Category: Internet

No hot blog action for a while, as I’m motoring up to the Portland, Oregon area for a fairly extended stay. I’ve got a client in the consumer products business up there, and we need to put our heads together on the future of some of their key technologies and build the next big thing. I’ve talked with some 25 companies in Silicon Valley over the past year on product planning and engineering in the areas I know — protocols, wireless, broadband, audio-video, open source, protocol verification — without finding anyone as sharp as these consumer guys. It’s sad to say this, but there’s precious little innovation in Silicon Valley any more. Sure, there are lots of people burning lots of venture cash making minor enhancements to big ideas hatched a decade or so ago, but precious little in the way of big ideas with the potential to fuel a new new economy, one that’s not based solely on hype, creative bookkeeping, and stock fraud.

The Valley’s really, really stale. It’s always been a sorry place to live, but one I could deal with because the work was so much fun, but lately the work has begun to suck as bad as the rest of it. I’m not ready to say “Silicon Valley is over” but without an infusion of creativity, and a big parade of lemmings over some cliffs, it may as well be.

I’ve never been to Portland before, so I’m also looking forward to exploring some new geography and meeting some new people. This isn’t a permanent move yet, but if it goes as well as I anticipate, in a couple of months I’ll be loading stuff in a truck and committing major finances on real estate. But I get ahead of myself.

Got any things I should know about Portland? Leave a comment, e-mail’s not likely to get answered for a few days.

Tim Hudson pitched one of the best games I’ve ever seen tonight against the Red Sox: a complete game, two hit, one walk shutout, 93 pitches, 28 batters, and only three balls hit out of the infield. Both singles were scratch infield hits, with the runners being immediately wiped out by double plays. A few more like this, and Hudson wins the Cy Young.

The win moved the A’s into a tie with Boston for the Wild Card, but with the addition of Jose Guillen to their lineup, they’re shooting for a division title. Guillen, if you haven’t seen him, has the most amazing arm in all of baseball. In his first game with the As, he threw a strike from semi-deep in right field that caught his catcher off guard three steps in front of the plate. If he’d been in position, a runner scoring from second on a deep single would have been out.

They’re a lot scrappier than the Giants, generally more fun to watch. Barry Bonds is starting to annoy me with his lack of hustle. Standing at the plate to see where his mighty blasts go is fine when they’re in the water, but I’ve seen him lose extra bases that way on Texas Leaguers, one of which cost his team the game when he couldn’t score on the single behind him.

The Giants pitching rotation is also giving me headaches; Reuter’s been hurt, Schmidt missed a game, Foppert’s inconsistent, this new guy Dustin Hermanson hasn’t got anything, and I can see no reason why Jim Brower isn’t a starter. The bright spots are rookie Jerome Williams with the puka shells, Kevin Correia, the new rookie that just came up from Fresno and pitched like he’s been in the bigs all his life, and Sidney Ponson, the vet from the Orioles.

That’s seven starters when Reuter gets better, so good-bye to Hermanson and Foppert and back to the bullpen for Brower. Now if they could just get a closer with an intimidating fastball, there might be hope for them in the post-season. The infield is obscenely strong, and everybody on the team hits.

The Cleveland Indians have a player named Coco Crisp who’s on a hitting streak, but the A’s beat them anyway, right after the Cubs beat the Giants on a 3-run homer by Moizes Alou, son of Giants manager Felipe Alou. While the Giants were 11-1 since the break, they failed to score a run against the Cubs on account of they never play well when Dusty Baker is in the room.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, just like Dusty stuck it to the Giants by blowing the All Star Game and with it, home field advantage in the playoffs.

