Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Arafat's sudden illness has prompted a flurry of activity all over. The Israeli military is of course concerned about what might happen after he dies, to the extent that rioting Palestinians might overrun settlements and military positions in the territories, or that Jordan, pressed between the West Bank and Iraq, could get violent.
Within the West Bank, occupation policy is tense (via Haaretz):
IDF commanders were instructed, should such a situation arise, to do everything in their power to prevent a flare-up and reduce friction between troops and Palestinian demonstrators in West Bank and Gaza towns. Even so, commanders were also told to make every effort to prevent demonstrations from overrunning IDF roadblocks and settlements in the territories.
In the Ramallah area, IDF troops were put on a raised level of alert, fearing that the gravity of Arafat's condition would spark a wave of Palestinian demonstrations.
Military sources believe that the causes of Arafat's deterioration would have a direct effect on the extent to which Israel is held responsible for his death, even though the IDF is not particularly active in Ramallah recently nor has it strictly maintained the siege on his headquarters.
Still, IDF sources say that should Arafat die, soldiers will be told to respect Palestinian mourning rituals, thereby avoiding a situation in which expressions of joy of Israeli soldiers cause emotions to ignite.
Early IDF discussions on the matter included the question of where Arafat would be buried. The PA chairman had in the past stated that he wished to be buried on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, although it is unlikely that Israel would ever agree to this.
"Divvying Up Arafat's Powers." At least the Palestinians are already planning a round of elections in a couple months.
Inside Israel, we now see the emergence of a messianic, pro-settler faction within Likud led by Benjamin Netanyahu. We need to fear this man:
Netanyahu revolted against Sharon on live television. For three years he has been repeating to his people that he would not depose the prime minister because he is not willing to sit on a chair that is bleeding. This week he did, although in an embarrassing way, but there is no need to worry. He will recover. The person who managed to recover after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and go on to win the elections will ultimately succeed in defeating the elderly leader who is now clinging to the tattered remnants of his party.
Henceforth it will be like in the period prior to the 1996 elections. Netanyahu is now conducting a campaign for the leadership of the Likud party and in order to do this he is turning to his home camp, the Yesha (settlers' acronym for the territories: Judea, Samaria and Gaza - which also means "salvation" in Hebrew) Council, the courts of the National Religious Party rabbis and Shas leader Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef. When the moment rolls around he will run a national campaign - he once again will go back to being "moderate" and speak to Shinui voters.
The dumb Shas party is against withdrawal, says the settler news.
"Dismantling Jewish communities in Gush Katif and northern Samaria would endanger Israel," Shas party spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said Saturday night. "Next, they will chase Jews out of Ashkelon, [West Bank city Hebron] Hevron and Be'er Sheva; there will be no end!"
Speaking in his weekly Saturday night sermon, which drew much more press coverage than usual given its political content and ramifications, Rabbi Yosef ruled that the 11 Shas MKs - and others - must vote against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan. The Rabbi's decision stonewalled Sharon’s attempt to win an impressive majority in the Knesset when the disengagement bill comes to a first reading on Tuesday.
The rightwing WorldNetDaily reported it believed that the ailing Mr. Arafat prefers that Kerry wins. This item via the settler news service Arutz Sheva. It's a one-time opportunity for progress, eh? What kinds of shakeups for the Middle East?
A writeup on CounterPunch critical of Thomas Friedman's sudden turn against the Bush Administration because it regards the Israeli-American hegemon issue as something transmitted via TV.
In some random domestic headlines,
Is Bush's website blocking international visitors?
Tom DeLay's corruption may bite him on the ass in the election, before he goes down for certain indictment. Wouldn't that be sweet if Texas voters knocked him out first?
Ralph Nader has a letter from a Minnesota highway. Fuck him and the tarmac he rides on.
This is the partial transcript of Osama Bin Laden's recent video released on Al Jazeera. I have to say the best thing about it was his podium.
DUBAI, Oct 30 - Following are excerpts from a speech by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden addressing the American people in a video tape, parts of which were aired by Al Jazeera television on Saturday, as translated by Reuters.
"O American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results.
"Security is an important foundation of human life and free people do not squander their security, contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. Let him tell us why we did not attack Sweden, for example.
"It is known that those who hate freedom do not possess proud souls like those of the 19, may God rest their souls. We fought you because we are free and because we want freedom for our nation. When you squander our security we squander yours.
"I am surprised by you. Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened.
