Rereading this Washington Post article from the campaign, jusy 3 years ago and wondering how they kept a straight face.
This is a man š he’s got a record, you know, of sometimes exaggerating to make a point.
..campaign officials challenged several debate statements …, calling them fresh signs of ‘embellishments and exaggerations’.
It’s another in a disturbing pattern of … simply making things up.
Read the article to find out which candidate was being discussed. I’d laugh if I was not crying.
A very nice point. Easterbrook most likely got canned because he publically denigrated his employer. Not a smart thing to do. He could have tried to quickly aletr this but his apology did not examine this at all. If I piss my boss off by publically embarrassing him, I had better be prepared to crawl a lot if I expect to keep my job. Editor or no editor.
The boss of a blogger is the commuity the blog serves. As a blogger, you have to respond to the community. When it rises up, you had better look to why, Instead of saying that, while you mean everything you said you should have said it better. Otherwise the community will leave you.There are many ways to engage the community and make it think or re-examine its assumptions in ways that are not devisive. But you have to smart and nimble.
Too bad I was right when I wrote this assessment of the Bush doctrine before the war in Iraq started. [John Robb's Weblog]
Robb wrote this back in March and has been fairly accurate. I sincerely hope his later assessments are wrong but I do believe that this Adminstration has not made us safer in the long run, accomplishing the exact opposite instead. Ballooning debt, coupled with well entrenched enemies, coupled with a greater need for social services for an aging population will all serve to drag us down. It may take a generation to overcome what this Adminstration has accomplished in 3 years.
More and more, MS demonstrates it just does not get it. Just as the music business does not. Just as the movie business does not. Just as the publishing business does not. Just as the Republican National Committee does not. Just as the pharmaceutical business does not. Just as the Democratic Leadership Council does not. Just as the WTO does not. Just as Jerry Falwell does not.
In a changing world, it is so very easy to identify those who will be unable to adapt. A world where transparency and openess holds tremendous power because they permit people to disperse information and create knowledge to a degree impossible for those that do not get it. It is their blindspot and will lead them on a downward spiral unless they adapt. That is why these are such interesting times.
There is a great article in the New Yorker this week about how Ken Lay will likely never be convicted for Enron (sorry, it isn’t online). Inside the article is an amazing statement from the judge who presided over the trial of Fastow, Enron’s CFO. It is an amazing indictment of American civilization that a judge with these malformed attitudes ascended to preside over the most important (and complex) case of corporate malfeasance in a century.
[John Robb's Weblog]
One of the few African-Americans appointed to the bench by President Reagan, Hoyt had a reputation for eccentricity. In a 1997 case involving alleged environmental contamination in a largely minority neighborhood, the Judge asserted that physical differences between races were the product of their environment. “Why do you think Chinese people are short?” Hoyt told the lawyers in the case. “Because there is so much damn wind over there they need to be short. Why are they so tall in Africa? Because they need to be tall. It’s environmental. I mean, you don’t just jump up and get a banana off a tree if you’re only four feet. If you are seven feet tall and standing in China, then you’re going to get blown away when that Siberian wind comes through.”
A continuing series on how many absolute idiots we have on the Federal Judiciary. Looking forward to them being appointed to higher positions, since idiocy seems to be a prerequisite for advancement these days.
‘Enough is Enough’: Theologian Joseph Hough On Why the Time for a Non-Destructive, Civil Disobedience May Be Near… (Bill Moyers). ‘Enough is Enough’: Theologian Joseph Hough On Why the Time for a Non-Destructive, Civil Disobedience May Be Near… (Bill Moyers) [Common Dreams]
I am so relieved when I get a chance to read truly religious people of faith, instead of the garbage the media always play up. Read this interview, as someone who tries to remind all of us that the 3 branches of Abraham can make common cause but will have to wrest control of their beliefs from the leaders who betray the principles of each religion. In the best pastoral tradition, the first act is to help the poor and the needy.
Colin Powell: He Let the Nation Down… (Minneapolis Star Tribune). Colin Powell: He Let the Nation Down… (Minneapolis Star Tribune) [Common Dreams]
I have been horribly disappointed in Colin Powell. I believe he is at sea when it comes to the political battle field that is Washington today and has shown himself as a follower instead of as a leader. Thsi Adminstration is full of so many failures but his is the one I hate to see the most.
Daily Outrage: ëHelp Is on The Way!‰. Hundreds of sick soldiers wait for doctors while paying for toilet paper. [The Nation Weblogs]
This may be on the way to being fixed but how did it ever happen to begin with. Spending $700 million for an Iraqi hospital yet housing our own wounded in substandard housing with no air conditioning. Priorities. And the fact that few want to re-enlist is not too surprising. It took years for the Armed forces to recover from Vietnam. It will have to happen again.
Two things:In the paper Co-evolution of….
Two things:
- In the paper Co-evolution of neocortex size, group size and language in humans, Robin Dunbar predicts that the maximum group size that humans can maintain as a cohesive social unit, based on the ratio of neocortex volume to brain volume, is 147.8 (100.2-231.1 at 95% confidence). Consulting the literature, he finds that there’s a trimodal distribution of group sizes: bands at 30-50 people, tribes at 1000-2000, and an intermediate one. The mean size of the intermediate level group societies is 148.4.
