Posted 3/29/2003 10:23:45 AM by Edward Driscoll
"ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY": Sorry for the lack of posting these past few days. Writing for "dead tree" publications just went into overdrive, with numerous articles simultaneously requiring telephone interviews for background material. And our home remodeling efforts, which I've discussed before in this blog, are finally starting to come to fruition. Our contractors have a week or two to go, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel. (And as my wife said, "fortunately, we're close enough to the light that we're sure it's not an oncoming train!") The contractors have roughed out the telephone and computer network cabling in our home. My wife is eager to get back into her office, so I spent a few hours late yesterday afternoon and evening cutting an opening for a wall plate, and installing a single gang plate that provides her with the following jacks, running off of three Cat-5 cables that I terminated and installed the jacks for:

Line #1 and line #2 of the telephone on one jack Line #3 of the telephone on another Fax on another dial-up modem on another And because we use a software-based proxy server for the cable modem, there are two LAN jacks in the outlet.

I've written several articles about installing wired and wireless home networks (I've put both in my home), but when I get a hard-wired LAN outlet installed and working, it never ceases to amaze me. Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I think my Third Law is "Any sufficiently advanced technology that I can install and make work is indistinguishable from magic"! I felt so jazzed about getting this outlet in and working that I picked up a copy of Wired on the way back to the hotel where we've been spending nights (getting the plumbing turned on again--major bathroom renovations are also reaching fruition--is part of the light at the end of the tunnel). I don't tend to read Wired every month these days; I only buy it if something leaps off the cover at me. (And their April issue is their tenth anniversary, which, coupled with my network wiring was enough to get me to pick it up.) It's funny, I write three or four technology-oriented articles a month, but I tend to forget the Buck Rogers-like aspect of my life (not the least of which is this blog. People are actually reading my writing on their own computer monitors in their homes and offices. If you had told me that would be happening when I was first experimenting computers back at St. Mary's when I was 12 or 13 years old, that would have been sheer Star Trek-like fantasy! Sorry to go all Lileksian on y'all--but I did want to explain why there's been less posting recently, despite the war to liberate Iraq. Fortunately, the rest of the Blogosphere has been doing more than share this week. And I'll try to post more this coming week. (Except when I'm wiring up more LAN outlets.)

Posted 3/28/2003 10:31:27 AM by Edward Driscoll
FIELDSBORO NEW JERSEY "BANS YELLOW RIBBONS": Nice to see this immense show of support for our brave troops from my home state. No word yet on what Amiri Baraka thinks of the city's gesture.

Posted 3/26/2003 09:54:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
CLASS ACT: Tiger Woods on Iraq.

Posted 3/26/2003 02:45:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
PAT MOYNIHAN DEAD AT AGE 76: For our previous coverage of the Senator from New York, click here.

Posted 3/26/2003 01:32:02 PM by Edward Driscoll
HAMMER TIME: My interview last week with Jan Hammer, the man who composed the Miami Vice soundtrack (other than the hit singles used to create the "MTV cops" feeling of the show) is online at Blogcritics. Sorry the lack of posting for the past couple of days--I've been on the phone for big chunks of both days, gathering material for upcoming (and mostly dead tree) articles. Watch for more posts soon! (in the meantime, check out all of the usual suspects on the links page for additional--and excellent--real time war coverage.)

Posted 3/25/2003 11:03:16 AM by Edward Driscoll
RADICAL CHIC, VATICAN STYLE! "Pope Endorses Antiwar Movement", says The Washington Post. Meanwhile, the Vatican is making de facto endorsements of Palestinian suicide bombers, while still clinging to those old school, pre-postmodern ideas that...suicide is a sin. Nice to see them able to multitask so well.

Posted 3/25/2003 12:57:10 AM by Edward Driscoll
"PEACE" ACTIVIST THREATENS REPORTER: Ho-hum, nothing new, right? Except this time around, it's actor Tim Robbins, the husband of Susan Sarandon. Robbins threatened to "find" and "hurt" reporter Lloyd Grove of the Washington Post, for interviewing Sarandon's mother and "outing" her as a Republican. Shock and Awe indeed: Hollywood actors threatening Post reporters, when they once produced films lionizing them? Now that's far removed! (On the other hand, I wonder if Robbins is a bit more sympathetic to Newt Gingrich these days? Probably not.)