"God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed -- when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet.
"In those difficult moments many emotions came over me which are hard to describe, but which produced an overwhelming feeling to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust.
"As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way [and] to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.
"We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush and his administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half by the sons of kings ... They have a lot of pride, arrogance, greed and thievery.
"He [Bush] adopted despotism and the crushing of freedoms from Arab rulers and called it the Patriot Act under the guise of combating terrorism.....
"We had agreed with the [the Sept. 11] overall commander Mohammed Atta, may God rest his soul, to carry out all operations in 20 minutes before Bush and his administration take notice.
"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American forces (Bush) would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone at a time when they most needed him because he thought listening to a child discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than the planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers. This had given us three times the time needed to carry out the operations, thanks be to God...
"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands and each state which does not harm our security will remain safe.
A Perfect Circle is popular music around here. Something appealing about being more ethereal than Tool, but just as despairing. Personally, my favorite songs are from a live concert last Halloween in San Antonio that someone taped and put on the Internet. The excellent recording shows how skillfully the group uses reverberations to build a sonic masterpiece.
With that in mind, the band has released a couple music videos to the Internet, highly critical of Bush etc. One, a deceptively simple looking cartoon-style "Counting Bodies like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums" (RealMedia & Quicktime available) features a hypnotizing Bush channeled through tons of television screens. Beautiful imagery.
A more disturbing video, "Imagine" covers the John Lennon classic (RealMedia only, sorry) in the most scathing way possible, subverting the happy happy joy joy stuff with unfiltered images of the horror of war.
On Election Day, A Perfect Circle is releasing their next album, eMOTIVe, about "WAR, PEACE LOVE AND GREED," according to their website, which has all kinds of goodies, including more tracks from the album, for free. The album art for this one looks excellent: a battered concrete peace sign in the foreground, torched city in the back. What more do you want?
Crucial:
With your halo slippin' down,
I'm more than just a little bit curious
How you plan to go about making your amends
To the dead
-- A Perfect Circle, The Noose
AUGH, no one's around here, it's boring as hell. Sucks!!!!
Nonetheless, everyone needs to see the almighty Lego-based Abston Church of Christ. (via metafilter)
WITNESS the LEGO Faithful. PAAARAISE JESUSAH!
Eminem's new video, and not the funny one, has been getting a lot of attention lately. All about the election, war and everything.
It's called Mosh and you can see it online.
HURRAY fall break... time to freak out!!! WHOOO
UPDATE Oct. 30: A review of the Eminem video via The Nation.
Well, everyone has heard by now about Jon Stewart's exciting trip onto CNN Crossfire a couple weeks ago. You can download it via this BitTorrent link. I've had this link a while but been too lazy to put it up.
The International Roundtable at Macalester is one of the biggest annual events on campus. This year, (Sir) Ahmed Samatar of the International Studies department managed to corral three leading intellectuals into speaking: super-leftie Tariq Ali, historian of the British empire Niall Ferguson and mega-neoconservative Michael Ledeen. (Right now the Mac Weekly site is not showing my story that was published on Friday. I emailed the webmaster about it, so that should be cleared up.)
As a senior, I was invited to the Roundtable lunch. Things just went from there. The following was my editorial on what happened:
With the election scorching our brains, the future has seldom looked less certain. A small network of ideologues, analysts and bureaucratic adventurers known as neoconservatives have shaped our strange generation in ways unimaginable only a few years ago. As Washington reporter Josh Marshall put it, the war in Iraq will forever be known as the war that neocons agitated for, framed, planned (poorly), and finally carried out, by persuading a trusting American public with fake intelligence, over the resistance of the vast majority of the world. Thomas Friedman stated that this war could never have happened without a couple dozen in the capital leaning on the levers of power.
At this precipitous, binary moment in our nation’s history, either we are about to reach the High Noon of an eight-year Bush presidency, or we are tripping through its final days. If Bush is finished, the psychopathology of individuals like Michael Ledeen will be digested for decades. If the smirk-in-chief is just settling in, we’d better figure out these people’s motives, and quickly.
After Tariq Ali’s Friday morning session, where Ledeen perused a book for long stretches, the speakers, and some seniors and professors retreated to the Weyerhauser Boardroom. I asked Dhruva Jaishankar to save me a seat at some table. I built a croissant sandwich, and I suddenly discovered that Dhruva had landed at Ledeen’s table. He saved me the chair on Ledeen’s left. I thought, “What the hell? Let’s do it,” and sat down with the grim scholar of war.