- The AOL Instant Messenger servers impose a hard limit on the number of people you’re allowed to put in your buddylist: 150.
(For more, and a better summary of Dunbar’s paper, read The Magic of 150. Malcolm Gladwell also refers to the number 150 in his book The Tipping Point.)
I’ve been looking for a good link to this paper from 1993. Although there is a wide variation around the magic number 150 it is a really interesting conjectyre.
A case of tech ignorance and security.
A computer administrator discovered a security flaw in his company’s software. The man warned his managers. They ignored his pleas. So he quit and fired off thousands of e-mails alerting customers to the problem.
The vulnerability got fixed. But the administrator was charged and convicted of causing damage under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
“It can be very difficult for people who barely understand e-mail to grasp the difference between ethically sound network vulnerability research and the public disclosure of vulnerabilities“, the employer stated.
The employee maintained he was ‘merely a whistleblower doing the right thing’. Prosecutors now agree, the story tells. The conviction ‘hinged on the message, not just the method’.
Mercury news story in Silicon Valley
You know it is a messed up law when the prosecuters are asking the conviction to be overturned. But the 16 months he had already served can never be returned. Bad laws and ignorance are a terrible combination. And we have ahd a ton of them passed in the last decade. Frighteningly, this Adminstration is pushing for even more. Poorly written and vaque. What fun!!
“the White House is using technical means to prevent spidering and archival of key documents” [Daypop Top 40]
Isn’t it lovely? The only reason that makes any sense is that the White House does not want search engines to archive certain parts of its own web site. Only if it deals with Iraq. Very interesting. I am sure that people will just ignore the robots.txt. Not a very sophisticated approach.
Bush and Ashcroft: Patriot Act Wishlist. St. Petersberg Times columnist Robyn Blumner writes today about new powers Ashcroft and Bush are seeking as supplements to the… [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]
Just in case the debacle in Baghdad was not depressing enough, we now get further discussion of the civil rights this adminstration wants to take away from American citizens.(1) Interrogations without any judicial review, simply because someone in the FBI says so. Why even have a judicial branch since the executive branch knows what to do? (2) Lock people up without bail. As the column says, arrst first, then investigate. They already did this with 750 immigtants post 9-11 looking for terrorism links. None were charged. See they say they can do that to foreigners now. they want the ability to do it to citizens next. (3) Provide the Death Penalty for giving money to an organization that the government decides to label as terrorist ex post facto. I guess anyone who gave money to Greenpeace would be in trouble.
The adminstration’s response is to say trust us. We would never abuse this. But history has shown us that every government that had the ability to do these very things DID abuse them. Human nature is too flawed to give that much power to a centralized government. Our forefathers fought to prevent too much power residing in a single entity. Yet we seem to be negating all of their sacrifice, creating an Executive branch with little checks on its powers to intimidate its own citizens.
This does not bode well since it took place on the first day of Ramadan and it was the Red Cross headquarters. These terrorists are trying to show outsiders and Iraqis that the US can not protect them. And they are succeeding. I have a hard time seeing that this will be fixed anytime soon.
Sweets Again. Dana Milbank reports on breakfastgate, reported here earlier:
- President Bush is a man of steely discipline, but it appears the commander in chief has not gained complete mastery over his sweet tooth.
In a new book by author Stephen Mansfield, “The Faith of George W. Bush,” the following passage appears on page 173: “Aides found him face down on the floor in prayer in the Oval Office. It became known that he refused to eat sweets while American troops were in Iraq, a partial fast seldom reported of an American president.”
Seldom reported — and apparently little observed. When the White House sent out the shared “pool report” of Bush’s roundtable interview with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Australia, it became apparent that the president had fallen off the candy wagon.
“And he was relaxed. Very relaxed,” was the description. “As a reporter began to ask about the Middle East . . . Mr. Bush popped a butterscotch Lifesaver in his mouth. He smacked the candy as he said: ‘Middle East, that’s right.’ ”
[Eschaton]
This would be silly if it were not so tragic. Sounds like someone got the talking points memo incorrect.
Newsday on Damadian. An article this week in Newsday addresses
the issue of Damadian vs the Nobel committee. It’s a great article and
worth reading for all the details it gets into including an attempt to
dissect the relevant scientific contributions that the Nobel Laureates
and Damadian made.I have been speaking with a number of other journalists who are working
on reasonably large or in-depth stories on this issue and I’ll let you
know when I see them in print.For the discussion so far on Damadian, see my previous posts.
[David Harris' Science & Literature]
The Newsday article is very enlghtening. The man came up with an idea that turned out to be wrong. Others modified this idea, creating entirely new technologies that made MRI what it is. Who should get the award? A wrong idea that does not produce reproducible results and is cumbersome. Or the people who took that wrong idea, figured out how to make it work using totally new approaches? As a scientist, I know how easy it is to have great ideas without results but the important people are those who have the great ideas and actually produce results.
Besides, I have a hard time taking seriously anyone who calls themself a scientist yet believes the Earth is 6000 years old. Dogmatic attention to beliefs in the presence of hard evidence to the contrary is the hallmark of an ideologue and not a scientist. Ideologues seldom move our understanding of the natural world forward, and more often, in fact, try to hamper that understanding. From what I have learned, I think the Nobel committee made the right choice.
