January 2005 Archives

One of the reasons I got interested in politics was I started reading the transcripts of the administration briefings. I was shocked at the difference between what the administration said, and what got reported they said.

Bottom line, CBS, NYT and WP are all capitalist organizations organized for profit. They make that profit by getting you to consume their product, and they get you to do that by making the news more exciting. One need not look for liberal bias, one need only look for “conflict bias”.

The news we see or read every day is more and more just “made up” in the newrooms. If Professional Wresting isn’t a “Sport” but “Sports Entertainment”, our media has become not “News” but “News Entertainment”. So something like “memogate” isn’t particularly surprising to me. I don’t expect 60 Minutes to be any more accurate in their coverage then CSI is accurate with the science.

Of course, you’re not going to be convinced by anything I say, so I’ll make a suggestion.

Stop relying on the mainstream media to report what the White House, DOD, etc. actually said. Instead, go to their websites and subscribe to the transcripts.

You’ll find, as I did, that the news we get from the MSM is so distorted/filtered as to be meaningless. Realize I’m not asking you to believe the Administration, I’m merely asking you to go directly to the source for what the Administration said, not let it be filtered by the media.

I already knew that most of the “torture” allegations were bullshit (no actual evidence, the Red Cross report on Gitmo was just silly), but here’s an interesting article to back that up:

Interrogation

Hat Tip: Volokh Conspiracy

Which also linked to this counter-argument here.

The argument that Abu Ghraib stemmed from possible torture proceedings in order to gather intelligence doesn’t hold water. I’d be more willing to consider it if any of the supposed abuses happened to intelligence-related prisoners. Since they happened only to the worst of the criminal prisoners, I’m much more inclined to believe the “bad apples” theory, especially since its well known that prisons in the US aren’t much better…

Friend of mine was beaten up and nearly raped in a holding cell in LA county jail…for a parking ticket…

It talks about how a couple of captains in the Army started some public web sites that are now an invaluable part of officer training and the war in Iraq. Read it Here

Hat Tip: Mudville Gazette

While the movie A Bug’s Life was really a remake of The Magnificent SevenMagnificent Seven, it occurred to me yesterday that it represents America’s hopes for Iraq.

The Grasshoppers are the Baathists or Islamists who are preying upon the regular Iraqi people who represent the Ants.

The Circus bugs would be the US. While we can distract and scare the Grasshoppers away, it will ultimately be the Ants themselves who will have to band together against those who would take away their freedom.

Granted, its not the deepest metaphor in the world (The Ants have a queen, not a democracy), I still found it amusing.

So during our recent flooding, one of our neighbors was venting that “The County should take care of this”. My wife just laughed at him, that he thought that the government was actually going to fix it for us.

Now this was the same neighbor who took it personally when our power was out for a good chunk of a weekday during a storm. I guess he’d lived in town his whole life, and now that he was a bit further out of town, it kind of rocked his world to realize that electricity wasn’t 100% reliable.

So my neighbor believes that Government is the solution to all his problems? Wanna bet he was a Kerry voter? Lifelong Democrat I bet…

I tried only minimal commenting on Ra^thergate, but I said at the time that you didn’t need to be a document expert, that it was HUGELY obvious that the documents were done in Microsoft Word if you had just a modicum of experience using computers.

Seems like the CBS report agrees with me.

The real issue is that it should have been minimally obvious to everyone involved that they were fake, even if they weren’t document experts. So its not just myopia on Rather’s part, its all computer illiteracy, the Ra^therGate story is interesting for what it tells us about CBS and Dan Rather.

1. Dan Rather probably doesn’t use a computer much. He’s probably the sort of person who has his secretary print out his email. If he, or any of the people who had looked at this story were both computer literate, and had reviewed the memos even a little bit, they would have thought: “That looks an awful lot like Microsoft Word”. Even if he either hates Bush, or he was so greedy for a story that he didn’t matter that his source was hugely tainted, he would have known they weren’t just forgeries, but bad forgeries

2. This story also serves as a warning to all professional journalists: These days, with lots of people having blogs, there are lots of people to call you on a mistake. You might want to remember that, even when under deadline pressure.

3. The annoying “helpfulness” of Microsoft Word to automatically put in superscripts probably got 4 people fired from their job. As a UI designer, I find this freaking hilarious.

So I got home from Christmas with a cold. That was kind of annoying because I’ve been getting a cold after the Xmas holidays for several years in a row. The cold wasn’t too bad so I figured if I just got some extra sleep it would go away.

It was not to be. Last Wednesday a storm came in, turning the homestead into lakefront property:

This is pointed at our neighbors house so it looks worse then it is. The reality is that in the upper right, you can just see the beginning of the “shoreline”, our house is about 50 feet beyond that, but its up a bit from the water, this is the low point on our property. As you can see the neighbors had it much worse, since they now owned a houseboat.

The problem was that the culvert that runs under the road in front of our house was blocked, which backed up the water quite a ways since it has to run under our street before it can run under the main road. None of the water was especially deep, our land is pretty flat, there was just a lot of it because we’d gotten about 3” of rain in about 12 hours.