How do I converse with a genuinely diabolical person, especially one about to speak before the whole campus? I thought, chewing my sandwich, can I just bitch at the man holding the American Enterprise Institute’s ‘Freedom Chair?’
Parsing my words, I asked him if the Middle East was a fundamentally inscrutable “wasteland of mirrors,” a phrase I erroneously thought he’d used. No, the Middle East was pretty easy to figure out, he said.
Ledeen has staked everything on the belief that the fundamentalist Iranian leadership will nuke Israel or the U.S. once they have the bomb. Thus, for him, their downfall is among the highest of priorities. He has fought within what he deemed Washington’s “chaos” of policymaking to go after Iran. But the neocons tend to get carried away with rhetoric for its own sake: witness how State Department Undersecretary John Bolton has threatened the sensitive North Koreans right before negotiations just for the hell of it. So I asked him, if the regime in Iran is highly unpopular, how can he be sure that they aren’t exaggerating their intentions, hoping to goad the United States into overreacting and threatening them, so that they can turn around and tell the Iranian opposition that they must unite to fight the external threat?
Ledeen, a Machiavellian to the core, said that this was much too convoluted for him. He said that he was a historian of the twentieth century who’d read a great deal of fascist rhetoric, and those people were very serious about killing the Jews. Likewise, he said that former President Rafsanjani stated he would nuke Jerusalem despite the losses from a counterattack, because it would benefit Islam to take out a huge proportion of the Jews while only a small proportion of Muslims would get killed in return.
I asked why the Iranians would bomb Jerusalem if it would kill so many Muslims. He said that the Iranians murderously hate Arabs and kill them all the time. In fact, he said, the Iranians are killing “hundreds” of Arabs in Iraq today, sending in money and munitions.
His scheme to free Iran was to supply the opposition with the tools to destabilize the regime, “but not a single bullet.” I have a hard time believing he could resist arming the Iranian opposition. In fact, many say that the Pentagon, administered by Ledeen’s allies, has courted a weird, cultish anti-regime Iranian guerilla group based in eastern Iraq called the Mujahideen al-Khalq. If Bush wins, it’s quite unlikely that the neo-cons will be able to resist using forces like these to harass Tehran, but we have no idea what sort of reaction this would provoke from the highly mobilized, nationalist Iranians.
Trying to avoid provoking more mobilization, I asked Ledeen what sorts of places he got his information. “Never watch television,” he told the students at the table. He’d also given up on The New York Times. He surprised us when he said that he really likes reading online blogs, in particular Iranian and Iraqi blogs. Iranian blogging has snowballed into a serious trend, providing a sizeable young population with the means to skirt government censorship. Ledeen said that once you’d been reading a source for a while, you can get a feeling for their perspective and veracity, something I agree with.
He kept muttering little statements, preparing himself for the dramatic speech to follow. In particular, at both the lunch and his speech, he referenced sliding over the “border between manic depression and genius,” while he later admitted that writing about Iran was his therapy.
More than anything else, this explains the neoconservative agenda in a way that has eluded me during this bizarre presidency. Ledeen’s power in Washington has shaped not just their unresolved debate over Iran. More importantly, his militant myopia has fed the government’s racist, irrational and self-destructive tendencies. Yet Ledeen admits he has an anarchic streak inherited from his Russian anarchist Uncle Izzy. He also admits to a Trotskyist belief in perpetual global revolution. He said that America’s government was a “chaos,” but a better, more productive chaos than others. America is a revolutionary power, he argues, that crushes ideas before it makes a new order. Strip out Trotsky’s stuff about proletarians, swap bourgeoise for ‘terror master,’ and you’ve got a recipe for everlasting wars.
After I got away from that table, my little moral universe was bent. I hadn’t confronted the man like I would have a year ago; I hadn’t hacked the bristly defenses raised so harshly in the talk that followed. I didn’t get to the bottom of their motives. Did I, of all people, make a good impression on a man who wants to crush everything I stand for? Was that the wrong thing to do?
A big story's popped up over the weekend about 350 tons of high explosives (RDX and HMX, for those keeping score at home) stolen from a Baathist military compound in Iraq sometime after the war. The explosives, which can be used to blow up vehicles—or trigger nuclear weapons—apparently were hauled away by some large-scale operation. Because these were a classic 'dual use' product, for construction, military and WMD purposes, was the old Iraq permitted to keep such stockpiles. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency had tagged the stockpiles
So, in a sense, they were at least tied to the international system that was supposed to defend us from the anarchy of their widespread distribution. Which is exactly what has occurred.
Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo.com broke the munitions story to the Internet, quoting the Nelson Report. He has followed up the story with several posts. The New York Times has a story out on the munitions now, as well.
Only now has the 'interim' Iraqi government officially notified the IAEA that they disappeared. Apparently the Bush administration was hoping that this could be covered up until after Nov. 2. Unfortunately, the Iraqis are now left carrying the ball of exposing the disastrous occupation policies, and how avoidable the disaster has been.
The Nelson Report writeup has quotes from military people saying that this stuff probably plays a huge role in providing the explosives that rip through American military vehicles and personnel on a regular basis.
This should provide all sorts of flak for the hypercharged political week we're looking at. Hell, it could finally drive home the 'malicious incompetence' meme that just hasn't quite stuck since Abu Ghraib went down the mental Novocain hole of our domestic media environment.
This is only the latest episode in the whole disturbing arms-cache saga. I had a very bad feeling when the U.S. soldiers started running across piles of guns all over the country. Yet now we find that we even managed to lose the tagged explosives.
Honestly, why should I bother trying to avoid losing things when the Pentagon can't even track TONS OF EXPLOSIVES IN A CONQUERED COUNTRY?
Have a happy week, everyone. Try not to visualize how much trouble you could cause with just one ton of this stuff.
Then multiply by three-fifty.
I'm don't have the details about this, but it sounds like an amazing movie: "The Fourth World War" is a documentary out of the various movements against wars all over the world, or rather, the 'thousand civil wars' the trailer speaks of. Suheir Hammad is narrating, and she was really impressive when she spoke at Macalester last year.
The movie is touring the U.S., and playing at the Campus Center Sunday night at 7:30. It will be screened in Minneapolis later tomorrow night, at the Soap Factory at 10 PM (2nd St. SE and 5th Ave.).
Additionally, this is an example of how our Macalester internet setups aren't working. There is nothing about a MOVIE in the CAMPUS CENTER on Macalester's event calendar website. What is the point of having a site like that? If we started doing more dynamic things online at Mac, then such events could be better publicized, as I argued in a Mac Weekly editorial a couple weeks ago.
'The Corporation' also screened on campus recently, and I'm sad I missed that, although I saw it at Lagoon a while ago.
I ♥ Huckabee's opens tonight at the Grandview. Nice. My Michael Ledeen story will be in The Mac Weekly today... "Lunch Beyond Good And Evil." Coming soon.
Some random tidbits for Friday morning:
Hans Blix on the preposterous games that Bush played with the inspections. Not as funny as Blix's role in TEAM AMERICA, which I saw last Saturday and really liked.
What is going on regarding Major Assaults Planned Right After the Elections? More of the democracy-terror nexus whipping about and killing innocent people.
Get your Armies of Compassion domain names. They're going quick. In the time I was watching this, someone bought armiesofcompassion.net. WhoooO!
As everyone knows by now, Ron Suskind's article in the NY Times Sunday magazine was staggering. I left one quote as my AIM away message for awhile:
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
All sorts of faulty technology messed up the war for troops, besides the catastrophic planning.
"Post-war planning non-existent" by those stalwart Knight Ridder guys.
War on Terror spreads terror, says Rami G. Khouri in "Filling the Swamp."
"Allawi Presses Effort to Bring Back Baathists." Yes, that's Moral Clarity! Green Zone sabotage. Actually this proves that the "Green Zone" no longer exists, if it ever did.
On a lighter note, how about that Apple stock?
"Because something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"
Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man (Highway 61 Revisited)
Small, somewhat terrifying factoid: a poll in Israel last week revealed that about 36% of Israelis fear their country is "close" to a civil war. On the other hand, the poll also showed that strong majorities, even of Likud voters, favored withdrawing from Gaza, and most of them also favored holding national referendums to decide the matter, and others. All in all, very very interesting. But also scary.
Are you for or against carrying out a national referendum on the plan to
disengage from the Katif Bloc and Gaza Strip?
Total: For 57% Against 32% Other 11%
Likud voters: For 71% Labor voters: For 54%
And if a referendum takes place on the matter of disengagement from the
Katif Bloc and Gaza Strip how would you vote?
Total: For 62% Against 26% Other 12%
Likud voters: For 54% Against 36%
Labor voters: For 73% Against 19%
[.....]
