TomB ::: (view all by) ::: July 29, 2004, 04:53 PM:
"Patrick is right that I was speculating. I hope it works out. Since the Democrats are stage-managing the convention, the mainstream media are focusing on the stage-management, instead of reporting on the content (or actually analyzing it, perish forbid). "
I think that by now it's clear that the mass media wouldn't be caught dead actually analyzing content.
Not when there are horse races and meta-stuff to be debated.
Kip W ::: (view all by) ::: May 24, 2004, 09:08 PM:
"Hmm. I, too, wonder what'll happen if/when the Gops lose. I see them as not-un-sore heads, proud of their might yet feeling powerless. "
The pattern has already been developed - take Clinton-bashing, and do the same on Kerry. Expect a wave of denunciations of Kerry, a complete reversal of the present 'to criticize the president is unpatriotic' theme, and (the GOP) Congress suddenly finding out that they have constitutional powers.
janeyolen:
"Heidi has had the same thing going into her second week. Has watched a LOTG of movies. Says not prarie dogs but more like bigger, slow-moving animals, maybe armadillos. And we have to give a major speech together this weekend in Ohio. At least it wasn't last weekend.
Keep on dosing."
I guess I really shouldn't mention that armadillos are carriers of leprosy. That'd be no comfort at all to somebody who imagines that they have an armadillo colony infesting their body :)
Nice.
A sweet note of spring, in a cold, grey, dirty winter.
Well, the US is in a far, far stronger position than the USSR was. The US could probably establish a large empire, and defend it for quite a while. There would be costs, of course, but one of the fundamental principles of the Bush administration and the neo-cons is that costs are for the suckers.
Also, anybody who pulls the 'he got an honorable discharge so he couldn't have been AWOL' is forgetting how Bush got in, the fact that he was commissioned right out of basic training, selected for flight training over many others, and not hassled about the whole 'missing the flight physical and getting grounded' thing.
Scott, I'm a subscriber to Salon.
As my post above says, you have a
choice - be one of the 'in crowd' with
the media, or be back to what Salon was.
If you want an example of where you
might end up, just go to slate, and read
(even the liberal!) Kaus' columns on the
Democratic candidates.
Salon is going through a crisis of faith.
They obviously want to be 'kewl kids', in and down wit' da media homeboyz. Remember 1998-2000? Salon had stuff on the GOP which the mainstream media just didn't want to know, let alone print.
Running an actual liberal newszine which publishes good liberal stuff has got to be both exhiliarating and frightening. They've got to decide which they want to be.
What amazes me is that, from a strictly marketing viewpoint, I'd think that running a liberal site would be more lucrative. There are too many right-wing organs of the GOP to compete with, for a right-wing site.
NelC, the example is extreme. However, the point remains that playing 'fool the dictator' games with Saddam would carry very, very painful penalties. Probably for one's spouse and children, then for oneself.
Of course (cue australian accent, for movie buffs) a *smart* dictator, a *very smart* dicator, might have a scientist tortured first. Under the promise (true or false) that if the scientist could reveal some scams, then he and his family would be spared. Perhaps done to several scientists separately, at the same time, after they've been arrested, and told that an informant has said that something's up.
This is the sort of prisoner's dilema that a dictatorship could be very good at.
Now, if Saddam tells his scientists that he wants an orbiting Death Star made, about the only thing that they could do is to attempt a big deception campaign. Please note that there has been nothing put out by the Bush administration, or leaked, about any traces of such a campaign being discovered. IMHO, by now, this means that no large-scale deception campaign was conducted.
On the other hand (this will be repetitive for those who've read my posts), let's say that Saddam call his scientists together, and tells them that he wants never gas, mustard gas, artillery shells/'stalin organ' rockets with gas, and some bio weapons.
Most of this is *not* cutting-edge tech. Fooling the secret police about 30-80 year old technology should be much, much harder. All that the secret police need would be an agent in the labs with a chemicstry/Chem E BS degree, to make a deception campaign very tricky. Especially as the deceivers don't know who the agents are.
Please remember that Iraq was manufacturing cyanide, nerve and mustard gas during the 1980's, and using them in combat. There'd be a lot of practical skill and knowledge floating around, and the secret police would have had a decade to make sure that there were agents in place throughout the industry.
One additional comment - last I heard, mustard gas is WWI technology. Nerve gas is 1930's-40's technology. Artillery shells to deliver gas are of similar vintage.
Cutting edge delivery methods might be high-tech, but a lot of this is not particularly cutting edge. Expecting the Mukhbarat (sp?) to not have the appropriate technical expertise is a very bad idea.
Note that for strategic missile defense programs, it's very likely that many of the flaws are known, but that the programs are being continued to give
money to the defense contractors involved. The people being fooled are us, not the higher ranks of the Pentagon, or of Congress.
And the big problem with the various theories being put out is that they are *excellent* for explaining how Saddam's 'vast stockpiles' and 'hundreds of tons' of this and 'thousands of tons' of that, and 'ready to go in 45 minutes' would have turned into 'a few thousand shells of dubious quality, with insufficiently trained special troops, and deployment plans which were optimistic, to say the least, and not even any decoys or dummies which might have been used to at least *look* like something was going on'.
