoxious and counterproductive entities in the middle east. Haaretz on this whole mess:
Likud hands Sharon a crushing rebuff: Ariel Sharon suffered a crushing rebuff at last night's Likud convention when delegates voted for a proposal blocking the Labor Party's entry into a unity government, and rejected a proposal by the prime minister which would have effectively enabled him to hold talks with Labor.However, another article described how the anti-Sharon folks are actually really tired of dealing with the settlers:Convention members were asked to vote on two resolutions - one from Sharon, authorizing him to carry out coalition negotiations with any Zionist party, and a competing one from Minister Uzi Landau rejecting a coalition with Labor. Sharon's own proposal was defeated by just 5 votes - but Landau's passed 843 to 612, a majority of 231.
[....]
Nevertheless, it would be very difficult for Likud MKs to raise a hand in favor of a decision rejected so sweepingly by the convention, since it is the convention that controls their political fate - it chooses the party's Knesset list.The defeat was all the more humiliating for Sharon because, unlike at previous Likud party gatherings, he and his people worked hard to win this vote, lobbying convention members energetically and making sure that the hall was packed with Sharon supporters so that booing from opponents could be offset by cries of "Arik, King of Israel!"
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There is a faction within the Likud, Sharon charged, that "has worked against the government since its inception" and has now "announced that it intends to vote in the Knesset against the policy of our government, a Likud government. This is not appropriate behavior for members of a ruling party. It is behavior that is liable to bring the Likud to the verge of a split. We have to decide - will the Likud continue to run the country in a united, responsible and statesmanlike fashion, or is the Likud led by an extremist, rebellious and irresponsible opposition?"The Likud, he added, has suffered boycotts by other parties in the past, and precisely because of this, it should not itself boycott any Zionist party.
"I hear terrible cries of boycotts, hatred, bans, voices that threaten civil war... voices that call for violence against soldiers, policemen and even against me. We must make a different voice heard in the Likud... the voice of the late Menachem Begin, who prevented civil war before the founding of the state, who brought about a unity [government] on the eve of the Six Day War, who made peace with Egypt despite the difficulties. This is a voice that knows how to place the good of the state above any personal or party interest... If we do this, we will continue to be victorious."
[Minister] Livnat backed Sharon in her speech, declaring: "Any boycott of a Zionist party is unacceptable. It is unacceptable morally, and it will hurt us electorally... Every time the national camp has failed to line up behind its leader, we have lost."
But Minister without Portfolio Landau, one of the leading opponents of both disengagement and Labor's entry into the coalition, rejected both the allegation of boycott and the allegation that he and his fellows were a rebellious faction. It is Sharon, he charged, who has repeatedly "scorned" the Likud and its historic path - by terming Israel's presence in the territories an "occupation," by calling for a Palestinian state, and by ignoring the decision of Likud members, who rejected his disengagement plan in the May referendum.
Sharon's desire to bring in Labor is merely one more example of the prime minister's utter contempt for his own party, Landau said. As for Labor, "we aren't rejecting a party - we're rejecting a path," he said.
Labor's presence in the government, he said, would mean a return to the 1967 borders, the division of Jerusalem, an end to the army's determined war on terror, and the return of both Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat and Labor Party Chairman Shimon Peres to the center of the political stage.
One of the Likud leaders said, "It's hard for me to admit but the Likud must take the power away from the committee members, one way or another. You can't run a ruling party with more than 3,000 members, each thinking he can grab the prime minister by the balls. It's undignified, both for the party and the state."For other minutia from Israel, a non-Jewish woman's name on a memorial plaque to a suicide bombing was written differently than the Ultra-Orthodox victims of the bombing. People hate living next to the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv because it's noisy, smelly and has ruined their apartments. A Labor MK writes about how horrible economic conditions have become there, in essence due to the cutbacks needed to support the settlements and the war in Netanyahu's sandbox world. A rightwinger argues against considering a deal on the Golan Heights with Syria:
That is the interesting thing about Israel: people aren't sure if it's a nation or a narrative, no one likes smelly bus stops, and the enormously powerful ruling party is completely set against itself. Perhaps the only advantage of their coalition-parliamentary system is that it has some flexibility in theory, that better parties might go in and shift it leftward without another election. However, you can't do this if the overpowered Central Committee is stubborn, corrupt and worthless. Yet again this indicates that the problem with Israel might be that the executive actually isn't powerful enough against its internal rivals.