Do you think that the Israeli public is close or far from civil war?
Total: Close 36% Far 52% Other 12%
Likud voters: Close 43% Far 50%
Labor Voters: Close 42% Far 54%
Danny Rubenstein in Haaretz says that the Israeli setters, who have already conquered the West Bank, are actually turning their sights around and trying to rule Israel. An interesting argument!
From the Palestinians' perspective, and apparently not only theirs, the real battle has recently moved entirely onto the Israeli side of the court. There, one of the sides in Israel is well-defined. These are the Jewish settlers in the territories and their allies, who are doing with the territories what they think is good for Israel - that is, doing whatever they please. They grab land and properties, for the most part in accordance with plans that are defined in advance and with government budgets. They set up settlements and outposts, mark what they think should be Israel's border, and shape the way the Arabs who live there are controlled.
The other side - the Israeli government and its mechanisms - is harder to define because at least in the West Bank, the government of Israel does not exist. If it does, it appears in the form of Jewish settlers. On the weekend, for example, Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev Boim declared that the Israel Defense Forces will not be able at this time to demand that Jewish settlers who have illegally seized shops owned by Arabs in Hebron's wholesale market, clear out.
The IDF will also not be able to protect Arab olive-harvesters who are attacked by Jewish settlers, and the evacuation of the outposts has already become a joke. Palestinian spokesmen cite many examples of how the settlers and the Israeli government in the territories are one and the same. A significant proportion of the people in Israel's administration and security forces in the West Bank are inhabitants of the Jewish settlements there, and many of them see the rulings by the rabbis of Yesha (the settlers' acronym for Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, which also means "salvation" in Hebrew) and the decisions of the Yesha Council as authoritative and legitimate.
In this context it can be said that the political battle that has moved onto the Israeli side of the field is abandoning the territories of the West Bank and is moving inside Israel proper. The state of the Jewish settlers, which has won in Yesha, is now trying to rule all of Israel.
Hard to know how to respond to that one. At least we know that the second Bush administration will continue its pattern of excellent decisionmaking.
I will have to merge my Campaign 2004 and Israel-Palestine topics: for a rather graphic example of the Republican-Likud merger, check out Republicans Abroad-Israel. Norm Coleman is smiling there, sharing a sign saying "Minnesotans in Israel for Bush."
Why have I been silent for a while here? It is not that I'm being lazy out in the Real World. Between four classes, a radio show, editing the newspaper and all the election stuff, it's really hard for me to get onto here and give you all something new to look at.
In no small part because I had a conversation with Michael Ledeen on Friday during Macalester's International Roundtable conference. I feel like my unbalanced little moral universe has totally spun off its bearings. Yet I now understand the neoconservative mindset much better than before. This is not comforting nor relaxing information to find out about. So I haven't been sure what to say about it yet. We will have something in the Mac Weekly about it later this week.
Still, the website gets hits from all over, and the nature of these global information networks still amazes me. And yet again, the government and the military are all over my shit.
I finally got around to looking at the HongPong.com access log, and I found that traffic is quite high right now, higher than my sputtering efforts here probably deserve.
So I have not looked at the site's traffic patterns for awhile. In the last week, there have been an average 356 requests for pages a day. That's not too bad. Traffic has tapered off a bit during September, but there is a lot of variability any given day, from 200 to 500 hits.
Somewhere among these visits came the Central Intelligence Agency, although apparently they were on a Google search for 'tower bridge terrorism.' I just ran this search and found an old post about my London trip up on the third results page, above MSNBC and National Review stories.
I wonder if the CIA's visit was just a spider logging information about terrorism. That wouldn't surprise me any more than CENTCOM's visit to my Iraq page this summer.
The Department of Homeland Security came by looking for "unedited iraqi prison photos and videos." I don't have those. But I feel safer already.
Someone from the State Department came in on Google via searching for "Dan Senor CPA Israel neo-con" and I didn't disappoint them! (that's the second time I've gotten a search critical of neoconservatives from the State Department!)
There also seems to be an uptick in the number of visitors from Israel, including the Tel Aviv University and Weizmann Institute of Science, as well as the mysterious barak.net.il.
A Palestinian newspaper searching for information about radio transmitters found something totally irrelevant here. This would mark the first connection to my site from the West Bank that I've detected. So the site projects some sort of minute, momentary effect on the situation. That's pretty sweet.
