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Tuesday, July 09, 2002 |
The So-called New Tone in Washington
But something changed when George W. Bush became president. The current administration has not lacked questionable behavior: Karl Rove met with Intel executives in the White House even as he held a significant amount of Intel stock; Deputy Interior Secretary J. Stephen Griles, a former coal-industry lobbyist, intervened in an energy-exploration dispute on behalf of former clients; Dick Cheney met repeatedly with energy company officials who appear to have had a strong hand in formulating the administration's energy policy; and, of course, there is White. Yet each retains his job. Eighteen months into Bush's term, his only appointee to resign under a cloud is Michael Parker, the former civilian chief of the Army Corps of Engineers, and not over allegations of corruption, but for what this administration views as the one true deadly sin: disloyalty. (Parker publicly criticized the president's budget.) By contrast, two years into the Clinton administration, 10 political appointees had resigned; under the elder Bush, eight; under Reagan, 13. What has changed isn't so much the conduct of officials, but the standards by which they're judged. The "new tone" that George W. Bush brought to Washington isn't one of integrity, but of permissiveness.
8:08:00 PM Permalink
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I'll do it for $900 million
Beatles guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said on Wednesday in a July 4 message to Americans nervous about new September 11-style attacks that he could kill world terrorism with love — but he would need $1 billion to do it.
"July 4 could be a great day for freedom," Maharishi, who brought Transcendental Meditation to the West more than 40 years ago and is a spiritual inspiration to some 6 million people worldwide, said in a conference call from the Netherlands.
8:02:02 PM Permalink
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The Last Small-r Republican?
Nice short interview with Gore Vidal in the LAWeekly. Excellent stuff:
The number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947-48 is more than 250. These are major strikes everywhere from Panama to Iran. And it isn't even a complete list. It doesn't include places like Chile, as that was a CIA operation. I was only listing military attacks.
Americans are either not told about these things or are told we attacked them because . . . well . . . Noriega is the center of all world drug traffic and we have to get rid of him. So we kill some Panamanians in the process. Actually we killed quite a few. And we brought in our Air Force. Panama didn't have an air force. But it looked good to have our Air Force there, busy, blowing up buildings. Then we kidnap their leader, Noriega, a former CIA man who worked loyally for the United States. We arrest him. Try him in an American court that has no jurisdiction over him and lock him up -- nobody knows why. And that was supposed to end the drug trade because he had been demonized by The New York Times and the rest of the imperial press.
I took issue personally with some stuff I read about what Vidal had said in the wake of the McVeigh terrorism. But in this interview he makes sense, and it's consistent with what he's been saying for years. I don't always believe what I read when I read the guy, nor agree with what he says, but these days it's a relief to read a different view!
I was in Guatemala when the CIA was preparing its attack on the Arbenz government [in 1954]. Arbenz, who was a democratically elected president, mildly socialist. His state had no revenues; its biggest income maker was United Fruit Company. So Arbenz put the tiniest of taxes on bananas, and Henry Cabot Lodge got up in the Senate and said the Communists have taken over Guatemala and we must act. He got to Eisenhower, who sent in the CIA, and they overthrew the government. We installed a military dictator, and there's been nothing but bloodshed ever since.
Now, if I were a Guatemalan and I had
the means to drop something on somebody in Washington, or anywhere Americans were, I would be tempted to do it. Especially if I had lost my entire family and seen my country blown to bits because United Fruit didn't want to pay taxes. Now, that's the way we operate. And that's why we got to be so hated.
7:31:10 PM Permalink
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Mind Boggling
Mind boggling library of astronimical images, with a very nice interface. The captions are detailed, telling you where the object is, and they are extensively cross-referenced, not only to this site, but to others. They're all from the Anglo-Australian Observatory in New South Wales Australia. The images were "mostly" made by David Malin, whose images have graced the astronomy magazines for years, and who is pretty much unparalelled in astro images. I could dig for days in here. If you do nothing else, take a look at the 50 favorite images page.
This is one of the things that makes the web great. Back in 1994, when comet Shoemaker-Levy smashed into Jupiter, I was using CompuServe a lot, running up big bills downloading images as they appeared. I still have a few of them on my hard disk. There were also some images in the newsgroups, such as sci.astro, I think, and some binary newsgroups. Otherwise, there were some ftp sites around. Ron Baalke set up some early sites at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA and I was using Lynx on Netcom to see them. Later, when I got a klugy utility to allow TCP/IP access to the net through my SLIP dialup account on Netcom, things really changed for me. For me, then, it was really astronomy that made me see the value of the web, and appreciate it.
7:16:08 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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