Posted 3/24/2003 11:06:46 PM by Edward Driscoll
"GOTCHA! How Reuters transformed an accidental death into homicide": Remember the infamous photo that made the rounds after 9/11 that showed a clueless 20-something standing on top of the World Trade Center posing for a photo on the morning of 9/11 as an Al-Qaida controlled airliner loomed perilously close? According to David Bedein, Reuters fell for the same type of mocked-up-in-Photoshop shot to "illustrate" anti-Israeli protestor Rachel Corrie just seconds before being hit by an Israeli bulldozer. Reuters does seem to have a recurring problem with their photos, and their captions lately, don't they? (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Posted 3/24/2003 04:29:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
WAS LAST NIGHT'S OSCAR CEREMONY Hollywood's equivalent of a Free Mumia protest? Let's see. You have a group of people almost entirely against a war that 75 percent of America supports. You have a Best Documentary award going to someone who doesn't support the Constitution's Second Amendment. Plus you have two awards go to a biopic of an unrepentant Stalinst. And worst of all, you have the Best Director award going to a convicted rapist. Have there been any outcries from feminists over Roman Polanski receiving the Best Director award? (By the way, don't get me wrong--I love Chinatown, arguably the best film to come out of Hollywood in the 1970s. But that was directed before Polanski's conviction for the statutory rape of a 13-year old girl.) Friviledge indeed: no wonder this ceremony had the worst ratings of any Academy Awards presentation. Talk about being far, far removed from the values of the vast majority of your audience.

Posted 3/24/2003 04:04:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
RANDOM THOUGHTS, by Thomas Sowell:

Never before in history has the word "unilateral" been thrown around so gratuitously when the issue was war. Only in recent years has there been any question that a sovereign nation takes the solemn step of going to war unilaterally. What a farce to have Cameroon or Portugal deciding whether it is OK for the United States to go to war. * * * Why do actors -- people whose main talent is faking emotions -- think that their opinions should be directing the course of political events in the real world? Yet it is a mistake that they have been making as far back as John Wilkes Booth. * * * Most people do not realize that Winston Churchill was a pariah in the 1930s, for telling people what they didn't want to hear -- namely that Britain needed to build up its military forces to deal with the threat that Hitler and the Nazis represented. What we are seeing today in the attempts to ridicule or demonize President Bush is nothing new. * * * We can only hope that whoever had the bright idea of dealing with Iraq through the United Nations will be leaving the administration "to pursue other interests," as they say.

On that last one, I'd beg to differ. When we look back on the liberation of Iraq, I doubt we'll focus all that much on the length of the buildup before the War. If Bush has discredited the UN (And as Dennis Miller recently noted, "If you have faith in the United Nations to do the right thing, keep this in mind, they have Libya heading the Committee on Human Rights and Iraq heading the Global Disarmament Committee. Do your own math here."), and banished it to history, then he's done his job.

Posted 3/24/2003 12:57:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN PITTSBURGH, PA: Dennis Miller has an excellent top ten list for those against the war. Miller's really come on strong as a rare sane voice in Hollywood. I just hope it doesn't cost him his career.

Posted 3/24/2003 10:52:25 AM by Edward Driscoll
SEMPER FI: Happy 59th birthday to everyone's favorite drill sergeant, R. Lee Ermey.

Posted 3/24/2003 10:39:42 AM by Edward Driscoll
DO'S AND DON'TS: National Review Online's Amir Taheri has a checklist for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Posted 3/24/2003 12:56:28 AM by Edward Driscoll
MEMOREX: Saddam never mentioned the bombing of his palace or surviving it, Amatzia Baram just noted.