Since the water was about 3” from pouring into the top of our cistern and polluting our well water and it was still raining, I had to run to Home Depot to engineer some way to seal the cistern.

Meanwhile, that left De to figure out how to unblock the culvert. Its good to have a wife who’s pretty self sufficient. Self sufficient enough that I knew that if I left, she would get all the neighbors organized and helping.

That’s pretty much what happened. While I was gone, De scavenged a 40’ pole from a construction side and managed to ram it through the culvert, unblocking it.

Of course, that makes it sound easy. That entailed:

1. Finding the 40’ pole.
2. Getting 5 neighbors to help her.
3. Arguing with the county flood people who told her not to (while they took pictures of the flooding).
4. Getting sucked into the culvert.
5. Getting rescued from the culvert by the neighbors.
6. Getting about 5 more neighbors to help her so she can go back inside.

7. Going back into the house and changing clothes for the 3rd time. (Realize that all this is happening in the rain at about 35 degrees F, while standing in a foot of water.)

   Anyways, it turned out there was a basketball stuck in the culvert, so unblocking it really helped. The neighbors meanwhile voted De the “Macho Chick” award. Strangely, her husband more or less just felt that it was par for the course, that it was somehow to his credit for picking such a tough wife.

   Shortly after she finished, I got back from Home Depot with the stuff to seal the cistern, with about 1” to spare. That took awhile because cistern seals aren’t exactly something home depot sells, so I ended up having to improvise with a sheet of vinyl cut to fit and about 8 bolts for the lid. De expected it to take awhile, but she thought I’d left about a half hour earlier then I did, so she though I’d gotten sucked into shopping at Home Depot or something. So she was a bit upset with me when she saw me (“I’m going to kill you” were her first words to me) but we didn’t have time to fight we had to dive into sealing the cistern.

   So with both of us standing in about 2 feet of water, with the rain coming down, De and I managed to get the seal bolted onto the cistern. That was a bit hard because we had to hold onto the nuts and wrenches under the freezing water, but luckily I had gotten one of those cordless drills for Xmas about 2 years ago, so I was able to tighten the bolts fairly quickly.

   After that, it was back into the house to sit in a tub of hot water and thaw out. While we were thawing out, De regaled me with stories of getting sucked into the culvert. I still had a cold (now much worse) so I went to collapse into the bed, while De went to help the neighbors some more.

   Meanwhile, the new neighbor we don’t get along with had finked on De taking the pole to the construction guy, so he came over all irate and wanting it back. De and him had words in the driveway and I had just staggered out there to defend my wife from the neighbor when he drove away. De then stomped into the house, grabbed her car keys, picked up the pole and threaded it through her truck windows (having to yell at the county guys to get out of the way, because they were standing around taking more pictures) and drove it back to the construction guy.

Meanwhile, the construction guy had come back to apologize, he hadn’t quite noticed the flooding until he was leaving, and after he looked at it, he realized he was being silly. De met him in the driveway and they shook hands to forgive and forget.

Unblocking the culvert helped quite a bit, as shortly after e the water stopped rising and started to subside a bit, we put the seal on the culvert at about a half hour before the high point. It was still raining though, with more storms coming our way though, so the neighbor went and rented a pump. After some tribulations with that (they gave him the wrong size hose, it wouldn’t start, etc.) De and the neighbor took shifts that night and into the next day keeping the pump running, and they were able to get the water to drop about 2 more feet.

The rain also switched to snow, which helped, because snow stays in one place (at least temporarily).

Of course, now we have about 4’ of snow to deal with instead, so hopefully that won’t all melt at once. 4 feet of snow is about 8 inches of rain so that’s quite a bit, but there’s a lot of melting first.

Anyways, that was Wednesday and Thursday of last week. De managed not to get sick until Saturday, and I’ve been getting better slowly since then, so I’m back at work today. I might have gotten better sooner but Monday is when we got the first 3 feet of snow, so De and I had to go out there, dig out the car, and move it to the end of the driveway so that when we got the next snow, we wouldn’t be snowed in. 3 feet of snow is a little more then the Honda can handle, so that actually meant digging the car out, getting stuck, digging the car out again, getting stuck again, etc.

Of course, that meant we both had to go out in the cold while we were sick, so that didn’t help either of us get better.

BTW, for those of you who don’t live in the country, a cistern is the water tank attached to the well (well fills water tank, second pump pumps into house), and a culvert is the metal pipe you see running under driveways.

He’s sending a retired 4-star general to review things in Iraq:

The Pentagon is sending a retired four-star Army general to Iraq next week to conduct an unusual “open-ended” review of the military’s entire Iraq policy, including troop levels, training programs for Iraqi security forces and the strategy for fighting the insurgency, senior Defense Department officials said Thursday.

Hat tip: Captain’s Quarters

I’ve never thought things were perfect in Iraq, and I think its great that Rumsfeld has always been man enough to question his assumptions. I remember when Rumsfeld’s “how are we doing?” memo leaked. The press jumped on him for possibly admitting things weren’t going perfectly. I thought it was great that he constantly questioned himself and the DOD.

Yeah, Rumsfeld is a lame Secretary of Defense, but he’s an awesome Secretary of War.