Other strange visitors include mail3.JohnKerry.com, a Russian dating site called your-ideal.com, a couple hits from Brandeis and Stanford. There are quite a few folks from the Netherlands and Pakistan this time, as well. I won't get into the country list now.
I got a couple hits from Army computers who came in on Google searched for "helicopter video kills" and "video of riot control," both of which connected with old stories. The Air Force and Navy have also been visiting on similar Google searches.
Another hit came over something called nipr.mil, described as
Nipr.mil is not a single domain a but a hush-hush web proxy that acts as a gateway for hundreds of U.S. military domains in order to hide their identities. It was established by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in response to a memorandum (CM-5 1099, INFOCOM) issued in March 1999 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling for "actions to be taken to increase the readiness posture for Information Warfare." "Uncontrolled Internet connections," the document says, "pose a significant and unacceptable threat to all Department of Defense information systems and operations.
Ok, good the information warfare people are here. Nice. Another Army hit came from a Google search for 'tactical humint team team leader' where surprisingly enough, I am on the first results page due to a blockquote in a story about Army deserters. Great, now some computer thinks my site has sympathy for deserters. I wonder how many bad juju points I get for that.
The prize for funniest scary government computer name goes to:
moses.radium.ncsc.mil
More interested government agencies these days include:
I just found this list that someone made about Big Brother computers watching them. It's roughly like that around here! Hurray Tech!!
I had a piece in the Mac Weekly on Friday about the technological gap at school and getting some new stuff going on the Internet. People seem to like the idea. I'll post the link when the story becomes available.
The town hall debate went real well for Kerry, and I think he's building a good foundation here. This weekend Alison and I volunteered for Paul Gardner, who's running against Phil Krinkie in the north suburbs. I think it's going really well up there. We put out flyers across Lino Lakes today. The weather was really excellent.
There is a lot of hectic news about the need-blind admissions, and it's all gotten intense on campus. I don't want to even talk about it, save to say that this issue of the Weekly also spells out some of the stuff that has been going on. William Sentell '02, one of the alumni speaking out on the policy conflict, has a site needblind.com, also at http://ilovemacalester.blogs.com/.
Right now I don't want to take a swing at this. I hope you all understand. Trying to enjoy the weekend. Too much work on Sunday!
I am hoping Cheney just flips out and dives, goes sliding across the little table, grabbing for Edward's throat. I think we will get some true nasty grimaces from him. I'll probably watch it on C-SPAN so I can see the splitscreen. Last time, Bush's facial expressions in reaction to Bush were priceless. Cheney's body language has only gotten more severe over the course of this Administration, and he could seem like a cartoon by the end of this one.
They're both such cutouts, its hard to know which way this debate will unfold. People always say Edwards looks like a little boy. So Make Cheney appear as the evil headmaster rapping shiny schoolboy on the knuckles for his irrepressible good spirit.
It's the first and last time someone will get to challenge the Great Tilted Head before the election. On CNN now, they are talking about Halliburton, mercilessly chasing Cheney on all the shady things he's done.
This debate will be about about confidence and credibility. Cheney will tease the trial lawyer thing, and then Edwards might say, "Yeah, I'd like to ask you some questions," and proceed to launch into a full out attack on how they provided fake intelligence through a ring of shady people in the Pentagon, people that have botched the whole thing, basically incompetent people.
I mean, for the purposes of the election, right now, those neo-cons and other spooky Defense people, those who fabricated the intelligence for the war, and laid down the policies that led to Abu Ghraib, I consider that their motives are horribly evil, as far and deep as anyone's could ever be. But this is very difficult to prove to people.
It's my view that you can convince ANYONE that they are incompetent.
So Edwards should put on a big pouty face and talk about fake intelligence that tricked all the well-meaning senators and congressmen. Edwards can cut to the heart of it by talking about all the shadiness around the Vice President's office, the Scooter Libby investigation, the corrupt deals all around. And how sad it makes him....
But who knows if Edwards will zap him like that. He should really keep in mind that there are more than a hundred million people in this country furious about George W Bush, all of whom would have a few well-chosen words for the most machiavellian character since Nixon to stalk the White House.
This debate will change Cheney's whole image, one way or another. And for that, we will cheer.
Right now, doing the endless elections project, but its easier listening to Arthur Cheng's radio show at the University of Puget Sound, "Midnight Love," which sounds like him and about six of his friends. International hip-hop night coming out, Chinese and Canadian stuff so far. Nicely done, Mr Cheng! He's on from 11 to midnight Pacific, which would be 1 to 2 AM Central.
