Geoff Arnold

Lucy's

We've lived in various places over the last 30+ years: a year in Hayes, three years in Newcastle-on-Tyne, four years in Chesham, nineteen years in Foxboro, and now four years in Brookline. In all that time we've never really had a "local": a regular place to hang out and eat or drink. In England the "local" is usually a pub, but our nearest pubs in both Newcastle and Chesham were dismal places. And Foxboro was the kind of dormitory suburb without a centre, where most socializing happened at the homes of friends and neighbours. Oh yes, we've patronized various restaurants, but we never got to know the staff as friends.

But here in Brookline I think we've found our "local": a really nice, interesting, friendly restaurant called Lucy's. OK, it isn't very local - it's up at Coolidge Corner, about 4 miles away. But over the last year or so we've found ourselves eating there more and more often, or simply stopping in for a cocktail and a chat. The food is really good and always imaginative. This afternoon we were shopping at Coolidge Corner, and we found ourselves rearranging our schedule in order to be at the door of Lucy's when it opened at five. We had a martini and chatted with Mitzi (the proprietor) for about half an hour before heading home to deal with the trick-or-treaters. Sure feels like a local to me.

Lucy's. Recommended. See you there.

Halloween evening

It was one of the warmest Halloweens I can remember recently, and we'd put a carved and painted pumpkin outside, so I decided to sit outside to receive the trick-or-treaters. Although we got a lot of kids this year, they tended to come in gaggles, so I took a book out with me. I actually spent the time reading chapter 2 of Chalmers' The Conscious Mind on Supervenience and Explanation. Supervenience is one of those cool logical/philosophical tools that leaves you wondering how you ever got by with fuzzy notions like "depends on". Mind you, I am having difficulty working up a lot of sympathy for some of Chalmers' ideas about consciousness - specifically, I can't see why he finds phenomenal consciousness "surprising" and "troubling" - but as Dennett says, "explore before you deplore."

Not your grandfather's Vatican...

With the blessing of the Vatican, two Italian theologians have just published a book on sex for Catholics, entitled It's A Sin Not To Do It. One might be forgiven for thinking that this is just a way to get the faithful to increase the Catholic birth-rate; far from it. It's much more expansive in scope. For example, as the Telegraph reports, the book "unearths theological justification for post-coital masturbation for women who fail to achieve orgasm during intercourse". How times change. Mentioning something like that in the Catholic school I attended back in the early 1960s would have meant six of the best. (But I thought Catholic teaching was supposed to be inerrant and eternal....)

Eminem's "Mosh"

I finally got a chance to watch the politically-charged video for Eminem's "Mosh". I'm not a big rap fan, although I really like Maxie Jazz and Faithless, and I've never gone for Eminem (even if Elton John has exonerated him). However Mosh really worked for me. It's powerful, and absolutely spot-on. A precision-guided musical weapon headed for the White House. Crank up the volume, check it out, get angry, and VOTE.

Correlation of beliefs

Seymour Hersh on why Kerry isn't winning by a landslide: "I think one thing you have to face up to is the fact there are roughly 70 million people in America who do not believe in evolution - and those are Bush supporters."

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Celtics... then Pats... now the Red Sox

So finally, incredibly, the Red Sox have done it.

When I came to the USA 23 years ago, Boston sports was all about the Celtics. Larry Bird, Robert Parrish, and all the rest of them: although there were various pretenders (Philly? LA?) the Celtics were the natural champions.

Then came a drought. Occasionally the Red Sox would tease their fans, but everybody knew better than to take them seriously.

Then, quite unexpectedly, the star-less Patriots started winning; grinding out victories with a frightening implacability.

And now, from the depths of despair after three games of the ALCS, the Red Sox have swept to victory, under a total eclipse of the moon. Sweet. Stay safe, everybody.

Mobility

Tim wrote: "Bluetooth? I think it hits the sweet spot for me. I’d totally love one of the hot new phones with high-speed flat-rate data that I can leave in my bag. Then I stick a Bluetooth headset over one ear, and then have my computer connect through it so I’m really on the Net all the time.

But... iPod? Blackberry? Texting? Not for me, thanks; at the moment anyhow. Are there others like me?"

Today I use a Nokia 3650 phone and my PowerBook. Both support Bluetooth. The phone has a (primitive) camera, and I can easily transfer the photos to my PowerBook and into iPhoto. I also use Romeo and Veta Universal to use my phone as a wireless mouse for the PowerBook. I sometimes use my phone to display speaker notes during presentations, which I transfer from the PowerBook. I'd like to sync my PowrBook's iCal calendar into my phone, but I haven't yet taken the time to sync Sun's EdgeCal service with iCal. I don't use my phone as a modem, not because I can't but because people tell me it's far to easy to run up enormous phone bills. (I don't have an "unlimited data" plan.) All of these features use BlueTooth.

iPod? Yes, I have one: I love it for long flights, or walks; I also play it through my car stereo. Texting? Not outbound, but absolutely inbound. I have EdgeCal set up to send a text message to my phone 10 minutes before every appointment, including location and phone number (for phone conferences). Not only does this work when I'm not online; the discreet "beep" is a great way of initiating a graceful end to my previous meeting, so that I can actually get to the next one on time! (An alien concept to many, I know.) And I definitely use the browser on my phone for ad hoc information - headlines, stock prices, sports scores (GO SOX!!!), flight schedules. (Oh, yes: I use text messaging to get flight and upgrade notices.)

Having said all this, I'm probably going to switch to the Treo 650 when AT&T Wireless starts shipping the GSM version. Better screen, cleaner browsing, more apps, usable games.... I've tried games on the Nokia 3650, but it's really not quite usable - partly because of the quirky circular keypad. I figure that the Treo 650 should be almost as usable as my GameBoy Advanced.

Hitchens vs. Hitchens

OK, this is priceless. The mercurial expat Brit writer Christopher Hitchens (note my restrained description) has seen fit to endorse both Kerry and Bush!! Maybe another bottle of port will cure his double vision. Or perhaps he should stick to writing about Henry Kissinger and George Orwell.

(Thanks to Atrios.)

"How many more have to die?"

