Feed your war news addiction with a near real-time compilation of breaking reports at The Command Post - A Warblog Collective
I love it because it saves me looking at multiple sites, or waiting for one to post the latest update. Plus, most of the minute-by-minute news is really only worth a sentence or two, but the news sites generally feel compelled to write a 300 word-story for each new tidbit.
My only criticism? A bit too much news from Fox television, for my taste, combined with somewhat of a hawkish lean; but you'd expect that from folks following every battle action so closely.
War Lingo
Today's network news catchphrase seems to be "preparing the battlefield." I guess if we're going to do "surgical strikes" (1991 lingo), then we first need to prepare the operating theatre. Still, it seems like a very removed replacement term for "blowing the crap out of things high on our list." Does anyone else think the military shows are increasingly sounding like FoodTV? Will Tommy Franks be punctuating his bomb damage assessments (BDAs) with the occasional "bam"???
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Countdown to War
Looking at MSNBC this morning, they've got the "war timer" up now. Seems that it's become mandatory to put up a countdown timer on the overlay any time anyone gives any kind of deadline. Is it really necessary to track exactly how many minutes remain? Is the first missile really going to launch when the timer reaches zero? No. If Saddam steps down at hour 48, minute 2, will we still attack? In international diplomacy, should there really be "buzzer beaters" to avoiding war?
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Fortune: Generation Wrecked
Fortune has an article that Generation X (those age 25-35, approximately) has experienced the worst career reversal seen since the Great Depression. I'd argue the game isn't over yet, but it's true that I'm stunned how many of my friends have been laid off at least once, over the past few years -- and many of them graduated from Ivy League (or better, heh) colleges. It's tough to see this happen to the people who most bought into the promise of education -- work hard, go to a good college, have a great career. My hope remains, however, that this game isn't over yet. Those who were positioned best before the current recession (depression?) will be ready to take advantage of the bounce back -- if our student loans don't crush us first.
" Now that the thrill ride is over, Gen X's plight seems particularly bruising. No generation since the Depression has been set up for failure like this. Everything the dot-com boom delivered has been taken away--and then some. Real wages are falling, wealth continues to shift from younger to older, and education costs are surging."
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NYT: Thomas Friedman on Iraq
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, manages, as usual, to sum up the intuition of many intelligent Americans: Why is Bush so determined to attack Iraq, and why now? His article, which is heavily influenced by the thinking he developed in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, is that as a nation we should be figuring out how to unravel and reverse the conditions that are creating "undeterrable" menaces like those of 9/11.
"...only by helping the Arabs gradually change their context — a context now dominated by anti-democratic regimes and anti-modernist religious leaders and educators — are we going to break the engine that is producing one generation after another of undeterrables.
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Alton Brown Interview
Slashdot has an extended interview with Alton Brown, host of Good Eats on the Food Network.
Alton: No matter how much creativity goes into it, cooking is an art -- or perhaps I should say a craft. It abides by absolute rules, physics, chemistry, etc. and that means that unless you understand the science you cannot reach the art. We're not talking about painting here -- cooking's more like engineering. I happen to think that there is great beauty in great engineering (the wing of a Boeing 777, a suspension bridge) but they are not works of art, they are works of science. To my mind art is a matter of personal expression and the exchange of ideas; food is in the end, fuel -- a means to an end.
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News.Com: Bill Authorizes MPAA Hacking
News.Com is reporting that a draft bill being introduced in Congress would authorize copyright holders to disable consumer's PCs being used for illicit file trading. Not only that, but it would immunize them from any state or federal laws and most civil liability for damages. Sounds like it's time to finally join the EFF.
"The legislation would immunize groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America from all state and federal laws if they disable, block or otherwise impair a 'publicly accessible peer-to-peer network'"
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NYT: A Bluesman's End
The New York Times has a great requiem for Jimmie Lee Robinson, a Chicago-native blues guitarist/vocalist who fought the gentrification of the neighborhood near U. Chicago where he learned his trade. "A Chicago Bluesman, Reaching Crossroads, Gives Up His Fights."
Watching NYU community gobble up the immigrant neighborhoods of the East Village... replacing genuine ethnic restaurants with the Taco Bells and KFC's that suburban students prefer... it's not hard to understand that Robinson had reasons to fight for a neighborhood that others simply saw as delapidated.
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Makin' People Burgers
If cutting himself shaving hadn't decided it, Marty was now definitely realizing that it was probably going to be a bad day, on the balance.
Okay, the photographer wasn't gored or anything... he probably had the camera on a boom with a remote shutter release, so he may not have even been on the street level. Still, nice photo.
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The Perfect Storm of Cliche
Okay, can everyone stop quoting spokesmen when they declare that some massive failure was the result of a "perfect storm" of some condition they were supposed to have under control?
The latest to float this claim was NYSE chairman Richard Grasso, who called the Worldcom scandal "the perfect storm of failure." Ummm.. no. This was not the convergence of three minor failures. This was a huge case of accounting fraud. And it wasn't a once-per-hundred-year kind of thing, either, quite obviously.
Before this, we've had the perfect forest fire (can't find the citation, but it's been used to refer to several), the perfect meteor storm, and even a "perfect little ice storm", just to name a few.
Time for a perfect little thesaurus, perhaps.
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