"Narrative" is a post-modern term that stresses relativity and subjectivity. In the history of the nations there is no absolute truth - except, of course, the Palestinian truth. It is important to reiterate and state that the life story of the Israeli nation in the land of Israel, the exile from the land and the people's cleaving to the land that developed in the Diaspora in order to return to the land, are neither myth nor relative truth. They, according to every historical and sociological parameter, are absolute truth, not narrative.There is no "clash between two narratives" here. Although a large group of Arabs who today call themselves Palestinians have formulated a national identity - and their success, due partly to Jewish failures, is quite convincing - and deny any Jewish connection to the land of Israel, no one, apart from Israel's enemies from within and without, relates seriously to this denial.
This was well put by the historian Prof. Ben-Zion Dinur, a Mapai (Land of Israel Workers Party) member and Israel's second education minister: The Arabs who arrived here in recent centuries have all the rights in the State of Israel, but no rights to the land of Israel.
While listening to MPR this afternoon I learned that they are in the process of purchasing St. Olaf College's non-profit radio station WCAL, another classical station on 89.3 FM, for $10.5 million. They don't have the cash on hand, so they are borrowing it. Gary Eichten just asked, "Is Minnesota Public Radio out to conquer the world?" in his classic way. Hahahahaaa....
I would say this will probably work out very nicely, but I'm not sure if such a nerdy thing as a St. Olaf classical station could ever become cool.
The press release has some helpful info:
WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH WCAL?On a tangent there's kind of a funny story in Haaretz about Ultra-Orthodox pirate radio stations in Israel.
We do not yet have specific plans as we did not expect this opportunity to be on the horizon this year. Over the years, we have explored several formats that we think would be valuable services for the Twin Cities. Now we will have the opportunity to work with the community to develop the best one.We will maintain the current classical music format until we are able to determine the best use for the frequency. We acted quickly because it was most important for us to save the frequency for public radio. For the long term, we will review other options, such as programming not currently available to the 2.6 million people within the range of the WCAL signal.
The future of signature WCAL national programs such as Sing for Joy and annual broadcast of the St Olaf Christmas Festival, which are St. Olaf's programs, is still under consideration.
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WHY DID ST. OLAF DECIDE TO SELL THEIR STATION TO MINNESOTA PUBLIC RADIO?
St. Olaf said in its press release that it wanted to sell WCAL to an entity that would reflect the college's values and that would appreciate the 80 years of dedication and hard work that went into building the station's programming and broad listenership. President Christopher M. Thomforde noted Minnesota Public Radio's mission "to enrich the mind and nourish the spirit" and its 37-year history of operating public radio stations, and called it a "perfect partner" to carry on WCAL's legacy. St. Olaf said it would use the assets of the sale to strengthen the college's endowment and support programs that strengthen the college's mission.HOW MANY LISTENERS DOES WCAL REACH? HOW MANY MEMBERS? WHAT IS ITS HISTORY?
WCAL reaches more than 80,000 listeners each week in the Twin Cities and Rochester areas, with broadcast transmitters in Rosemount and Rochester. It began as a student physics experiment in 1918. It was licensed as an AM broadcast station in 1922 and received its FM license in 1968. WCAL has 8,000 members.
It's fitting that finally, at this late date, I saw this President we've heard so much about. The War on Terror came to Hudson, Wisconsin, and I posted up at Second and Locust, just outside the security perimeter. At least there weren't any of those 'free speech zones' today. Rather, Bush and Kerry partisans circulated freely. I was more agitated than usual because this was an infringement on my home turf.
The roads were blocked off by city dump trucks to block car bombs. Did that mean they weren't just dump trucks, but Dump Trucks in the War on Terror?
Three large Bush-Cheney buses came up from Exit 1 and I basically grimaced there. In 10 minutes they had gone up another block and turned down towards the river. Peering from my spot on Second Street down to the "HUDSON, WIS." archway at the end of the dike where they built the stage, the buses pulled up in tandem and for a blazing moment George W. Bush, in a blue shirt, worked the crowd lined up on the other side.
