Day: September 22, 2003

When Would Wesley Have Went to War?

The other day I noted that one of Wesley Clark’s version of his views on Iraq is that he supports the idea of going to war against Iraq, but thinks “We could have waited” and conducted the war at a time TBA. So far, however, Clark has not offered his opinion on when the stars would have been aligned properly to begin such a war.

Maybe there is a hint of what Clark was looking for, however, in a decade-old blunder by Clark when he was doing that whole Bonsia thing. Here’s the Weekly Standard’s summary,

On August 27, 1994, representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff during a fact-finding mission to Bosnia, Clark “ignored State Department warnings not to meet with Serb officials suspected of ordering deaths of civilians in a campaign known as ethnic cleansing” and paid a courtesy call on Serbian army commander Ratko Mladic. Mladic was already the subject of multiple U.S. war-crimes charges: “artillery attacks on civilians in Sarajevo” and the “razing of Muslim towns and villages,” along with random acts of “mass murder.” According to a contemporaneous Washington Post report: “On Friday [August 26, 1994] and again on Saturday, State Department officials said, they instructed [Clark] not to go, but he went anyway.” The meeting “occurred as the Clinton administration is trying to isolate the Serbs in advance of possible military action against them.”

. . .

“What State Department officials said they found especially disturbing was a photograph of Clark and Mladic wearing each other’s caps. The picture appeared in several European newspapers, U.S. officials said. Clark accepted as gifts Mladic’s hat, a bottle of brandy, and a pistol inscribed in Cyrillic, U.S. officials said. ‘It’s like cavorting with Hermann Goering,’ one U.S. official complained.”

So maybe Clark’s upset that hostilities with Iraq started before he was able to exchange hats and ceremonial side arms with Chemical Ali.

Mladic, by the way, is still a fugitive wanted for crimes against humanity.

80,000 and Counting

I measure the success of this and my other blogs/web sites by three criteria: 1) how useful they are to me when I’m looking for information that I wanted to track; 2) number of page views; and 3) number of discussion group posts.

When it comes to page views, last week was the busiest week here ever with almost 160,000 page views served (that’d be 8.3 million page views annually if I could sustain that level of traffic year round).

And as for the discussion group, today the total number of posts on all of my sites hit the 80,000 mark. That’s millions and millions of words about every topic under the Sun — and a surprisingly high signal-to-noise ratio.

As for the last (but most important part), like many people when I want to find out pretty much anything I usually turn to Google first. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how often I do a Google search on something and it returns exactly the information I needed . . . except it happens to be a page on my site (this happens a lot with the animal rights stuff).

Cheap Networked Backup Solution for the Home

Gizmodo.Com had a brief mention today about the Mirra network backup device which is targeted at home users.

Looks like this is a box running embedded Linux that polls any other boxes hooked up to your home network and backs up the files on them automatically. The product site isn’t big on details, but it looks like the software is configurable so you can tell it exactly what to back up on each machine (i.e. so you’re only backing up the data). It also has some sort of software that has to be installed on each machine that keeps track of newly created or modified files, so if you’re off at Starbucks rewriting that Great American Novel, the devices detects this and automatically backs up the new version of the document when you’re back on the network.

A Mirra with a 120gb hard drive goes for $499. Assuming it actually works as advertised, that’s not a bad price at all, especially since it has USB connectivity (hopefully that’s USB 2.0) and the site talks about future software upgrade plans to allow the device to use external USB 2.0 drives for additional backup space.

Can’t wait to see the reviews on this puppy. If they’re positive, this might be the answer to my ongoing backup woes (there doesn’t appear to be a fast way to back up 30gb of data, especially when it is all sitting on my laptop’s crappy 4200 rpm drive.)

Update:

Interesting item from the manufacturers’ overview on this product,

Mirra automatically synchronizes your files on your PC to your Mirra appliance, and from your Mirra appliance over the web to trusted friends with whom you have set up a Mirra Share.

Hmmmm…so if I’ve got one and my friends got one, we can set it up to so the MP3 file automatically synchronizes?