The blogosphere is a-flutter with praise for Marxist Norman Geras’ criticism of the anti-liberation left, and rightly so. My favorite part was the conclusion:

When the war began a division of opinion was soon evident amongst its opponents, between those who wanted a speedy outcome – in other words, a victory for the coalition forces, for that is all a speedy outcome could realistically have meant – and those who did not. These latter preferred that the Coalition forces should suffer reverses, get bogged down, and you know the story: stalemate, quagmire, Stalingrad scenario in Baghdad, and so forth, leading to a US and British withdrawal. But what these critics of the war thereby wished for was a spectacular triumph for the regime in Baghdad, since that is what a withdrawal would have been. So much for solidarity with the victims of oppression, for commitment to democratic values and basic human rights.

Similarly today, with all those who seem so to relish every new difficulty, every set-back for US forces: what they align themselves with is a future of prolonged hardship and suffering for the Iraqi people, whether via an actual rather than imagined quagmire, a ruinous civil war, or the return (out of either) of some new and ghastly political tyranny; rather than a rapid stabilization and democratization of the country, promising its inhabitants an early prospect of national normalization. That is caring more to have been right than for a decent outcome for the people of this long unfortunate country.

Conclusion. Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed – and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed – and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug – opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.

But the question this raises is: why is it remarkable that a leftist supports the liberation of an oppressed people all of a sudden?

My, how the Movement has fallen.

Expressing dismay about falling contributions, Howard Dean shrugged-off the deaths of Qusay and Uday:

Questioned about the deaths of Saddam’s sons, Odai and Qusai, in Iraq, Dean dismissed suggestions that it was a victory for the Bush administration.

“It’s a victory for the Iraqi people … but it doesn’t have any effect on whether we should or shouldn’t have had a war,” Dean said. “I think in general the ends do not justify the means.”

As we all know, Howard Dean is a man with great compassion for the downtrodden masses. OK, maybe not for those in who don’t vote because they’re foreign, or, maybe, dead, at the hands of a couple of torturing butchers, but for everybody else, certainly. Except all Republicans and those Democrats who approved of the liberation of Iraq, and his rivals for the nomination, and members of Congress, and a few million others, but he’s still a great guy, for sure.

According to Yahoo finance, markets rallied on news of that the pig-latin boys, Uday and Qusay, are toast:

Close Dow 61.76 at 9,158.45, S&P 9.31 at 988.11, Nasdaq 24.61 at 1,706.02: The death of Saddam Hussein’s two sons helped the stock indices post gains across the board…a modest up open quickly gave way to continued profit-taking such as occurred yesterday…the Dow and S&P quickly sank into the red…the Nasdaq held up better, helped by an upgrade to the semiconductor equipment maker sector by Lehman…then came word from Iraq that Saddam’s sons were probably either captured or killed…that proved the stimulus stocks needed to break the lethargy that had set in and the indices all went solidly positive…

In related news, Howard Dean’s fundraising numbers are likely to decline, for two reasons: an improving economy is bad for Democrats, as is improving cooperation between Iraqi civilians and the Coalition. The pig-latin boys were knocked off on a walk-in tip.

Do the math, you can bet Saddam’s done it, as have the celebrating Iraqis:

Baghdad, Iraq — Red and yellow tracer bullets scythed through Baghdad’s sky in celebration Tuesday night when U.S. officials announced that Uday and Qusay Hussein were dead.

Two down, one to go.

There’s an interesing article in the Mercury News today on the Argentine obsession with beef:

Argentines so revere their country’s 11th Commandment — Thou Shalt Eat Beef — that babies are weaned on steak juice. A curvaceous woman is whistled at and called “a great steak.” Despite recent decades of economic woe, the average Argentine still consumes more than twice as much beef as an American.

Argentina exported so much beef in the early twentieth century that it was one of the world’s ten richest countries, ahead of France even. So if you’d like to help Latin America get its economy back in order, eat more beef.

The best commentary I’ve seen on the John Gilmore airline delaying stunt was left in tin-foil hat wearer Larry Lessig’s comments by Seth Finkelstein:

I’ve finally figured out what bothers me so much about this.

In effect, Gilmore was doing a millionaire’s version of trolling.

Exactly. To the idle rich Gilmore, airline security is a big, fat, joke, but to the people who fly airplanes every day, it’s a reality that they confront every day of their working lives.