From Capitol Hill Blue: How many more have to die?: "An internal memo circulating at CIA headquarters at Langley says more Iraqi civilians have died since the American invasion than died at the hands of Saddam Hussein over the past decade."

RIP: John Peel

Starting in the late 1960s, John Peel introduced a generation of British radio listeners - including me - to wondrous and strange "underground" music: Captain Beefheart, the Incredible String Band, Country Joe and the Fish, and many, many more. (Who can forget the Purple Gang's "Granny Takes A Trip", an innocent little ditty whose title was guaranteed to get a rise out of BBC management?) He even started his own record label, Dandelion, to give a chance to college bands like Principal Edwards' Magic Theatre. And the wonderful thing was that he wasn't stuck in one era: he was always looking ahead, introducing listeners to the unexpected, for nearly 40 years.

On my last trip to England, I was driving down the M40 and tuned in to a talk radio show which seemed to defy all the rules for the genre. It juxtaposed topics in a head-spinning way: the silly, the sad, the ecstatic, and the profound. The host's voice seemed familiar, but I was concentrating on my driving, and so.... And then at the end I learned that it was John Peel, in a non-musical role, and I realised why the program had challenged conventions. Because he always did. Thanks, John. And goodbye.

Update: Chris just posted a nice piece with a link to John Peel's favourite song, Teenage Kicks by the Undertones.

Update: The radio show was Home Truths. You can listen to a tribute issue of this wonderful program at the BBC Radio 4 website.

Two CDs of the week: "Blackfield" and "Speak"

It's like waiting for a bus... you hang around for ages, and then along come several. Well, in this case the waiting has been for the mail from England, which finally delivered two very special CDs with one thing in common: Steven Wilson.

In the USA, Steven Wilson is best known as the leader of Porcupine Tree, the progressive and increasingly heavy rock band that began with some home produced tracks with a fictitious back-story and has now become a major force, with albums such as The Sky Moves Sideways, Signify and In Absentia. But in Europe, he was always better known for a variety of collaborations with different artists using different names. Which leads us to today's crop.

First up is Blackfield, a new project by Steven and Aviv Geffen. The songs are simple, short, direct, and beautiful; the sound is that of Lightbulb Sun-era Porcupine Tree, with full, sensual arrangements. Deeply satisfying. The album is short - ten songs, just over 30 minutes - and there's a bonus CD with two new tracks plus a live version of Cloudy Now and an MPEG video of the title track.

The second album is Speak by No-Man. Tim Bowness and Steven Wilson have been No-Man since the late 1980s, and this material first appeared on cassette back in 1989, long before they had a recording contract or a sense of where they were going! Although unmistakably by the same artists who gave us the rich soundscapes and tone poems of Flower Mouth and Returning Jesus, Speak is more eclectic, less structured. Fragments of melodies, rhythms, and "found sounds" of indefinite provenance sweep in and disappear as if dissipated by a sudden breeze, while Tim's quietly insistent words pull you in. I have all of No-Man's later work; it's good to be able to hear their roots.

Blackfield has been released in the USA, but No-Man recordings are hard to find. The best source is Burning Shed Records in England.

The empty accusation of the "L-word"

From the Des Moines Register: "Yes, Kerry is liberal. But what's to fear from a liberal president? That he would run big deficits? That he would increase federal spending? That he would expand the power of the federal government over individuals' lives? Nothing Kerry could do could top what President Bush has already done in those realms."

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

How not to break a record

Like Steve, I was (on balance) glad that Manchester United beat Arsenal. Even if it did end the Gunners' record-breaking run, the Premiership is now really exciting. But not this way:

BBC SPORT | Football | Premiership | FA acts after Old Trafford battle: "Manchester United's Ruud Van Nistelrooy has been charged with serious foul play by the Football Association for a tackle on Arsenal's Ashley Cole.

Van Nistelrooy has been given until Tuesday to "deny or admit" the charge which will be heard on Thursday."

Two great streaks - one continues, one ends

Here in New England, the Patriots stretched their streak to 21 by beating the NY Jets. And back home in old England, Manchester United finally ended Arsenal's 49 game unbeaten run. All good things must come to an end....

Trying ecto again after trying MarsEdit

In general, ecto is much more WP-like than MarsEdit. It has convenient toolbar options for colouring text, building lists, and so forth. As in MarsEdit, the option to manage multiple blogs just clutters things up for the 90% of us who find that running one blog is hard enough work.

ecto has no support for images at all: you have to do it all by hand.

I take that back: there is an Import from iPhoto feature that works (that's Al Stewart in concert in Boston), but this ignores the third party image link issue.

As usual, I want features from each of them.

Blog update: added security for comments

An administrative note: I've modified the comment forms for the blog to require you to enter a security code - a four digit number corresponding to a grey image. This is necessary to foil the increasingly aggressive blog spam bots - I receive literally dozens of attempted intrusions every day.

If anyone reading this blog is visually impaired and can't cope with this system, please drop me an email.

Testing MarsEdit weblog editor

OK, I misread the info on NetNewsWire 2.0 and assumed that the blog editor was "broken" rather than "broken out". So this is what it's broken out into: MarsEdit.

The overall appearance of MarsEdit is nice. However it hasn't imported my blog categories, and I'm not sure how to get them in. I'll see what happens when I upload this.

Also the Format option only seems to offer None - will it convert line breaks to paragraphs, which is my preferred style? I like the option to use either style for italics - i or em - although I was surprised to find it in a submenu at the bottom of the HTML menu, rather than in Preferences.

Having the MarsEdit Add Link up in the HTML Tags menu really sucks - 90% of my blogs entries involve banging out a bunch of text with a few links in, and I'd like the Add Link to be on the toolbar. Also I'd like the Edit menu to support Paste and Paste as quotation, as in Mail.app.

The XML-RPC Console is a really useful idea. Of course you should never need to use it - except for the situation when nothing else will do....

Highlighting text and hitting cmd-B for bold or cmd-I for italics is nice - but why not cmd-U for underline?

[Updated] OK, that first post looked awful. But after I hit Refresh (how obvious is that?) I pulled in a bunch of recent posts, and it populated my Categories and allowed Convert Line Breaks. Hint: perhaps force a Refresh first time out? And who would know that to set the properties and defaults for a blog you had to double-click the blog in the Weblogs drawer with apparently no menu alternative?

