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October 30, 2005
2000
An anti-war group in Oregon is using (with permission, mind you) my render of many flag-draped coffins I made a while back when the Bush regime stopped allowing photos to be taken of them. Yay Internet!
Posted by griffjon at 04:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Iran
The Independent has a short article; "Ten very surprising things about Iran" (linked from BoingBoing), that is at least a small chink of information against the US propaganda on Iran.
Of interest:
8 Iran has one of the only condom factories in the Middle East, and actively encourages contraception as a means of family planning. Sex education for married couples and major advertising campaigns helped Iran to slow its booming population growth.9 Satellite television is banned in Iran, but receiver dishes sit in plain view on top of many houses. The most popular channels are run by Iranians based in Los Angeles, who broadcast Iranian pop music and a steady stream of anti-regime propaganda - though many Iranians also scoff at the radical tone taken by the stations.
Ah! They're pro-condom! That's why we wanna invade!
Posted by griffjon at 09:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 29, 2005
Fitz
Oh, it's a great week to be a liberal.
The Washington Post captures this gem of what they describe as a textbook case of what can go wrong in the second term:
House Government Reform Committee Chairman Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) was stinging, saying he was "very disappointed in Libby, and the White House, and the vice president and the president.""They should have taken care of this a long time ago," Davis said in an interview. "They should have done their own investigation. They're going to get very little sympathy on Capitol Hill, at least from me. . . . They brought this on themselves."
They also exerpted the best part of his press conference:
his appearance was as much about answering the charge that will inevitably be lodged against Fitzgerald himself: that he exceeded his charter and brought charges on "technicalities" rather than major crimes.The prosecutor had prepared his defense well. "That talking point won't fly," he said when a questioner raised the anticipated criticism. "If it is proven that the chief of staff to the vice president went before a federal grand jury and lied under oath repeatedly and fabricated a story . . . that is a very, very serious matter," said Fitzgerald, 44, licking his lips frequently and moving his eyes back and forth across the line of eight cameras. "The truth is the engine of our judicial system, and if you compromise the truth, the whole process is lost."
And the Village Voice breaks down the timeline of the events, and the Seattle Times reminds us that this could still capture Cheney in it as well:
The indictment says that Cheney was the third person, after an unidentified undersecretary of state and a CIA officer, to discuss with Libby the fact that Plame was a CIA officer. It is not illegal for senior officials with security clearances to talk about classified matters. What was illegal, Friday's indictment charged, was the alleged false statements Libby subsequently made about the Wilson affair in interviews with the FBI and testimony before the grand jury investigating the CIA leak case.Libby's conversation with Cheney took place around June 12, 2003, about the time Libby and unidentified other "officials in the office of the vice president" discussed how to respond to Wilson's allegations that the administration was lying about Iraq's alleged purchase of uranium from Niger, a claim that formed part of President Bush's rationale for invading Iraq.
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The indictment hints that Cheney and Libby may have discussed how to handle the Wilson problem and the media coverage of Wilson's charges. It says that on or about July 12, on the return leg of a trip to Norfolk, Va., with Cheney, Libby talked over "with other officials aboard the plane" how Libby should respond to media inquiries, including some from Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper.The indictment did not indicate whether Cheney participated in that discussion.
Posted by griffjon at 09:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 25, 2005
Creative Destruction
Just to note, I am taking great pleasure in watching the NeoCons fall apart this week. Delay, Frist, and now Libby, Rove and maybe even Cheney.
It's a good time!
Posted by griffjon at 03:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
USA Today on Peace Corps
USA Today has an op-ed piece on the need for a makeover for Peace Corps.
While I will certainly agree that the PC programs need some updating and revision, this piece... uh... how does one kindly and professionally say "is smoking crack"?
Laura Vanderkam opens with a great PC-success-story of a volunteer who organized his community to bring piped water in over the course of his assignment, then attacks the cost of this. With 7,700 volunteers serving worldwide, and the PC budget of over 300 Million (less than the cost, I might point out, of one bomber), then each volunteer costs $40k/yr to support. First -- hold on. This number means the same as taking the entire defense budget and dividing it by the number of servicemen and women overseas only, and claiming that that is then the cost to support them per year. The 300M number includes salaries for the PC/W staff, salaries for the staff at each post, insurance, supply, office space rental or purchase for each post HQ, transportation costs, medical supply costs... In other words, this masks the massive administrative and other fixed costs, and claims that each volunteer is only a variable cost, so if we send one less, that's 80k not coming out of the tax payer's burden. I can let you know that my stipend for living and housing expenses, total, was under $500/month, that's 6k/yr. Total per year after you amortize plane tickets and medical supplies that went to me and specific non-fixed program costs might push it to...almost 10k/yr. So this alone undermines her point that an 80k project done by "development professionals" would provide more value to the community rings false.
