Ethel the Blog
Observations (and occasional brash opining) on science, computers, books, music and other shiny things that catch my mind's eye. There's a home page with ostensibly more permanent stuff. This is intended to be more functional than decorative. I neither intend nor want to surf on the bleeding edge, keep it real, redefine journalism or attract nyphomaniacal groupies (well, maybe a wee bit of the latter). The occasional cheap laugh, raised eyebrow or provocation of interest are all I'll plead guilty to in the matter of intent. Bene qui latuit bene vixit.

The usual copyright stuff applies, but I probably won't get enraged until I find a clone site with absolutely no attribution (which, by the way, has happened twice with some of my other stuff). Finally, if anyone's offended by anything on this site then please do notify me immediately. I like to keep track of those times when I get something right.

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"When they say, 'Gee it's an information explosion!', no, it's not an explosion, it's a disgorgement of the bowels is what it is. Every idiotic thing that anybody could possibly write or say or think can get into the body politic now, where before things would have to have some merit to go through the publishing routine, now, ANYTHING." - Harlan Ellison JOLLY OLD PALS Other stuff of mild interest to some: unusual literature scientific software blog physical oceanography glossary computer-related tutorials and texts Friday, October 17, 2003 VOTESCAM Eric Alterman - who finds it a bit too easy to throw the "conspiracy nuts" phrase around - has jumped into the nutbowl. He's finally discovered - several months after the rest of the nuts - that something most anomalous happened in the last mid-term elections in Georgia. To put it bluntly, GOP-owned and -operated companies installed electronic voting machines in Georgia, and those machines produced some huge voting anomalies in those elections. Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss. Those figures were more or less what political experts would have expected in state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to statewide office. But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points. ... There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in different parts of the state. In 58 counties, the vote was broadly in line with the primary election. In 27 counties in Republican-dominated north Georgia, however, Max Cleland unaccountably scored 14 percentage points higher than he had in the primaries. And in 74 counties in the Democrat south, Saxby Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points more for the Republicans than the party as a whole had won less than three months earlier. ... It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were tabulated, or if they were counted at all. And we will probably never know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could theoretically provide a written record of voters' choices, but these were not activated. Consequently, recounts were impossible. Had Diebold Inc, the manufacturer, been asked to review the votes, all it could have done was programme the computers to spit out the same data as before, flawed or not. ... Strangely, however, the pollsters made no comparable howlers in lower-key races whose outcome was not seriously contested. Another anomaly, perhaps. What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican Party donors? Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O'Dell, Diebold's chief executive, in which he said he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" - even as his company was bidding for the contract on the state's new voting machinery? ... posted by Steven Baum 10/17/2003 03:29:49 PM | link Wednesday, October 15, 2003 THE PREQUEL In a most entertaining review of George Crile's Charlie Wilson's War - a book about a former Texas congressman who got the CIA to arm the precursors to the Taliban to the teeth in the early 1980s - we find a bit about one of our favorite lunatic neocons who's currently in possession of about twenty orders of magnitude more power than he deserves on any rational planet. ... Then came pages 330-333, which I would urge everyone to read. If you don’t want to buy the book--and why should you?--read these four pages in the bookstore with the clerk glaring at you. In these pages Crile describes Richard Perle’s ‘80s Afghan plan, which is simply a rough draft of his even crazier Iraq plan. Avrakotos, a really loathsome little thug, actually becomes almost sympathetic when he describes his contempt for Perle and his minions, whom Avrakotos calls “rightwing cuckoos.” Perle barged into Avrakotos’ Afghan weapons-supply plan just when it was working well. He had a better idea: stop giving the Afghans money and instead “....encourage Soviet officers and soldiers to defect to the mujahideen…” And guess who was backing Perle’s plan: that other military genius, Ollie North: “At a White House meeting, [Lt. Col. Oliver] North and Perle told Avrakotos to spend millions on this program, expressing the belief that as many as ten thousand defectors could be expected to pour across the lines.” ... posted by Steven Baum 10/15/2003 04:26:40 PM | link FURTHER PREDICTIONS In the long-assed comment portion of an entry entitled Why are we in Iraq? over at Brad DeLong's, we not only get every possible theory on the topic but some predictions from Zizka, my favorite conspiratorialist. I don't think there's really a lot of mystery about the Bush administration's motives. It was an adventurist, aggressive attempt to totally rearrange the world order, especially in the Middle East. Seemingly they miscalculated a few things, but adventurists will do that. Right now they're almost certainly trying to figure out how to pull a rabbit out of a hat to regain the initiative; I suspect that Sharon is helping out with his Syrian attacks. Trial balloons have been floated for a much larger military, a draft, and greatly increased military spending. In order to do