[Updated] That fixed the paragraphs.

The blog entry editing window is a bit schizophrenic. If it really wants to be like mail or word processing, I want formatting items on the toolbar. And the section of the toolbar that includes the Weblog: menu and the Body|Extended... stuff is just clutter. I imagine if I had multiple blogs I could refresh the entries in one, double click a specific entry, select a different blog, and post it. Blog-to-blog cut'n'paste. Cute, but useless to all but 5% of us. An option to hide that stuff would be good, and would free up space for formatting options.

Let's try inserting a picture. Again, that's on the HTML menu rather than the toolbar. The New dialog is nice; the Previous one is odd, and didn't seem to work - perhaps it only shows images that you've previously uploaded with MarsEdit. But neither of these lets me link to a third party image, as far as I can see.

[Updated] On the image question; it's a shame to lose the cool MovableType feature of creating a thumbnail linked to a popup image.

Overall this feels nice - a bit smoother than Ecto. More expensive, of course.

Testing the Mac version of ecto

This is the Mac version of the ecto blog editor. It's visually much nicer than the Windows version.

Strangely, even though I specified a default of “convert line breaks” during initial configuration, it seems to have been lost. Or at least the “Options” menu has it set wrong and greyed out. The “Preview” looks ok. We'll see.

One more ecto test

I keep getting "The underlying connection closed" messages - odd. Also my modification to the previous entry didn't look quite right, because (I guess) when you edit an entry ecto forgets my default formatting mode (convert line breaks).

Overall I think this will definitely be easier than hacking raw HTML, as I do now. The other candidate is the full version of NetNewsWire, but I may have complicated life for myself by testing their latest beta, in which the editor is apparently broken. And of course NetNewsWire is Mac only, which is OK in principle and awkward in practice.

Testing ecto

Testing Ecto for blogging. So far I've created an entry, created a second entry, deleted that entry, and now I'm modifying the first entry. The UI is a bit clunky under Windows - small unintuitive icons scattered all over the place - but the basic functionality seems to work after a shaky start. Spell-checking is OK. Default post settings are broken; there's a documented workaround on the support forum. It works with my Movable Type 2.64 version out of the box.

I''ll try the Mac version later. (I'm in the middle of backing up everything to my new LaCie 200GB drive.)

ecto is shareware... or rather trialware - it stops working after 14 days without paid registration. (That's not my definition of shareware, but never mind.) It's $17.95 for either Windows or Mac OS X; if you use both, you need two licenses. If the Mac version is as good as I expect, that will be a very reasonable price; I'll just have to decide which machine to use as my primary blogging vehicle.

[composed and posted with ecto]

Jurisdiction? Sovereignty? What quaint notions....

Here's the latest twist in the saga of the seizure of Indymedia's web servers. This ought to be an urgent and compelling story of international law and data protection, but unfortunately everything seems to be covered by secrecy agreements, and so all we can do is speculate. However the bottom line seems to be that an Italian judge was able to persuade the FBI to seize computer systems in England, possibly violating several UK laws, without the involvement of UK law enforcement agencies. The way things are going, I'm probably breaking the law (somewhere - does that matter any more?) just by blogging about the affair. Paging George Orwell....

Bush on civil rights

This piece in Salon by Sidney Blumenthal (registration possibly required) needs no comment:

Oct. 20, 2004  |  Passing almost without notice earlier this month, the public release of the official staff report prepared by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission on "The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration," whose submission is required by federal law, was blocked by the Republican commissioners. Nonetheless, it was posted on the commission's Web site. "This report," the site states, "finds that President Bush has neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that matched his words."
[more, particularly on the implications for minority voting]

"Going Upriver"

This morning before I left for work I started downloading the film Going Upriver. At 650MB, I figured it would take a couple of hours, even via cable modem. This evening I sat down at my PC to watch it. This may sound like rank heresy, since the Red Sox were playing the Yankees at the culmination of a series which has turned even cricket-loving expat Brits like myself into baseball enthusiasts! (I must admit, however, that I did have a browser window open to keep an eye on the score.....)

The film runs for 90 minutes. The first half hour is about the Vietnam experiences of John Kerry, Max Cleland, Bob Kerrey, and others. It is not for the squeamish: the snapshot of US soldiers grinning over Vietnamese corpses is disturbingly familiar. The remainder of the film is about the Vietnam Veterans Against the War: the Winter Soldier Investigation of winter 1971; the Dewey Canyon III demonstration in Washington a couple of months later, which culminated in Kerry's appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the repudiation of medals; and Kerry's subsequent TV appearances, including the confrontation with O'Neill.

Over the last year or so, I've seen many clips from these amateur movies and TV recordings, but this is the first time I've seen the material assembled so completely, unhampered by the exigencies of MTV-generation editing. Kerry is remarkably impressive for a man of his age, both in his speech and his actions. One thing that really comes across from the body language of those around him - whether long-haired veterans or pin-stripe-suited Senators - is the fact that he clearly commanded enormous respect. As we now know, this respect even extended to the Nixon White House; the legacy of their response is still with us in the form of John O'Neill's vicious "Swift Boat" lies. (He learned his dirty tricks from the master.)

Even though the film is playing in theatres, and can be purchased on DVD, you can download it from here, as I did. You can also get it through BitTorrent, eDonkey and Kazaa. Please watch it, and share it. It's an important part of American history, and painfully relevant today.

And yes - the Red Sox did it! 10 to 3. Who would have believed it? As I finish typing this, people are outside in the street, sounding car horns, letting off fireworks, whooping it up... and this is in a quiet residential area of Brookline. I wonder what it's like downtown?

Memo from Hackworth to C-in-C

Ambitious, but cogent.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

In one of my recent pieces on Dennett and Wright, Steve Esser offered the following interesting comment; with his permission, I'm repeating it:

On Wright's notion of subjective awareness as a kind of extra epiphenomenal stuff, I've come to agree this is wrong. But I am also one of those who read Dennett's Consciousness Explained a number of years ago and came away thinking "no, not quite". First-person subjective experience, stripped of all the other cognitive apparatus, is a different beast than the other things we explain scientifically (i.e. from an "objective" stance). The fact that we have experience is prior to everything else we know -- there is no reality without it. So, I don't think we have the whole story solved yet.

