Today the Supreme Court of the United States did the right thing in three decisions finding that the government cannot indefinitely people designated as enemy combatants indefinitely without giving them an opportunity to challenge their detention. That includes enemy combatants held outside of the United States, such at Guantanamo Bay.
Source:
Supreme Court Affirms Detainees’ Right to Use Courts. David Stout, New York Times, June 28, 2004.
Interesting blog post at RatherBiased.Com about CBS News’ business relationship with Amazon.Com. The subtext for this is some conservatives who think that CBS News is acting inappropriately in the way it is heavily promoting Bill Clinton’s new biography and other “controversial political books” (though I would put Clinton’s book in that category, although the RatherBiased.Com does).
Frankly, I could care less about both issues. American media companies long passed the Rubicon when it comes to using their pages and airwaves to engage in cross promotion of other products in their vast empires. What really offends me is watching sporting events and hearing the announcers plug crappy shows on their network that I have no interest in watching.
What is odd is that CBS News felt the need to initially deny and then finally tersely concede that CBS News and Amazon.Com have such a relationship. The RatherBiased.Com article quotes Peter Collier who is appalled saying,
blockquote>
The other thing is that these are supposed to be news shows. The whole deal raises serious questions about their authenticity. First they make news out of liberal authors which increases their commercial viability and then they, in effect, profiteer from it by selling the books on their site. The whole marketing concept is bad, period.
This might have been insightful in, say, 1987, but television news (all of it, including Fox) is suffused with marketing and such cross-promotions. Not that there’s anything wrong with it (it’s very entertaining, such as when networks cravenly bend over backwards to please such statesmen as Michael Jackson), though it would be nice if they would just drop the news label and be honest about it.
If it weren’t so emblematic of the news media in general, these paragraphs from a CNN story would be funny,
Meanwhile, a source told CNN that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld never approved a controversial interrogation technique called “water boarding.” That source had told CNN the opposite Monday.
The senior defense official who provided the original information to CNN now says Rumsfeld only approved “mild, noninjurious physical contact” with a high-level al Qaeda detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and specifically did not approve a request to use water boarding.
How stupid does CNN think its readers/viewers are?
Okay, so on Monday CNN runs a story saying that Rumsfeld personally approved the general use of water boarding for prisoners at Guantanamo. One day later, CNN’s story is that the source lied to them on Monday, but should be believed on Tuesday that Rumsfeld only approved water boarding for a single prisoner. That, by the way, wasn’t news — the Washington Post reported earlier this month that Rumsfeld approved using a number of more severe interrogation tactics on Mohamed al Qahtani who the government believes was to have been the 20th hijacker in the 9/11 attacks.
Like most (all?) anonymous sources, this Pentagon official had an agenda and was basically using CNN for his or her own purposes. CNN and other news media are happy to go along, even when it leads to embarassing backtracking like this.
It’s interesting to note that despite all of the talk about the judicial review of the legality of torture, etc., that ultimately the working group that Rumsfeld chaired approved only seven interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo that weren’t already part of standard U.S. military doctrine. According to the Washington Post,
Seven of those approved techniques are not included in U.S. military doctrine, and are listed as: “change of scenery up; change of scenery down; dietary manipulation; environmental manipulation; sleep adjustment (reversal) ; isolation for 30 days”; and a technique known as “false flag,” or deceiving a detainee into believing he is being interrogated by someone from another country.
Most of those tactics require interrogators notifying their commanders ahead of time that they plan to use them.
Source:
Guantanamo List Details Approved Interrogation Methods. Dana Priest and Bradley Graham, Washington Post, June 10, 2004.
I agree completely with Jim Moore on the ongoing genocide in Sudan. It is long past time for the United States to stop twiddling its thumbs waiting for the United Nations and act unilaterally again to stop genocide in Sudan.
A bigger question is exactly what the hell would have to happen for the United Nations to actually do something about genocided. It sat on the sidelines while hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were slaughtered. It sat on the sidelines again in Yugoslavia while mass graves and institutionalized rape were being used, and now it is standing by while Sudanese Arabs slaughter Sudanese Blacks.
What would it take for the UN to actually intervene to stop genocide? Does a country have to actually put out a sign saying “Gas Chambers Here”?
Not surprisingly, again China, France and Russia are the main obstacles to getting a resolution passed in the Security Council (France’s position seems to be that the only time it wants to send troops anywhere is to defend those responsible for genocide, as it did in Rwanda).
This Dave Winer post had me laughing out loud. It’s so bizarre to see people who get themselves in situations largely through their own bad acts and then seem clueless about that. Winer is upset that he’s being attacked for taking down Weblogs.Com and that no one is coming to his defense,
And I said next time, and there will be a next time, it would be nice if the people who know me, would say publicly that I am honest and hard-working, and to give me a chance. The reason so many of these people say ever-more-damning things about my integrity, is that no challenges them. Every time it’s like starting from zero, I have to prove that I’m not the cretin they cast me as. Next time, would the Internet have a memory please, and would the people who know me, who even would like to think of themselves as my friends, say something, publicly, so people know.
