March 18, 2006
What happens when get-it-out-the-door wins ::
rant, legal — No Tags
10:50 am
What a terrible sentence:
Lawyers for two airlines being sued by 9/11 victims prompted a federal attorney to coach witnesses in the Zacarias Moussaoui death penalty trial so the government’s case against the al-Qaida conspirator would not undercut their defense, victims’ lawyers allege.
March 8, 2006
Not really much of a choice ::
rant, personal, legal, music — No Tags
10:08 pm
Not really a choice
Originally uploaded by gjs.
So, I followed EFF’s advice and signed up for the settlement agreement with Sony BMG for the Rootkit software that was installed on many of their CD’s released last year (yes, I bought My Morning Jacket’s Z; no, I did not install the rootkit software on my computer). At Sony/BMG’s site, I jumped through the various hoops in order to sign up for my free album download. Then I came to the above-pictured screen, which has a list of the free albums I had access to (I can only choose one? I asked myself sarcastically). Ultimately, I couldn’t decide which album I would want taking up space on my hard drive, so I quit out and decided instead to post this miniature rant.
Based on these albums, maybe the case should have gone to trial!
January 3, 2006
Criticizing one end-of-the-year music list ::
rant, meta, music — No Tags
3:50 pm
Over at False 45th, Flatlander has a pretty excellent critique of a recent best album of the year list published by the Times-Argus. His criticism of three of the musicians on the list implies a deeper problem with the Vermont music “scene,” which is, well, its lack of diversity:
Do you hear a difference? They all sound the fucking same to me. We should just merge all of their names into one. From now on, “Kristina Casey Blachly” should be the way to describe the graying female folkie movement in VT. Sort of like using “Great White Lion Snake” to describe all of the Hair Bands of the late 80’s.
May 26, 2005
Crazy Rain ::
rant, personal — No Tags
9:27 pm
The weather report for Bethel over at NOAA shows a forecast that sounds more like “The Long Rain” by Ray Bradbury than it does Vermont in Spring. See here:
At some point this weather has to change, right?
January 7, 2005
Gonzales Implications ::
rant, politics — No Tags
6:48 pm
So, I watched some episodic and disjointed coverage of the Albert Gonzales confirmation yesterday. (I’m still recovering from oral surgury, which serves as a great justification for watching C-SPAN all day.) After what I saw, I’m left with a profound feeling of ambivelence about the whole thing. Although I generally feel OK about the prospects of Gonzales being appointed — if for no other reason than his power will be restrained through our constitutional system — I have come to believe that he simply has not shown enough ethical or legal competence to take on the post of Attorney General.
The Department of Justice and the White House has received a lot of heat for the so-called Torture Memo, which was a central issue in the confirmation hearings. That heat has come from legal circles, human rights organizations, and even from military leaders who fear what might happen if the United States chooses to walk away from — or selectively apply — anti-torture laws. As Lindsey Graham — yes, the conservative Republican from South Carolina — stated in his opening statement yesterday,
every Air Force wing commander lives in fear of an air crew being shot down and falling into enemy hands. And we instill in our people as much as possible that, “You’re to follow the law of armed conflict, because that’s what your nation stands for, that’s what you’re fighting for, and you’re to follow it because it’s there to protect you.”
Note that Graham is a judge advocate in the Air Force. So he’s aware of the realities of fighting a war, and more importantly, he is aware of how anti-torture rules benefit American troops.
The biggest dissapointment regarding yesterday’s hearing is that Gonzales’ confirmation is all but a foregone conclusion. Despite all the concern about his involvement in the 2002 torture memo and his questionable choices when he was Bush’s head legal counsel (as noted above), all the senators qualified their statements with a phrase similar to “I have no doubt that you will be confirmed,” or “I plan to vote to confirm, but…” As a result, the hearings functioned as little more than an open forum for the general, almost abstract concerns that the senators had about the concept of torture and the possibility of it being used by the United States. I feel like if there was some question of how the Senators would vote, the discussion would make the real existence of (and intolerance for) torture a much more tangible issue.
January 1, 2005
That old song of international responsibility ::
rant, politics — No Tags
10:49 pm
Jared Diamond has a good editorial in the New York Times today, in which he compares our current state of affairs with those of fallen nations just before their collapse. His conclusion? That there are many similarities between what he sees in our nation, and what was going on in those now non-existent nations.
After some pretty compelling comparisons between our culture and those of the Norse and Mayan societies, he gets to the two “deeper lessons” that history teaches us. First, he argues that “[a] society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions.” In those situations, the elite (who make the policy decisions) are not threatened by the state of affairs until they have destroyed their environment. This can be seen both in Mayan societies and, for example, in gated Los Angeles communities, which are “guarded by private security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. By doing these things, they lose the motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security and public schools.”
The second lesson is — thankfully — more optimistic. Socieities can save themselves if the have a “willingness to re-examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those values no longer make sense.” The argument he makes (in a broad sense) is that societies can still save themselves, if they choose to do so. Applying that idea to our current state of affairs, he finds that the most dire problems we face are of our own making, thus we have the power to unmake them. We just need to start making the right decisions.
Overall it was an interesting article — at the same time scary and energizing. I’m not sure how much staying power the book has, but it was a good read for New Years Day nonetheless.
Diamond’s previous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel dealt with many of the same themes that he addressed in the Op-Ed. (Here’s a review of it, which I wrote a couple of years ago; note that I would rewrite it if I had the time.) So I found his arguments somewhat familiar. My sense from this latest article is that he’s he’s trying now to translate his ideas into sound policy. The effect, I hope, is a thoughtful, and wise discussion about the risks that we have created, not only with our current policies, but with our collective lifestyle choices as well. But on the other hand, his discussion also runs the possibility of being somewhat unhelpful. I mean, asserting that the times are as perilous as he suggests does little to start a thoughtful discussion about the direction our Nation is taking.