I agree with the first and last sentences, and while I too have reservations about some of Consciousness Explained, I suspect that my issues are different from Steve's.

"First-person subjective experience, stripped of all the other cognitive apparatus"... OK, stop right there. I don't believe that there is any such thing. It is that cognitive apparatus which converts raw sensory stimuli into experience. No cognitive apparatus, no experience. Here I use the word experience in the sense of "the apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind", with the emphasis on apprehension. Some people use experience as an opposite of thinking; for example one dictionary defines it as "the feeling of emotions and sensations as opposed to thinking". I deny the distinction implied here: for me, all experience involves the processing by cognitive apparatus of internal and external stimuli. To the extent that these stimuli do not involve cognition, they are sub-conscious: inaccessible, and therefore not experienced.

I'm not sure what Steve means by subjective here. The dictionary provides a wealth of possibilities, some of which are essentially question-begging (since they would define the experience as, e.g. "Particular to a given person"). Later he puts objective in quotes and couples it with science, so perhaps subjective is intended to mean unscientific - but that, too, seems to beg the question. I tend to use first person, as Steve does too, because I view the objective/subjective dichotomy as a (mostly) social construct.

Ultimately Steve's assertion that "First-person experience is a different beast" seems to rest on his view that "the fact that we have experience is prior to everything else we know -- there is no reality without it". What does prior mean here? A precondition? I can perhaps understand an instrumental relationship between experience and knowing - thought experiments about sensory deprivation and brains-in-vats seem pertinent - but how does this justify the claim that experience is a "different beast"? Eating is "prior" to digestion, but both are amenable to scientific inquiry. (I'm afraid I don't understand the "no reality" comment at all.)

Ultimately I think Steve seems to be arguing for the familiar "uniquely privileged" viewpoint: that there is something about first-person experience that is real - accessible to the individual concerned - but is intrinsically inaccessible to scientific, "objective" inquiry. It seems to me that such a radical claim must be either a matter of faith (mysterian), or must be explicable in terms of the known properties of individuals and brains. If one backs off from the claim of intrinsic inaccessibility, first-person experience presumably moves into the realm of the empirical - which is how I view it.

Does anyone remember Abu Ghraib?

Andrew Sullivan just blogged a comment that is so perfectly expressed that all I can do is reproduce it verbatim.

THE MISSING ISSUE: It does strike me as astounding that in four debates lasting six hours, the horrors of Abu Ghraib were never mentioned. Remember when we were reeling from the images? They remain the most spectacular public relations debacle for this country at war since Vietnam. And we know the underlying reasons for the abuse and torture: the prison was drastically under-manned and incompetently managed, the Pentagon had given mixed signals on what constituted torture, the CPA had no idea that it might be dealing with an insurgency and was dragging in all sorts of innocents to extract intelligence in a ham-handed manner. Although the administration has clearly done all it can to stymie Congressional investigations, it has become clear that responsibility for the chaos ultimately stops at Rumsfeld's desk. No, it wasn't a systematic policy. It was a function of what wasn't done, rather than what was done - and, in that, it remains a symbol of everything that has gone so wrong in Iraq. Bush, of course, barely mentioned it at the time. He has no ability to stare harsh reality in the face - especially if it means reflection on himself and his administration. As with everything else on his watch, he was not responsible. In fact, no one was responsible except for those literally caught on camera raping, murdering and abusing prisoners in the care of the United States. And so his silence in the debates is not surprising. But Kerry's is - and reveals a worrying lack of courage. Kerry is afraid that criticizing Abu Ghraib will make him look like a war critic, or anti-American, or somehow responsible for weakening morale. Vietnam hovers over him. It shouldn't. What happened was unforgivable negligence and evil, a horrendous blow to American moral standing - as well as simply an outrage on a human and moral level. It didn't affect Iraqis' views: they tragically already believed we were as bad as these images portrayed. But it was a fatal blow to domestic morale. I haven't fully recovered from it in my pro-war heart. I couldn't believe America could do this. I still wince at the memory. But what I still remember was Dick Cheney's response to criticism of Rumsfeld at the time. "Get off his case," he harrumphed. Even after such a blow to the very core of the meaning of America, Cheney was contemptuous of holding anyone in his circle accountable. It says it all, doesn't it?

Let's talk RSS (on the Mac, of course)

There's an interesting discussion of RSS by the authors of five RSS clients for Mac OS X. Quite apart from the subject itself, the format is really nice - I'd like to see more like this.

The "reality-based community"

There's an excellent - and sobering - analysis of Bush's faith and certainty, by Ron Suskind in today's NYT Magazine: Without A Doubt. (Registration required.)

Two quotes. First, what do we mean by "reality-based"?:

In the summer of 2002 [...] I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Second quote, on why Bush's crew isn't worried about the opinions of people who think that reality matters:

We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

Read the whole thing. To this reality-based individual, it was an eye-opener.

Alternative histories of 2001-2004

During this presidential campaign, one consistent Republican mantra has been that "if Kerry had been President, Saddam would still be in power and blah, blah, blah...." And this got me thinking about counterfactuals, about alternative histories - what might have plausibly happened if the initial conditions had been different.

Naturally I turned to the web, but I was disappointed with what I'd found. For example, Ed Driscoll links to several pre-9/11 alternative scenarios, all of which are equally implausible to anyone that has read Richard Clarke's book. Most of the other uses of the term (or its cognate "alternate history") seem to involve alternative accounts or interpretations of what actually happened. (The works of Seymour Hersh and Michael Moore are often described in this way.)

So what kind of alternative am I thinking about? Well, consider a world in which two little things are changed. First, in the summer of 2001, Tony Blair has a heart attack. This is plausible; we know today of his heart problems. His doctors advise him to retire, and he hands over to Gordon Brown. Second, imagine that Project Anaconda had been blown open in the press with Rumsfeld's fingerprints all over it. (Anaconda really happened; it was a horribly botched operation in Afghanistan in which the military chain of command broke down completely, resulting in dozens of US Army fatalities. See Hersh's Chain of Command.)