Further, drop an 80k project (or even a 10k one), and watch how fast it disentegrates. The value add of the PCV is not necessarily what they do, but how they do it. PCVs are trained to focus only on sustainable, community-supported projects that they can organize the community members to take part in and take ownership of. This, ideally of course, leads to the community gaining power over their own destiny and being able to do more self-upliftment projects with less and less outside intervention.
Ms. Vanderkam continues on, nonetheless, and complains that reforming the Peace Corps to focus on sites where the volunteers have more access to technologies such as the Internet would provide better results. True! You can make larger strides with better technology/support infrastructure. But... Where do the people who don't have access to the Internet end up? This is a horrible and short-sighted arguement. According to 2003 numbers, whereas 50% of the world has made or received a phone call (dramatically up due to the cell phone leapfrogging revolution), only about 1% of the world's population has an email account. So by focusing on these, we will ignore huge numbers of people who undoubtedly need more help than ones who already have community access to the Internet (which requires some combination of electricity and phone or cell networks).
Further, every PC HQ in the world has and has had Internet access for quite a while. You can always take a trip into the HQ (might be a long trek, might be 3 hours), and check and send email. Many volunteers have cell phones worldwide (currently mostly bought from savings or their own stipend, perhaps PC should subsidize them), which closes the gap dramatically. And (the list just goes on) PC HQs provide immense resources for most development projects, from schemata on how to build a ventilated pit latrine to reproductive health best-practices to language guides.
She also argues that PC should charge fees to the organizations that it send volunteers to. Often these are community-based organizations with no appreciable budget, already being staffed solely by volunteers. They have to go through training on how to work with PCVs effectively, and provide contacts and support for the volunteer in housing options. This already is a high barrier to entry for many deserving organizations, charging a fee would be reprehensible. Requiring the target of a development project to pay a fee to the developers is not development, it's consulting.
She also suggests volunteer teams. This in fact is done in many cases, it's called "clustering," and has a variety of effects, some good, some bad. It provides a close support network for the volunteers, and often allows for better cross-sector development projects, and more complicated projects. BUT, it reduces their interaction with the local population and often reduces the sustainability of the project. It's being tested already, presuming it hasn't is presuming that all of modern PC is like the 1962 version. It's not.
"Hire volunteers with useful skills" is a direct quote of a suggestion. Let me, for the record, state that you cannot logically speaking hire a volunteer. PC receives applications from volunteers and does its best (which I have to admit is often a mysterious and not wholly logical science) to place them. They do not and cannot just post a job search seeking out experts willing to do development work for 6k a year plus health. Try it yourself, see if you can find 7,700 people.
She finishes her diatribe with a request for accountability. Again, she exposes her lack of research into the realities of the Peace Corps system. Peace Corps reports to congress, and volunteers report in quarterly to their country's PC HQ with an exhaustive account of number of community members affected/trained, projects completed, and so forth. If a volunteer is not performing, they most likely are having a rough time of it, or were one of the ones (you get a few in every batch) who've given up and are partying. In either case, they'll get a review, perhaps get moved to a different assignment, or in extreme cases get sent home.
In the end, does PC have problems? Surely. Are some jobs overly vauge? Yes. Why? Well, there's a push to double the number of volunteers serving -- with only a 1/3rd increase in funding, which means no additional staff to work on finding valid projects for new volunteers. And, in the end, as a volunteer, you have to remember that you're there to help your community -- you forever have a solid mission statement to work with.
Ms. Vanderkam perhaps should do more careful research before launching in on PC. Perhaps she might even take a 2 year sabbatical from her journalism gig and see how the rest of the world really lives. I bet that she'd denounce her own article, and realize that spending two years to organize her community to bring in piped water might provide her the most rewarding shower of her life, realizing that the community will be able to sustain this gift for all their future, and will have an understanding of Americans that goes deeper than what they hear in their news or see on TV.
Maybe, just maybe, providing 7,700 annual experiences to Americans, and 7,700 multiplied by the members of the communities whose lives they affect globally like that is worth the cost of one additional bomber plane per year. Maybe, just maybe mind you, it might reduce the need for bomber planes!
Posted by griffjon at 12:57 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 23, 2005
WTF: A collectionq
"Tropical Storm ALPHA" ???
Posted by griffjon at 09:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 16, 2005
Grad Adventures: The First Big Paper
Actually, at this point I'm pretty much done. I might go back through and tidy things up one more time, check references, spelling, etc., but the structure is complete, and I get to revise it again after class discussion on the book manana.