The problem Dave has, however, is precisely that the Internet does have a memory. Winer’s spent the past few years raging at and abusing pretty much everyone he’s come into contact with. There are a significant number of ex-Userland customers who migrated to other platforms largely to avoid having to deal with Winer’s outbursts. Winer is a case study in how to create an exciting technology and then completely alienate people who otherwise might be champions of said technology.
But Dave is completely oblivious to this, so he turns to his ongoing sexist mantra — they must dislike him because they’re women,
I’m a big, strong, intelligent, self-reliant male. Our culture acts as if such people never need help. “Be a man,” they say. Enough of that bullshit. Inside every strong self-reliant male is a scared kid, who doesn’t think he’s going to get out of this alive. The attackers are dispropotionately women. Do you think maybe they’re using me to get even for how someone treated them? A father, a brother, an uncle, an ex? Does our culture let them be abusers, assuming the man is always wrong, guilty until proven innocent?
Ah, yes — they’re women and they’re attacking Dave, so they’re probably just taking out some irrational rage on him. Heck, Dave, it’s probably just PMS.
As I’ve said before, why would anyone ever want to work with someone who posts such bizarre crap?
I am looking to make contact with any Vietnam veterans who were serving in Company D, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division in early 1971 when that Company was deployed near Duc Pho.
Last month I mentioned Hitachi’s annoucement of a 400gb hard drive. Now Seagate has announced its own 400gb hard drive. This one’s a three-platter drive (as opposed to the four-platter Hitachi model), with a 16mb cache. It will be interesting to see head to head performance comparisons, but as I’ve said before, the continually declining costs of large-scale storage is just amazing.
Seagate is also apparently going to start selling a 100gb USB-powered hard drive in the consumer market. I hope they get that out soon as I’ve almost filled up my SmartDisk FireLite 80gb drive and would prefer to buy a 100gb portable drive rather than another 80gb one.
No word yet on pricing for either model.
Source:
Disc Drive Leader Seagate Increases PC Hard Drive Capacities to 400GB, Unveils New Portable and Pocket External Drives. Press Release, Seagate, June 14, 2004.
Nature has a summary of a fascinating find mentioned at the 41st Animal Behavior Society meeting, Oaxaca, Mexico — octopuses favor one of their 8 appendages over the other. According to Nature,
Most octopuses have a favourite arm, zoologists have discovered. This is the first time they have been found to show any bias when choosing which of their eight limbs is right for the job.
The creatures use their trusty first-choice appendage when exploring a new nook or cranny, says Ruth Byrne of the University of Vienna in Austria. She presented the discovery on Sunday at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society in Oaxaca, Mexico.
. . .
What’s more, the creatures tended to deploy favoured combinations of one, two or three arms when manipulating objects, said Byrne, and used them in particular orders. In studies of eight octopuses, the researchers observed only 49 different combinations of one, two or three limbs, from what they calculated to be a possible 448.
Researchers also have a good idea as to why octopuses end up favoring one or a small combination repeatedly — 92 percent of the octopuses they studied had a preferred or dominant eye. Byrne believes that the octopuses favor the limb(s) closest to the dominant eye.
Source:
Octopuses have a preferred arm. Michael Hopkin, Nature, June 15, 2004.
The Center for Consumer Freedom points out that under definitions used by the U.S. government 75 percent of the players on the L.A. Lakers and Detroit Pistons are overweight or obese.
With all that junk food he’s been eating, Kobe Bryant’s just a heart attack waiting to happen.
This post accuses me of perpetuating a myth about Ronald Reagan’s statement about AIDS. It basically accuses me of repeating Deroy Murdock’s error which was just mindblowing — he was off by two days on a statement that Reagan made about AIDS. Rather than the statement being part of the State of the Union address, it was made two days later on Feb. 6, 1986.
But when Reagan made that statement (or the pointless issue of whether or not he actually made the statement as a speech or just issued a written message) is really irrelevant, because he mentioned AIDS during a September 17, 1985 press conference. Here’s the relevant part from the transcript from the New York Times of the press conference,
AIDS Research
Q. Mr. President, the nation’s best-known AIDS scientist says the time has come now to boost existing research into what he called a minor moon shot program to attack this AIDS epidemic that has struck fear into the nation’s health workers and even in schoolchildren. Would you support a massive Government research program against AIDS like the one that President Nixon launched against cancer?
A. I have been supporting it for more than four years now. It’s been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last four years and including what we have in the budget for ’86 it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS, in addition to what I’m sure other medical groups are doing.
And we have $100 billion, or $100 million in the budget this year; it’ll be $126 million next year. So this is a top priority with us. Yes, there’s no question about the seriousness of this, and the need to find an answer.
Q. If I could follow up, sir. The scientist who talked about this, who does work for the Government is in the National Cancer Institute, he was referring to your program and the increase that you propose as being not nearly enough at this stage to go forward and really attack the problem.
A. I think with our budgetary restraints and all it seems to me that $126 million in a single year for research has got to be something of a vital contribution.
Source:
Transcript of Ronald Reagan Press Conference. New York Times, September 18, 1985.
