brainrow

Last night Keith Olbermann reviewed “The Nexus of Politics and Terror,” and considered how often heightened terror alerts seem to come just when the Bush administration wants to distract us from negative news, or needs a P.R. boost.

The basis of all this, at heart: remarks made on May 10, 2005, by a former Bush administration official discussing the old color-coded terror threat warning system. More often than not, he said, “We were the least inclined to raise it. Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment, sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don’t necessarily put the country on alert. There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, ‘For that?'”

The speaker was the first secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge. In the light of those remarks and his criticism this week of the vice president for politicizing terror in the context of the Connecticut senatorial primary, it is imperative that we examine each of the coincidences of timing since 2002, including the one last week in which excoriating comments by leading Republicans about leading Democrats just happened to precede arrests in a vast purported terror plot, arrests that we now know were carried out on a timeline requested not by the British, nor necessitated by the evidence, but requested by this government.

Crooks and Liars has the video. It’s a big file, but if you have high-speed internet access, it’s worth watching.

The great animation director Chuck Jones said his Roadrunner-Coyote cartoons were meant to be something his team could crank out quickly and inexpensively, so that time, effort and money could be diverted to more elaborate cartoons like “What’s Opera, Doc?” But in his later years, Jones got more philosophical about the Roadrunner cartoons. He would explain the behavior of the hapless coyote by quoting George Santayana:

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

We remember, of course, that the coyote always failed to catch the roadrunner. What we might forget is that he pursued ever more elaborate schemes that wouldn’t have done him any good even if they’d gone off without a hitch.

Today New York Times columnist Bob Herbert begins his column with that same line from Santayana.

There was something pathetic about the delight with which Republicans seized upon the terror plot last week and began trying to wield it like a whip against their Democratic foes. The G.O.P. message seemed to be that the plot foiled in Britain was somehow proof that the U.S. needed to continue full speed ahead with the Bush administration’s disastrous war in Iraq, and that any Democrat who demurred was somehow soft on terrorism.

The truth, of course, is that the demolition derby policies of the Bush administration are creating enemies of the United States, not defeating them…

Almost three years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, Jessica Stern, who lectures on terrorism at Harvard, wrote in The New York Times that the U.S. had created in Iraq “precisely the situation the Bush administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for its citizens’ rudimentary needs.”

Ms. Stern went on to say, “As bad as the situation inside Iraq may be, the effect that the war has had on terrorist recruitment around the globe may be even more worrisome.”

…

The debacle in Iraq, and inhumane policies like torture, rendition and the incarceration of Muslims without trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, serve only to strengthen the appeal of militants who are single-mindedly dedicated to the destruction of American lives.

The U.S. needs to be much, much smarter in its efforts to counter this mortal threat. We should be focused like a laser on the fight against Al Qaeda-type terrorism. We need to ramp up our security efforts here at home. (Even as the terror plot in Britain was emerging, the Bush administration was trying to eliminate millions of dollars in funding for explosives-detection technology. Congress blocked that effort.) We need a new approach to foreign policy that draws on the wisest heads both here and abroad. And we need a strategy for withdrawal from Iraq.

From the PBS program NOW, actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith:

I don’t use words like “safety” when I teach. I talk about resilience. Knowing how to move. Knowing how to be in motion. Knowing how to deal with discomfort. So, I think we have to get off of where we thing we just know everything, and think about becoming more resilient about what we don’t know, and getting better at asking questions and having fewer answers, if we want to accomplish the kinds of things we want to try to accomplish.

Earlier this week, Apple Computer introduced Intel-based replacements for their PowerMac G5 desktop systems, and announced an October shipping date for Intel-based XServes, Apple’s line of rack-mounted servers. The announcements complete Apple’s transition to Intel CPUs on their entire Macintosh line.

On its website Apple says:

Ushering in a new era of outstanding performance, Mac Pro introduces the 64-bit Dual-Core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processor to the Mac lineup. A state-of-the-art processor, it makes Mac Pro one of the fastest desktop computers on the planet.

…

And at 3GHz, the Mac Pro runs up to 2x faster than the Power Mac G5 Quad.

Macworld has done some early benchmarks, and this is what they have to say about the 2.66GHz Mac Pro:

The standard configuration of the Mac Pro outperforms its PowerPC-based G5 predecessors by a wide margin, helping to justify Apple’s 2005 decision to switch to processors from Intel.

Outperforms by a wide margin, huh? Are they nuts, or is it me?

A video render that took 30 seconds on the Power Macs takes only 28 seconds on the new Mac Pro. An MPEG2 encode operation that used to take 1:52 now takes only 1:47, and an iMovie effect that previously ran 39 seconds now comes in at 38 seconds! WHOOooooooo!!

To be fair, there are some tests where the Intel-based machines have a more impressive edge. But there are also results like this: MP3 encoding that took 43 seconds on the old machine takes 48 seconds on the new one. A Photoshop benchmark that runs in 45 seconds on a Power Mac takes almost twice as long on a Mac Pro.

The Photoshop results aren’t terribly surprising. There is not yet an Intel-native version of Photoshop for the Mac. That’s expected sometime next year, almost certainly at an upgrade price of hundreds of dollars. It’s hard to be certain, but that new version probably will perform a little bit better on a Mac Pro than on a Power Mac.

Okay, Apple’s business depends on shipping machines. It’s no surprise they’re hyping their new products. Macworld’s business depends on Apple’s business, and I guess if you’re shilling computers for a living, you don’t need to maintain even the appearance of objectivity or journalistic integrity.

My congressional representative is Deborah Pryce. She often shows up on TV when the Republican leadership appears en masse to face the microphones, because she’s Chair of the House Republican Conference.

Last week she sent me this.

Oh, it may look like campaign literature — the Ohio Republican Party has decided to make immigration a big campaign issue this November. It may smell like campaign literature. But this mailing was produced and mailed entirely at taxpayer expense.

Apparently it counts as Deb’s community service — er, constituent outreach — because it includes this little “survey”:

Deborah Pryce’s position: we are all too dumb to notice how she’s using taxpayer money.

Me not so sure about that.

Orville Schell, a journalist and the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, on the PBS program NOW:

I read even Bill Keller, the editor of the New York Times, who made remonstrations against the government, and in it one sees all sorts of self-doubting, self-questioning, ombudsmen, self-lacerations — I mean, it’s the very healthy actual liberal impulse to find whatever fault one can within oneself, before blaming someone else.

It’s not a bad human instinct.

It dates back a while. From Luke 6:41:

…why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Either how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Schell continues:

In the world in which we presently live, that is a sign of weakness, and people like Bill O’Reilly or the administration — they’ll just drive a truck right through there and mow you down.

And Jesus continues:

Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.

Tomorrow is primary election day in Connecticut, and right now it looks like Senator Joe Lieberman will lose the Democratic nomination to Ned Lamont. I think Lieberman hurt himself by declaring that, if he loses, he will run as an independent. That kind of talk doesn’t charm a lot of Democratic primary voters, but Lieberman seems to be targeting Republicans who want a rubber-stamp for Bush war policies and Democrats who aren’t paying any attention.

Lamont is challenging Lieberman mostly because of his continuing support for the war in Iraq, and his uncritical endorsement of the administration’s handling of the war.

In all honesty, I don’t know what we should do now in Iraq. We shouldn’t have invaded, but it’s too late to fix that now. I worry that simply packing up and leaving will leave a lawless state like Afghanistan — a sanctuary for the worst kinds of extremists — but it might be better than the current policy: do what fails until it works.

Because I’m full of uncertainty, I don’t want to see Lieberman defeated just because he supports the war. No, I want to see him defeated because he’s incapable of learning from experience, and because he scolds Democrats for daring to think there’s got to be a better way.

If Lieberman loses tomorrow’s primary, he’s still got his independent race in November, and if he wins that, probably a switch to whichever party has the majority in the Senate, in hopes of getting some nice committee assignments.

Via Colorado Jyms: If Lieberman loses big, Gary Hart says we should look for an October Surprise:

Depending on the fate of Senator Joe Lieberman on Tuesday, it should come as no surprise to anyone when (not if) the Bush administration announces a dramatic plan to exit Iraq sometime before the Congressional elections this fall.

…

Since, with precious few exceptions, political careers trump principle, and since the cabal of neoconservatives and the religious right intend to govern forever, the genius Karl Rove will concoct a patently phony Iraq exit strategy.

When I signed up for high-speed internet service years ago, storage space for a personal web site was thrown in as part of the deal. I chuckled a little when I saw that. I’d never had a web site, and never needed one.

But it was free. And there was this constant world-wide clamor to know everything about me, and what I thought about different stuff. And besides, all the cool kids were setting up websites.

So I created a home page. I didn’t know anything about designing or writing for the web. I didn’t have any programs that could help. I had a lot to learn just to put up a simple first page. It looked pretty bad. I imagined anonymous web-surfers forming harsh first impressions of me based on that page. So I gave it an apologetic name: Michael Burton’s Pathetic Home Page.

As time went by, I learned more about web design; I bought programs to help create better-looking web sites. I used templates designed by people with better taste than my own. Yet everything I’ve done online has been pathetic. It’s… uh… it’s branding. Yeah, that’s it — branding.

Now it’s time for a re-branding. In recent months, server performance on the ol’ weblog has been even more pathetic than successful branding requires, so I’m moving this blog to a new host. And besides, all the cool kids are getting their own domain names, so I’ve got one, too: brainrow.com.

The word “brainrow”, of course, conjures up images of a forbidden wing of a nightmarish futuristic prison, where the brains of prisoners are kept alive in glass jars, wired together into a giant organic supercomputer used by the totalitarian government to keep track of everyone and control everything. The brains are all fully conscious and aware, but powerless to do anything because of the way they are wired into the computer grid. Until…

Or, uh, maybe it makes you think of happy, colorful rainbows. Those are nice.

All the blog posts have been moved to brainrow. At this point, comments have not been moved. It might not be possible to move them. I fixed a number of glitches after the move, but I may have missed others. If you see a post that doesn’t look right, send me email.

Long-time readers can rest assured: this blog may have a new name, and a new address, but, deep down, it will always be pathetic.