It's a lit review on a wide variety of readings and one book. It's heavily academic and probably not my best piece of work, as I only really got in to one third (content, sadly, not length) of the readings, but had to find an argument that encompassed the whole set. Below are some tidbits from my writing process:
GoogleFight for neologism spell-checking
I'm referencing in my paper an idea of Foucault and I wanted to say Foucault-ian, but I didn't know how to adapt the word, because I've seen FoucaulDian and foucalTian both.So I used GoogleFight to determine the most used version
Foucauldian wins 4:1 http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=foucauldian&word2=foucaultian
In related news; I whoop the ass of a hoard of pirate cybermonkey ninjas.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=GriffJon&word2=A+hoard+of+pirate+cybermonkey+ninjas
But I bet the Pirate Captain of the Internet could still be a fair fight.
Amazon for citations
One of the books for Monday's paper/presentation is Marginal Gains. I've been abusing Amazon's Search-inside-the-book to find some citations I'd failed to take note of while reading. Amazon also provides SIPs -- Statistically Improbable Phrases, that occur in one book and few (if any) others. In Marginal Gains, one of the SIPs is "enough petrol"Yup, that's statistically improbable.
"Productivity"
While writing this paper, I discovered everything I can do in a given amount of time that doesn't include writing the paper:-made and eaten dinner (kinda important)
-cleaned up the kitchen
-read up on today's DC newspaper
-checked email, blogs, etc.
-moved paper around
-cleaned out keyboard/handrest gunk on my laptop
-made this blog entries/responses
Posted by griffjon at 07:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 13, 2005
dreamweaver
I always forget just how much I despise DreamWeaver until I'm forced to use it. It really enforces a lot of design methods that I really and truly dislike.
Posted by griffjon at 11:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 11, 2005
Ad Revenue!
Oh, and I've made $2.60 on the new ads in 4 days. That's kinda exciting. They could maybe pay for my website. I'll have an e-business! Now I just need some venture capital to spend on a big re-launch party for my new dotcom.
Wait, sorry. wrong decade.
But still, at 4 days in, that's just over $0.50/day, which would cover the hosting and domain name costs for my site. Which ain't much, but hey, for the amount of effort I put into it...
Posted by griffjon at 10:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Work Balance
OK, so... Last week I was (again) a tightly wound ball of stress. This was mainly because I had this horrible idea to calendar out all my assignments for the semester, and then also look at it. It appeared entirely overwhelming. But now, a week into the overwhelmtion, I'm on track with what I have scheduled as milestones, and it was more manageable than I thought, and the econ midterm will be take-home, so no sweat, and we don't get it until the 18th, which means no interference from it onto my currently scheduled paper-writing due the 17th, and that will only minorly overlap with my 2 papers due on the 7th and 5 minute movie due on the 14th (I'll explain that as I get closer to it).
Also, due to various oddities in my reading shedule, I'm already caught up for next weeks reading, except in Econ, where I've been 2 weeks ahead until now, when I'm back on schedule (I was keeping with the syllabus instead of the class, which was helping my comprehension even less).
So yay. I'm trying to bitch less. I realize that this life that I'm living is indeed the life that from the outside I was envious of, and I'm trying to re-establish what the hell I was thinking. Oh yeah. part-time job, simple but pleasant living with occasional splurges, and lots of exposure to new ideas, and people to talk with about them.
Maybe I'm in a good mood because it's pleasantly chilly, not-hot, not-cold, just crisp, and I ate pizza, which often puts me in a good mood? Who knows.
Posted by griffjon at 10:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Lighter side of Ja
To balance out the story from the other day, here's a piece from the Star, as seen in BoingBoing, of all places:
http://www.jamaica-star.com/thestar/20051006/news/news1.html
DARAIN HOUSEN HAS not taken off his hat for the last 20 years. He bathes, he sleeps and does everything possible in it. It is a perfect fit.But unlike other hats, his is not made of cloth but from the very hair on his head which is why it cannot be removed.
Housen has been sporting his 'natural hat' hairstyle for the last 20 years. The 40-year-old barber who lives in Somerset, St. Thomas said he came up with the idea after some of his friends decided to wear hats to a party but he could not find one to wear.
Posted by griffjon at 10:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 07, 2005
Jamaican Violence
From Ian, I thought some of my non-overlapping readers might get a nice dose of Ja reality from this:
http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20051006/lead/lead1.html
FOR MANY residents of Barnes Avenue in St. Andrew, the screams of 10-year-old Sasha-Kay Brown, as she attempted to escape the fire which eventually took the lives of her grandparents, her aunt and herself, will live with them forever.Tearful women told The Gleaner yesterday how they heard Sasha-Kay crying out for help, until her voice faded in the blaze which destroyed the family's five-bedroom concrete house near Maxfield Avenue, yesterday morning.
Dorcas Brown, her husband Gerald, their daughter Michelle, along with Sasha-Kay, were trapped inside the building, after heavily armed gunmen fire-bombed their house about 3:00 a.m.