These theories don't explain how Saddam ended up with *nada*. This would suggest not that Saddam could be spun on technical details, or on the quantity/quality of things, but that he could be fooled like a naive newbie manager on the very existance of large programs.
Patrick:
"Beg to differ. It seems to me that history shows us that secret police are generally very good at Job One, Scaring Everybody Half to Death; but much spottier at Job Two, Knowing What the Heck Is Going On."
Yes, but as I was submitting simultaneously with you - this theory assumes not just skimming, not just that stuff was being shuttled around to make X items look like 4X or even 10X, but that pretty much 0 was being made to look like 4X or 10X. And this is in a country which was manufacturing, deploying and using chemical weapons in combat.
To make an analogy with the USSR: this is not telling the Politburo that there are 10,000 class 1 tanks, all of which are deployable, when there are only 2,000 class 1 tanks, which are shuttled around for inspections. It's telling the Politburo that that are 10,000 class 1 tanks, when there are no tanks, and no dummy tanks.
I was going to urge people to read the comments, where Kevin's idea got fed into the plastic shredder, so to speak.
I'd like to emphasize three key points:
(1) Saddam survived a decade after serious setbacks (the Iran-Iraq war, Gulf War), and didn't do so by sweetness and light. He had enough resources to keep his army from bumping him off, even though that'd have made the US and Europe very, very happy (everybody could have made profitably nice with the 'New Iraq'). He did this through having everybody who mattered watched, and double watched, with lots of informants and lots and lots and lots of fear. Playing games with Saddam would be like playing BDSM games with a serial killer. This theory supposes not just that *some* people did this, but that a large number of people did so, for a decade, without exposure.
2) It's *not* the case that Saddam thought that he had X tons of weapon types Y, of quality Z, with reliability R and deployability D, but actually had less. It *is* the case that there was virtually nothing (By now, even if anything is found, it'd be the tiniest scraps). I imagine that there was a lot of skimming going on (with a good chunk of it known, and punished if and when desired). However, here there would have to be 100% skimming, and that's really hard to hide. Having (say) half the weapons, and shuffling them around for inspections, is doable. Having *none* of the weapons, and passing even a light inspection, is unlikely.
3) There were no decoys or dummies that we know of. Repeat: there were no decoys or dummies that we know of. By now, the administration should be leaking any sort of program that Saddam had to fool surveillance, making everybody think that he had the weapons. This would be an excuse for thinking that there were WMD's, and could also be spun to buy time in the search ("we're searching through a 'Maze of Evil Mirrors'" Thomas Friedman would probably say). This also means that there are no programs being exposed, whose purpose was to fool Saddam. That leads to the conclusion that virtually the entire WMD budget was stolen from under Saddam's nose, with no significant attempts to fool Saddam.
"The typical early generaation weaponized device weighs somewhere beteen .5 and 5 tons, and in the case weapons made from the high 240 plutonium from power reactors, will be detectably radioactive. This is not something you can sneak on an airplane in either checked or carry-on baggage."
Hence shipping by sea. Fortunately, many, many cities are quite water-accessible. And for those which aren't, railroads are so handy.
Alex ::: January 22, 2004, 10:00 AM:
"I don’t see why everyone is so surprised by this phrase - it’s exactly what one should expect from “America’s first CEO President”.
If Bush is reelected, I predict that next year’s SOTU will be a PowerPoint presentation."
You know, as time goes by, the press doesn't use that phrase. Or 'first MBA president', either.
I guess that, given the economy, either phrase would now be considered a disloyal negative.
From Greg Greene,
"Sure about that? [that NYC would be cleaner, under a GOP one-party state] If you pinned me down on it, I'd have to say that 9-11 taught us that the Republicans don't give a s--- about New York. You'll be able to eat dinner off the streets of Plano, though."
From what I've heard, you can eat dinner off of the streets of Plano, TX right now, without being disturbed. I've heard that the telecom crashed devastated that town.
From Bryan:
"The Iowa veterans came through for Kerry, the only veteran in the race. He now inherits the media scrutiny that was focused on Dean."
Since the GOP has shown that slandering a disabled veteran is All Good Stuff, it will be interesting (if disgusting) to see what the GOP does to Kerry. His war record is a danger to them, for obvious reasons. What will the veterans' groups do?
J.Scott Barnard:
(re: whether he has questions about all of
these alleged 'intelligence failures')
"Yes, the questions arise in my mind. And I do care about the answers.
But should the answers be not politically convenient for you...I wonder if suddenly YOU won't care."
We don't know for whom the answers might be politically inconvenient. We do know that the Bush administration acts like they believe that the answers will be politically inconvenient for them.
And they're in an excellent position to know that.
About DRM - Hollywood doesn't care if it creates or destroys value, just what it does to them. And they are probably a more focused interest group on this than anybody else. They seem to be winning most of their battles, even against the electronics industry (the only other focused interest group). And Microsoft is in such a good position to implement DRM, with massive market share, that the only obstacle is MS and Hollywood coming to an agreement.
In terms of transparency and ease of use under DRM, that is secondary. And Microsoft's record doesn't inspire confidence. We'll probably be seeing reviews in 10 year that are like the Windows XP reviews now: 'finally after 10 years, Microsoft has gotten most of the hassle out of the way. I only had (insert number between 2 and 5) problems with my new computer....'.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 22 |
| 2003 | 97 |
| 2002 | 5 |
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