Posted 3/24/2003 12:26:21 AM by Edward Driscoll
SADDAM'S SPEECH: The bad news: there's enough details in it that he's probably still alive. The good news: as speeches by totalitarian, megalomaniac dictators go, Triumph of the Will, it ain't. "Blah blah blah, Iraq will be victorious...blah blah blah, kill the enemy and enter paradise...blah blah blah, Jihad...blah blah blah...Allah." Those last bits are interesting--calls to Muslims to fight for him. Did anybody catch the graphic of the Iraqi eagle logo on blue cardboard before and after the speech? PBS in 1968 had better graphics. (And yes, this time I think it's him, and not a double.) Whoops--guess I spoke to soon. Walid Phares, MSNBC's Arab expert just said that Saddam didn't mention bombing of Baghdad, captured prisoners, recent battles, meeting of Arab League tomorrow. And this classic--"The bulk of the speech was beautiful Arab poetry." Geez. MSNBC's man in the field says, "If I had to guess, I would say tape," adding, "Not a clean open" to the speech. Amatzia Baram, another MSNBC Arab expert says, "This speech is canned." "he knew ahead of time" enough to make canned speech. No mention of prisoners of war. No mention of airplanes down by friendly fire. No mention of battles raging. "Taped maybe even a week before the war started." Both Phares and Baram agree that no mention of Basra is telling. By the way, if that was a live speech, Saddam been able to resume his daily paradrop of Grecian Formula--his hair was much blacker than the Saddam we saw on Wednesday night. Sounds like Memorex to me. Another man in the field, this time from Qatar: Saddam referenced the commander of the 11th brigade--that brigade has already surrendered. The US and British "troops will find strong Iraqi troops fighting back", another MSNBC reporter quotes Saddam as saying. Well, they're already fighting back.

Posted 3/23/2003 10:16:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
FRIVILEDGE: James Lileks, discussing quagmire and the BBC, and the quagmire that is the BBC, is in rare form.

Posted 3/23/2003 10:03:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
LOVELY PARADOX FOR THE UN noted by Andrew Sullivan, who writes:

In one of the loveliest paradoxes of this battle, the U.N. therefore laid the groundwork for its subsequent self-destruction twelve years later. Without the U.N.'s restrictions on American force twelve years ago, Saddam would not be around today. Any non-U.N., American-led coalition with any sense of military opportunity, would have finished off the old Stalinist more than a decade ago. 1991 was therefore, in one sense, the U.N.'s post-Cold War high-point. Too bad it guaranteed its future nadir.

It didn't have to guarantee that nadir--but the accumulated weight of the UN's actions in the post Soviet 1990s certainly did.

Posted 3/23/2003 02:02:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
IRAQI FORCES ARMED WITH CHEMICAL WEAPONS, according to this Reuters report, remarkably free of shock quotation marks.

Posted 3/23/2003 02:00:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
GENIE OUT OF THE BOTTLE DEPARTMENT: Drudge has stills of the footage of captured US POWs originally shown on Al-Jazeera, via Iraqi TV. (Click here for another example of "the genie out of the bottle".)

Posted 3/23/2003 01:37:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
FOG OF WAR: Here's more information on the "downed Coalition pilot" being sought in Baghdad--which may or may not be real. If the footage shown on CNN (look below) is real, didn't the Iraqis just document themselves committing a war crime? Or is it acceptable to shoot at pilots parachuting in from a downed aircraft?

Posted 3/23/2003 01:32:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
"A FATHER'S WORDS ON GOING TO WAR", is the title of ths MSNBC interview with the original President Bush. I love this exchange, which begins with Bush #41 saying:

What burns me up now are these statements that are critical of the president and of Colin Powell—”failed diplomacy.” The problem they face is so different and so much bigger that I think any comparison is just night and day. It seems to be au courant, if you’ll excuse my knowledge of French, having studied it for 11 years, but I don’t agree with it. I think when history is written people are going to find some very interesting things about the French position. And I’m annoyed at the German position. I don’t talk about it publicly, but I know a lot of German people not in the coalition government with Schroder who are very, very upset about the position of their government. MSNBC: What do you think is going on with France? GHWB: [Pause] They’re French.

When asked "What do you say to critics who say the president doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks?", the elder Bush replied, "in the final analysis, you’ve got to do what’s right, and that’s why I have great respect, not just love and affection, but great respect, for the president because he can make those tough decisions, and for Colin Powell, too, I might add. I hate criticism of Colin Powell from any quarter."

Posted 3/23/2003 01:00:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
FIVE REASONS WHY MISTREATING US POWS IS A VERY BAD IDEA.