A whole crush of people were all around us, standing on railings around a pit reaching the basement windows of this corner building. I turned because Jon Lyons couldn't see a damn thing, so I crouched down and made a bridge with my hands, and Jon saw Bush ascend onto the stage and out of sight behind the buses. That was the end of our contact with the Officeholder.
In an interesting side story, my sister and some friends apparently sneaked most of the way through the security zone, in a sense proving that the war on terror is smaller than Lakefront Park. I will have to follow up on this exciting story.
I want to post this satellite photograph of the enormous holy cemetery where the Marines have been ordered to crush the Iraqi fighters. This diagram, perhaps a little out of date, still shows how we are basically rushing the holy site... to prove what? What does it gain the United States of America to wipe out those guys, sitting, waiting around the all-important shrine of Ali. Is this some kind of windup for the big pitch into the apocalypse? Are the waves of bombers shocking and aweing like they were supposed to?
The al-Sadr / all-Shi'ite freakout continues as the Iranians get missiles and the aerial bombardment of ancient places escalates. How much can get crushed?? How quickly??
In this context I will place the appearance of the G. W. Bush in my hometown of Hudson about 12 hours from now. What will happen? Who knows? In any case, I will regard that spot as the place where this cruising hallucination of a government planted its flag in my space. Then an appearance at the Xcel Center.
Saw Norm Coleman on the Daily Show. Stewart was shocked, shocked that Norm was a nice Jewish Democrat from Brooklyn at some point. Coleman sported a nearly identical outfit to Stewart, which spurred a whole weird episode.
Anyhow I will round up quickly the main bits. See the anguished Iraqi blogs Baghdad Burning:
300+ dead in a matter of days in Najaf and Al Sadir City. Of course, they are all being called ‘insurgents’. The woman on tv wrapped in the abaya, lying sprawled in the middle of the street must have been one of them too. Several explosions rocked Baghdad today- some government employees were told not to go to work tomorrow.Raed in the Middle:So is this a part of the reconstruction effort promised to the Shi’a in the south of the country? Najaf is considered the holiest city in Iraq. It is visited by Shi’a from all over the world, and yet, during the last two days, it has seen a rain of bombs and shells from none other than the ‘saviors’ of the oppressed Shi’a- the Americans. So is this the ‘Sunni Triangle’ too? It’s déjà vu- corpses in the streets, people mourning their dead and dying and buildings up in flames. The images flash by on the television screen and it’s Falluja all over again. Twenty years from now who will be blamed for the mass graves being dug today?
We’re waiting again for some sort of condemnation. I, personally, never had faith in the American selected proxy government currently pretending to be in power- but for some reason, I keep thinking that any day now- any moment- one of the Puppets, Allawi for example, will make an appearance on television and condemn all the killing. One of them will get in front of a camera and announce his resignation or at the very least, his utter disgust, at the bombing, the burning and the killing of hundreds of Iraqis and call for an end to it… it’s a foolish hope, I know.
Raed also contributed to the Iraqi casualty database.
As I said once before, don’t tell someone to go to hell, unless u can really send him there.What are we gaining?
We, Americans and Arabs, what did we gain after all of those years of the war on terror?Thousands of bodies, and more hate.
What did we, Iraqis, gain after months of occupation and destruction?
A silly selected government? With a CIA agent as our PM and a Sheikh of a tribe as our president?Our fat Sheikh speaks English in his conferences…
What a great president…
Please, tell him that he is the president of Iraq, an Arabic country, even if he was taking his salary from what’s his name… bremer.When is this comedy play going to finish
I am not amused.
Then says Fred Kaplan: No Way Out:
No solutions in sightThis whole matter with the Pakistani Khan Al-Qaeda e-mail prisoner's name getting leaked by someone, and Condi saying such odd things about it, is just another example of this Administration's tendency to throw out very important information in an effort to gain some odd degree of spin that barely even helps their horrible situation. Juan Cole is trying to figure out how the terror alert might have led to the Khan leak, exactly. I don't know where to pass judgment, it's too messed up.
