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Daily Blah for... Monday, March 31, 2003
Newspaper Requires Spine
More bad news on the free speech front: the San Francisco Chronicle's tech columnist, Henry Noor, has been suspended without pay. Not for writing anything anti-war; heaven forbid. But for participating in a peace protest and being one of several thousand people arrested. Getting arrested at a protest is pretty much a badge of honor in San Francisco these days. Seems the Chronicle, not for the first time, is out of step with the city.
Daily Bleccch
Oh my sainted aunt. I have the world's most horrendous head cold. My sinuses feel fit to explode. The gunk quotient in there is astonishing. Hence here I am at 4am, unable to sleep, grabbing the laptop and semi-casually looking up the symptoms of SARS. [Sidenote: How can a Respiratory Syndrome be both Severe and Acute? Can't it make it's mind up?]
High fever and a persistent cough are involved. Great. So I haven't got the Hong Kong flu -- and if I wash my hands, I'm not likely to get it. That makes me feel so much better.
Maybe this is divine retribution for slighting the boys on the battlefield. Or more likely for laughing at Halley, the infant daughter of a friend, one time when she sneezed out what appeared to be twice her body weight. Halley, I take it all back. Can I sleep now please?
Daily Blah for... Sunday, March 30, 2003
Two Kinds of Going to War
Not to make this a matter of national pride or anything; quite the opposite. I wish American troops were fighting a more competent and humane war than their British counterparts; since the vast majority of Iraq's invaders are American, they ought to be setting the gold standard of self-discipline. But the fact is, the Brits have lost more troops to American firepower than its Iraqi equivalent, even when they paste one ft.-wide flourescent Union Jacks on their vehicles. It's funny how you never hear of British troops accidentally killing their transatlantic counterparts, isn't it? And that, sadly, is not the only difference in style between the coalition of the willing's two active members.
A number of reports are piling up in the UK press of nervous and inexperienced US farmboys going trigger-happy around civilians. Commanders in the British Army, man for man the most experienced peacekeepers in the world, have been warning their underlings that "the mark of Cain" would be upon any one of them who did such a thing. Years of bitter mistakes in Northern Ireland have taught them to walk lightly among a hostile civilian population, like that of Basra. They know better than to terrify the locals with clumsy, camera-laden helmets; berets are worn instead. The sole humanitarian relief effort of the war, 200 tons of food and water unloaded at Umm Qasar? Again, I don't want to brag, but it is an entirely British operation.
Meanwhile, what account have the Americans given of themselves? The impression one gets is of a bunch of guys out on an armored SUV road trip, treating the road to Baghdad as a five-lane freeway. They were embarrassingly ill-prepared for resistance -- what, you mean the Iraqis are still allowed to fight after we dropped a dozen million leaflets on them? -- and were shocked, shocked to discover that a vastly outnumbered force would fight dirty, not dress up in the proper uniforms, and indulge in guerilla tactics. That Pentagon leaflet budget would have been better spent dropping historical pamphlets on the Rumsfeld and Franks residences, reminding them how they lost Vietnam. Or perhaps telling a story about another impossibly small bunch of rag-tag irregulars who became so galvanized by the presence of the world's largest army that they kicked it out of their country. It was a little incident called the Revolutionary War. We Brits certainly haven't forgotten that punishing lesson. Have the sons of '76?
Haiku Tunnel Haiku
Satire of worklife
Causes bellyaching laughs
Run straight to Netflix
Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 27, 2003
The Progress Index
So I wanted to tell you about an idea I had. An idea that could transform Daily Blah from a bog-standard blog about random events, thoughts and feelings in my life to something a little more substantial.
Remember my post the other day? The one about this war dragging the civilized world down, back into the Stone Age? Well, that's the kind of thing I find myself considering all the time: whether we’re making progress as a species, becoming more enlightened, more self-aware, more peaceful, more respectful, more civilized, more cerebral; or slipping backwards, becoming more violent, more greedy, less tolerant, more self-destructive. In short: are we focused more on the long-term than the short term?