With these changes, let's run the movie forward. 9/11 happens, and coalition forces hit Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Anaconda blows up, and although Rumsfeld doesn't resign, his relationship with the military leadership is fatally poisoned.

Now Bush and his team begin to plan for Iraq, as described in Woodward's Plan of Attack. But there's a hitch. Unlike Blair, Gordon Brown understands the caveats and codicils to the various intelligence reports, and he asks the hard questions. Hearing only unsatisfactory answers, he declines to offer Bush his unconditional support. Bush and Rumsfeld are willing to push ahead without Britain, but now Powell reaches his limit. A coalition without a single permanent member of the UN Security Council other than the USA has no credibility, he says; the damage to America's standing in the world from unilateral action would be irreparable. It's a resigning matter. Meanwhile Rumsfeld is challenged from another quarter: the Joint Chiefs refuse to sign off on a plan for military operations without adequate supplies, body armor, and training.

Faced with these obstacles, Bush realizes that he can no longer push for an early invasion of Iraq... [to be continued]

This feels like an interesting counterfactual. Would Bush have taken the time to build a coalition? What if Blix had had a year to demonstrate that there were no WMDs? How might Bush have approached the questions of Iran, of the Palestinians? Would Saddam have resigned and fled in the face of an inexorable build-up with full UN support? Fascinating to speculate.....

Flip-flops

Try these all season Flipflops. Click on image to progress forward.

(Thanks, Kate.)

Amother web quiz (sillier than usual)

Which Nigerian spammer are You?

That poetry thing

Per Terry, when you read this, post a poem.

Adlestrop
Yes, I remember Adlestrop -
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

It's by Edward Thomas (1878-1917). I learned it by heart when I was about 9. A couple of years later I actually visited Adlestrop Station (long since closed) while on holiday near Stratford-on-Avon. It was a hot summer's day, much as Thomas described in his notebook on June 23, 1914.

For years I remembered the poem almost perfectly (though I sometimes stumbled in the third verse). It was not until recently, when I was researching my blog entry on First World War music and poetry, that I discovered that Edwards' vision of a countryside full of life yet devoid of people was a comment on how the War, and the call-up, had affected rural England.

To me this is still a wonderful picture of the beauty of England as I remember it, but there is now a shadow across the sun, and the men who should be gathering the "haycocks dry" are far away....

"al-Qaida a dark illusion"?

OK, so this is really contrarian thinking. In the midst of an election campaign in which one of the main issues is how to prosecute "the War on Terror", along comes a documentary which argues that al-Qaida may not really exist. In today's Guardian, Andy Beckett reviews the series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear which begins on BBC2 next Wednesday. In this three-part series, the director Adam Curtis:

... points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation.

Bill Durodie, director of the international centre for security analysis at King's College London, says: "The reality [of the al-Qaida threat to the west] has been essentially a one-off. There has been one incident in the developed world since 9/11 [the Madrid bombings]. There's no real evidence that all these groups are connected."

Good heavens - maybe Bush was right to dismiss Osama bin Laden as he did. But in that case, who are we supposed to be fighting? Iraqi patriots insurgents? Or perhaps - and even more terrifying - it's....

"The United States of Fighting Terrorism"

Thomas Friedman's op-ed Addicted to 9/11 today was right on the money. He addresses Kerry's hope that America can get back to a state where "terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance", and says, "The idea that President Bush and Mr. Cheney would declare such a statement to be proof that Mr. Kerry is unfit to lead actually says more about them than Mr. Kerry. Excuse me, I don't know about you, but I dream of going back to the days when terrorism was just a nuisance in our lives."

I would certainly like that, and having lived in England through the IRA's mainland bombing campaign I can remember what it felt like. I can still recall the moment when I caught myself looking at a package in the sidewalk and, for the first time in years, didn't immediately think panic "Bomb...?". It's a good feeling. Naive? I don't think so; just getting things into proportion and being careful rather than obsessive.

Friedman concludes, "Lastly, politicizing 9/11 put a wedge between us and our history. The Bush team has turned this country into The United States of Fighting Terrorism. [...] I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because ultimately Sept. 11th is about them - the bad guys - not about us. We're about the Fourth of July. Just so.

Charging, charging...

It was my own fault. I put down the power adapter for my PowerBook in the cafeteria, and when I returned a little while later it had gone. I blame Apple's sexy styling: it's simply irresistible. Whatever: I was chargeless. I kept working on battery power until the system went to sleep to save me from myself. That was yesterday evening.

This afternoon, I was driving back from Sun's Santa Clara campus to Menlo Park, and I decided that I had just enough time to stop in at Micro Center to pick up a new charger. They didn't have the model I needed (scratch that store in future) but they did have a third-party "universal" charger. Reluctantly, I bought it.

Now I've always thought that electricity is electricity, right? The charger supplies juice, the battery charges, that's it. Simple. Well, maybe not. Take a look at the X-Charge graph above. It shows my PowerBook charging up from zero to full over the course of 5 hours. There's a 2 hour gap (leaving work, getting food, doing a conference call), and then after a weird curve (sure looks like it's approaching an an asymptote to me!) the system decides that it's not 85% charged, it's 100%. Finished. Complete. Instantanteously. Weird. And iBatt confirms that it's fully charged, at 4.151 Ah.

I never got that kind of curve with a standard Apple charger. And besides, this "universal" thing is running awfully hot. I think I may have to stop by the Apple company store tomorrow and pick up a kosher unit. I wonder if I'll bump into Steve Jobs, as I did on Monday....

Asymmetry or hypocrisy?

After a series of mind-bogglingly inept op-ed pieces in the New York Times, David Brooks came up with what seemed like a reasonably interesting column today. Under the heading Not Just a Personality Clash, a Conflict of Visions, he argues that there is a relationship between political orientation and geography:

We're used to this in the realm of domestic politics. Politicians from the more sparsely populated South and West are more likely, at least in the political and economic realms, to champion the Goldwateresque virtues: freedom, self-sufficiency, individualism. Politicians from the cities are likely to champion the Ted Kennedyesque virtues: social justice, tolerance, interdependence.

Politicians from sparsely populated areas are more likely to say they want government off people's backs so they can run their own lives. Politicians from denser areas are more likely to want government to play at least a refereeing role, to keep people from bumping into one another too abusively.