This is a terribly grim thing to say, but there might be no solution to the problem of Iraq. There might be nothing we can do to build a path to a stable, secure, let alone democratic regime. And there's no way we can just pull out without plunging the country, the region, and possibly beyond into still deeper disaster.Much as the Bush administration hoped otherwise, the fighting didn't stop—or so much as turn a corner—after sovereignty passed from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the new government of Iraq. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi made a fine speech on the occasion about dealing with the insurgency, especially the need to isolate the foreign jihadists from the homegrown rebels who simply don't like being occupied. But the distinction has turned out to be muddy, and it will remain so until Allawi demonstrates he deserves their loyalty—that is, until he proves that he's independent from his American benefactors and competent at restoring basic services.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military—the only force in Iraq remotely capable of keeping the country from falling apart—finds itself in a maddening situation where tactical victories yield strategic setbacks. The Marines could readily defeat the insurgents in Najaf, but only at the great risk of inflaming Shiites—and sparking still larger insurgencies—elsewhere. In the Sadr City section of Baghdad, as U.S. commanders acknowledge, practically every resident is an insurgent.
Know your ayatollahs. Quickly.
The Ancient city of Samarra. A Hotbed of violence. Really!?! That's what happens when you bomb a place.
For some reason this place is considered related to my site. It reminds me of mine but I don't understand the reason.
Paul commented that
That isn't what I meant to convey. The outlet in question was up on the pole in the alley. The puppy didn't do it. The actual term for the fried thing is the 'line tap,' I think, inside the box on the telephone that the cable connects to. And Comcast fixed it for free, because we pay them plenty as it is, so they better fix their own boxes when they get messed up.
So I'm paying Comcast to fix your puppy chewed outlet? Sheesh.Oh wait. I don't have Comcast.
Whatever. They're all the same.
Paul would be one of the people I took a class with this summer. He sports the blog Bush-haters.blogspot.com. Big ups to him for stopping by. Next time I'll clarify that we don't have too much electronic puppy sabotage going around here... at least so far.
Well, the site was down for much of the weekend, unfortunately, as something went fuzzy on Saturday afternoon, while I was in Utah. The Comcast guy came at about 9 this morning, and after all these rounds of repairs I was able to tell him a thing or two about the hookup here. There are crazy voltage problems somewhere along the line, between the outside of the house and the closet, that changed the signal voltage really negative, while now it's really positive.
Fortunately the problem was outside. In other news the upstairs people Eric and Kirsten have a new puppy named Mia or Mya. It is a fuzzy golden retriever a few weeks old and Eric let her out right as the cable guy was going outside and the puppy jumped at the cable guy and ran all over the place—including darting under the edge of the fence and into the alley. But she looped around the car and came back, moving in circles as the retrievers tend to do. Also teething a lot.
So in this instance, Comcast came first thing in the morning after I called and fixed it right away. Kudos to that! The problem was a crumbled jack, or something...
I will tell some tales of the wedding in Utah later...
Ok then kids, my dad will be here in like 20 minutes. I have all these browser windows to clean out before I go to Utah, so this will be a little funky. But interesting stuff.
josh Marshall points out a new washington blog. this guy wrote a sweet article about think tanks.
low numbers for bush. checkpoints.
Robert Fisk says Iraq imploding. Durrr.
mccain and the swift boat veterans thing.
israel says to hell with road map, more suburbs in west bank!! interesting letters.
Alan Keyes is the Quintessential American
The internal press squabbles about WMD lameness
particles information holes etc.
After the convention, Democrats are reclaiming the center says Dionne. Right wing son of a bitch liked Obama. Explosions of applause etc. krugman on the Script. go to hell Brooks.
So then are the Dems shifting to the right on foreign policy?!
Dissection of Iraq lies from before. So then why did they go to the desert? the uprising is a test!
American prisons are horrible too.
i saw this sweet video called Spin that was made from unedited network TV satellite transitions, and people come across as racist or just batshit crazy, in Larry King's case. About Spin [1 2 3 4 5 6]
I liked Manchurian Candidate. Read Ebert's review of the classic original and the new one.
Keep reading TPM. Duhhh.
Iraq reconstruction funding has spawned 27 criminal inquiries. what the hell?!