Unfashionable as this may be in the age of irony, I'm a fan of progress. I feel I'm standing on the sidelines of human history cheering my lungs out for the greater, long-term good; booing every war, every lawmaker who gives in to the urges of corporate greed. But it’s a complex game we’re watching here. The players keep changing sides. The moves across the pitch, and often under it, are extraordinarily subtle. The goals are rarely obvious, and nobody can say with any certainty what the score is.
Nevertheless, I keep score. I can’t help it. Either a news story makes my heart leap, or it gives me a queasy feeling in my stomach (or it leaves me unmoved, in which case it probably isn’t news and most likely has something to do with a celebrity). So if this is happening every time I pick up the paper, why not try to quantify it?
Call it the Progress Index. Every Daily Blah entry concerned with the wider world will be followed by a positive or a negative score, determined by how much impact I think it has on our collective future. The looming battle on the road to Baghdad, for example, might rate a minus 50; the Senate’s principled stand against drilling for oil in the Alaskan wildlife refuge would make for a plus 10. No story is too small to be considered: the fact that New York just banned smoking in restaurants, bars and workplaces could save enough lives in the long term to be worth a plus two. Each score would be applied to an ongoing total, posted at the top of the page. And if that total ever breaks into positive numbers – well, at least I won’t feel quite so worried about where the world is going.
This is, of course, a completely arbitrary exercise: just a bit of fun, as BBC presenter Peter Snow used to say. You may well disagree with my numbers. In fact, I'd be very surprised if you agreed with them all. But I'll always explain my thinking, and you are welcome to argue with me, or send in stories I might not have considered. If you change my mind – and I do try to stay open minded – I’ll change my score. My only proviso: you must source the stories. Rumors and conspiracy theories don’t make the grade, I’m afraid.
I’m just about to move house and head off to Europe for a three-week long vacation, so the Progress Index won’t go online until I return in May. In the meantime, I want to hear your thoughts. Should I change the layout of the site, dividing it into positive and negative, or would that look needlessly complex? How about icons – up arrows and down arrows? And can you think of a more exciting name? (I also liked "Karma Index", but that sounds a little too Slashdot-ish.)
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, March 26, 2003
Stupidity By the Numbers
World deaths from smallpox in the last 30 years: 0
Terrorist groups known to have the smallpox virus: 0
U.S. deaths from the smallpox vaccination program: 3
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 25, 2003
War Fatigue
This always seems to happen several days into one of these one-sided modern wars. It happened with Afghanistan; it happened with Kosovo. I find my desire to watch the 24-hour news channels waning, and my longing for escapist fiction and movies increasing. I think it takes a certain kind of immature, Tom Clancy-esque, toy soldier warlust to stay engaged. How many genuinely thoughtful people can absorb accounts of tank battles and enemy deaths without knowing what it really means, without feeling the crushing weight of human loss? You have to be the kind of armchair soldier who wears combat fatigues to the mall. Your heart has to be as rigid as a rock in a Baghdad sandstorm.
The whole concept of conflict is too horrifically primitive to stomach. We're slipping backwards as a species. We're bombing ourselves back to the Stone Age.
Death to Spammers
To Saeid and Daniel Yomtobian, creators of the Xupiter toolbar: You are the worst kind of bottom-feeding scum imaginable. I hope you both die horrible, slow deaths. I hope little poisonous spikes are hammered into your fingernails and large earthworms worms feast on your eyelids.
Pardon my uncharacteristically violent outburst, but I've just spent the best part of an hour removing the Yombtobian's nasty little piece of spyware from my PC. I didn't ask for it. Xupiter just installs itself. When you visit a client website, it worms its way into your browser, changes your homepage, stops you from searching for anything else, and causes a zillion pop-ups to appear whenever you launch a new window. Sadly, it is thus far immune to the Internet's best spyware remover, Ad-Aware. You have to go in and delete it manually: here's how. It's a long, complicated process involving going into the registry and using the DOS command prompt. I shudder when I think of the thousands of innocent, techno-challenged PC users out in the heartland who are going to have to deal with this.