You can get UPS's radio broadcast streamed via their website. Sounds good. Someday Macalester will have it too.... I had my show tonight, but I sense the audience was not as grand as Cheng's. Also they are allowed to air music with swearing. Bastards!!!!
Now it sounds like insane Russian rappers hollering at each other. WTF?
Well well. Newsweek reported yesterday that Bush's commanding lead in their national poll, around 11 points, has completely evaporated, and now Kerry enjoys about a 2 or 3 point lead. I had a feeling going into the debate that it would shift ten points, one way or the other. Fortunately, Kerry had some damn wits about him! Talking about the now-famous Bush scowl complex. The Dems made a video of it!
Take the Armageddon Books poll immediately: Armageddon Books Prophecy Poll:
Will the Illuminati be the force that brings about Antichrist's one-world government and religion?
I've got a ton of homework and a radio show in two hours so I've got to lay this out quickly.
Keep reading Josh Marshall and the TPM. Lots of interesting stuff coming thru there. Can you believe that we've only fully trained about 8,000 Iraqi police?! Juan Cole always crucial.
The officials in Washington -- CIA, State, Defense -- have rapidly worsening opinions about the situation. Interesting information from a Wall Street Journal reporter, Farnaz Fassihi, who wrote a really hellish email of life in Iraq (also posted here):
It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.
Iraqis like to call this mess 'the situation.' When asked 'how are thing?' they reply: 'the situation is very bad."
What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health -- which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers -- has now stopped disclosing them.
Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.
Have to love a good military-industrial conspiracy! "Ex-Pentagon official gets 9 months for conspiring to favor Boeing" in an arms deal. Haha talk about the tip of the iceberg!
"International Observers predict trouble in US vote." ...Alarm bells....
Pentagon Paperer Daniel Ellsberg says "Where are the leakers of the Iraq war?" As in, why aren't more horrible facts coming forward right now?
WaPo says that the government is starting a PR campaign to paper over the hellish disintegration of Iraq.
Interesting issue: Google News frequently gives these links to hard rightwing sites when it seems that more balanced news sources should appear instead. Why is this happening?
Humor: Bush and the yawning boy via Wonkette. Bush vs Jesus political advertising via Atrios. Thanks to Alison on the link.
Random right wing opinion: classic anti-Islamic fear mongering from Daniel Pipes: "The Islamic States of America?" Of course they're trying to Subvert our Way of Life, those Damn Commies IslamoFascists!!!
So these are just a few of the random things I've got for you today... Gotta go!
Howard Fineman's article on battleground states spent a while discussing Hudson this week.
It turns out that television alone can't reach some voters, at least to the extent that Bush and Kerry need to reach them. At best the tube can be an annoyance, at worst it can feed a sense of distance and suspicion, especially in a swing state inundated by ads. "People here don't pay much attention to what they see on television," said Bob Feickert, a Democratic organizer in Hudson, Wis., a fast-growing Minneapolis exurb. "They want to hear somebody from around here say, 'I support my candidate, and this is why'." Lori Bernard, a Republican counterpart, agreed. "Someone sitting next to you in church, someone you go hunting with, that's who you know best," she said. "That's who you trust."
[...]
Demography is destiny. In Wisconsin, Republicans are scoping out the gun-loving members of Turkeys Unlimited—not to mention Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever.
First: we are an exurb? And of Minneapolis?! To hell with you, Mr Fineman. You and all the other Kool Kids who lied about the basis for the war and continuously frame the issues in a misleading fashion. (Can you tell I don't like him?)
The second page of the article has a photograph of the Hudson Democratic office downtown.
So yes, Hudson is one of those hinge places... So goes Hudson, so goes the nation? Can I believe that? Anyhow, it is pretty cool that we are in there.
Ok, I have tackled a major problem with the site, and finally closed the many old comment threads that were collecting incredible amounts of spam. Now no one can comment on anything older than 30 days. For those of you looking for a quick MySQL command to shut your old MovableType threads, go no further than:
update mt_entry set entry_allow_comments = 2 where
TO_DAYS(NOW()) - TO_DAYS(entry_created_on) >= 30;
This helpful information came from burningbird.net and 'a crank's progress.'
You probably don't notice these spams much, because they tend to get attached to the old stories. A poor old Edward Said quote, for example, got yet another one hooked to it today, making it a total of 46 over many months.