Millionaires who delay flights carrying hundreds of people in order to get attention are enough to make me return to the Bolshevik values of my youth and advocate eating the rich, or at least taxing them into poverty. This stunt — reminiscent of a Woody Harrelson protest that shut down the Golden Gate Bridge for several hours, preventing ambulances from reaching hospitals and fathers from being present for the birth of their babies — is on the wrong issue in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Stunt-master John Gilmore was a co-founder of the EFF, a civil liberties organization that’s never done anything of value for any of the sufferers of the major civil liberties threats of the last decade, which should come as no surprise.

UPDATE: Prompted by the Gilmore stunt, Reason magazine rushes an article on civil liberties by Brian Doherty onto their web site (note: this is a correction), which attempts to explain why the government wants a picture ID from all airline passengers:

As you check in, your biometrically encoded national ID (a perennial legislative favorite, though not in active play at the moment) is scanned and your identity is checked against every available database the government can access, public and private. This will likely include, among many others:

…

? the “deadbeat dad” database (a poster child for the inevitable mission creep of all government databases, it has already expanded in just a few years to be used to track down student loan deadbeats and unemployment cheats);

The “deadbeat dad” database Doherty mentions is the “National Newhire Registry”, to which all employers are required to report all newhires, whether they’re child support debtors or not, so cross-referencing this database to airline passengers would be a meaningless exercise. The government wants to know if people on the “do not fly” terrorist watch list are boarding planes, and to do this they need to know who’s flying.

Civil libertarians who like to complain about the maltreatment of terrorists and the idle rich have been silent about the government’s systematic, monthly scans of all bank records and utility accounts for those with names similar to those of known child support debtors. Why is that?

ANOTHER UPDATE: There is also a federal law to the effect that child support debtors lose their passports when they get $5000 behind, which the INS enforces, so once again, Doherty’s “mission creep” argument goes nowhere.

Judge Gilbert Merrit has been given a document naming Saddam’s chief contact with Osama:

The document shows that an Iraqi intelligence officer, Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, assigned to the Iraq embassy in Pakistan, is ”responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group.”

The document shows that it was written over the signature of Uday Saddam Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein.

The judge, a Democrat serving on the federal appeals court in Nashville who’s currently in Iraq creating a court system, says he believes the document is genuine. We believe it’s the smoking gun.

Via Instapundit.

This article has been up for a while, but I just found it via a link from Christopher Hitchens in Slate. The author, Rolf Ekeus, was the head of UNSCOM from 1991-1997, and now runs the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. He explains the nature of the Iraqi WMD program, why stocks of chemical weapons are hard to find, and what Saddam intended to do with the weapons. Unlike fellow Swede Hans Blix, Ekeus supports the invasion:

The chemical and biological warfare structures in Iraq constitute formidable international threats through potential links to international terrorism. Before the war these structures were also major threats against Iran and internally against Iraq’s own Kurdish and Shiite populations, as well as Israel.

The Iraqi nuclear weapons projects lacked access to fissile material but were advanced with regard to weapon design. Here again, competition with Iran was a driving factor. Iran, as a major beneficiary of the fall of Hussein, has now been given an excellent opportunity to rethink its own nuclear weapons program and its other WMD activities.

The door is now open for diplomatic initiatives to remake the region into a WMD-free area and to shape a structure in the Persian Gulf of stability and security. Moreover, the defeat of the Hussein regime, a deadly opponent to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, has opened the door to a realistic and re-energized peace process in the Middle East.

This is enough to justify the international military intervention undertaken by the United States and Britain. To accept the alternative — letting Hussein remain in power with his chemical and biological weapons capability — would have been to tolerate a continuing destabilizing arms race in the gulf, including future nuclearization of the region, threats to the world’s energy supplies, leakage of WMD technology and expertise to terrorist networks, systematic sabotage of efforts to create and sustain a process of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the continued terrorizing of the Iraqi people.

This is powerful stuff and it deserves a lot of play.