And he goes on to wonder if this dichotomy is related to the way people think about international affairs. (He cites a recent article by Adam Wolfson in the Weekly Standard, at which point my interest started to wane. C'mon, there has to be a better source than that rag.)

However before Brooks gets to that point, he tosses in the following throw-away line:

Neither group lives up to its ideals with perfect consistency, but this is what both groups say.

And that got me thinking. Brooks clearly intends this as an even-handed characterization, in true journalistic style, but is it accurate. Are liberals and conservatives equally inconsistent when it comes to living up to their ideals?

I think not. My sense if that, by and large, conservatives are much more likely to be "closet liberals" than are liberals to be "closet conservatives". The newspapers report many arch-conservatives who denounce the Federal government one moment and then turn around to lobby for a contract, or a tax break, or a subsidy. Taxprof Blog published an analysis of government spending and subsidies last month that showed:

...that of the 32 states (and the District of Columbia) that are "winners" -- receiving more in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes -- 76% are Red States that voted for George Bush in 2000. Indeed, 17 of the 20 (85%) states receiving the most federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Red States.

On the other hand, I can't remember a single case of a prominent liberal politician displaying "closet conservative" tendencies. (Apart from Zell Miller, I guess, though he's out of the closet these days.) Of course you may regard the efforts of Clinton, Rubin, Kerry and others to balance the budget in the 1990s as rather conservative behavior. I thought so at the time, but after four years of Bush and his runaway deficits I'm thoroughly confused.

Naturally I'm not talking about campaign fundraising or pandering to special interests. Those are equal-opportunity failings, neither liberal nor conservative.

The bottom line: Brook's simplistic ideas about geography and politics do illustrate a point - but not necessarily the point that he intended to make.

On the exploitation of fear

Recommended: my colleague Alec's recent piece on America, Terrorism, and the Power of Nightmares.

Wright and Dennett, encore une fois

Wright still doesn't get it. In his latest update to his response to Dennett he writes:

Some of Dennett’s defenders have e-mailed to accuse me of playing “Gotcha”. They say I take two separate parts of Dennett’s interview [A and B in the transcript excerpts above], note that they logically imply the existence of evidence of higher purpose, and then attribute that conclusion to Dennett even though he never states the conclusion explicitly.

But it's more than that. At the very beginning of the interview, Dennett explicitly disavows the position which Wright seeks to deduce from his later answers. One might reasonably expect Wright to pause and reflect on whether Dennett was in fact conceding the position, or whether he (Wright) was making a mistake in drawing the conclusion. And as Wright wrote:

Dennett didn't volunteer this opinion enthusiastically, or for that matter volunteer it at all. He conceded it in the course of a dialogue with me—and extracting the concession was a little like pulling teeth.

In his latest response, Wright concedes:

Granted, I should have used less dramatic language in attributing this conclusion to him. Rather than saying in paragraph 3 of the Beliefnet piece that he had “declared” the existence of evidence of higher purpose, I should have said he “acknowledged” it.

Rubbish. Try: "...I should have said that I put those words into his mouth, without checking that this what what he meant."

Wright insists that Dennett's complaint "...continues to strike me as wholly untenable. But I suppose I could be wrong." As I noted, his approach seems fundamentally dishonest. He seems more interested in preserving what he seems to view as his "scalp" than in reaching a meeting of the minds, and this is not to his credit. Based on all that has passed, does Wright still seriously believe that Dennett "acknowledges a higher purpose"? (If he does, is this belief falsifiable?)

The obvious solution would be for Wright to simply state:

"When I wrote the Beliefnet piece, I believed that Dennett's statements during our interview constituted an acceptance of a 'higher purpose' viewpoint. However it is clear from what Dennett has said, in that interview and subsequently, that he does not hold this viewpoint. I therefore recognize that my inference must have arisen from a mutual misunderstanding."

Would that be so hard? Even the RavingAtheist would probably accept it.

October Project @ Capo's

What a perfect end to a lousy week! I've been sick since Monday (probably a bug I picked up at the offsite in Washington DC), and not until Friday afternoon did I finally start to feel human. This morning, I woke with a feeling of pent-up energy and anticipation: I was going to see October Project. And I just did.

You may remember October Project from the two wonderful albums that they released on Epic Records back in 1993 and 1995. The combination of magical songs by Julie Flanders and Emile Adler and the ethereal yet powerful vocals of Mary Fahl and Marina Belica wowed many fans: their live performances were pure dynamite, and the albums still keep selling. I saw them twice, once in an acoustic set and once in high-octane electric, with guitarist Julian Coryell blasting them into orbit. Inexplicably (at least to someone not in the music biz) they were dropped by Epic, and went through a turbulent time. Mary Fahl left, eventually producing a solo album that was OK, but nothing like as good as OP. Marina (decembergirl) made a nice solo EP and an intriguing instrumental album. Julie and Emile worked with several lead vocalists and backing musicians under the name November Project, and released one promising EP, A Thousand Days, which is almost like an October Project album, but.... I saw one of these line-ups at Johnny D's in Somerville, and wondered whether or not it was going to work out. It didn't.

At last, what many fans had hoped for came to pass: Julie, Emile and Marina got back together to re-form October Project. In the new line-up, Marina handles lead vocals with Julie singing harmony. Is it the same as Mary and Marina? No. Does it matter? Not really. The key to OP has always been the combination of the singers and the songs: the magic is holistic - forget reductionism. I can't imagine anyone covering an OP song, and I can't imagine OP singing anyone else's material.

The new OP has released one excellent 6-song EP, Different Eyes, and is working on a new album, albeit without a recording contract. (I wish that they'd try the approach that Marillion used to finance their last two albums: getting fans to "pre-buy" the album over the Internet. But I digress.) Meanwhile they continue to play live with a variety of instrumentalists, mostly around their home base of New York City.

Which brings us to tonight's concert at Capo's in Lowell, Mass. It was the first time I'd been there, and from a look at their calendar I suspect I'll be back. The opening act was an interesting singer/songwriter from Vermont, Gregory Douglass. The friends I was with really liked him, but he wasn't quite my cup of tea. Never mind, I was glad of the chance to hear him.

