IF YOU GOT OUT OF THE HABIT of checking out Tom Maguire’s blog while he was on hiatus, well, he’s back and blogging up a storm. He’s got Avril Lavigne advising John Kerry, a Vulcan mind-meld with Maureen Dowd, and a new Senatorial candidate, among other things.
Archive for 2004
January 12, 2004
WOW: A one-terabyte external hard drive! I’ve got a LaCie 160GB firewire hard drive for video. It works fine, and at the UT computer store I got it for about a buck a gigabyte. Of course, that would still work out to a lot of money for this one. . . . What’s certain is that in a few years, I’ll be saying “only one terabyte?”
(Via Gizmodo).
UPDATE: Here, by contrast, is what a terabit storage unit looked like in 1969. I didn’t even know they had those then. Story here. (Thanks to reader N.J. O’Neill). Note the distinction between bits and bytes.
KIMBERLY SWYGERT has seen the face of the future, and she pronounces it beautiful.
DID SADDAM’S CAPTURE MAKE AMERICANS SAFER? These Americans, I guess: “Attacks against coalition forces in Iraq have dropped 22% in the four weeks since Saddam Hussein’s capture, military records show.” I don’t know how much stock to put in numbers like this, but you can bet that some people would be making a big deal out of it if the numbers had gone up.
POWER LINE has some doubts about Paul O’Neill’s honesty.
UPDATE: Daniel Drezner has a lengthy O’Neill-related post. And reader Angie Schultz asks:
I do want to know what laws O’Neill broke by giving Suskind “transcripts of private, high-level National Security Council meetings”. Is that more or less of a crime than outing a CIA agent?
Hmm. It’s by a Republican, which makes it bad. But it’s anti-Administration, which makes it, er, patriotic! Yeah, that’s the ticket. . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Hmm. Angie isn’t the only one wondering about O’Neill:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury has asked the U.S. inspector general’s office to investigate how a possibly classified document appeared on Sunday in a televised interview of ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, a department spokesman said on Monday.
“It’s based on the (CBS program) ’60 Minutes’ segment, and I’ll be even more clear — the document as shown on ’60 Minutes’ that said ‘secret,”‘ Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols told reporters at a weekly briefing.
As Henry Hanks emails: “The ‘Frog march Karl Rove’ crowd ought to be outraged if the allegations are true…” No doubt.
BUSH LIED! BUSH LIED! Er, but if he did, so did Wesley Clark:
Less than a year before he entered the race for the Democratic nomination for president, Gen. Wesley K. Clark said that he believed there was a connection between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda.
The statement by General Clark in October 2002 as he endorsed a New Hampshire candidate for Congress is a sign of how the general’s position on Iraq seems to have changed over time, though he insists his position has been consistent.
“Certainly there’s a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda,” he said in 2002. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that they would be talking to Al Qaeda, that there would be some Al Qaeda there or that Saddam Hussein might even be, you know, discussing gee, I wonder since I don’t have any scuds and since the Americans are coming at me, I wonder if I could take advantage of Al Qaeda? How would I do it? Is it worth the risk? What could they do for me?”
At numerous campaign events in the past three months and in a book published last year, General Clark has asserted that there was no evidence linking Iraq and Al Qaeda. He has also accused the Bush administration of executing “a world-class bait-and-switch,” by using the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as an excuse to invade Iraq.
Well, somebody has switched.
UPDATE: Here’s an interesting post on Saddam’s public terror threats against the U.S.
ABRAHAM REDIVIVUS: Ralph Luker reports on a case of academic dissent-crushing (or maybe it’s just, er, crushing) that, ultimately, failed.
IT’S OBVIOUSLY TIME to start publishing the Journal of Critical Cyberspace Studies.
Hey, maybe we already are!
I HAVEN’T GOTTEN MY COPY YET, but Matt Welch asks that if you have gotten the new Corvids CD Fought Down (featuring him, Layne, et al.) and like it, you consider posting a review over at its Amazon page. Prime that PR pump. . . .
NO BIG SURPRISE HERE — but it must be worrying a lot of people:
People are turning increasingly to alternatives such as the Internet for news about the presidential campaign, shifting away from traditional outlets such as the nightly network news and newspapers, a poll found. . . .
The number of people who say the Internet is a top source of campaign news was 13 percent, double the number who said that at the same stage of the 2000 campaign.
The number of people who say they regularly or sometimes get campaign news from the Internet increased to 33 percent from 24 percent.
The changing habits of young adults are leading the shift of sources for campaign news.
Even if the revolution is televised, I guess a lot of people won’t be watching.
INDYMEDIA SUPPORTS THE TROOPS: No surprise here, sadly.
HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW with French freedom activist Sabine Herold. Excerpt:
I’d say that when you have no freedom and when you don’t respect the individual, it can lead to slaughter. And the only way to respect the individual is to give him the freedom to decide for himself.
I’d say that you can’t decide for others what they should be. When you try to centralize everything and when the state tries to help the people too much and to decide for them what is good, it doesn’t work. It didn’t work in China, it didn’t work in Cuba, it didn’t work in North Korea.
Perhaps there’s hope for France, after all.
UPDATE: And here’s another woman who’s fighting for freedom in Europe, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
THIS WEEKS’ CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS — a roundup of business and economics-related blog items — is up. Check it out!
ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY REPORT ON GUN BIAS IN THE MEDIA is up. Plus, my home state is rated.
WELL, THIS IS NO SURPRISE:
What former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and other Bush administration blabbermouths failed to mention when leaking NSC documents and the like for the forthcoming book O’Neill worked on, is that the Clinton administration had many of the same documents prepared laying out plans for a Iraq post-invasion Iraq.
“We had the same stuff,” says a former senior Clinton Administration aide who worked at the Pentagon. “It would have been irresponsible not to have such planning. We had all kinds of briefing material ready should the president have decided to move on Iraq. In fact, a lot of the material we had prepared was material that the previous Bush administration had left for us. It just isn’t that big a deal. Or shouldn’t be.”
Of course they had the same stuff. And, yes, it would have been irresponsible not to.
THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS:
The celebrations that followed such attacks in the early days of the occupation are becoming more rare, several residents said, and martyrdom no longer seems noble when it means upturning the lives of ordinary Iraqis.
“I’m against the resistance now, and I’m not afraid to say it,” said Mahmoud Ali, 25, who was tending a roadside soda stand. “I can bring you a dozen friends who say the same thing. I wish the attacks would stop. It’s affecting our whole stability, our whole life.”
It’s the “not afraid to say it” that’s probably the biggest indicator here.
DAVID BRODER: “Then I went over to the Dean headquarters, they’re young, they’re female, they’re gay, and they’re small. And I thought to myself, I hope those Gephardt guys don’t run into the Dean people. You know it would be a bad scene. ”
MICKEY KAUS joins the list of bloggers finding Wesley Clark’s abortion position insufficiently nuanced.