Update #2:

Actually, the friend doesn’t need a Mirra appliance, they can access your MP3 directory using a web account (assuming you authorize them to), but that runs through some sort of special Mirra web site. Their web site talks about how secure this is, so will they be monitoring such transfers to stop music file sharing, or simply argue they are a backup service provider with no interest in violating the privacy of their users? The best option would be to simply encrypt traffic so even the company doesn’t know what is being transmitted, but I bet that’s a can of worms they’re unwilling to open.

I’m Sick of Hospitals

I am sick of hospitals, having spent way too much time in them over the past couple weeks (though thankfully not as a patient).

It all started a couple weeks ago with a scheduled procedure for my grandmother. She had a stent procedure a couple years ago, but she’s still having problems with circulation, so they ran some dye through her and took some pictures. I drove over to her apartment (about 20 minutes) and stayed the night so we could get her there bright and early the next morning.

No sooner was I back from helping out with that, than my daughter developed a kidney infection and was in the hospital for several days while they pumped antibiotics into her. Now she gets to go through all of the wonderful procedures we thought we had left behind after she had surgery for this sort of problem a few years ago.

So my daughter gets out of the hospital last week, and all seems well for a relaxing weekend for a change when I get a call from my brother that my grandmother is back in the hospital and is acting goofy. So it’s off to Battle Creek again where my grandmother acted like she had a stroke or maybe advanced alzheimers. Complete personality change accompanied by delusions/hallucinations. She tells me she’s waiting to receive a phone call from people who have been dead for almost a decade, and half the time she doesn’t realize she’s in a hospital (she spooked a lot of family/friends by calling them and explaining that she was trapped at a funeral home and needed someone to come get her).

That was very scary, but fortunately it seems to have been a drug reaction. The dye gave her an allergic reaction and she had hives all over her body, which is why my brother took her back to the hospital. She hadn’t been sleeping because of the allergic reaction anyway, and then the hospital pumped her full of prednisone. Prednisone is a steroid which is known to cause such hallucinations and delusions (and occasionally even psychotic episodes) in a very small percentage of the population, and the effect is exacerbated by lack of sleep.

She’s back home now and she occasionally says something that sounds like it’s the residual effect of the medicine, but she’s about 95 percent back to her old self. My brother wisely confiscated her car keys until we’re sure she’s 100 percent, and we’re trying to keep as close an eye on her as we can.

Apparently "Holocaust On Your Plate" Isn't Shocking Enough

On August 6 a story appeared in the Spokesman Review (Spokane) newspaper chronicling the appearance of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal’s “Holocaust On Your Plate” display which appeared at the Spokane County Courthouse for a day.

The reporter sent to write a story on the exhibit described the display thusly,

One panel shows a large photo of emaciated Jewish prisoners on one side; a picture of a cow with its ribs showing is on the other. The words, “Walking Skeletons,” appears over the panel.

“During the seven years between 1938 and 1945, 12 million people perished in the Holocaust,” another panel reads. “The same number of animals is killed EVERY 4 HOURS for food in the U.S. alone.”

It encourages people to adopt a vegetarian diet “to help end this holocaust.”

Most commentary about the “Holocaust On Your Plate” display has focused on the shocking nature of the Holocaust imagery juxtaposed with imagery of animal slaughter. But apparently at least for one vegetarian who turned out to show her support, it wasn’t graphic enough. The Spokesman-Review reports (emphasis added),

“It’s about the only way you’re going to shock people out of the lethargy of meat eating,” said Chris [Anderlik, a local animal rights advocate], who eschews nearly all meat products. She said she occasionally eats the eggs of a friend’s pet chickens.

So it’s wrong for the rest of us to enjoy a nice steak, but this “vegetarian” can make a snack out of eggs stolen from this enslaved chicken? Fine, then I’m a vegetarian who occasionally eats a steak from my local restaurant’s pet cattle.

Source:

PETA exhibit shocks friends, foes alike with graphic images. Adam Lynn, The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington), August 6, 2003.