Neighbours who attempted to assist the young girl were fired at by the gunmen.
PLEADING FOR HELP"The little girl climbed up on the grill and called out the names of almost everybody who lived on Barnes Avenue, begging them to come and help her," said a woman who spoke with The Gleaner.
"But (when) we ran out of our houses and tried to assist her, the gunmen fired at us. The last thing we heard the little girl said was that the fire was burning her, then her voice just faded."
The charred remains of Sasha-Kay and her grandmother were found on the veranda while in another room were the burnt bodies of her aunt and grandfather.
...
"Me daughter should never lose her life so," the 26 year-old mother of three said.
...
Head of the West Kingston Police Division, Deputy Superintendent Delroy Hewitt, has linked the fire-bombing and death of the four family members to an ongoing gang feud in the community.
"We believe the fire-bombing is a reprisal to an incident in which a man was shot and injured. The injured man is now hospitalised under police guard," said DSP Hewitt.
The feud is between men from Barnes Avenue and Ramsay Road.
Posted by griffjon at 02:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ads
I figured I'd add in some advertisements to my website, mostly just google text ads, to see if I can bring in any $$ through that. If you don't like 'em, well, use FireFox and the AdBlock Plus extension, obviously, and you won't see 'em. Easy. I'll let you all know how it goes to my ability to report that publically.
Posted by griffjon at 12:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 06, 2005
Senate votes against Bush and Torture
The Washington Post is running an article today about the Senate, led by McCain, passing a referendum to set specific interrogation limits; quoth McCain, "what we lose when by official policy or by official negligence we allow, confuse or encourage our soldiers to forget . . . that which is our greatest strength: that we are different and better than our enemies."
In his closing speech, McCain said terrorists "hold in contempt" international conventions "such as the Geneva Conventions and the treaty on torture.""I know that," he said. "But we're better than them, and we are the stronger for our faith."
In its statement on the veto threat, the White House said the measure would "restrict the president's authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bringing terrorists to justice."
But as new allegations of abuse surface, the chorus of McCain supporters is broadening. McCain read a letter on the Senate floor from former secretary of state Colin L. Powell, who endorsed the amendment and said it would help address "the terrible public diplomacy crisis created by Abu Ghraib." Powell joins a growing group of retired generals and admirals who blame prison abuse on "ambiguous instructions," as the officers wrote in a recent letter. They urged restricting interrogation methods to those outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation, the parameters that McCain's measure would establish.
McCain cited a letter he received from Army Capt. Ian Fishback, who has fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Over 17 months, he struggled to get answers from his chain of command to a basic question: What standards apply to the treatment of enemy detainees?" McCain said. "But he found no answers. . . . The Congress has a responsibility to answer this call."
I guess it's a bad day when the good news is about the US Congress restricting our use of torture, but... compared to the bad news of the last 5 years, this is a breath of fresh air. The congress critters are standing up to the White House and their Great Leader more and more.
Posted by griffjon at 08:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 05, 2005
Be happy..
This NYT article (seen in BoingBoing) talks about happiness as a measure of development and well being.
What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money.Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic product, or G.D.P., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation.
In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan's newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation's priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness.
...
Around the world, a growing number of economists, social scientists, corporate leaders and bureaucrats are trying to develop measurements that take into account not just the flow of money but also access to health care, free time with family, conservation of natural resources and other noneconomic factors.
The goal, according to many involved in this effort, is in part to return to a richer definition of the word happiness, more like what the signers of the Declaration of Independence had in mind when they included "the pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right equal to liberty and life itself.
It goes on to show that this actually has an impact;
While household incomes in Bhutan remain among the world's lowest, life expectancy increased by 19 years from 1984 to 1998, jumping to 66 years. The country, which is preparing to shift to a constitution and an elected government, requires that at least 60 percent of its lands remain forested, welcomes a limited stream of wealthy tourists and exports hydropower to India."We have to think of human well-being in broader terms," said Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan's home minister and ex-prime minister. "Material well-being is only one component. That doesn't ensure that you're at peace with your environment and in harmony with each other."
And that mony != happiness
In the early stages of a climb out of poverty, for a household or a country, incomes and contentment grow in lockstep. But various studies show that beyond certain thresholds, roughly as annual per capita income passes $10,000 or $20,000, happiness does not keep up.
Posted by griffjon at 07:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 03, 2005
Miers
OK, so Miers, at first glance, has some positive aspects. Heck, she's even donated money to the Democrats, including Al Gore it seems. But haven't we learned from the Michael Brown episode that putting old buddies into important offices when their background is not a great match?
Guess not.
Posted by griffjon at 10:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 02, 2005
My next band-aid purchase
Posted by griffjon at 10:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack