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we were early on this one, and a fresh flood of coverage came for easter, with slashdot and metafilter leading the charge.
ok, so now it’s news.
is this an attempt to keep the business down so the war on piracy and filesharing can maintain political traction, or is this greed threatening to choke the baby before it’s out of the crib, or is this some vast walmart conspiracy to get everyone else to price themselves out of the market?
or maybe it’s aliens…
bill moyers, “what now, ” 2004.03.26mister bush clearly believes what he says: the war on terror is an inescapable calling of the generation now in charge. like many of you, i want to support him in that work, but the president makes it hard.
i’ve been meaning to say something about this whole pdb mini-fiasco for a while, but i don’t want to wrap myself into a full essay, so hopefully i can keep this short…
after fighting the creation of a 9/11 investigative commission…
and fighting against giving that commission subpoena powers…
and in-effect declaring that the “independent, bipartisan commission” is a congressional commission (the separation-of-powers argument keeping dr. rice away from the microphones)….
and putting dr. rice on the media circuit to spin the story…
and limiting access to many documents under the color of classified material (and how did we manage to get people we couldn’t trust with classified material on this commission in the first place?)
and claiming privilege with regard to the presidential daily briefing…
and now spinning the rice testimony and the newly-declassified pdb….
now i get to say something about all this trouble from the bush administration… and speculate a bit. this administration hasn’t been forthcoming, so they’ve left lots of room for speculation.
everyone, up and down the intelligence hierarchy, signed off on this pdb. people in field offices made reports and their superiors passed them up to regional offices, and those got passed up to national offices, and through multiple agencies and through the cabinet-level officials, everyone decided that despite the inability to “corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting,” that this material was important enough for the desk of the president.
now, i may have unreasonable expectations here, but if i saw this document as president the first questions i’d ask are “what do we know about these al quaida members in the united states and this support structure they’ve created?” “what’s the status of these 70 investigations?” “is there anything else we should be doing?” (like, maybe, watching these al qaida members for strange things like… interstate travel or odd financial transactions?).
my people, operating in the most expensive and expansive intelligence-gathering structure in the history of the world used up 30 of less than 500 words in this brief to tell me there was an infrastructure inside the united states operating with the intent to “strike.”
that’s “actionable” enough for me. impossible to know if these actions might prevent or mitigate the 9/11 attacks, but i have more than a month to get upset about “terrorist support structures in the united states.”
it seems that almihdhar and alhazmi were identified as al qaida operatives by the cia in 1999 or 2000 (i’m not digging deep enough to put a solid date on that), but didn’t make the fbi/ins terrorist watch list until late august 2001. would a couple extra weeks have found them? would it have stopped them at the airport?
perhaps moving up the september 4 cabinet meeting on terrorism by a few weeks would make some difference…
anyway, pure speculation, of course…
pdb text below…
(more…)
[excuse me a moment while i take the foreigner off the record player]
reported by msnbc, the hot new thing in body modification is jewelry on your eyeball.
The procedure involves inserting a 0.13 inch wide piece of specially developed jewelry — the range includes a glittering half-moon or heart — into the eye’s mucous membrane under local anaesthetic at a cost of $610 to $1,232.
unfortunately, the picture included with the story shows a heart-shaped object on the eyeball.
which leads us to more unfortunate speculation…. green clovers? purple diamonds? they’re magically delicious.
us marshal nehemiah flowers can’t think of alternatives to the illegal siezure and destruction of media recordings documenting a speech by us supreme court justice scalia.
“The justice informed us he did not want any recordings of his speech and remarks and when we discovered that one, or possibly two, reporters were in fact recording, she took action,” Flowers told The Associated Press.
“Even with hindsight, I can’t think of what other steps she could have done,” Flowers said.
how ’bout these other steps?
1) confiscate the recording devices after the event and issue an injuction to prevent the use or reproduction of the recordings until the issue is resolved.
2) maintain the integrity of the recording as evidence.
3) allow a court to decide if the recordings should be destroyed.
just a thought… i dunno.
do we really need to help our law enforcement officials figure out this whole “due process” thing? we don’t even have to get into strange laws (like the privacy protection act – mentioned in the ap story), we can just stick to the simple ones:
us constitution, amendment 4The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
us constitution, amendment 5No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
A Belgian motorist was left stunned after authorities sent him a speeding ticket for travelling in his Mini at three times the speed of sound.
The ticket claimed the man had been caught driving at 3380 kph (2, 100 mph) – or Mach 3 speed – in a Brussels suburb, a Belgian newspaper reported.
it’s just a book review, but it’s a perspective that explains why it’ll take a whole lot of silver bullets to fix the mess we’ve created.
It began back in the 1980s with the United States government’s misplaced multi-million dollar anti-Soviet policy in Afghanistan. During that time, an Afghan royalist mujahideen commander offered this warning to the US: “For God’s sake, you are financing your own assassins.”
the earth impact effects calculator. this handy web-based calculator provides all kinds of nice information about how the rock falling from the sky might kill you… you can find out how big the hole will be, how crispy-fried you’ll be, how much stuff will fall on you, how much rocking and rolling is going on, and even how loud it’ll be.
now all you have to do is find the rock so you know what to put in the form before it hits.
asa has apparently approved extended missions for the mars exploration rovers, with a $15 million budget and operations through september.
keep your heads down, my martian friends.
an economist might look at this and see an attempt to constrain sales volume….
or just greed.
anyway, the wall street journal is reporting on an interesting phenmonon where online sales of music are getting more expensive. this, of course is very unwalmartlike, and may help take care of that nasty problem of rising sales that could undermine the war on piracy.
[via slashdot]
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