Most important: does M. Night Shammaaaala (no time to type) suck as director?
OK I am the hell out of here!!!! Peace to y'all!!!!! Be back Sunday!
Mordred has posted something about Donald Trump this morning so I suggest ya check it. Again I'll note that he's going to have a top link on the side here, but I haven't had the time to change my templates yet, and I guess I won't until I get back.
The wild documentary "Outfoxed" that even Kerry is mentioning finally arrived at my house yesterday and I haven't had time to watch it yet. It sounds awesome though.
Well well, it took one hell of a long time, but my summer video project is finally finished. I decided to call it 'Between the Lines' because that's where I'm always looking, true?
In the University lab right now, I am burning a total of four DVD copies. Turns out the first two that I made last night have a couple glitches in the menus that i didn't catch. I would also like to note that Apple's DVD Studio Pro, while a fairly powerful and intuitive program, is really annoying because it seems to always want to render (in this case called 'compiling' menus and 'muxing' tracks) every time I want to burn a copy. In other words, it is rendering out the whole thing, and then throwing it away every time. What the hell? It wastes like 20 minutes a disc.
On the other hand I may have been using the wrong command, 'Build' instead of 'Build/Format.' Right now it's doing the latter, so my hopes are higher.
So I am getting picked up at 3:30 today to fly out to Utah for my cousins' wedding. As I wait for the discs to burn, let me share some quick headlines that have been sitting around. I have a stack of about 30 links to post up. In the meantime here's a smaller collection of older tidbits:
Times feature on a woman who educates naive county officials on the madness of electronic ballot systems. What can I say? These things scare the hell out of me and I try not to think about it. Some terrorist plotting to disrupt the election? Who cares, we've got electronic machines that can eat votes by what, the millions?
In Iraq
The Times has switched its little "Iraq news theme" motif to "THE REACH OF WAR: THREATS AND RESPONSES" with scary looking narrow type. Hey, they gotta be selling papers....
This cemetary fighting in Najaf is some seriously creepy stuff. Can you imagine the chills on their spines as the Marines go into this ancient collection of Shi'ite graves? This type of situation is so incredibly combustible I don't even know what to say. And Robert Fisk (or was it Juan Cole?) said that the governor of the province is some unemployed old Iraqi they dragged out of Michigan. However, I think that the anger Iraqis feel about violating the sanctity of the cemetary is perhaps directed as much to Muqtada al -Sadr's guys that hunkered down there. I mean, it's not exactly a standard insurrection tactic. Then again, if you were a fanatical pre-millennialist you might want to bring about a more mythic Mahdi Army by fighting among the dead spirits. Or something like that. Like I said, chills on the neck.
A National Guardsman was ordered to look the other way at torturous conditions in an Iraqi detention center. Down the slippery slope...
Newsweek on Fallujah: "We Pray the Insurgents Will Achieve Victory."
Al Jazeera shut down in Iraq again?grouchy ministers. So is Jazeera just a Jihadi PR device? (I don't buy that; Control Room really put the idea away)
Elsewhere
Alternet on the vast right-wing Scaife conspiracy and more specifically his grudge against Teresa Heinz-Kerry.
"Afghanistan's Transition: Decentralization or Civil War?" on EurasiaNet. Indeed.
BAGnewsNotes has the best regular collection of parody images. Laughs every day.
Kerry has an interview in the Army newspaper Stars & Stripes, and it's really a pretty gutsy one. Nice work on both sides. But does this stuff, particularly about the global military base arrangement, mean Kerry is just going to play the military-industrial game yet again? (in fairness, Kerry is not a huge military pork enthusiast) He knows the jargon pretty well.
I found this random weird online science fiction story via a BlogAd. Just for something different.
Ok, so right now I am sitting in the computer lab at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities West Bank, where I took an electronic arts class. My video is rendering for what I hope will be the final time.
The process of making a DVD entails generating a huge MPEG-2 video file that DVD Studio Pro burns onto DVD-Rs. This process works best when the computer processes the whole video stream twice?or two-pass variable bit-rate encoding. It just started the second pass about 10 minutes ago.
