nameOfBlog

a long-delayed update

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 19:52:46 GMT

I'm now travelling in the US for holidays and to present a paper at PyCon in Washington DC. (As it turns out, 2 talks).

I'm using livejournal for trip reports while I'm away. When I get back, I will be looking to revamp this stuff pretty thoroughly to make it easier for me to be motivated to write stuff here.

(The LJ page has links to the slides for the two talks, as well as the text of the paper I wrote for the main talk on Shtoom)

I don't think that word means what you think it means

Tue, 28 Oct 2003 05:22:45 GMT

Apparently, the desire to flog the rest of Telstra, making hundreds of millions of dollars for the lucky merchant bankers, Telstra executives, ~~and completely random family members of the Communications Minister~~ who are in on the deal, dooming the rest of us to sub-standard service and an unstoppable monopoly, isn't a matter of crazed ideology run rampant, but it's a matter of "conscience". Well, it is for at least one member of the pathetic rabble that remains of what was once the Australian Democrats. If you, like I, find the notion of a "conscience vote" on this topic to be laughable, well, the Senator's contact details are here, or email him directly at senator.murray@aph.gov.au.

Vote Democrat in 2004: "We're Just Like The Liberals, Only Less So"

take a fucking hint

Fri, 24 Oct 2003 04:00:34 GMT

For fuck's sake, how much of a hint do some people need?

Actor Jim Caviezel has been struck by lightning while playing Jesus in Mel Gibson's controversial film The Passion Of Christ.

The lightning bolt hit Caviezel and the film's assistant director Jan Michelini while they were filming in a remote location a few hours from Rome.

It was the second time Michelini had been hit by lightning during the shoot.

(emphasis added)

analogy of the moment

Thu, 23 Oct 2003 04:27:19 GMT

Another thoughtful piece from Juan Cole, on the quite-probably-illegal privatisation of Iraq's assets by the US, finished with this gem:

Markets, like pet tigers, can be wonderful dynamic things, but they are stupid and amoral, and need to be regulated if they are to be tamed.

hersh again

Tue, 21 Oct 2003 02:27:06 GMT

Sy Hersh's latest, on Iraq, intelligence, WMDs and the like. Wow.

My favourite bit (on the initial source of the forged Niger documents):

Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, "Somebody deliberately let something false get in there." He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

"The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney," the former officer said. "They said, O.K, were going to put the bite on these guys." My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. "Everyone was bragging about it--'Here's what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.'" These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the SISMI intelligence.

"They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go--to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence," my source said. "They thought it'd be bought at lower levels--a big bluff." The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. "It got out of control."

comics geek

Mon, 20 Oct 2003 04:01:25 GMT

Warren Ellis is a bad man. I like him.

Yay for Grant Morrison managing to make the X-Men cool and interesting. Of course, having done this, he's now leaving to go do something else. Bastard. Here's hoping he finishes his run on X-Men in a more coherent fashion than the way he finished off The Invisibles.

And what the hell is the artist of Marvel's "Ultimate Six" thinking? Here's me thinking that one of the advantages of having a unified story-line and continuity is that the characters would look, well, somewhat similar, in different books. Nope. Not even close. Bah.

more disgusting than you can possibly imagine

Mon, 13 Oct 2003 12:45:21 GMT

I love Harper's Index. From the current issue:

Number of Canadian prison inmates who overdosed in March on fellow prisoners' methadone-laced vomit: 2
Number of inmates charged with drug trafficking for providing the vomit: 3

excellent writing on a difficult subject

Mon, 13 Oct 2003 01:49:52 GMT

In case you haven't seen it, Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent piece of writing on the meaning of "no". She also kicks recent serial idiot Gregg Easterbrook in the head repeatedly in passing.

Easterbrook's come up with a "solution" to the whole "does no mean no?" issue - instead of "no", women should be required to state "this is rape". This is idiotic. Utterly utterly idiotic. "No" already has a perfectly usable meaning. That meaning is... well, "no". How fucking hard is that to understand? Jesus.

Anyway, read the whole thing.

maybe I was too kind

Sat, 11 Oct 2003 18:10:19 GMT

I said something nice about David Brooks' first column for the NYT, but since then he's been something of a disappointment. His latest is a call for Pope John Paul II to be given a Nobel Peace Prize. It's somewhat tupical that Brooks writes:

Defending the dignity of life from the moment of conception to the moment of death, he has fought abortion, euthanasia and the scientific refashioning of human nature, putting himself on the side of conservatives.

Notice something missing there in his list? Like, ooo, I dunno, maybe something about the death penalty? While the Catholic Church has been responsible for some utterly fucked up shit recently, they've been consistent in their opposition to the death penalty. Of course, the American Religious Right and their allies have been completely consistent in ignoring that part of the Pope's message. This piece is completely typical.

While David Brooks is still Not As Bad As Safire, he's no genius. He's just another Republican hack.

(And yes, I appreciate the irony of an organisation that's been responsible for so many horrible horrible deaths being against the death penalty. Nice of you guys to join the human race now. Pity it didn't happen about 500 years earlier.)

I can't imagine the Nobel committee giving the peace prize to someone who's the leader of a organised gang of liars, thugs, child rapers and protectors of child rapers. On the other hand, they did give one to Arafat, so they're obviously fine students of irony.

is it a Qld thing, or a Christian thing?