Do the Yomtobians really think this is clever? Do they actually make money this way? How do they sleep at night? According to Wired News, the father and son team are infamous spammers and porn site merchants from Sherman Oaks with several dozen lawsuits pending against them. Generally I'm against the death penalty, but I'd be willing to consider it in this case.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, March 22, 2003
Saddam Sells
An Irish betting site, Tradesports.com, is selling Saddam futures. You buy shares according to which month you think he's going to lose power in, and the site will pay out $10 per share if you're right. April is doing pretty well right now. Of course, if you think the guy is already dead, you can pick up a good bargain on March.
Daily Blah for... Friday, March 21, 2003
Pardon Me While I Geek Out
Okay, I'm not getting sucked into the glitzy television coverage of the attack or anything, but that total 3-D GPS Earthviewer.com "Digital Earth" thing they're using on CNN to show the precise location of bombing runs in Baghdad is so cool.
Naturally, their servers are being hit pretty hard right now. Be patient.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 20, 2003
A Three-Letter Word
Driving down Polk to report on the opening of the Asian Art museum this morning, with traffic backed up by the protest, I had ample time to study an odd, old-style newspaper booth on the corner of Polk and Washington. It looked like it had just emerged out of a timewarp from 1941: a wooden booth not much larger than the tiny man in the flat cap inside, with a single American flag and a faded, yellowing copy of the Chronicle stuck to the inside wall like a souvenir. In a font so large you could read it halfway across the city, the headline on the newspaper read simply: "WAR". I had to remind myself that this was, of course, today's paper.
How cliched, how ineffectual those three large letters seem. In the newspaper business in Britain, they were what the art department used to test out its largest possible font size. I did it myself once, when I was editing Oxford's own Cherwell. Every editor gets a little thrill at the idea of using them for real one day, but never believe he actually will. The Onion, as ever, offered a superb parody of this in the book "Our Dumb Century." The front page announcing World War II declared, in the most humungous 144-point type, "WA-" while a tiny addendum read "headline continued on page 2."
So the Chronicle's headline today probably fulfilled editor Phil Bronstein's wildest, most secret dreams. Technically, however, it's not factual. No country in the world has officially declared war since Russia joined battle against Japan in 1945. It just isn't done any more. For one thing, it's a lot more expensive under the laws of most nations for the government to support war veterans and war widows than those who are simply the victim of a "conflict" or "battle" or "police action." In the U.S., war has only been declared three times in history; the Constitution states that Congress alone has the power to declare it, which in this case it hasn't. It simply passed a resolution giving the President authority (which he didn't need) to use "all necessary force" -- in other words, passing the buck.
Suggesting that what is happening right now in Iraq is a "war" confers a kind of legitimacy on it that doesn't exist. No one declared war. No one authorized war. And it certainly isn't as even-sided as that word suggests. Nor is the peaceful-sounding word that Bush used, "disarmament," at all appropriate -- there are men out there who are going to lose a little more than their arms. So what's really going on? Lobbing million-dollar cruise missiles at senior army figures? That's assassination. Tracer fire in the night sky? C'est magnifique, at least for television, mais ce n'est pas le guerre. 200,000 troops crossing a national border? That's an invasion.
Let's be clear about what we're doing here: we are invading Iraq. Ten years after we went into bat for Kuwait, ostensibly because its sovereign territory was violated with the world's disapproval, we are ourselves blithely violating sovereign territory, again with the world's disapproval. You want to know what really terrifies me? That quote from an unnamed administration official in this week's New Yorker: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran." Remember that. This White House is being run by people who want to prove themselves "real men," and believe invasion to be the ultimate testosterone test. There's something horribly, apocalyptically Freudian about all of this.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, March 19, 2003
Yes, It's War. Or Is It?
The attack on Iraq has officially begun, in case you haven't heard.
Nevertheless, the image Baghdad I'm seeing on CNN make it look pretty peaceful. Grey misty skies, gently rolling traffic, tiny street lights and a muezzin. The calm before the storm, perhaps?
Or maybe this is a Wag-the-Dog scenario. The White House says there's a war, so there must be a war. We don't need proof. What if they gave a war and nobody came?
You know what it is. Bush doesn't want to get scooped by CNN like his dad was. This time, the Bushies are announcing way in advance.
