Month: June 2005

This is from Moveon.org. You may or may not like their chosen mission of slapping down the Repubs for their excesses, but if you value PBS, please join them on this — ask our congress to do the right thing and keep them around. Or if you know of another organization doing a similar petition or action, let your feelings be known through them. Or call your Congresscritters.

Hi,
You know that email petition that keeps circulating about how Congress is slashing funding for NPR and PBS? Well, now it’s actually true. (Really. Check at the bottom if you don’t believe me.)
Sign the petition telling Congress to save NPR and PBS:
http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/?t=1
A House panel has voted to eliminate all public funding for NPR and PBS, starting with “Sesame Street,” “Reading Rainbow,” and other commercial-free children’s shows. If approved, this would be the most severe cut in the history of public broadcasting, threatening to pull the plug on Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Oscar the Grouch.
The cuts would slash 25% of the federal funding this year—$100 million—and end funding altogether within two years. The loss could kill beloved children’s shows like “Clifford the Big Red Dog,” “Arthur,” and “Postcards from Buster.” Rural stations and those serving low-income communities might not survive. Other stations would have to increase corporate sponsorships.
The next vote on the cuts will take place tomorrow (Thursday). Help us reach 400,000 signatures to be delivered to the committee members.
http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/?t=2
Thanks!
P.S. Read the Washington Post report on the threat to NPR and PBS at:
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=745

You got your Prog Rock in my Tuvan throat singing!

Mmm… delicious! Two great tastes that taste great together!

Big Sky sounds a lot like the old prog rock band Renaissance (singer Johnna Morrow’s voice is a dead ringer for the amazing Annie Haslam of Renaissance), but it’s less orchestral, more ethereal and at the same time more rockin’, and has a zing of Tuvan Khoomei thanks to guitarist/throatsinger Steve Sklar.

Their free mp3s are great (“Siberia” is the one with the major throatsinging component; if it’s present on the other tracks it’s not very prominent). I’m putting them in my iTunes and I’m gonna buy their CD if they grow on me.

I don’t know why, but it bothers the heck out of me. I’ve been all thinking about ditching Mac OS X and installing Linux lately, and that’s just crazy talk. (It’s hard enough being on an open source OS without also being on a minority platform for that open source OS.)

Best I can figure is, it seems like the support of Apple is the only thing making this unusual platform, PowerPC, not a complete dead end road (a la Amiga). Like, they were telling us all this time, “hey, this is great, it’s definitely worth being on mutant hardware, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you,” and then suddenly, bam, no, I don’t think so. And it’s not like the Intel stuff is a better, more advanced version of the powerPC stuff, like the G3/G4/G5 were. It’s just the stuff the Windows and Linux guys had the whole time, and we didn’t.

I know that Apple will support the PowerPC for a while, but they won’t support it forever, and third party developers will probably bail as soon as they can get away with it. The PowerPC is now a deadend platform for personal computing.

That’s the best I can articulate it. It’s not really a rational conclusion though, it’s more this inarticulate feeling of annoyance and disgust. The rational explanation is post hoc.

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: Yat-Kha covers Motorhead, Joy Division: Yat-Kha is a Tuvan khoomei (throat-singing) group. Not to be missed.

The paper in question.

How the Times of London headlines it:

“Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’”

How the New York Times headlines it:

“Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn’t Made”

Justification for the headline:

“A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made “no political decisions” to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced. The memo also said American planning, in the eyes of Mr. Blair’s aides, was “virtually silent” on the problems of a postwar occupation.”

Read the paper. It makes it clear that the Bush Administration is planning a war, and has not yet made all the “political” decisions about exactly how that war is going to occur. But no doubt is left that the war will happen, and Britain is just concerned with finding some pretext for making it vaguely legal:

US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law. But regime change could result from action that is otherwise lawful.

The NYT reading of the memo is incredibly… generous. Let’s put it that way. Generous. That’s the way it looks to me anyway. Read the papers yourself and form your own conclusions.

Would have been nice if the NYT had reprinted the papers and let people form their own conclusions too.