I always approve of primary sources. Here’s a great place to get them: DoD News. It’s the central page for Department of Defense news items, and most interestingly includes email lists for DoD press releases and so on. I get the transcripts of all the DoD press briefings. It’s always interesting reading.
Month: January 2003
Mister Sterling isn’t bad. I was kind of expecting something more draggy, and it is a touch preachy at times, but as TV dramas go it’s not bad. I like the cast, I like the characters, and I was OK with the setup. I can say that last mostly because of the nice little twist in the middle of the first episode, which I personally took as a metatextual zing at everyone who thought the show would be The West Wing II.
The back and forth between Senator Sterling and his new chief of staff regarding his beliefs lived up to the promise of the twist. Keep up the ambiguity and it’ll be a decent drama; lose track of the differences between the new Senator and the party with which he votes and it’ll wind up sucking. I’ll be interested to see how long the writers are willing to portray someone in the Senator’s unusual political position as laudable.
I’m not sure why Blix’s latest comments haven’t gotten more play. I think that when Blix says “We feel that Iraq must do more than they have done so far in order to make this a credible avenue,” that it behooves us to take note. He is in fact agreeing at least in part with the US claims that Iraq has not demonstrated that they have disarmed.
This is, in my book, exceedingly good news — we want the various parties interested in the sanctions to agree on the current state of affairs. If it’s generally accepted that Iraq is ignoring UN sanctions, the matter becomes much clearer, and you have common ground on which to base any further discussion. It’s hard to have a rational argument about what happens next when you can’t even agree if the milk is spilt.
Mind you, there is still discussion to be had subsequent. C.f. John Le Carre’s op-ed, in which he explicitly says he wants Saddam gone even though he disagrees with Bush’s methods. The dissension on method but not on goals is perhaps overly complicated; certainly Lileks missed it. (Hint: when the man says he would love to see Saddam’s downfall, that’s probably an indication that he doesn’t like Saddam’s policies, including the ecological diaster’s Saddam’s caused.)
This does sort of make people who predicted Blix would never find fault with Iraq look silly. That’s the risk of partisan punditry, though.
Cory Doctorow has another story, “Liberation spectrum,” up on Salon. It’s most definitely Transhumanist: deeply rooted in today’s technological culture, set in a fairly near future, and so on. It doesn’t have the body modification elements I’d been thinking were a key component of the subgenre, although I think there’s one or two offhand references to the concept.
I like this story more than “Jury Service” or “0wnz0red,” possibly because the conflict between the techie founder and the need for business oversight is something that crops up all the time in my day to day work. The characterization rocks too. Lee-Daniel’s got personality, and he’s real, not just a carrier for the thoughts on technology. Same goes for the other characters. I’m really impressed with how much Doctorow was able to say about Mac in so little room.
People occasionally accuse me of being a sensible liberal, or likely to lose my liberal blogger badge. This is pretty warming, since I don’t really think of myself as a liberal; I think of myself as an anarchocapitalist hampered in his desire for untrammeled freedom by the practicalities of realpolitik. I.e., if I could push a button and remove all government from the world, I wouldn’t do it. I think that, unpaired with some serious education about enlightened self-interest, the results would be very bad. In the interim, I tend to lean towards the left, because I think the left is somewhat more likely to preserve the freedoms I care the most about without imposing the restrictions I find most distasteful.
However, now and again I feel obliged to say something really contrarian, so here goes. I am utterly, 100% serious about this:
James Lileks is the conservative Michael Moore.
This post does an excellent job of summarizing and linking to various reactions to Lessig; I recommend keeping an eye on it over the next few days.
I just implemented this tip. Someday I’ll be the kind of person who meticulously adds titles to my links by hand, too.
Lessig has posted the opinions in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Here’s the majority decision, here’s Stevens’ dissent, and here’s Breyer’s dissent.
Lessig reports that the Supreme Court has rejected the Eldred challenge to the Sonny Bono law, 7-2. John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer dissented. More details as this develops.
The blogosphere is all excited about moblogging, which I guess is the neologism for mobile blogging. I am too, actually. Mobile blogging is cool.
But I had another thought, which I think was triggered while I was driving around with my brother looking at all the pretty 802.11b networks the other day. What about a non-mobile collaborative blog? What if I stuck a wireless access point somewhere in Harvard Square, and set up a weblog for people using the access point, and only let people post to it if they were coming from the access point’s IP?
That’d be pretty keen. It’d be an ad-hoc collaboration, but it would be tied together by a given community. I’d love to see all the variations on how people perceived the Square (or wherever this was located). You’d probably want to set up a web proxy, so that you could display a little info about the weblog to anyone using it. Otherwise people would never figure out that they could post. It’d be neat if you could do a sidebar with some information on the people using it, but I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t be somewhat invasive of privacy. “Last Ten Mobile Google Searches?” Maybe, maybe.
They say you can’t solve social problems with software, but I believe that you can shape social interactions with technology.