The core trio of OP - Marina, Julie, and Emil - was augmented by three instrumentalists; I got the impression that this was the first time they'd all performed together. Martha Colby played cello. That probably gives the wrong impression; let me try again. Martha Colby played LEAD CELLO. HEAVY METAL CELLO. Think J.J.Cale's viola on the Velvet Underground. I could imagine Martha jamming with Porcupine Tree. Don't mess with Martha. (Plus it was her birthday.) Craig Benelly was on guitar. And a Boston-area friend of the band, Joey G., handled percussion. [If I've got any details wrong I hope Marina will correct me.] As usual, Emil played keyboards and added vocal harmony.

The concert was wonderful. I didn't write down the setlist, but they did at least a dozen numbers, followed by a three-song encore. They did all of the "greatest hits": Ariel, Falling Farther In, Take Me As I Am, Sunday Morning Yellow Sky, and Bury My Lovely. They did five of the songs from the recent EP, including See With Different Eyes and If I Turn Away. And they introduced a number of new songs. When I see a group for the first time in years, I always have a slight feeling of trepidation about new songs. "Do they still have the touch? Will they be up to the standard of the songs I've loved for so many years?" Well, as an Australian would say, "No worries, mate!" The new songs are OP at their finest. Two stood out in particular. The first was a moving story of a woman who finds that she was adopted, and who travels to meet her birth mother. The second was what I hope will be the title track of the new album: This Is For You. It contains some of Julie's most compelling and poignant words, in a deceptively simple and quite beautiful setting. Marina sang it perfectly, effortlessly. It brought forth a standing ovation from the wildly enthusiastic audience.

Thanks, OP, for one of the best concerts I've ever been to. And thank you Marina for our conversation afterwards. I can't wait for the album.

Morning-after update: Some particularly memorable moments:
- Emil explaining how the Sesame Street theme evolved into the music for Bury My Lovely.
- The special gleam in Julie's eyes as she sang Always.
- Martha's solo at the end of Sunday Morning Yellow Sky.
- Everybody singing Hey Jude to celebrate John Lennon's 64th birthday.
- Ariel. 'Nuff said.

John Maynard Smith interview

All of this stuff about Robert Wright and Daniel Dennett led me to meaningoflife.tv, a collection of interviews by Robert Wright with scientists, historians, philosophers and others. Wright doesn't pretend to be a professional interviewer, but that doesn't matter very much. I just watched the complete interview with the late John Maynard Smith (pictured here), probably the greatest evolutionary biologist of the 20th century. The interview runs just under an hour, and ranges from the application of game theory to evolution, to Marxism, to computers and consciousness, and death. Highly recommended. I hope the rest are as good.

Wright, Dennett, and Occam's Razor

Dan Kaplan pointed me at Wright's response to Dennett's complaint about his piece in Beliefnet. I don't see that Wright gets himself off the hook. Leaving aside the validity of the argument, the ethics just stink. To reduce it to bare bones:

- Dennett said A and B
- Later on, Dennett said C
- After the interview, Wright concludes that C can be interpreted as if A then not B
- Wright therefore concludes, and announces to the world, that Dennett believes not B

Now before taking this last step, a reasonable person would have noted that this conclusion meant that Dennett had claimed B and not B. Moreover, all of Dennett's previous statements had been consistent with B. There seem to be three possibilities:

- Dennett believes both B and not B.
- Dennett has changed his mind and now believes not B.
- Dennett still believes B; there is an error somewhere in the chain of reasoning - an equivocation, or a misunderstanding, or a subtle ambiguity.

Common sense suggests that the last of these is the most likely: in spoken (as opposed to written) discussion, such miscommunication occurs quite often. It certainly is more likely than someone changing a deeply-held belief.

So what does Wright do? Does he contact Dennett to double-check what was said and the conclusion that he's drawn, or does he publish without checking? The first approach is most likely to lead to a true reporting of the exchange. The second has the better "Gotcha!" potential, even though it's likely to lead to an acrimonious follow-up. (Like this.)

Maybe Wright got carried away, and thought this was a political debate in which zingers were more important than getting at the truth. That would seem to be a lousy way to practice philosophy.

UPDATE:I think I understand why Wright might have behaved in this way. If you watch the whole interview between Dennett and Wright, from about 30:00 through 45:00, you can see Dennett absolutely destroying Wright's incoherent notion of epiphenomenalism. (I guess I should commend Wright for being honest enough to publish the interview even though he comes off so badly in it, trying to "defend indefensible positions" as he put it, but I can't imagine that he was happy.)

More on Dennett and Wright

Yesterday I wrote of Robert Wright's dishonest piece about Daniel Dennett in BeliefNet. After watching the video of the Wright-Dennett interview again, and re-reading Wright's piece, I sent the following email to Wright, cc: Dennett.

I read the piece "Planet with a purpose" and then watched your interview with Dennett. I have to say that I find your triumphal announcement that:

Geoff Arnold

Dissing Dennett

I was reading Andrew Sullivan's blog (yes, I know he's infuriating, but he's such an entertaining contrarian - and at least he doesn't have Christopher Hitchens' vicious streak), and I came across a little piece that I'll reproduce in full:

AN ATHEIST RECANTS: Philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of the influential 1995 book, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," now says he sees a higher purpose in the universe. Bob Wright breaks the news.

Now anyone seeing that headline would naturally conclude that Dennett had "recanted" his atheism - that he now believed in God. Puzzled, I read the piece by Robert Wright that Sullivan linked to. And Wright certainly launches into the topic with enthusiasm, asserting:

I have some bad news for Dennett's many atheist devotees. He recently declared that life on earth shows signs of having a higher purpose.

So what is this "higher purpose"? We're meant to assume that it is "God", obviously. Yet here's the money quote, later in the piece:

1) Dennett's climactic concession may not sound dramatic. He just agrees reluctantly with my assertion that "to the extent that evolution on this planet" has properties "comparable" to those of an organism's maturation—in particular "directional movement toward functionality"—then the possibility that natural selection is a product of design gets more plausible. But remember: He has already agreed that evolution does exhibit those properties. Ergo: By Dennett's own analysis, there is at least some evidence that natural selection is a product of design. (And this from a guy who early in the interview says he's an atheist.)