Some of them are really pretty funny. For example, "Ryan Thayer" said about a month ago on Said:
Back when I was a boy, it was 40 miles to everywhere, uphill both ways and it was always snowing.
prozac online "I have a friend who just got back from the Soviet Union, and told me the people there are hungry for information about the West. He was asked about many things, but I will give you two examples that are very revealing about life in the Soviet Union. The first question he was asked was if we had exploding television sets. You see, they have a problem with the picture tubes on color television sets, and many are exploding. They assumed we must be having problems with them too. The other question he was asked often was why the CIA had killed Samantha Smith, the little girl who visited the Soviet Union a few years ago; their propaganda is very effective.
-- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
"Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100
prozac
Think of it the open threads as sticky fibers, drifting through the electronic ether, and automated spam robots track them and continually affix worthless garbage. Unfortunately, now the site is saddled with thousands of garbage messages, many of them obscene. They are there to boost the spammer-site's rank on Google, when Google indexes my comments.
I feel bad that I let the problem go on for so long, but there is one cynical reason I let it continue. The 'artificial stimulation through spam' on the old comments makes Google think my site is more well-connected than it really is, and hence my ranking on search results rises. The spam gives a padding of links, awful as they might be. But do I want my site associated with Cialis? No, not really.
But when looking around for a way to quickly close all the old threads at once, I happened upon this rather threatening missive from one Adam Kalsey:
The arms race against comment spammers has been stepped up a notch. I received a flurry of spam that linked to entries on other blogs. Curious to see what that was all about, I clicked on one of the links, fully expecting to be redirected to porn or an online casino. I was surprised to see a discussion of patent law; this comment spam linked to a legitimate site.
The comment that I received was certainly spam — other than the odd link, it was the typical formula: the name was “online casinos,” fake generic email address, and a vapid comment. Certainly a Stanford law professor hadn’t actually sent the spam. There was another reason this spammer was promoting someone else’s blog entry.The blog entry in question was full of comment spam. In the last 3 months, this entry had accumulated thousands of spam links in the comments.
It appears the spammers have a new tactic in increasing their PageRank. They find a site that doesn’t delete comment spam and fill it with links. Then they boost the PR of that site by spamming it in blog comments. Once the spam-friendly’s site has in increased Google ranking, all those spammed links in their comments will get a boost in rank as well.
It’s rather clever, actually.
I’m leaving out a link to the spam-ridden blog entry on purpose. I don’t want to give the spammers the link they want. If you want to see the page in question, find Elizabeth Rader’s March 1, 2004 entry called “All rights reserved in Birth Control for Flatworms” on cyberlaw.stanford.edu.
If you are a site that is apathetic toward link spam, it is now time to choose a side. If you continue your apathy and allow comment spam links to linger on your site you are helping the spammers. Spam friendly sites will now be placed on the list of blacklisted domains that are not allowed to post comments on this site.
In the war on spam if you are not for us; if you choose to look the other way and allow spammers to use your site; if you feel that keeping your site free from spam is too much trouble — you are against us.
I didn't realize that the battle over my comment threads meant life and death to other people. I can understand where he's coming from, I just don't take this stuff so seriously.
It would take me hours to go through and strip the garbage off these old threads. Is the flora of false messages just a natural part of the Internet, albeit an obnoxious one, that still serves to organically drag the site further into the network, or is it just me losing a war with a bunch of unscrupulous shitheads?
Ok, I'm about to crash now, but I just had to post something about how delightfully the debate went tonight for Kerry.
I could not believe how far Bush was off his game. Kerry was collected, interesting, cool and persuasive. Admittedly, I watched it in an auditorium of boistrous liberals at Macalester in the Campus Center, so maybe we were extra cynical. But we had the C-SPAN split screen, so we were treated to all the nasty scowling faces Bush made, quite frequently, after Kerry attacked him. It provoked a lot of laughing. Actually, Bush provoked a lot of laughing many times.
Kudos to Mr Kerry. He could have had a little more sauce on it tonight, sometimes was repetitive, but the tone was basically what the situation called for, and he totally knocked Bush off-message.
I couldn't believe it when Bush completely bobbled his introduction. I mean, how hard is it to remember an opening spiel?
I think we definitely saw Kerry get repositioned as a strong and logical guy here. For that, I think we can all sleep quite a bit more soundly.
And get ready for Cheney-Edwards on Tuesday!!!!