Month: June 2006

“Why Conservatives Can’t Govern” by Alan Wolfe

Wow, apparently I’m not the only one that thinks putting people who think government is inherently evil in charge of government is a ridiculous idea.

Contemporary conservatism is first and foremost about shrinking the size and reach of the federal government. This mission, let us be clear, is an ideological one. It does not emerge out of an attempt to solve real-world problems, such as managing increasing deficits or finding revenue to pay for entitlements built into the structure of federal legislation. It stems, rather, from the libertarian conviction, repeated endlessly by George W. Bush, that the money government collects in order to carry out its business properly belongs to the people themselves. One thought, and one thought only, guided Bush and his Republican allies since they assumed power in the wake of Bush vs. Gore: taxes must be cut, and the more they are cut–especially in ways benefiting the rich–the better.But like all politicians, conservatives, once in office, find themselves under constant pressure from constituents to use government to improve their lives. This puts conservatives in the awkward position of managing government agencies whose missions–indeed, whose very existence–they believe to be illegitimate. Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.

The New Yorker explains the way James Joyce’s grandson, controller of all Joyce’s works which are under copyright, regularly uses that fact to abuse and exploit James Joyce scholars.

It’s a more interesting story than the usual “author’s estate copyright-holder” situation, which is just massive financial extortion.  The Joyce-whelp adds insult, threat, and abuse to all that.  Via Metafilter.

These things are just going to get worse as copyright terms are extended and extended and extended for the sake of Disney and such….

ochen k. discusses a story bouncing around the interweb about the uses of sounds so high in frequency they can only be heard by subhuman life-forms, like dogs and teenagers.

He came up with the clever idea of recording a bunch of tones at increasing frequencies so you could listen in and figure out where your cutoff range is.  I didn’t get a good idea of mine because I could hear:

• 15KHz clearly
• 16 not at all,
• 17 faintly but distinctly,
• 18 so faintly I don’t know if I was imagining it,
• 19 very clearly,
• 20 very clearly,
• 21 very faint but there,
• 22 very faint but there,
• 23 not at all,
• 24 just barely barely audible but there,
• 25 no way.

This weird pattern of frequencies suggests that the test isn’t that useful.  One of the commenters pointed out that a high note may have a low harmonic within it, so some of the super high ones I heard, maybe I wasn’t hearing the actual frequency, just some piece of its harmonics.  Also, they’re mp3s.  Lossy compression.  Heaven knows what that does to pure tones.  You know how JPGs cause the most visible, nasty artifacts on very simple clean precise geometric forms?  I would not be surprised if mp3 compression is an equally iffy proposition for very high pure synth tones.

This is via digg.

“They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

What. The. Hell.
“The US military said the men’s bodies were being treated ‘with the utmost respect’.”

And that is a first for Guantanamo. Apparently death qualifies you for that.

Update: forgot link.  Sorry Paul!

The Timely Death of al-Zarqawi by Chris Floyd

In yet another amazing coincidence, the announcement of the death of Zarqawi or somebody just like him came just as Prime Minister Maliki was finally submitting his candidates for the long-disputed posts of defense and interior ministers, which then sailed through parliament after months of deadlock. The fortuitous death also came after perhaps the worst week of bad PR the Bush Administration has endured during the entire war, with an outpouring of stories alleging a number of horrific atrocities committed by U.S. troops in recent months.Oddly enough, Zarqawi first vaulted into the American consciousness just after the public exposure of earlier U.S. atrocities: the tortures at Abu Ghraib prison in the spring of 2004. With story after story of horrible abuse battering the Administration during an election year, Zarqawi, or someone just like him, suddenly appeared with a Grand Guignol production: the beheading of American civilian Nick Berg. This atrocity was instantly seized upon by supporters of the war to justify the “intensive interrogation” of “terrorists” – even though the Red Cross had determined that 70 to 90 percent of American captives at that time had committed no crime whatsoever, much less been involved in terrorism, as the notorious anti-war Wall Street Journal reported. Abu Ghraib largely faded from the public eye – indeed, it was not mentioned by a single speaker at the Democratic National Convention a few weeks later or raised as an issue during the presidential campaign that year.

Today’s news has likewise knocked the new atrocity allegations off the front pages, to be replaced with heartening stories of how, as the New York Times reports, Zarqawi’s death “appears to mark a major watershed in the war.” Thus in his reputed end as in his reputed beginning, the Scarlet Pimpernel of Iraq has, by remarkable coincidence, done yeoman service for the immediate publicity needs of his deadly enemy, the Bush Administration.

It is not yet known who will now take Zarqawi’s place as the new all-purpose, all-powerful bogeyman solely responsible for every bad thing in Iraq. There were recent indications that Maliki himself was being measured for the post, after he publicly denounced American atrocities and the occupiers’ propensity for hair-trigger killing of civilians, but he seems to be back with the program now. Administration insiders are reportedly divided over shifting the horns to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s already much-demonized head, or planting them on extremist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, or elevating some hitherto unknown local talent – or maybe just blaming the whole shebang on Fidel Castro, for old times’ sake.