[Interjection: Note the assumption that "directionality" implies (not merely "is compatible with") "design", and that "design" implies a divine, non-natural designer - otherwise how is this incompatible with atheism? Sloppy. Back to Wright:]

2) Again: to say that natural selection may be a product of design isn't to say that the designer is a god, or even a thinking being in any conventional sense. Conceivably, the designer could be some kind of natural-selection-type process (on a really cosmic scale). So Dennett might object to my using the term "higher purpose" in the first paragraph of this piece, since for many people that term implies a divine purpose. But "higher purpose" can be defined more neutrally.

So now "higher purpose" may just be an emergent property of a higher-level natural system - for example, natural selection applied to a many-worlds cosmology. I don't see anything that Dennett has said that is incompatible with atheism.

Wright's agenda is all too clear, as his closing paragraph shows:

Still, one could mount an argument that evolution on this planet has at least some of the hallmarks of the divine—a directionality that is in some ways moral, even (in some carefully delineated sense of the word) spiritual. In fact, I've mounted such an argument in the last chapter of my book Nonzero. But Dennett hasn't signed on to that one. Yet.

And having read most of Nonzero, I'm reasonably confident that Dennett wouldn't sign on to it. While there are some very interesting ideas in the first half of the book, the last chapter is full of equivocation, particularly around the notions of "design", "purpose", and "divine". It's nowhere near as good as Wright's earlier The Moral Animal.

Oh goody - another test

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Indus Women Leaders conference

My colleague Nausheen is involved in Indus Women Leaders (IWL), a national forum that develops South Asian women leaders. While South Asians are one of the most successful minorities in the US, there's a huge gap between men and women in that community, particularly in education. IWL provides South Asian women with the resources to achieve their life goals through goal setting tools, advocacy, networking, mentorship, and education. They're holding a Leadership Summit in Boston later this month. Sun's sponsoring the event, and it looks really interesting.

"Dear Michael Moore..."

The Guardian has an article today in which they show some of the letters that Michael Moore has received from soldiers and contract workers in Iraq. All are bitterly angry with George W. Bush.

And yes, I'm sure Moore's received other letters from people who support Bush. But with the election less than a month away, it's worth paying attention to the soldier who wrote: "People's perceptions of this war have done a complete 180 since we got here. We had someone die in a mortar attack the first week, and ever since then, things have changed completely. Soldiers are calling their families urging them to support John Kerry. If this is happening elsewhere, it looks as if the overseas military vote that Bush is used to won't be there this time around."

Update: The letters are taken from Moore's new book, Will They Ever Trust Us Again?

I'm in the wrong job

Computer technology is SO 20th century! It's time for a career change - to antimatter weapons!! Consider the example of:

...Gerald Smith, former chairman of physics and Antimatter Project leader at Pennsylvania State University. Smith now operates a small firm, Positronics Research LLC, in Santa Fe, N.M. So far, the Air Force has given Smith and his colleagues $3.7 million for positron research, Smith told The Chronicle in August.

Smith is looking to store positrons in a quasi-stable form called positronium. A positronium "atom" (as physicists dub it) consists of an electron and antielectron, orbiting each other. Normally these two particles would quickly collide and self-annihilate within a fraction of a second -- but by manipulating electrical and magnetic fields in their vicinity, Smith hopes to make positronium atoms last much longer.

Smith's storage effort is the "world's first attempt to store large quantities of positronium atoms in a laboratory experiment," Edwards noted in his March speech. "If successful, this approach will open the door to storing militarily significant quantities of positronium atoms."

It seems that Positronics Research is hiring. Woo-hoo! Move over, Edward Teller. You think your H-bomb was a big bang? You ain't seen nothin' yet....

Note for the humour-impaired: this is sarcasm. Frame your comments accordingly.

The other George had a way with words, too...

During the tenure of the current President, many people have compared him with his father. Herewith a few bon mots from George Senior. Make of them what you will.

27 Oct 1984 "Let me assure you of one thing: the United States under this administration will never -- never -- let terrorism or fear of terrorism determine its foreign policy."

28 Jan 1987 [On selling weapons to Iran] "On the surface, selling arms to a country that sponsors terrorism, of course, clearly, you'd have to argue it's wrong, but it's the exception sometimes that proves the rule."

Maybe this explains why his son prefers other counsel. But sometimes they seem too much alike. More from Bush pere:

2 Aug 1988 [When the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner] "I will never apologize for the United States, ever. I don't care what the facts are."

4 Dec 1990 "I know what I've told you I'm going to say, I'm going to say. And what else I say, well, I'll take some time to figure that all out."

12 May 1991 "I've got to run now and relax. The doctor told me to relax. The doctor told me to relax. The doctor told me. He was the one. He said, 'Relax.'"

4 Mar 1992 "Somebody asked me, what's it take to win? I said to them, I can't remember, what does it take to win the Superbowl? Or maybe Steinbrenner, my friend George, will tell us what it takes for the Yanks to win... one run. But I went over to the Strawberry Festival this morning, and ate a piece of shortcake over there -- able to enjoy it right away, and once I completed it, it didn't have to be approved by Congress -- I just went ahead and ate it."

More here.

"If Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote"

I keep running across links to quotations from recent emails by the WSJ reporter Farnaz Fassihi in Baghdad. Here are two sobering excerpts:

Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity. Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler. I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote. This is truly sad.

I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to some degree elect a leadership. His response summed it all: "Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are you joking?"

After reading this, and watching Bush and Kerry debate Iraq, all I can say is, "Don't promise what you can't deliver."

A channel 9 moment

I was flying home this evening on UAL994, IAD-BOS, B752. It was misty in Boston, with RVR fluctuating betwen 1500 and 5000; traffic was landing on 4L and departing on 9. We'd left PVD on the 070 radial to pick up the BOS 4L localizer, and at MILT we'd gone to BOS TWR and been cleared to land. Less than 2 miles out, at about 500 feet, I heard the following exchange on channel 9:

BOS TWR: Eagle Flight 538, cancel takeoff.
Perplexed voice: Er... Eagle Flight 538 is in the air!
BOS TWR: OK, I must have confused you with... Eagle Flight 538, contact departure.

[With apologies to those who don't grok aviation jargon.]