Mon, 06 Oct 2003 04:03:24 GMT

The Age today has a piece that almost defies description. Just go read it.

And marvel that the world still contains people that are this stupid.

poor timing

Sun, 05 Oct 2003 07:49:38 GMT

Unfortunate timing on the Onion's part - compare and contrast:

The Onion: "Thank You, But That Was Siegfried's Idea"
The Observer: "Magician mauled in stage horror"

Oops.

when is a spam bill not a spam bill?

Sat, 04 Oct 2003 09:44:22 GMT

EFA has a rather harsh report on the new "anti-spam" bill going through Federal Parliment at the moment.

I think it says pretty much all you need to know that it exempts anything sent by "registered political parties" from ever being spam. But it's much, much worse than that. It allows the Australian Communications Authority to search and seize computer equipment, without a warrant. I'm sure our new Minister for IT, Darryl "Never saw a warrantless search he didn't like" Williams will be fixing that soon.</laughter class="hollow">

For fuck's sake, can't these clowns do anything right?

rules are for the little people

Sat, 04 Oct 2003 09:39:14 GMT

The chief law officer of the United States doesn't seem to understand fairly basic concepts like "prejudicing a trial" or "gag order", and might be cited for contempt as a result.

I'm so glad we don't have a reactionary bigot as our Attorney-General. Oh, wait. Damn.

just wondering

Sat, 04 Oct 2003 09:06:41 GMT

But how long before all the Vicodin spam starts including "As preferred by Rush Limbaugh!"

why I am not a libertarian

Sat, 04 Oct 2003 08:22:39 GMT

See, aside from the whole "tax-dodging professional whiner" (thanks Berke Breathed for that great phrase), you get stuff like this posting to the normally sane Politech.

Seems the ex-Canadian Privacy Commissioner has been accused of rorting his office for money. A libertarian response? Obviously this shows that we shouldn't have Privacy Commissioners. A more nuanced response might be that this shows that we should have tighter checks over bureaucrats spending, or that maybe the process by which the Canadian government handles expenses needs to be tweaked. But, nooo. Must... push... barrow...

Oh, and of course it wouldn't be a libertarian response without a gratuitous slam at the European Union:

Credit where credit is due: At least Canada will punish what wrongdoing is found. Europe probably gives its privacy bureaucrats carte blanche to free-spend tax dollars.

See, I can play the gratuitous link game too - obviously this shows why "libertarian intellectual" is an oxymoron.

(but hey, what can you expect from folks who think Ayn Rand had anything worthwhile to say...)

even a stopped clock

Sat, 04 Oct 2003 08:13:27 GMT

Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day:

"After reading the paper this morning about the pill-popping, skirt-chasing and Hitler-praising, it would be very tempting to point out Republican hypocrisy on values," Lieberman said. "But would that be the right thing to do? Absolutely."

idiot journalist award

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 14:00:42 GMT

Suprisingly, no, this isn't about Robert Novak, who's a whole different class of idiot journalist.

Go read this piece from Media Watch. Seems some lovely ABC journo wanted to do a piece on a bunch of dangerous weapons left lying around in Baghdad. All good and fine. Unfortunately, as out-takes obtained by Media Watch show, she actually got the kiddies to pose with the dangerous missiles.

This isn't a "oh, what bad people the ABC are" issue. This is a "that journalist needs to be sacked" issue. Jesus christ.

(thanks to Liz and Damien for pointing this one out)

hell of a way to start a week

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 12:03:59 GMT

Assume Bush was telling the truth last week when he said he only got news from his advisors at the early morning meetings. Can you imagine the bad day that Rice, Card &c are going to have this morning, presenting the weekend's news? And you thought your Mondays sucked...

howard's little reshuffle

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 09:33:30 GMT

Of note in Howard's reshuffle announced today:

Abbott to Health - there's not likely to be much more that the Libs can jam through in the Industrial Relations area, and the next target for Howard is Medicare, so this makes sense.
Dazzling Dazza to Alston's old spot - IT, Communications and the yartz. While almost anyone would be better than Dick Alston, Dazza's a pretty useless specimen. Expect to see his authoritarian bent (remember the ASIO "grabbing 14 year olds for questioning without a lawyer" idea?) come through in various Internet-related issues.
Amanda Vanstone to Immigration? Jesus. What did the refugees do to deserve that?
Tuckey's back to the back-bench. Again. Wonder how long he'll spend there this time? His efforts on behalf of his son made Howard's government look utterly stupid, so with a bit of luck he'll stay there. Or better yet, leave parliment and fuck off back under whichever rock he originally crawled out from.

Course, the other thing this shows is what a sparkling bunch of non-entities the Federal Liberal party contains. I guess for reasons of balance, or something, they had to appoint some MPs from WA, but christ. Julie Bishop as a minister?

the guessing game

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 08:43:16 GMT

Go back and re-read Ron Suskind's piece from January on Karl Rove. Tell me that the description of Rove from this piece doesn't sound exactly like the sort of person who'd pull a dumb stunt like outing a CIA agent in an act of petty revenge.

TPM also points out that Rove got fired from the Bush 1992 campaign for planting a negative story with... Robert Novak. The same Robert Novak who put the Plame allegations into print.

My money's on Rove and Fleischer being the perps. Assuming the White House can't cover it up (which seems less and less likely) I'd also guess Spurious George might be forced to play the presidential pardon game.