make this work there would also have to be an enormous media blitz, some sort of terrifying threat, and crackdowns on domestic opposition. ... And it doesn't cheapen this prediction at all to realize that anyone comprehending even the Classic Comix version of "The Prince" could make it. posted by Steven Baum 10/15/2003 03:37:08 PM | link THIS IS JUST TOO EASY As predicted here at EthelCo immediately following the California election. Emboldened by the success of his recall initiative, anti-tax crusader Ted Costa said Tuesday he plans to go back to the voters with a ballot measure to break incumbents' grip on California's Legislature and congressional delegation. Proponents of redrawing the state's political map have tried before to overhaul the redistricting process, which is controlled by the Legislature and in 2001 protected its Democratic majority and incumbent Republicans. But Costa, a Republican, is hoping for a boost from Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, who campaigned to remove reapportionment from the whim of the Legislature and put it into the hands of a panel of retired judges. ... Retired judges. Hmmm. Lessee, there's Bork, Starr.... In the comments section over at Atrios, Publius thinks redistricting not instrinsically a bad thing vis a vis digging out entrenched incumbents regardless of party affiliation. But there's also a rub: ... I don't trust Costa or anyone else behind this drive, but I do think their proposals make sense on the face of it. The problem is that if California--a big Democratic state--goes to a fair districting process while big Republican states like Texas do not, then California will send a modestly Democratic-majority delegation to the House and will not counterbalance Republican gerrymanders elsewhere, thus keeping the House in Republican hands "no matter what the national mood is," as the Republican staffer's e-mail recently said. I think reform needs to happen at the federal level--mandate a better process in all states, to take effect after 2010, or even after 2020. This means neither side has to disarm unilaterally, and no one knows which party will have a net benefit from going to a better system; thus members of Congress might actually vote on such a bill according to its merits in promoting democracy--which is so important that we fought a war to bring it to Iraq, right? Right? posted by Steven Baum 10/15/2003 02:23:45 PM | link HOW OLIGARCHY FUNCTIONS An excellent tutorial by Al Giordano. The Organization of American States, newly sensitized by coup attempts in Venezuela last April and December, has called for "a consensus solution to the crisis through dialogue" and mediation by the Catholic Church in Bolivia, according to the Bolivian daily La Patria. Meanwhile, in the same newspaper, Zvonko Matkovic, president of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, offers us a splendid view of the one-way class-war advocated and maintained by the Bolivian oligarchy. In a characteristic temper tantrum (of the kind showed frequently in recent times by the Venezuelan and Colombian oligarchies when faced with social movements from below), Matkovic rails: "This is a revolution brought forward by people who want to destroy the country, headed by Evo Morales and El Mallku, because everything began with (the demand for) a cato (small farm parcel) of coca. What they want is to destroy the country. The army is in the streets, and the police, not of their own will, but because the Constitution sends them there to be able to protect the security of all Bolivian citizens... "The Army is not massacring, nor the Police, nor the government is guilty of this. It is the people who are provoking and disgracefully people are dying who have nothing to do with it and those who do are not at the battle front... Matkovic the Oligarch, according to the newspaper, "said that the goal of creating chaos in Bolivia is being aided by some Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that receive financing from some countries to support projects in the fight against poverty.... At the same time, he accused the media of generating much more violence with 'explosive and extremely sensationalistic reports.'" "This is the news that goes to the world from Bolivia, and not only that, what I want to say to all who form part of the media is that this disgrace is going to touch them too. They're going to end up without advertising, because there won't be businesses to advertise with them." Matkovic The Oligarch then rejected the Catholic Church as a mediator to the dispute (claiming that the opposition would never accept it) and called, instead - get this - on foreign governments to mediate: "The relations are not with the Church. It's important, now, that the Embassies be part of this. I believe the neighboring countries are worried." This is typical oligarch-speak: We're against foreign interference so we want foreign interference! All that's left is for Marcela Sánchez to echo Matkovik's call in the Washington Post. Heh. I can see it now. A "Bring Back Tuto" column wouldn't surprise me at all. Damn, the "garks" would bring that gorilla Banzer back from the grave to rule the land if they could. But guess what? They can't. posted by Steven Baum 10/15/2003 02:11:17 PM | link FRANK'S WAR Guerrilla News provides a piece called Frank's War. ... It would be hard to imagine any intellectually honest anti-war protestor who, witnessing Frank's emotional reunions with his family, would not admit that there have been some positive outcomes of this invasion. Saddam was one of the world's most brutal dictators, and Frank has the scars to prove it. In this sense, Frank's story is equally beneficial and problematic for each side of the issue. The image of a returning Iraqi "freedom fighter," kissing the ground at the border is the kind of real-life drama that Karl Rove would pay money to engineer, and Roger Ailes would give his left arm to videotape. One could even argue that it would be as important, and more effective, than the President's much-ridiculed landing on