Posted 3/23/2003 12:59:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
SUNDAY WITH BLOGGER: For some reason, Blogger's archive of Sunday posts usually doesn't start working until after 12 noon. I'll have to change the times of all of the posts that don't have archieved posts, and I'll do so later today. (Originally posted at 10:24 AM) UPDATE (1:54 PM): I think I have everything moved--everything I posted this morning should have working links--as well as correct original post times.

Posted 3/23/2003 12:11:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
BBC: "Given the amount of resistance you've been receiving, has this in fact been more difficult than you expected?" Lt. Gen. John Abizaid: "No." Nice to see the Rumsfeld doctrine for handling reporters is filtering down through the ranks. (Originally posted at 11:43:16 AM)

Posted 3/23/2003 12:10:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
IRAN SAYS THE MISSLE THAT LANDED INSIDE THE IRANIAN BORDER WAS IRAQI, NOT US, according to CNN.com. (Originally posted at 11:41 AM)

Posted 3/23/2003 12:08:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
US GENERAL JUST GAVE AL-JAZEERA REPORTER A DRESSING DOWN for his media showing images of our captured troops. "This is absolutely unacceptable", Lt. Gen. John Abizaid said, during US press conference shown on CNN (and I assume Fox). Good for him. UPDATE (12:02 PM): CNN has made the decision not to air the footage (again?), with the exception of one very blurry still with no soldiers' faces shown. (Originally posted at 11:36:27 AM)

Posted 3/23/2003 12:07:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
IRAQI ARMED FORCE FALLS TO US ADVANCE: "Late Saturday, the brigade encountered dozens of Iraqi vehicles armed with machine guns and fought with them until dawn Sunday, destroying 15 vehicles, killing at least 100 Iraqi soldiers and capturing 20. The Iraqis were believed to be members of the ruling Baath party militia, loyal to one of Saddam Hussein's sons. (Originally posted at 10:55:24 AM)

Posted 3/23/2003 12:06:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
HAVE WE CAPTURED AN IRAQI CHEMICAL PLANT? Needless to say, great news (for all sorts of reasons) if it's true. (Originally posted at 10:42:05 AM)

Posted 3/23/2003 12:05:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
IRAQI FOOTAGE SHOWS CAPTURED AMERICAN SOLDIERS. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says television footage of those POWs violates the Geneva Convention. Steven Den Beste comments that "Last week the US government announced that Iraq had acquired uniforms like the ones our men were wearing":

I wonder if maybe we just discovered what those uniforms were really intended for? The Iraqis just showed interviews on TV with five people they claimed were captured US servicepeople, and showed a morgue full of dead bodies, all of whom were wearing American uniforms. Hmmm... I hope so. Otherwise it means something really bad just happened.

Den Beste also links a sign carried by the anti-war protestors last week to the "fragging" incident that occurred yesterday. (Originally posted at 10:38:13 AM)

Posted 3/23/2003 12:04:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
DID THE RUSSIANS SELL IRAQ NIGHT VISION GOGGLES? (Originally posted 10:21:26 AM)

Posted 3/23/2003 12:03:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
EMBEDDED JOURNALISTS: Good post from the Cut on the Bias blog. See also the post below it about a soldier from Maine killed. (Originally posted 10:12:55 AM)

Posted 3/23/2003 12:02:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
RAF AIRCRAFT "HIT BY US MISSILE". UPDATE (10:15 AM): Not surprisingly, Glenn has links to more information. (Originally posted 12:02:49 AM)

Posted 3/23/2003 12:01:00 PM by Edward Driscoll
ARE THE IRAQIS FAKING NEWS FOOTAGE? Wouldn't surprise me in the least. Strange video of Iraqis shooting into a river (The Tigris?) at "a downed US pilot" just shown on CNN with a surprising amount of incredulity from Wolf Blitzer, with numerous "reporters" clicking away with still camera. Hopefully CNN has learned their lesson from the Peter Arnett "milk factory" debacle during the first Gulf War. The US is claiming that no US planes went down in Iraq. And I tend to believe them, given our overwhelming (near total) air superiority. UPDATE (6:16 PM): John Derbyshire has an important tip for the Iraqis shooting into the water: "Memo to those idiots shooting into the Tigris, hoping to spot two downed American airmen: Airmen who survive the downing of a military fighter jet do so with the aid of p-a-r-a-c-h-u-t-e-s. Which f-l-o-a-t."