TV Go Home
Miraculously, the jackhammers and sirens and other charming city noises stopped long enough for me to bluster my way through a few answers to cursory questions. "Do you think having kids has made Bill Gates softer? How has the antitrust trial affected him? What's he like to have dinner with? How would he like to be remembered, and how do you think he will be remembered?" Then one guy ran to catch the FedEx truck while the others heaved their equipment back into the van. So much trouble for one talking head.
More Delay
I was wrong. Jackhammers have started up outside. "How to make sure things get noisy," says one of the cameramen. "Invite a film crew round." They're getting antsy because they have to FedEx this tape to New York in about an hour.
The Long Wait
I'm blogging this from my living room, where a film crew from A&E's Biography has just spent the last hour and a half setting up their cameras and lights and wires and boom. All this to record a ten-minute interview on Bill Gates for an updated Biography on the Microsoft chief, which in turn will probably be spliced down to two soundbites of about five seconds each. If I'm lucky.
This, you see, is why I don't work in television.
Ah. I think they're almost ready for me.
The Runners-up
It seems highly appropriate that Al Gore has joined the board of Apple.. After all, both have been wronged by history. If circumstances had been ever so slightly different, both would be on top of their respective worlds right now. We probably wouldn't be about to go to war, and you'd be reading this on a Mac. Wouldn't that be nice?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Free Speech vs. Freedom Speech
What the hell is it with this country? Last week french fries bit the bullet and became Freedom Fries. Now it seems free speech is going the way of the dodo too, replaced by what I guess we should call Freedom Speech.
Freedom Speech means saying you support American troops and their commander in chief and beyond that, nada. Declaring that the President "failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced into war," as Tom Daschle did today? Sorry, that would be free speech. You can give aid and comfort to the enemy that way, GOP speaker Denny Hastert says. Bush's diplomacy may indeed have been a failure of the most miserable variety, but best keep your mouth shut about it if you don't want to be dubbed a traitor.
Look what happened to poor Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks. "Just so you know," she told the fair citizens of London last week, "we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." And who could dispute that, you might think? It's clearly her opinion. She can't be the only Texan to think it. As for Texans who are proud of the President and want to tell all of London -- well, here's a good place to make plane reservations. Bon Voyage. Et bonne chance.
Yet amazingly, the Chicks have been banned from radio stations across the country -- Maines' hasty apology notwithstanding. Now, let's see. What kind of free speech can't you take back? What kind of free speech earns you eternal opprobrium? Oh, yes, that's it. Blasphemy!
But who speaks for free speech? Who is going to stand up and scream the First Amendment in Hastert's ear? When will some descendent of Thomas Jefferson -- black or white -- phone in to those country music stations and give them a piece of their free mind between station breaks? Does the right wing really have a monopoly on absolute, apoplectic outrage?
Meanwhile, the Pope has been making his opposition to this war increasingly clear, saying the Bushies will have to answer to "God, their conscience and history." Which, if they are consistent, should soon put our Freedom Speakers in an interesting position: accusing the Holy Father of treacherous blasphemy.
High Noon ... Not
I've got one thing to say to you, Mr. Bush:
This isn't High Noon. It's real life, and real lives.
Saddam is not arriving in town on the midday train, or indeed any train. The only deadline is one of your creation.
You're not Gary Cooper, standing up for what's right even if you have to stand alone. The reason you haven't been able to gather a posse? Because there's no *%@#ing threat imminent.
France is not Grace Kelly. Russia is not Lloyd Bridges. You are not surrounded by Quakers, cowards or drunkards. You are surrounded by concerned global citizens who want to act responsibly, and not go blundering into other countries half-cocked.
And this isn't going to end with a five-minute shoot-out where you nail all the bad guys without getting your hair mussed. This is going to be bloody.
It's a Small World After All
I've just had my fourth request to join Friendster, a very clever little network that connects you to your friends' friends' friends', six degrees of separation-style. This thing is just exploding. If you're on it -- or would like to be -- let me know and I'll send you an invite.
Daily Blah for... Monday, March 17, 2003
Bye Bye, Atkins
After a month or so, I ended my experimentation with the Atkins diet last night. It's been good for my weight -- I shed 15 lbs in that time -- but after the first three weeks, bad for my energy levels. I felt brain-fogged. I felt a little greasy on the inside. It didn't feel good when a medical student told me told me my brain was now running exclusively on ketones, which are produced by the liver, when it's powered normally by glucose. The whole idea of Atkins is to be in ketosis, but I didn't realize that meant effectively putting my liver in charge of my brain. No sir. Not when my brain is my livelihood.
Coincidentally enough, there's a story today about the National Wheat Council, or some such horrific industry entity, launching a new anti-Atkins campaign. The diet is popular enough that it's starting to eat into wheat product profits. So far, the campaign seems to consist of trying to get people to call it the "Fatkins" diet. There's a million bucks in consultancy fees well spent. Come on, let's be grown-ups about this. Atkins worked for me as a kick-start, and I know a lot of other people it's still working for. Besides, as study after study has shown, it's not fat that makes you fat. It's excessive amounts of carbs, especially flour-based products. The new diet and exercise regimen I'm on, Body For Life, also tries to limit the amount of carbs you eat every day and balance it with protein. Does anyone still believe in that outdated USDA food pyramid from the 70's, with its 6-11 servings per day of starchy badness?
Daily Blah for... Friday, March 14, 2003
Cricket Gets Angry
One of the things I remember fondly about growing up in England is the dependably dull drone of cricket commentary. I have about as much time for cricket as I have for baseball, which is to say none whatsoever. But my father invariably listened to the play-by-play on the radio -- even, as is common, when watching the same match on TV with the mute button on. Cricket is an interminably slow game designed for drowsy, sunny afternoons; like fishing, it's practically a Zen meditation. Rather than try to get around that fact -- as an American commentator would by blurting endless statistics -- the benign, grandfatherly cricket announcers turned being boring into a fine art. "And there's a number 39 double-decker bus pulling up outside the grounds ... sparrows seem to be nesting in the pavilion ... a gentle breeze stirs the freshly-cut blades of grass around the wicket ... the new bowler has a rather fashionable haircut ... I have here a delightful carrot cake sent in by a Mrs. Wadsworth of West Riding, Surrey ..." And so the old voice would ramble brightly on, even when -- especially when -- rain stopped play.
As ever, technology seems to be changing things. Emily sent me this link to the Guardian's online commentary on the current India vs. New Zealand match by London-based reporter Scott Murray, who is apparently having something of a bad day: "Meanwhile, have you ever thought WHAT SORT OF LIFE IS THIS AND WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING BOARDING A TRAIN FOR MOORGATE AT 6.30 IN THE MORNING AND THEN STANDING AROUND FOR AGES WAITING FOR A TUBE WHILE STARING AT A SIGN TELLING YOU THAT IF YOU WAIT FOR FOUR MINUTES YOU CAN BOARD A TRAIN TO UXBRIDGE I'D RATHER WAIT FOUR HOURS FOR A JOURNEY WITH THE GRIM REAPER," he writes in a sudden splurge. "LOOK I'M SORRY THIS ISN'T EXACTLY THE SORT OF QUALITY EDITORIAL COPY YOU EXPECT FROM THE GUARDIAN BUT LOOK AT THE FACTS I'M ADRIFT IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE OF THE WORST CITIES IN THE WORLD SITTING IN FRONT OF THE SAME COMPUTER SCREEN I FACE DAY AFTER INTERMINABLE DAY HELL ... No? Only me then? Good."
Murray then proceeds to have an e-mail dialog with readers around the world about whether his job is really that bad, how he could be living in worse places, and what results you get when you bang your fists on the keyboard. As in the old-school commentary, any actual cricket is no more than an interlude -- but the style is far from sunny. "The rest of the over passes without incident," he writes at one point, "much like our lives." It's hilarious and astonishingly iconoclastic stuff, as if an MP just got up in the House of Commons and started doing an impromptu rap. Murray's voice is the flipside of the English character, the side that finds a cloud to every silver lining. They should put him on the radio; that would really put the cat among the pigeons. Or perhaps he can come over here and do baseball play-by-play. After all, if American Idol is any guide, the U.S. really loves sour Brits.
Tres Amusant
Meanwhile, as if to prove nobody hates the French more, my countrymen come up with this bon mot. Go to Google UK, search for "French military victories" and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky."
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 11, 2003
You Want Freedom Fries With That?
Now here's a story to sink your teeth into. A couple of Congressmen have censored the Francophonic output of the Capitol cafeteria. "Freedom fries" and "freedom toast" are now on the menu, lest our poor impressionable representatives be influenced by any reference to those European peaceniks.
On the surface, it sounds like a moronic publicity stunt -- the sort of thing those chicken-livered, helmet-haired philanderers in Washington are doing all the time to save them from having to come up with any real policies. You could brush past it, shrug, and hope they grow up one of these days. Go a little deeper, though, and the implications are frighteningly Orwellian.
Orwell knew what a powerful tool language was. Consider what's being done here: because the French oppose official U.S. administration policy, anything that bears their moniker is to be replaced with the word "freedom." Things that are free are now diametrically opposed to things that are French. Now I'm no scholar of human rights, but it seems to me that one very essential freedom is the right to oppose official U.S. administration policy. (I oppose official administration policy; evidently my name should be erased from the phone book and replaced with "Freedom Freedom.")
Sadly, there's more of this sort of thing going on in America today than we realize. A father and son in Albany, New York went to the mall and had T-shirts printed up with antiwar slogans. They wore them to the food court and were asked to leave. They refused. The son took his T-shirt off. The father did not, and was arrested. Yes, actually arrested! Luckily, the guy turned out to be a lawyer and charges were soon dropped. The next mall-based protestor may not be so lucky.
Remember the tautological slogan from 1984, pasted in enormous letters on the Ministry of Love? FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. It's the kind of phrase with a hundred layered meanings, but the one I like is this: redefine freedom, and you have none. The redefinition, in this instance, is support for a U.S.-led attack on Iraq. You can have any outcome to the current crisis you like, to paraphrase Henry Ford, as long as it's war.
Besides, as the French ambassador sniffed, the origin of french fries is Belgium. And where I come from, they call them chips.
Anniversary Ring
Brace yourself for another round of anniversary stories: the cellphone turns thirty next month. Weighing in at two and a half pounds -- compared to two or three ounces today -- the very first model was inaugurated on the streets of New York on April 3rd 1973 by researcher Martin Cooper. The first sentence spoken on a cellphone wasn't quite as memorable as Bell's "come here, Watson, I need you": Cooper simply called up a rival at Bell Labs and told him "I'm talking to you on a real cellular phone." No doubt this was immediately followed by "what? What? You're breaking up!" And a new era in human communication was born.
Daily Blah for... Friday, March 07, 2003
Mystical Mechanical
San Francisco's Musee Mechanique, a wonderful little time capsule of old-time seaside coin-operated amusements, reopened recently in Fisherman's Wharf at the very end of Taylor Street. It's an absolute delight. Armed with no more than a handful of quarters, you can play mechanical baseball against the mechanical Yankees, watch mechanical executions and arm-wrestle an extraordinarily strong mechanical arm (see the sign above it warning you to be careful what strength level you enter? It means business).
And to top it all off, you can go home with a prediction from the mystical mechanical typwriter. Here's mine. I think they got it mixed up with George W's.
No Exit
You remember how the U.S. got itself into trouble in Vietnam? It’s the same way Germany got itself into trouble in 1914. (For “trouble,” read “horrific casualties, years of stalemate and the annihilation of national pride.”) Johnson kept sending more and more military advisers to Saigon; the Kaiser kept putting more and more German troops on westbound trains. Their folly was this: by committing themselves so thoroughly to deployment, they had no face-saving alternative. They couldn’t back down, even if they wanted to. Now the Bushies are treading the same dangerous path. There’s no exit strategy. Troops are massed outside Iraq, and the clock is ticking, and even if Saddam appears to be disarming, well, we can’t just let the bombers and the marines and the aircraft carriers sit there all year, can we? I mean, it’s expensive. Might as well effect a regime change, and to hell with the hundreds of American and British corpses that will require.
There’s been a lot of talk about all-out war, and a lot of talk about more inspections. These ideas are so politically polarized right now that, as far as Washington is concerned, they mean victory for the U.S. and victory for Iraq respectively. In all honesty, we’re not going to avoid casualties if we advocate either position. We need to be more creative. We need a third way. We need to think outside the war-vs.-peace box.
Kudos to Professor Michael Walzer, then, for his Times op-ed today calling for limited war. Why not extend the no-fly zone to all Iraq, allow surveillance flights without 48 hours’ notice, impose sanctions on any nation that sells Saddam weapon-making tools, and send peacekeeping troops to permanently monitor all inspection sites? Wouldn’t this allow the U.S. to look strong without costing a single life? Well, yes, if it works. It may not. It’s just a place to start the conversation, a roughly-sketched map to one possible exit from this explosive situation. I’d love to start reading about others. I don't see many bright ideas emanating from Pennsylvania Ave.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 06, 2003
My Country, Wrong or Right?
Could it be? As the Bush administration barrels towards Baghdad with all the diplomatic subtlety of a steamroller, might Britain be preparing to jump from the passenger cabin? Or am I dreaming? I probably am; Tony Blair's tongue is tied too firmly to the Presidential shoelaces. Nevertheless, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw just declared himself open to “the possibility of an amendment” to the upcoming Security Council resolution -- which, if genuine, could bring the UK just a wee bit closer to the concept of letting inspections work a little longer, and the Sino-Russo-Franco-German alliance that champions it. Nothing will stop the U.S. going to war, it seems, but my fantasy outcome is this: to see the four other permanent security council members stalling for time. To achieve a moral victory. Thanks to China's declaration today, three are on board. There's only one to go.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 04, 2003
Dial H for Hydro
Heard a fascinating talk by renowned futurist Peter Schwartz tonight. Schwartz, the man who predicted the 1970's oil crisis five years before it happened, told us the era of oil is over: the future is hydrogen. Refineries are starting to make the change. Even the Bush administration officials he's been talking to are looking to make a genuine change: it is, for them, a national security issue.
Interestingly, Schwartz wasn't just talking about hydrogen-powered cars, he was talking about laptops and even cellphones with hydrogen fuel cells, carrying four or five times the charge. This wasn't idle speculation. Schwartz just recently became the first person ever to make a call with a hydrogen fuel cell phone. You will too, he predicts, starting in about 2005.
I love it when the future pops its head round the corner a lot sooner than you expected.
Daily Blah for... Monday, March 03, 2003
Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Will Scare
This is a very tense time in international politics. Fear is rife. Nobody seems to know exactly where the enemy is, or what he can throw at us. What we need right now is the calm, reassuring voice of our insurance companies to tell us everything's going to turn out alright. Which is why State Farm recently sent out letters to all of its policyholders, helpfully reminding them that they will not be covered in the event of a nuclear attack. Isn't that nice of them? You may also like to know that being crushed by a giant radioactive lizard voids your life insurance, and vaporization at the hands of alien lifeforms is going to be hell on your premiums.
My New Favorite Joke
"Can you make me one with everything?"
-- Buddhist to hot-dog vendor
Daily Blah for... Saturday, March 01, 2003
Charms to Soothe the Savage Beast
Wow. Herbie Hancock just gave us the most incredible presentation: a mixture of live music, surround sound, international politics, hip hop, vox pops and clips from the Matrix. Without saying a word himself, he described the anger and fear and simple wrong-headedness about the direction this country is taking more lucidly than any speech-maker.
This is in stark contrast to Brian Eno, who decided the greatest statement he could make about the threat of war was not showing up -- and sending six ghetto-blasters in his stead. Eno, it seems from the letter he sent, believed he would somehow be endorsing the Bush administration by flying to America in the first place. What he didn't realize, perhaps, is just how many dissident voices there are in this country right now, especially at TED. I'm listening to one right now. And he plays piano like an angel.
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