the aircraft carrier. But, at the same time, Frank's lost and divided family and the brutal condition of the country are direct results of Bush Sr.'s betrayal and subsequent U.S. sanctions that have left Iraq in a state that Frank finds nearly unrecognizable. Perhaps that is the reason that the administration's spin machine never put exiled Iraqis like Frank on television. He would be a vivid reminder that the only genuinely noble reason for invading Iraq was that we had a debt to the people of this country. Not only did the U.S. government help Saddam seize power, and hold on to it up until weeks before he invaded Kuwait, but they failed Iraqis willing to die for their freedom in their hour of direst need. It could be said that the 1991 popular uprising represented the one moment, the singular opportunity, that the U.S. had to accept responsibility for the fate of the Iraqi people. That failure is telling. Throughout the 90's, while U.S. and British jets continuously "softened" the country for the inevitable invasion, the U.S. funded the Iraq National Congress led by Ahmed Chalabi in hopes they would take charge when Saddam was ousted. A wealthy banker and convicted embezzler who had not been in the country for three decades, Chalabi was given millions of dollars by the CIA to gather evidence on Saddam's weapons programs, much of which has now been largely discredited. Exiled freedom fighters were all but ignored. ... America's Middle East policy is not a game for the weak-willed. Whether it was the 1954 overthrow of the democratically-elected Mossadeq in Iran or the CIA's support of Saddam while he gassed the Kurds and Iranians, the U.S. has always been able to justify its most heinous breaches of American "values" in the context of "stability" and long-term access to oil. Frank's revolution was dangerous - it was too direct, too "popular," too potentially harmful for American business interests. Indeed, the American effort here is increasingly looking less like a "liberation" and more like a corporate takeover. Local businessmen are locked out of major contracts, while billions of dollars disappear into the black hole of "feasibility studies" and security. ... posted by Steven Baum 10/15/2003 01:54:15 PM | link LAST ONE SPEAKS The folks at Last One Speaks provide "a voice of reason in the cacophony of drug war rhetoric." They also point us to Drug WarRant, which "looks at the front lines of the drug war, with news, analysis, and the occasional rant." An especially pointed paragraph from the former: ... Let's see, Rumsfeld doesn't want to waste his resources on chasing drug lords. Is he still working for the same government that spent hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars on a media campaign to convince kids that even taking one hit of marijuana was supporting terrorists? And they wonder why that ad campaign failed. ... posted by Steven Baum 10/15/2003 01:51:57 PM | link CAPITAL MOBILITY IS NOT FREE TRADE The comments section at Big, Left, Outside provides an interesting commentary by Hezekiah. When the economic powerhouses speak of free markets and free trade they are disingenuous, at best. Their primary concern is capital mobility. This generates wealth, of a sort, but not in any productive sense. What it does create is an arena in which they have every advantage. It's like well-heeled gamblers who are able to raise the stakes past the point others can afford to risk. Of course, it's possible that they are delusional and not cynically bent on currency speculation, ramping and then dumping stocks to create wide spreads and forcing smaller players to the margins. What's surprising is the number of sincere, intelligent neoliberal academics who go along with it. The corporatist/crony capitalist ideal has always been monopolozing as much of the market as they can get away with. They have no interest in competition. "Darwinism for thee, but not for me" should be on their logos. What they do is always disastrous. They inevitably turn on each other and cause severe dislocations that afflict huge populations. The pass the IMF is giving the USA is prime example of their double standard. They had no qualms about trashing Argentina. It's good to see people waking up. posted by Steven Baum 10/15/2003 01:45:14 PM | link Tuesday, October 14, 2003 THE LEAGUE OF EVIL EVILDOERS LADIES' AUXILIARY The cabal - undoubtedly agreeing with the old sports maxim that the best defense is a good offense - has supplemented its "don't worry, be happy" campaign about the Land of No WMD with another involving crying wolf about the mini-axis of evil, i.e. those countries to which Saddam's WMD were magically spirited by the WMD fairies just as the cabal was invading Iraq. The "axis of evil" is back - and in expanded form. Anticipated congressional action against Syria this week is just one sign that the US plans to keep up the pressure on countries it places on the wrong side in the war on terror. The triad of WMD-seeking states that President Bush first targeted in his January 2002 State of the Union address no longer includes Iraq. But the club otherwise made up of North Korea and Iran has grown to include Syria, Libya, and Cuba, in the administration's eyes, as it seeks to keep the nation and the world focused on the dual threats of weapons proliferation and state-sponsored terrorism. Some experts see the new club members as minor threats compared to the original three - one former US official calls them "the ladies' auxiliary of the axis of evil." But the Bush administration is showing lack of patience with any state tolerance of terrorism, while making clear its determination to see development of and trading in weapons of mass destruction stopped. ... That last highlighted bit wins the "most unintentionally funny sentence of the week" award. posted by Steven Baum 10/14/2003 05:22:14 PM | link WINNING THEIR HEARTS AND MINDS Patrick Cockburn reports on yet another cabal tactic sure to gain even more bouquets of flowers from the citizens of occupied Iraq. More news of rural pacification programs is sure to be forthcoming. After all, what are you supposed to do given that they all look the same and, more importantly, value life less than their conquering betters. US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops. The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for firewood. Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons." Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district. "They made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while they were cutting down the trees," said one man. Ambushes of US troops have taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because 'you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us'." What the Israelis had done by way of collective punishment of Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added. ... posted by Steven Baum 10/14/2003 05:08:33 PM | link DYING FOR OIL In the first of a five-part series, Jay Shaft interviews five U.S. military servicemen who've returned from Iraq. You couldn't find a starker constrast to the cabal's concerted happy-talk campaign, led by the chief bobble-head doll babbling "don't worry, be happy" right before heading out for a round of golf. ... CFTM-- “How are you today? Resting I hope?” USA-- “Can’t sleep for sh..t and I have horrible nightmares when I do sleep. I might be lucky to catch an hour at a time before the nightmares wake me up. I slept easier in the combat then now that I’m away from there. Most awful place I’ve ever been or served duty and I didn’t want to leave my guys. That was the hardest part was leaving the guys I had been leading around and trying to keep out of trouble and alive.” CFTM-- “Did you see a lot of your buddies get killed? How did it affect you?” USA-- “How the hell do you think it affected me? I saw over 30 of the men I had to keep safe die, and over 100 get wounded and not come back. I still don’t know if some of the wounded men made it or not. I was never told before I came back home.” CFTM-- “So it really was awful and as bad as some returning troops have claimed?” USA-- “It was like a long trip to hell that you knew you might return from. Of course it is as bad as the soldiers say it is. Hell it’s even worse if the truth has to come out. It’s a constant fu..ing nightmare trying to figure out where the guerillas are going to hit, how to keep the civilians calm, and also getting enough water and food to eat. That is one thing the media never really told the Americans about, how bad it was when our convoys weren’t getting through. We had to go to some Iraqi people and trade socks and underwear for some food and a little water.” CFTM-- “You really did get that desperate because I saw it in the foreign media that the Iraqi civilians had stepped in and fed a whole bunch of troops that had been days without food.” USA-- -“Yeah, that ain’t no joke about getting help from the civilians right after the invasion. We had a pretty good laugh about that and how the army owed them some money for reimbursement. We would not have starved probably, but when we got the food from the people it made sure we could still operate as a functioning unit. It was a near thing that several guys almost died of dehydration because we ran out of clean water for a few days.” CFTM-- “Just keep going, I want to hear more about the hardships the military and Bush made you go through. I want the American people to know what a nightmare this war has become and what it’s doing to our service men over there.” USA-- “Okay, well I can bitch about the problems like food being short and water going bad, but I want to tell people about how bad the attacks on US and coalition forces have gotten in the last month. In the last two weeks I was there we were attacked at least 20 times a day if you count all the shots we heard from random sniper or opportunity attacks. We were losing at least five men a day to injuries and there was at least one of our unit killed every twenty four hours.” CFTM-- -“So you were getting one a day killed and at least five injured? Did you know many of the guys killed?” USA-- -“That’s a real dumb fu..ing question to ask me. You know what my rank is, of course I knew them, I was the head NCO for years in our unit. I knew most of the guys who died and I held a lot of hands as they were dying. You tell me that’s not gonna to give you nightmares!” ... posted by Steven Baum 10/14/2003 03:19:30 PM | link GOODBYE NARCO NEWS While Al Giordano has announced the indefinite cessation of the very good Narco News, he continues to fight the good fight in his Big, Left, Outside weblog. Al says goodbye to the former and hello to the latter: ... The Empire is getting nastier and more violent in its approach to the hemisphere, as can be seen most visibly in Colombia's dirty and US-imposed Civil War, and in last year's coup attempts in Venezuela. Washington and Wall Street are desperate to maintain the imposition of their prohibitionist, anti-democracy, and pro-looting positions, at any cost. The paradox is this: the closer we come to victory, the more dangerous the work for our journalists and the social movements that we cover. At the very moment that we urgently need to strengthen the "safety net" for our reporters on the front lines, that safety net grows weaker due to lack of resources. Organizations and individuals of conscience in the United States often speak of how much they "admire" and "support" our work. Some really have been supportive. A few have been very generous. Others - including many of the largest self-proclaimed "human rights" or "press freedom" organizations - increasingly do more harm than good to the causes they profess to champion in our America; they've made our job, and that of others they claim to help protect, more difficult and dangerous, not less. I'll have more to say about their behaviors, one at a time, at the inevitable moments when they will behave in harmful ways again, over at my personal weblog in the near future. ... posted by Steven Baum 10/14/2003 03:06:50 PM | link

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