In a delightful turn of events, the DVD recording of John Kerry's appearance at Macalester that I ordered from C-SPAN in the middle of last month finally showed up this morning. I brought it straight into the lab here and extracted my 15 seconds of C-SPAN fame for the project. This would be "Fair Use" if such a thing still exists.
Having just written about DVD decryption for my journalism law class, it was interesting to try the process again. The tools are easier than ever to find. The indispensible VersionTracker readily lists several programs that will hack DVD copyright protections for you, a gutsy step considering that not too long ago, those who linked to DeCSS got their butts kicked in court.
So in other words, to get DVD footage into a personal project on the Mac, it is basically a two-step process. First, extract the chapters you need with DVD2oneX, which works even if you haven't registered (and don't forget to get the audio as well). This will produce a decrypted .VOB file inside a VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive. Then use the freeware MPEG Streamclip to turn the .VOB file into whatever format you need, in my case a digital video stream.
It took quite a bit of fiddling to find the programs and get it working, but the results are undeniable. Now I've really got the kicker for the end of my disc. Hurry up and render now!!!!!!
In other grand news,
HongPong.com has another blog... bumm bumm bumm...
That dark denizen of Wild Canyon, Mordred himself, i.e. Nick Petersen, is going to shower us with his irregularly formed thoughts on an intermittent basis. Or else he will take us to David Brooks-like heights of flowery mescal divinations.
The new blog is located at http://www.hongpong.com/mordred, and I will be setting up some new menus and update boxes so that Nick's latest is excerpted on the front page.
Nick also has a posting account to this page, as well, so he may yet add some wisdom to the front page, if he so chooses. And Nick has just informed me that his associate Leroy Babolian is about to make his first post.
Further down the road, I have secured the donation of one aged Dell Pentium 4/1.1GHz machine to act as a Linux server once I return from a family wedding after this weekend. We will probably institute something like TikiWiki, Scoop or PHP-Nuke for our global plot to thwart control of everything.
I will be gone from Wednesday to Sunday, up in the mountains above Salt Lake City, participating in a most modern ceremony. Should be fun.
Andy just sent me this link to White House West, a fakr White House ad starring Will Ferrell stumbling around down at the ranch.
Can you believe that Bush is going on another huge vacation? WTF... do they think that a more relaxed, wood-chopping oriented president is expressing an image of leadership?
The project is coming along nicely, over these horribly long days in the lab all week. And I've gotten a parking ticket... back to it now...
Last night I burned a draft version of the DVD, and I found that many of the transitions I'd put in were no good. I remember that the same thing happened on a project before.
The problem with making videos on the computer is that the screen makes all these visual distortions in how it represents motion. It makes transitions and wipes look fuzzier than they actually are, and the video color balance is a lot darker.
When we did the "American Women in World War II" video, we had a digital video camera hooked right up to the computer all the time, and the camera passed its signal out to the television, so you could see the way it bulges outwards and cuts off the sides of the picture, and how weird some things look that you can't see at all from the computer.
The problem is that this University lab has little TVs, but they can't represent what people are doing on the computers. So it took until tonight to see a bunch of glitches...
I have to work on stuff all day today but I had to post this amazing bit. Israeli anarchists broke through the West Bank barrier, a brilliant application of anarchy:
Activists, Palestinians break through fence near Tul Karm
By Yoav Stern, Haaretz CorrespondentPalestinian residents of the West Bank village of Kafr Zeita and anti-separation fence activists on Monday burst through a gate in the barrier separating the village from its agricultural lands.
Activists from the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement and the Israeli group Anarchists Against the Fence said this was the first time demonstrators have managed to break through the barrier.
Activists and residents of the village, located north of Tul Karm, began breaking through the gate when there were no Israel Defense Forces soldiers present. When the first patrol jeep arrived on the scene, the gate had already been opened.
"Nothing will dissuade us from breaking this fence," Yonatan Pollack, of Anarchists Against the Fence, said.
The organization's activity in Kafr Zeita was part of its protest march from Jenin to Jerusalem along the route of the separation fence. The march is slated to end in another two weeks.
In 2003, Anarchists activist Gil Na'amati was wounded by IDF gunfire during an attempt by the group to break through the fence.
